Progressive Media Advocates
Steve Hochstadt: Despite the continuing economic disaster, despite lingering racism across white America, despite the daily uncertainties of the world outside our borders, Barack Obama wins again. His victory in 2012 means that Republican ideology is a failure.
Steve Hochstadt: onsiderable pressure has been brought on Republicans at the federal level to make ideological promises which exclude political compromise. The most notable is the Taxpayer Protection Pledge not to raise taxes ever on anyone, promoted by Grover Norquist.
Steve Hochstadt: The individualist quest for personal benefit is not in itself admirable. Individualism must be judged by its relation to the collective or it is just selfishness.
Steve Hochstadt: epublican proposals in the Senate and House, created mainly by Romney’s VP selection, Paul Ryan, lower taxes on the wealthy in two whopping chunks: the top tax rate drops from 35% to 25%, and all taxes on capital gains disappear.
Steve Hochstadt: Romney thinks that the people who got the jobs he says he created are those irresponsible parasites who are hopelessly dependent on government. That is ironic.
Steve Hochstadt: Maintaining our wasteful national lifestyle and relying on underground sources of energy means watching other nations take the lead toward an affordable energy future.
Steve Hochstadt: The Democrats offer a known quantity, the continuation of this cautious foreign policy of the previous four years. What Romney would do in office is much less certain.
Steve Hochstadt: Romney and his campaign advisers know that he was not telling the truth on that Boca Raton tape. But a bigger mistake was to put into the same basket all the people he doesn’t like.
Steve Hochstadt: Mitt Romney defends foreign Christians who pretend to be Jews as they condemn all Muslims, and he condemns American diplomats in danger who try to explain that “Innocence of Muslims” does not represent US policy.
Steve Hochstadt: Nobody who comes to my home smokes. But cigarette butts litter the ground near the curb and the sidewalk in front of my house. If you multiply those butts by every building in town, thousands of acts of littering, constantly repeated, are dirtying our town.
Steve Hochstadt: Among voters, according to a poll in 2011, party affiliation also determines scientific belief: 80% of Democrats and 47% of Republicans say that warming has been occurring.
Steve Hochstadt: Liberals in the Democratic Party argue that Biblical support for discrimination against gays or for the teaching of a creationist version of human origins should be irrelevant to government policy.
Steve Hochstadt: When Romney and the Republicans talk about cutting back on government, they mean much larger cuts in local government spending than what has happened so far.
Steve Hochstadt: The speeches and the ads and the PACs that politicians create seek to win our votes, not to educate us. They want us to listen to them, but they won’t listen to us.
Steve Hochstadt: Our marriage debates show that electoral politics is not the only politics, that it reflects the broader and deeper, and much more interesting, politics of the whole American people.
Steve Hochstadt: One obvious conclusion is that high, even very high tax rates on the wealthiest taxpayers do not impede economic growth.
Steve Hochstadt: Dodd-Frank was passed by Democrats when they controlled Congress. Nearly every Democrat voted for Dodd-Frank, and nearly every Republican voted against it.
Steve Hochstadt: In his foreign policy speech last week, Mitt Romney replayed the deepest theme of Republican politics this year— President Obama, in particular, and Democrats, more generally, are traitors to the United States.
Steve Hochstadt: For many people in the U.S., the fact that China is ruled by the Communist Party provides a ready-made answer — communism is the opposite of freedom.
Steve Hochstadt: The goal of a liberal arts education is not mainly the accumulation of knowledge, but an understanding of how knowledge is created and the ability to create new knowledge by oneself.
Steve Hochstadt: European newspapers have noted that Republicans portray Europe not as a kindred continent, but as the kind of dystopian society the US might become should the wrong person win.
Steve Hochstadt: Mainstream Republican politicians say that liberals are ruining the country and hint that they don’t really have the best interests of our country at heart.
Steve Hochstadt: Unless Iran actually puts our nation in mortal danger, declaring war on Iran would violate the trust that Americans put in our government. It’s what our government shouldn’t do.
Steve Hochstadt: Romney defenders trivialize his gay bashing with a variety of excuses: people did not use the word “gay” in the mid-1960s; homosexuality was not a big issue then; boys will be boys, especially at prep schools.
Steve Hochstadt: One of the facts of small town American life, which is often held up as the American ideal, is that nasty partisan politics are tempered by the bonds of friendship and the need to get along with your neighbors.
Steve Hochstadt: Even when 97% of the world’s scientists engaged in climate research (yes, 97%) agree that global warming caused by human actions is occurring now, it’s easy to close our eyes for one more day.
Steve Hochstadt: These two conservative propagandists know that the average reader, especially those who want to believe conservative ideas, won’t or can’t follow the trail backwards from their misleading writings to the real facts. They don’t seek truth, they obscure it.
Steve Hochstadt: Most of us know so little about how a climate works and how it might change that we must rely on distant experts to tell us what is going on and what might happen in the future.
Steve Hochstadt: Polls showed that only 4% of filers do file taxes the way I do, with pencil and paper and a calculator. Most people use some tax software and file electronically.
Sikivu Hutchinson: Black Skeptics Los Angeles spearheaded its First in the Family Humanist Scholarship initiative, which focuses on providing resources to undocumented, foster care, homeless and LGBTQ youth who will be the first in their families to go to college.
Carl Matthes: Despite the much-heralded 2008 success of Prop 8 in California to stop same-sex marriage, that vote, and it’s subsequent ramifications, provided not only 18,000 lesbian and gay couples with legal marriages, but the accelerant for the Prop 8 case currently being decided by SCOTUS.
Randy Shaw: Obama could regain young people’s support by lowering student loan rates, enacting immigration reform and rejecting the Keystone XL Pipeline, but time—and his political capital—is running out.
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Romney’s Lies
Steve Hochstadt: I think the many untruthful claims that Romney made were the most notable feature of this debate, because he got called out on most of them.