Is the pressure of Thursday's debate with Joe Biden getting to Paul Ryan? 

On Sunday, a Ryan fundraiser at the Hyatt Regency O’Hare in Rosemont, Illinois, prominently featured a sign banning audio and video recording.

Ryan's remarks were reportedly routine, so why the sign?  Perhaps Ryan was thinking about those secretly recorded video remarks that Romney made at a fundraiser in May, which caught him saying that 47 percent of Americans were "dependent on government" and saw themselves as "victims."

Then on the following morning, Ryan sounded worried about the upcoming debate.

"Because [Obama] had such a bad debate [on Oct. 3], that Joe is just going to come flying at us," Ryan told radio host Frank Beckmann.  "It seems pretty clear that their new strategy is just basically to call us liars, to descend down into a mud pit, and hopefully with enough mudslinging back and forth and distortion, people get demoralized and then they can win by default."

And later in the day, Ryan just lost it, abruptly ended an interview with ABC 12 in Flint, Michigan, after an exchange on gun violence in inner cities:

Since last week's court ruling blocking Pennsylvania's voter ID law, the state has appeared to be in no rush to let voters know that the law is no longer in effect for the November election, and that an ID is no longer required. Both Lean Forward and The Rachel Maddow Show (see video above) have reported on the various ways in which the Republican state administration is dragging its heels.

But in terms of reducing confusion, the instructions that the state gives to county election boards are among the most crucial pieces of the puzzle. So what has Pennsylvania told the counties since last week?

The email below, obtained by Lean Forward, was sent by the office of Secretary of State Carol Aichele to county election administrators last Tuesday, the day of the court's ruling. It appears to fall far short of a clear declaration that photo ID is no longer required.

Instead, it tells local election officials they "MUST" (all caps in the original) ask voters for ID, but adds that voters "will not be required to vote by provisional ballot in the event that they do not show proof of identification"—a mixed message that appears to have the potential to cause confusion among county election administrators.

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted announced today he'll appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court last week's court ruling that restored full early voting rights for all Ohioans. 

Ohio Republicans had tried to pass a law blocking everyone but military personnel from voting 72 hours prior to election day.

However, this ruling still leaves it up to individual counties to decide if they want to implement the 72 hour voting ban.

Ohio State Sen. Nina Turner sounded off on the issue on last night's The Ed Show, including her reaction to a billboard in a predominately African-American neighborhood in Cleveland that warns: "Voter Fraud is a Felony."

Office of the Ohio Secretary of State

Secretary of State Jon Husted

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted has announced he'll appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court last week's court ruling that restored full early voting rights for all Ohioans. 

“This is an unprecedented intrusion by the federal courts into how states run elections," Husted, a Republican, said in a statement issued Tuesday afternoon, "and because of its impact on all 50 states as to who and how elections will be run in America we are asking the Supreme Court to step in and allow Ohioans to run Ohio elections.

On Friday, a three-judge panel ruled that Ohio's plan to scrap the last three days of early voting before the November 6 election for everyone except military service-members violated the Constitution's equal protection clause. The Obama campaign had challenged the plan in a lawsuit.

Rick Hasen, a prominent election-law expert, wrote Friday that he was "surprised" by the Appeals Court ruling, and that it "may not survive further review ... should Ohio choose to appeal."

A study released Monday by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights found that in 2008 in Cuyahoga County—Ohio's most populous—black voters used this period at 26 times the rate of white voters. Many African-Americans vote en masse after attending church the Sunday before the election.

Maybe Mitt Romney’s confused about what "foreign" means. 

The Romney campaign hyped what it called a "foreign policy speech" in Virginia yesterday.   He focused on the Middle East so he missed several other big foreign policy issues.  Actually, he missed a couple of Middle East issues, too.

Let’s start with Yemen, where al-Qaeda is hunkered down.  Militants have mounted a number of kidnappings and are said to be interrogating an American who might be linked to terrorists.  But Romney only mentioned Yemen two times during his “foreign policy” speech.  Both in the vaguest of terms:

“It is a struggle that has unfolded under green banners in the streets of Iran, in the public squares of Tunisia and Egypt and Yemen, and in the fights for liberty in Iraq, and Afghanistan, and Libya, and now Syria. In short, it is a struggle between liberty and tyranny, justice and oppression, hope and despair.” 

“But al-Qaeda remains a strong force in Yemen and Somalia, in Libya and other parts of North Africa, in Iraq, and now in Syria.”

Romney doesn’t outline any specifics for dealing with the mounting threat in Yemen.

Here are the foreign policy issues Romney completely left out.  Not a single mention:

Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, skewered Mitt Romney’s foreign policy team on Monday, saying their policies make his stomach turn.   

Wilkerson took particular aim at John Bolton, former President George W. Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations—and now an adviser to Romney. 

“The man scares me to death,” Wilkerson, a retired U.S. Army colonel told MSNBC’s Ed Schultz. “He would defeat all the enemies in America and the world—and believe me they’re plentiful—and he’d do it with everyone else’s blood. John is like Dick Cheney, never served a day in his life and wouldn't serve a day in his life … These people make me sick.” 

Wilkerson’s harsh rhetoric comes on the heels of Romney’s foreign policy speech earlier in the day, in which the former Massachusetts governor laid out a hawkish approach.

Without offering much in the way of specifics, Romney vowed to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, go after terrorists who attacked the U.S. consulate in Libya, and work to ensure Syrian rebels obtain arms to defeat Bashar al-Assad’s regime. 

A Michigan CEO is giving his employees a little friendly advice: Vote Romney, or you'll end up paying for it.

In a letter to company workers, Richard Lacks, who runs auto parts supplier Lacks Enterprises, advised them to “vote to improve your standard of living” by opposing President Obama.

Obama's healthcare overhaul, Lacks claimed, would lead to higher health insurance costs for the firm. “As employees, you will receive no additional direct benefit other than you will have to pay for it,” he added.

29 days until the election and Mitt Romney uses fear and lying to get votes, but Ed won’t get away with it!

Tonight, Ed welcomes retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff at the State Department during Gen. Colin Powell’s term, and currently the Pamela Harriman visiting professor at the College of William and Mary, to analyze Romney’s scare tactics, his bad ideas and the desire to return to the bungled foreign policy of George W. Bush.

Republicans continue to push conspiracy theories on Friday’s jobs numbers.  The Nation's Ari Melber joins Ed to discuss the GOP’s alternate reality.

Female legislators could gain several seats in the U.S. Senate this November. We'll look at why women are leading in the some key races with Michelle Goldberg, Senior contributing writer, Newsweek & The Daily Beast NY, and Keli Goff,  author (“The GQ Candidate”) and Political Correspondent for TheRoot.com.

We found out Friday that the national unemployment rate fell in September to 7.8 percent, the lowest rate since President Barack Obama took office.

Great news for American workers, but some wingnuts on the right said it was the result of a conspiracy to re-elect the president by bureaucrats at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Today, Donald Trump joined that echo chamber, saying there was "a lot of monkey business."

"I'm telling you in a month and a half from now, they will do a readjustment like has been happening for the last year and a half. They will do a readjustment and the number will be 8.2 or more," Trump told Fox & Friends.

It turns out, however, that if anything, there’s a conspiracy to help Mitt Romney get elected!

In a little-noticed part of Friday’s report, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that it had systematically undercounted jobs by 386,000 from April 2011 through March 2012.  That's roughly 32,000 jobs per month, on average.

It means that the jobs picture looked WORSE than it actually was for the 11 months ending in March 2012 (and probably beyond), actually hurting President Obama's chances for re-election!

Here's an excellent chart from Mother Jones that illustrates the point:

Unemployment is the lowest it's been since President Obama took office and the conspiracy theorists are going nuts!

Tonight, we'll get the truth on today's huge jobs report from Robert Wolf, former President of UBS Investment Bank, and Democratic Strategist Bob Shrum.

Then, a Republican talking point died a bloody death.  Tonight, a requiem for the "8% promise" with Democratic Strategist Chris Kofinis.

A new report says the same company where mine workers attended a Romney rally without pay ALSO made workers donate to his campaign. Alec MacGillis, Senior Editor at The New Republic, has the details.

Mitt Romney is completely changing his tune after he basically called half the country lazy moochers. Karen Finney, MSNBC Political Analyst and Former DNC Communications Director, joins Ed for that.

Social media election sentiment for Thursday, Oct. 4. Click the image for the full report.

The immediate consensus that Mitt Romney won Wednesday's presidential debate has eroded significantly as fact-checkers have weighed in and supporters of President Barack Obama have fought back, according to NBCPolitics' computer-assisted analysis of more than 1.3 million post-debate comments on social media.

M. Alex Johnson is a reporter for NBC News. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

The analysis suggests that as debate over a news event continues unmediated over time, the impact of the conventional wisdom of journalists and partisan commentators can be mitigated.

Before the debate, Romney partisans — never shy about criticizing what many of them see as the news media's bias against Republicans — had predicted that Obama would be declared the "winner" regardless of how it unfolded: