SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- As Paul Ryan made the campaign rounds Tuesday in Ohio, a battleground state where GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney continues to trail an empty chair in polls, he focused his attacks on the Democratic National Convention rather than the current administration's handling of the economy. Ryan's first target was former President Jimmy Carter, for whom President Obama has planned a tribute. Ryan reminded his base of Carter's abysmal record in office, which included the creation of wasteful and needless agencies such as the Department of Education, Carter's role in destroying Three Mile Island to protect his ties to greedy oil interests, Carter's well-documented atheism and anti-human rights stances, Carter's work with OPEC to bring about a crippling energy crisis, and Carter's involvement in causing the eruption of Mount St. Helens. But the majority of Ryan's speech chided the "ridiculous stunts" Obama aides have planned in response to Clint Eastwood's improvisational empty chair skit.

Sources close to DNC event planners leaked details of President Obama's version of the empty chair routine earlier this week. One of the skits will allegedly feature Barack Obama talking into an empty file box, representing Mitt Romney's invisible tax records.

"Are you better off now than you were four years ago, Mr. Romney?" Mr. Obama will ask humorously, pulling what appear to be invisible sheets of paper from the box. "It's hard to tell since we can't seem to find your returns."

Obama will look again and eventually discover a real document. "Wait, what's this? Oh, just my long-form birth certificate. Never mind," the president will declare.

In another planned sketch, Vice President Joe Biden will tour an empty factory owned by Bain Capital and ask, "Where are all the jobs Mitt Romney created during his tenure as a business leader?"

At that moment, a video screen behind Biden will activate with a live feed into sweatshops filled with child laborers in China and India. "Oh, there they are," Biden will add.

Ryan called the proposed theatrics a distraction from the pressing issues of the day: "They're slanderous lies. The whole show stinks of a poorly conceived, senile, vulgar attempt at vaudeville unbefitting retarded children, let alone persons of dignified positions."

Romney's running mate left the stump after regaling Ohioans with exploits of bench-pressing more weight than Arnold Schwarzenegger, developing a cure for cancer, and closing down eighteen illegal abortion clinics operated by a satanic church Barack Obama founded as a teenaged drug lord living in Jakarta.

(c) 2012. See disclaimers.