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The latest tracking by Nanos Research for CTV News and the Globe and Mail suggests the Liberals have a seven-point lead in the closing week of the federal election campaign.

Numbers released on Oct. 14 show:

Respondents were asked: "If a federal election were held today, could you please rank your top two current local voting preferences?"

Nightly tracking by Nanos Research for CTV News and the Globe and Mail, released Oct. 14. (Nanos Research)

If Canadians were voting today, the most recent results suggest they would elect a Liberal minority government, pollster Nik Nanos told CTV News Channel on Wednesday.

"With a seven-point advantage, the Liberals are in very good shape," he said. "However, there's five days left and a lot could happen."

With the campaign in its final stretch, Nanos said it will be a challenge for Conservative Leader Stephen Harper to close the gap between his party and the Liberals.

"Realistically, last week was the most important week for the ad campaign because we know that people make their decision over the holiday weekend," he said. "The numbers decidedly moved in favour of the Liberals last Friday, Saturday, and Sunday."

The late shift towards Liberal support means that Harper needs more than a well-run campaign to take the lead, Nanos said.

"He needs some massive, major misstep from either the Liberal campaign or (Liberal Leader) Justin Trudeau to try and turn the current trend."

Nanos said the NDP also faces an uphill battle in the coming five days.

After a strong start to the campaign, the party has fallen to third place in the most recent Nanos tracking, almost 12 percentage points behind the Liberals.

"The story for the NDP has been that there was a lot of good will on the front end of the campaign, but as it looked like the Liberals were the only party to challenge the Conservatives, people strategically voted," Nanos said.

"So it's not a repudiation on Thomas Mulcair and the NDP, just people seeing the Liberals as the vehicle for change."

Poll methodology

A national dual-frame (land and cell) random telephone survey is conducted nightly by Nanos Research throughout the campaign using live agents. Each evening a new group of 400 eligible voters are interviewed. The daily tracking figures are based on a three-day rolling sample composed of 1,200 interviews. To update the tracking a new day of interviewing is added and the oldest day dropped. The margin of error 1,096 decided voters is 3.0 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

Regional Races:

The Liberals lead in Atlantic Canada and Ontario, while the Conservatives have the lead in the Prairie provinces.

According to Nanos, the Liberals' Ontario advantage could significantly impact the election results.

"We call it a killer province in terms of the outcome of the election," Nanos said on Wednesday. "Ontario made Stephen Harper a majority government last time, and right now the Liberals have a 12-point advantage."

Meanwhile, in Quebec, the latest numbers show a tight race between the NDP and Liberals.

Nanos said the Quebec tie is the result of a "massive drop" in support for the NDP in the province.

Earlier in the campaign, the NDP was polling at approximately 50 per cent support in Quebec, Nanos said, but more recently the party's fallen to 32.6 per cent, while the Liberals are at 30.5 per cent in the province.

British Columbia is also locked in a tie, with the Conservatives and Liberals both hovering around 30 per cent.

But, Nanos said, the "party to watch" in British Columbia is the fourth-place Greens, who are currently at 13.9 per cent support in the province.

"They've been doing better in the last three or four days," he said. "Perhaps Elizabeth May might have a little company, a B.C. seat-mate."

The most recent regional numbers:

Full poll at Nanos Research

Follow @niknanos on Twitter

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Nanos tracking: Liberals have 7-point lead in campaign's ...

Adding to our earlier commentary Iven Plis writing at the Daily Caller reports:

Reporters Asked Pope Francis About Being Communist. Heres What He Said

And to the accusations of communism, Francis said that I havent said anything more than whats written in the social doctrine of the Church. If there are mistakes in his teaching, the pope said, they are an error of explanation, not a flaw in the teaching itself.

He joked that he could gladly clear up any misconceptions about his Catholic bona fides: If necessary, Ill recite the creed.

People are using his ill-informed words to advocate for flesh and blood policy matters on climate and economies. He cannot abjure responsibility and joke about the seriousness of getting it right and not sowing confusion.

Patriot Post writer Nate Jackson had this commentary, set forth in its entirety here with permission.

Francis Confuses Corporatism and Capitalism

Pope Francis arrived Tuesday for his first visit to the U.S. He will not only tour a Philadelphia prison and a Harlem school to showcase his trademark concern for the poor and downtrodden, but he will give the first-ever papal address to Congress Thursday on a range of topics. The political angle is that Democrats have finally found a pope with whom they can agree on the issues of climate and poverty all while ignoring traditional Catholic teaching on marriage and the sanctity of life.

Francis arrived here by way of the Communist paradise poverty-stricken totalitarian island known as Cuba, where he spent four days and met not with dissidents but with Fidel Castro whom he reportedly thanked for his contributions to world peace. Notably, Francis arrived by plane, not by homemade raft on the shores of Florida as do many of the poor people fleeing Cubas oppressive regime for the Land of Liberty.

Indeed, if Francis truly cares for the poor, he showed it quite poorly in this instance.

Of capitalism in general, he said in his recent apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape. Such an economy kills.

Its no wonder he has an eager audience in the Democrats and Castros of the world.

But its important to understand that Francis views on capitalism are informed by his experience in his home country of Argentina a nation beset with powerful families and businesses influential in government. In other words, its not the free market and its not capitalism. Its cronyism and corporatism.

Its also ironic, writes Thomas Sowell, considering Argentina was once among the leading economies of the world, before it was ruined by the kind of ideological notions [Francis] is now promoting around the world.

God does warn His people about loving money, and greed and inequity are part of sinful human nature no matter the economic system. But which countrys poor are better off Cubas, Argentinas or Americas? The truth is that no economic system has done more than capitalism to lift the poor out of poverty.

Tyranny kills, not Liberty.

Furthermore, Jesus never told his followers to perform charity by giving their money to the Romans instead. Contrary to the assertions of far too many, Jesus was not a socialist He always preached individual responsibility for our brothers and sisters, not collective statist mandates.

In many respects, Francis care for the poor is welcome. All Christians ought to see every opportunity to help the disadvantaged among us. But its the popes methods we object to. He is a proponent at least tacitly of liberation theology, a synthesis of Marxism and Christianity born in South America in the 1970s and 80s. Liberation theology embraces collectivization, the subordination of the individual in favor of the group, and the forced redistribution of wealth and property without fair compensation. Furthermore, Marxism is profoundly anti-religion, making its blending with Christian teaching like mixing oil and water.

Its noteworthy that Francis has thus effectively reversed the position of John Paul II, who was a staunch opponent of such noxious theology, and, together with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, brought down the Soviet Empire. Try to imagine John Paul glad-handing Fidel Castro while dissidents languished in prison.

On the subject of climate change, the onerous regulations and top-down government solutions favored by Francis and his fellow alarmist travelers (and we do mean travelers in fuel-burning jets all over the world) are exactly the policies that will hurt the poor the most.

In his recent encyclical, Francis declared, The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth. He blames the problem on consumerism, corporate greed, overreliance on technology and the poisonous political atmosphere in and among many nations. He called for a radial change in how people conduct their political and economic affairs and suggested that the time has come for each of us to alter our individual lifestyles in response to climate issues.

But The Wall Street Journal retorts, Well, he should have seen East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall, or the air in Beijing today. Coercive governments are the worst befoulers of the environment. Democratic capitalism has created the wealth and electoral consent to clean the air and water, and only continued economic growth will create the resources to deal with climate change if it does become a serious threat to the Earth.

Francis says, Humanity is called on to be aware of the need to change lifestyles, production and consumption because the world is filled with a culture of waste. Were all for using energy judiciously and curbing waste, but not under the pretense of a UN-Vatican mandate, which is essentially the prescription Francis gives.

In short, while Francis has authority over doctrinal issues in his own church, his message on climate and economics is dead wrong and it should be rejected.

R Mall

Originally posted here:
Veritaspac.com | Defeating liberals /advocating a ...

New York Democrat Sen. Chuck Schumer stole the headlines and put the White House on the defensive when he said he would vote against President Barack Obamas nuclear agreement with Iran.

But Obamas backstop in the House, where the Democratic Caucus is dominated by liberals, is holding firm.

Close to 40 House Democrats have come out in favor of the deal since it was first announced in mid-July, while 16 senators have voiced their support. And there are dozens of additional Democrats whove signaled in interviews and statements that they are inclined to back Obamas deal, which aims to stop Tehrans development of a nuclear weapon in exchange for lifting economic sanctions. Most notably, not one of the 151 House Democrats who signed a May letter in support of the broad outlines of the agreement have announced opposition to the final product.

Obama needs at least 144 House Democrats to stick by him to sustain a veto of any GOP legislation that would undermine or dismantle the deal with Iran.

Growing Democratic support comes despite fierce opposition from Republicans and a huge, multimillion dollar effort by anti-deal groups like the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Republicans are planning to pass legislation this September that would disapprove of the deal and prevent the lifting of key sanctions, a move that would scuttle the agreement.

And opposition from Schumer is a significant blow for the administration, given his power and prominence in the party hes expected to be the leader of the Democratic Caucus after Harry Reid retires at the end of this Congress. But Schumers not expected to push other Democrats to oppose the deal. And even if enough swing Democrats followed Schumer and threatened to override a veto, the House would still serve as a bulwark for the agreement.

In the House, recent endorsements have come from the liberal wing of the party, including California Reps. Lois Capps, Doris Matsui and Mark Takano. Minnesota Rep. Tim Walz also announced his support this week.

This deal gives us the best chance we have had in years to halt the Iranian nuclear program, Walz said on Tuesday. It dismantles the progress they have made and opens up the country to strict inspections.

On Wednesday, Massachusetts Rep. Niki Tsongas voiced her support.

The consequences of rejecting this deal cannot be underestimated, leaving the United States isolated with no leverage and weakened alliances and credibility. Iran, already a nuclear threshold state, would be left unchecked with no reason to hold back its pursuit of a nuclear weapon, Tsongas said.

So far, only nine House Democrats have come out against the deal but that number is likely to edge up slightly by the time the House holds its September vote. And Schumers opposition is a setback, particularly given how tight the Senate vote is expected to be.

POLITICO reported this week that Schumer has called 20 to 30 Democrats since he announced his opposition last week to explain why he cant support the deal. Sources said, however, that Schumer is promising not to whip lawmakers against the agreement.

And even Democrats who support the deal had some reservations; Matsui and Takano included broad criticisms of the deals framework in their announcements of support.

The deal is not perfect. No diplomatic endeavor ever results in an agreement wherein one side or the other gets everything it hoped for, Takano said. Iran has broken previous agreements, and we should be under no illusion that this deal means that they are now trustworthy or our friends.

But Takano added that having had family members affected by the atomic bombs that the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II made him inclined to support the deal.

Preventing the proliferation of nuclear weaponry is more than sound policy; it is a moral imperative, he said.

The House and Senate are both expected to take up resolutions disapproving of the deal in mid-September when Congress returns from its five-week recess. The measures will likely pass, with nearly unanimous Republican support and some Democrats as well.

Obama has pledged to veto any legislation that stops the agreement from moving forward. It would then fall to either House or Senate Democrats to sustain that veto. Senior staffers in the House have predicted for weeks that lawmakers have the numbers to back Obama and prevent an override of his veto.

House lawmakers currently on record opposing the deal include Steve Israel of New York a leading Jewish lawmaker and Nita Lowey, Eliot Engel, Grace Meng and Kathleen Rice of New York, Albio Sires of New Jersey, Ted Deutch of Florida and Juan Vargas of California.

Iran is a grave threat to international stability. It is the largest state sponsor of terror in the world and continues to hold American citizens behind bars on bogus charges, Engel said last week. We can have no doubt about the malevolent intent of a countrys leaders who chant Death to America and Death to Israel just days after concluding a deal.

Many lawmakers, including influential leaders, are still keeping their positions quiet. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif) is leading the whip operation for the deal in the House but her top lieutenants, Minority Whip Steny Hoyer and Democratic Caucus Chairman Xavier Becerra are both publicly undecided.

Hoyer, a Maryland Democrat, traveled to Israel over the August recess with a group of House Democrats and Republican Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California. On their visit, the lawmakers met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu an ardent critic of the deal.

Hoyer didnt make any comments on the nuclear agreement while in Israel but released a jointly authored statement with McCarthy on Wednesday underlining congressional support for Israels security.

As we visited the towns of Ashkelon and Sderot near Gaza, we saw firsthand that without the Iron Dome, many more people would have lost their lives, the joint statement read. Congress stands united with Israel, not only in support of its Iron Dome defenses, but also in preserving Israels security and ensuring the safety of its people. In these dangerous times, Israel can always be certain that the American people are by their side.

Continue reading here:
Liberals poised to give Barack Obama a win on Iran - POLITICO

This article discusses liberalism as that term is used in the United States in the 20th and 21st centuries. For the history and development of American liberalism, see Liberalism in the United States. For the origin and worldwide use of the term liberalism, see Liberalism.

Modern American liberalism is the dominant version of liberalism in the United States. It combines social liberalism with support for social justice and a mixed economy. American liberal causes include voting rights for minorities, legalized abortion on demand, support for same-sex marriage, and government programs such as education and health care.[1] It has its roots in Theodore Roosevelt's New Nationalism, Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom, Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, Harry S. Truman's Fair Deal, John F. Kennedy's New Frontier, and Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society. Conservatives oppose liberals on most (but not all) issues; the relationship between liberal and progressive is debated.[2][3][4][5][6][7]

Keynesian economic theory has played a central role in the economic philosophy of modern American liberals.[8] The argument has been that national prosperity requires government management of the macroeconomy, to keep unemployment low, inflation in check, and growth high.[8]

John F. Kennedy defined a liberal as follows:[9][10]

"...someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the peopletheir health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil libertiessomeone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a 'Liberal', then I'm proud to say I'm a 'Liberal'."

Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1941 defined a liberal party as one

"which believes that, as new conditions and problems arise beyond the power of men and women to meet as individuals, it becomes the duty of Government itself to find new remedies with which to meet them. The liberal party insists that the Government has the definite duty to use all its power and resources to meet new social problems with new social controlsto ensure to the average person the right to his own economic and political life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."[11]

Modern American liberals value institutions that defend against economic inequality. In The Conscience of a Liberal Paul Krugman writes: "I believe in a relatively equal society, supported by institutions that limit extremes of wealth and poverty. I believe in democracy, civil liberties, and the rule of law. That makes me a liberal, and I'm proud of it."[12] Liberals often point to the widespread prosperity enjoyed under a mixed economy in the years since World WarII.[13][14] They believe liberty exists when access to necessities like health care and economic opportunity are available to all,[15] and they champion the protection of the environment.[16][17] Modern American liberalism is typically associated with the Democratic Party, as modern American conservatism is typically associated with the Republican Party.[18]

Liberalism is one of the dominant ideologies of the United States, but remains well behind conservatism in popularity among voters. In the 2012 election, 25% of voters who went to the polls identified themselves as liberals.[19][20] In the November 2014 House elections liberals comprised 23% of the voters, and conservatives 37%.[21] A January 2015 poll by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal found that 26% of all adults considered themselves either very liberal or somewhat liberal compared with 34% who considered themselves either very conservative or somewhat conservative.[22] Also in the same month, Gallup recorded that liberal self-identification reached a record high of 24% in their poll.[23]

In early 21st century political discourse in the United States, liberalism has come to include support for reproductive rights for women, including abortion,[24] affirmative action for minority groups historically discriminated against,[25]multilateralism and support for international institutions,[26] support for individual rights over corporate interests,[27] support for universal health care for Americans (with a "single payer" option), support for gay rights and marriage equality, and opposition to tax cuts for the rich.[28]

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Modern liberalism in the United States - Wikipedia, the ...

Neoliberalism[1] is a term whose usage and definition have changed over time.[2]

Since the 1980s, the term has been used by scholars[3] and critics[4] primarily in reference to the resurgence of 19th century ideas associated with laissez-faire economic liberalism beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, whose advocates support extensive economic liberalization policies such as privatization, fiscal austerity, deregulation, free trade, and reductions in government spending in order to enhance the role of the private sector in the economy.[2][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12] Neoliberalism is famously associated with the economic policies introduced by Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the United States.[5] The transition of consensus towards neoliberal policies and the acceptance of neoliberal economic theories in the 1970s are seen by some academics as the root of financialization, with the financial crisis of 200708 one of the ultimate results.[13][14][15][16][17]

Neoliberalism was originally an economic philosophy that emerged among European liberal scholars in the 1930s in an attempt to trace a so-called Third or Middle Way between the conflicting philosophies of classical liberalism and socialist planning.[18] The impetus for this development arose from a desire to avoid repeating the economic failures of the early 1930s, which were mostly blamed on the economic policy of classical liberalism. In the decades that followed, the use of the term neoliberal tended to refer to theories at variance with the more laissez-faire doctrine of classical liberalism, and promoted instead a market economy under the guidance and rules of a strong state, a model which came to be known as the social market economy.

In the 1960s, usage of the term "neoliberal" heavily declined. When the term was reintroduced in the 1980s in connection with Augusto Pinochets economic reforms in Chile, the usage of the term had shifted. It had not only become a term with negative connotations employed principally by critics of market reform, but it also had shifted in meaning from a moderate form of liberalism to a more radical and laissez-faire capitalist set of ideas. Scholars now tended to associate it with the theories of economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman.[2] Once the new meaning of neoliberalism was established as a common usage among Spanish-speaking scholars, it diffused directly into the English-language study of political economy.[2] Scholarship on the phenomenon of neoliberalism has been growing.[19] The impact of the global 2008-09 crisis has also given rise to new scholarship that critiques neoliberalism and seeks developmental alternatives.[20]

The German scholar Alexander Rstow coined the term "neoliberalism" in 1938 at the Colloque Walter Lippmann.[21][22][23] The colloquium defined the concept of neoliberalism as involving "the priority of the price mechanism, the free enterprise, the system of competition and a strong and impartial state".[24] To be "neoliberal" meant advocating a modern economic policy with State intervention.[25] Neoliberal State interventionism brought a clash with the opposite laissez-faire camp of classical liberals, like Ludwig von Mises.[26] While present-day scholars tend to identify Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Ayn Rand as the most important theorists of neoliberalism, most scholars in the 1950s and 1960s understood neoliberalism as referring to the social market economy and its principal economic theorists such as Eucken, Rpke, Rstow, and Mller-Armack. Although Hayek had intellectual ties to the German neoliberals, his name was only occasionally mentioned in conjunction with neoliberalism during this period due to his more pro-free market stance. Friedman's name essentially never appeared in connection with neoliberalism until the 1980s.[2] In the sixties, use of the term "neoliberal" heavily declined.[2]

Another movement from the American left that used the term "Neoliberalism" to describe its ideology formed in the United States in the 1970s. Prominent neoliberal politicians supposedly included Al Gore and Bill Clinton of the Democratic Party of the United States.[27] The neoliberals coalesced around two magazines, The New Republic and the Washington Monthly. The "godfather" of this version of neoliberalism was the journalist Charles Peters[28] who in 1983 published "A Neoliberal's Manifesto."[29]

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer argues that, "Academics (largely left-wing) started using neoliberalism in the 1970s to describe and decry a late twentieth-century effort by policy makers, think-tank experts, and industrialists to condemn social-democratic reforms and unapologetically implement free-market policies."[30] Other academics note that neoliberalism has critics from across the political spectrum.[31]

During the military rule under Augusto Pinochet (19731990) in Chile, opposition scholars took up the expression to describe the economic reforms implemented in Chile after 1973 and its proponents (the "Chicago Boys").[2] Once the new meaning of neoliberalism was established as a common usage among Spanish-speaking scholars, it diffused directly into the English-language study of political economy.[2] In the last two decades, according to the Boas and Gans-Morse study of 148 journal articles, neoliberalism is almost never defined but used in several senses to describe ideology, economic theory, development theory, or economic reform policy. It has largely become a term of condemnation employed by critics. And it now suggests a market fundamentalism closer to the laissez-faire principles of the "paleoliberals" than to the ideas of the original neoliberals who attended the colloquium. This leaves some controversy as to the precise meaning of the term and its usefulness as a descriptor in the social sciences, especially as the number of different kinds of market economies have proliferated in recent years.[2] In the book Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction, published by Oxford University Press (2010), the authors argue that neoliberalism is "anchored in the principles of the free-market economics."[15]

According to Boas and Gans-Morse, neoliberalism is nowadays an academic catchphrase used mainly by critics as a pejorative term, and has outpaced the use of similar terms such as monetarism, neoconservatism, the Washington Consensus and "market reform" in much scholarly writing.[2] Daniel Stedman Jones, a historian of the concept, says the term "is too often used as a catch-all shorthand for the horrors associated with globalization and recurring financial crises"[32] Nowadays the most common use of the term neoliberalism refers to market-oriented reform policies such as "eliminating price controls, deregulating capital markets, lowering trade barriers", and reducing state influence on the economy especially by privatization and fiscal austerity.[2] The term is used in several senses: as a development model it refers to the rejection of structuralist economics in favor of the Washington Consensus; as an ideology the term is used to denote a conception of freedom as an overarching social value associated with reducing state functions to those of a minimal state; and finally as an academic paradigm the term is closely related to neoclassical economic theory.[2] The sociologists Fred L. Block and Margaret R. Somers claim there is a dispute over what to call the influence of free market ideas which have been used to justify the retrenchment of New Deal programs and policies over the last thirty years: neoliberalism, laissez-faire or just "free market ideology."[33]

Other academics, such as Susan Braedley and Meg Luxton, assert that neoliberalism is a political philosophy which seeks to "liberate" the processes of capital accumulation.[14] American professor of political science and Democratic socialist Frances Fox Piven sees neoliberalism as essentially hyper-capitalism.[34]Robert W. McChesney, American professor at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign and co-editor of the independent socialist magazine Monthly Review, claims that the term neoliberalism, which he defines as "capitalism with the gloves off," is largely unknown by the general public, particularly in the United States.[35]

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Neoliberalism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia