It does indicate quite how bad things have got that being exposes as once supporting sanity is potentially fatal to a Republican candidate’s hopes.

Well he’s also claimed that Obama closed his hometown’s GM plant.
It closed during Bush’s presidency.

He’s also claimed to love Rage against the Machine. RatM’s Tom Morello had this to say:

Paul Ryan’s love of Rage Against the Machine is amusing, because he is the embodiment of the machine that our music has been raging against for two decades. Charles Manson loved the Beatles but didn’t understand them. Governor Chris Christie loves Bruce Springsteen but doesn’t understand him. And Paul Ryan is clueless about his favorite band, Rage Against the Machine. Ryan claims that he likes Rage’s sound, but not the lyrics. Well, I don’t care for Paul Ryan’s sound or his lyrics. He can like whatever bands he wants, but his guiding vision of shifting revenue more radically to the one percent is antithetical to the message of Rage.

I wonder what Ryan’s favorite Rage song is? Is it the one where we condemn the genocide of Native Americans? The one lambasting American imperialism? Our cover of “Fuck the Police”? Or is it the one where we call on the people to seize the means of production? So many excellent choices to jam out to at Young Republican meetings! Don’t mistake me, I clearly see that Ryan has a whole lotta “rage” in him: A rage against women, a rage against immigrants, a rage against workers, a rage against gays, a rage against the poor, a rage against the environment. Basically the only thing he’s not raging against is the privileged elite he’s groveling in front of for campaign contributions.

Somebody in the Romney campaign will be fired for this oversight.

Given it was 10 years ago he could argue that he has seen the error of his ways and changed his mind. It would be interesting to know if he was an Ayn Rand acolyte back then.

The problem is that the media in the US is being so easy on the Romney campaign that almost no-one, especially no swing voters, will get to hear about it. I have heard people there saying the media is going even easier on the Repugnant Party than the media here did on the Tories in 2010!

Is there still time for the Republican VP candidate to be switched to someone more dependable or would that make everything worse by drawing attention to the debacle?

Corporate ‘news’ media never tell the truth, the whole truth & nothing but the truth. It will mean political and ecenomic suicide for the elite, if their ‘supporters’ saw their true nature!

Try this by Larry Summers on: The reality of trying to shrink government
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/lawrence-summers-the-reality-of-trying-to-shrink-government/2012/08/19/0e786b40-ea00-11e1-a80b-9f898562d010_story.html

Summers, now a prof at Harvard, was the last US Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration. The US budget was in balance at the end of that administration, which it hadn’t been since the Johnson administration (1963-69). The GW Bush administration, following Clinton, restored the budget deficit by making all those tax cuts which largely benefited the most wealthy.

As Warren Buffett, generally reckoned to be the third wealthiest man in the world, has commented:

“Last year my federal tax bill — the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf — was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent.” [NYT August 2011]

For info, try this on the history of US budget deficits and surpluses as a share of US GDP 1962-2010:
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/12/rev_spen_exss3.html