On June 7, the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, a libertarian think tank founded and funded by the Koch brothers, released its latest snapshot of liberty in the U.S.A: "Freedom in the 50 States: An Index of Personal and Economic Freedom."

As is usually the case in studies of this sort, high-population blue states inevitably end up ranking last. The metrics used by the authors of the study penalize high taxes, regulations and, in general, just about anything that restricts the freedom of individuals and corporations to do as they please, from gun control laws and healthcare mandates to rules requiring seat belts and motorcycle helmets. Befitting libertarian sensibilities, the ideological biases in the Mercatus report do not purely jibe with conservative Republican priorities -- states get points for decriminalizing marijuana and allowing same sex marriage or civil unions, for example -- but nevertheless, the political gist is hard to ignore. Blue states cluster at the bottom, while red states are at the top.

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Leaving aside the rehashed argument that "Teletubbies" "Sesame Street" is a liberal attack on family values, can we talk about how Ben Shapiro's first sentence on the show was, "Yeah, I kind of want to take them out back and cap 'em." What? Hopefully, he is talking about Big Bird and Elmo and not the children that Hannity said were going to hate the conservative author/pundit after his book comes out. Family values!

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Superior Court Judge Mark Rindner issued his ruling late Tuesday in a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union of Alaska.

The ACLU filed a lawsuit contending the raids are unconstitutional because they violate property rights of the homeless. The group says the homeless have the same rights as everyone else.

The city passed an ordinance this summer giving the homeless five days' notice to leave the illegal camps. The ACLU says property then is seized and destroyed.

The ACLU wants the city to provide longer notice and store seized property, as well as give time for social services to be involved.

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Lindsey coined that term in a 2006 piece on the possibility of libertarians and liberals finding common cause. Cato produces a lot of work that liberals ought to love -- Radley Balko's work on police militarization, to pick one example, is essential, enraging reading. But it looks like any explicit efforts toward reaching out to liberals and Democrats have been called off.

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In a video played Saturday at the annual Netroots Nation convention, the president acknowledged that some in the party's left wing have been unhappy with the pace of change. Liberals have been disenchanted on issues from the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the failure to create a government-run insurance option in the health care overhaul.

The president says in the brief video that the combat mission in Iraq will end in August.

It's a tough election year for Democrats, but Obama warned about returning to Republican policies "that got us into the mess."

He says "change is hard," and he urged hundreds of activists and bloggers in the audience to "keep making your voices heard."

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In a review of "Never Enough: America's Limitless Welfare State" by William Voegeli, editor of the Claremont Review, Will endorses the outlandish claims of the Straussian school. According to Will, we must choose between "two Princetonians -- James Madison, class of 1771, and Woodrow Wilson, class of 1879." Madisonian conservatives believe that government should "protect the exercise of natural rights that pre-exist government, rights that human reason can ascertain in unchanging principles of conduct and that are essential to the pursuit of happiness." In contrast, Wilsonian progressives believe that History with a capital "H" "rather than nature, defines government's ever-evolving menu of rights -- entitlements that serve an open-ended understanding of material and even spiritual well-being."

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Interior Ministry spokeswoman Sabine Haddad said Chomsky was turned away for "various reasons" but declined to elaborate. Chomsky was trying to cross the Allenby Bridge from Jordan. He was scheduled to deliver a lecture at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank.

Haddad said her ministry was looking into allowing him to enter only the West Bank.

Chomsky told Channel 10 TV from Jordan Sunday: "I've often spoken at Israeli universities."

Chomsky is one of Israel's harshest academic critics. After Israel's 2009 war in Gaza, he was quoted as saying, "supporters of Israel are in reality supporters of its moral degeneration."

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Kitty Kelley might claim that her book "Oprah," which hits shelves on Tuesday, includes revelations about Oprah's enormous ego, her controlling ways, her coldness toward her mother, her strange relationship with longtime beau Stedman Graham, but early reports suggest that the book is a retread of information we already have. Either way, though, most of Oprah's viewers, fans and even casual curiosity-seekers will find any new information beside the point. How could a human being with this much power and ambition not be a little bossy or self-aggrandizing?

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Behind Glenn Beck's televised crusade against progressivism and Jonah Goldberg's bestselling tract "Liberal Fascism" is more than the usual attempt to smear political opponents by shouting, "So you agree with Hitler!" Beck and Goldberg are peddling dumbed-down versions of the history of the American center-left that originated with serious scholars on the American right. As Beck says of his frequent guest professor R.J. Pestritto's book "Woodrow Wilson and American Progressivism, "That book will make your head hurt but you will read things that you'd never knew [sic] in history."

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It's a fair question, considering that Democratic politicians regularly substitute "progressive" for "liberal" in news releases and speeches. Predictably, Republicans call their opponents' linguistic shift a craven branding maneuver, and frankly, they're right: Most Democrats make no distinction between the two words.

However, that doesn't mean the ideologies are synonymous. In fact, if the last decade of economic policy proves anything, it is that even as the word "progressive" is now ubiquitous, a perverted form of liberalism has almost completely snuffed out genuine progressivism.

Some background: Economic liberalism has typically focused on using the government's treasury as a means to ends, whether those ends are better healthcare (Medicare/Medicaid), stronger job growth (tax credits) or more robust export businesses (corporate subsidies). The idea is that taxpayer dollars can help individuals afford bare necessities and entice institutions to support the common good.

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A generation after Ronald Reagan and his allies turned "liberal" into an epithet, conservatives are going after the term many Democrats adopted in its place. Glenn Beck and his paranoid Fox News Channel ranting is just at the forefront of what appears to be a movement to demonize the word "progressive," in hopes of scaring voters away from the left. "Progressivism is the cancer in America, and it is eating our Constitution," Beck told thousands of adoring fans at the conservative CPAC conference last month. "And it was designed to eat the Constitution. To 'progress' past the Constitution." The National Review ran a whole special issue on progressives in December; staff writer Jonah Goldberg even published a book on the subject, "Liberal Fascism," two years ago. The latest ad for Liz Cheney's new group, Keep America Safe, prominently features Attorney General Eric Holder declaring that progressives are about to run the nation -- before seguing, sharply, into asking whether Holder's pals share the values of al-Qaida.

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For now, though, it doesn't seem as if those critics have had much effect on the opinion of most liberal Democrats. In an article for the National Journal, Pollster.com's Mark Blumenthal makes a convincing case based on polling that there's not really any evidence of a larger backlash against Obama:

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Mainstream media outlets barely do a decent job reporting the news. Their attempt at political science is absolutely atrocious.

The assumption that Obama is a progressive

When commentators describe Obama as a pragmatist, they assume that he is a progressive who compromises to achieve practical benefits. It is unclear, however, that Obama is actually a progressive.

Although Obama became the darling of the political left during the Democratic primaries, he never really embraced policies that were more progressive than other mainstream Democratic presidential contenders. Nevertheless, the left was so desperate to replace President Bush and to avoid the "triangulation" of the Clinton era that it easily accepted Obama's progressive narrative. Obama also benefited from an adoring media, which failed to raise tough questions about his progressive credentials and which often rushed to denounce his critics.

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Many Democrats -- including President Obama -- previously argued that such measures, particularly the public plan, could provide competition for insurers and reduce the cost of insurance premiums. Indeed, one of the strongest arguments in support of a universal mandate -- which the bill contains -- is that the public plan would reduce costs and make insurance affordable for the uninsured.

Under orders from the White House, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid deleted the public plan and Medicare buy-in from the healthcare bill. This move has angered liberals, who rightfully point out that Obama is betraying promises from his own very recent presidential campaign. Howard Dean, a medical doctor and former head of the Democratic National Committee, has advocated that senators "kill" the bill and craft a new measure that offers "real reform." Furthermore, Senator Bernie Sanders, who actually prefers a single-payer system, announced yesterday that he was not committed to voting for the legislation in its present format.

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I had you going there for a minute, didn't I? The "weapons supply tax credit" is a joke. It was proposed some years ago by the late David Bradford, a Princeton economist who worked in the Ford and George H.W. Bush administrations. Bradford's purpose was to ridicule the growing reliance of Congresses and presidents on tax credits and other so-called tax expenditures as an alternative to ordinary spending programs funded by ordinary taxes.

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That is women with children are often more liberal, but dads are, more often than not, no different than men without children. When we do see these conservative differences for dads, we hypothesize that the Republican rhetoric has largely been effective, e.g., men want to keep the government out of their way in providing for their family. For example, men actually start working more when they have kids thus lower taxes means more take-home pay to provide for the family rather than appreciating the government services that benefit children/families.

The fact that a majority of dads do not change their political allegiance after parenthood suggests that the press release from N.C. State pushed by EurekAlert slightly misrepresented Greene's conclusions. However, Larry Letich, a psychotherapist in Bethesda, Md., offers a thoughtful response explaining why the minority might become more conservative that feels intuitively on-the-mark to me.

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From research presented by NC State professor Steven Greene and Dr. Laurel Elder of Hartwick College at the American Political Science Association's annual meeting, we learn that "Parenthood makes moms more liberal, dads more conservative."

Unfortunately, the summary from EurekAlert doesn't offer any theories as to why this might be so, but I think that with reader help, I can fill in the blanks.

The mom part is obvious. Since even in these supposedly progressive times, moms end up doing must of the child-rearing, they have an instant, intuitive grasp of the necessity of a strong welfare state. They naturally appreciate the advantages provided by state-funded day care and education, because without government, they'd be doing all of it. Moms generally take care of most of the kid's doctor and dentist appointments, so they also understand why comprehensive health care insurance is essential. They also knowthat leaving kids alone to organize their own anarcho-syndicalist communes where they can do whatever they want is a recipe for smashed crockery and peanut butter stains on the Persian carpets. Moms think libertarians are just silly. Moms provide most of the nannying -- of course they are pro nanny-state.

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The new progressive coalition follows the lines of the "emerging Democratic majority" that Ruy Teixeira and John Judis predicted in their 2002 book of that name: minority, professional, and younger voters, with help from a large gender gap. This is a coalition that can win without a majority of white working-class voters, whether union members or not ... But it's also dangerous. A political coalition that doesn't need Joe the – fake – Plumber (John McCain's mascot of the white working class) can also afford to ignore the real Joes, Josés, and Josephines of the working middle class, the ones who earn $16 an hour, not $250,000 a year. It can afford to be unconcerned about the collapse of manufacturing jobs, casually reassuring us that more education is the answer to all economic woes. A party of professionals and young voters risks becoming a party that overlooks the core economic crisis – not the recession but the 40-year crisis – that is wiping out the American dream for millions of workers and communities that are never going to become meccas for foodies and Web designers.

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Examine the symptoms of this infection, beginning with David Letterman's comments (widely noted but insufficiently analyzed) about Sarah Palin "buying makeup at Bloomingdale's to update her slutty flight attendant look," as well as his joke about Palin's teenage daughter: "Sarah Palin went to a Yankees Game yesterday … during the seventh inning stretch, her daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez." (Letterman insists he was talking about her 18-year-old daughter, Bristol, who actually had been, well, knocked up, not her 14-year-old, Willow, the daughter who attended the game.) A week before these remarks aired, there was an uglier outbreak of the contagion in the pages of Playboy -- never a bastion of egalitarian forward thinking, but still -- where writer Guy Cimbalo published a list of 10 conservative women he'd like to "hate fuck," a term that various observers interpreted as rough sex, sex tinged by rage, or rape. (Gabe Winant wrote for Broadsheet about the "Hate Fuck" story, which has since been yanked by Playboy.) Worse than the violence of the general sentiment was the graphic specificity of the "Hate Fuck Rating" appended to each woman -- a list that included Michelle Malkin, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Dana Perino and Laura Ingraham. On Hasslebeck: "You'd be better served sucking off Regis Philbin." On Malkin: "Worse than fucking Eva Braun."

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Unlike the Oscars, we won't make you wait three dull, agonizing hours to hear the results you care about. So, without further ado, the winners are:

Most liberal senator: Washington's Patty Murray

Most conservative senator: A four-way tie between Arizona's Jon Kyl, Wyoming's Michael Enzi, Nevada's John Ensign and Wyoming's John Barrasso

As War Room loyalists might remember, the National Journal got plenty of attention last year when they slapped the most liberal label on then-Sen. Barack Obama (John Kerry got the same rating in 2003). Alex expressed some skepticism about the rankings at the time:

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