Abbreviated pundit round-up: Liberals & conservatives agree, Paul Ryan is the candidate they wanted

Rupert Cornwell confuses bold with desperate in his discussion of Mitt Romney's choice of Paul Ryan as a running mate. He seems to think Ryan on the ticket will end the talk about Romney's taxes and Romney's stumbles by returning the conversation to the economy, as if the spread of public knowledge about Romney's and Ryan's tax and spending plans will be electorally advantageous.

Charles Krauthammer offers another of his famous misdiagnoses because he once again misinterprets the symptoms:

If Republicans want to win, Obama's deeply revealing, teleprompter-free you-didn't-build-that confession of faith needs to be hung around his neck until Election Day. The third consecutive summer-of-recovery-that-never-came is attributable not just to Obama being in over his head but, even more important, to what's in his head: a government-centered vision of the economy and society, and the policies that flow from it.

Paul Ryan's phony reputation as a deficit cutter ought to be the main target of Democratic attacks writes Matt Miller. Instead of letting him get away with calling himself fiscal conservative, he ought to be blasted for first presenting a plan that would add $60 trillion to the national debt, then tweaking it into a plan that would add $14 trillion, neither of which would ever bring the national budget into balance.

Thomas B. Edsall says there is one thing that liberals and conservatives are united on: their happiness that Paul Ryan was chosen by Mitt Romney. The difference being that conservatives see him as a rescuer and liberals see him as an anchor:

Until now, the Democratic super PAC Priorities USA has concentrated its commercials attacking Romney on his stewardship of Bain Capital, especially on decisions by the company to put businesses Bain acquired into bankruptcy, to close plants and to lay off workers. It has done so in part because of the focus group findings that voters were reluctant to believe that a mainstream politician would back the scope of [spending] cuts called for in the Ryan proposal.

David Corn says Paul Ryan is the candidate Barack Obama wanted.

Ever since the Democrats' clock was cleaned by the tea party-ized Republicans in the 2010 midterm elections, Obama has pursued a grand political strategy of setting up his reelection contest as a choice between archly different visions. Long before Romney had vanquished the midgets of the GOP pack, Obama began using the Ryan budget proposal as his chief foil. In April 2011, he gave a speech at George Washington University that was a tongue-lashing of the Ryan's budget plan, which would end Medicare as a guaranteed benefit and throw more tax breaks at the well-to-do than George W. Bush could imagine. Ryan, who attended the speech, was insulted and immediately blasted the president.

George Lakoff and Elisabeth Wehling see Barack Obama as a champion for religious freedom and Mitt Romney as its foe because of their stance on the issue of church-owned institutions covering employees' contraceptive needs.

While correctly pointing out that Barack Obama has not introduced the most solid job-creation program, Bill Boyarsky starts out his latest column with a false equivalency, essentially tying the empty glass of Mitt Romney with the president's half full one. It's enough to make you stop reading after the first paragraph. But he recovers by focusing on some examples from local communties'big and small'in which a combination of public and private leadership have produced jobs that otherwise wouldn't exist, a blueprint for others that a bit of federal guidance and funding (not edicts) could spread around the nation.

Andrew Leonard laments the Obama administration's raising the white flag by not prosecuting Goldman-Sachs at the same time Wall Street is shifting its campaign contributions from 75 percent Democratic in 2008 to 70 percent Republican in 2012:

Unfortunately, what seems clearly obvious to the normal person does not appear to translate into a slam-dunk court case, in the judgment of Department of Justice prosecutors faced with the daunting prospect of tackling the best-money-can-buy legal defense sure to be marshaled by Goldman. There's surely a nugget of truth there ' Wall Street did a very effective job in the 80s and 90s of ensuring that the rules governing their behavior were as lax as possible. But it still feels pusillanimous. And the cowardice completes a circle ' because one of the key reasons why Goldman's campaign contributions are now flowing to Romney is his promise to repeal the Obama administration's primary effort to prevent future financial sector misbehavior ' Dodd-Frank.

As the Wisconsin Sikh temple shooting pushed the Colorado movie theater shooting off the op-ed pages, Amy Goodman stepped forward last week with a plague-on-both-parties essay:

Amidst the carnage, platitudes. With an average of 32 people killed by guns in this country every day ' the equivalent of five Wisconsin massacres per day ' both major parties refuse to deal with gun control. It's the consensus, not the gridlock, that's the problem.

The Nation's Editorial Board applauds the marriage equality plank that is being added to the Democratic Party platform. It suggests six other planks as well: a Robin Hood Tax; Medicare for All; Regulation of the Banksters; a National Industrial/Economic Policy; a New Internationalism; and, a Democratic Politics and Media.