"Progressive" is becoming more of a dirty word, but all political labels - except "being like Ronald Reagan" - are falling into disfavor with many U.S. voters, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.
"Liberal" is still the worst and remains the only political description that is viewed more negatively than positively. Being like Reagan is still the most positive thing you can say about a candidate.
Just 15% of voters say they view the description of a candidate as politically liberal as positive, down four points from last November. Forty-one percent (41%) see it as a negative description, up five points form the earlier survey, while 42% say it's somewhere in between.
Aware of their low ideological ratings, political liberals have shifted in recent times to calling themselves progressives, but that name, too, has begun to lose its luster. Thirty-two percent (32%) now consider it a positive to describe a candidate as politically progressive, but that's down from 40% just after the last election. Twenty-seven percent (27%) see it as negative label, up from 16%, and 36% put it somewhere in between the two.
Obama's FCC man on the Bill of Rights:"It should be clear by now that my focus here is not freedom of speech or the press. This freedom is all too often an exaggeration."
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Obama recently approved CZAR of EXECUTIVE REGULATION: "My tentative suggestion is that the individual right to have guns as it's being conceptualized now is best taken as a contemporary creation and a reflection of current fears, not a reading of civic-centered founding debates. Modern gun owners who are invoking the Second Amendment on the basis of a principle they favor are perfectionists"
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President Obama's Justice Department continues to stonewall inquiries about why it dropped a voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party.
The episode--which Bartle Bull, a former civil rights lawyer and publisher of the left-wing Village Voice, calls "the most blatant form of voter intimidation I've ever seen"--began on Election Day 2008. Mr. Bull and others witnessed two Black Panthers in paramilitary garb at a polling place near downtown Philadelphia. (Some of this behavior is on YouTube.)
One of them, they say, brandished a nightstick at the entrance and pointed it at voters and both made racial threats. Mr. Bull says he heard one yell "You are about to be ruled by the black man, cracker!"
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Darnell Nash, a voter in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, has been indicted by a grand jury for, among other things, illegal voting.
Nash was registered to vote by ACORN.
Ryan Miday, spokesman for Cuyahoga County, Ohio Prosecutor Bill Mason, a Democrat, just spoke with me.
Miday said an "investigation is continuing into activities by ACORN. Darnell Nash is the first we've charged in this ongoing investigation."
"ACORN workers approached him to fill out voter registration cards and he did so on nine different occasions using different names and addresses, then he actually registered and voted on Sept. 30 and voted with a different address and the address was an address here in the Cleveland area in a suburb called Shaker Heights."
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SEIU Intimidation of Own Members
We have for some time been following the internal fight between the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the United Healthcare Workers (UHW) of California. After merging with the UHW the SEIU claimed that the UHW was officered by corrupt officials and claimed that the only way to cleanup the union was to put the union into trusteeship, conduct an investigation, and then rearrange the union by completely taking over the union and placing it directly under SEIU control.
The members of the UHW, of course, resented an outside group coming in and strong arming their elected leaders. Worse, they claimed that the "trustees" placed over them were hand-picked by DEIU President Andy Stern and would sever his interests, not theirs.
In any case, the SEIU won with its hostile take over of the UHW. However, that is not the end of the tale. Many members of the UHW quit the SEIU/UHW and started a new union. And the charges of the heavy handed tactics of the SEIU main office in Washington D.C. are still flying.
Of course, the reason the internal battle interests us is not because we support the old UHW or the new NUHW, but that this battle shows the ruthlessness to which the SEIU is prone. The SEIU is one of the most powerful unions in the country and if they are willing to do this to their own people, what are they going to do with the rest of us.
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ANY WONDER WHY REAGAN EVOKES POSITIVE FEELINGS?