Midweek News: Women Breaking for Obama, GOP Extremism, Spanish Rallies

And another midweek selection of articles--these commenting on political issues discussed previously here:

At Truthdig, Peter Z. Scheer notes that recent polls indicate Romney is losing by significant margins in the swing states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida.  And what's making the big difference?: women voters.  Scheer:

Women in Ohio prefer Barack Obama to Mitt Romney by a margin of 25 points, according to a new poll. In Pennsylvania, it’s 21 points and in Florida, another swing state, women gave the president a 19-point edge.

At  Salon, Irin Carmon puts her finger on what is, quite specifically, the GOP's problem in the current election cycle: "birth-control extremism."  As she notes, in both the Brown-Warren race in Massachusetts and the McMahon-Murphy race in Connecticut, the early buy-in of Brown and McMahon to the bogus "religious freedom" rhetoric about denying women access to birth control in healthcare plans--buy-in that occurred at a point at which it seemed the phony "religious freedom" rhetoric might actually sway voters--is coming back to bite both candidates on the posterior.  

And as Carmon concludes,

But both races highlight how far to the right the national Republican agenda on reproductive rights has moved — and the how much the phrase “pro-choice” has lost meaning when it can be deployed to include denying birth control access.

At Huffington Post, Robert Reich surveys two views about why Romney is losing.  The first, preferred by right-wing activists, is that Romney is simply a defective candidate.  The second, which strikes Reich as more intuitively correct, is the following:

The Republican primaries, and then the Republican convention, have shown America a party far removed from the "compassionate conservatism" the GOP tried to sell in 2000. Instead, we have a party that's been taken over by Tea Partiers, nativists, social Darwinists, homophobes, right-wing evangelicals, and a few rich people whose only interest is to become even wealthier.

And a majority of Americans appear increasingly disenchanted with the vision for our future promoted by this cabal.

And see Steve Kornacki's analysis at Salon of the polling data about Obama's lead over Romney and the reasons for the lead--as does Scheer, Kornacki notes the strong lead the president is enjoying among women voters.

And, finally, as a corrective to the inward focus that afflicts us Americans during election cycles (and at any other time of any other year, if truth be told): also at Salon, Natasha Lennard reports on the huge rally of indignados fed up with Spanish austerity measures that took place yesterday in Madrid.

Common Dreams also has a report on the Spanish rallies, with live Twitter feed.