Republican running mate Paul Ryan drew boos today at an AARP convention in New Orleans when he said Mitt Romney would repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which closed a gap in coverage for seniors' prescription drugs.

"The first step to a stronger Medicare is to repeal Obamacare," Ryan said to a chorus of boos.  "I had a feeling mixed reaction so let's get into it."

Ryan continued (with a typical smirk): "It weakens Medicare for today's seniors and puts it at risk for the next generation (more boos).  First, it funnels $716 billion out of Medicare to pay for a new entitlement we didn't even ask for (more jeers).  Second, it puts 15 unelected bureaucrats in charge of Medicare's future." 

President Barack Obama rebutted Ryan's charges in a live video appearance to the same audience. He said the Republican voucher prescription for Medicare would mean "billions in new profits for insurance companies"and higher out of pocket costs for seniors.

Here's a clip of his presentation:

AARP, a non-partisan organization, supported the Affordable Care Act.

Mitt Romney is receiving all kinds of flack for his now-infamous 47% comments. But could they hurt his running mate too?

Rob Zerban, Paul Ryan's Democratic challenger for his Wisconsin House seat, told Ed Schultz Wednesday that Badger State voters are "quite resentful" over the remarks, which were surreptitiously recorded at a Romney fundraiser and posted online Monday by the liberal magazine Mother Jones.

Zerban said the comments echoed Ryan's own much-debunked assertions at last month's Republican National Convention that President Obama had gone back on a promise to keep open a Janesville GM plant . Ex-Janesville plant employees told Schultz after that speech that Ryan "ought to be ashamed of himself" for the claim.

Despite Ryan's presence on the national ticket, he's spending $2 million in ads against Zerban—a sign the 7-term incumbent may actually be worried.

Zerban, who currently trails by around 8 points, said he himself benefited from "government cheese" as a young kid and is living proof of the American dream.

After taking advantage of Pell grants and Stanford loans—students, of course, account for a good share of the 47% Romney was talking about—the Democrat started two businesses of his own that employ 45 people.

"I was one of those job creators the Republicans like to talk about," Zerban said, despite his humble beginnings. "The American dream shouldn't just be reserved for people who are wealthy and well-connected."

What's a presidential candidate to do when his own party is calling on him to articulate some actual positions? That's the conundrum Mitt Romney is facing: prominent voices in the Republican base from Rush Limbaugh to former GOP leader Trent Lott are clamoring for him to stop being vague and start being substantive.

On Tuesday's The Ed Show, GOP strategist and MSNBC contributor Susan Del Percio said "Romney is sending a mixed message out there" with his hedging on issues like health care. That hedging seemingly contributed further to conservative frustration.

Salon's Joan Walsh said Romney's decision to pick conservative darling Paul Ryan as his running mate has not helped him develop a firmer platform, because the campaign chose to "muzzle" the vice presidential candidate. "Ryan hasn't chosen to stand for anything," said Walsh.

Del Percio hopes the campaign will serve as a lesson to Republican leaders. Whether "Romney wins or not ... this becomes a campaign where we have to talk about governance, and compromise, and getting things done," she said.

Still, the GOP consultant doesn't think the next two months will be a walk in the park for the Obama campaign. The base is "very energized," not demoralized, she said, and it's "going to be a very close election."

The man who handled budget issues for President Reagan has something to say about the Romney-Ryan plan. And it's not a compliment.

"They have a secret plan to cut the budget," David Stockman, who ran the Office of Management and Budget under Reagan, told Ed Schultz on Monday night's The Ed Show, adding: "They won't close any loopholes" in order to protect the highest earners.

"The top 2 percent are so damn lucky from the boom we've had over the past 20, 30 years," Stockman said. "They ought to stop whining about paying a little more in taxes, because we are in trouble fiscally."

Stockman, who in recent years has emerged as a frequent critic of the modern-day GOP, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times last month in which he slammed Paul Ryan's "fairy-tale budget plan."

"Mr. Ryan’s sonorous campaign rhetoric about shrinking Big Government and giving tax cuts to “job creators” (read: the top 2 percent) will do nothing to reverse the nation’s economic decline and arrest its fiscal collapse," he wrote.

But Stockman had harsh words for President Obama, too. 

"After four years, President Obama hasn't cut a dime out of defense," Stockman told Schultz. "He should be taking on the generals, the military-industrial complex ... [he should] cut back this huge defense establishment we don't need."

When it comes to its budget pitch to voters, Romney/Ryan has quite a vision: they'll slash taxes, increase defense spending, increase entitlement spending, and balance the budget -- all while protecting the home-mortgage-interest deduction, the health care deduction, and the charitable-contribution deduction. How? By closing unnamed tax loopholes.

There's growing impatience over the campaign's refusal to offer any kind of substance or details, to the point that even some Fox News hosts not named Shep Smith are getting irritated on the air.

On "Meet the Press" yesterday, Romney went so far as to try to redefine what the word "specifics" means.

David Gregory specifically asked for "specifics" to explain how Romney "gets to this math." The Republican replied, "Well, the specifics are these which is, those principles I described are the heart of my policy."

In other words, in Mitt Romney's mind, specific policy details and broad statements about generalized goals are the same thing. When Gregory asked the candidate to name a single tax loophole he intends to close, Romney would not.

On ABC, George Stephanopoulos pressed Paul Ryan on this, asked whether "voters have a right to know which loopholes you're going to go after." Ryan said voters would learn the details after the election, once the Romney administration begins workting with Congress.

Asked if this constitutes "a secret plan," Ryan insisted it does not, saying he and Romney "want to do this out in the open," having "this debate in the public" -- but not until after they're elected.

Let this argument roll around in your brain for a moment: Romney is trying to redefine the word "specifics" to give it the opposite of its intended meaning, while Ryan is trying to argue that secrecy is actually just a delayed version of transparency.

I'd long assumed Ayn Rand inspired the Romney-Ryan script. Now, it's looking more like George Orwell.

GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan is calling former President Jimmy Carter's leadership "the good old days" compared to the last three-plus years under President Barack Obama.   

"The president can say a lot of things and he will," Ryan told more than 2,000 supporters today in Greenville, North Carolina. "But he can't tell you that you're better off. Simply put, the Jimmy Carter years look like the good old days compared to where we are right now." 

So the Romney-Ryan ticket is going to defeat Obama by comparing him to an 87-year-old former president who hasn't been in office for more than three decades?

Mr. Ryan, how 'bout we go back three years instead of three decades (to 2001-2009, definitely NOT known as "the good old days") and look at the last president before Obama, who also happens to be the last Republican president.

There, you find many reasons the Siena Research Institute of Siena College ranked George W. Bush as the fifth-worst president in U.S. history in 2010.

Here's a just a few samples:  

• Worst economic contraction in U.S. since the Great Depression
• Went to war based on false information (Saddam Hussein's "connection" to 9/11, weapons of mass destruction), 4,000+ Americans killed
• Mismanagement of Iraq War (no plan for after "Mission Accomplished" banner display)
• Failure to capture 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden
• Hurricane Katrina ("heck of a job Brownie")
• Legalization of torture
• active attempt to privatize Social Security
• highest gas prices ever in U.S.
• politically-motivated dismissal of U.S. attorneys
• illegal surveillance of Americans and other curbs on citizen rights
• nominated Harriet Miers for U.S. Supreme Court

Click here for a list of 400 (yes, 400!!) of Bush scandals.

What's on your list? 

Unique in their unanimity, for once, mainstream and more opinionated media outlets have been calling out Paul Ryan for the multiple distortions in his speech to the Republican National Convention Wednesday night. One assertion has received a little more attention than the rest: Ryan's charge that Obama is to blame for the closing of the GM plant in his hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin.

One problem: the plant closed all but a few last operations on December 23, 2008 - and Obama was inaugurated as President in January 2009.

Though the fact-check articles have piled up, The Ed Show went one step further on Friday night. The best fact checkers are "the people actually given notice they were losing their jobs," said host Ed Schultz, who brought a former Janesville GM plant worker on the show.

Brad Dutcher, an employee who was at the meeting when then-Senator Obama spoke inside the plant, said Obama "had nothing to do with the decision to close our factory." He also said "there was never a promise made...to keep our plant open. That is completely false."

Four years after the closing of the plant, Janesville families are still feeling the effects. "We still have families that are separated, we have moms and dads that drive 4, 5 states away that come home on the weekends to see their families," said Dutcher. "To turn this plant closing into a political football is shameful, and he [Paul Ryan] ought to be ashamed of himself." The crowd behind him cheered and affirmed that comment, an audience comprised of people holding pro-union placards.

Schultz also pointed out another key date before the plant closure: November 18, 2008, when Mitt Romney wrote the now-infamous "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt" op-ed column.

Dutcher took issue with one more Ryan fiction. "When our congressman made the remark that nobody in Wisconsin benefited from those auto loans, it's absolutely false. I have a lot of retirees behind me that still collect the pension they earned because of those auto loans," he said. At his statement, the crowd erupted into cheers and applause. 

"This entire room is full of Obama supporters," he told Schultz.

Nobody is forgetting about Paul Ryan's lies from last night's vice presidential acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in Tampa -- especially the one trying to link President Barack Obama to the closing of a General Motors plant in his hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin.

"There’s no delicate way to say this. Last night, Paul Ryan lied -- repeatedly, knowingly and brazenly," Stephanie Cutter, the communications director for President Barack Obama, told reporters today. 

"When the speechwriters came in and said, 'Now, Paul Ryan, we want you to say Barack Obama closed that GMC plant in Janesville,' he should have stopped them and said, 'That isn’t true. That’s not going to be in my first important speech of my political career.' But he left it in," said U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois).

PolitiFact Wisconsin rated Ryan’s claim "false." 

"When Wisconsin needed him most, Paul Ryan turned his back on us, repeatedly voting against legislation aimed at helping displaced workers," said Ron McInroy, director of UAW Region 4, which covers Wisconsin.

"He voted to cut unemployment insurance (UI) and voted against extending UI several times when protection was what Janesville workers needed most."

Here's what Ryan said last night:

"My home state voted for President Obama. When he talked about change, many people liked the sound of it, especially in Janesville, where we were about to lose a major factory.

A lot of guys I went to high school with worked at that GM plant. Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said: ‘I believe that if our government is there to support you … this plant will be here for another hundred years.’ That’s what he said in 2008.

Well, as it turned out, that plant didn’t last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day."

Then-presidential candidate Obama did visit the Janesville plant on February 13, 2008, and spoke about the need for government investment in alternative energy.  But he did not promise to keep the plant open:

“I know how hard your governor has fought to keep jobs in this plant. But I also know how much progress you’ve made – how many hybrids and fuel-efficient vehicles you’re churning out. And I believe that if our government is there to support you, and give you the assistance you need to retool and make this transition, that this plant will be here for another hundred years.”

Of course, this was several months before the financial panic triggered by the fall of Lehman Brothers (Sept. 15, 2008) and Romney's call of "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt" (Nov. 18, 2008). 

The GM Janesville plant closed on Dec. 23, 2008, one month before Obama was inaugurated as president (Jan. 20, 2009). 

Obviously, any suggestion that Obama had anything to do with the closing of GM Janesville is false.