Tag: Punting the Pundits

Stanford’s research showing that organic produce probably isn’t any more nutritious than the conventional variety is mostly remarkable for what it omitted.

So a new study from Stanford University shows that organic produce probably isn’t any more nutritious than the conventional variety. We doubt the folks at Whole Foods are trembling in their Birkenstocks. We’re not aware of too many people who thought otherwise – it doesn’t make a lot of sense to assume the application of pesticides would have much impact on a fruit’s vitamin content. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t safer to eat.Perhaps the most valuable thing about the study of available research undertaken by Stanford’s Center for Health Policy is that it points up how little is yet known about the benefits of organics and the harms done by widespread pesticide use. The review, which looked at 240 studies from around the world on the health effects of eating organic and the comparative levels of nutrients and contaminants, made headlines because it supposedly struck a blow against the perception that cheaper, conventionally grown produce – which usually involves both pesticides and chemical fertilizers – is bad for you. “There isn’t much difference between organic and conventional foods, if you’re an adult and making a decision based solely on your health,” concluded senior study author Dena Bravata.

Not only is that debatable, but it fails to get to the heart of the reason most people spend extra for organics.

Mijin Cha: Fracking Water Hogs

As summer comes to an end, much of the country is still suffering from drought conditions. While rain brought relief to areas in the East, the Plains and Western parts of the country are still experiencing above normal temperatures and below normal precipitation levels. The impacted areas also happen to be where a lot of our food is grown and we’ve highlighted how we can expect higher food prices due to the reduced crop production.

Looking ahead, there seems to be little relief for farmers and ranchers in the short-term. The National Weather Service predicts that drought conditions will continue for the Plains and much of the West through the Fall with little indication that precipitation levels will return to normal, let alone to the level needed to alleviate drought conditions. Compounding this, the oil and gas fracking boom, especially in the Rockies, is starting to become a competitor for water resources. Fracking requires a significant amount of water. A recent report (pdf) highlighted that the amount of water currently needed for fracking operations in Colorado is up to 13 billion gallons per year, enough to serve nearly 300,000 people.

David W. Blight: Voter Suppression, Then and Now

SUPPRESSING the black vote is a very old story in America, and it has never been just a Southern thing.

In 1840, and again in 1841, the former Frederick Bailey, now Frederick Douglass, walked a few blocks from his rented apartment on Ray Street in New Bedford, Mass., to the town hall, where he paid a local tax of $1.50 to register to vote. Born a slave on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in 1818, Douglass escaped in an epic journey on trains and ferry boats, first to New York City, and then to the whaling port of New Bedford in 1838.

By the mid-1840s, he had emerged as one of the greatest orators and writers in American history. But legally, Douglass began his public life by committing what today we would consider voter fraud, using an assumed name. [..]

Should this fugitive, who had committed the crime of stealing his own freedom and living under false identities, have been allowed to vote? Voting reforms in recent decades had broadened the franchise to include men who did not hold property but certainly not to anyone who was property.

Leslie Savan: Clinton Tries to Teach Obama a Lesson in Humility

Why did Bill Clinton bow so deeply before Barack Obama after his amazing barn-burner of a speech Wednesday night?

I mean, his bow wasn’t a bob of the head; it wasn’t a slight slump of the shoulders or a passing nod. It was practically a salaam. He bent double at the waist, taking the kind of bow a courtier might make before a king. Did Clinton-right after defending Obama’s policies better than Obama ever has-feel he still had to overcome any lingering doubts about his loyalty?

Probably. But I think in that moment Clinton was also schooling Obama in humility.

The reason politicians find themselves transfixed by Clinton-whether they’re old opponents like George H.W. Bush or longtime allies like Rahm Emmanuel-has to do with the way he understands power as a source of personal struggle. Clinton subscribes to the ancient belief that every leader must give up something, usually something he or she loves, for power-as Odin gave his eye and MacBeth his honor. There’s a great scene in the HBO movie A Special Relationship in which Clinton takes the measure of Tony Blair’s character by asking him what he’d be willing to do to stay close to power under incoming President George Bush. That, as it turned out, was the right question to ask about Blair

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The meticulously scripted spectacles of the two corporate party conventions are very poor backdrops for clear thinking – but luckily, the ordeals are almost over. What remains after the tents are folded, are the crimes of this administration and its predecessor: both horrifically evil in their own ways. History will mark Obama as the more effective evil, mainly because of the lack of opposition. [..]

It is as useless to anchor a serious political discussion to this year’s Democratic and Republican convention speeches, as to plan the liberation of humanity during Mardi Gras. Truth is no more welcome at the former than sobriety is at the latter. So, forget the conventions and their multi-layered lies. Here are a few highlights of what Barack Obama has inflicted on the nation and the world . . .

Robert Reich: The Most Important Political News This Week

The biggest political news this week won’t be the Democratic convention. It will be Friday’s unemployment report.

If the trend is good — if the rate of unemployment drops and the number of payroll jobs is as good if not better than it was in July — President Obama’s claim we’re on the right track gains crucial credibility. But if these numbers are moving in the wrong direction, Romney’s claim the nation needs a new start may appear more credible.  

Gail Collins; Bill, Barack and Us

On Wednesday, the Democrats got to the point.

That was thanks to Bill Clinton, Beloved Democrat, a man who got negative ratings from only 27 percent of Americans in one recent national poll. There are pictures of kittens that get worse grades. [..]

So, we’re almost done, convention-wise. We’ve learned that both parties like God and moms, particularly moms with humble roots. They both have faith that people who work hard and play by the rules can overcome exposure to secondhand furniture while they’re in college. Otherwise, it’s just a matter of whether you want to raise taxes and balance the budget like Clinton, or cut taxes and plunge us into a hopeless sea of debt, like Bush. Let the fight begin.

Robert Kuttner: Party Animals

“I’m not a member of any organized political party,” Will Rogers famously declared,  “I’m a Democrat.”

Rogers would not recognize the 2012 Democrats.

I’ve been attending conventions since 1964, when as a student I smuggled floor passes to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party insurgents in Atlantic City. And I’ve never seen anything as well choreographed and unified as night one of the 2012 convention. [..]

After decades and decades of being internally divided, the Democrats are stunningly unified and almost shockingly professional, yet without sacrificing genuine passion. Though an incumbent’s convention with no real business to transact can be criticized as just another stage show, there are good shows and bad ones. This one is off to a great start.

Robert Blum: Is John Roberts Coming for Your Vote?

Watching the almost uniform sea of white faces in attendance at the 2012 Republican National Convention called to mind one of the defining hallmarks of all reactionary movements of the modern era: Whatever their particular social and historical contexts, they seek not a new future free of past injustices but a return to mythologized past glories. [..]

Contrary to the right’s mythology touting the virtues of our lost democracy, voting was never a truly public pastime during the nation’s formative period. As political scientist Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, has noted, only 4 to 6 percent of the eligible electorate (which did not include women, black slaves and in many states white men without property) turned out to vote in the country’s first five presidential elections. And although voter turnout grew markedly after 1824, Jim Crow policies implemented after the Civil War caused turnout rates to nosedive again.  

I remember the first time I realized that Barack Obama was not going to be another Bill Clinton. Everyone assumed that the Secretariat from Illinois was the natural heir to the Secretariat from Arkansas. But Barry was only out of the gate for a day in 2007 before it became apparent that, while the senator had a bouquet of talents and several virtues that Clinton would never possess, he was not quite Bill’s match as a political natural.  [..]

It’s not a bromance, like Romney and Paul Ryan. It’s a transaction. Obama needs his Democratic predecessor to reassure jittery voters that the future can look like the past, with a lower deficit, plenty of jobs and the two parties actually talking. In return, Bill will have the capital to try to ensure that the past can look like the future, with Hillary as Obama’s successor.

What a wild twist. Instead of ushering in the post-Clinton era, as intended, Obama has ushered in the pre-Clinton era.

Amanda Marcotte: In 2012 Campaign Season, Anti-Choicers Show Their True Colors

Anti-choicers know that their official line is that they’re not in this because they have backwards views on gender or that they’re afraid of female sexuality. Sure, they do have these beliefs, but we are expected to pretend that there’s no connection between their “traditional” views on women generally and their opposition to abortion rights. People who fail to play along with these expectations and insist on pointing out connections get paid in screaming, yelling, and playing-the-victim antics from anti-choicers. Considering how much knowledge anti-choicers have that their backwards views on gender hurt their cause, you’d think they wouldn’t be messing it up and letting the cat out of the bag as often as they do lately.

Indeed, showing their true colors has been a theme of anti-choicers this campaign season, from Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” comment to Mike Huckabee’s extolling the virtues of rape as a baby delivery system to Paul Ryan minimizing rape by calling it a “method of conception.” But even beyond making comments indicating that they don’t really think rape is a big deal—it’s not like raping uterus vessels is the same as violating people, right?—it just seems generally like anti-choicers are getting weary of play-acting like this is about “life.” The urge to say what they actually mean, to shame women for being sexual and for being independent, is just becoming too great. Decades of pretending has worn thin. Now the seams are showing, and the misogynist comments are coming out.

Marjorie Cohn: No Accountability for Torturers

The Obama administration has closed the books on prosecutions of those who violated our laws by authorizing and conducting the torture and abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody. Last year, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that his office would investigate only two incidents, in which CIA interrogations ended in deaths. He said the Justice Department “has determined that an expanded criminal investigation of the remaining matters is not warranted.” With that decision, Holder conferred amnesty on countless Bush officials, lawyers and interrogators who set and carried out a policy of cruel treatment. [..]

Amnesty for torturers is unacceptable. General Barry McCaffrey declared, “We tortured people unmercifully. We probably murdered dozens of them during the course of that, both the armed forces and the CIA.” Major General Anthony Taguba, who directed the Abu Ghraib investigation, wrote that “there is no longer any doubt as to whether the [Bush] administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.” Holder has answered Taguba’s question with a resounding “no.” [..]

There are two federal criminal statutes for torture prosecutions-the U.S. Torture Statute and the War Crimes Act; the latter punishes torture as a war crime. The Torture Convention is unequivocal: nothing, including a state of war, can be invoked as a justification for torture.

By letting American officials, lawyers and interrogators get away with torture – and indeed, murder – the United States sacrifices any right to scold or punish other countries for their human rights violations.

Daphne Wisham; The Six Stages of Climate Grief

I have discovered a new sixth stage, beyond acceptance of the truly depressing climate science: doing The Work.

Now that the hottest summer on record is drawing to a close, are we any closer to admitting that climate change is upon us? If not, why not?

It might have something to do with the five stages of grief. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross identified these stages as denial, then anger, followed by bargaining, depression, and acceptance. With record drought killing our cattle and our corn, West Nile virus sweeping the country, and Arctic ice sheets melting away, it’s no surprise that millions of people are responding to these frightening signs of environmental decline in stages.

Nobel Laureate Steve W. Running first proposed this frame for understanding the popular response to climate change in 2007. I’d like to go one step further and suggest a sixth stage: The Work.

If politicians and those around them do not pay their fair share of taxes, how can we expect that anyone else will?

Mitt Romney’s income taxes have become a major issue in the American presidential campaign. Is this just petty politics, or does it really matter? In fact, it does matter – and not just for Americans.

A major theme of the underlying political debate in the United States is the role of the state and the need for collective action. The private sector, while central in a modern economy, cannot ensure its success alone. For example, the financial crisis that began in 2008 demonstrated the need for adequate regulation.

Moreover, beyond effective regulation (including ensuring a level playing field for competition), modern economies are founded on technological innovation, which in turn presupposes basic research funded by government. This is an example of a public good – things from which we all benefit, but that would be under-supplied (or not supplied at all) were we to rely on the private sector.

Conservative politicians in the US underestimate the importance of publicly provided education, technology, and infrastructure. Economies in which government provides these public goods perform far better than those in which it does not.

Bob Herbert: How We Can Bring Millions of Americans to the Middle Class

The United States needs to be reimagined. A recent study from the Pew Research Center tells us that in economic terms the middle class “has suffered its worst decade in modern history.” It’s shrinking.

With jobs scarce, wages declining and the nation’s wealth concentrating ever more intensely at the top, the middle class has shrunk in size for the first time since World War II. [..]

What we’re experiencing is nothing less than an historic generational decline in living standards. We’ve obviously been doing something very wrong.

Laura Flanders; Labor Day Message: We Can’t Labor Without Our Lives

“Every culture lives within its dream,” wrote Lewis Mumford in 1934:

   “It is reality – while the sleep lasts. But, like the sleeper, a culture lives within an objective world that…sometimes breaks into the dream, like a noise, to modify it or to make further sleep impossible.”

This Labor Day it’s conventional wisdom to say the American dream is broken. For those who ever dreamed it, that dream featured all that typically fills the fantasies of capitalist cultures: if not heaven, then at least happiness here on earth, built from stuff and standing acquired through human sweat and toil; Americans sold themselves (and others) another fancy too, a fair shake, in a “city upon a hill” nation replete with opportunity. (The facts of slavery, land theft and genocide notwithstanding.)

For many who were sleeping soundly previously, the noise that’s broken in is that of millions of Americans living without enough to eat (46 million, including one in five of all children); the racket of rampant ill-health, the half-of-all jobs that barely lift families out of poverty ($34,000 or less) and the kicker: less social mobility than exists in most of Old World Europe.

Joe Nocera: They’re Not What They Used to Be

What did I miss while I was away? Ah, yes, the Republican National Convention. I hear the Republicans nominated Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan for president and vice president. Imagine that. [..]

As usual, journalists vastly outnumbered the delegates. As usual, the thing was so finely scripted, Eastwood aside, that there wasn’t a whole lot of genuine news to report. As Jeremy Peters put it in The Times, “Today’s media labor to enliven coverage of what typically are endless hours of preordained events.” The decision by the major networks to cut back coverage to an hour a night is not irrational. [..]

On the other hand, old-style conventions, for all their flaws, demanded compromise that is essential for governing. Nor were the party bosses willing to throw their weight behind candidates who were too far outside the mainstream.

The primary system has allowed the two parties to be captured by their more extreme elements. Compromise is now a dirty word. Centrism is for losers. Conventions now enforce the views of the hard-liners.

It has been six months since the big banks settled with state and federal officials over evidence of widespread foreclosure fraud, promising to provide $25 billion in mortgage relief in exchange for not being sued over past foreclosure abuses.

At the time, it looked like a sweet deal for the banks. The fines were paltry compared with the damage done to homeowners and the economy. And much of the relief the banks were obliged to provide could be met by continuing more or less with business as usual.

It still looks like a sweet deal. [..]

The economy will not recover and justice will not be done unless and until the mortgage mess is resolved.

Richard Reeves: Romney’s Lies and Liars

I once wrote, about Gerald Ford, that an honest politician is one who lies only when he has to. Ford, a pretty straight shooter, is gone now. He has been replaced by Mitt Romney the ignorant and Paul Ryan the liar.

Last week’s Republican National Convention may be the last in the line going back to 1832, when President Andrew Jackson called a convention in Baltimore because he needed a plausible arena to bump his vice president, John C. Calhoun, in favor of a more compatible Martin Van Buren. It worked.

It doesn’t anymore. This Republican spectacle crumpled on its last night when Clint Eastwood incoherently debated a chair. The chair won.

Owen Jones: Getting Rid of George W. Bush Wasn’t Enough. The US Remains a Bully

The issue isn’t Obama, any more than it was Bush before him. The issue is US power

How easy it was to scrutinise US power when George W. Bush was in office. After all, it was difficult to defend an administration packed with such repulsive characters, like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, whose attitude towards the rest of the world amounted to thuggish contempt [..]

It was a bad dream that went on for eight years, and no wonder much of the world is still breathing a sigh of relief. But US foreign policy these days escapes scrutiny. In part, that is down a well-grounded terror of the only viable alternative to Barack Obama: the increasingly deranged US right. A deliberate shift to a softer, more diplomatic tone has helped, too. But it is also the consequence of a strategic failure on the part of many critics of US foreign policy in the Bush era. As protesters marched in European cities with placards of Bush underneath “World’s No 1 Terrorist”, the anti-war crusade became personalised. Bush seemed to be the problem, and an understanding of US power – the nature of which remains remarkably consistent from president to president – was lost.

Jonathan D. Moreno: What the Chair Could Have Told Clint

MANY found Clint Eastwood’s speech at the Republican National Convention odd, but I found it oddly familiar. When Mr. Eastwood set up a chair next to the podium and used it in an imaginary dialogue with the president, I recognized it as a technique from psychodrama – the psychotherapy my father, the psychiatrist J. L. Moreno, started developing nearly 100 years ago.

Therapists often use the “empty chair” as a way of orienting a patient to a particular relationship. “Here’s your mom,” they might say. “What would you say to her if she were here, right now?” The empty chair can be a very powerful warm-up to a problematic situation, a way of concretizing dormant, suppressed or abstract emotions in an important or troubling relationship. Used properly, it can lead to insight.

The other day I picked up on something in an op-ed in Slate titled “Why I Love Paul Ryan” by the commentator William Saletan that illustrates the conventional wisdom that has let the essentially ridiculous Paul Ryan rise so far. Today let me pick on William Galston – not a household name, but a good representative of the Beltway gone bad.

In an op-ed in The New Republic, Mr. Galston, a contributing editor, urges Democrats not to “demagogue” Mr. Ryan, but despairs: “Here’s what I fear will happen instead. The Obama campaign will not take the other side in a high-minded debate. Instead, it will relentlessly attack Romney-Ryan for plotting to ‘end Medicare as we know it,’ and for leaving the poor to go hungry without food stamps and suffer, even die, without health insurance.”

What’s wrong with this lament?

How about the fact that the Romney-Ryan plan actually is a plan to end Medicare as we know it? (And why the quotation marks? That’s what it is – replacing the system with fixed-value vouchers.) It is also a plan for drastic cuts in food stamps and Medicaid, not to mention canceling the expansion of coverage under the Affordable Care Act, which would mean lost insurance for tens of millions of Americans – thousands of whom would, in fact, die as a result.

Yet pointing out these truths is, in the eyes of Very Serious People, “demagoguery.”

Charles M. Blow: The G.O.P. Fact Vacuum The G.O.P. Fact Vacuum

Honesty is a lost art. Facts are for losers. The truth is dead.

Pick one.

Whatever the term of art, they all signal a dark turn, and, this week, the Republican Party took that turn with reckless abandon.

Lying is certainly nothing new in politics. One could even argue that it’s fundamental to politics. Saying incredible things in a credible way is the art; using math of vapors to sell dreams of smoke is the craft.

But Paul Ryan’s acceptance speech on Wednesday took things up a notch. [..]

Romney long ago demonstrated that he was willing to do anything and take any position – even if they contradicted previous ones – to make it to the White House. And while that may be fine for him, it shouldn’t be fine with us.

We deserve better and should demand better. We deserve better than a weather vane candidacy that doesn’t care whether it’s being candid. We deserve better than a party and a presidential aspirant so wanton that they refuse to let facts get in the way of a fairy tale.

Robert Reich: Labor Day 2012 and the Election of 2012: It’s Inequality, Stupid

The most troubling economic trend facing America this Labor Day weekend is the increasing concentration of income, wealth, and political power at the very top — among a handful of extraordinarily wealthy people — and the steady decline of the great American middle class.

Inequality in America is at record levels. The 400 richest Americans now have more wealth than the bottom 150 million of us put together.

Republicans claim the rich are job creators. Nothing could be further from the truth. In order to create jobs, businesses need customers. But the rich spend only a small fraction of what they earn. They park most of it wherever around the world they can get the highest return.

The real job creators are the vast middle class, whose spending drives the economy and creates jobs.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Goodbye, Liberty! 10 Ways Americans Are No Longer Free

Our struggle for liberty is a fight against concentrated wealth.

Our most fundamental rights, to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, are under assault. But the adversary is Big Wealth, not Big Government as conservatives like to claim. Consider:

Life? The differences in life expectancy between wealthier and lower-income Americans are increasing, not decreasing.

Liberty? Digital corporations are assaulting our privacy, while banks trap us in indebtedness that approaches indentured servitude. The shrunken ranks of working Americans are being robbed of their essential liberties – including the right to use the bathroom.  

The pursuit of happiness?  Social mobility in the United States is dead. Career choices are increasingly limited. As for working hard and earning more, consider this: Between 1969 and 2008 the average US income went up by $11,684. How much of that went to the top 10? All of it. Income for the remaining 90 percent actually went down.

These changes didn’t just happen. Wealthy individuals and corporations made it happen – and they’re still at it. Meanwhile, Corporate America’s wholesale theft of your individual liberties has been rebranded as a fight for … the corporation’s individual liberty.

I built this column.

I built it all by myself in this second American century.

I built it after seeing banners at the Republican National Convention saying, “Build, Baby, Build!” So I decided to drill down and see what I could find.

I found I needed a laptop that somebody else had built, somewhere outside the United States, somewhere like China, where there’s a lot of building going on. Naturally enough I discarded the computer in horror because I believe in building things myself from the ground up, just like my role-model Mom told me. She, by the way, was from Sicily and came via Wales to the United States, where she built a small business.

Now, that’s the last time I’m going to mention foreign countries in this self-built column. Real Americans know the rest of the world does not exist. The rest of the world is just a bad fantasy the other party has.

John Nichols: Mitt Romney: His Party Is the Problem

Who knew that Mitt Romney was such a fan of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign?

“How many days have you woken up feeling that something really special was happening in America?” Romney told thousands of Republican delegates, alternates and hangers-on Thursday night. “Many of you felt that way on Election Day four years ago. Hope and Change had a powerful appeal.”

Speaking of the “fresh excitement about the possibilities of a new president” Americans felt upon Obama’s election, the man who will now seek to prevent the Democratic president’s reelection told the 40th Republican National Convention about how much he had hoped Obama would succeed “because I wanted America to succeed.”

But it wasn’t just that citizens wanted America to succeed. As Romney noted: “Every family in America wanted this to be a time when they could get ahead a little more, put aside a little more for college, do more for their elderly mom who’s living alone now or give a little more to their church or charity… This was the hope and change America voted for.”

In this, Romney was right.

Laura Flanders; The Bushwomen. They’re Back.

There she is, just the woman I was thinking of, on the op-ed page of the New York Times. Except she isn’t apologizing for her role unleashing the GOP’s “war on women.” She is writing about terrorism and the Clean Air Act. What I’d wanted someone to ask Christine Todd Whitman about was the day at the 1996 RNC, when she helped coronate today’s extremist GOP.

Former New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman is usually described in the money media with the words “moderate” and “pro-choice” glued firmly to her name. Republican in a pro-choice state, she’s on the record saying that abortion is “a personal decision between a woman and her doctor,” and the government has no business telling a woman what to do. (That used to be the conservative position.) She’s held up by pro-choicers as a tragicomic victim,  abandoned by her party, but the fact is, Whitman’s done more to help the vicious wing of the GOP than she ever did to stop the backlash.

Richard Dreyfuss: US Sells Three-Fourths of Worldwide Arms

Here’s the opening phrase of a scare story in the Washington Post from this weekend:

   China’s arms exports have surged over the past decade… [..]

China doesn’t even show up as a blip on the screen. The Post buries in the piece that China is “the sixth-largest arms exporter in the world.”

So dominant is the United States in worldwide arms trafficking that-get this!-US arms sales to a single country, Saudi Arabia, totaled $33.4 billion last year. That amount surpassed the entire total of US arms sales to all countries in the world in 2009, $31 billion. A commentary by a Wall Street analysis site notes happily: “The news confirms how critical defense, airplane, and agricultural exports are to the overall American trade balance.”

Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan and the Republican Party are now mounting a massive attack against Social Security and other programs. Using “deficit reduction” as their rationale, they are attempting to dismantle every major piece of legislation passed since the 1930s that provides support and security to working families.

They are being aided by at least 23 billionaire families, led by the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson, who are spending hundreds of millions of dollars in this campaign as a result of the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision. Despite paying the lowest effective tax rate in decades, the billionaires want more tax breaks for the very rich. Despite the fact that the elimination of strong regulations caused the Wall Street meltdown and a terrible recession, the billionaires want more deregulation. Despite outsourcing of millions of good-paying American jobs to China and other low-wage countries, the billionaires want more unfettered free trade.

At this pivotal moment in American history, it’s important to note how we got into this deficit crisis, who was responsible and what is the fairest way to address it.

Robert Reich; How Romney Keeps Lying Through His Big White Teeth

“We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers,” says Neil Newhouse, a Romney pollster.

A half dozen fact-checking organizations and websites have refuted Romney’s claims that Obama removed the work requirement from the welfare law and will cut Medicare benefits by $216 billion.  

Last Sunday’s New York Times even reported on its front page that Romney has been “falsely charging” President Obama with removing the work requirement. Those are strong words from the venerable Times. Yet Romney is still making the false charge. Ads containing it continue to be aired.

Presumably the Romney campaign continues its false claims because they’re effective. But this raises a more basic question: How can they remain effective when they’ve been so overwhelmingly discredited by the media?

Mark Morford: How to Spot Completely Miserable GOP Women

You can see it in the eyes. Vacant, sort of glassy, dark and distant as if staring into a cave full of nails from a thousand miles – and a million joyful lifetimes – away.

It moves on to the skin, pale and ill-fitting like a mannequin in a human costume, like it’s not the slightest bit comfortable in there, closing around a sallow tightness of the mouth and lips, maybe a severity of haircut, the sweater buttoned a bit too tight and the collar cutting circulation to the vital organs, but most especially and obviously, to the heart.

Do you see it? Do you see it, most frequently and with a tragic sigh, in the women of the GOP, from the senseless female candidates themselves (Hi, Ms. Bachmann!) to the sallow wives and disoriented daughters of the ultraconservative males who fear and detest everything real women represent?

You know the look. You’ve seen it a million times, this “Oh my God how did I get here,” this “How can this really be my life,” this look of deep and long-muted pain and/or dull resignation (Hi, Mrs. Vitter!), the long rusted-over knowledge that choices have been made and there was no other way, even though there was, even though there still is.

Gail Collins: Renovating Mitt Romney

So, about Mitt Romney.

The Republicans have been holding a convention to nominate him for president! I am telling you this on the off chance that you haven’t been paying attention. Perhaps you feel as if you’ve already met Mitt Romney and don’t require another introduction. Perhaps you feel as if you’ve met him a lot. But this is entirely different because the party’s mission this week is to construct an entirely new, improved, warmer, more lovable version.

They built this Romney!

“We built it” is one of the themes here, at the government-underwritten convention in a government-subsidized convention center in a city that rose on the sturdy foundation of government-subsidized flood insurance. But no taxpayer dollars were expended in the attempt to put together a New Mitt.

None. Really, it was just private corporations and rich people.

The sixteenth anniversary of TANF hit this week, and the Republican presidential candidate spent his time lying about the president’s position on it. President Obama, Mitt Romney insists, stripped the work requirements out of the temporary assistance program that replaced welfare for poor families under Bill Clinton in 1996.

Although every fact-check has shown he’s wrong, Romney and the Romney-phile propaganda groups keep pounding away at their message with ads like this one:

Unidentified male: “Under Obama’s plan you wouldn’t have to work and you wouldn’t have to train for a job. They just send you your welfare check.”

The president’s responded in typically Obaman fashion. Without wading into the welfare fray, he’s wagged his finger at Romney’s facts: “You just can’t make stuff up….” On the campaign trail this week, the Democrat beat the drum for “more popular” government programs, like those for seniors and students. He’s closing all his rallies with Bruce Springsteen’s rousing paean to solidarity, “We Take Care of Our Own.”

Leslie Savan: Even GOP Guvs Admit that Romney’s Welfare Ads Are False

Governor Rick Snyder (R-MI) as much as admitted that Mitt Romney’s race-baiting claim that President Obama is “gutting” work requirements in the welfare program is a load of manure.

He didn’t use those words, of course, but when Tom Brokaw asked Snyder about the program at the Republican convention this afternoon, the governor had only positive things to say about it.

This is the same program that Romney insists Obama is using to “shore up his base.” (Read: black people.) As one of Romney’s five welfare ads says, “Under Obama’s plan, you wouldn’t have to work and wouldn’t have to train for a job. They just send you a welfare check. And welfare-to-work goes back to being plain old welfare.”

To back up, the Obama administration recently announced that states could apply for waivers from the 1996 welfare reform law in order to find alternative ways to help welfare recipients find work. Nothing is gutted, the work requirement stands, and in fact, in2005, 29 governors-including Governor Romney-asked for even more flexibility in how they applied the welfare law.

Liliana Segura: In Sentencing Criminals, Is Norway Too Soft? Or Are We Too Harsh?

It’s not very often the concept of restorative justice gets much play outside scholarly publications or reformist criminal justice circles, so first, some credit for Max Fisher at The Atlantic for giving it an earnest look last week. In seeking to explain Norway’s seemingly measly twenty-one-year sentence for remorseless, mass-murdering white supremacist Anders Breivik-a sentence that is certain to be extended to last the rest of his life-Fisher casts a critical eye on the underlying philosophy that animates that country’s sentencing practices, finding it to be “radically different” from what we’re used to in the United States. When it comes to criminal sentencing, he notes, the United States favors a retributive model-in which an offender must be duly punished for his crimes-over a restorative model that “emphasizes healing: for the victims, for the society, and, yes, for the criminal him or herself.”

“I don’t have an answer for which is better,” he says at the outset, acknowledging that his own sense of outrage over Breivik’s sentence-like that of many Americans-“hints at not just how different the two systems are, but how deeply we may have come to internalize our understanding of justice, which, whatever its merits, doesn’t seem to be as universally applied as we might think.”

Jessica Valenti: Fantasy Women of the GOP

As the “war on women” continues, my sole comfort has been watching dumbfounded Republicans try to explain away the misogyny that’s so foundational to their agenda.

In the midst of the fallout over Todd Akin’s comments claiming “legitimate” rape victims are unlikely to get pregnant, the science-whiz whined to Mike Huckabee in a radio interview that he “made a single error in one sentence.” He was frustrated that people “are upset over one word spoke in one day in one sentence.”

Bryan Fischer, a spokesperson from the American Family Association, complained about the Akin backlash, saying, “You talk about somebody being a victim of forcible assault, that would be Todd Akin.” Mitt Romney denounced Akin’s remarks as “insulting” and “inexcusable,” but accused the Obama campaign of trying to link Akin to the GOP as a whole, calling it “sad” and that the move stooped “to a low level.”

But what Romney, Akin, and their ilk don’t understand is that women’s anger isn’t about “one word” or one politician-it’s about an ethos, a Republican ideology steeped in misogyny and willful ignorance.