Pun Salad

Vacation's over, so let's see if anything happened in campaign phoniness:

Nope. But in recent phony news:

• Not only does President Obama have a seemingly insurmountable lead in the Phony Poll, it's now being reported that most of his Twitter followers are phony, too.
  Forty-one percent of the commander in chief's 18.6 million Twitter followers are fake, 35 percent are inactive and 25 percent are "good," or likely to be authentic, according to Fake Follower Check, which scours the messaging service specifically for phony adherents.

  Of Mitt Romney's 860,200 followers, 22 percent are sham, 33 percent are inactive and 45 are percent real, the tool shows.

  It's interesting that the Obama/Romney ratio of Twitter followers is about 21.6, in the same ballpark as the Obama/Romney ratio of phony hit counts (currently about 20.6). As Roy Neary said in Close Encounters: "This means something! This is important!"

  Nah, probably not.

• It's been awhile since Romney picked Paul Ryan as his running mate. At Cato, David Boaz notes that Ryan's record as a "fiscal conservative" is, well, phony:
  As I say, the test for a fiscal conservative is how he votes on budget-busting bills. And there, Paul Ryan has a real problem. Consider his votes during his 14 years in Congress and particularly during the 8 years of the Bush administration:

  FOR the No Child Left Behind Act (2001)
  FOR the Iraq war (2002)
  FOR the Medicare prescription drug entitlement (2003)
  FOR Head Start reauthorization (2007)
  FOR Economic Stimulus Act (January 2008)
  FOR extending unemployment benefits (2008)
  FOR TARP (2008)
  FOR GM/Chrysler bailout (2008)
  FOR $192 billion anti-recession spending bill (2009)

  It's fun to watch Democrats try to paint Romney/Ryan as if it were Rothbard/Rand (I wish), but that's show biz. Reason editor Nick Gillespie soberly points out what that means:

  But it nows seems that the 2012 election may come down to a vision of a government that either spends $1 trillion or $2 trillion more annually than we do now. Which is not a welcome development.

  Not for the first time, we quote the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band: "No matter who you vote for, the government always gets in."

• "Well," you say, "there's always Gary Johnson." (As not everyone may know: the Libertarian Party candidate.) But at the Washington Times "communities" site, Shaun Connell asks: "Is Gary Johnson a 'Fake' Libertarian?"
  Gary Johnson is running for president, and many see him as the "other" Ron Paul. But is this true? Is Gary Johnson the third-party version of Ron Paul? Does he support no corporate welfare, bringing the troops home, ending the global drone attacks, and a foreign policy of peace?

  To quote Johnson, "perhaps not".

  (Bonus: if you click over to read the whole article, you'll see a picture of Johnson that makes him look, well, deranged.)

• VP Joe Biden upped the dreadfulness in Virginia last week in front of a predominantly African-American audience:
  "Look at what they [Republicans] value, and look at their budget. And look what they're proposing. [Romney] said in the first 100 days, he's going to let the big banks write their own rules -- unchain Wall Street," Biden said a rally in Danville, Va. "They're going to put y'all back in chains."

  Republicans pounced, in what David Axelrod deemed to be "phony outrage."

  Fine. If anyone deserved to be outraged, it was (specifically) Biden's audience, who Biden assumed would be charmed by his racially-charged condescension.