Gallup polls show Obama winning among voters in the East, West, and Midwest. It's the south that has Romney ahead. At The National Memo, Gene Lyons looks at Why Do So Many Republicans Really Hate Obama?, and finds that the answer lies in the South and its peculiar institutions of "conspiratorial threats and eschatological panics":

New York Times Magazine profiles Paul Ryan, and punctures the myth of him as a serious "idea guy": Paul Ryan Can’t Lose

Skeptics say Ryan owes his superwonk standing as much to comparisons with his colleagues than to any great knowledge or depth. In a recent profile of Ryan by Alec McGillis in The New Republic, Barney Frank dismissed his colleague’s brainy reputation as being relative to that of other House Republicans, some of whom had just been implicated in a late-night escapade during a Congressional trip to Israel last summer. “He is being graded on a curve,” Frank said of Ryan, “with a bunch of guys who jump into the Sea of Galilee because they want to be closer to God.”

David Stockman, who was Ronald Reagan’s budget director, points out that Mitt Romney was no businessman. Mitt Romney: The Great Deformer

Except Mitt Romney was not a businessman; he was a master financial speculator who bought, sold, flipped, and stripped businesses. He did not build enterprises the old-fashioned way—out of inspiration, perspiration, and a long slog in the free market fostering a new product, service, or process of production. Instead, he spent his 15 years raising debt in prodigious amounts on Wall Street so that Bain could purchase the pots and pans and castoffs of corporate America, leverage them to the hilt, gussy them up as reborn “roll-ups,” and then deliver them back to Wall Street for resale—the faster the better.

It seems like every week brings an account of a new despicable Republican politician, from New Hampshire Republican Martin Harty's call to let "defective people" die, to Todd Akin's vile comments on "legitimate rape", to Paul Ryan's staged photo-op at a soup kitchen. (Ok, maybe that last one was more pathetic than despicable; certainly funnier that the others, in a tragicomic sort of way.)

Here's this week's contender for the GOP delenda est prize: Arkansas Representative Loy Mauch. Before this insane neo-Confederate managed to round up enough ignorant and brain-damaged people to elect him to office, he was a regular in the letters page of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Arkansas Times blogger Max Brantley has gone through the archives to find some of Mauch's gems:

More on the Walmart strikes (previously mentioned here and here), and the reaction from the Walmonster, over at The Huffington Post: Exclusive: Inside Walmart's Secret Strike Plan

Walmart launched a large-scale response this week to a series of unprecedented labor strikes, according to a confidential document obtained by The Huffington Post.

... The strikes were the first by Walmart retail employees in the company’s 50-year history.

The memo makes clear that Walmart, the world's largest private employer, views the labor protests as a serious attack, a message that runs contrary to the company's public comments that the strikes are mere "publicity stunts," as Walmart's vice president of communications David Tovar told The Huffington Post Tuesday.

Striking workers are demanding that Walmart end retaliatory practices against employees who attempt to organize by Nov. 23, Black Friday. If not, they will strike again on the biggest shopping day of the year, according to Colby Harris, a Walmart worker from Dallas, who participated in Tuesday’s strike.

10-11-12 has been designated the first international Day of the Girl. (Maryland, by the way, was the first state to make this declaration, following on the work of a group of Maryland students.)

As Nicholas D. Kristof points out over at the NYT, the attempted murder of young Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai by Taliban gunmen and the expulsion of a 14-year-old Indonesian girl after she was raped (because that "tarnished the school’s image") show how a greater focus on the plight of girls around the world is desperately needed.

I recently posted about the first ever strike against Walmart, and how international worker solidarity got it moving. The strike has now spread to stores in Texas and Maryland. At her blog at The Nation, Bryce Covert reports on the strike's spread, and Why We Should All Care About the Walmart Strikers:

Occupy Wall Street, build businesses on Main Street, but leave Sesame Street alone. From The Hill's "Blog Briefing Room": Sesame Street asks Obama campaign to take down attack ad featuring Big Bird

Sesame Street has asked President Obama's campaign to take down its latest attack ad against Mitt Romney, which features footage of Big Bird.



"Sesame Workshop is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization and we do not endorse candidates or participate in political campaigns," a Tuesday statement on Sesameworkshop.org reads. "We have approved no campaign ads, and as is our general practice, have requested that the ad be taken down."

The Huffington Post reports on a breakthrough of sorts: Walmart Workers Go On Strike For First Time Ever

While Walmart in the U.S. remains free of labor unions, the retailer's workers elsewhere in the world are largely unionized.

Foreign Walmart workers met with LA workers to discuss how to effectively organize and advocate for better working conditions... The unionized foreign workers were from Latin America, Africa, the U.K. and Canada.

Sad to realize that union busting has been so successful that U.S. workers need help from Latin American and African ones; but maybe this small strike against the Walmonster will be a turning point