A recent Gallup poll found that 31 percent of Americans self-identify as social liberals, and that an equal percentage call themselves social conservatives -- the first time since Gallup began conducting such surveys in 1999 that conservatives haven’t outnumbered liberals. On Tuesday, pundit Michael Tomasky seized on this development as an indication that Republicans no longer will be able to use so-called wedge issues to gain Democratic crossover votes, but that maybe now Dems can win away GOPers who aren’t thrilled with their party’s stands on matters like gay marriage.

Tomasky added that any Democratic wedge issues would have a different “psychic ingredient” than those that Republicans have pressed, given that the GOP has relied on “fear-mongering…Conservatives are much better at this than liberals are, and in any case, if liberals tried this it just wouldn’t make sense or work. Everybody knows that the anti-same-sex-marriage side is losing fast.”

In a competition for Dumbest Headline Ever, we might consider the Daily Beast asking, “Can We Please Get God Out of Religion?” The subheadline was “We all need a spiritual side. But not because of some make-believe afterlife. Because it makes us better in this life.”

Barrett Holmes Pitner wrote this as one of those godless “millennials” now showing up in Pew Research polls about America becoming less Christian.

Kimberly Dozier of Daily Beast has an excellent piece today you might not see picked up by many in the Obama-puffing national media: "Special Ops to Obama: Let Us Fight ISIS, Already."

They don’t observe any pretense of objectivity at the Daily Beast with a headline like “Hero Judge Rules Abstinence-Only Sex Ed Is Illegal.” The sexual revolution was the one of the foundational layers of 1960’s leftism. But “national reporter” Kate Briquelet came along much later.

In the course of her celebration of this “groundbreaking decision,” Briquelet showcased the shouts of joy from other leftist groups, such as the ACLU, who called the ruling a “huge victory for students.”

The faltering religious right would be well served to borrow a strategy from gay activists, but it almost certainly won’t, contended The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky in a Friday column.

In Tomasky’s telling, the gay-rights movement in the 1980s alienated many because it could be self-righteous to the point of belligerence, but eventually “the leaders of the movement saw that it was more important to persuade public opinion than to shock it. And so the public-relations strategy around the movement for same-sex marriage became ‘we’re just like you.’ And it worked.”

The religious right, Tomasky argued, “can’t change. When you believe the Big Guy Himself handed you down your positions, you’re not going to alter them or indeed even the way you talk about them. What is the religious right’s version of ‘we’re just like you’? I don’t think there is one. Because they are not like the rest of us, at least when it comes to politics.”