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Must-Read Op-Eds for Thursday, April 19, 2012

IT'S 1936 ALL OVER AGAINBY DANIEL HENNINGERWALL STREET JOURNALBarack Obama is asking people to cast a less-than-hopeful vote in November.

IT'S 1936 ALL OVER AGAINBY DANIEL HENNINGERWALL STREET JOURNALBarack Obama is asking people to cast a less-than-hopeful vote in November. Resentment is not something most people in 21st-century America carry around in the front of their heads. Once Barack Obama stirs it up, as he's doing now, he has to sustain it for six months. He is asking people to vote out of something resembling, well, depression. Incidentally, of the final four Republican primary candidates, three were about as personally grim and earnest as the incumbent. Only one ran with unmistakable personal optimism.

BIRTH CONTROL AND TEENAGE PREGNANCYEDITORIALNEW YORK TIMESThe clear lesson here is prevention works. Yet this lesson is lost on Mitt Romney and his Congressional allies. Mr. Romney has called for ending Title X, the 42-year-old program that helps provide family-planning services and reproductive health care to low-income women, including teenagers. Like the Republican-led House, Mr. Romney also wants to eliminate federal financing to Planned Parenthood, a major provider of contraceptive care nationwide.

Must-Read Op-Eds for Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Must-Read Op-Eds for Tuesday, April 17, 2012


DEMOCRATS BATTLE BACK AGAINST REPUBLICAN 'WAR ON WOMEN'BY DANA MILBANKWASHINGTON POSTIf Republicans are truly engaged in a “war on women,” as the Democrats claim, they are fighting it about as well as Gen. Custer did at Little Bighorn. First they were routed over their objections to contraception. Then they had to defend Rush Limbaugh’s insults of Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke and Ted Nugent’s description of two top Democratic leaders as “varmints.” ... Whatever their objections, Republicans are virtually certain to fold. Democrats have been so relentlessly uniform and monotonous in pounding the opposition on women’s issues that Congress may need to pass a Violence Against Variety Act.THE CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO BE LEFT ALONEBY GEORGE WILLWASHINGTON POSTThe Constitution is a document, one understood — as America’s greatest jurist, John Marshall, said — “chiefly from its words.” And those words are to be construed in the bright light cast by the Declaration. Wilkinson worries about judges causing “an ever-increasing displacement of democracy.” Also worrisome, however, is the displacement of liberty by democracy in the form of majorities indifferent or hostile to what the Declaration decrees — a spacious sphere of individual sovereignty.TWO-PAYCHECK COUPLES, WORKING BECAUSE THEY MUSTBY E.J. DIONNEWASHINGTON POSTAs a result, the United States has the weakest family-leave laws in the industrialized world. ... It’s good that Ann Romney had choices. She made them honorably and raised a great family. Now let’s debate what should matter in a presidential campaign: which policies will relieve the economic pressures on millions of parents who are equally determined to do right by their kids but have far less room for maneuver. Pro-family rhetoric doesn’t pay the bills.A FAIRER WORKPLACE IN FEDERAL CONTRACTINGEDITORIALWASHINGTON POSTThe president played a pivotal role in the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” and also deserves credit for refusing to defend the discriminatory Defense of Marriage Act. He should again seize the mantle of leadership by issuing an executive order that prohibits the federal government from doing business with contractors that fail to guarantee basic fairness to their LGBT employees.