The taxpayer loss on GM hits $35B.

Does Obama really want to run on this issue? Romney should make it clear that he didn’t save the auto industry — he saved the UAW. Temporarily.

[Update a while later]

“This isn’t investing. This is welfare.”

…is worse than the quote.

It may be that when historians discuss this election, they’ll point to that untelepromptered gaffe as the moment that Obama lost the election.

Some history and context. It’s nothing new. He was raised as a Marxist, and he’s never changed.

[Afternoon update]

No, Adam Gopnik, Adam Smith would not have agreed with Barack Obama.

Obama’s latest plagiarism from Atlas Shrugged is providing a lot of graphical fodder. And he did earn that. More devastating, I think, was Romney’s response.

[Update a while later]

The ultimate takedown of Obama’s speech:

When Obama implied at the Roanoke, Virginia rally that some businessmen refuse to pay for public works from which they benefit, he presented a thesis which, like a three-legged stool, relies on three assumptions that must all be true for the argument to remain standing:

1. That the public programs he mentioned in his speech constitute a significant portion of the federal budget;
2. That business owners don’t already pay far more than their fair share of these expenses; and
3. That these specific public benefits are a federal issue, rather than a local issue.

If any of these legs fails, then the whole argument collapses.

And all of them fail. As he notes, it’s significant because it really was revealing, and an Atlas Shrugged moment.

[Update late morning]

It’s a miracle!