Tag: Punting the Pundits

No matter how well Republicans do at the polls Tuesday-and my hunch is they won’t do as well as they hope-the GOP won’t be able to claim any kind of mandate. That’s because they have refused to articulate any vision for governing.

I do not celebrate this failure. I’ve always believed the nation’s interest is best served by competition in the marketplace of ideas. An innovative, forward-looking conservative platform would force those of us who call ourselves progressives to update and sharpen our own thinking.

Sadly, this year’s campaign has been dull and disheartening. It is a testament to the cynicism of our times that the failure of most candidates to say anything meaningful is intentional. The near-universal message isn’t “vote for me.” It’s “vote against my opponent.”

Actually, that’s not quite accurate. The dominant Republican message is an exhortation to vote against someone who’s not on any ballot: President Obama.

Ralph Nader: Be a Passionate Voter for Justice

Millions of Americans displayed passion and fevered interest in the recent exciting World Series championship. Now it’s time to move on to a serious matter of national importance that often suffers from a lack of public enthusiasm. Millions of Americans, many of whom are avid sports fans, are suffering due to low wages, income inequality, and a gridlocked Congress that is obsessed with campaign fundraising and incapable of addressing many of country’s most pressing needs, from public investments to fair play for working families.

With Election Day just days away, now is the perfect time to transfer some of that passion and energy for sports into the political realm. After all, there is far more on the line than just a championship and bragging rights. And elections are not a spectator sport — you need to be on the field yourself!

Just imagine if the majority of eligible voters had the same dedication and diligence as sports fans who know all the stats and figures, the players, and the management hierarchy. Imagine if voters were as informed, passionate and vocal as baseball fans.

David Sirota: Is the Minimum Wage Really a Living Wage?

Under pressure to raise his state’s minimum wage, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker confidently declared that there was no need to do so. Low-wage workers had filed a complaint charging that the state’s minimum wage-$7.25-did not constitute a “living wage” as mandated by state law. But the Republican governor’s administration, after examining the issue, announced earlier this month that it found “no reasonable cause” for the complaint.

That official government finding was supposed to come from a dispassionate investigation. Yet, documents reveal that it was largely based on information provided by the state’s restaurant lobby, which represents major low-wage employers including fast-food companies.

Indeed, the Raise Wisconsin campaign, which is pushing for a higher minimum wage, requested all documents on which the state based the “living wage” ruling. And the only economic study that the administration released in response was an anti-minimum-wage analysis from the Wisconsin Restaurant Association-a group that lobbies against minimum wage increases.

Joe Conason: Plutocrat or Populist? Actually, Hillary Clinton Is Neither

As America’s biggest political target-a status she is likely to enjoy for the foreseeable future-Hillary Clinton takes incoming fire of every caliber from all directions. One day her words are ripped from context to depict her as a plutocratic elitist; on another day, she is quoted, selectively, to prove that she is a raving populist. And on still another day last week, when she was campaigning in North Carolina for Sen. Kay Hagan, a right-wing rag tarred her as a “plutocratic populist.”

Her partisan critics never worry about such ludicrous contradiction, as long as they can keep pumping out the cheap shots. Having endured the same tactics in the White House, the Senate and the State Department, in campaigns and in daily life, she must find it all boringly familiar by now.

So far, her popularity has remained remarkably durable-but the constant effort to sow confusion about her sympathies, positions and policies, especially on economic issues, still deserves rebuttal.

There is a database housed in Arkansas with your name in it … that is, if you live in one of the 28 states participating in the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program. It’s one of the growing components of an aggressive drive across the U.S. by Republicans to stop many Americans from voting.

Early voting has already begun in many states in the 2014 U.S. midterm elections. Control of the U.S. Senate hangs in the balance, as do many crucial governorships, congressional races and ballot initiatives. One question looming over this election is just how significant will be the impact of the wholesale, organized disenfranchisement of eligible voters.

Ari Berman: New Voting Restrictions Could Swing the 2014 Election

On Monday, October 27, eight activists with Moral Monday Georgia occupied the office of Georgia GOP Secretary of State Brian Kemp, holding signs that read “Let Us Vote.”

There are 800,000 unregistered African-American, Hispanic and Asian eligible voters in Georgia. This year, the New Georgia Project registered 85,000 of them. After the applications were submitted, Kemp subpoenaed the group’s records and accused them of voter registration fraud. It turned out that only 25 of the forms were fraudulent and the group was required by law to turn them in regardless.

Despite the scant evidence of voter fraud, 40,000 new voter registration applications have yet to be processed in the state, according to the New Georgia Project. Civil rights groups sued Kemp and voter registration boards in five heavily populated urban counties, but on Wednesday a Fulton County judge dismissed the lawsuit. It was the latest court decision restricting voting rights this election year. [..]

Those 40,000 missing voters could very well be the difference in a hotly contested Senate race between Republican David Perdue and Democrat Michelle Nunn and a close gubernatorial contest between Republican incumbent Nathan Deal and Democratic challenger Jason Carter.

Michelle Chen: What Happens When People-Rather Than Politicians-Are Given the Chance to Vote for a Higher Minimum Wage?

You can tell how popular the upcoming state minimum-wage ballot initiatives are from the opposition tactics conservatives are deploying. They breathlessly claim raising the minimum wage will not help a significant number of workers, or in a contradictory argument, insist a minimum-wage boost would drive the state’s economy into ruin. Or they might try to erase it from the ballot altogether, as conservatives in Arkansas did in their lawyerly court battle over the signature-collection process to bring up a referendum for a minimum wage of $8.50 per hour. The state Supreme Court just ruled in favor of ballot campaigners, so now Arkansas will be among four Red-leaning states to offer a minimum-wage initiative, alongside Alaska, Nebraska and South Dakota (weighing proposals for base wages of $9.75, $9 and $8.50, respectively). Illinois will weigh a non-binding proposal for a $10 minimum wage.

Two cities, Oakland and San Francisco will vote to hike the minimum wage to $12.25 and $15, respectively, extending a growing movement for wage reforms at the city level, inspired by Seattle’s trailblazing $15 minimum-wage law.

Pundits see these initiatives as a vote-boosting strategy for Democrats in key races. But advocates focused on economic justice simply see direct democracy as a straightforward way to deal with an issue politicians often ignore.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Justice for Edward Snowden

It is time for President Obama to offer clemency to Edward Snowden, the courageous U.S. citizen who revealed the Orwellian reach of the National Security Agency’s sweeping surveillance of Americans. His actions may have broken the law, but his act, as the New York Times editorialized, did the nation “a great service [..]

That requires hard choices. When a government is trampling the rights of the people in secrecy, patriots have a duty to speak out. Snowden notes that there is no “oath of secrecy” for people who work for the government. Contract employees like Snowden sign a form, a civil agreement, agreeing not to release classified information, opening themselves to civil or criminal prosecution if they do. “But you are also asked to take an oath, and that’s the oath of service. The oath of service is not to secrecy, but to the Constitution – to protect it against all enemies, foreign and domestic. That’s the oath that I kept.”

Changing congressional rules is a good idea. But that won’t fix a Congress run by people who seek to render government ineffective

I recently participated in a panel convened by Esquire Magazine, in which they asked four retired members of congress Senators Lott and Daschle, Congressman Livingston, and me to make recommendations about how to improve the function of Congress, including syncing up the House and Senate’s schedules, eliminating gerrymandering and speeding up the confirmations of executive appointees. I agree with all of them.

But as I made clear in the panel’s discussions, there is a much more important step that has to be taken before they can have any real beneficial impact. The reason we have suffered from a wholly dysfunctional Congress for the past four years is not procedural: it’s political.

Changing the House and Senate rules, and having those bodies meet more frequently are all good ideas. But they will not fix a Congress run by people who seek to render government ineffective. Only the voters can change this.

As long as the Republican Party is dominated by leaders of extreme ideological rigidity, and they escape the blame that they deserve, the dysfunctional situation in Congress will continue. Voters who are unhappy at gridlock need follow only a two-step program: first, pay some serious attention to who has caused this breakdown; second, vote them out of power.

Timothy Karr: Verizon’s Latest Censorship Plan Follows a Familiar Pattern

Last night, Daily Dot reported that Verizon is attempting to buy its way into the news cycle by creating a tech-news site, SugarString.com, to compete with the likes of Wired and The Verge.

But there’s a twist: According to emails from the site’s editors, SugarString will ban reporters from writing any stories about Net Neutrality or U.S. surveillance programs.

The site is now staffing up — hiring editors and reporters to produce stories that Verizon hopes will appeal to mainstream audiences. In an email to a prospective reporter, SugarString Editor Cole Stryker wrote that the ban on coverage of Net Neutrality and spying “is pretty much it as far as content restrictions go. The upside is that we have a big budget to pay people well, make video documentaries and other fun shit.”

From all indications, SugarString is nothing more than a thinly veiled Verizon PR effort. And it’s just the latest in the company’s ongoing campaign to control all things Internet. It’s a history that includes the offensive claim that Verizon has the constitutional right to censor everyone’s Web content.

Doug Bandow: Hawks Demand More Military Spending Than During Cold War: Stop Squandering ‘Defense’ Dollars on Other Nations

America accounts for nearly 40 percent of the globe’s military outlays, but Republican Party hawks believe that the federal government never spends enough on the Pentagon. The war lobby’s mantra always is more, much more.

Yet the U.S. already devotes far more than it should to “defense,” which today largely means protecting wealthy allies who prefer to spend their money on domestic goals. Washington should scale back its international responsibilities and cut Pentagon outlays accordingly.

The more U.S. officials want to do militarily, the more they must spend on the military. Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson rightly complained that Defense Department outlays today are being driven by budget concerns, “increasingly disconnected from our strategic interests and potential threats.” It is foolish to make commitments without providing the manpower and materiel necessary to follow through. Then Americans may die fighting losing wars. Washington should rationalize its strategic objectives first.

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.

With large numbers of people now shivering in fear over Ebola, it has occurred to many that it would be nice if we had a vaccine against the deadly virus. If we had a vaccine, people in the countries where the disease is prevalent and the health care workers who care for the sick could get the vaccine and quickly bring the disease under control. The threat of Ebola would soon be history.

The interesting part of this story is that we could have had a vaccine, if the government had been willing to put up the money. The New York Times reported last week about a vaccine that was developed nearly a decade ago with funding from the Canadian government. According to the article, the vaccine was 100 percent effective in protecting monkeys exposed to Ebola from contracting the disease. [..]

However, it was never tested in humans. The cost of doing such testing would run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. It could be as high $1 billion. To put that in context, this would be roughly $3 per person in the United States, assuming that there was no international sharing of development costs. Over the course of a decade, that would be a bit more than 30 cents per person per year, or 0.003 percent of what the federal government has spent over the last decade.

But the government wasn’t willing to spend the money. Undoubtedly politicians would have expressed outrage over spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a vaccine to prevent a disease that primarily affected people living in Africa.

Jeb Lund: This year’s hot new liberal strategy: just download the GOP hive mind!

If Democratic candidates refuse to stand up for their own party’s ideas, maybe these people don’t deserve to win

he Republican party has, reliably, been going more crazy for nearly a quarter century. So it’s been fairly easy for Democrats to guarantee a chunk of votes simply by standing still or inching rightward, while pointing at the loons and saying, “That’s not me.” Which is fine as a principle, but the only person Not Me will be dragging to the polls on a boring midterm election, is Billy from the Family Circus.

However, the closer Democrats get toward said crazy at which they’re pointing, the less saying “That’s not me” means to anyone – because it clearly doesn’t mean much to the candidates either.

Nothing brought home the depressing similarities quite like the final Florida gubernatorial debate between sitting Republican governor Rick Scott and Democratic candidate (and former governor) Charlie Crist on Tuesday night. Scott lied in his first statement, mischaracterizing something Crist had said – not on the trail, but literally seconds before, on the stage, in front of the audience. Both men made accusations and counter-promises like a couple of student body presidential candidates saying, “My opponent promised to take seniors to Big Kahuna’s Water Park for graduation and failed. I’ll take us to Six Flags.” The whole slapfight had less dignity than the Batley Townswomen’s Guild’s reenactment of Pearl Harbor. [..]

Rationalizations are easier to sell than platforms – which is why the latter are only constructed with great labor and reluctance, and the former are free and abundant. It’s true that the GOP turns out the vote better during midterms. But Republicans can only engineer so much crazy to create distinctions for Democrats to point and laugh at, and those distractions don’t mean much at the polls (or to encourage people to go to them) if liberal candidates refuse to stand up for their own party’s ideas, and instead cozy up to the Republican platform and employ the same dirty campaign tactics. What liberal voter wants to show up to witness that?

Robert Reich: Empathy Deficit Disorder

Commenting on a recent student suicide at an Alaska high school, Alaska’s Republican Congressman Don Young said suicide didn’t exist in Alaska before “government largesse” gave residents an entitlement mentality.

“When people had to work and had to provide and had to keep warm by putting participation in cutting wood and catching the fish and killing the animals, we didn’t have the suicide problem,” he said. Government handouts tell people “you are not worth anything but you are going to get something for nothing.”

Alaska has the highest rate of suicide per capita in America — almost twice the national average, and a leading cause of death in Alaska for young people ages 15 to 24 — but I doubt it’s because Alaskans lead excessively easy lives. [..]

Suicide is a terrible tragedy for those driven to it and for their loved ones. What possessed Congressman Young to turn it into a political football?

Dave Bry: The decline of interest in baseball is a harbinger of waning American power

An America that worships football and ignores baseball is one choosing its worse angels over its better ones

Long considered the country’s “national pastime”, baseball reflects the very best qualities of the American spirit, the higher values upon which our society was (theoretically, at least) founded: freedom, independence, tolerance. Football is a violent, territorial sport that rewards brute strength over everything else and symbolises, at its base level, imperialism, bloodlust, and corporate capitalism’s tendency to flatten any and all eccentricity into bland, cog-in-the-machine homogeny.

Sadly, it’s more than clear at this point that Americans don’t much like baseball anymore, at least compared to how much we like football.

This is a deep – and worsening – flaw in our collective character, as telling a sign of American decline as our terrible math skills, our tragic and preventable high infant mortality rate or the depreciation of our GDP vis-a-vis China.

The global economy is ailing, and the damage done by fiscal policy is going to come crashing. Here’s our sad fate

You usually think about October surprises in the political context, but we’ve had something of an economic October surprise this year. A tumultuous drop in oil prices and a significant stock market pullback underlie serious challenges for the global economy. And it points to a core problem that has really been with us for over a decade, but more acutely since the Great Recession: Countries cannot generate enough demand in the economy without a financial bubble of some sort. Sadly, the primary way to change that has been, catastrophically, shut off by the blinkered stubbornness of our policymakers.

Markets have unquestionably slumped: the S&P 500 is down 8 percent just since mid-September. More important, interest rates have plummeted. Geopolitical tensions, from ISIS to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, shoulder part of the blame. But markets also fear low inflation, partly due to crashing commodity prices. [..]

But the broader reasons for the commodity slowdown and deflation concerns involve a generally sick economy around the world. China has a growing debt bubble to manage. Japan’s experiment with economic revival has run aground amid a large increase in the consumption tax. And Europe stands on the brink of a triple-dip recession.

Robert Kuttner: Would Warren Really Run?

What is Elizabeth Warren up to?

Elizabeth Warren’s offhand remark in an interview with People magazine strongly suggested that the Massachusetts senator has revised her previous firm declarations of non-candidacy for president and is now deliberately leaving the door open a crack. Asked whether she was considering a run in 2016, Warren said disarmingly, “I don’t think so,” but added, “If there’s any lesson I’ve learned in the last five years, it’s don’t be so sure about what lies ahead. There are amazing doors that could open.”

That sure opened one door. Is Warren really thinking about challenging frontrunner Hillary Clinton? I’d be surprised if Warren has made any decision on that question, but her remark immediately set off two kinds of political waves.

First, it produced great excitement among the Democratic Party’s long-suffering progressive base. And second, it reminded many commentators of Clinton’s several vulnerabilities.

Adam Lee: Godless millennials could end the political power of the religious right

The 2014 midterm elections are drawing near, and it appears that the Democrats may well lose the Senate, since they’re fighting on unfriendly territory – a large number of seats in red states are up for grabs.

But if you look deeper than the national picture, there’s a more interesting story. In southern states like Georgia and Kentucky – which in the past would have been easy Republican holds – the races are unexpectedly tight. In fact, the only reason that the questions of which party will control the Senate in 2015 is unsettled at all is that [an unusual number of races in dark red states are toss-ups v], despite an overall political climate that generally favors conservatives.

What we’re seeing may well be the first distant rumblings of a trend that’s been quietly gathering momentum for years: America is becoming less Christian. In every region of the country, in every Christian denomination, membership is either stagnant or declining. Meanwhile, the number of religiously unaffiliated people – atheists, agnostics, those who are indifferent to religion, or those who follow no conventional faith – is growing. In some surprising places, these “nones” (as in “none of the above”) now rank among the largest slices of the demographic pie.

A new Pew study on America’s media consumption offers a window into the right’s collective mindset

Pew Research set out to find what’s behind what it considers the increasing political polarization of the United States; why the country is moving away from political moderation and becoming more and more divided between liberals and conservatives. Its first report on the phenomenon, which examines where people are hearing news and opinion in both regular and social media, shows that this is happening for very different reasons among people moving to the right than for people moving to the left.

Or that’s the charitable way to put it. The less charitable way is to say Pew discovered that conservatives are consuming a right-wing media full of lies and misinformation, whereas liberals are more interested in media that puts facts before ideology. It’s very much not a “both sides do it” situation. Conservatives are becoming more conservative because of propaganda, whereas liberals are becoming more liberal while staying very much checked into reality.

David Sirota: In Legalization Battles, Alcohol Defines the Politics of Marijuana

When Colorado voters in 2012 approved a ballot measure legalizing marijuana, the state did not merely break new ground in the ongoing battle over narcotics policy. It also bolstered an innovative new political message that compares cannabis to alcohol.

Two years later, that comparison is being deployed in key marijuana-related elections throughout the country, and drug reform advocates are so sure marijuana is safer than alcohol, they are now challenging police to a “drug duel” to prove their point.

The proposal for the duel from David Boyer, an official with the Maine chapter of the Marijuana Policy Project, came after South Portland Police Chief Edward Googins announced his opposition to a municipal referendum to legalize marijuana possession.

Gail Collins: Once Again, Guns

Think about this. It’s really remarkable. Two years after the Sandy Hook tragedy, the top gun-control priority in the United States is still background checks. There is nothing controversial about the idea that people who buy guns should be screened to make sure they don’t have a criminal record or serious mental illness. Americans favor it by huge majorities. Even gun owners support it. Yet we’re still struggling with it.

The problem, of course, is the National Rifle Association, which does not actually represent gun owners nearly as ferociously as it represents gun sellers. The background check bill is on the ballot under voter initiative because the Washington State Legislature was too frightened of the N.R.A. to take it up. This in a state that managed to pass a right-to-die law, approve gay marriage and legalize the sale of marijuana.

The United States now has an Ebola czar. But what about a surgeon general? The gun lobby has successfully shot down his nomination-at least so far.

The Ebola epidemic is a global health crisis that demands a concerted, global response. Here in the United States, action has been disjointed, seemingly driven by fear rather than science. One clear reason for this: The nomination of President Barack Obama’s choice to fill the public health position of surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, is languishing in the Senate. You would think that an Ebola epidemic would move people to transcend partisan politics. But Vivek Murthy, despite his impressive medical credentials, made one crucial mistake before being nominated: He said that guns are a public health problem. That provoked the National Rifle Association to oppose him, which is all it takes to stop progress in the U.S. Senate.

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.

Zoë Carpenter : The Stealth Campaign to Buy America’s Courts

Cole County, Missouri, seems an unlikely place for a national Republican group to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s a small county of 75,000, and its leadership is solidly red, with few exceptions. One of those exceptions is Pat Joyce, a Democrat who’s held her seat on the country circuit court for two decades. Until a few weeks ago, with $17,000 on hand and her opponent nearly $13,000 in debt, her chances of serving another term seemed good.

That financial advantage vanished abruptly in mid-October when the Republican State Leadership Committee stepped in with $200,000 to save Republican Brian Stumpe. Half of that money went directly to his campaign. The rest went to the RSLC’s local political action committee, which ran a tie-dye hued ad that accused Joyce of being a “groovy” ally of “radical environmentalists.”

Joyce holds a powerful seat, as far as local courts go. Cole County includes the Missouri state capitol, and so the court has jurisdiction over lawsuits against the state, such as legal challenges to ballot measures. But the RSLC’s involvement in the race isn’t necessarily about Joyce-it’s part of a broader campaign to make courts across the country more conservative.

John Nichols: Chris Christie’s Latest Terrible Idea: Let GOP Governors Control Voting for 2016

As the chairman of the Republican Governors Association and the self-appointed surrogate-in-chief for the Grand Old Party’s candidates for the top jobs in states across the country this fall, Chris Christie has plenty of reasons to want embattled governors like Florida’s Rick Scott and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker to be re-elected.

Yes, yes, Christie wants to elect governors who will stop all this talk about raising the minimum wage. Yes, yes, Christie wants to elect governors who will “start offending people”-like school teachers and their unions.

But that’s not all the New Jersey governor wants from his fellow Republican executives. Among the reasons he mentions for electing Republican governors, says Christie, is a desire to put the GOP in charge of the “voting mechanism” of likely 2016 presidential battleground states such as Florida and Wisconsin and Ohio..