With the Republican right persisting in baseless persecution of Susan Rice, the U.N. Ambassador who may replace departing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, it has left President Obama little choice but to move ahead with her nomination. If he backs away from Rice, in the face of what he has called false accusations against her, that display of weakness would undermine his second term before it begins.

The opposition to Rice is cobbled together from the remnants of a failed "October Surprise" election gambit, which began when Mitt Romney sought to smear the president by using the tragic attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which killed four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens. In the election's aftermath, Senate Republicans have fixated on Rice, whom they accuse of misleading the public in television appearances several days after the Sept. 11 incident.

Rice's supposed offense was to downplay the likelihood that the attack had been perpetrated by al-Qaida terrorists or their local allies, while underlining the idea that it had been inspired by an anti-Muslim video on the Internet. On ABC News' "This Week," she repeated almost precisely the talking points provided to her by the CIA: Our current best assessment, based on the information that we have at present, is that, in fact, what this began as, it was a spontaneous — not a premeditated — response to what had ...

When innocent citizens asked about unemployment last night at the town hall presidential debate on Long Island, would Mitt Romney again tout his plan to create 12 million jobs? Unable to Etch-a-Sketch away that often repeated claim — one that he has hired several conservative economists to endorse — the Republican candidate had little choice. It's up on his campaign website, it's there in his own well-advertised words, and it is the central appeal of his candidacy for the non-billionaire voting bloc.

But there is a serious problem with that promise. It now stands exposed as a complete fraud by Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post fact-checker, who pinned upon it his highest (lowest?) prize of four “Pinocchios.”

Here is how Kessler reached that troubling conclusion. After requesting the specific numbers behind Romney's jobs claim, he soon discovered that the citations offered by the campaign made no sense, and, in fact, the attempted deceptions were transparently obvious.

Romney's economic program has three basic elements that he says will produce those 12 million jobs, as outlined in a TV ad quoted by Kessler:

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Unemployment is still too high, income is still too low and the recovery is still much too slow — but the United States is faring considerably better than other developed nations against the threat of a renewed recession.

Don’t believe it? Maybe you should stop listening to the right-wing propaganda machine, which has been trash talking the U.S. recovery ever since Barack Obama's inauguration, and start paying attention to economic analysts who know what they're talking about — and provide hard data to back up their findings.

They provide a hard, factual, real-world context for our often-absurd political debate, especially as the presidential election approaches.

Every few months, a fresh report appears showing that the U.S. recovery is continuing and even strengthening, despite stagnation and austerity in Europe that drag down the entire global economy. Last June, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development noted that the U.S. recovery was gaining momentum, in contrast to its weak trading partners, despite continuing problems in housing and construction and its report praised the Obama administration's policy initiatives on employment, the budget and taxation.

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“It's not easy to debate a liar,” complained an email from one observer of the first presidential debate — and there was no question about which candidate he meant. Prevarication, falsification, fabrication are all familiar tactics that have been employed by Mitt Romney without much consequence to him ever since he entered public life, thanks to the inviolable taboo in the mainstream media against calling out a liar (unless, of course, he lies about sex).

Yes, President Obama ought to have been better prepared for Romney's barrage of blather and bull. The Republican's own chief advisor, Eric Fehrnstrom, had glibly described the “Etch-a-Sketch” strategy they would deploy in the general election, to make swing voters forget the “severe conservative” of the primaries. Romney executed that pivot on Wednesday night, but he could do so only by spouting literally dozens of provably fraudulent assertions — which various diligent fact-checkers proceeded to debunk.

Knowing that he is vulnerable on taxation and the budget for many reasons, including his own peculiar and secretive tax history, Romney made several contradictory claims regarding his economic plan. He has no plan to lavish $5 trillion in tax breaks on the wealthy. He won't cut taxes for the rich at all. He vowed to provide tax relief to the middle class and won't increase their tax burden. He swore that his tax cuts ...

While Mitt Romney may well wish he had expressed himself more “elegantly” at the swanky Boca Raton fundraiser where he denounced half the voting population as shiftless, government-entitled moochers, he isn't backing away from those secretly recorded remarks — although what he said was entirely inaccurate, as well as obnoxious.

Watching him on video, the Republican nominee sounds not only vulgar and arrogant, but profoundly ignorant about the nation he hopes to govern. “There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what,” said the Republican nominee, who proceeded to describe those people.

“All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government ... Those people,” he went on, “believe that they are victims ... believe the government has a responsibility to care for them ... believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.”

Let's stop right there: Whatever percentage of Americans plan to vote for the president, there is no plausible evidence that they all think of themselves as entitled to government benefits. Nor is there any evidence that all of Obama's supporters are in fact "dependent on government." And there is plenty of evidence that Romney supporters — Obama supporters and like many Americans who will not vote at all — receive Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment benefits, housing vouchers, veterans benefits and other forms of federal assistance.

The Republican-leaning moochers, as defined by Romney, can easily be found in the red states, which contribute far less in federal taxes than they receive in per capita benefits. Alabama, for instance, receives almost $4,000 per capita in federal spending on retirement and disability, while contributing just over $1,000 per capita in federal income taxes. Kentucky receives ...

On the same day that Mitt Romney cracked his birther “joke,” new evidence indicated that he and his partners at Bain Capital have used questionable methods to avoid federal taxes — including a scheme that transforms corporate stock into untaxed offshore “derivatives” and a practice that converts management fees into capital gains, which are taxed at a far lower rate.

While nobody has asked to see the Republican candidate's birth certificate, as he said at a Michigan rally on Friday, everybody has a renewed interest in examining the tax returns he continues to withhold.

The complex and tricky tax shelters used by Bain Capital continued to emerge as lawyers and other experts examined the hundreds of pages of previously confidential company documents uncovered by the Gawker website in an exclusive series this week. The authenticity of the documents was confirmed by a Bain spokesperson, who said that the company deplores the public posting of its proprietary materials.

In a sense, the latest revelations about how Bain protected its vast income from taxation are scarcely surprising to anyone familiar with the world of private equity where Romney made his fortune, estimated at $250 million or more. Avoiding taxes is among the most important attractions of that industry for the wealthy clients it aims ...

Defending himself against the perception that he has no significant foreign policy experience, Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan has drawn fresh attention to one of the most controversial acts of the past decade: the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq before U.N. weapons inspections were completed. Ryan now points to his vote for war as a token of his readiness to serve in the White House, but he is on the wrong side of both history and public opinion.

The Wisconsin congressman may come to regret his flippant response to Carl Cameron last Saturday, when the Fox News reporter asked how he would respond to critics who question his weak national security resume.

"I've been in Congress for a number of years," he said. "That's more experience than Barack Obama had when he came into office." Perhaps he should have stopped there, but instead blundered on, "I voted to send people to war."

Does Ryan believe that voting for war constitutes foreign policy experience? If so, it is a kind of experience that reflects very poorly on him. Even he must realize that the underlying premise of the war, Saddam Hussein's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction, quickly proved to be nothing more than a Bush administration hoax, along with the secondary claim that ...

Harry Reid has provoked outrage among liberals as well as conservatives, who seem to believe he has violated propriety by repeating gossip about Mitt Romney's taxes. The Senate leader says someone connected with Romney told him that the Republican candidate paid no income taxes for a period of 10 years. Offended by Reid's audacity, commentators on the right have indicted him for "McCarthyism," while others on the left have accused him of inventing the whole story.

Evidently the chief complaint against Reid — aside from aggressiveness unbecoming a Democrat — is that he cited "an extremely credible source" who he has so far declined to name. Some journalists have gone so far as to suggest that Reid must be lying because he won't identify the source.

Despite all this righteous tut-tutting among the great and the good, in newspapers and magazines as well as on television, Reid's critics simply have no way ...

If Mitt Romney's purpose in traveling abroad this summer was to prove his credentials as a potential world leader, the verdict is mixed at best. Neither his tendency to utter bizarre insults nor his shallow, ideological approach to policy inspired much confidence, although he managed to garner support from Israel's right-wing prime minister and an eccentric former leader in Poland. (Our allies in the United Kingdom may never want to hear from him again.)

On the trip's final leg, the world saw the most unattractive side of the Romney campaign, when the traveling press secretary loudly told reporters to “kiss my ass” and “shove it,” in a display of the attitude that trickles down from the top.

Contempt toward the press is an important aspect of this attitude. For most of the campaign so far, Romney has pursued a media strategy that has become increasingly typical of Republican presidential candidates: Speak with Fox News, and avoid the rest of the  READ FULL POST 11 COMMENTS

Forever incapable of embarrassment, let alone sober reflection, Karl Rove is very well suited to his current roles as Fox News commentator and Crossroads Super PAC smear sponsor. But he achieved a moment of near-perfection last Thursday when, appearing on a Fox morning news broadcast, he spoke up about President Obama's invocation of executive privilege against a House committee subpoena of Justice Department documents.

“It's one thing to exert executive privilege over the actions of the president, and his aides, and the White House,” he said. “It's another thing to exercise executive privilege with regard to a Cabinet official, seemingly in a matter that — according to the president up until now — had no connections with, no contact with, no communications with the White House ... .”

Rove went on to complain that the president's privilege claim over the “Operation Fast and Furious” documents demanded by Rep. Darrell Issa's oversight committee “is a very long reach. I mean basically, if the president is allowed to take the privilege that goes to the Executive Office of the President and extend it to a Cabinet department, then he can extend it to any branch of the government for any matter, even if there was no presidential or White House involvement. And I'm not certain that that's what the Founders thought about when they talked about executive privilege.”

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This week, Republicans on Capitol Hill opened yet another front in their continuous sniping against the Obama administration, the Justice Department and Attorney General Eric Holder. Having demanded a federal investigation of intelligence leaks, they now claim to be outraged because Holder has asked two United States attorneys to conduct that probe — and one of the two happens to be a Democrat.

Angry Republicans (and their media enablers at Fox News, et al.) insist that the White House must have leaked information about the president's terrorist "kill list," the success of drone strikes and the killing of Osama bin Laden to improve the president's martial image and re-election prospects. Never mind that they fawned over the Bush White House, regardless of its leaks and even its unlawful disclosure of CIA officer Valerie Plame's identity. That was then, of course — and now the alleged leaks of national security material from a Democratic administration enrage them.

Whether those stories emanated from the Obama White House or not, someone must have tipped off The New York Times, which first reported the "kill list," among other things. So consistent with President Obama's evident obsession about stanching leaks, Holder appointed Ronald Machen, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, and Rod Rosenstein, the U.S. attorney for the District of Maryland, to oversee an investigation and potential prosecution of the leakers.