Tag: Opinion

Free speech is dying in the Western world. While most people still enjoy considerable freedom of expression, this right, once a near-absolute, has become less defined and less dependable for those espousing controversial social, political or religious views. The decline of free speech has come not from any single blow but rather from thousands of paper cuts of well-intentioned exceptions designed to maintain social harmony.

In the face of the violence that frequently results from anti-religious expression, some world leaders seem to be losing their patience with free speech. After a video called “Innocence of Muslims” appeared on YouTube and sparked violent protests in several Muslim nations last month, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon warned that “when some people use this freedom of expression to provoke or humiliate some others’ values and beliefs, then this cannot be protected.” [..]

Of course, free speech is often precisely about pissing off other people – challenging social taboos or political values.

William K. Black: Ryan and Romney’s Secret Plan to Cut the Deficit — and Why Romney Opposes It

At Thursday’s vice presidential debate, Representative Ryan renewed his claim that he has a secret plan to cut the deficit while cutting all tax rates by 20 percent and not eliminating any tax deductions for which the middle class are large recipients. Oh, and Romney has also promised to increase military spending. [..]

There is, of course, no Ryan plan. There cannot be a Ryan plan because mathematicians are not like historians. The cruel joke about historians is that while God himself cannot change history; historians can. It is perhaps because they can be useful to God in this regard that he tolerates their continued existence and frequent errors. Mathematicians are useless to God, at least in the non-exotic realms of mathematics relevant to budgets, because they are so good at exposing errors and when they do so the error is beyond dispute. (Econometricians are God’s favorites among the quants.) No budget plan could meet all (or even most) of the policy constraints Ryan and Romney have promised they would obey. It is mathematically impossible. Romney and Ryan’s primary lie is that they have a secret plan to cut taxes, cut the deficit, and increase military spending.

Andrew Leonard: Romney’s magic economy plan

Mitt Romney gets a lot of guff from his critics for his unwillingness to spell out the details of how he plans to fix the U.S. the economy; how exactly his tax reforms will work, for example, or what precisely he will do in his first 100 days to boost job creation. But the best thing about the Romney agenda is that by his own admission, he doesn’t need a plan. Just getting himself elected is the ticket to prosperity. [..]

The notion that Romney could spur economic growth “without actually doing anything” invites mockery. The Atlantic’s Matt O’Brien memorably dubbed it “faith-based economic strategy.” At the very least it seemed to betray a breath-taking level of unwarranted hubris. But the key to understanding his boast is to ignore the low-hanging fruit (“without actually doing anything”) and focus on five crucial words: “We’ll see capital come back.“

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Town Hall Debate: Will Voters Ask the Medicare and Social Security Questions Reporters Haven’t?

If you support strong and effective government, then the unfamiliar glow you felt after last Thursday’s debate was the satisfaction of seeing your opinions forcefully defended by a national candidate. There hasn’t been much of that going on lately. But a deceptive question was asked in the vice presidential debate, while other important ones still haven’t been asked of any national candidate.

The president’s been undercutting his own party’s best message and keeps threatening to cut benefits for its signature programs. As for Mitt Romney and his running mate, there’s little left to be said: They’re both determined to undermine Medicare and Social Security. Even if they’re retreating from their most radical ideas now, you know those ideas will be back once they’re in office.

If what follows focuses more on the president than on his challenger, its because the Republicans are beyond redemption on this issue. But both candidates need to answer some direct questions on this topic.

Robert Kuttner: Muddled Ideology, Muddled Debate

The nation’s pundits have had a fine week, psychoanalyzing President Obama’s dismal performance in the first debate and Joe Biden’s effective if a bit over-the-top counter-punching in his match with Paul Ryan.

Maureen Dowd had it about right when she wrote that “Because Obama doesn’t relish confrontation, he often fails to pin his opponents on the mat the first time he gets the chance; instead, perversely, he pulls back and allows foes to gain oxygen.” Ouch.

But the psycho-biography school, fascinating as it is, mostly misses the point.

Romney and Obama have each muddled their views — but Romney does it in a way that helps him, while Obama’s muddling helps the Republicans. Let me explain.

The way a presidential candidate campaigns for office matters to the country. A campaign should demonstrate seriousness of purpose and a set of core beliefs, and it should signal to voters whether a candidate shows trustworthiness and judgment. Those things don’t seem to matter to Mitt Romney.

From the beginning of his run for the Republican nomination, Mr. Romney has offered to transfigure himself into any shape desired by an audience in order to achieve power. In front of massed crowds or on television, he can sound sunny and inclusive, radiating a feel-good centrism. His “severely conservative” policies and disdain for much of the country are reserved for partisans, donors and the harsh ideologues who clutter his party’s base. This polarity is often described as “flip-flopping,” but the word is too mild to describe opposing positions that are simultaneously held.

Bill Boyarsky: No Room for the Poor in This Election

In 90 minutes of debating, Rep. Paul Ryan failed to explain why the Romney-Ryan budget plan wouldn’t inflict hardship on the middle class and the working poor. Actually, poor people weren’t mentioned much, even by his foe, Vice President Joe Biden. This debate was about the middle class, that somewhat amorphous demographic at the center of the presidential campaign.

It’s not surprising that Ryan, the Republican vice presidential nominee, didn’t mention the millions of Americans on Medicaid and other social programs who would be badly damaged if his government-slashing budget plan, supported by running mate Mitt Romney, becomes law. But I expected more from Biden, especially after he talked in the debate about how he was influenced by Catholic Social Justice doctrine, which advocates helping the poor.

Robert Sheer: The Enemy of My Enemy Is My President

Maybe I have been too harsh in judging Barack Obama’s economic performance. Instead of following George W. Bush’s lead in bailing out the bankers first, I wanted Obama to do more for beleaguered homeowners and less for the Wall Street swindlers who trafficked in toxic mortgages. But the president must have done something right, or the hucksters at Goldman Sachs wouldn’t hate him so.  

Ever since Bill Clinton appointed Goldman honcho Robert Rubin to be his Treasury secretary, the firm has been the top corporate supporter of the Democrats, according to the authoritative Center for Responsive Politics. And the investment paid off big time when Clinton followed Rubin’s lead and teamed up with congressional Republicans to reverse the sensible restraints on Wall Street that had kept the economy sound for six decades. Thanks to that decision, Goldman, a high-rolling investment house, was allowed to suddenly become a commercial bank and avail itself of the cheap money provided by the Federal Reserve to bail out troubled banks.

Peter van Buren: Don’t Ask and Don’t Tell

We had a debate club back in high school. Two teams would meet in the auditorium, and Mr. Garrity would tell us the topic, something 1970s-ish like “Resolved: Women Should Get Equal Pay for Equal Work” or “World Communism Will Be Defeated in Vietnam.” Each side would then try,  through persuasion and the marshalling of facts, to clinch the argument. There’d be judges and a winner.

Today’s presidential debates are a long way from Mr. Garrity’s club.  It seems that the first rule of the debate club now is: no disagreeing on what matters most. In fact, the two candidates rarely interact with each other at all, typically ditching whatever the question might be for some rehashed set of campaign talking points, all with the complicity of the celebrity media moderators preening about democracy in action.  Waiting for another quip about Big Bird is about all the content we can expect.

George Zornick: Paul Ryan’s Congressional Opponent: Debate Me Next!

On the heels of last night’s vice-presidential debate, Paul Ryan’s Democratic opponent for his congressional seat wants a second round-while he sits Biden’s chair.

Rob Zerban is facing a tough road to unseating Ryan, who won Wisconsin’s 1st district with over 68 percent of the vote in 2010-and the district has since been reapportioned to include even more Republicans.

Yet, the district is still fairly purple-Obama narrowly won it in 2008, and the redistricting only added a couple Republican points. Zerban has far outraised any other Ryan challenger over the years, though he still lags far behind Ryan in that category.

But most importantly, Zerban believes that by exposing Ryan’s radical views on the safety net-Zerban notably supports a Medicare-for-all plan, as opposed to Ryan’s partial privatization-he can win over voters in the district. He believes a debate would be the best chance to do that.

For most people who have heard or read about Hugo Chávez in the international media, his reelection on Sunday as president of Venezuela by a convincing margin might be puzzling.

Almost all of the news we hear about him is bad: He picks fights with the United States and sides with “enemies” such as Iran; he is a “dictator” or “strongman” who has squandered the nation’s oil wealth; the Venezuelan economy is plagued by shortages and is usually on the brink of collapse.

Then there is the other side of the story: Since the Chávez government got control over the national oil industry, poverty has been cut by half, and extreme poverty by 70 percent. College enrollment has more than doubled, millions of people have access to health care for the first time and the number of people eligible for public pensions has quadrupled.

Tracy Bloom: Romney’s ‘Etch A Sketch’ Abortion Positions

GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney “reaffirmed” his staunch pro-life abortion position on Wednesday, saying his stance on the hot-button issue hasn’t changed. At least not since he became pro-life midway through his political career.

Like on many issues-taxes, health care, stem-cell research, minimum wage, immigration reform, etc.-Romney has flipped-flopped positions in a seemingly concerted effort to appeal to a certain ideological group of voters. This is not an earth-shattering revelation by any stretch of the imagination, as evidenced during the presidential primary when his Republican rivals challenged him on his evolving abortion stance. And after Romney suggested Tuesday that abortion-related legislation would not be a major part of his presidency, he was forced once again to clarify his position.

“I think I’ve said time and again. I’m a pro-life candidate. I’ll be a pro-life president,” Romney said Wednesday, attempting to convince social values conservative voters once again, perhaps for the final time, that he’s their man.

E. J. Dionne: Sherrod Brown’s Lessons for Obama

If anyone can testify to the problem of giving really rich people a chance to tilt the political playing field, it’s Sen. Sherrod Brown.

A proud labor-populist, Brown seems to invite the hostility of wealthy conservatives and deep-pocketed interest groups. The amount they have spent to defeat him went somewhere over $20 million this week.

Brown can live with that. His uncompromising advocacy on behalf of workers, toughness on trade, and progressive policies on a broad range of other issues have allowed Brown to build a formidable organization across Ohio, and a large cadre of small donors.

David Sirota: A GOP Shift on Taxes?

When it comes to tax policy, Mitt Romney is not merely a spinner, an equivocator or a run-of-the-mill dissembler. He’s a liar. Hyperbolic and overwrought as that label seems, it is, alas, the only accurate description for someone who would, in February, promote a proposal to cut taxes “on everyone across the country by 20 percent, including the top 1 percent” and then appear at an October debate and insist that the very same proposal “will not reduce the taxes paid by high-income Americans.”

For the most part, analyzing such hideous dishonesty is where political reporting has started and stopped. How big a liar is Romney? Was he lying in the first statement or the second one? These are, no doubt, important questions-and to answer but one of them, it’s obvious Romney was lying in the most recent one. As the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center reported, the Republican nominee’s proposal, if enacted, would “result in a net tax cut for high-income tax payers and a net tax increase for lower- and/or middle-income taxpayers.”

However, critical as such short-term fact checking is, it misses the much bigger news embedded in all the subterfuge. In short, it misses the genuinely mind-boggling fact that a Republican nominee for president is now campaigning for president on a promise to not cut taxes on the wealthy.

Affirmative action provokes conflicting views about what equal protection means under the law. Does the Constitution permit race-conscious programs that provide minorities with opportunities, even though it prohibits programs that exclude minorities because of their race? [..]

Affirmative action is largely a voluntary commitment by leading institutions that are convinced it is in their self-interest to enlarge opportunities for historically disfavored groups, because it helps fulfill their missions. It would be a travesty for the court’s conservatives to reverse or weaken longstanding legal precedent on this issue. The harm they would inflict in doing so would be felt in education, business, national defense and many areas of American life.

Martha Burk: The Corporate Court’s War on Women

So far, not so good.

When President George W. Bush nominated John Roberts and Samuel Alito for the Supreme Court, women’s groups mobilized to no avail. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid refused to filibuster either nomination despite personal pleas from feminist leaders. Our main worry was reproductive freedom.

But many of us feared something that has proven to be just as menacing – a strong bias in favor of corporations. Women’s rights at work have been under constant assault since Congress passed the Equal Pay Act and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibiting sex discrimination in the workplace in the 1960s.

History has proven that our fears of a Roberts Court were well founded. In 2007, it overruled six lower federal courts by upholding a ban on one abortion procedure with no exception for a woman’s health. The same year, in Ledbetter v. Goodyear, the Court overturned 40 years of precedent when it severely curtailed a woman’s right to sue for sex discrimination in pay. And in 2011 it piled on the punishment with Walmart v. Dukes, cutting the heart out of women’s ability to sue as a class when they’re unfairly denied pay and promotion.

Jim Hightower: The 1 Percent’s Cry for Justice

It’s out! This year’s list of American success stories has just been published, and according to its compiler, it “instills confidence that the American dream is still very much alive.”

Maybe you are one of these success stories. You might be a great public school teacher, for example, who motivated students to achieve new heights or an inventor who came up with an energy-saving device and got it to market at a fair price, generating a profit for yourself, the environment and society generally.

No, no, no. Not that kind of success. We’re talking money – the flow of mammon beyond regular people’s wildest dreams. That’s how Forbes magazine measures not only “success,” but also a person’s value: You are what’s in your Swiss bank account. And, just to rank last on this year’s “Forbes 400” listing of America’s wealthiest people, you need more than a billion dollars in financial wealth. To get into the top 10 requires at least $25 billion. And to be numero uno means you’ve got $66 billion socked away. Who says America is broke?

Gail Collins: Democrats at the Deep End

It’s a tough time to be a Democrat.

When Democrats run into each other in elevators, they exchange glances and sigh. Or make little whimpering sounds. [..]

Things haven’t really gone off the deep end for the Obama campaign. They’ve gone back to normal. You knew that the Obama-is-going-to-win-by-10-points euphoria wasn’t going to last. When did anybody ever win a presidential race by 10 points? Don’t tell me about Ronald Reagan. When Ronald Reagan was president, gas was 90 cents a gallon and I was writing on a Kaypro.

Maybe Democrats should try to be more like the Republicans, and reduce stress by blaming all bad news on incorrect information, cooked up by cabals of political partisans.

Romney’s VMI speech hints at more war in Iraq and Afghanistan — and demands that Europe spend more on defense

Mitt Romney’s hailed foreign policy speech combined magical thinking and mendacity, with promises or threats to maintain, restore, escalate or commence military involvement in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Iran, at minimum. Speaking at the Virginia Military Institute, Romney had to have his audience of cadets wondering how many wars he’d commit them to if elected. [..]

Perhaps fittingly for a guy who has staffed his foreign policy team with Bush retreads, Romney got high praise from former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who tweeted: “Terrific, comprehensive speech by Gov. Romney at VMI. He knows America’s role in the world should be as a leader not as a spectator.”

Doreen T. Warren: Go for the Jugular: What a Real Attack on Mitt Romney and the 1% Could Look Like

I agree with Deepak Bhargava that President Obama’s record “is more mixed” than critics and admirers admit, that progressives must refocus our attention on Congress and statehouse elections, and that elections are a “necessary but not sufficient condition for a revival of progressive politics.”

While Bhargava is right that we need to build a “deep alliance of movement forces” to pursue and win on a progressive agenda, we also need to become more hard-nosed, strategic and indeed ruthless in our effort to weaken the legitimacy and power of the right. Much as conservatives went for our collective jugular after the 2010 midterm elections by targeting the public sector labor movement, we must be willing to go for theirs-regardless of how much more money and power they might have.

What would a principled attack strategy look like? It must proceed on at least three tracks: ideological, organizational and structural. On all three, the Occupy movement has been a spark in jump-starting such a national campaign.

Bryce Covert: Why We Should All Care About the Walmart Strikers

As Josh Eidelson reported last week in Salon, retail workers at Walmart walked off the job in a strike for the first time in the company’s fifty-year existence. And he reports today that the strikes have spread: workers in Dallas, Texas, and Laurel, Maryland, have joined the original strikers in Southern California stores, and workers in other cities are expected to join in. Walmart is famous (or infamous) for successfully warding off unionization at its stores during its entire history, and these strikes were, as Eidelson reports, “in protest of alleged retaliation against their attempts to organize,” as well as a call for improved benefits and staffing.

While not a union making formal demands, the group behind the strikes, OUR Walmart, presented a “Declaration of Respect” to the company in June. It called for, among other things, a minimum of $13 per hour, full-time jobs for those who want them, predictable work schedules, affordable healthcare and wages and benefits that don’t mean employees have to turn to government assistance to fill in the holes. Walmart says the average hourly wage for its full-time workers across the country is $12.40, but an IBISWorld report put that figure at $8.81, barely above the minimum wage. And studies have shown that Walmart workers are more likely than others in the industry to rely on government benefits. In California, for instance, where the strike started, employees’ families use 40 percent more publicly funded healthcare and 38 percent more public assistance programs than the average employee at a large retail company. Walmart, for its part, has told Eidelson that the company “has some of the best jobs in the retail industry-good pay, affordable benefits and the chance for advancement.”

Leslie Savan: Why Mitt Likes to Say ‘I Like’

I’m not sure if I like the way Mitt Romney likes things. As the newly empathic candidate was promising to kill Big Bird at Wednesday’s debate, did you notice how he backed into it?  

“I like PBS,” Romney started out. “I love Big Bird. I actually like you [to moderator Jim Lehrer] too. But I’m not going to-I’m not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for it. That’s number one.”

“Like” is a decaffeinated form of “love” when Mitt uses it, but it’s also a mild protest, a plea for understanding. He usually lays a slight stress on the word, as if he’s revealing some vaguely surprising truth-“You may see me as an unfeeling, uncaring, bottom-line guy, but let me tell you, I enjoy life. I like things.” This man, who is so buttoned-up he can’t be honest about what he’s running on-like whether or not he’d cut taxes for the rich or cover pre-existing conditions in his health plan-uses like to establish his personal bona fides. I’m like you, he’s saying, I have “likes.”

Jessica Valenti: I’m Not a ‘Mother First’

Last week, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney said it was better for children to have a parent at home. “To have one parent to stay closely connected and at home during those early years of education can be very very important,” he said. It’s not hard to imagine which parent he’s talking about.

Romney’s statement didn’t elicit much in the way of outrage, a sign that American women have one more hurdle to overcome on the way to equality: the sexism of mom-ism. It’s no longer enough that women love their children. To be a truly committed parent, women are expected to be mothers above all else-we’re “moms first.”

Michelle Obama says that despite all her accomplishments, her “most important title is still ‘mom-in-chief’.” Ann Romney told the crowd at the Republican National Convention that it’s mothers “who really hold this country together.”

“We’re the mothers, we’re the wives, we’re the grandmothers, we’re the big sisters, we’re the little sisters, we’re the daughters.”

The sentiment may seem innocuous, but there’s a danger in returning to an ideal where women’s most important identity is relational rather than individual. If we want equality, women with children would be better served calling themselves people first, moms second.

If we credit the Occupy movement for casting two numbers into our political lexicon, 99 percent and one percent, we’ve also got to credit Mitt Romney and the Republican Party for adding another number: 47 percent. It’s been three weeks since Mother Jones magazine validated and posted the now infamous covert recording of an uncharacteristically candid and honest Willard Mitt Romney, who, speaking with the authority of an occult numerologist, gave us the magic number 47. [..]

What few pundits paid much attention to was the remainder of Romney’s sentence attacking the so-called 47 percent, saying they “believe that they are entitled to healthcare, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.” Most editors chose to shorten the sentence, ignoring Willard Romney’s outrage that people, the 47 percent or anyone else, would believe that they are entitled, as in having a right, to healthcare, food, and housing. Think about the concept: a right to healthcare, food, and housing. We’re not talking the McMansions, foodie epicurism, or elite health retreats that Romney’s donors have come to expect as class entitlements. No. This was questioning a more basic assumption, asking where people come off thinking they have a right to healthcare, a place to live, and food to eat.

Jon Walker: Obama Campaign Makes Sure You Know Obama Plans to Cut Social Security

President Obama’s performance in the first debate has been widely criticized, particularly his answer to a question about Social Security. As a result, the campaign felt the need to put up a blog post clarifying Obama’s position on Social Security. While the campaign uses some very weaselly phrases to put the best possible spin on Obama’s position, they make it perfectly clear that Obama’s plan includes cutting Social Security benefits.

From the Obama campaign website:

   Both President Obama and Mitt Romney know that the program is solvent for more than two decades and that there’s a need for gradual reforms to the benefits that millions of seniors have worked for, paid for, and earned. […]

   The President knows that guaranteed Social Security benefits are not handouts, but a bedrock of the commitment to retirement security America makes to our seniors. He believes that no current beneficiaries should see their basic benefits reduced, and he will not accept any approach that slashes benefits for future generations.

Note that use of the world “slashes.” Obama promises not to reduce benefits for current seniors but promises only to not “slash” benefits for future generations. The only reason to make these two separate promises is if the phrasing mean two different things.

Eugene Robinson; Hearing an Echo on Foreign Policy

Mitt Romney claims to disagree with President Obama on many aspects of foreign policy. We’re still waiting to hear what those differences might be.

I wasn’t surprised that Romney’s highly touted Major Policy Speech on foreign affairs Monday offered few specifics. But even in its generalities, Romney’s tour d’horizon sounded very much like a speech Obama might have given recounting his overseas initiatives over the past four years. [..]

I’m not arguing that Obama’s foreign policy has been perfect. I can think of a number of situations I believe he should have handled differently. But I defy anyone who heard Romney’s speech to explain how he differs from Obama, practically or even philosophically.

To the extent there’s any distinction at all, it’s rhetorical. Romney seems to believe that speaking in a more belligerent tone somehow changes everything. The world is unlikely to be impressed.

Wendell Potter: Romney’s Phony Answers to Tough Health Care Questions

During last week’s debate, GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney once again pledged to repeal Obamacare, but he was light on details about what he would replace it with, other than to suggest that his administration would encourage states to come up with reform plans of their own.

“What we did in Massachusetts is a model for the nation, state by state,” he said. “And I said that at that time. The federal government taking over health care for the entire nation and whisking aside the 10th Amendment, which gives states the rights for these kinds of things, is not the course for America to have a stronger, more vibrant economy.”

But considering that the Massachusetts law was the model for Obamacare, what, other than replicating what Massachusetts did, are the states to do?

The issue is not what separates Romney and Obama, but how much they agree. This hidden consensus has to be exposed

Wednesday night’s debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney underscored a core truth about America’s presidential election season: the vast majority of the most consequential policy questions are completely excluded from the process. This fact is squarely at odds with a primary claim made about the two parties – that they represent radically different political philosophies – and illustrates how narrow the range of acceptable mainstream political debate is in the country.

In part this is because presidential elections are now conducted almost entirely like a tawdry TV reality show. Personality quirks and trivialities about the candidates dominate coverage, and voter choices, leaving little room for substantive debates.

But in larger part, this exclusion is due to the fact that, despite frequent complaints that America is plagued by a lack of bipartisanship, the two major party candidates are in full-scale agreement on many of the nation’s most pressing political issues. As a result these are virtually ignored, drowned out by a handful of disputes that the parties relentlessly exploit to galvanise their support base and heighten fear of the other side.

Robert Kuttner: Notes for Next Time

I was pleased to see the unemployment rate come down to 7.8 percent. But honestly, that’s not nearly good enough.

Too many of the jobs don’t pay a decent wage. And they won’t pay decently until we get unemployment down to about 4 percent, as it was in the 1990s.

Our kids are saddled with a trillion dollars of student debt, and they are going out into a very weak job market. 30 percent of recent college grads move back in with their parents.

Our retirees are facing an eroding pension system, and the loss of their home equity, as well as very low returns on their savings because the Federal Reserve has rightly lowered interest rates, as one strategy of cleaning up the financial mess that we inherited.

This is not a four-year problem. It is a three decades problem.

It is not a case of young versus old, but a case of the one percent — who are only getting wealthier — versus everyone else.

Thomas B. Edsall: Toe to Toe

For the past year, conservative and Republican groups have spent more than $138 million in a concerted attempt to turn voters against Barack Obama.

The big dog in the effort to drive up Obama’s negative job approval ratings, the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future, has invested $82.5 million in independent expenditures, mostly for television ads. Restore Our Future hired Larry McCarthy, the media consultant who achieved both recognition and infamy for producing the Willie Horton commercial in 1988. Restore Our Future’s hope: to do to Obama what McCarthy did to Michael Dukakis.

So far in the campaign, the right has outspent the left on independent advertising by just over 3 to 1.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Romney’s Personality Shift

The strangest aspect of Wednesday night’s debate was Mitt Romney’s decision to change his tax policies on the fly. Having campaigned hard on a tax proposal that called for $5 trillion in tax cuts, he said flatly that he was not offering a $5 trillion tax cut.

“I don’t have a tax cut of the scale that you’re talking about,” Romney said, even though that is exactly the tax cut he has proposed.

Was Romney for his tax plan before he was against it?

Romney’s willingness to remake himself one more time brought into sharp relief a central flaw of his candidacy: Having campaigned as a moderate when he ran for governor of Massachusetts, he veered sharply to the right to win the Republican presidential nomination. Now, with the election just weeks away and polls showing him falling behind in the swing states, he has decided that he needs once again to sound moderate, practical and terribly concerned about the middle class — and that is the person he sought to be in Denver.

Mitt Romney’s Big Bird swipe during Wednesday’s debate raised some hackles: PBS’s, many on social media and mine. [..]

Big Bird is the man. He’s 8 feet tall. He can sing and roller skate and ride a unicycle and dance. Can you do that, Mr. Romney? I’m not talking about your fox trot away from the facts. I’m talking about real dancing. [..]

Big Bird and his friends also showed me what it meant to resolve conflicts with kindness and accept people’s differences and look out for the less fortunate. Do you know anything about looking out for the less fortunate, Mr. Romney? Or do you think they’re all grouches scrounging around in trash cans?

Jim Hightower; Romney Passes the Torch to Taxpayers

One of the mysteries of life in these curious times is that millions of Americans are enjoying the benefits of government – but are either unaware of it or in denial.

A 2008 study found that 40 percent of Medicare recipients, 44 percent of Social Security beneficiaries, 53 percent of people with student loans, and 60 percent of homeowners with taxpayer-subsidized mortgages answered “no” when asked whether they were using a government social program. [..]

But whatever their confusion, at least they’re not running for president. Mitt Romney, on the other hand, is. And on the campaign trail he’s disparaging Americans who turn to government to get what he calls “free stuff.”

Robert Reich: The Politics of the Jobs Report

The White House is breathing easier this morning. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports the unemployment rate dropped to 7.8 percent — the first time it’s been under 8 percent in 43 months.

In political terms, headlines are everything — and most major media are leading with the drop in the unemployment rate.

Look more closely, though, and the picture is murkier. According to the separate payroll survey undertaken by the BLS, just 114,000 new jobs were added in September. At least 125,000 are needed per month just to keep up with population growth. Yet August’s job number was revised upward to 142,000, and July’s to 181,000.

In other words, we’re still crawling out of the deep crater we fell into in 2008 and 2009. The percent of the working-age population now working or actively looking for work is higher than it was, but still near a thirty-year low.

Gail Colins: Of Hooters, Zombies and Senators

Today, let’s take a look at debates that do not involve Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. You can thank me later.

I am talking about the races for the United States Senate, people. Attention must be paid! And, as a reward, we can also discuss a new campaign ad featuring zombies.

There are 33 Senate contests this year, although voters in some of the states may not have noticed there’s anything going on. In Texas, for instance, Paul Sadler, a Democrat, has had a tough time getting any attention in his battle against the Tea Party fan favorite Ted Cruz. Except, perhaps, when he called Cruz a “troll” in their first debate.