Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: The election is on

_{Visual source: Newseum}

WaPo:

'I don't care how many ways you try to explain it ' corporations aren't people. People are people,' Obama told the crowd about halfway through his 35-minute remarks.

He also tied Romney to congressional Republicans. As he has in previous campaign-trail events, Obama argued that the congressional GOP agenda includes tax cuts for the wealthy and cuts to Medicare and education, and would 'give banks and insurance companies even more power to do as they please.'

Ross Douthat writes about The Life of Julia, and manages to channel his inner Dan Quayle. Making fun of a fictional woman (it's always a woman with conservatives) because you don't like their values? Not even original. But it does make you want to watch the slideshow.

National Journal:

'Even Jimmy Carter would have given that order,' Romney said at a campaign event in Portsmouth, N.H., last week.

As a symbol of a largely unsuccessful Democratic presidency, former one-term President Jimmy Carter has been a Republican punching bag for decades. But that's just the problem with Romney's decision to resurrect him as a rhetorical foil in 2012: It's been over three decades since he was in office -- Carter lost his reelection bid to Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980.

The Republicans are the party of the past. They can't get out of the 80's (Reagan, the Soviet Union) and George W. Bush's era (all their policies). That's what "Forward" really means.

Frank Bruni:

[Former Iowa Justice Marsha] Ternus, who is 60, agreed to meet with me because on Monday, she, Baker and Streit are receiving Profile in Courage awards from the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation in Boston. The timing, she said, felt right.

Ternus and her colleagues were tossed out for thinking gay marriage fell under the rule of law.

As for the decision itself, they learned in the first hours of discussion that none of them saw any way to square the marriage ban with equal-protection language. 'Everyone's jaws dropped ' that we had a unanimous decision,' she recalled.

David Lampo:

The resignation of Richard Grenell, the recently appointed and openly gay foreign policy spokesman for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, was as sudden as it was shocking. It was also yet another disturbing sign that the Romney campaign is still in pander mode when it comes to the anti-gay right.

Which is exactly the wrong direction for the presumptive GOP nominee to be moving in. Because according to a wide variety of poll data, Republican voters, unlike most of the politicians vying for their support, largely support gay rights.

Stephen Dworkin writes about Chris Christie and the NY-NJ transportation tunnel (aka ARC) that Christie killed:

Transportation infrastructure has historically been a major source of carbon emissions and ecological destruction around the world. No matter how 'eco-friendly' a transportation project, it always comes with a high carbon and resource cost, as a result of both construction and the traffic it enables. ARC would have been no different. In parts of the country where aging roads and railways already shoulder high traffic burdens, however, and where those original projects never had any sort of environmental impact reduction in mind when they were built, it can actually be environmentally beneficial in the long-term to construct a smarter transportation grid. The area of the Hudson between Newark and Manhattan is such a place. If a responsible environmental assessment and impact mitigation initiatives were undertaken during its construction, an infrastructure project that incentivizes public transportation in this urban setting could be a great asset to reducing carbon emissions over time.

Glenn Kessler:

Our Pinocchio Tracker indicates that you have been the two major 2012 presidential candidates with the lowest average number of Pinocchios. (Your claims are rated on a scale of one to four Pinocchios: Four indicates a whopper; a Geppetto Checkmark counts as zero. The tracker produces an average rating from all of the columns. President Obama has been rated 45 times and Romney 34times as of Friday evening.) In fact, you are nearly tied, with the president at 1.91 and the former governor at 1.97. No other candidate has come close: Michele Bachmann ended up at 3.08, Ron Paul at 2.6, Rick Santorum at 2.53, Newt Gingrich at 2.44 and Rick Perry at 2.41.

Still, an average of nearly 2 is nothing to brag about. On the scale, two Pinocchios means 'significant omissions and/or exaggerations.' As you know, it does not necessarily mean factual error. A politician can create a false, misleading impression by playing with words and using legalistic language that means little to ordinary people.

In other words, it's our opinion, and not the actual facts that matter. Remember that "mostly true" means "you got the facts right but we don't like the way that sounds." Note to fact checkers: Your fact checking would be much more valuable if you simply checked the facts and left your opinion by the door.