Wow:

Shawn Colvin:

In a recent piece headlined “Never Waver, Never Wobble,” Frank Bruni argued that Mitt Romney won his first debate with Barack Obama because he showed more “bravado,” which Bruni seems to think is the one character trait common to all successful politicians.

In making his point, Bruni dodged an important question: Would voters favor the candidate with bravado — “outsize confidence” is another term Bruni used — if they knew that candidate was a liar?

Bruni wrote “For the debate viewers [Romney] was all pluck and no doubt, even when he fibbed or flipped,” while Obama, on the other hand, “…just lost touch with his bravado in Denver.”

There’s the dodge — Romney didn’t merely fib and flip, he contradicted positions he’d previously taken and pretended he’d been taking the same positions all along. He lied, boldly and frequently, and Bruni should have stated this plainly. He should have mentioned that Romney lied when he said Obama “has not signed one new free trade agreement in the past four years”, and when he said Obama was “silent” in the face of street protests in Iran in 2009. And so on.

Bruni’s piece would have seemed a lot less specious if he’d addressed the history of Romney’s compulsive lying, as Robert Parry recently did.

More here.

From ThinkProgress:

A three-judge panel rejected South Carolina’s request that it reinstate a state voter identification law for the 2012 elections…

Mitt Romney actually admits he won’t overturn the order that’s permitting children of immigrants to stay here while applying for citizenship:

It took three-and-a-half months, but Mitt Romney has finally answered a very simple question: If you’re elected president, will you honor the executive order that Barack Obama issued granting legal status to potentially more than a million children of illegal immigrants?

“The people who have received the special visa that the president has put in place, which is a two-year visa, should expect that the visa would continue to be valid,” Romney told the Denver Post in an interview that was published late Monday night. “I’m not going to take something that they’ve purchased.”

This may seem like a rather obvious position to take, especially when you consider that the opposite view would involve revoking the legal status of children and possibly subjecting them to deportation. But Romney has – very awkwardly – tried to sidestep the entire question since mid-June, when Obama surprised the political world with his executive order.

Sounds like the Republicans are worried that the judge is about to issue an injunction prohibiting the use of the new voter ID law for the presidential election, and are trying to avoid that:

In a last-minute effort to protect the restrictive voter ID law now under review by a trial judge, Pennsylvania officials announced Tuesday they would relax requirements for obtaining a photo ID.

While the law had initially required two documents with proof of residency to obtain a state-issued voting-only ID, individuals will now only need to provide their name, date of birth, social security number and address.

Commonwealth Secretary Carol Aichele said she believed the change would meet the standard set by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which sent the case back to the trial judge last week due to concern that the state’s implementation of the law could lead to widespread voter suppression.

In its opinion, the Pennsylvania high court said the state was not living up to its promise to ensure access to voter ID, and rejected the court’s “mere predictive judgment” that the law would not lead to disfranchisement:

In this regard, the court is to consider whether the procedures being used for deployment of the cards comport with the requirement of liberal access which the General Assembly attached to the issuance of PennDOT identification cards. If they do not, or if the Commonwealth Court is not still convinced in its predictive judgment that there will be no voter disenfranchisement arising out of the Commonwealth’s implementation of a voter identification requirement for purposes of the upcoming election, that court is obliged to enter a preliminary injunction.

Atrios wrote an online column for USAToday yesterday:

We already have an excellent, if not especially generous, program in place. Workers contribute during their working lives in exchange for a promised benefit level during their retirement years. This program is called Social Security.

Instead of considering some exciting new program to try to encourage workers into saving more, another Rube Goldberg incentive contraption designed to nudge individual behavior in the right direction, we should increase the level of retirement benefits in the existing Social Security program.

That sounds like blasphemy because we’ve all been fed the myth that Social Security is bankrupt. It is almost universally accepted in policy circles and in the pundit class that strengthening Social Security involves cutting future benefits relative to what current law promises because according to current projections, Social Security only has the ability to pay promised benefits in full until 2033, and then 75% of them thereafter. The basic thinking is that we must promise to cut benefits now so that we won’t necessarily have to cut them 22 years from now. What?

Imagine if that is how we treated defense spending. Since it appears budgets will be tight in the 2030s, best to mothball all those aircraft carriers today. Who would buy that argument?

The reality is that we will make our defense decisions about the 2030s in the 2030s. That’s just how we should treat federally financed retirement programs. We never actually have to cut benefits if we make the policy choice to keep funding them.

Social security is only bankrupt to the extent that our political leaders lose the will to invest in a decent retirement for American workers.

As the system exists, large numbers of Americans nearing retirement will have little more than fairly meager Social Security benefits (the average benefit for retired workers is currently $1230) to survive on in their old age. We can doom them to a life of insecurity and relative poverty or we can take the obvious step to improve their lives: Increase Social Security benefits.

The goal of a retirement system should be to ensure that retired people have sufficient income to live out the remainder of their lives without a radical reduction in quality of life after they stop working. Our current system, a modest mandatory government retirement program combined with individual savings, is failing to do that. Strengthen Social Security now, not by cutting benefits, but by increasing them.

Chicago teachers have voted to suspend their strike and will return to school this morning. The full contract won’t be revealed until after the membership ratifies it:

The vote, with 98 percent in support of suspension, was not a final vote on the union contract but rather an agreement to suspend the strike pending a final vote on the agreement hammered out between Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the Chicago school board and the teacher’s union over the weekend.

What remains unclear is which side, if either, emerges from the walkout victorious.

With details of the contract yet to be revealed, we have little to go on beyond the statement of Chicago Teacher’s Union president Karen Lewis who noted, “We said that we couldn’t solve all the problems of the world with one contract and it was time to end the strike.”

Lewis’ remark would suggest that the union failed to get everything it hoped to achieve.

Bilingual elementary school language teacher America Olmeda added, “I think this contract was better than what they offered. They tried to take everything away.”

Also unknown is the impact the hearing set for tomorrow in a Chicago courtroom had on the teachers’ decision to go back to their classrooms. Mayor Rahm Emanuel had brought the court action in reliance on a state law that prohibits teacher walkouts when they are “strikes of choice” rather than a strike designed to address an economic issue.

While it appears that the parties had agreed on a 16 percent hike in salaries over the next four years, the strike was called over the failure of the parties to come to terms on how teacher performance is to be evaluated along with disagreement over union’s demand that teachers who have been laid-off get the first crack at open positions.

Teachers aren’t completely happy with the offer, according to the Chicago Tribune:

The voice vote was taken after some 800 delegates convened at a union meeting hall near Chinatown to discuss and debate a tentative contract. Union leaders had already signed off on the agreement with Chicago Public Schools.

“We said we couldn’t solve all the problems. . .and it was time to suspend the strike,” CTU President Karen Lewis said at a news conference after the vote.

“The issue is, we cannot get a perfect contract. There’s no such thing as a contract that will make all of us” happy, Lewis said.

But “do we stay on strike forever until every little thing we want can be gotten?” she said.

“I’m so thrilled that people are going back, all of our members are glad to be back with their kids. It’s a hard decision to make to go out, and for some people it’s hard to make the decision to go back in,” Lewis said.