“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.
Wednesday is Ladies’ Day
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Michelle Goldberg: The Women’s Equality Party Is a Joke
According to the website of New York’s nascent Women’s Equality Party, the organization was “[i]nspired by the spirit of Seneca Falls and those who came before us” and “brings together the strength of New York’s women leaders to help elect candidates who support the issues that matter most to us.” In actual fact, however, the Women’s Equality Party, which was founded by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo in July, seems inspired by nothing so much as his desire to undermine the progressive Working Families Party. Cuomo’s attempt to hijack feminism for his own petty ends is such a craven move it could have been dreamed up by the scriptwriters at VEEP. It would be bleakly funny if it didn’t pose an actual danger to an organization that has always fought for New York’s women.
One of the great ironies here is that Cuomo’s feud with the Working Families Party stems, in part, from his refusal to do enough for women in New York, despite his staunch support for reproductive rights. Like many on the left, the WFP, a coalition of unions, activists and community organizers, was incensed by Cuomo’s tacit support of a weird alliance in the New York State Senate, in which the Republican minority teamed up with a small faction of breakaway Democrats to wrest control from the Democratic majority. That’s a big reason why Cuomo’s vaunted Women’s Equality Agenda, a 2013 legislative package that’s now a centerpiece of his campaign, never went anywhere.
Meanwhile, his economic policies have hit New York’s women, who are more likely than men to live in poverty, especially hard. According to the National Women’s Law Center, about six in ten of New York’s minimum-wage earners are women. Cuomo fought efforts at a meaningful raise in the minimum wage, only changing his stance when the Working Families Party forced his hand.
Ana Marie Cox: What Al Franken’s Normcore Senate Race Can Teach Other Democrats
Despite a snippy debate Sunday, the senator’s run a staid campaign-and hasn’t distanced himself from Obama. The pundits may be bored, but he’s winning a state the GOP hoped to pick up.
Observers have noted that Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) has made strenuous efforts to distinguish his second career as a politician from his previous stint as a comedian by being as boring and staid as possible. So no wonder that the snippy exchanges that characterized Sunday’s debate between Franken and Republican challenger Mike McFadden was described in the media as a “free-for-all.” One local blogger’s headline captured the frenzy: “Franken, McFadden raise voices, interrupt one another during Senate debate.”
One must keep in mind that, in Minnesota, they think ice fishing is exciting. (I say this with much love for my adopted home state.) In the era of Tea Party stunts and dramatic fan-based delays, the debate was moderately fussy. Its most dramatic and politically risky moment came when Franken offered “the Green Bay Packer model” as an alternative to the corporate structure of the NFL-and then McFadden asserted that Minnesotans might not care about football! Its other distinguishing feature was relative substantiveness, aside from a pointless 10 minutes arguing about whether we should ban all the nonexistent flights from West African countries.
Debate theatrics-such as they were-aside, not many people will be paying attention to the Minnesota Senate race returns next Thursday. Franken will win in a walk. He’s currently up 10 points in the average of current polls over McFadden; 538 gives Franken just 4 percent chance of losing. And the lack of interest or excitement or doubt about that race is exactly why we need to think about it.
While Germany makes university tuition free, the US allows for-profit colleges to prey on low-income students
On Oct. 1, Germany’s Lower Saxony became the last German state to make college free to all, including international students. Briefly breaking from a national tradition of free universities, Germany began charging a small amount of tuition in 2006, but that experiment failed. German leaders now say the tuition-based education is unjust and unfairly privileges students from affluent backgrounds. “Tuition fees degrade the educational opportunities for bright young people from low-income families,” Gabriele Heinen-Kljajic, state minister for science in Lower Saxony, told the state parliament in September.
By contrast, tuition in the United States at public and private colleges has risen steeply over the past 10 years. Even worse, private for-profit colleges have proliferated around the country, with enrollment growing by 225 percent from 1998 to 2008. These colleges prey on low-income students, leaving many deep in debt, without a degree and in low-paying jobs that bear little resemblance to the descriptions in for-profit college’s recruitment pitches and late-night television ads. [..]
Today students from low-income households face a colder, meaner college world. Low-income students are more likely to enter college without adequate preparation and to drop out before completing a degree.
Zoë Carpenter: The Campaign to Gut the Right to Abortion in Tennessee Is Getting Shady
“This is the Women’s Center. We need an ambulance ASAP,” a woman’s voice says on the thirty-second television ad. Emergency lights flash across the screen. “You’re listening to an actual 911 call,” says the narrator. “Tennessee has compromised the health and safety of certain women. Some Tennessee abortion facilities are not regulated like other surgical centers. This has to change.”
One of the year’s most heated battles over abortion access is playing out in Tennessee, where voters are considering a constitutional amendment that would open the door to a flood of anti-abortion legislation. With early voting underway and the election a week off, supporters of the ballot measure-known as Amendment 1-are amping up a campaign built around misinformation and fear. Voters have reported meddling by poll workers. And some abortion opponents are trying to use procedural trickery to lower the threshold of “yes” votes needed to pass the measure.
The fight over Amendment 1 has been more than a decade in the making. In a 2000 ruling striking down a slate of abortion restrictions, the Tennessee Supreme Court declared that the state’s constitution contained a fundamental right to privacy, which covered a women’s decision to terminate a pregnancy. As a result, Tennessee lawmakers have not been able to impose the kind of anti-abortion laws, disguised as safety measures, that other southern states have in recent years, such as mandatory waiting periods.
Jessica Valente: Why are some men so angry?
From Gamergate to mass shootings to domestic violence and the NFL, the common denominator is male rage
There’s a Margaret Atwood quote that I can’t get out of my head these days: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
Last Friday, a young man from Washington state walked into his high school cafeteria and shot five people, killing one young woman. Early reports from other students indicate that the shooter, who reportedly shot himself, was upset over a girl. In early October, Mary Spears was shot to death in Detroit, allegedly by a man whose advances she rejected at a social club. In April, a Connecticut teen stabbed his classmate to death when she rejected his prom invitation. Turning men down is a risky business.
But the madness doesn’t stop there. From Gamergate to mass shootings to domestic violence and the NFL – the common denominator is male rage. Women are not committing most acts of mass and individual violence (pdf), nor are women lobbing out most death threats online or raping most college students. Violence – and the threat of it – remains a decidedly male domain.
But why are men so violently angry?
Amanda Marcotte: Fine, Sarah Palin. Here’s some attention.
I’ve been ignoring the entire story of the right wing grifter Sarah Palin’s family brawling at some party in Anchorage, mostly because what’s there to say except to note that if it were a prominent black family, it would be the only story on The O’Reilly Factor for at least a month? But now Sarah Palin’s incessant need to present her family as perfect and to suggest that anything that goes wrong for them must be the fault of the evil liberal cabal has gone too far. Her self-pitying comments and defenses of her spoiled daughter are so over-the-top with self-pity that it’s almost a parody:
Looking at the reports, it strikes me as bitterly ironic that the same people who tell us there is a “war on women” have no problem laughing at the recording of my daughter crying as she tells police about being assaulted by a man. I’d like to say shame on the media and those on the left laughing at her or at any young woman in a similar situation, but I no longer think they have any shame.
Shorter Sarah Palin: Who cares about the millions of women denied reproductive health care access or safe haven from abusive partners, when my daughter got into a drunken fight at a party?
The self-centeredness of this is no big surprise. Palin has always thought the world was about her and her family and the rest of us are just bit players, with liberals who are out to get her family because we’re evil due to being mustache-twirling cartoon villains who don’t need a motive outside of “evil”.
But it’s interesting that even in her whiny defenses of her family, Palin still took the time to imply that domestic violence, sexual assault, equal pay and reproductive rights are not serious issues. And also to imply that the only reason that liberals and feminists claim to care about these issues is not because we do-after all, her comments suggest these are minor issues compared to some woman who happens to be her daughter getting into a fight at a party-but because we’re just pretending these are serious issues to scare women into voting for Democrats.
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