Democrats are nuttier than Republicans by 2 to 1, and independents by nearly as much

Democrats believe in reincarnation, yoga, astrology, spiritual energy and the evil eye 176 to 87 for Republicans in a Pew Research study from 2009, a ratio of 2:1. So-called independents aren't far behind at 163 to 87, for a ratio of 1.87:1.

And when it comes to being in touch with the dead, ghosts and fortune tellers, the story is similar. Democrats buy this stuff over Republicans 163 to 81, also a ratio of 2:1. Independents beat Republicans 143 to 81, for a ratio of 1.76:1.

Apart from the greater prevalence of wacky beliefs among Democrats and independents generally, the results indicate that the much-vaunted independents are much more like the Democrats than they care to admit (nutty).

If someone really wanted to understand what accounts for America's turn toward the insane, go there.

I compiled the data above from the Pew findings, found here.

The country's become more liberal as "moderates" decline 21% since 1992

Gallup reported in January here that the country's moderates have declined from 43% in 1992 to 34% in 2016, a decline of nearly 21%.

At the same time the country's liberals have risen in number from 17% in 1992 to 25% in 2016, an increase of 47%.

Meanwhile conservatives are still stuck at 36%.

This means the country has become more polarized along the conservative-liberal axis as a huge part of the squishy middle has converted to the left.

My hunch is that the real story is that as the older generations have died off, what has been exposed is the more liberal elements of the Baby Boom generation and especially of their children and grandchildren, who were all indoctrinated in liberalism by the public schools, which were gradually taken over by the left after the 1960s.

I experienced this first hand in my high school in the early 1970s. I remember how two new young teachers freshly minted from college stuck out like sore thumbs compared with the old guard of my teachers. They wasted no time and immediately introduced us to the work of such luminaries as the Marxist Bertolt Brecht and the gay counterculture revolutionist Charles A. Reich, a teacher of both Bill and Hillary Clinton at Yale. Meanwhile I learned useful things from my lunkhead economics teacher, like how to do my taxes, but the textbook for the other parts of the class was the socialist Robert Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers. Fortunately for me, my American History teacher loved America and the US Constitution. His name was Walt Anderson. I think now he saved me.

I survived to become a conservative, but obviously, most of you didn't.    

McCain favorability is up because everyone knows he's going to die soon, not because they like him

Gallup, here, reports him at 58% in August 2017, up from 53% two years ago.

Pure sympathy bump of 9.4%, but that's it. Reminds me of all those protester kids in Charlottesville swarming the car crash victims, hovering around taking picture after picture.

Alive John McCain sucks. And dead he still will.

United States of Cuckistan: Not even "GOP" will condemn antifa (she means Trump)

Yes, girls can be cucks, too. Unnaturally! See Johnson's definition of woman preacher.

Laugh of the Day: Frank Bruni claims to be a white man

In The New York Times.

Charlottesville cops called-off Unite the Right's rally and forcibly dispersed it from the park into the streets, into antifa

Video here.

NYT quotes antifa member saying there was no police presence on the streets in Charlottesville

Here:

Brittany Caine-Conley, a minister in training at Sojourners United Church of Christ, who had come with other faith leaders to protest against the white nationalists, said she was horrified to see officers ins the park watching the violence take place outside in the street.

“There was no police presence,’’ she said. “We were watching people punch each other; people were bleeding all the while police were inside of barricades at the park watching. It was essentially just brawling on the street and community members trying to protect each other.”

Asked about the brawling and why police did not do more to control it, Brian Moran, Virginia’s secretary of public safety, said in an interview on Sunday that “it was a volatile situation and its unfortunate people resorted to violence.’’ But, he said, “From our plan, to insure the safety of our citizens and property, it went extremely well.’’

One ticket in Illinois won the $393 million Megamillions jackpot on Friday . . .

That's 2.6% of Illinois' unpaid bills totaling $15 billion.

Good luck collecting, buddy.

We're not in Skokie anymore, Toto: Another local police department sides with the violent left

But I repeat myself.

Was Seth Rich, murdered five days later, the DNC leaker after all?

From the DNC inside job story in The Nation, here:

Forensicator’s first decisive findings, made public in the paper dated July 9, concerned the volume of the supposedly hacked material and what is called the transfer rate—the time a remote hack would require. The metadata established several facts in this regard with granular precision: On the evening of July 5, 2016, 1,976 megabytes of data were downloaded from the DNC’s server. The operation took 87 seconds. This yields a transfer rate of 22.7 megabytes per second. ... 

Time stamps in the metadata provide further evidence of what happened on [Tuesday] July 5. The stamps recording the download indicate that it occurred in the Eastern Daylight Time Zone at approximately 6:45 pm. This confirms that the person entering the DNC system was working somewhere on the East Coast of the United States. In theory the operation could have been conducted from Bangor or Miami or anywhere in between—but not Russia, Romania, or anywhere else outside the EDT zone. Combined with Forensicator’s findings on the transfer rate, the time stamps constitute more evidence that the download was conducted locally, since delivery overheads—conversion of data into packets, addressing, sequencing times, error checks, and the like—degrade all data transfers conducted via the Internet, more or less according to the distance involved.

Pat Lawrence in The Nation concludes the so-called Russia hack of the DNC was instead a leak, an inside job

Here:

There was no hack of the Democratic National Committee’s system on July 5 last year—not by the Russians, not by anyone else. Hard science now demonstrates it was a leak—a download executed locally with a memory key or a similarly portable data-storage device. In short, it was an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system. This casts serious doubt on the initial “hack,” as alleged, that led to the very consequential publication of a large store of documents on WikiLeaks last summer.

It's a red letter day when the left complains about the indefensible corrupt manipulations of language

Affordable care, comrades.

Here in The Nation:

All this was set in motion when the DNC’s mail server was first violated in the spring of 2016 and by subsequent assertions that Russians were behind that “hack” and another such operation, also described as a Russian hack, on July 5. These are the foundation stones of the edifice just outlined. The evolution of public discourse in the year since is worthy of scholarly study: Possibilities became allegations, and these became probabilities. Then the probabilities turned into certainties, and these evolved into what are now taken to be established truths. By my reckoning, it required a few days to a few weeks to advance from each of these stages to the next. This was accomplished via the indefensibly corrupt manipulations of language repeated incessantly in our leading media.

Gotta love Alabama: Judge Roy "10 Commandments" Moore widens lead to +12 in latest poll

Here.

The Judge has been endorsed by Phil Robertson and Chuck Norris, but notably not by President Trump.

h/t Real Clear Politics

National Review notices that "North Korea just commits some random, unprovoked act of aggression every once in a while"

Here, but doesn't get that it's North Koreans' quintessential view of themselves.

I wonder how many artillery rounds of nerve agent, which Fat Boy used to kill his half-brother, are stockpiled for the much feared "conventional" attack on Seoul.

Laugh of the Day: Hillary's newest cause

Seen here.

You say Korans, I say Koreans . . .

Newt Gingrich is full of crap: Mitch McConnell promised immediate repeal in January 2017 in December 2016

This morning on The Laura Ingraham Show, hosted by Raymond Arroyo, Gingrich criticized Trump for making this too personal.

Laugh of the Day 3.0: Norwegian feminist feels guilty his Somali rapist was deported after serving his sentence

“I am afraid that no girls want me and that other men laugh at me. Afraid that I'll be perceived as anti-feminist when I say that young men who are struggling should get more attention."

Ha ha ha ha ha!

Stockholm obviously exports its syndrome. I wonder how much they make off that? Good thing they're not in NATO or they'd enervate the entire alliance, not just Norway.

Laugh of the Day 2.0: G&%lag, exporting censorship one search at a time

Laugh of the Day 1.0: G&%gle Diversity