A Gentleman’s view.

For the WOMEN.
Ladies READ this carefully!!!!
Fellas pay attention this applies to use as well but meant for the women!

If a man wants you, nothing can keep him away. If he doesn’t want you, nothing can make him stay.

Stop making excuses for a man and his behavior.

Allow your intuition (or spirit) to save you from heartache.

Stop trying to change yourself for a relationship that’s not meant to be.

Slower is better.

Never live your life for a man before you find what makes you truly happy.

If a relationship ends because the man was not treating you as you deserve then heck no, you can’t “be friends”. A friend wouldn’t mistreat a friend.

Don’t settle.

If you feel like he is stringing you along, then he probably is.

Don’t stay because you think “it will get better.” You’ll be mad at yourself a year later for staying when things are not better.

The only person you can control in a relationship is you.

Avoid men who’ve got a bunch of children by a bunch of different women. He didn’t marry them when he got them pregnant, why would he treat you any differently?

Always have your own set of friends separate from his.

Maintain boundaries in how a guy treats you.

If something bothers you, speak up.

Never let a man know everything. He will use it against you later.

You cannot change a man’s behavior. Change comes from within.

Don’t EVER make him feel he is more important than you are… even if he has more education or in a better job. Do not make him into a quasi-god. He is a man, nothing more nothing less.

Never let a man define who you are.

Never borrow someone else’s man. If he cheated with you, he’ll cheat on you.

A man will only treat you the way you ALLOW him to treat you.

All men are NOT dogs.

You should not be the one doing all the bending… compromise is two way street.

You need time to heal between relationships… there is nothing cute about baggage… Deal with your issues before pursuing a new relationship.

You should never look for someone to COMPLETE you… a relationship consists of two WHOLE
individuals… look for someone complimentary… not supplementary.

Dating is fun… even if he doesn’t turn out to be Mr. Right.

Make him miss you sometimes… when a man always know where you are, and you’re always readily available to him – he takes it for granted.

Don’t fully commit to a man who doesn’t give you everything that you need. Keep him in your radar but get to know others.

Share this with other women and men (just so they know)… You’ll make someone smile, another rethink her/his choices, and another woman prepare, and a man aware that you’re someone to be loved and appreciated or just left alone!

Remember: You can do bad by yourself!

Liberals vs. conservatives

We are not the same. I equate Republicans’ political views with thoughtlessness, intolerance and narcissism. They’re neither kind nor empathetic. By Diana Wagman

I recently played poker with a bunch of Republicans. My husband and I, both bleeding-heart liberals, are part owners of a cabin in the Sierra outside Fresno, a very conservative area. The Camp Sierra Assn. president has an annual poker game, and this year we, the newcomers, were invited.

No one mentioned politics. We talked instead about our kids and Las Vegas and the odd warm weather. There was a lot of laughter and a lot of very good Scotch. I had fun even though I lost $4.

When the game was over, we walked home with our across-the-road neighbors and invited them in for a final nightcap.

Conservatives vs. liberals

They are the best neighbors in the world. Always ready with a tool, an ingredient or a jump-start for the car. Whatever you need, if they have it, they will give it. They are a lovely family: husband, wife and four smart, funny, polite children. I was sure they were Democrats.

As the husband sat down in our living room with his drink, he announced, “The tea party is not racist.” We just looked at him. “The tea party is not racist,” he continued, “because I am a member of the tea party.”

I laughed. I thought he was joking, but he quickly made it clear he was not. He is white and his wife is African American. And they belong to the tea party. They don’t care who becomes our next president as long as it isn’t Barack Obama. The conversation devolved from there until he was shouting, I was shouting, his wife was trying to calm him down, my husband was trying to calm me down, and our other friends — Democrats — were trying to keep everybody from breaking the furniture.

Conservative vs. Liberal: Gay marriage

We argued about healthcare and welfare, President Obama’s nationality and religion, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We did not agree on anything. But honestly, the issues were not important. What matters is how personal it quickly became, how vitriolic, how filled with hate. He said I was sucking the country dry with my support of food stamps and public education. He said I needed to get off my butt and take care of myself. I suggested he sign his kids up to die in Iran, the next place he thinks we should attack. He called me a spoiled idiot and worse. I called him selfish, shortsighted and worse. It was awful, and it went on until after 3 a.m.

The next morning, they knocked on our door and we apologized to each other and laughed sheepishly. All in good fun, the wife said. It was the Scotch talking, my husband replied. But my feelings about them are changed. I cannot respect them as I did before. And as they headed back across the street, I saw the look they gave each other: They don’t like us anymore either.

My mother had Republican friends. She was a lifelong Democrat, worked with the Adlai Stevenson for president campaign and was a precinct chairman for Hubert Humphrey. She was ashamed of Richard Nixon and thought Ronald Reagan was misguided. Still, she didn’t hate Republicans. She disagreed with their politics and they with hers, but she believed people, no matter how they vote, are basically all the same.

Conservative vs. Liberal: Healthcare

I don’t agree. I don’t want to be friends with someone who is a member of the tea party or is a Newt Gingrich Republican. We are not the same. I equate their political views with thoughtlessness, intolerance and narcissism. I think they are not kind or empathetic. And my neighbor made it clear that he does not respect my opinions or me.

“You’re what’s wrong with this country!” he shouted. “No, you are!” was my intelligent retort. In only one area could we agree: We each would prefer the other just didn’t exist. If only they would all go live in Gingrich’s moon colony. If only we would all move to Canada with the other socialists. My mother would have been horrified, but times have changed.

My neighbors want good jobs, nice houses and security for their four children. They want to be able to retire before they get too old so they can spend more time at their cabin. They love the Sierra Nevada and want it to remain pristine. I want those things too. I want it for their children as well as mine, and for all children everywhere. Of course I do. And that’s what I find so frustrating.

My views on all these things — gay marriage, abortion, the war in Iraq, healthcare, education, food stamps, even NPR and PBS funding — seem so logical to me. Of course we need to take care of those less fortunate; of course we want everybody to have the joy and legal benefits of a life partner; of course we want every baby to be wanted and every person to be safe, healthy, informed and looking forward to a better future.

These things are no-brainers to me, and it kills me that my neighbor disagrees. I wonder what would happen if he woke up one morning to find that his son had been killed in Iraq or that his 15-year-old daughter was pregnant or that his favorite sister was gay. What if he suddenly lost his job, his wife got cancer, there was no insurance and not much food? I’m not saying I want life to knock him around. But would he still feel that the government shouldn’t be helping anybody out?

Next time I drive to our cabin, I’m going to make sure I take everything I could possibly need. I don’t want to ask my neighbors for help. I hope it’s their weekend to stay home.

Diana Wagman is the author of the novels “Skin Deep,” “Spontaneous” and “Bump.”

A Conservative Explains Why Right-Wingers Have No Compassion By Mike Lofgren

Although Mitt Romney used the word “conservative” 19 times in a short speech at the February 10, 2012, Conservative Political Action Conference, the audience he used this word to appeal to was not conservative by any traditional definition. It was right wing. Despite the common American practice of using “conservative” and “right wing” interchangeably, right wing is not a synonym for conservative and not even a true variant of conservatism – although the right wing will opportunistically borrow conservative themes as required.

Right-wingers have occasioned much recent comment. Their behavior in the Republican debates has caused even jaded observers to react like an Oxford don stumbling upon a tribe of headhunting cannibals. In those debates where the moderators did not enforce decorum, these right-wingers, the Republican base, behaved with a single lack of dignity. For a group that displays its supposed pro-life credentials like a neon sign, the biggest applause lines resulted from their hearing about executions or the prospect of someone dying without health insurance.

Who are these people and what motivates them? To answer, one must leave the field of conventional political theory and enter the realm of psychopathology. Three books may serve as field guides to the farther shores of American politics and the netherworld of the true believer.

Most estimates calculate the percentage of Republican voters who are religious fundamentalists at around 40 percent; in some key political contests, such as the Iowa caucuses, the percentage is closer to 60. Because of their social cohesion, ease of political mobilization and high election turnout, fundamentalists have political weight even beyond their raw numbers. An understanding of their leaders, infrastructure and political goals is warranted. Max Blumenthal has done the work in his book “Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party.” Blumenthal investigates politicized fundamentalism and provides capsule bios of such movement luminaries as James Dobson, Tony Perkins, John Hagee and Ted Haggard. The reader will conclude that these authority figures and the flocks they command are driven by a binary, Manichean vision of life and a hunger for conflict. Their minds appear to have no more give and take than that of a terrier staring down a rat hole.

Blumenthal examines the childhoods of these religious-right celebrities and reveals a significant quotient of physical and mental abuse suffered at the hands of parents. His analysis of the obvious sadomasochistic element in Mel Gibson’s films – so lionized by the right wing – is enough to give one the creeps. But the book is by no means a uniformly depressing slog: the chapter titled “Satan in a Porsche,” about fundamentalist attempts to ban pornography, approaches slapstick.

According to the author, the inner life of fundamentalist true believers is the farthest thing from that of a stuffily proper Goody Two Shoes. They seem tormented by demons that those in the reality-based community scarcely experience. That may explain their extraordinary latitude in absolving their political and ecclesiastical heroes of their sins: while most of us might regard George W. Bush as a dry drunk resentful of his father, Newt Gingrich as a sociopathic serial adulterer and Ted Haggard as a pathetic specimen in terminal denial, their followers on the right apparently believe that the greater the sin, the more impressive the salvation – so long as the magic words are uttered and the penitent sinner is washed in the Blood of the Lamb. This explains why people like Gingrich can attend “values voter” forums and both he and the audience manage to keep straight faces. Far from being a purpose-driven life, the existence of many true believers is a crisis-driven life that seeks release, as Blumenthal asserts, in an “escape from freedom.”

An observer of the right-wing phenomenon must explain the paradox of followers who would escape from freedom even as they incessantly invoke the word freedom as if it were a mantra. But freedom so defined does not mean ordinary civil liberties like the prohibition of illegal government search and seizure, the right of due process, or the right not to be tortured. The hard right has never protested the de facto abrogation of much of the Bill of Rights during the last decade. In the right-wing id, freedom is the emotional release that a hostile and psychologically repressed person feels when he is finally able to lash out at the objects of his resentment. Freedom is his prerogative to rid himself of people who are different, or who unsettle him. Freedom is merging into a like-minded herd. Right-wing alchemy transforms freedom into authoritarianism.

Robert Altemeyer, a Canadian psychologist, has done extensive testing to isolate and describe the traits of the authoritarian personality. His results are distilled in his book “The Authoritarians.” He describes religious fundamentalists, the core of the right-wing Republican base, as follows:

They are highly submissive to established authority, aggressive in the name of that authority and conventional to the point of insisting everyone should behave as their authorities decide. They are fearful and self-righteous and have a lot of hostility in them that they readily direct toward various out-groups. They are easily incited, easily led, rather un-inclined to think for themselves, largely impervious to facts and reason and rely instead on social support to maintain their beliefs. They bring strong loyalty to their in-groups, have thick-walled, highly compartmentalized minds, use a lot of double standards in their judgments, are surprisingly unprincipled at times and are often hypocrites.

There are tens of millions of Americans who, although personally lacking the self-confidence, ambition and leadership qualities of authoritarian dominators like Gingrich or Sarah Palin, nevertheless empower the latter to achieve their goals while finding psychological fulfillment in subordination to a cause. Altemeyer describes these persons as authoritarian followers. They are socially rigid, highly conventional and strongly intolerant personalities, who, absent any self-directed goals, seek achievement and satisfaction by losing themselves in a movement greater than themselves. One finds them overrepresented in reactionary political movements, fundamentalist sects and leader cults like scientology. They are the people who responded on cue when Bush’s press secretary said after the 9/11 attacks that people had better “watch what they say;” or who approved of illegal surveillance because “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear;” or who, after months of news stories saying that no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, nevertheless believed the weapons were found. Altemeyer said:

Probably about 20 to 25 percent of the adult American population is so right-wing authoritarian, so scared, so self-righteous, so ill-informed and so dogmatic that nothing you can say or do will change their minds. They would march America into a dictatorship and probably feel that things had improved as a result…. And they are so submissive to their leaders that they will believe and do virtually anything they are told. They are not going to let up and they are not going away.

Twenty to 25 percent is no majority, but enough to swing an election, especially since the authoritarian follower is more easily organized than the rest of the population. As for Altemeyer’s warning that such personality types “are not going away,” the rise of the Tea Party after 2008 showed that he was a better prognosticator than Max Blumenthal, who thought the radical takeover of the GOP during the Bush presidency had “shattered the party.”

Altemeyer cites clinical data to show us how certain people score high on psychological tests measuring authoritarian traits and that these high scores strongly correlate with right-wing political preferences. What Altemeyer is lacking is a satisfactory explanation as to why a significant percentage of human beings should develop these traits. We obtain some clues in Wilhelm Reich’s “The Mass Psychology of Fascism,” written in 1933 and unfortunately only obtainable in a stilted 1945 translation full of odd psychological jargon. One does not have to agree with Reich’s questionable later career path and personal eccentricities(1) to notice that his 1933 work is a perceptive analysis of the character of the authoritarian political movements that were rising in Europe. Anyone reading it then and taking it seriously could have predicted the new totalitarian regimes’ comprehensive repressiveness, extreme intolerance and, within a few years, nihilistic destructiveness.

Reich appears to see fascism as the political manifestation of an authoritarian psychology. Who are the authoritarians?

Fascist mentality is the mentality of the subjugated “little man” who craves authority and rebels against it at the same time. It is not by accident that all fascist dictators stem from the milieu of the little reactionary man. The captains of industry and the feudal militarist make use of this social fact for their own purposes. A mechanistic authoritarian civilization only reaps, in the form of fascism, from the little, suppressed man what for hundreds of years it has sown in the masses of little, suppressed individuals in the form of mysticism, top-sergeant mentality and automatism.

Here again we see the paradoxical nature of the authoritarian personality: rebelling against authority while hungering for it – exactly as the contemporary right wing fancies it is rebelling against big government while calling for intrusive social legislation and militarism. In the midst of dire economic circumstances, why do they expend inordinate energy brooding over contraception, abortion, abstinence education, gay marriage and so forth and attempt to transform their obsessions into law? Reich said:

The formation of the authoritarian structure takes place through the anchoring of sexual inhibition and sexual anxiety…. The result of this process is fear of freedom and a conservative, reactionary mentality. Sexual repression aids political reaction not only through this process which makes the mass individual passive and unpolitical but also by creating in his structure an interest in actively supporting the authoritarian order. The suppression of natural sexual gratification leads to various kinds of substitute gratifications. Natural aggression, for example, becomes brutal sadism which then is an essential mass-psychological factor in imperialistic wars.

According to Reich, a patriarchal, sexually repressive family life, reinforced by strict and punitive religious dogma, is the “factory” of a reactionary political order. Hence, the right wing’s ongoing attempts to erase the separation of church and state, its crusade against Planned Parenthood, its strange obsession with gays. Consider the following political platform, which sounds almost as if it were taken from a speech by Rick Santorum:

The preservation of the family with many children is a matter of biological concept and national feeling. The family with many children must be preserved … because it is a highly valuable, indispensable part of the … nation. Valuable and indispensable not only because it alone guarantees the maintenance of the population in the future but because it is the strongest basis of national morality and national culture … The preservation of this family form is a necessity of national and cultural politics … This concept is strictly at variance with the demands for an abolition of paragraph 218; it considers unborn life as sacrosanct. For the legalization of abortion is at variance with the function of the family, which is to produce children and would lead to the definite destruction of the family with many children.

So wrote the Völkischer Beobachter of October 14, 1931. As Altemeyer warns, they are not going away: certain psychological constructs and the political expressions they give rise to, persist over time and across cultures.

Crazy Conservative Contradictions  By Justin “Filthy Liberal Scum” Rosario

There’s a reason liberals look at conservatives like they might be insane. Often, a conservative will say one thing and then, almost immediately, contradict it. Pointing out the contradiction often angers the conservative who then accuses you of either being “stupid” or “twisting their words.” But, because it’s funny to look at crazy people, let’s take a look at conservative contradictions:

1. There is no need to regulate corporations! The free market dictates that all corporations will act in the best interest of the consumer or be put out of business by the “Invisible Hand.”

The Contradiction: Corporations only exist to make money. You cannot expect them to do anything that will interfere with the bottom line. They cannot concern themselves with environmental issues or customer safety if it is more profitable to ignore them. You, as the consumer, need to be more careful!

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2. Corporations should have all the rights of a person. They should be free to exercise their First Amendment rights and buy influence elections just like any other citizen of the United States.

The Contradiction: Corporations are not people so they cannot be treated like any other citizen of the United States. You can’t arrest them for manslaughter or negligent homicide even if they DID add known carcinogens to that baby food on purpose.

Ultimate Contradiction: Unions (basically, a group of people pooling their resources) should not be allowed to influence elections. It corrupts the democratic process.

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3. You should never try to organize labor. That’s selfish. Unions extort money from corporations, inflate the salaries of workers and give them unearned benefits, like maternity leave and pensions. Union workers are greedy and do not care about the companies they work for. The fact that they are paid so well is a sure sign that they are wrong.

The Contradiction: How dare you try to limit CEO pay and severance packages?! Those people work hard and earn every penny they get, even if they drove the company right into bankruptcy! So what if they took billions of tax payers’ money to stay afloat, they still deserve those bonuses!

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4. All liberal celebrities should shut the hell up. They don’t know what they’re talking about and should leave politics to politicians. Liberal celebrities aren’t real Americans anyway because they’re from Hollywood!

The Contradiction: Here to explain to you how liberal policies are unpatriotic and probably illegal are Victoria Jackson, Kelsey Grammer and Jon Voight.

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5. The Government cannot create any jobs at all and can never reduce unemployment, only the private sector can do that.

The Contradiction: The Government has too many people on its payroll; we have to reduce the number of public sector jobs.
Ultimate Contradiction: See how many public sector jobs we’ve lost under Obama? He made unemployment worse!

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6. We really invaded Iraq to get rid of a terrible dictator and it had nothing to do with 9/11.

The Contradiction: Why is Obama invading Libya?! To take down a terrible dictator?! How is that our problem?!

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7. Osama bin Laden was responsible for 9/11 because he gave the order to carry out the attack.

The Contradiction: President Obama can’t take ANY credit for the death of Osama bin Laden because all he did was give the order to carry out the attack.

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8. Any journalist, politician or private citizen that questions President Bush during a time of war is a traitor.

The Contradiction: During this time of war it is our patriotic duty to question President Obama about every little detail of his agenda.

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9. Providing billions of tax-payer money to people in dire financial straits is Socialism and will lead to the destruction of the country.

The Contradiction: Providing trillions of tax-payer money to banks in dire financial straits is Capitalism and will lead to the salvation of the country.

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10. We must protect innocent fetuses by any means necessary. Terrorism and assassination is justifiable because we are protecting children!

The Contradiction: Providing pregnant women with medical care and proper nutrition is a burden on the tax-payers and we can’t afford it. We need that money to fight terrorism!

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11. Islam is a religion of terrorists! They murder innocents in the name of Allah and that’s just wrong! That’s why we’re better than they are!

The Contradiction: All homosexuals should be put to death! They are the work of Satan! If we cannot pray away their gay then we must do as the Jayzus commands and stone them to death!

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12. My freedom of religion is absolute! It says so right there in the Constitution! You can’t restrict my right to worship where and how I want!

The Contradiction: Those damn Muslims keep putting up mosques wherever the hell they want! Who do they think they are?! That should be illegal!

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13. The Constitution is inviolate! Why are liberals always trying to shred the Constitution?!

The Contradiction: We should just ignore the 14th Amendment! It allows anchor and terror babies! We have to protect ourselves from the furrners!

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14. Damn liberals always trying to select activist judges that will just “interpret” the Constitution however they want to fit their Socialist agenda! The Founding Fathers knew what they were doing and we should also follow their intent, not just make it up as we go along!

The Contradiction: Citizens United? I think the Supreme Court did a fine job of interpreting the Constitution to fit our much more complex times, don’t you?

Edited by Sherri Yarbrough

• Rick Santorum: Obama Agenda Not ‘Based On Bible’

By Samuel P. Jacobs

COLUMBUS, Ohio, Feb 18 (Reuters) – Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum challenged President Barack Obama’s Christian beliefs on Saturday, saying White House policies were motivated by a “different theology.”

A devout Roman Catholic who has risen to the top of Republican polls in recent days, Santorum said the Obama administration had failed to prevent gas prices rising and was using “political science” in the debate about climate change.

Obama’s agenda is “not about you. It’s not about your quality of life. It’s not about your jobs. It’s about some phony ideal. Some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible. A different theology,” Santorum told supporters of the conservative Tea Party movement at a Columbus hotel.

When asked about the statement at a news conference later, Santorum said, “If the president says he’s a Christian, he’s a Christian.”

But Santorum did not back down from the assertion that Obama’s values run against those of Christianity.

“He is imposing his values on the Christian church. He can categorize those values anyway he wants. I’m not going to,” Santorum told reporters.

A social conservative, Santorum is increasingly seen as a champion for evangelical Christians in fights with Democrats over contraception and gay marriage.

“This is just the latest low in a Republican primary campaign that has been fueled by distortions, ugliness, and searing pessimism and negativity – a stark contrast with the President who is focused everyday on creating jobs and restoring economic security for the middle class,” said Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt.

The campaign’s response signaled a new respect for Santorum. Until this week, the Obama campaign appeared exclusively focused on Mitt Romney. Republicans are waging a state-by-state contest to pick a candidate to challenge Obama in November’s election.

At a campaign appearance in Florida last month, Santorum declined to correct a voter who called Obama, a Christian, an “avowed Muslim.”

Santorum told CNN after that incident, “I don’t feel it’s my obligation every time someone says something I don’t agree with to contradict them, and the president’s a big boy, he can defend himself.”

On Saturday, Santorum also took aim at Romney, his main Republican rival, on one of the central accomplishments of his resume, saying the former Massachusetts governor’s rescue of the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics required millions of dollars in handouts from the federal government.

The attack was a response to the Romney camp trying to portray Santorum as a proponent of big government because of his use of earmarks while he served in the U.S. Senate.

“He heroically bailed out the Salt Lake City Olympic Games by heroically going to Congress and asking them for tens of millions of dollars to bail out the Salt Lake Olympic Games – in an earmark,” Santorum said.

“One of his strongest supporters, John McCain called it potentially the worst boondoggle in earmark history. And now Governor Romney is suggesting, ‘Oh, Rick Santorum earmarked,’ as he requested almost half a billion dollars of earmarks as governor of Massachusetts to his federal congressmen and senators. Does the word hypocrisy come to mind?” Santorum said.

Romney often talks of how he turned around the struggling Olympics organization and is appearing in Utah on Saturday to mark the anniversary of the Olympics.

In a statement, the Romney campaign said Santorum was in a weak position to challenge its candidate on big spending.

“Sometimes when you shoot from the hip, you end up shooting yourself in the foot. There is a pretty wide gulf between seeking money for post-9/11 security at the Olympics and seeking earmarks for polar bear exhibits at the Pittsburgh Zoo. Mitt Romney wants to ban earmarks, Senator Santorum wants more ‘Bridges to Nowhere,’” said Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul. (Editing by Peter Cooney)

Reagan Would Envy Obama’s Economic Record by Jeff

If there are two things that Republicans want us to believe, it would be these:
1. Barack Obama’s economic policies are a failure which made the recession worse.
2. Ronald Reagan was an economic genius who should serve as an example of how to improve the economy.

The best way to examine both of these statements is to compare how these 2 presidents handled the economy during their first 3 years as president.

It’s fair to say that when any new president takes office, it takes a few months for their economic policies to have an effect on the economy. So you have to look at the condition of the economy when they took office and how it responded after the new president’s policies have had time to take effect.

The graph accompanying this article uses unemployment numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to compare the monthly unemployment rates for the first 3 years under Presidents Reagan and Obama.

Both Reagan and Obama took office when unemployment was considered fairly high. In February, 1981, Reagan’s first full month as president, unemployment was at 7.4% and was slowly improving. It dropped down to 7.2% by April, his third month in office.

In February, 2009, Obama’s first full month in office, unemployment was at 8.2% and rising rapidly. The economy was already losing 750,000 jobs per month before Obama was sworn in.

Look closely at what happened during each president’s first 2 years in office. By October, 2009, Obama’s 9th month in office, unemployment peaked at 10.1%. After that, we started to see job growth and the unemployment rate declined over the next 2 years. The longer his policies were in effect, the more the economy improved.

Compare that to what happened during Reagan’s first two years. Although unemployment was stable when he first took office, after about 7 months, it started rising. After his first full year, unemployment climbed to 8.5% and it continued to rise throughout his 2nd year. Nearly two full years after Reagan took office, unemployment was at 10.8%, higher than it ever reached under Obama. It wasn’t until nearly 2 ½ years into Reagan’s presidency that unemployment finally dropped below 10%.

There is a stark contrast between what happened with Reagan and what happened with Obama. Under Obama, unemployment briefly topped 10% during his first year and then began to go down. Under Reagan, unemployment remained above 10% for the better part of a year.

Most of the job losses that occurred during Obama’s presidency happened during the first few months as a result of the deep recession that began a year before he took office. Less than a year into his term, the economy showed steady improvement. By contrast, the job losses under Reagan didn’t begin until about six months after he became president and continued to get worse for the next 18 months.

The severity of the economic crisis that Obama inherited cannot be over-emphasized. Not since the Great Depression had we seen such massive job losses as were occurring at the time Obama was sworn in. It would be difficult to find any other time in our country’s history when 750,000 jobs were lost in a single month. Economists predicted that we would have 20% unemployment within a year. It is remarkable that unemployment peaked at only 10.1% and that the economy began improving as quickly as it did.

Obama clearly inherited a far worse economic situation than Reagan did. Yet he managed to turn around the economy in less than half the time it took Reagan. Obama’s policies resulted in a measurable improvement within a year of taking office, while Reagan’s policies resulted in a worsening of the unemployment situation for two years.

In reviewing Obama’s accomplishment, there are other factors that need to be considered in this comparison. When Reagan was president, Democrats in the House of Representatives who opposed him were willing to make compromises and to work with him in creating jobs. They didn’t see their role as simply to obstruct everything he did.

The Republicans who oppose President Obama have tried to prevent anything from getting done at all with regard to the economy. During the first 2 years, Republicans in the Senate filibustered virtually everything they could; including bills they previously supported, in order to prevent any legislation from coming up for a vote. After gaining control of the House of Representatives, Republicans refused to pass any job creation bills at all, even rejecting proposals that they had supported in previous years.

Despite Republican attempts to stifle job creation, President Obama has managed to have far greater success at pulling the country out of a recession than the sainted Ronald Reagan did during his first 3 years in office.

Why Right-Wingers (and Media Hacks) Are Totally Wrong About What Americans Believe — We’re Becoming Less, Not More, Conservative

Americans’ views on the most pressing issues of the day are actually solidly progressive, so why do the media keep getting the story wrong?

Despite some misguided triumphalism on the Right, America is not getting more conservative. In fact, if you look at lots of public opinion polls, you’ll find that just the opposite is true—Americans’ views on the most pressing issues of the day are actually solidly progressive, with strong support for the social safety net and growing support for once-controversial social issues like marriage equality.

Nevertheless right-wing and center-contrarian media outlets love to jump on polls that identify Americans as conservative, without ever asking what the difference is between what your average Ohioan means by that word and what Marco Rubio means when he announces at CPAC that “the majority of Americans are conservatives.”

(Rubio’s inaccurate comments sparked a controversy and prompted a vehement reaction from Rachel Maddow this week, as Politifact debunked his statement—but then rated it “mostly true” anyway, proving the pervasiveness of the myth of conservative America.)

An article by the Atlantic’s Richard Florida titled, “Why America Keeps Getting More Conservative,” is an excellent example of the problem of relying on nebulously defined, self-identified “conservatism” as a measure of ideology. Florida cites new Gallup poll numbers (the same ones Rubio and Politifact cited) that the polling outlet itself said provided little evidence that America is “track[ing] right.” Gallup offered the far more innocuous headline, “Mississippi Most Conservative State, D.C. Most Liberal,” with the subhead: “State patterns in ideology largely stable compared with previous years.”

But “nothing has changed” doesn’t make a good headline, and so Florida hooked an entire story on a false premise that belies the conclusions drawn by the pollsters he cites. Gallup goes on to point out, “Unlike political party identification, which has shifted significantly over the last four years, the state-by-state patterns in ideology have remained remarkably stable this year compared with previous years.”

And Ed Kilgore at the Washington Monthly noted:

If you look at the Gallup data on which Florida’s entire “analysis” (mainly just a charting of ideological self-identification by state) rests, it certainly doesn’t show any dramatic recent rightward trend. The percentage of Americans self-identifying as “conservative” since 1992 has varied from a low of 36% to a high of 40% (a high it reached in 2004, before dropping to 37% in 2008). As it happens, the percentage of Americans (again, according to Gallup) self-identifying as “liberal” has also gone up 4% since 1992 (from 17% to 21%). The percentage self-identifying as “moderates” has, accordingly, drifted down from 43% in 1992 to 35% in 2011, though the number was only two points higher in 2007 and 2008.

So this is a non-story given a clickworthy headline. Yet the willingness of writers and editors to greenlight stories on the myth of “conservative” or “center-right” America – and the willingness of supposed fact-checkers to support the idea – shows that this is a myth with incredible staying power in the American imagination. Why is that?

What Is a “Conservative,” Anyway?

When politicians speak to the Conservative Political Action Conference, as AlterNet’s Adele Stan reported this week, they consider “conservatism” to be rigid opposition to abortion (and this year we’re throwing birth control into that category as well), a deep aversion to taxes (for the rich, anyway) and a hatred of immigrants. Some years conservatism also includes a willingness to bomb whichever majority-Muslim country looked at us funny. If Rick Santorum is right, conservatives think the more energy they waste, the better they are, and if Newt Gingrich is to be believed, there’s nothing they hate more than unemployment insurance.

But when Americans tell a pollster how they identify, most of them show their true colors, and it’s not a deep red. As Paul Waldman of Media Matters for America noted back in 2008, “People who know a lot about politics — like journalists — assume that ordinary people have the same interpretation of those terms as political junkies have. But the truth, as nearly a half-century of political science research has made clear, is that a significant portion of the public has little or no idea of what these terms mean in the political world. A third of the public can’t even tell you which of the two major parties is the ‘conservative’ one.”

And Ezra Klein pointed out in 2010, even noted right-leaning pollsters have found for decades that more Americans self-identify with the Democratic party. So clearly, there’s some space between what the GOP thinks “conservative” means and what the general public does.

The fact is that most Americans don’t identify their political positions on a left-to-right spectrum the way journalists and political scientists do. As veteran organizers know, people vote with their guts, and their reaction to issues is both visceral and complicated. Thomas Ferguson, professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, told AlterNet, “On specific concrete issues the population often likes a lot policies that are belied even by the labels they sometimes choose.”

Choosing three words like “conservative,” “moderate” and “liberal” as the only options to describe one’s politics is, as Kilgore noted, a flawed methodology that tells us literally nothing about what those people actually support.

Polls are not always a reliable way to judge public opinion in the first place, Ferguson, who previously worked with the New York Times‘ pollster, pointed out. “If you do really careful samples and ask really careful questions you can usually learn a lot about true opinion. But that’s difficult and expensive and most polls don’t do this.”

Florida’s story, for instance, doesn’t describe the questions actually asked of responders. Ferguson explained that when it comes to issues on which people have conflicted opinions—like abortion—the way in which the question is asked or even the order in which questions are asked can change the response significantly. This phenomenon is called “priming” and happens subconsciously, but can still complicate or invalidate results.

A 2009 study from the Center for American Progress tried a more specific calculation of Americans’ views, based not on which words they chose but their actual political positions:

Based on an innovative categorization of ideology, calculated from Americans’ responses to 40 statements about government and society split evenly between progressive and conservative beliefs, the American electorate as a whole records a mean ideological score of 209.5 in the Progressive Studies Program measure of composite ideology—solidly progressive in orientation. This figure is based on a composite scale of “0” to “400” with “0” being the most conservative position on the continuum and “400” being the most progressive. Americans are most progressive about the role of government and least progressive on cultural and social values. Ideas about economics and international affairs fall in-between.

And a new paper presented last month at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology found that political polarization in the U.S. has hardly changed at all in the last 40 years—but that Americans vastly overestimate how polarized we are. In a separate study presented at the same conference, another psychology professor looked at the reasons behind that perceived polarization, examining why people who are extremely partisan assume that others are as well, and found that projection, unsurprisingly, plays a role—those with strong views project their strong views onto others.

Which may explain part of the problem when it comes to the media and politicians. Marco Rubio, a right-wing Republican, obviously believes that when people identify as conservatives, they’re just like him. And PolitiFact’s team and Richard Florida, as well as other reporters, are steeped in a culture of conventional wisdom and stock narratives into which they fit information they receive. The problem, though, is that those narratives and conventional wisdom are often based on little in the way of hard evidence—and are often counter to reality.

Where Are We Really?

If most Americans don’t really identify themselves on a left-right scale, and often hold complex and conflicted opinions on subjects that don’t line up politically with the labels they choose, how do we figure out what people really think?

In a 2011 paper (PDF) on the polarization of Congress, Ferguson pointed out that it may well be a mistake to assume that people vote based on “hot-button” issues like abortion or gay rights. “Huge numbers of people holding hot-button attitudes continue to affiliate with the ‘wrong’ political party,” he noted. (This played out in California, when the referendum banning same-sex marriage passed at the same time Obama swept the state’s presidential vote.)

In the same paper, Ferguson also noted, “To the extent any ideological change at all shows, it is as often as not slightly leftward. On some issues, such as same sex marriage, public opinion has moved sharply in that direction.”

But while we caution anyone not to read too much into polls, there are several issues on which the American public has been fairly well surveyed, and those polls show that the progressive position is not just popular, but extremely popular. People’s view of Social Security, for instance, remains overwhelmingly positive—79 percent think it is “good for the country”–despite repeated right-wing attempts to cut benefits and convince Americans that private accounts are the solution. Eighty-eight percent of Americans like Medicare, the single-payer health insurance program for those over the age of 65, and 77 percent of them are fans of Medicaid, the healthcare program for the poor.

In September, Americans favored taxing the rich and eliminating tax deductions for corporations, according to another Gallup poll—and by big margins, too, with 70 percent in favor of tossing the loopholes and 66 percent in favor of taxing those who make over $200,000 more ($250,000 for families). And a poll last April found that even 54 percent of Republicans favored higher taxes on the wealthy.

(One piece of Florida’s report that was interesting was that so-called conservative political affiliation strongly correlated with a large percentage of blue-collar workers in a state, but those self-identified conservatives “appear to be split along class and income lines when it comes to the issue of whether government should provide help for the poor.” He cited a survey by the Pew Research Center, which found that 57 percent of Republicans with family incomes of less than $30,000 said that government does not do enough for the poor. Unsurprisingly, the rich Republicans think the government is giving too much of their money away. Of course, Florida doesn’t bother extrapolating this information to the idea that maybe conservatism as defined by Republican politicians simply isn’t as popular as its reputation, but that would be complicated.)

The Republicans, at the moment realizing that they won’t beat Obama on the economy with a plan that includes cutting taxes on the rich, seem to have pivoted to the classic “culture war” issues, presuming that they can win there. But they might want to take note of some polling data taking stock of the latest ridiculous right-wing non-controversy—Americans seem to like their birth control (99 percent of women who have had sex have used some form of it) and at least 56 percent of them think that health insurance should cover it. (And just for the sake of argument—Catholics haven’t abandoned Obama en masse over birth control, either, with 46 percent of them approving of the president during the week in which we saw a very public temper tantrum from the Catholic bishops over contraception coverage in health insurance, down only three points from the week before. And churchgoing and nonchurchgoing Catholics feel about the same about the president.)

Gay marriage, as Ferguson pointed out above, is an issue on which the public has largely swung more progressive—for the first time, in 2011, a majority of 51 percent favor same-sex couples being allowed marriage rights (from an average of four polls conducted by different organizations). And what polls even better than marriage equality? Protection from workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Indeed, this is so popular that nearly three-fourths of Americans believe it should be a law, and 9 out of 10 of them think it already is.

In his Atlantic story, Florida provides graphs mapping demographic characteristics that correlate with the more self-identified “conservative” parts of the country. While many of his points seem pretty obvious (more diverse areas of the country are less conservative! College graduates are more liberal!) they also, if he chose to dig any deeper, would spell disaster for his conservative-creep theory.

As Ruy Teixeira pointed out in a Center for American Progress report in 2009, the demographics aren’t on the conservatives’ side. Younger voters are trending progressive, and voters of color will be a greater and greater percentage of the population as time passes. “By the election of 2016, it is likely that the United States will no longer be a majority white Christian nation,” Teixeira wrote.

And perhaps reflecting that shift in demographics, a recent Pew Research Center poll found that most Americans consider the conflict between the rich and the poor to be the greatest source of tension in American society—two-thirds of us, up about 50 percent from a 2009 survey. Richard Morin, a senior editor at Pew, credited Occupy Wall Street, among other things, for pushing the shift in national opinion. “The story for me was the consistency of the change,” he told the New York Times. “Everyone sees more conflict.” (In 2009, by contrast, immigration was seen as the largest source of conflict.)

Media outlets report on these polls individually all the time, but rarely bother to refer back to earlier studies when new ones come out—particularly one, like the Gallup poll, which seems to offer a sweeping conclusion easily demagogued by politicians like Marco Rubio. Politics these days is all about the campaign, and the media is all about the sound bite. Calculating where the American public actually stands on an issue, rather than sweeping them into a category called “conservative” or “liberal” is a complex affair, and reporters and pundits prefer simple answers.

The fact is, though, as Rachel Maddow pointed out, the simple answer in this case is very simply wrong. Americans aren’t getting more conservative, a majority of the country is not Republican or Republican-leaning, and if anything, we’re swinging the other way—which should make all of us who don’t subscribe to Rubio and Newt Gingrich’s version of America sleep better at night.

Sarah Jaffe