More to the point – Has the Conservative moment arrived?

Has the liberal moment come and gone?

By: Byron York
Chief Political Correspondent
09/30/09 7:16 AM EDT

A new Gallup poll shows a sharp increase in the number of people who say they want the government to promote “traditional values.”

Gallup’s question was simple: “Some people think the government should promote traditional values in our society. Others think the government should not favor any particular set of values. Which comes closer to your own view?” In the new poll, taken in the first days of September, 53 percent of respondents say they want the government to promote traditional values, while 42 percent say they do not want the government to favor any particular set of values. Five percent do not have an opinion.

The results are a significant change from recent years. For most of the last two decades, a majority of people have been in favor of the government promoting traditional values. But that number began to decline in 2005, and the number of people who believe the government should not favor any particular set of values began to rise. Last September, when Gallup asked the same question, the public was split down the middle on the issue, 48 percent to 48 percent. Now, opinion has rather abruptly gone back to the old position, and there’s an 11-point gap between the two, in favor of traditional values.

By the way, the Gallup pollsters did not define “traditional values” when asking the question. “Thus, respondents answer in light of their understanding of the term,” Gallup writes. But Gallup adds that “the results by party and ideology…suggest that respondents understand traditional values to be those generally favored by the Republican party.”

The recent change in favor of traditional values has been most pronounced among independents, among whom Gallup says there has been a “dramatic turnaround.” Last year, independents were overwhelmingly in favor, by 55 percent to 37 percent, of the government not favoring any set of values. In the new survey, those numbers are almost reversed, with 54 percent saying the government should promote traditional values and 40 percent saying it should not. Gallup did not find similarly striking changes among Democrats and Republicans, although Democrats have also moved a little bit in the direction of wanting the government to promote traditional values.

But it is the turnaround among independents — Gallup also found similar numbers among people who called themselves moderates — that put a screeching halt to the shift that had been taking place in the last few years. “Americans’ views of the proper government role in promoting traditional values had moved in a more liberal direction since 2005, to the point that last year, as many said the government should not promote traditional values as said it should,” Gallup writes. “If that trend had continued, 2009 would have marked the first time Gallup found more Americans preferring that the government refrain from actively promoting traditional values. Instead, Americans’ attitudes reverted to a more conservative point of view on the matter. Now, Americans favor the government’s promoting traditional values by an 11-point margin, similar to the double-digit margins favoring that view through much of the prior two decades.”

There’s no way to know precisely what this means. But here’s one theory. In the last few years, public opinion on the role of government was driven by the intense unpopularity of George W. Bush and the Republican Party. Unhappy with Bush and the GOP, voters recoiled from the image of Republicans as the party of traditional values — even though they basically held to those traditional values in their own lives. Now, however, with a government completely controlled by Democrats, that is, by the anti-traditional values party — in last year’s poll, Democrats were 60-37 against the government promoting traditional values — the public has abruptly returned to its basic pro-traditional values position.

But that period of revulsion at Bush and Republicans from 2005 to 2008 left a legacy: a Democrat in the White House and large Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, at least until 2010. That is why you see Democrats racing to enact their agenda, even as they see the political conditions around them changing. They have the majorities, based on the public’s very temporary mood of 2005-2008, and they are determined to put their preferred policies in place no matter what the public thinks now.

The Gallup numbers also suggest that Barack Obama and the Democratic leadership in the House and Senate have fundamentally misread their own victories. Did voters elect Democrats because they desperately wanted national health care? Sprawling and expensive environmental regulation? Federal deficits triple the size of just a few years ago? No. The voters elected Democrats because they were sick of Bush and Republicans. Now Bush and the GOP are gone and out of power. Democrats are doing what they thought the voters wanted. And it turns out the voters didn’t want that at all.

Just Superb!

David Kahane.

Quotes of the Day – Gore Vidal

a much younger Gore Vidal

… America has “no intellectual class” and is “rotting away at a funereal pace. We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn’t realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is. Benjamin Franklin said that the system would fail because of the corruption of the people and that happened under Bush.”

“Obama believes the Republican Party is a party when in fact it’s a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred — religious hatred, racial hatred. When you foreigners hear the word ‘conservative’ you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They’re not, they’re fascists.”

“Does anyone care what Americans think? They’re the worst-educated people in the First World. They don’t have any thoughts, they have emotional responses, which good advertisers know how to provoke.”

from the London TimesOnline.

-11 Approval index

If you check the trends, Americans are alnost evenly split on total approval/disapproval numbers and have been for a long time. This is really not a good thing. It indicates how polarizing and devisive this administration is to the American people.

From Rasmussen today

These people are disgusting! (how’s that for a dull headline? it’s the best I could do, I’m tired.)

I love going to the movies. I especially love the NACHOS!

I used to have this routine on Monday mornings: I’d get off work (I work night shift), go home and change clothes, do some stuff around the house so that I could stay awake and then at 11 am I’d take off for the movies. First thing I bought was a Dr.Pepper and nachos. After the movie, I’d go next door to Cold Stone Creamery for ice cream and then go home to bed.

I loved that routine. But I can no longer in good conscience spend money supporting the immoral and unethical Hollywood elite. I have no respect for them and they have none for most of America. Granted, there’s a handful (Jon Voight, for instance) who I would and will continue to go see, but there are way too many like this:

Rape-rape? Rape-rape? What the hell is that? Whoopi is a moron. End of that story.

She was 13. She was drugged and liquored up. It was rape. There’s no other way to slice it. She could not consent because she was 13. What part of this is not understandable to these Hollywood dummies?

Where is their humanity? She was a CHILD!

So, I will turn my family room into my very own movie theater and watch movies that I really like: Hitchcock and Capra and Chaplin, the Marx Brothers and movies that I already own. I want to watch movie stars that were MOVIE STARS and not political activists whose views and morals are contrary to mine or in Whoopi’s case, totally absent.

There was a time when movie stars appreciated their fame and their fans. Not so anymore. These entertainers now feel entitled to adoration. They are the other end – the rich end – of the entitlement mentality in this country. They belong to their own exclusive club and the rest of us are the unwashed. Screw them! When you subtract their wealth, they are no different from me. They suffer and mourn and laugh, just like I do. But I have something they don’t: morals, ethics and values.

Although I know that my personal boycott won’t effect any of them, I feel better for it.

America is a nation rooted in values and laws. As President Obama would say–and should say to his Hollywood supporters–these issues are not red or blue, but American. Hollywood does America a great disservice when they demand we trade our economy in for global warming bills from their G5 jet; when they demand we push millions of Americans onto an inferior health care plan; when they attack capitalism from their exclusive country clubs; when they demand that we hug dictators like Chavez or excuse rape because a debatably good movie or two was directed by the aggressor. The hypocrisy must end. The Heritage Foundation

I can make better nachos at home and I don’t need the added ice cream calories, anyway.

Malkin on Obama bringing home the gold

My first thought when I read that Obama was going to Denmark to do his Billy Mays pitchman routine was who in Obama’s circle will this benefit and how will it benefit them? I knew that it would just be a matter of time until someone with the right connections and information would be able to put it in perspective.

An illustrated guide: All the president’s Olympic cronies

More from Michael Moore-on

Don’t we all want Michael Moore to have our backs? LMAO

Be sure and listen to his 2 minute video. It’s a hoot!

How to get shunned in Hollywood

It sure doesn’t taking drugging and raping a 13 year old girl and then running from the law for 31 years.

Big H/T to Trogolopundit. This is well done! See it here.

And another H/T to EdDriscoll.com for this:

Update: After fleeing the US in the mid-1970s, Polanski would of course arrive in Paris, where he quickly resumed his film career, complete with A-list Hollywood stars at his beck and call. It was all part of the, “horrible, soul-wrenching price for the infamy surrounding his actions”, as the L.A. Times recently wrote. In 1979, he told one interviewer:

“If I had killed somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But… f—ing, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to f— young girls. Juries want to f— young girls. Everyone wants to f— young girls!”

What a vile little man.

Recent ACORN tapes not news to the Times

The NYT needs to own up to their own bias and stop playing stupid. They spiked a story last year that could have, in their words, been a “game changer” in the presidential election.

Disgusting.

Congressional Testimony: ‘Game-Changer’ Article Would Have Connected Campaign With ACORN

By Michael P. Tremoglie, The Bulletin

Monday, March 30, 2009

A lawyer involved with legal action against Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) told a House Judiciary subcommittee on March 19 The New York Times had killed a story in October that would have shown a close link between ACORN, Project Vote and the Obama campaign because it would have been a “a game changer.”

Heather Heidelbaugh, who represented the Pennsylvania Republican State Committee in the lawsuit against the group, recounted for the ommittee what she had been told by a former ACORN worker who had worked in the group’s Washington, D.C. office. The former worker, Anita Moncrief, told Ms. Heidelbaugh last October, during the state committee’s litigation against ACORN, she had been a “confidential informant for several months to The New York Times reporter, Stephanie Strom.”

Ms. Moncrief had been providing Ms. Strom with information about ACORN’s election activities. Ms. Strom had written several stories based on information Ms. Moncrief had given her.

During her testimony, Ms. Heidelbaugh said Ms. Moncrief had told her The New York Times articles stopped when she revealed that the Obama presidential campaign had sent its maxed-out donor list to ACORN’s Washington, D.C. office.

Ms. Moncrief told Ms. Heidelbaugh the campaign had asked her and her boss to “reach out to the maxed-out donors and solicit donations from them for Get Out the Vote efforts to be run by ACORN.”

Ms. Heidelbaugh then told the congressional panel:

“Upon learning this information and receiving the list of donors from the Obama campaign, Ms. Strom reported to Ms. Moncrief that her editors at The New York Times wanted her to kill the story because, and I quote, “it was a game changer.”’

Ms. Moncrief made her first overture to Ms. Heidelbaugh after The New York Times allegedly spiked the story — on Oct. 21, 2008. Last fall, she testified under oath about what she had learned about ACORN from her years in its Washington, D.C. office. Although she was present at the congressional hearing, she did not testify.

U.S. Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wisc., the ranking Republican on the committee, said the interactions between the Obama campaign and ACORN, as described by Ms. Moncrief, and attested to before the committee by Ms. Heidelbaugh, could possibly violate federal election law, and “ACORN has a pattern of getting in trouble for violating federal election laws.”

He also voiced criticism of The New York Times.

“If true, The New York Times is showing once again that it is a not an impartial observer of the political scene,” he said. “If they want to be a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party, they should put Barack Obama approves of this in their newspaper.”

Academicians and journalism experts expressed similar criticism of the Times.

“The New York Times keeps going over the line in every single campaign and last year was the worst, easily,” said Mal Kline of the American Journalism Center. “They would ignore real questions worth examining about Obama, the questions about Bill Ayers or about how he got his house. Then on the other side they would try to manufacture scandals.”

Mr. Kline mentioned Gov. Sarah Palin was cleared by investigators of improperly firing an Alaska State Trooper, but went unnoticed by The Times.

“How many stories about this were in The New York Times,” he asked.

“If this is true, it would not surprise me at all. The New York Times is a liberal newspaper. It is dedicated to furthering the Democratic Party,” said Dr. Paul Kengor, professor of Political Science at Grove City College. “People think The New York Times is an objective news source and it is not. It would not surprise me that if they had a news story that would have swayed the election into McCain’s favor they would not have used it.”

ACORN has issued statements claiming that Ms. Moncrief is merely a disgruntled former worker.

“None of this wild and varied list of charges has any credibility and we’re not going to spend our time on it,” said Kevin Whelan, ACORN deputy political director in a statement issued last week.

Stephanie Strom was contacted for a comment, and The New York Times’ Senior Vice President for Corporate Communications Catherine Mathis replied with an e-mail in her place.

Ms. Mathis wrote, “In response to your questions to our reporter, Stephanie Strom, we do not discuss our newsgathering and won’t comment except to say that political considerations played no role in our decisions about how to cover this story or any other story about President Obama.”

The Times keep getting it wrong or too lazy to get it right

In an effort to embarrass itself but one more time, the NYTs has announced it will name an unnamed editor to monitor opinion. That person will be monitoring Fox News, sites like BigGovernment.com  and other outlets, for… news…

Do I need to spell this out further or do you get it?

Most people are smart enough to get it. If you’re the minority who doesn’t get it, move on to another blog and don’t bother with mine… k?

Now that I’ve gotten that point out of the way, you will find this from Investor’s Business Daily, an interesting read.