As it turns out, Clint Eastwood was the mystery speaker tonight at the Republican National Convention. In a strange interlude that was part speech and part comedy bit, the always gruff Eastwood argued with a theoretical Obama purportedly seated in an empty chair, made some off-color jokes, almost forgot to praise Mitt Romney, and finally lead the audience in a repetition of his signature line from the “Dirty Harry” films.

As Jamelle Bouie put it on Twitter, “This is a perfect representation of the campaign: an old white man arguing with an imaginary Barack Obama.” ThinkProgress has the highlight reel. Watch it:

You can read the full transcript HERE.

A black camerawoman for CNN is speaking out after she was assaulted at the Republican National Convention when two attendees began throwing nuts at her, saying “This is what we feed animals.”

Patricia Carroll is not interested in rehashing the incident, but she did offer some thoughts to the Maryland Institute. “This situation could happen to me at the Democratic convention or standing on the street corner. Racism is a global issue,” she said:

Carroll, 34, said that as an Alabama native, she was not surprised. “This is Florida, and I’m from the Deep South,” she said. “You come to places like this, you can count the black people on your hand. They see us doing things they don’t think I should do.”

Carroll noted of the Republican convention, “There are not that many black women there.”[...]

“I can’t change these people’s hearts and minds,” Carroll added. “No, it doesn’t feel good. But I know who I am. I’m a proud black woman. A lot of black people are upset. This should be a wake-up call to black people. . . . People were living in euphoria for a while. People think we’re gone further than we have.”

Caroll’s assessment that “you can count the black people on your hand” isn’t far off; only 2 percent of delegates at the RNC are African-American. When the Democratic Convention begins, an estimated 26 percent of the delegates will be black.

Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) speech to the Republican National Convention last night was chock-full of bald-faced lies. For example, Ryan blamed the Obama for S&P’s downgrade of our credit rating (despite the fact that S&P blamed GOP policies) and blasted Obama for failing to heed the Bowles-Simpson debt commission (which Ryan torpedoed). Yet political reporters covering the speech have, in many cases, been curiously reticent to call Ryan’s lies what they are. Here’s a list, in no particular order, of the euphemisms used in place of “lie” to describe Ryan’s falsehoods:

1. “Factual shortcuts.” — Jack Gillum and Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Associated Press. Even in some pieces ostensibly devoted to fact-checking Ryan’s speech, like this Associated Press item, reporters shy away from the term “lie.”

2. “Factually challenged” – John Berman, CNN. The word lie was later used on air to describe Ryan’s speech, but by The Daily Caller’s Will Cain, who was defending Ryan against the charge.

3. “Inaccuracies” — Donovan Slack, Politico. In what’s essentially a he-said-she-said post about the Obama campaign’s reactions to Ryan’s lies, Slack refers to the speech as “otherwise well-reviewed” despite the avalanche of criticism Ryan received for the speech’s tenuous relationship with the truth.

4. “Mr. Ryan ran headlong into the fire” — Jim Rutenberg, The New York Times. The Times’ write-up of the speech fails to call out any of the lies in Ryan’s speech, focusing instead on how the speech would play politically — an issue which is in part determined by how the press chooses to cover the speech.

5. “He is viewed as a truth teller.” — Howard Kurtz, Newsweek/The Daily Beast. Kurtz chooses to repeat this supposed perception of Ryan without addressing the question of whether the content of the speech is, in fact, truthful.

6. ” Paul Ryan stretched some truths Wednesday night…according to the fact checkers” — Mark Memmott NPR. In an otherwise admirable piece critiquing Ryan’s speech, Memmott uses both a the “stretched the truth” euphemism and frames the issue as a debate between fact-checkers and Ryan. The Romney campaign dismisses factcheckers, having said “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.”

7. “Questionable claims.” — Carol Costello, CNN. Costello goes on to say that Ryan’s claims about a GM plant in his hometown were rated by CNN factcheckers as “true but incomplete.”

8. “It’s keeping fact-checkers busy…[the Obama campaign] is trying to call attention to perceived inaccuracies in Ryan’s speech” — Chuck Todd, MSNBC. Indeed.

As the GOP concludes its convention in Tampa, Florida this week, ThinkProgress continues keep you updated on everything you need to know about the featured speakers.

We’ll live blog the festivities tonight starting at 7:00 PM. Here is a rundown of Thursday’s luminaries:

Callista and Newt Gingrich

Newt Gingrich spent most of the past two years savaging Mitt Romney in the primary campaign. Many of his attacks focused on Romney’s record at Bain Capital — labeling them “rich people figuring out clever legal ways to loot a company, leaving behind 1,700 families without a job.” He called out Romney for his false claim of creating 100,000 jobs and said he would listen to Romney only if he’d “give back all the money he’s earned from bankrupting companies and laying off employees.” When Romney acknowledged that he was not concerned about the very poor, Gingrich slammed him, saying the Founding Fathers wanted equal opportunity for the poor. When asked about Romney’s immigration policy views, Gingrich noted that one must “live in a world of Swiss bank accounts and Cayman Island accounts and making $20 million for no work, to have some fantasy this far from reality.” Even after endorsing Romney, Gingrich continued to characterize the Republican nominee as a liar. The emnity was clearly mutual — throughout the campaign, Romney labeled Gingrich as an unregistered lobbyist for Freddie Mac, “at a time that Freddie Mac was not doing the right thing for the American people,” and said he “had to resign in disgrace” from Congress.

Former Gov. Jeb Bush (R-FL)

While his brother, former President George W. Bush, has largely avoided the political scene entirely since leaving office, the former Florida Gov. has emerged as something of a thorn in his party’s side in recent months. He has called the GOP’s immigration and tax policies –- which Mitt Romney has firmly embraced –- “short-sighted.” Bush recently criticized his party’s increasing intolerance of diversity of opinion, noting that “Ronald Reagan would have, based on his record of finding accommodation, finding some degree of common ground, as would my dad [former President George H.W. Bush] — they would have a hard time if you define the Republican party — and I don’t — as having an orthodoxy that doesn’t allow for disagreement, doesn’t allow for finding some common ground.” While Romney embraced Grover Norquist’s no new taxes under any circumstances ever pledge, Bush said “I don’t believe you outsource your principles and convictions to people.” Norquist called that comment an “insult” to Romney.

Grant Bennett

Bennett, who succeeded Romney as a bishop of a Mormon meetinghouse, was likely selected to speak on Romney’s faith. Nevertheless, Bennett’s presence on the speaker list undermines the convention’s “We Built This” message that successful businesspeople achieved that success without help from the government. Bennett is the president of CPS Technologies, a company that’s received millions of dollars worth of government funds.

Former Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey (R-FL)

When Romney opted not to seek re-election in 2006, he backed his handpicked Lt. Governor Healey to replace him as Governor. With Romney’s approval ratings in the low 30s, Healey garnered just 35 percent of the vote. During her campaign, she criticizing Romney for not doing enough to help small business, saying “I think the emphasis when the governor came into office was very much on `How do we go outside of Massachusetts and bring jobs in?’ My orientation is very different.” While many of her views matched the ones Romney espoused during the 2002 campaign, her support for civil unions, abortion rights, public funding for renewable energy, public lands, and comprehensive sex education do not mesh with Romney’s new “severely conservative” stances.

Staples Co-Founder Thomas Stemberg

Thomas Stemberg (left) was the co-founder of Staples along with Leo Kahn (right). During Romney’s tenure as CEO at Bain, the private equity form invested heavily in Staples, and the chain’s history is frequently held-up as evidence of Romney’s job reaction cred. Unfortunately for that cred, creative destruction is a sword that cuts both ways: From 1990 to 2012, jobs in the “Office Supplies and Stationary Stores” retail field actually declined by 13.5 percent even as Staples and the economy as a whole were adding jobs. Worse, the growth in the average weekly earnings of employees in this field failed to keep up with the growth in inflation. In other words, Staples was part of a business model that reduced jobs and drove down real wages in its field, even while reaping millions in profits for Bain’s investors. As for Stemberg himself, his other claim to fame was complaining earlier this year that President Obama’s health care reform hurts jobs by requiring businesses to provide new mothers with reasonable break time and a private area in which to breastfeed while on the clock.

Rep. Connie Mack IV (R-FL)

As he continues to change his mind, Mack has not yet decided what he thinks about Paul Ryan’s budget plan that would end Medicare as we know it. First he said he would vote for the extreme budget plan, then skipped the vote on it before calling it a “joke.” Now, he says he has not always backed the Ryan plan, and he is pushing his own “penny plan” that he claims will balance the budget sooner. And Mitt Romney’s immigration policies would use SB 1070 — Arizona’s harmful immigration law — as a national model, but Mack condemned the measure as “reminiscent of a time during World War II when the Gestapo in Germany stopped people on the street and asked for their papers without probable cause.”

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL)

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) floated the idea of proposing a GOP alternative to the DREAM Act, but after President Obama announced a new deportation directive to grant deferred action to DREAM Act-eligible young adults, Rubio complained that Congress will not be able to pass a legislative version of the President’s immigration directive because the “sense of urgency has been taken away” — even though the policy is only temporary. And while Mitt Romney has staked out far-right immigration stances in favor of harmful self-deportation measures, Rubio has said that “it feels kind of weird” to deport undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children. And in his memoir released in June, Rubio wrote that he would immigrate illegally “if my kids went to sleep hungry every night.” His comparatively moderate immigration positions put Rubio at odds with other anti-immigrant officials who are Romney advisers and supporters.

Bain Capital Managing Director Bob White

Bob White is a former partner of Bain Capital and Romney adviser who led his 1994 Senate campaign, headed Romney’s transition team as Massachusetts governor, and chaired both of his presidential campaigns. It was White who encouraged Romney to not release his tax returns, saying that “you never release something that’s five hundred pages long or more till you understand it,” according to The New Republic.

Vice presidential candidate Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) is taking flack on the morning news shows for his keynote address at the Republican National Convention Wednesday night. His speech was riddled with false claims, so much so that even Fox News wrote, “To anyone paying the slightest bit of attention to facts, Ryan’s speech was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech.”

Here are the most glaring lies from his speech:

1. “A downgraded America.” Ryan blamed the president for the nation’s credit downgrade in August 2011 after Republicans threatened to allow the government to default on its debt for the first time in history. But the ratings agency explicitly blamed “Republicans saying that they refuse to accept any tax increases as part of a larger deal.”

2. “More debt than any other president before him, and more than all the troubled governments of Europe combined.” Romney has made the almost identical claim, that Obama has amassed more debt “as almost all of the other presidents combined.” But their math doesn’t add up: when Obama took office, the national debt was $10.626 trillion. It has increased to slightly above $15 trillion.

3. Shuttered General Motors plant is “one more broken promise.” Ryan described a GM plant that closed down in his hometown, Janesville, Wisconsin, and blamed Obama for breaking his promise to keep the plant open when he visited during his campaign. But Obama never made that promise, and the plant shut down in December 2008, before Obama even took office.

4. Obama “did exactly nothing” on Bowles-Simpson. Ryan said, “He created a bipartisan debt commission. They came back with an urgent report. He thanked them, sent them on their way, and then did exactly nothing.” In fact, Ryan was instrumental in sabotaging the commission, leading the other House Republicans in voting against the plan.

5. “$716 billion, funneled out of Medicare by President Obama.” Ryan’s favorite lie is a deliberate distortion of Obamacare’s savings from eliminating inefficiencies. Furthermore, Ryan’s own plan for Medicare includes these savings. Romney has vowed to restore these cuts, which would render the trust fund insolvent 8 years ahead of schedule.

6. “The greatest of all responsibilities is that of the strong to protect the weak.” Ryan closed the speech with an invocation of social responsibility, saying, “The truest measure of any society is how it treats those who cannot defend or care for themselves.” However, numerous clergy members have condemned Ryan’s budget plan as “cruel,” and “an immoral disaster” because of its devastating cuts in social programs the poor and sick rely on. Meanwhile, Ryan would give ultra-rich individuals and corporations $3 trillion in tax breaks.