Being Liberal is Thirsty Work

Liberals Drink More Than Conservatives

The Week

A sobering new study published by the Journal of Wine Economics — yes, there is a Journal of Wine Economics — finds that alcohol consumption in American states rises as the population’s politics becomes more liberal. The study by Pavel Yakovlev and Walter P. Guessford of Duquesne University in Pennsylvania shows a direct correlation between political beliefs and the demand for alcohol.

The study compares sales of alcoholic beverages against the political leanings of a state's members of Congress, as ranked by liberal organizations Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) and the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education (COPE). The research reveals that states with more liberal representatives like Nevada tend to consume up to three times more alcohol per head than more politically conservative states like Arkansas and Utah.

The study concludes:

"In this study, we show that liberal ideology has a statistically significant positive association with the consumption of alcohol in the United States even after controlling for economic, demographic, and geographic differences across states."

These findings are consistent with other recent studies in other parts of the world showing that people with socialist views tend to drink more.

One 2002 study found that Russian socialists were significantly more likely than anti-socialists to drink alcohol frequently. Another 2006 survey of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine found that adults with anti-communist views were less likely to drink, smoke, or take drugs than their pro-communist peers.

The authors of this latest study offer two theories to explain this divergence in behavior. One possibility is that people of a more liberal persuasion tend to be more open to new experiences, such as the consumption of alcohol or drugs.

Another possibility is that people living in more liberal states or countries may feel more confident in government health care and social welfare to pick up the pieces if drinking leads to health or social problems.

Chicago Opens First ObamaCare Unnecessary Care Clinic

Fishnet Friday

Hollywood's Not So Invisible Propaganda Machine

NRO's  Jonah Goldberg recounts the story of the William Randolph Hearst-financed FDR propaganda film, Gabriel Over the White House (starring Walter Huston). The film features a carbon copy FDR president as the hero, who undergoes a coma-inducing car accident only to wake up “transformed from a passive Warren Harding type into a hands-on dictator.”

"The reborn commander-in-chief suspends the Constitution, violently wipes out corruption, and revives the economy through a national socialist agenda. When Congress tries to impeach him, he dissolves Congress.

The Library of Congress summarizes the film nicely. “The good news: He reduces unemployment, lifts the country out of the Depression, battles gangsters and Congress, and brings about world peace. The bad news: He’s Mussolini.” 

Unsurprisingly, FDR loved it and was more than willing to offer some changes, later telling Hearst, “I think it is an intensely interesting picture and should do much to help.”

“Should do much to help,” indeed.

Hollywood has of course long been in the business of propaganda. Goldberg cites a number of examples of Hollywood's hypocritical propaganda double-standard, including recent outrage over Lone Survivor’s supposed “jingoistic, pornographic work of war propaganda.” As an example of left-wing propagandizing, Goldberg highlights the political proselytizing of Norman Lear, as highlighted by Ben Shapiro in his book Primetime Propaganda:

As Shapiro notes, perhaps no figure was more upfront — or successful — at yoking art to political proselytizing than Norman Lear, the creator of All in the Family, The Jeffersons, and other shows.

"Last fall, the California Endowment, which is spending millions to promote the Affordable Care Act, gave $500,000 to the Norman Lear Center at USC to work on ways to get Hollywood to do its part. In February, the center will co-sponsor with the Writer’s Guild of America an event in New York titled “The Affordable Care Act: Comedy, Drama & Reality,” about portraying Obamacare in TV and film. The Obama administration, naturally, will be sending an emissary to help."

And so the legacy of FDR endures, as Hollywood and the political left continue their silver screen propaganda campaigns, while hypocritically decrying all political messages that don't seem to fit the progressive metanarrative.  

via Truth Revolt

Henry Waxman's Exit Opens Up Chances for New Age Guru

 Californian to Vacate Congressional Seat

With little chance of regaining their majority in congress, another house Democrat with diminished power decides after 40 years of pushing us around with government lawmaking to take his fabulous taxpayer funded golden parachute and his toys and go home at the end of his term. It's tough not being the majority. Say goodbye Henry.

Among Waxman's prolific accomplishments as a congressman were the reform and modernize the Postal Service (2006) which looses money hand over fist every year, and he was also instrumental in the passage of the Affordable Care Act.  Thank You Henry, you won't be missed around here. 

With nostril boy's exit at the end of his term, the field has opened up to among others, a political novice,  New-Age Guru,  FOO (Friend Of Oprah) author and  ex–lounge singer, Marianne Williamson. 

This is a seat that represents Beverly Hills after all.

Williamson announced last October she planned to run against Waxman for his congressional seat. Williamson has spent three decades offering a path to inner peace for those who seek it. Now she's entering an arena in which inner — and outer — peace seems in particularly short supply.

"I feel I’m further expanding my work by taking the transformational principles to which I have dedicated myself for the last thirty years into another area where they are sorely needed. While a new paradigm, holistic, relational perspective now saturates many areas of our society — from education to business to medicine to spirituality — our politics seem to be outside its reach. And we cannot afford to turn away from politics. We might not touch it, but it certainly touches us. And the increasingly calcified thought forms that dominate U.S. politics today — based more on the past than the present, more on fear than on love, and more on economic than humanitarian values — threaten to sabotage our collective good and undermine our democracy."

Yeah, she will fit right in...... 

No word yet of a bidding war for Waxman's office in the bowels of the Capital Office Building.

The Progressive Plantation and Government Incompetence

Better than a half century into the Great Society, huge numbers of blacks live trapped in urban Bantustans, Newark, Detroit, Birmingham, Philadelphia, barely literate if at all, unemployed and unemployable, bastardy almost universal, utterly dependent on federal charity, without the slightest hope that any of this will change. If Washington had deliberately tried to make a greater mess, it couldn’t have.

‘Pause’ of Global Warming Destroying The Reputation Of Climate Science

Virtually all scientists directly involved in climate prediction are aware of the enormous uncertainties associated with their product. How is it that they can place hands over hearts and swear that human emissions of carbon dioxide are wrecking the planet?

Somewhere along the line it came to be believed by many of the public, and indeed by many of the scientists themselves, that climate researchers were the equivalent of knights on white steeds fighting a great battle against the forces of evil—evil, that is, in the shape of “big oil” and its supposedly unlimited money. The delusion was more than a little attractive. The scientific establishment behind the global warming issue has been drawn into the trap of seriously overstating the climate problem.

"The trap was set in the late 1970s or thereabouts when the environmental movement first realised that doing something about global warming would play to quite a number of its social agendas. At much the same time, it became accepted wisdom around the corridors of power that government-funded scientists (that is, most scientists) should be required to obtain a goodly fraction of their funds and salaries from external sources—external anyway to their own particular organisation.

The scientists in environmental research laboratories, since they are not normally linked to any particular private industry, were forced to seek funds from other government departments. In turn this forced them to accept the need for advocacy and for the manipulation of public opinion. For that sort of activity, an arm’s-length association with the environmental movement would be a union made in heaven…

The trap was partially sprung in climate research when a number of the relevant scientists began to enjoy the advocacy business. The enjoyment was based on a considerable increase in funding and employment opportunity. The increase was not so much on the hard-science side of things but rather in the emerging fringe institutes and organisations devoted, at least in part, to selling the message of climatic doom. A new and rewarding research lifestyle emerged which involved the giving of advice to all types and levels of government, the broadcasting of unchallengeable opinion to the general public, and easy justification for attendance at international conferences—this last in some luxury by normal scientific experience, and at a frequency previously unheard of…

The trap was fully sprung when many of the world’s major national academies of science (such as the … Australian Academy of Science) persuaded themselves to issue reports giving support to the conclusions of the IPCC. The reports were touted as national assessments that were supposedly independent of the IPCC and of each other, but of necessity were compiled with the assistance of, and in some cases at the behest of, many of the scientists involved in the IPCC international machinations. In effect, the academies, which are the most prestigious of the institutions of science, formally nailed their colours to the mast of the politically correct.

Since that time three or four years ago, there has been no comfortable way for the scientific community to raise the spectre of serious uncertainty about the forecasts of climatic disaster… It can no longer escape prime responsibility if it should turn out in the end that doing something in the name of mitigation of global warming is the costliest scientific mistake ever visited on humanity.

Read the Full Story Here 

Pressing for Positive Change

"In America, the test of any political movement is not what that movement is against, but what it is for. The founders made a point at Boston Harbor, but they made history in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall.

Unfortunately, in recent years, we have had no choice but to engage in a number of protests against our current president’s Washington-centered agenda.

As Americans we must always be willing to fight the Boston-type battles — boldly calling out bad policy whenever we see it — but we must do so with an eye toward Philadelphia, maintaining a positive focus on the kind of nation we want to be and become."  — Senator Mike Lee (R-UT)

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