A little over half that income comes from Ryan’s salary.Like Mitt Romney, Ryan has agreed to release only two years of tax returns.

Ryan’s overall assets are worth between $2 million and $7.7 million, according to his financial disclosure statements.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, which got a first look at the returns, has a deeper dive into Ryan’s investment income, much of which comes from his wife’s holdings.

“As these are properties Rep. Ryan ‘married into,’ for lack of a better term,” Ryan spokesman Kevin Seifert told the paper, ”he does not play an active role in them and has no plans to.”

Romney paid an effective tax rate of 13.9 percent in 2010 and estimated an effective tax rate of 15.4 percent in 2011. The Republican nominee told reporters this week that he has never paid a rate of less than 13 percent.

* Obama released a Medicare ad, and the AARP doesn’t endorse it.

* The White House press corps pressed the White House on Obama’s unavailability.

* Paul Ryan decried partisanship in Virginia.

* And Republicans are now attacking Obama for cutting spending on two fronts.

Republican vice presidential candidate Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) walks on stage during a campaign stop at Deep Run High School. (Getty Images)

Four times now, Republican VP nominee Paul Ryan has told crowds that “we want this debate” — the debate over Medicare spending. Mitt Romney and his running mate are trying to get out in front of an issue where Democrats traditionally have the advantage. (As of last year, Obama had a 14-point advantage over House Republicans on who would better “protect the Medicare system.”) We won’t know until at least next week if it’s working.

Another recurring Ryan theme: teleprompters. “That’s right — no teleprompters. Everybody says that, everywhere I go,” he said today in Springfield. He hasn’t used one since the VP rollout; Romney relies on them more often.

“I have to admit that I’m a Birther,” said SOS founder Larry Bailey, a retired 27-year veteran of the Navy SEALs, in an interview. “If there were a jury of 12 good men and women and the evidence were placed before them, there would be absolutely no question Barack Obama was not born where he said he was and is not who he says he is.”

According to CNN, a week ago some 38 percent of Americans had no idea who Paul Ryan was.

Davis also said, “One week ago, our Democratic friends believed that they were going to win an election based on fear and that they were going to scare our seniors based on Medicare. One week later, after Paul Ryan has been doing some truth-telling, there’s only one candidate running for president who had a plan to cut Medicare by over $700 billion.”

First it was Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) who raised the issue at a Paul Ryan rally in Glen Allen.

Now, it’s Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), who is addressing supporters ahead of Ryan at West Springfield High School.

“Sequestration means that we may have thousands of people, millions nationwide, losing their jobs,” Wolf told the crowd.

The political battle over sequestration — coupled with the Romney campaign’s recent claims that President Obama “raided Medicare to pay for Obamacare” — now means that two of the GOP’s main arguments against Obama hinge on the issue of spending cuts.

It’s an interesting turn of events, given that Republicans have spent the better part of the 112th Congress making the case that Obama has cut too little, rather than too much.

Of course, the real debate is over where in the federal budget to make those cuts, and many Republicans have long considered the Pentagon budget sacrosanct — despite the fact that last summer’s bipartisan debt deal, which put the defense sequester into place, was agreed to by more than 60 percent of House and Senate Republicans.

The Republican vice presidential candidate has often used the powers of his office over his 13 years in Congress to seek federal funds for his Wisconsin district, sometimes from existing pools of money and other times in ways that would increase federal spending. His success has meant funding for projects ranging from a runway extension at a local airport to an environmental study of the Kenosha Harbor.

There’s nothing unusual in Ryan’s record, but it complicates the budget-cutting, anti-spending image Romney’s campaign is trying to project. The Boston Globe notes that one of the programs Ryan praised in 2009 he now wants to eliminate.

See the full story here.

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Erik Wemple reports that Mitt Romney’s campaign is “reaching out” to NBC about a remark made by MSNBC host/cultural critic Touré on “The Cycle.”

Touré had this to say Thursday about Romney’s attacks on Obama:

“I don’t say it lightly, but this is Niggerization. You are not one of us. You are like the scary black man we’ve been trained to fear.”

Rep. Paul Ryan debuted a new Twitter handle as he set out on the campaign trail with Mitt Romney this week. @PaulRyanVP only sent five tweets since last Saturday, but he racked up 122,768 followers in that time.

His new handle was mentioned more than 125,000 total times this week — not as many times as his new running mate, @MittRomney (189,330 mentions) or @BarackObama (233,983) mentions, but more than his Democratic counterpart, @JoeBiden (18,962 mentions). Here’s how the mentions broke down throughout the week.

We only tracked mentions of the candidates’ Twitter handles, but our @MentionMachine tracks even more data, including the candidates’  names. And we’re adding the running mates soon.