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After taking a shot at Mitt Romney, his criticism of the government "picking winners and losers" and comparing the government's track record to Bain Capital's record in that regard, Jon Stewart reminded us of what the real problem is that Romney and Ryan have been carping about on the campaign trail. They only think government shouldn't pick winners and losers when the Democrats are in charge.

As always, IOKIYAR.

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In what was one of the more useless, softball interviews I've seen in some time, CBS's Bob Schieffer allowed Mitt Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan get away with one lie after another with little to no push back during their first interview together on 60 Minutes this Sunday evening. Here's one portion where Schieffer allowed Ryan to play the Solyndra straw man instead of responding to his question about the rich not paying their share in taxes.

He then allowed Romney to dodge his question about the rates not being fair and use the weasel words that the wealthiest pay the "largest share of taxes" knowing full well the question Schieffer was attempting to ask him. And he allowed him to lie about his plan not raising taxes on the middle class when the experts at the Tax Policy Center say that's not true. Then he let Ryan get away with the whopper that there are enough tax loopholes they can close to be able to lower the rates for the rich, when that same study "concluded that there aren’t enough loopholes in the tax code to balance out the cuts."

SCHIEFFER: You said yesterday, I'm going to quote you Mr. Ryan “America is a place where if you work hard and play by the rules you can get ahead,” but the fact is a lot of people don't think that's true any more. They don't think the rules are fair. They think corporations and rich people are getting all these breaks and they're getting stuck with paying the bills. They see some of the wealthiest paying the lowest tax rates. How are you going to fix that?

RYAN: What I see is a new amount of crony capitalism and corporate welfare, which both parties have been engaged in, but the President has brought this to a whole new level, where President Obama is picking winners and losers based on connections, based on fads like Solyndra and basically giving handouts to businesses, giving preferences to the tax code. We want to get Washington out of the business of picking winners and losers. We want entrepreneurs to have the barriers removed from in front of them, so that people can work hard and succeed. We want to turn the American ideal back on. We want a system of upward mobility and what we think we need to do is bring fairness back to the system by getting government bureaucracy and political clout out of the system. Those are the kinds of reforms we've been talking about.

SCHIEFFER: Well, doesn't fairness dictate that the wealthiest people should not be paying the lowest taxes? Because that's what's happening many times.

ROMNEY: Well, fairness dictates that the highest income people should pay the greatest share of taxes, and they do. And the commitment that I've made is, we will not have the top income earners in this country pay a smaller share of the tax burden. The highest income people will continue to pay the largest share of the tax burden and middle income tax payers, under my plan, get a break. Their taxes come down, so we're not going to reduce taxes for high income people and we are going to reduce taxes for middle income people.

SCHIEFFER: You say that of course the wealthiest people pay the largest share, but don't they also pay the lower rate when you figure in capital gains and all of that?

ROMNEY: Well, it depends on the individual and what their source of income is, but if you look at the top one percent or five percent or quartile, whatever, they pay the largest share of taxes and that's not something which I would propose making smaller.

RYAN: What we're saying is take away the tax shelters that are uniquely enjoyed by people in the top tax brackets so they can't shelter as much money from taxation, so we can lower tax rates for everybody to make America more competitive.

Ryan followed that up by telling Bob Schieffer he was only going to release two years of his tax returns: Paul Ryan: I Gave Romney ‘Several’ Tax Returns, Will Release Two:

Mitt Romney knows more about Paul Ryan’s taxes than America will.

Ryan told 60 Minutes Sunday that he gave Romney’s campaign “several” years of tax returns during the vetting process, but promised only to release two publicly, in keeping with the number Romney has promised to release.

He dismissed calls from both Democrats and Republicans for Romney to release more of his tax returns.

“I think these issues are more or less distractions to try and take us off the fact that the president has given us failed policies that are putting us deeper into debt, that are costing us jobs,” Ryan said.

The 42 year-old congressman said he went through a “very exhaustive vetting process” before being selected as Romney’s running mate. He said the process was “confidential.”

Mission accomplished Bob. I'm sure they'll both be more than willing to come back on your network and on your Sunday show and lie some more.

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A top surrogate for presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney on Tuesday said the United States was turning into the Soviet Union because the government had backed green energy technologies.

During an interview on CNN, host Soledad O'Brien told Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) that various fact-checking organizations had debunked Romney's claim that the Obama administration had "steered money to friends and family, to campaign contributors" by backing investments in companies like Solyndra, a failed solar panel manufacturer.

"Solyndra, it doesn't make the investment a good investment, still a half billion dollars of taxpayer money squandered," Johnson replied. "That's really the main problem here is that President Obama simply doesn't understand that it's the free enterprise systems, the private sector, productive sector, not the government sector that creates long sustainable jobs. All of his efforts are towards growing government."

He added: "Take a look at the Soviet Union, Venezuela is economic basket case, is anyone moving to the island paradise of Cuba?"

"You're surely not suggesting that the idea and concept behind Solyndra and other green energies like Solyndra is comparable to the Soviet Union and Cuba, right?" O'Brien wondered.

"No, I am suggesting that," Johnson insisted. "When you take taxpayer money and you invest that into businesses, that's the taxpayer money put at risk. And let’s face it, the lesson of the Soviet Union and other socialist nations is that governments are very poor allocators of capital. It’s an economic model that doesn’t work."

"Didn't it work in Massachusetts?" O'Brien asked. "Isn't that exactly what governor Romney did in Massachusetts in green energy when he was the governor of Massachusetts?"

"Listen, the path we need to take this country on is with free enterprise system, the private sector that creates long term self-sustaining jobs," the Wisconsin Republican replied, dodging the question. "And that's exactly what Governor Romney would do as President Romney. "

(h/t: Think Progress)

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Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Reince Priebus on Sunday called an Obama campaign event in Boston a "political stunt," but said the same wasn't true of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney's surprise press conference in front of Solyndra, a bankrupt solar energy company.

During an interview on CBS, host Bob Schieffer began by asking Priebus if he expected Republican Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker to win Tuesday's recall election.

"I think it's going pretty well," the RNC chairman insisted. "You know, the difference between Scott Walker and the president is pretty stark. ... Scott Walker is one of these special people that have made promises and kept promises. You contrast that to [Obama adviser] David Axelrod's boss, he's a president who's in love with the sound of his own voice but hasn't been able to follow through on too many promises."

Schieffer went on press Priebus about the differences between an Obama campaign rally in Boston -- which Republicans admit they tried to undermine -- and the GOP hopeful's visit to Solyndra, where the Romney campaign said there might be a White House conspiracy to block the event.

"You say, a president that's in love with his own voice," Schieffer noted. "That leads me to what you all were doing last week, that is organizing a rally to try to drown out David Axelrod when he goes up to Boston at the same that out on the west coast Gov. Romney was loading up reporters and taking them on a secret mission to the Solyndra plant because he said he couldn't reveal where they were going, but he was fearful that Democrats would try to break that up."

"Isn't that kind of silly and petty when you look at it?" the CBS host wondered.

"I think Solyndra is a serious thing," Priebus argued. "I think highlighting Solyndra, highlighting this president's foray into venture capitalism, using taxpayer money to send to Solyndra, of which the Solyndra executives were donors to Barack Obama. I mean, this is political cronyism in its worse form."

"Now as far as David Axelrod and going to Boston, I mean, that's the height of a political stunt," he continued. "I mean, what's the purpose of the Chicago clan going to Boston to hold some sort of political stunt? And for these tough guys from Chicago to cry about it, I just find it laughable."

"They've failed so badly that they want us to believe that we're not living on Earth and that the president isn't the president and all of these things that are going wrong have nothing to do with Barack Obama."

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Steve Benen, who once upon a time was a contributor here at C&L before being hired by the Washington Monthly is no longer a regular guest on Rachel Maddow's show, probably because because he's working for her now, both as a producer and writing for her blog. And you can definitely see his influence when she does segments like this one, because he's been writing about Mitt Romney and his constant lying on the campaign trail for some time now.

He's been keeping a running list and doing weekly installments documenting Romney's lies in a series that comes out on Fridays, the latest of which from last week you can read here: Chronicling Mitt's Mendacity, Vol. XIX. I'm sure Romney's latest which Maddow reported on in the clip above will make this Friday's post as well.

As Rachel noted, on a crazy news day when most of the media was reporting on George W. Bush at the White House having his portrait unveiled, Romney openly admitting to sending hecklers out to scream over Obama adviser David Axelrod and the trial of John Edwards finally coming to an end, Mitt Romney appeared for a campaign stop at the failed energy company Solyndra, and besides the crazy conspiracy theories the Romney campaign was throwing out there that Dave wrote about this Thursday and the fact that Romney has a Solyndra type problem of his own from his time as Governor in Massachusetts, there's also the problem that Mitt Romney just straight up lied about the Obama administration supposedly steering contracts to "friends and family."

Here's more on that from the Time article she quoted in the segment: Mitt Romney’s Ads: Still Wrong on the Stimulus:

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Mitt Romney's campaign aides said on Thursday that they kept the presumptive Republican presidential nominee's visit to a bankrupt company secret because they worried the White House would conspire with local officials to block the event.

CNN's Jim Acosta explained that the trip was "steeped in secrecy and mystery" until reporters were told at the last minute that Romney would be boarding the campaign bus and traveling with them to Solyndra, a San Francisco solar energy company that went bankrupt after receiving over $500 million in government loans.

According to ABC News, Romney's aides were asked if they were being "paranoid" by suggesting that the "Obama administration" would prevent the candidate from visiting the company.

"He is the president," one adviser reportedly replied. "I mean, they could work with town officials to deny us access."

"We knew, if word got out, that Solyndra would do everything in their power, and the Obama administration would do everything in their power, to stop us from having this news conference," the aide insisted.

During the press conference, reporters also asked Romney why the event had been kept a secret.

“I think there are people who don’t want to see this event occur, don’t want to have questions asked about this particular investment," the former Massachusetts governor replied.

DNC communications director Brad Woodhouse told Talking Points Memo that the campaign's conspiracy theory was "bizarre."

"I don’t want to use the term ‘weird,’ but I dont know where he would get that idea from," he said.

Another Democratic aide called Romney "delusional."

Republicans have been trying to tie President Barack Obama to the company since it failed in August 2011, but the White House has pointed out that the loan program actually began under President George W. Bush.

(h/t: Talking Points Memo)

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Jon Stewart returned from vacation this Tuesday night and responded to the article he read at the Huffington Post where Fox News chief Roger Ailes went after Stewart for admitting he's a "Socialist" and wouldn't do well without Fox. What we got in response was Stewart doing a really good job of explaining why being called a Socialist should not be a pejorative.

As far as not having enough material for his show if Fox did not exist, I'm sure Fox existing makes his job as a comedian easier, but as long as we've got wingnut politicians who are on the air either at the other networks or on C-SPAN spouting nonsense from the House or Senate floor, I don't think Stewart is in danger of running out of new material that's ripe for mockery any time soon.

After having a bit of fun with his "scenario" about what actually happened during that meeting with Ailes, Stewart went on to explain just what he meant by his remarks and what he considers "Socialism" such as protecting things like Social Security and Medicare.

He also took some shots at Republicans for pretending the health care law, or "Obamacare" is that dreaded "s- word", Socialism:

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Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney suggested to a group of business people in Michigan on Thursday that entrepreneurs should ask their parents for money instead of using loans from the federal government.

In a speech to the Greater Farmington Area Chamber of Commerce, the former Massachusetts governor blasted the Obama administration for trying to jump start renewable energy with government loans to companies like Solyndra.

"When the president says I'm going to take your money and give it to Tesla and Fisker, two new car companies, which by the way, Fisker now builds their cars in Finland, that's not good," he explained. "When he takes $500 million and puts it into Solyndra, that's not good. That's not good for American enterprise and innovation."

"The president wanted to encourage solar energy and he thought by taking $500 million and giving it as a loan to a company would do that," Romney continued. "It did just the opposite. Not understanding the private enterprise system explains why he doesn't understand that.

"Because my guess is that there are about 100 or more entrepreneurs in America that have ideas for solar energy, and they're trying to go out and get funding for their business, for their startup for their ideas. Going to venture capitalists and angels and their parents to try and get funding."

Although the Obama administration did approve funds for Solyndra, the loan process began under President George W. Bush's administration.

(H/T: Think Progress)

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Chris Wallace might have given Reince Priebus a hard time about Republicans being the party that looks out for the rich, but he quickly made up for it by attacking President Obama and carrying some water for Mitt Romney with the GOP's favorite whipping boy of the day, the failed solar company, Solyndra. Wallace did his best to hammer home one of the Republicans favorite talking points, that President Obama was somehow the "CEO" of General Motors or of Solyndra due to the government investment in both of them and therefore personally responsible for any layoffs at either company.

As DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz rightfully pointed out it is comparing apples to oranges:

WALLACE: Let me ask you about that. Is the president responsible for laying off the people at Solyndra?

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: No, because the president wasn't the CEO of Solyndra.

WALLACE: Well, Romney wasn't the CEO of these companies, either. The president was --

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: No, Romney --

WALLACE: Excuse me. The president was not a venture capitalist. He put taxpayer money into Solyndra and a thousand people lost their jobs.

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: OK.

WALLACE: So is the president responsible for the thousand people who lost their jobs at Solyndra?

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: Not even close. But Mitt Romney is responsible for being CEO of companies that he took over. That --

WALLACE: No, he wasn't the CEO.

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: He was the CEO of Bain. Bain bought these companies, took them over --

WALLACE: Well, the president is the CEO of the country.

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: But he's not the CEO of Solyndra.

And it went on and on like that with Wallace continuing to conflate Romney personally profiting from taking businesses over to the government investing in solar companies. And naturally Reince Priebus got the last word and chimed in with more of his usual attacks blaming President Obama for our economic woes while his party is busy actively sabotaging the economy on purpose.

Full transcript below the fold.

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As Rachel Maddow pointed out during this segment from Monday night's show, while the Republicans may be doing a lot of carping about the government investment in the failed solar panel manufacturer, Solyndra, it seems Republicans on the local level are more than happy to have the money coming into their areas for these same type of investments.

MADDOW: The federal government is quietly investing in renewable energy and making energy more affordable and more renewable. Happens in ways you don`t hear about much unless you read local business pages where federal money coming to town makes a big deal, makes a big difference. To the extent that Washington is talking about alternative energy right now at all, the talk has to do with a failed government loan to a company called Solyndra, a maker of solar panels.

In 2009, Solyndra got a loan for more than half a billion dollars from the U.S. government. This month the company closed its plant, laid offmore than 1,000 people and went bankrupt. Congress called its top executives to testify last week on Capitol Hill. The executives took the fifth. You can argue the Solyndra case any number of ways, whether President Bush was responsible for it since the loan started under him or whether you want to blame President Obama. Whether any administration should have known better to lend the Solyndra or whether this is just a bad bet in one of those public-private partnership that are never a sure thing but nevertheless elected officials are always saying, we need more of.

Solyndra made headlines in the latest round of funding for electrification. Of course the dirty word of clean energy anymore. And this week, the conservative weekly, "The Weekly Standard" put President Obama on its cover as President Solyndra, that what they want to call him trying to reduce his own presidency to one loan to one failed maker of solar panels.

But even as national conservatives want to make you feel bad about public investment in electricity, in energy, even some conservatives are pouring on the dollars for it in the states. The solar thing in particular makes sense to a lot of conservatives back home. Investing in infrastructure back home remains a core value. The same way it was a core value when the nation first started wiring our far flung farms. Just this month the Mississippi state legislature approved a $75 million loan to bring one maker of solar equipment to the state of Mississippi. Another solar company opened its doors in Mississippi this month with another 75
million bucks in loans and tax breaks from the state.

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