Progressive Opinion

huffingtonpost.com — Arguably the biggest lie coming from the Republicans and the Romney campaign is that President Obama is a tax and spend liberal who's directly and personally responsible for record deficits and a crushing national debt. Not only is Mitt Romney telling his supporters that President Obama continues to spend out of control, but additionally that the president is responsible for doubling the budget deficit since he took office. This is not a new attack. Republicans who blindly greenlit trillions in Bush-era spending have been engaged in this nonsense practically since the minute the president was inaugurated.

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thedailybeast.com — This morning comes the news that the "prairie fire"Obama spending spree is, surprise surprise, a lie. What people forget (or never knew) is that the first year of every presidential term starts with a budget approved by the previous administration and Congress. The president only begins to shape the budget in his second year. It takes time to develop a budget and steer it through Congress — especially in these days of congressional gridlock. The 2009 fiscal year, which Republicans count as part of Obama’s legacy, began four months before Obama moved into the White House. The major spending decisions in the 2009 fiscal year were made by George W. Bush and the previous Congress.

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salon.com — Growing public support for gay rights, including gay marriage, is the latest example of the moral liberalism that has transformed advanced industrial societies in the last few generations. The social traditionalists who claimed to be a “moral majority” in the United States in the 1980s are acting like an embattled, declining minority in the second decade of the 21st century. Many paranoid social conservatives blame the triumph of moral liberalism on a conspiracy of sinister secular humanists, using the media and the public schools to indoctrinate their children and grandchildren in a godless morality. But the truth is that social conservatism has been undermined by technological progress, which has increased the opportunities for freedom in matters of sex and censorship while raising the costs of enforcing traditional norms.

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thenation.com — Conservative strategists have been toying with how to use race against President Obama in this year’s election. Since Obama’s May 9 announcement supporting same-sex marriage, some Republicans have been salivating about the delicious possibility of dampening black voters’ enthusiasm for the president by casting him as out of touch with their religious sentiments. They seem intent on repeating the strategic mistake made by Illinois Republicans nearly a decade ago—a mistake largely responsible for making possible the swift ascendance of Barack Obama from state senator to president.

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campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com — I love this moment in the political season because the polls pour in and invariably something tucked in among the questions catches my eye but doesn’t grab the headlines. I have selected two that get us away from the presidential race, both of which highlight just how much trouble the Republican brand continues to find itself in despite the party’s many legislative and statehouse victories in 2010. Public sentiment is slowly drifting away from the Republicans in a way that must be giving the party’s long-range strategists sleepless nights.

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salon.com — Watching the antics of the House GOP, you get the very strong sense that if the class of Republicans elected in 2010 were offered a chance to repeal the Enlightenment, they would leap at the opportunity. The great flowering of science and philosophy that reached critical mass in the 17th century employed human reason to batter away at the dogmas of blind faith. But as far as the Tea Party seems to be concerned, that was just one big wrong turn. The most recent evidence that the current incarnation of the Republican Party just can’t handle the truth arrived this month when House Republicans voted to get rid of the American Community Survey.

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thedailybeast.com — I'm an Electoral College Geek, so we're going to be spending a reasonable amount of time on the subject. As I wrote not too long ago, putting aside the national head-to-head polls and looking at Electoral College counts, Obama has a big edge, and I'll be monitoring that pretty closely. The starkest way to put it is like this. Obama won nine states in 2008 that George Bush had won in 2004. Obama can lose eight of them. That's right, he can give eight of the nine back, as long as the one he wins is Florida, and he hits 275 electoral votes. And there are many alternative scenarios. And again, class, why? Because the R's have made themselves too crazy even for moderate-to-conservative states like Virginia and Colorado. It's just fine with me if they never figure this out.

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salon.com — President Obama’s reelection prospects depend on swing voters considering not just the current state of the economy, but also the factors that led us here and the economic vision that Mitt Romney would bring to the presidency. Romney’s hopes, on the other hand, depend on those same voters either ignoring or rationalizing away the context that Obama tries to introduce and simply voting him out because of their profound economic anxiety. This often results in maddeningly deceptive messaging from Romney and his allies. There’s nothing very complicated going on here, just an attempt to connect an everywoman’s despair about what a weak economy has done to her family with a bunch of scary-seeming statistics about spending and debt under Obama.

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truthdig.com — One of the most overused metaphors in a writer’s arsenal is the one about “walking and chewing gum at the same time.” Nonetheless, I feel it is fitting right now because it so perfectly summarizes the argument being made by Republicans. They now insist that America cannot simultaneously walk the walk on equal rights and also chew economic gum. Obviously, it’s perplexing to see the Republican Party allege that social issues are insignificant and “divisive.” This is, after all, the the same GOP that made an art out of riding a “guns, God and gays” agenda to electoral victory. But while such naked hypocrisy is enraging, the substance of the Republican rhetoric about gay rights is downright offensive. Essentially, conservatives are asserting that we cannot extend equal rights to all Americans and fix the economy. In the process, they are deliberately insinuating that the twin goals are somehow contradictory.

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huffingtonpost.com — Mitt Romney has a lovely corner office at his Boston campaign headquarters. Two walls of tall windows give him a view of the inner reaches of Boston Harbor, Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown and the "Old Ironsides" battleship. A large desk is positioned so that he can survey the soothing and inspiring vista should he ever have a few moments off the campaign trail. But he rarely uses the office -- which makes the handsome but empty space a perfect metaphor for the grave risk that Romney now faces in this early but crucial phase of his general election race against President Barack Obama and the Obama machine. Most of the American people don't know who Mitt Romney really is.

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