Bill Scher, Campaign for America's Future "Progressive Breakfast" lead piece, October 23. For any folks you know who are still looking for, or receptive to, facts or arguments on which candidate is better on jobs.

Mitt Romney's jobs plan is a collection of bullet points masking the fact that he has literally no proposals to create jobs.

President Barack Obama's newly published jobs plan is a collection of bullet points that understates the detail in the jobs policies he has already proposed.

The heart of the Obama plan is stated very succinctly, almost casually, but it's a very big deal: "use half the savings from ending foreign wars to pay down the debt and the other half to invest in infrastructure at home."

Those savings are not chump change. They are currently estimated at $848 billion.

Using savings from ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan gets derided by the pundits as if Obama is credited himself for money already pocketed. But as I and others have noted previously, these are savings not yet pocketed, and may never be realized if we elect a new president is who is not committed to ending those wars.

Half of $848 billion is basically the cost of the President's American Jobs Act proposed last year.

All the nitty-gritty details of that legislation may not be on the president's campaign website, but they are on the White House website. Here are some of the key elements:

..........

The 15-hour working week predicted by Keynes may soon be within our grasp – but are we ready for freedom from toil?

Radio Free Europe/Radio Free Liberty, October 22, 2012

Georgia's missing acting Defense Minister Dimitri Shashkin has announced that he decided to leave the country.

Shashkin said via his Facebook account on October 22 that he hoped to return to Georgia someday. He said he left Georgia because his viewpoints do not coincide with those politicians who won the parliamentary elections on October 1. Shashkin also called on his colleagues and friends "not to believe unbelievable stories" about him that may emerge soon. [.....]

Also see:

After Elections, Many Georgian Officials Disappear, Leave Town, RFE/RFL, October 16

As the historic peaceful transfer of political power unfolds in Georgia, some outgoing officials with the former government apparently are not waiting around to find out how the story ends.

Since the October 1 elections, which were won by the opposition Georgian Dream coalition of billionaire businessman Bidzina Ivanishvili, a growing number of senior officials and former officials from the government of President Mikheil Saakashvili's United National Movement have disappeared. Georgian media have been rife with speculation that they have fled the country in fear of possible prosecution by the new authorities.

Among those missing in action since the election results became clear are [.....]

By Richard Florida, Atlantic Cities, October 23, 2012

[....] In March 2009, I wrote a piece for The Atlantic outlining the likely effects of the crisis on America’s economic landscape. Several years into the crisis, I wanted to look at how the crisis might have affected the geography of finance across America.

With the help of my Martin Prosperity Institute (MPI) colleague Charlotta Mellander, I looked at two dimensions of finance. The first covers the geography of the firms and establishments that make up the finance and insurance industry based on 2010 data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. The second covers the geography of finance and related jobs and wages based on 2011 data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The MPI’s Zara Matheson mapped the data [....]

Perhaps the most striking thing in our analysis is this: While finance was the main force in precipitating the crisis, its share of occupations and wages has increased in its wake. The finance share of all U.S. occupations grew from 4.4 percent in 2006 to 4.8 percent in 2011 according to our analysis, while the finance sector’s share of wages grew from 6.8 percent to 7.3 percent over the same period. During this time, nearly three-quarters (73.3 percent) of U.S. metros saw their share of finance jobs grow, while nearly 60 percent of metros saw their share of finance wages increase. The average wages and salary for finance-related jobs increased from $60,000 in 2006 to $68,740 in 2011. [....]

A little pre-debate fun from McSweeney's.

Strategic Allied Consulting, a firm tied to allegations of voter registration fraud, was paid more than $600,000 by Republican sources in September before being blacklisted in the wake of those allegations.Federal campaign finance records disclosed on Friday show that in September the Republican National Committee paid the company more than $416,000 and the Republican Party of Virginia paid it another $200,000. The RNC’s payments were first reported by BuzzFeed.

Run by Arizona-based GOP consultant Nathan Sproul, Strategic Allied Consulting was hired by the RNC and several state Republican parties to run voter registration drives and get-out-the-vote campaigns throughout the nation. But the RNC fired the company late last month and the state parties followed suit after Florida officials flagged dozens of questionable voter registration forms being filed by the company. Florida authorities are now investigating whether the filings amounted to fraud. The RNC paid the company more than $3.3 million before firing it on Sept. 27.

The company has also been linked to a case of voter registration form destruction in Virginia. A former employee of the company, Colin Small, 23, was charged last week with destroying eight voter registration forms there. Small, like many employees originally hired by the company, continued to work on behalf of the Republican Party after the company was fired.

Sproul and Republican groups have denied wrongdoing and blamed the problems on low-level employees who they say had disobeyed their training.

By Max Fisher, Washington Post, October 22, 2012

The United States and Iran have agreed in principle to direct negotiations over the Iranian nuclear program, the New York Times reported on Saturday, citing unnamed Iranian and U.S. officials. The talks would take place after the election, apparently at the Iranians’ request. The story fueled wide speculation in Washington over the weekend, driven by three questions: First, is it true? Second, who leaked it? And, third, if it’s true, why are the talks happening now? [....]

Reuters in Moscow, October 21, 2012

Russian security forces have killed 49 militants in an operation across the North Caucasus region, where rebels are fighting to carve out an Islamic state, Russia's top anti-terrorism body has said.

The agency, which serves as a mouthpiece for law enforcement agencies operating in the region, gave no time period for the operation, which was launched days after the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, led a meeting of the country's security council.

Putin has pushed the North Caucasus insurgency, rooted in two separatist wars in Chechnya, back to the forefront of national politics [....]

As previously reported in by the Columbus Free Press, the Romney family, namely Mitt, Ann, G Scott and Tagg Romney, along with Mitt's "6th son" and campaign finance chair have a secretive private equity firm called Solamere Capital Partners. This firms ties to Romney's campaign and bundlers is already well documented, along with its connection to the manufacture and distribution of voting machines. What is not as well documented is a subsidiary of that private equity firm hiring employees of a failed firm tied to a Ponzi scheme that has a long history of money laundering for Latin American drug cartels and to the Iran-Contra scandal.

As reported by ThinkProgress, Solamere Capital Partner's subsidiary Solamere Advisors is a investment advisory group, providing advice to Solamere clients and boosting sales. Would-be corporate pugilist Tagg Romney is a director. According to the New York Times, all but one of its 11 employees came from the Charlotte office of the Stanford Financial Group, the US investment arm of convicted felon R. Allen Stanford's offshore banking and fraud network that comprised a host of companies including the Stanford International Bank, Stanford Capital Management, The Bank of Antigua, Stanford Trust and Stanford Gold and Bullion. Three of these employees, Tim Bambauer, Deems May, and Brandon Phillips, received incentive compensation related to their direct sales of securities linked to a fraud that brought down this banking network.

Much more in full report, please click on link.

...While any argument for squelching speech in deference to religious taboos is obviously “illiberal” in its content, there’s a narrow sense in which this kind of argument is formally liberal, in that it strives to meet the requirements of liberal public reason. It is not, in other words, an argument that depends on one’s sharing any particular comprehensive religious or metaphysical doctrine, but aims to present reasons that could be accepted by persons of any faith (or none).

By Rosa Brooks, ForeignPolicy.com, October 18, 2012

[....] It doesn't have to be this way. If Obama wants to fix his broken foreign policy machine, he can do it -- but conversations with numerous insiders, as well as my own government experiences, suggest that he needs to focus on strategy, structure, process, management, and personnel as much as on new policy initiatives.

Not sexy, I know. But just as a start-up company needs more than an entrepreneurial founder with a couple of good ideas and a nifty PowerPoint presentation, the United States needs more than speeches and high-minded aspirations. [....]

Author bio:

Rosa Brooks is a law professor at Georgetown University and a Schwartz senior fellow at the New America Foundation. She served as a counselor to the U.S. defense undersecretary for policy from 2009 to 2011 and previously served as a senior advisor at the U.S. State Department.