Mitt and MLK: Heretofore, I've not discussed the flap over Mitt Romney's statement that he saw his father march with Martin Luther King -- a claim which aroused howls of derision from progressives, and which prompted Rachel Maddow (of Air America) to pronounce the Romney campaign "over." My gut told me that people had done the conclusion-hop. And hop they had: The Politico now presents convincing evidence that George Romney did indeed march with MLK.

Thank you George Bush: Food banks cannot keep up with the surge in requests for assistance, and are turning people away. Working people are going hungry. Food prices keep rising, and landlords and gas stations now take so massive a percentage of the paycheck that employed people have little left over.

A correspondent from Australia told me that a family member recently toured California and was appalled by the poverty.

Ohio: I heartily recommend Brad Friedman's interview with Ohio's new Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner. review of electronic voting systems, a review which had the catchy title of "Evaluation & Validation of Election-Related Equipment, Standards & Testing," or EVEREST. The Republican reaction was of interest:

BB: ...But then there was immediately an attack from the Republican Party of Ohio's website saying that your study was put together with "left-wing activist academics" and claiming that you "cooked up" the report. So I wanted to give you a chance, if you wanted, to respond to that pretty startling criticism.

JB: Well, unfortunately, the tenor of the Republican Party on issues dealing with a Democratic state office holder such as myself, is not very objective. And they tend to find any small little thing to blow out of proportion and turn into criticism. And I'm surprised that they have any credibility within their own ranks, because if I were a member of the Republican Party and trying to read the blogs or what was on my state Party website, I would get very tired of all that negativity.

Why would they fight so hard against scientific, independent testing?

Social Security and health care: The finest pages of Al Franken's The Truth (With Jokes) concern Bush's attempt to bamboozle the American public over Social Security. All those frightening numbers W bandied about came from rotten data cooked up by the libertarian Cato Institute. Well, the Republicans have renewed attempts to go after our elderly, and the numbers are still concocted.

The amount of bullcrap the privatizers have slung over the years is amazing. Apparently their new trick is to conflate Medicare (which is in trouble -- that's why the privatizers want nothing to do with it) with Social Security (which is not).

Why is Social Security safe? Because the sky-is-falling projections used by the Trustees are based on unrealistically gloomy economic forecasts (less than 2% per year forever), as if we were going into a permanent recession or depression. The reality is that even with growth that averages below-par -- 2.7% -- Social Security never runs out of money. Ever.

But get this: In order to convince Americans to destroy Social Security and hand their pensions over to the brokerage firms, the privatizers tout phenomenal rates of return on stock-market-based accounts of as much as 7% per year. These rates are possible only if the economy is growing at 1998-peak-boom-year levels every single year to the end of time. So the privatizers aren't just arguing Permanent Recession -- they're also arguing Permanent Boom. At the same time!

As for Medicare:

Funny thing: Health care costs, which are out of control in the US (to the point where they're rising twice as fast as wages), aren't out of control in places with socialized medicine. You know, like Canada, where car makers like Toyota are building new plants instead of in America, because in the US health care costs make up around $1500 of the cost of each car that rolls off the assembly line. But the privatizers don't want you to know about that.

This is why I became so infuriated listening last night to the Ed Schultz show, where the stand-in host referred to Ron Paul as one of two candidates not beholden to "the corporations." Paul is a Libertarian, and Libertarians abetted Bush in his scheme to turn Social Security into a far more costly, far less effective profit-making scheme for select business cronies.

But why are the Republicans making a big deal out of this issue now? This is an election year. Is Social Security no longer considered the third rail?