Early voting began in Ohio on Tuesday morning. Obama supporters camped out overnight at polling stations around the state, as part of state Democrats' "sleep out the vote" effort. Early turnout bodes well for the president because, as Ed Schultz pointed out on Tuesday's The Ed Show, "early voters tend to favor Democrats."

In Lucas County, in the north part of Ohio, turnout on the first day of early voting nearly doubled from 2008's numbers. Of Tuesday's 928 voters, 696 were Democrats, while only 40 were Republicans. The Obama campaign has 96 field offices in the state, while Romney's team has just 36.

Early voting tends to be hugely important in Ohio. In 2008, 30 percent of voters got in their ballots before Election Day. This year the number could total 40 percent, said Schultz. According to the auditor of Ohio's Johnson County, a whopping 55 percent of voters in that region voted early in the last presidential election. He says "demand for early ballots so far is up significantly from 2008," according to CNN.

Schultz cautioned against excessive optimism, however. "Beware: Michael Dukakis had the lead before the election in 1988," he said. "This is a long haul."

Mitt Romney has been strongly criticized for his lack of policy specifics, and his plan for education is no exception. But the Romney campaign has offered a few details. As host Ed Schultz put it on Tuesday's The Ed Show, "One of his big solutions for education reform is a new one we've been talking about for some 70 years: parental involvement." The rest of his plan is characterized by support for charter schools, vouchers, and deep cuts to public education.

Here's what Romney would do if he were elected president:

• Cut Pell Grants for More than 9 Million Students
• Eliminate Head Start for More Than 2 Million Children
• Cut Nearly $5 Billion for Low Income and Special Needs Students

There's more. “Romney wants to dial it back further and really gut the provisions of [No Child Left Behind]," Drew University education professor Patrick McGuinn told The Christian Science Monitor. Romney also wants to give states money if they abolish or reform teacher tenure.

The Romney plan "would affect the future of education in this country," Schultz said. "Mitt Romney, if you want to draw the line here, really made the case for the 47 percent in education."

As the Romney campaign suffers in the polls and struggles to counter the infamous the video of their candidate seemingly deriding 47 percent of the electorate, Republican candidates across the country are backing away from their presidential nominee. The latest evacuee: Romney's campaign co-chair, former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, who quit the campaign to join a Wall Street lobbying firm. Ohio's Republican governor Jon Kasich also distanced himself, saying he disagreed with Romney's "47 percent" comments, then qualifying his disagreement by saying, "We all have misspoken."

"They're jumping ship," said MSNBC's Ed Schultz on Thursday's The Ed Show. "They've had enough."

Pawlenty and Kasich were hardly alone. Hawaii Senate candidate Linda Lingle recently emphasized that she is not "a rubber stamp for the national party," and that she cannot be held responsible for Romney's statements. Even arch-conservative George Allen, running for Senate in Virginia, said on Thursday night that he had his "own point of view on the subject." His view is that "the people of America still believe in the American dream."

The latest ship-jumpers join a host of other Republican critics of Romney's "47 percent" remark. On Wednesday night's Hardball, even Republican strategist John Feehery conceded that Romney's secretly recorded speech was hugely problematic. "If you're running for president, you have to get as many votes as you can. A lot of those in the 47 percent are people who want to vote for Mitt Romney," he said.

The leaked footage of Mitt Romney's remarks at a private fundraiser include some statements that are at odds with the Republican candidate's stated views on Israel and Palestine. While the Republican candidate has publicly expressed support for a negotiated two-state solution, in private, he has been recorded suggesting that America should "kick the ball down the field."

"And I look at the Palestinians not wanting to see peace anyway, for political purposes, committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel, and these thorny issues," said Romney in leaked footage of a private fundraiser, "and I say, 'There's just no way."

"All right," he went on, "we have a potentially volatile situation but we sort of live with it, and we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it."

That's not what Romney has said in public. In his campaign white paper "An American Century," Romney writes, "the key to negotiating a lasting peace is an Israel that knows it will be secure." But Romney's remarks show that he doesn't believe a U.S.-negotiated peace between Israelis and Palestinian is possible at all. Similarly, the paper states that "as president, Romney will reject any measure that would frustrate direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians." In the video, he makes clear that he think the Palestinians have no interest in making peace, and so negotiations are useless.

“I believe in a two-state solution which suggests there will be two states, including a Jewish state," Romney told Israeli newspaper Haaretz. "I respect Israel’s right to remain a Jewish state. The question is not whether the people of the region believe that there should be a Palestinian state."

On Tuesday's The Ed Show, host Ed Schultz said, "Now that's not what he told his donors. Are we to believe this, or this just lip service?" MSNBC contributor Richard Wolffe added, "it doesn't help Israel to have American leaders disengage," despite what Romney said on the tape.

The first day of the Republican National Convention leaned heavily on the party's rebuke to Obama's, "You didn't build that" line. In fact, the official theme of day one was: "We Built It." 

On Tuesday, the first official day of the convention, the Republican National Committee unveiled a series of three videos in which small business owners declared Obama's claim that business owners benefit from government help to be, in one of the businessman's words, "complete nonsense."

Metal fabricating company owner Jack Gilchrist also went after the "you didn't build that" line in a speech delivered at the convention. "This Administration is killing us out here," he said, citing the difficulty following the government's "rules and regulations."

Bev Gray, owner of a company called Exhibit Edge, delivered a speech on that theme as well. "The President said that business owners didn't get there on our own," she said. "Well, he's wrong. We risked everything and succeeded because of our hard work and commitment."

Their remarks were echoed by the speeches of major figures in the GOP, including Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell. "Big government didn't build America: You built America!" he said. "Small businesses don't come out of Washington, D.C. pre-made on flatbed trucks.
That coffee shop in Henrico; that florist in Virginia Beach, that bakery in Radford, they were all built by entrepreneurial Americans with big dreams, not a big-spending government with a wide-open wallet full of other people's money!"

In fact, Obama never said that entrepreneurs didn't build their businesses; he said that they built it while taking advantage of government infrastructure such as roads and electricity. And as Rachel Maddow pointed out, the convention itself is taking place at an arena in Tampa whose construction was subsidized in large part by government funds.

Joy Reid, MSNBC contributor and managing editor of The Grio, tweets: "The entire first night of #RNC2012 is built on a misquote. Ah, politics... #msnbc2012"

"If we were to implement the Ryan plan, you could rest assured that many, many senior citizens would die who otherwise wouldn't have to," said former insurance executive Wendell Potter on Tuesday's The Ed Show. Stark language, but he had the math to back it up.

"Over the past 10 years, premiums in this country have increased 113%," explained Potter, who is now an analyst at the Center for Public Integrity. The vouchers provided by the Ryan plan, which have a value based on the rate of inflation, would not be enough to increase future premium increases, he said.

"The cost of medical care has always exceeded the rate of inflation, so over time, the value of that voucher would diminish, to the point that seniors would be paying a lot more out of their pockets for the premiums, and a lot more out of their pockets for medical care," Potter said.

Not all seniors would be able to keep up; and those that couldn't just wouldn't get the medical care they need. "If we were to implement the Ryan plan, you could rest assured that many, many senior citizens would die who otherwise wouldn't have to, because of the fact that benefits would be reduced," Potter said.

Of course, that is not what the Romney campaign is saying. It has a new television commercial out blasting the Obama administration for allegedly cutting $726 billion dollars from Medicare. That charge "is absolutely false," said Potter. "What the president is doing—what needs to be done—is to reduce payments over the next several years, but he is not cutting benefits."

In a column for Lean Forward on Tuesday, Potter said that Ryan was a "dream come true" for the health insurance industry, "and a potential nightmare for just about everyone else in America under the age of 55."