The corporate media has been trying really hard to minimize the revelation that rice has dangerous levels of arsenic contamination. They sort of talk around it as if it were natural, and of course the 'organic' brown rice is far worse than the good polished 'white' rice.

In case you were wondering why all of a sudden the rice has arsenic in it even though arsenic poisoning has been known for hundreds of years, the problem is corporate agri-business. They've been shifting huge amounts of irrigated cotton land into rice production. Never mind that a hundred plus years of using arsenic as a pesticide on the cotton has contaminated the soil beyond redemption.

Romney's campaign announced today that he will be coming out with a concrete five point plan to fix the economy. With early voting starting in Iowa next week, he's cutting it kind of thin. Since he was supposed to be the expert, the 'smart guy in the room', the whiz kid of Bain Capital, why didn't he share any of this wisdom with voters before? Why was the plan secret?

The 'intellectual' leader of the Republicans, Paul Ryan, says tax reform policies need to be vague in order to get them passed in Congress. This guy should lose his House seat once they hear him back in Wisconsin. The math simply doesn't work. Even if you closed all the 'loopholes' on the poor who 'don't pay taxes,' you know: child credits, home mortgage interest, credits for the blind, that sort of thing; the money simply isn't there.

'Look it up', this is something you'll never, ever hear from the right. They love their talking points that they treat as facts, as they do with any opinion that pops into their heads. Even when they quote an actual real number, they never put it into context.

The big headline today on the rightwing 'news' sites is that the workforce non-participation total is now 89 million. They are implying and hoping you will accept this to mean that there are 89 million unemployed people (all on welfare of course). This is simply nonsense. The number represents everybody over 16 who isn't institutionalized or in the military. Even if you are a 100, you are counted as a potential worker if you have stayed out of the nursing home.

Incredibly, the Republicans think they can pull a Ronald Reagan stunt and work the 'Morning in America' scam on the voters again. Carter lost a big chunk of the union vote who blamed him for the bad economy caused largely by Nixon, they foolishly believed Reagan to be on their side. Mitt Romney doesn't pass the smell test for most voters, even with many of those who will vote for him anyway.

But are you better off than four years ago? Well, the banks are no longer dropping like leaves from the trees after an early frost. At 4.5 million, more jobs have been created than Bush lost, in fact more than he created in 8 years. In total Bush's new job creation was a net zero. The first decade of zero growth ever.