“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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Katrina vanden Heuvel: The GOP’s Contempt for Women
Republicans may be trapped in a death spiral from which they cannot escape.
During the Republican primary in 2012, one of Mitt Romney’s most damaging gaffes was saying that he would “get rid of” Planned Parenthood. If only that were the Republican Party’s biggest problem with women today.
Leading in the early polls, billionaire blowhard Donald Trump ignited a firestorm of controversy when he said that Fox News host Megyn Kelly, who moderated last week’s presidential debate in Cleveland, had “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.” Trump was angry that Kelly had the gall to ask, among other things, how Trump justified his lengthy record of misogynist attacks on women. (“The big problem this country has is being politically correct,” he answered, ridiculously conflating political correctness with common decency).
However, Trump’s ugly bombast is a distraction from a far more serious problem for the GOP. Three years after Romney lost the women’s vote by a double-digit margin, in part because of his support for defunding Planned Parenthood, the presidential debates last week made clear Republicans have only become more disrespectful toward women’s bodies, more deranged in their hatred of Planned Parenthood, and more dismissive of female voters.
Bryce Covert: Freezing Offices Are Just the Beginning of Sexist Workplace Norms
The workplace was originally oriented around men, and that remains largely true today even though women claim half of the workforce. Consider office temperatures, a subject of much discussion of late. The Washington Post’s Petula Dvorak detailed the plight of D.C. women in summer, “the time of year desperate women rely on cardigans, pashminas and space heaters to make it through the workweek in their frigid offices. And their male colleagues barely notice.” Less than two weeks later, The New York Times reported on a new study that found most office buildings rely on an old formula from the 1960s to determine the ideal temperature. The short of it: Thermostats are programmed around the needs of a 40-year-old man who weighs 154 pounds.
This was back when just a third of women worked. Today, women make up nearly half of the labor force, and a little more than half of managerial and professional employees. Yet air conditioning is still being blasted into offices as if women weren’t there. Room temperature, however, is just one of many office norms that revolve around men but persist to this day. Some are year-round and can’t be solved with a Snuggie-like unequal professional dress codes, which were similarly cemented decades ago.
Austerity measures will hurt the vulnerable to protect the wealthy
On Aug. 1, Puerto Rico defaulted on a bond payment, setting the stage for a protracted fiscal battle between the U.S. territory and its creditors. San Juan paid only $628,000 toward the $58 million on its Public Finance Corp. bonds, though it managed to pay nearly $500 million in other debt payments due on Aug. 3. The selective default may be a gambit because Puerto Rican residents, who are owed much of the overdue payment via credit unions, are unlikely to pursue the legal remedies that litigious hedge funds would be expected to aggressively undertake.
The island’s economy is buckling under a staggering $72 billion debt. In June, Gov. Alejandro Garcia Padilla urged investors to renegotiate the terms of repayment, calling the debt “unpayable.” But hedge fund investors, who bought up Puerto Rico’s distressed debt, are demanding austerity measures that would exact a toll on the public. And they have rejected proposals to restructure the debt, which would reduce their returns on investment but enable the economy to recover.
Megan Carppentier: Republicans have breathed political life into their very own Trump-enstein
As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump is little more than a walking, talking conservative blog comment section: he is the seething, narcissistic id of a political class which decries any legitimate claims of unequal or discriminatory treatment by non-white heterosexual men (including rape victims, African Americans and LGBT people) while claiming to be the true victims of, well, everything.
Trump is every profane Facebook commenter who calls women “cunts” while denying the existence of sexism; he’s that guy on Twitter who replies to strangers using #BlackLivesMatter to demand they discuss black-on-black crime.
But, Republicans, Donald Trump is not a witch – he’s you.
Marion Nestle: Coca-Cola says its drinks don’t cause obesity. Science says otherwise
These days, you almost have to feel sorry for soda companies. Sales of sugar-sweetened and diet drinks have been falling for a decade in the United States, and a new Gallup Poll says 60% of Americans are trying to avoid drinking soda. In attempts to reverse these trends and deflect concerns about the health effects of sugary drinks, the soda industry invokes elements of the tobacco industry’s classic playbook: cast doubt on the science, discredit critics, invoke nanny statism and attribute obesity to personal irresponsibility.
Casting doubt on the science is especially important to soda makers. Overwhelming evidence links habitual consumption of sugary drinks to poor health. So many studies have identified sodas as key contributors to chronic health conditions – most notably obesity, type-2 diabetes and coronary artery disease – that the first thing anyone trying to stay healthy should do is to stop drinking them.
Soda companies know this. For at least the last 10 years, Coca-Cola’s annual reports to the US Securities and Exchange Commission have listed obesity and its health consequences as the single greatest threat to the company profits. The industry counters this threat with intensive marketing, lobbying and millions of dollars poured into fighting campaigns to tax or cap the size of sugary drinks.
But it is also pours millions into convincing researchers and health professionals to view sodas as benign.
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