Ruth Conniff says all may not be amiss in Wisconsin:
Sure, our once-progressive state is now mainly famous for Ayn Rand acolyte Paul Ryan and his plan to destroy Medicare. And our union- busting, education-gutting governor survived a genuinely grassroots recall effort by raising more money than any state politician in history, mostly from out of state.
But the radical rightwing machine that has been bulldozing teachers, the elderly, poor kids, and the entire middle class slipped a gear when it took on Tommy.
Katrina Vanden Heuvel checks out the credibility of the GOP vice presidential candidate's claims of tough-minded realism:
Ryan’s claim to courage—beating up on the poor notwithstanding—lies in his supposed willingness to tackle tough fiscal issues without obfuscation or sugar-coating. This would be admirable—if it were not utter nonsense. He preaches the need for austerity while refusing to touch defense spending. He doesn’t specify which tax loopholes would be eliminated to pay for massive tax cuts. He voted against stimulus to help the whole country, but for the auto bailout to help his own congressional district. [...]
Is that courageous? Not on the level of, say, our returning veterans, for whom Ryan’s budget would slash support by 13 percent. No, he is remarkable only because—unlike the man at the top of the ticket, who is a shameless cipher—Ryan isn’t hiding the ball. Instead, he’s hitting struggling Americans in the face with it.
Gail Collins sings the middle-age blues:
So, about Medicare. Why don’t Romney and Ryan want to let me have it?
You really are obsessed with that, aren’t you? The National Republican Congressional Committee has warned all its candidates that whenever the subject comes up, they are to avoid mentioning “entitlement reform,” or “privatization,” or “every option is on the table.” Instead, the keywords are: “strengthen, secure, save, preserve, protect.”
So I suspect Romney and Ryan would say that they want to change the current system in order to strengthen, secure, save, preserve and protect your future health care. Which will involve a lot of choices, even though every option is not on the table. Totally not.
Basically, the Republican message is that it’s Barack Obama who is trying to destroy Medicare and that they will save it.
Debra J. Saunders does her best to pick up the unhinged theme of Romney campaign:
The president's henchmen are running a dirty campaign. The worst part of it: These nasty antics are the best Obamaland has to offer.
Naomi Wolf ponders the new "totalitarianism of surveillance":
A software engineer in my Facebook community wrote recently about his outrage that when he visited Disneyland, and went on a ride, the theme park offered him the photo of himself and his girlfriend to buy – with his credit card information already linked to it. He noted that he had never entered his name or information into anything at the theme park, or indicated that he wanted a photo, or alerted the humans at the ride to who he and his girlfriend were – so, he said, based on his professional experience, the system had to be using facial recognition technology. He had never signed an agreement allowing them to do so, and he declared that this use was illegal. He also claimed that Disney had recently shared data from facial-recognition technology with the United States military.
Yes, I know: it sounds like a paranoid rant.
Except that it turned out to be true.
Garance Franke-Ruta ponders what to do about political lies:
Fact-checking was a great development in accountability journalism -- but perhaps it's time for a new approach. It's no longer enough to outsource the fact-checking to the fact-checkers in a news environment where every story lives an independent life on the social Web and there's no guarantee the reader of any given report will ever see a bundled version of the news or the relevant fact-checking column, which could have been published months earlier. One-off fact-checking is no match for the repeated lie.
Peggy Haslar:
Sandra Fluke seems as sincere as the young woman I once taught. Each deserves her dignity and, with a mother bear's vehemence, I'd defend either of them from crude sexual slurs.
That doesn't mean Fluke speaks for me when she claims to speak for women. Most women take offense when men insinuate we're all like, but reproductive-rights advocates don't hesitate to act as if we all agree with them. When they grab the mike and claim to give women a voice, they silence millions of us in the process. You could call us Fluke's forgotten.
Bryce Covert deconstructs conservative claims on why women make less than men in 593 of 600 occupations:
I would love to agree with Ramesh Ponnuru’s latest Bloomberg column, in which he argues that the gender wage gap—in which women on average still make 77 cents for every dollar a man makes—is not caused by discrimination. Ponnuru argues that, rather, it’s caused by different choices women make in their career paths and family formations. Wouldn’t it be great if the gap didn’t exist because women are held back and given less, but because they simply want different things? And it’s certainly true that the fact that women are congregated in a different set of jobs and often have to leave the workforce when they have children plays a role. But even this can’t explain away the gap.
Christina Patterson writes about Helen Gurley Brown's
Sex and the Single Girl published 50 years ago:
"Dear Helen," her mother wrote in a telegram a few weeks before it was due to come out, "if you move very quickly, I think we can stop publication." [...]
But Helen Gurley Brown, who died on Monday night, didn't listen. The book came out. It sold two million copies in three weeks. And it caused a very big fuss.
Meghan Daum examines the contradictions of Brown:
I'm not being hyperbolic when I talk about masochism. For all the lip service paid to the ego-affirming qualities of women's magazines, the truth is these publications walk a fine line between offering self-help and engendering self-hate. That's why the postmortem anointing of Brown as an unimpeachable feminist heroine — "pathfinder" and "icon of the sisterhood" were among the countless panegyrics on Twitter — is at once predictable and puzzling. Not because Brown wasn't a pioneering role model in her way, but because her vision of the emancipated woman — a self-made but coquettish striver for whom professional achievement often went hand in hand with the sexual manipulation of men — was not all that different from the Stepford Wife model from which the emancipation was ostensibly taking place. [...]
And there's the ideological rub for Brown: By taking the concept of independence and reframing it as a lifestyle, one in which fabulousness is essentially code for materialism and external self-improvement, Brown's vision was less a revolution than a brilliant marketing scheme.
Anna Pycior notes that the older generation has taken on student loans not for themselves to get the younger generation through college. And now their Social Security checks are garnished to cover the debt:
Social Security is supposed to be a response to economic insecurity among America's seniors. To garnish these checks it is to undermine one of our most important social programs and begin a dangerous precedent that threatens the safety net for millions of Americans.
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