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Poll: Liberals Making Huge Comeback This Year

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Photo Credit: AP There are signs that liberals are making a comeback — and not just because a socialist is running for president, gay marriage is spreading like wildfire and pot legalization is gaining acceptance.

A new analysis of Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll data finds a marked increase in the share of registered voters identifying themselves as liberals, and an even bigger drop in the share saying they are conservatives.

In three national polls conducted so far in 2015, the analysis found that 26% of registered voters identified themselves as liberals — up from 23% in 2014. At the same time, the share of voters identifying as conservatives dropped to 33% from 37% in 2014 . . .

Photo Credit: WSJ/NBC

From 2010 through 2014, there was little overall variation in the share of people identifying themselves as conservative, moderate and liberal, with conservatives either a plurality or tied with moderates. But that stability seems to be ending this year. For the first time since 2010, conservatives are no longer are a plurality: 38% identify as moderates, compared with the 33% who identify as conservative and 26% as liberal.

Bill McInturff said it wasn’t immediately clear what accounts for the shift. Another poll analysis by Gallup also suggests there has been a leftward movement on social issues: 31% of adults in a May 6-10 poll identified themselves as liberal on social issues — the largest share since Gallup started asking the question in 1999, and the first time social liberals matched the share who said they were socially conservative. On economic issues, by contrast, conservatives continued to dominate by a 39%-19% margin. (Read more from “Poll: Liberals Making Huge Comeback This Year” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

A Liberal Studied Conservative Brains and Made a Discovery He Never Expected

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Photo Credit: Western Journalism

Photo Credit: Western Journalism

Generally articles about conservatism vs liberalism basically say that one rules and one drools, depending on who the author voted for in 2012. In this case, it was written by someone at Salon.com, who admitted that this is a problem for the left. We give credit where it’s due here.

He’s also selling a book called “The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality,” because his publisher rejected the original titles, “Arbitrary Liberal Buzzwords that Don’t Really Mean Anything.”

Some choice nuggets:

47 percent of conservative Republicans said they were “very happy,” compared with just 28 percent of liberal Democrats…this result could not simply be attributed to the seemingly obvious cause: differences in income levels between the left and the right. Rather, for every income group in the study, conservative Republicans were happier than Democrats.

One striking finding is that conservatives tend to be less neurotic — or, more emotionally stable — than liberals. It is part of the inherent definition of neuroticism that one is less happy — more fretful, more depressed.

That means they probably make more friends and feel more comfortable in groups and communities. They’re more sociable. Once again, this probably helps confer a subjective sense of greater happiness.

To the author’s credit, he didn’t try to make excuses for this. It was more of just sounding the alarm for his leftist followers to stop being so miserable all the time.

Conservatism vs Liberalism: conservatives can haz cupcakes… and liberals can’t enjoy cupcakes when there’s so much alleged income “inequality.” (See “A Liberal Studied Conservative Brains and Made a Discovery He Never Expected”, originally posted HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

7 Biggest Liberal Fails of 2014

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Want to get your New Year started off right? Let’s recap 2014′s biggest blunders from the left. (Why only seven? Our time is limited.)

7. The child migrant crisis at the border. The Obama administration floated an amnesty for young illegal immigrants, preventing the removal of people who would have benefited from the DREAM Act — which Congress pointedly refused to pass — by executive fiat. Tens of thousands of teenagers and families from Central America came across the border, including unaccompanied minors.

Coincidence? The 1986 amnesty and six smaller subsequent amnesties were followed by an increase, not a decrease, in illegal immigration. Additionally, the Obama administration was warned at least a year in advance, according to The Washington Post, that a border crisis was brewing. Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions said “the rising crisis at the border is the direct and predictable result of actions taken by President Obama.”

Conditions in the country of origin aren’t likely to change soon. Neither are the conditions here in the United States. After the midterm elections, Obama made his proposed executive amnesty a reality. It’s not clear what, if anything, congressional Republicans will do about it in the New Year.

6. The Democrats’ abortion obsession backfired. The tide finally turned in the “war on women.” Democrat Wendy Davis ran for governor of Texas, of all places, on the color of her running shoes and the strength of her support for late-term abortion. Colorado Democratic Sen. Mark Udall campaigned for reelection with a heavy emphasis on abortion and his challenger’s supposed desire to ban birth control. (Read the rest of the liberal fails HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Liberal Icon Urges Obama Impeachment

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Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

Worse than Richard Nixon. An unprecedented abuse of powers. The most un-American president in the nation’s history.

Nat Hentoff does not think much of President Obama.

And now, the famous journalist says it is time to begin looking into impeachment.

Hentoff sees the biggest problem as Obama’s penchant to rule by executive order when he can’t convince Congress to do things his way.

The issue jumped back into the headlines last week when, just before his first Cabinet meeting of 2014, Obama said, “I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone … and I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions.”

Read more from this story HERE.

5 Ways the Liberal Obsession With Income Inequality Hurts the Poor

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Photo Credit: Townhall

Photo Credit: Townhall

After the last century, it shouldn’t even be controversial to assert that the more a nation focuses on income inequality, the more it hurts the poor. After all, there have been whole societies formed around the slogan Marx popularized, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” — and they’ve universally been lousy places to be poor. Would you rather be poor in America or Cuba, Vietnam or the old Soviet Union? If the question doesn’t answer itself, P.J. O’Rourke’s quotation about traveling to the Soviet Union with a gang of Communists should answer it for you, “These were people who believed everything about the Soviet Union was perfect, but they were bringing their own toilet paper.” Meanwhile, we live in a world where China has seen tremendous economic growth by embracing some of the capitalistic policies that made America a superpower while the Democrats are embracing some of the policies that led to hundreds of millions of Chinese living in huts on less than a dollar a day…

What liberals don’t realize or alternately, just don’t care about, is that their obsession with income inequality may make them feel good, but it actually hurts the poor in a number of ways.

1) The higher the government mandated minimum wage/living wage, the more people it prices out of jobs: When you force businesses to pay people more than they can return in value with their work, companies tend to respond either by hiring better quality people, replacing the jobs with automation, moving the posts overseas or by looking for opportunities to get rid of the positions entirely. The higher the wages and benefits the government insists on, the more stagnant it makes the labor market for the people who need to build their skills the most. If your goal were to deliberately put as many young, unskilled single mothers out of work as possible, the best politically feasible way to do it would be to jack the minimum wage up into the stratosphere.

2) It emphasizes making people more comfortable, not helping them succeed: There is no shame in taking any honest job, but you’re not supposed to make a living pressing the button that drops the fries into the grease at McDonald’s. If you work long enough at an entry level job to worry about raising the minimum wage, you’re failing your family, your society and yourself. Instead of encouraging minimum skill workers to demand that the government force businesses to give them more money than they’re currently worth, we should be encouraging people to build their skills and move up, move on or start their own business. Want poor people to be eligible for more education or training? Want to give them micro-loans? Want to make it easier for them to create small businesses? Those are policies that make poor Americans more valuable. That’s good for them and the country. On the other hand, trying to redistribute income ultimately brings everyone down, especially the poor Americans who lose their drive after becoming dependent on it.

Read more from this story HERE.

Liberal Pundit: U.S. Has Become an ‘Authoritarian Surveillance State’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: YouTube

Paul Krugman, an outspoken liberal economist known for his support of the Obama administration, today said the United States has become an ‘authoritarian surveillance state.’

Part of a panel on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Krugman offered his take on the bombshell NSA spying revelations:

Read more from this story HERE.

Video: Liberal Democrat Agrees that Obama’s Benghazi Talking Points Were False

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Photo Credit: YouTubeFox News Chris Wallace: I want to talk to you about a controversy, a continuing controversy, about the talking points that came out afterwards that led, some people say, to a lot of disinformation. These were the talking points the administration put out after the attack. Steve Hayes of The Weekly Standard reports that the first draft by the CIA on September 14th said this: “The crowd almost certainly was a mix of individuals from across many sectors of Libyan society. That being said, we do know that Islamic extremists with ties to al Qaeda participated in the attack.” This was the first draft of talking points from the CIA on September 14th. But after objections from State and after the White House had a meeting, you can see the talking points — and it’s a little hard to see there on the screen — there were lots of lines drawn though them. They were heavily edited. And all mention of the Islamic extremists were taken out. Congressman Lynch, weren’t the talking points the administration put out in advance of Susan Rice’s appearance on those five Sunday shows, weren’t those talking points scrubbed?

Rep. Lynch: They certainly weren’t accurate. I don’t know what the process was there. But absolutely. They were false. They were wrong. There were no protests outside the Benghazi compound there. This was a deliberate and strategic attack on the consulate there. So any statement that this was sort of like the you know the other protests in Cairo and other embassies, this was not that type of attack.

A Few Things I Never Want to Hear Again

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Tired. That is my overriding sensation as I write this. How to bang one’s first impressions of hell out on a keyboard? Let us begin a new day, in a new world, with a first principle of sorts — in this case, a negative principle. Here is a short list of words or turns of phrase that I never want to hear again.

(1) “America is a center-right country.” Center and right are entirely relative terms. The “center” between Lenin and FDR, for example, is very far to the “left” of George Washington. And political self-identification is a meaningless standard of judgment, even by meaningless current standards.

Many on the “right” are fond of reminding us that only twenty percent of Americans self-identify as “liberals.” I actually heard Brit Hume trying to squeeze this bromide out during the Obama victory post-mortem. But in a nation that embraced a vast social welfare system eighty years ago, and has expanded it continually ever since; a nation that for the past fifty years has moved inexorably towards the locus classicus of socialist egalitarianism, government-controlled health care; a nation that elected and re-elected a man who has openly self-identified as a progressive and advocated wealth-redistribution; and a nation in which the popular culture is dominated by artless harlots, pimps, and gangsters, a “centrist” is a person who embraces social disintegration and authoritarianism. To be “moderately conservative” in such a milieu simply means that one finds the latest music video about teenage lesbian orgies just a little over the top.

America is not a center-right country, whatever that means. It is — notwithstanding its still-sane minority (which includes almost everyone reading this) — a socialist-leaning nation that lags behind the rest of the progressive world only due to a slight residual guilt complex regarding all that old Constitution stuff. The events of the past couple of days suggest that even that little bugaboo has now been largely overcome by the majority, for whom most inhibitions about accepting their chains — and chaining their neighbors — are now gone.

(2) “Mitt Romney was only the nominee because of a thin primary field.” Phooey. He was the nominee because the entire GOP establishment threw everything it had at all the other candidates, in order to guarantee that it would get the candidate most likely to succumb to their advice and direction. As of September 2012, Romney was the only candidate left in the primary field whom no one had ever described as a conservative, let alone a constitutionalist. That, in short, is why he was the nominee.

Read more from this story HERE.