“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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Paul Krugman: Europe’s Austerity Madness
So much for complacency. Just a few days ago, the conventional wisdom was that Europe finally had things under control. The European Central Bank, by promising to buy the bonds of troubled governments if necessary, had soothed markets. All that debtor nations had to do, the story went, was agree to more and deeper austerity – the condition for central bank loans – and all would be well.
But the purveyors of conventional wisdom forgot that people were involved. Suddenly, Spain and Greece are being racked by strikes and huge demonstrations. The public in these countries is, in effect, saying that it has reached its limit: With unemployment at Great Depression levels and with erstwhile middle-class workers reduced to picking through garbage in search of food, austerity has already gone too far. And this means that there may not be a deal after all.
Peter Z. Sheer: Republicans Lost the War With Women the Moment They Declared It
A new Quinnipiac University/CBS News/New York Times poll has the voting women of Ohio giving Barack Obama 25 points over Mitt Romney. In Pennsylvania, women prefer Obama by 21 points and in Florida the president has a 19-point advantage, according to the same poll. That might have something to do with the war on women Republicans have been accidentally waging this summer. Well, the war is not accidental-it’s quite intentional-it just wasn’t meant to be this public.
Let’s talk about women.
My grandmother didn’t think her daughter needed to go to college. Mom could find a husband to provide for her. She went anyway and worked her way through school until she got herself a “copyboy” job at the Los Angeles Times at a time when women, if they were hired to write at all, wrote about clothes and food.
While House members are back home campaigning straight to Election Day, voters might want to alert them that the United States Postal Service is about to default on a $5.6 billion loan obligation – mainly because the House took off without allowing the service to modernize its archaic business practices.
This was one of the simpler, cost-free tasks before Congress, and the Democratic Senate did its job in April in passing a Postal Service reform bill. But the Republicans in the House, who never stop calling for government to be run like a business, failed to act, thereby denying the Postal Service innovations that would allow it to be run like, yes, a modern delivery business.
Mike Edwards and Danny Oppenheimer: Eliminate the Electoral College
The Electoral College is one of the most dangerous institutions in American politics today.
The primary impact of the Electoral College is to give the citizens of some states more influence over the presidential election than citizens of other states. If you live in a Battleground State you are showered with attention. Your issues gain traction at the national level. You have political power. But if you happen to live in a Red State or a Blue State — as do roughly 79% of Americans according to Nate Silver’s electoral map — then you are pretty much out of luck. Your vote doesn’t matter. And when we say “your vote doesn’t matter,” we can actually quantify this. According to the Princeton Election Consortium a vote in Nevada this year (a small battleground state) is over one million times more likely to have an impact on this election than a vote in New Jersey (a large Blue state).
This is horribly unjust. It makes a mockery of the principal of “one man, one vote”; it doesn’t matter if we all get one vote when some votes are worth more than others.
Robert Reich: Romney’s Goal for the Companies Bain Acquired: “Harvest Them at Significant Profit”
Here’s a video of Romney in his early years at Bain, explaining his purpose in acquiring companies was to “harvest them at significant profit.”
No one should be surprised. After all, Bain Capital wasn’t in the business of creating jobs. It was in the business of creating profits.
The two goals aren’t at all the same — as Americans whose jobs have been eliminated or whose wages and benefits have been cut know all too well.
For years, higher corporate profits have come at the expense of fewer jobs and lower wages. Business leaders and financiers have been “harvesting” like mad, leaving most Americans behind in the dirt.
Romney’s main selling point to voters is his so-called “business experience.” Yet America can’t afford this sort of “business experience” in the White House.
To the contrary, we need someone who doesn’t see the economy as profits to be harvested, but as people who need more and better jobs.
Andrew Rosenthal: Will Waterboarding Make a Comeback?
Last September, Mitt Romney’s advisers were so determined to attack President Obama from every direction and to revive long-discredited neo-con theories about interrogation that they actually encouraged the candidate to come out strongly pro-torture in his presidential campaign.
In what The Times’ Charlie Savage describes as a “near-final draft” of a memo, Romney advisers denounced Mr. Obama’s executive order on interrogation (which instructed interrogators to hew to the Army Field Manual, i.e. to legal techniques). They also urged Mr. Romney to pledge that, upon taking office, he would rescind that order.
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