In a move clearly meant to encourage early voting, Michelle Obama cast her vote for her husband today. The President says he'll vote early as well, on Oct. 25.
The real Bain Capital's effect on the real world. Bainport needs to be a big story. Read it. Follow it.
Related, former Reagan budget director David Stockman writes that Romney's record as a "job creator" is mostly nonexistent. "Mitt Romney was not a businessman; he was a master financial speculator who bought, sold, flipped, and stripped businesses," Stockman writes. "He did not build enterprises the old-fashioned way -- out of inspiration, perspiration, and a long slog in the free market fostering a new product, service, or process of production. Instead, he spent his 15 years raising debt in prodigious amounts on Wall Street so that Bain could purchase the pots and pans and castoffs of corporate America, leverage them to the hilt, gussy them up as reborn 'roll-ups,' and then deliver them back to Wall Street for resale -- the faster the better."
Ayn Rand acolyte Paul Ryan helping out at a soup kitchen for the homeless? Can that be right? OK yeah, it's BS. The weird thing is, with all the effort Ryan put into pretending he was volunteering, he could've actually done something helpful. Photo ops are nice, but reports saying staffers "ramrodded their way" into a soup kitchen to click photos of you rewashing clean pots... Yeah, that's not so nice. This may actually gain some traction as a negative story, as the kitchen's director is complaining about the strongarm tactics here. Sounds like they practically broke in.
A helpful Benghazi timeline.
Romney had a $10 million fundraising disadvantage last month.
Gallup has Romney up 5 in 12 swing states, surveyed as a whole. Good news is that it's a six point margin of error, so it's a statistical tie. And this one shows a big swing among women voters, so it may be an outlier. Wait and see if the results are duplicated elsewhere. Still, pressure's on for debate night.
Here's a palette cleanser for that last item: an in-depth look at early voting and Obama's big lead there -- we're talking landside percentages in most cases. In many states, early voters will make up between 20%-33% of the total ballots. Most state polling shows tight races, so the early balloting may make all the difference.
A "longtime aide" to Mitt Romney's father does not have good things to say about young Mittens.
That would be the same Mittens who's apparently a'scared of appearing on The View.
I'm not sure to take this as good news or bad news, but George W. Bush is "skeptical" of a Romney win. On the good news side: say what you like about Dubya, but he was good at electioneering. On the bad news side: it's George W. Bush, the man who lost a fair fight to a pretzel.
Finally, a new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation finds that replacing Medicare and Medicaid with vouchers will cost more. Experts say, "Duh." Medicare as it is now pays doctors. Medicare as a Romney-Ryan voucher system would pay a private insurer -- who takes a cut -- who then pays doctors. What sort of mental patient would think that would be less expensive? It's looting Medicare and Medicaid to pay for entirely unnecessary middle-men. Hell, the Romney-Ryan plan is a freakin' heist. If you can't see that, you're using some sort of anti-math.
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