Daily Archives: February 6, 2017

The outspoken South Australian Liberal senator Cory Bernardi will break away from the Turnbull government early this week to form his own conservative movement.

Bernardi has gone to ground but expectations within the government are now hard set that the split is on.

The South Australian has been telling friends hes been waiting for the resumption of parliament for 2017 to clarify his intentions, which have been the subject of internal speculation for much of the summer.

Bernardi is likely to confirm his position either on Tuesday, which is the first day of the new parliamentary year, or by midweek.

There was speculation that Queensland conservative Liberal National party backbencher George Christensen might join Bernardi, but Christensen said he remained loyal to his leader Barnaby Joyce and the LNP, as long as the government held true to its values.

Christensen told Guardian Australia he still believed he could be effective within government.

I still believe we can effect change from within government, thats why I am not going anywhere, Christensen said.

Christensen said he remained loyal to Joyce, and to the National Party.

Im here in the government, as long as the government holds true to the values of the people that put us there.

Christensen said Bernardi had not approached him to join and they had not spoken for the past week but that the South Australian senator was a wasted talent on the backbench.

As parliament returns for the first week of the year, Newspoll shows Labor in front 54% to 46%. At the same time conservative MPs are pushing back against reports that moderate Liberals are positioning to move marriage equality forward following the failure of the plebiscite legislation.

Treasurer Scott Morrison labelled the reports that moderates were involved in a new push for a free vote fake news.

But conservatives, including Tony Abbott, insist that a plebiscite engineered under his leadership but rejected by the parliament is the only way forward.

Christensen also warned fellow MPs against any push for a free vote.

If this government goes down the road of breaking its agreement with the people that we made that we were going to do to a plebiscite, then, you know, the shows over, Christensen said.

And he again had an ambiguous warning for the Turnbull-Joyce government on moving away from the conservative agenda.

We need to reconnect with our core constituency and with the people at large and I think that theres moves a foot to do that, Christensen said. So I really do hope that we succeed in doing that. Because if we drift away any further, you know, its going to become untenable.

Bernardis defection has been a long time coming. His Conservative Leadership Foundation reregistered a number of domain names relating to a conservative party in December 2014, including conservative.org.au, conservativeparty.com.au and conservativeparty.org.au.

Immediately after the election last year, when the Coalition almost lost office, Bernardi warned a conservative revolution was required within the Liberal party to reset the broad policy direction and if we dont do that weve got a taste of the revolution waiting for us outside.

He had a ringside seat in the US during the presidential election that saw Donald Trump take the presidency on the back of a conservative, grassroots insurgency.

His preparations to break away have intensified after what he witnessed in the US.

The split to open the political year will add to the list of woes being faced by the prime minister, which include bad polling, a lack of Senate support for the governments policy agenda and a threat from a resurgent One Nation party.

The treasurer, Scott Morrison, attempted to hose down the dangers posed by the split in an interview on Monday where the Sydney broadcaster Ray Hadley declared the only hope the government had of retaining power was if Malcolm Turnbull resigned as prime minister.

Morrison said what Bernardi did was ultimately up to him. Lets see what he announces, what he chooses to do is a matter for him.

Read more:

Cory Bernardi to quit Liberals to form own conservative party - The Guardian

Just last week, Breitbart News editor and public speaker Milo Yiannopoulos saw one of his speaking engagements canceled when a protest against him at UC Berkeley turned into a violent riot. Rioters broke windows and even took part in brutal beatings of Milos supporters.

I am not on the same side politically as Milo. I am a liberal because I believe in liberty. First and foremost, my most cherished liberty is freedom of speech. The entire idea of freedom of speech is predicated on the notion that one must protect not only speech which they agree with, but also speech they disagree with. That also extends to speech which *gasp* offends you.

The violent rioters at UC Berkeley are representative of a phenomenon I and other actual liberals call the regressive left. The regressive left doesnt truly stand for liberty. Instead, they stand for the idea that anyone that says anything which offends them or doesnt fit their narrative can and should be silenced.

This regressive mindset is not only wrong, it is incredibly dangerous. A healthy public debate of ideas never silences anyone who wishes to engage in an open and honest dialogue about important issues. Unlike many of his critics and the bulk of these rioters, I have actually listened to Milo speak.

When Milo is faced with a tantrum from a protester who disrupts his events, he mercilessly mocks them to no end. However, and this is crucial to my view of Yiannopoulos, when faced with a respectful challenge to his ideas, hes extremely polite and gives very well thought out answers to genuine questions from liberals.

This is what public discourse between people who disagree is supposed to look like. Its not supposed to look like the absolute temper tantrum that many regressive leftists throw at his events.

And when theyre not throwing tantrums, these regressives resort to the next most destructive thing, name-calling. Youve all heard it over the course of the past year. Conservatives are racist, sexist, islamophobic etc. Despite my progressive views and liberal credentials as a youth leader in the Democratic Party, Ive been called all of these things when I speak freely about political issues. The one thing I have not been called is the utterly hyperbolic neo-Nazi.

Milo has been called a neo-Nazi by many of his most fervent critics. He is also a half Jewish, openly gay man. I will refer to my ethnic heritage when I say that calling Milo a Nazi is incredibly insulting to the memory of my ancestors and the millions of others who suffered during the holocaust.

Milo is not an oppressor, hes a messenger. I dont agree with every aspect of his message. However, I must admit, I agree with some of it. And thats important. Its important for people from different sides of the isle to listen to one another. Thats how you find common ground and come to a consensus. Its how you change minds and strengthen your movement.

When you listen and engage in a respectful dialogue about your differences, thats called making an argument; something many liberals, the regressives, are forgetting how to do. Instead, they attempt to silence their foes by name-calling and throwing dramatic tantrums to distract from their weak debating skills.

If Milo comes to Towson, and I hope he does, dont be one of these regressive babies. Go to his event, listen, and if you disagree with something he says, ask about it during the Q&A. As a true, blue liberal Democrat who vehemently opposes President Trump, I want avid Trump supporter and right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos to know that people like me exist. I want him to know that true liberals are here to debate him, not silence him.

And lastly, I want all the regressives to know that their childish antics will not be tolerated. To each and every one of you that would even think to engage in the kind of behavior that took place at UC Berkeley, or who calls their political opponents neo-Nazis in a pathetic attempt to slander them with false, ad hominem attacks which harken back to the tactics of McCarthyism. You are the shame of the progressive movement and could not be more antithetical to true liberalism.

Learn to make actual arguments or get out of the debate hall. Right now, with this country in the state that its in, we adults dont have time for your tantrums.

Visit link:

I'm A Liberal, And I Want Milo Yiannopoulos On My Campus - Huffington Post

Beit Hillel says women are fully permitted and able to give rulings in Jewish law. (photo credit:YUVAL BEN-YEHUDA)

Several institutions and rabbinical leaders from the liberal wing of the religious-Zionist community in Israel have questioned the wisdom of the OUs recent decision not to allow women to give rulings in Jewish law or otherwise participate in the clergy or positions of public spiritual leadership.

Speaking to The Jerusalem Post, Rabbi Yehudah Gilad, a member of the board of directors of Beit Hillel, started by saying he believed elements of the OU decision were a step forward, including its embrace of women participating in pastoral roles within Jewish communities as teachers and lay leaders.

Although insisting that it was not Beit Hillels position to criticize decisions of Jewish communal organizations in the US, Gilad said that there were aspects of the OUs rabbinical position paper on the issue with which he disagreed personally.

In particular, he pointed out that the OUs document did not bring any concrete sources which ban women from undertaking one of the most critical functions of a rabbi, issuing rulings on Jewish law, halacha.

The reason is that it is very hard to find an authoritative source who banned women from issuing halachic rulings, Gilad said simply.

The phenomenon of women who are arbiters of Jewish law is growing and we should welcome it and guide it within the halachic framework.

He noted that Beit Hillel issued a position statement two years ago specifically endorsing the legitimacy of women to give halachic rulings, although noting that the organization nevertheless does not endorse women leading communal religious services, being part of a prayer quorum and other functions which Jewish law does prohibit.

But we should welcome and support women carrying functions in rabbinical position which do not contradict halacha as long as it does in a moderate, delicate way and with consideration with of the community, said Gilad.

Women serving in such a manner in synagogue communities as assistant rabbis was an example of how they could fulfill such roles, he said.

Rabbi Benny Lau, who heads the Ramban Synagogue in Jerusalem that recently appointed a female spiritual leader to serve alongside him, described the OUs position paper as expressing weakness and fear, instead of welcoming the adoption by women of communal spiritual responsibilities.

On every page of the document (14 pages!) one can discern worry about bringing in women to positions of communal spiritual leadership, as if there is some kind of competition over hegemony and control, wrote Lau on his Facebook page.

This train of the integration of women in the work of spiritual leadership of the community has already started its journey and is not waiting for the position papers of organizations to approve or prohibit this journey. The question is if those organizations will be relevant for the next generation or if they will be left on the side of the tracks by the old, forgotten train station.

Relevant to your professional network? Please share on Linkedin

Prev Article

British PM May: 'Were committed to a two-state solution'

Dont cry for me, Arye Deri

Next Article

Read the original:

Liberal Orthodox rabbis oppose OU ban on female religious leadership - Jerusalem Post Israel News

The 7 Most Outrageously Liberal Super Bowl Ad Campaigns of 2017 NewsBusters (blog) If you just crawled out from under a rock and turned on Fox last night, you might have thought you were witnessing a presentation sponsored by the United Nations, instead of the Super Bowl. We weren't treated to We are the World, but there was no ... and more »

Follow this link:

The 7 Most Outrageously Liberal Super Bowl Ad Campaigns of 2017 - NewsBusters (blog)

Perhaps the most pivotal scene in Damien Chazelles La La Land takes place in a restaurant, one that Mia (Emma Stone) chances upon while walking the long journey home, with no idea that Seb (Ryan Gosling) works there playing the piano. But before that, as Mia approaches the restaurant, she passes a long, colourful mural. We see Mia walk past Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Chaplin, Shirley Temple, WCFields, and James Dean. The wide shot that follows reveals the full wall, a crowd of recognisable figuresall sittingon red velvet seats in a darkened theatre, staring out at the street in front of them, as well as Mia, stepping out of a perfect empty frame of red neon light.

This is the You Are The Star mural, which sits at the southeast corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Wilcox Avenue in LA. Fred and Ginger dance in the aisle, while Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton sit up front.A nod to the Old Hollywood legends La La Land so often pays homage to, the mural plays with the idea of spectatorship, inverting the roles of artist and audience by seating screen legends in the cinema, and the average passerby on screen.

La La Land has been described by various critics as a love letter to lots of things: to Hollywood, to musicals, to dreamers, to LA, even to romance itself. It is, to an extent, all these things. Its familiar story (cynical, frustrated male creative seeks wide-eyed female creative, for the mutual following of dreams) necessarily romanticises the experience of being an actor, a musician, a writer even, especially, if it involves struggle. But La La Land is also an ode to the audience.

Mia and Seb both hope to be performers: Seb wants to run, and play at, his own jazz club; Mia wants to make it as an actress. But when we meet them, working low-paid, dead-end hospitality jobs, they are primarily audience members. We see Seb obsessively playing jazz cassettes and records on loop, Mia gushing about a childhood spent watching Notorious, Bringing Up Baby and Casablanca.

In fact, Seb and Mia fall in love as observers their romance blossoms as they share experiences as audience members. They stroll around the Warner Bros lot together, watching films being shot. I love it, Mia sighs. They go to a jazz club together and bond over the music. Shifting in red velvet seats, their hands inching towards the others during a screening of Rebel Without a Cause. They even go to a literal observatory together (the Griffiths Observatory yes, the same one they just watched on screen in Rebel), where their romance takes off. We even see them watch a home movie of their own potential life together in the films epilogue.

Theatres, music clubs and sets therefore become significant sites of communion, both culturally and personally, and fetishised by Seb and Mia. In fact, Mia leaves her uninspiring boyfriend, Greg, when shesinks into the jazz melodies underscoring their dinner at a posh restaurant. Meanwhile, Greg and his brother and sister-in-law discuss the advantages of their expensive home cinemas compared to public theatres: You know theatres these days, theyre so dirty. And theyre either too hot or too cold. And theres always people talking. (After comments like these, Greg is a write-off.)

We often use films, books and music as tools to make connections with each other, even form lasting relationships. The experience of being Someone in the Crowd, as the films soundtrack describes it, doesnt just inspire the creative careers at the heart of La La Land, but every area of life.

When Seb suggests taking Mia to see Rebel Without a Cause, hes embarrassed it seems too obviously like a date, and Mia isnt single. I can take you, he says, before adding, You know, for research. For research! Mia repeats. Yeah. Great. For research. The joke, of course, is that both Seb and Mia know their date is just that, a date but the script also plays with the idea that watching movies can be a kind of emotional research, not just for an actress preparing for a new role, but for anybody. For Seb and Mia, their research brings them to each other, a life-changing (if not lifelong) relationship.

We see Seb and Mias relationship play out as a series of performances, with Seb playing and Mia watching. There are five scenes that explore this dynamic their first meeting at Sebs restaurant, their run-in at a pool party where Mia requests I Ran, a few weeks into their romance at The Lighthouse, at a huge gig where Seb performs in his new band, The Messengers, and, finally, in Sebs own club. Each of these scenes reveal incremental changes in Mias perspective on her life, her ambitions, and her desires, as she moves from awe to playful cynicism to optimism to disillusionment and, finally, to a bittersweet compromise of all the above.

Critics have raised eyebrows at the gender politics of this film on the back of these scenes arguing that they present the male lead as the artist, the female lead as mostly observer, contributing to decades of fetishising male artists while dismissing women as primarily muses or facilitators of male art and ambition.

Guy gets Madeline, Andrew gets greatness (and Fletcher), and Sebastian gets his club (if not Mia), writes Morgan Leigh Davis, of La La Landand the plots of other jazz movies Guy and Madeline on a Park Benchand Whiplash. And women? All they get to do is listen.

But scenes of Sebs performances dont actually focus on Seb, nor do they form deep explorations of his career ambitions they are important to us as an audience because Mia is watching. We rarely see him perform if not through her gaze, and we see her emotionally develop through her evolving reactions to his music, while the films most fantastical scenes are all her projections, her imaginative response to what she hears. We repeatedly see Mia writing, auditioning, and performing without Seb present and the films opening and closing scenes are all shot through her eyes. For me, this is Mias film, the story of her ambitions realised.

Criticisms of the focus being on Sebperformingalso rest on the idea that making art is fundamentally more important than engaging with it, envisaging culture as a series of monologues rather than a great, messy dialogue. But watching is a key part of Mias artistic life. Its as important to her as performing, and La La Land suggests that watching and listening are not passive activities. When Mia notices the jazz in the posh restaurant, for instance, listening is positioned as something that requires skill, practice and attentiveness; while going to see Rebel Without a Cause can end in a beautiful dance sequence at the Griffiths Observatory. Watching and listening are figured as active, creative, transformative acts. Here, consuming art can have as much personal and cultural value as making art: both must occur for culture to exist.

Mia is always open to art that is new to her music she hasnt yet heard and films she hasnt yet seen. Ultimately, staying open to new kinds of watching and listening is what allows her to create genuinely original work. Her time spent watching film with her aunt inspires the audition that bags her her breakout role and we know those also shape her final performance (the film she gets a part in has no script; theproducers want to work with Mia to mould the role over three months of rehearsals and a four-month shoot in Paris).

Seb, on the other hand, is a closed book to the new. Hes never genuinely interested in The Messengers, and prefers to stay stuck in the past, listening obsessively to the same pieces of music over and over again. We first meet him rewinding cassettes in his car, and later see him dropping the needle of his record player on the same spot on the vinyl in his kitchen. His hands instinctively move to the same keys on the piano. In the end, he decides to move away from original work, instead choosing to become a facilitator of the music of others, in a club that only plays traditional, nostalgic jazz.

Seb might spend a lot of time explaining what makes art beautiful, but we can never take him seriously his insistences on pure jazz, fists clenched with passion, or claims that he is a serious musician, are usually played for laughs. Mias dreams arent (even if she is a lot more likely to laugh at herself).

The visual landscape of La La Land creates a world hovering somewhere between fantasy and reality. Through melodic camera movements, oversaturated colour palettes, dreamlike fabrics, dance and song and references to Old Hollywoods most iconic scenes, the ordinary becomes fantastical. Bathroom lamps become spotlights, hilltop sunsets become perfect movie sets.

And it works both ways: a cinematic tracking shot of Mia auditioning, slowly focusing on the emotion of her face, is interrupted when an assistant outside the door enters the left of the frame. Many of the films most dramatic moments are punctured by the mundane: phones ring, smoke alarms go off, records abruptly finish, analogue film eats itself just before the romantic climax. These both serve to disrupt and reinforce classic tropes (the interrupted kiss is as familiar as the dramatic, orchestral one), and as a result were never sure when were in La La Land and when were in the real world.

This is an impulse that seemingly comes from Mia. She gets herself work on a film set, to immerse herself in the fictional landscape, and we watch her twirling along the streets like shes in a musical in her own mind. She writes in her play blurb that shes interested in the porous border between dreams and reality, and we know that her play So Long, Boulder City! is concerned with windows, like the one from Casablanca that sits opposite her cafe, whichoffer a portal from one world into another. (The whole world from your bedroom? Seb says of her play, while the stagehand is left baffled by that whole window thing.)

We see lush posters of Ingrid Bergman taking up space in Mias apartment, then we see Mia, lying on her bed in sweatpants, shot in a similarly dramatic fashion. She literally steps into the movie at the screening of Rebel Without a Cause, the film projecting onto her face, then takes Seb to the films real sets.

Mias touchstone for inspiration is the story of her aunt jumping into the Seine in the snow. We see a picture, in Mias living room, of a woman in a red bathing suit frozen in a dive above a swimming pool then see that moment recreated at different LA parties across town, never fully sure if its coincidence or a trick of Mias mind, while snow suddenly falls after her Somewhere in the Crowd solo.

In the films epilogue, places from her memory become movie sets, fromthe lamppost Seb danced on at the LA hilltop where they first danced, to the motorway where they were stuck in traffic at the movies opening. As Seb plays, shes writing the movie of their perfect, alternate lives.

La La Lands own audience can never fully escape the fact that they are watching a movie: though it is undoubtedly immersive, the experience of watching La La Land is too referential and self-consciously cinematic to transport its audience out of their seats into another specific place. But the dreamy, technicolour panorama of La La Land encourages audiences to revel in the moments when life feels like a movie, and to find the connections between life and art.

The You Are the Star mural is a strange cultural artefact. It shouts that anyone can make it in Hollywood, anyone can have their dreams come true, but if you look at the selection of celebrities sat in the theatre, its hardly the most broad selection of humanity. If you squint, you might see a few faces that arent white, but theyre few and far between. The vast majority of the stars are white, chiselled young men and women; and so the trick of the muralworks betterif you fit a similar description. La La Land functions in a similar way, and at the end, Emma Stone seamlessly slots into the role of successful Hollywood actress as shes already a rail-thin, white, traditionally beautiful, successful Hollywood actress. As Ira Madison III wrote on the films US release:La La Land opens with a stunning and visually masterful dance sequence sung by an incredibly diverse group of Los Angeles denizens, but they are quickly whisked away so the Caucasian sing-along can begin.

Life mostly happens inside our own heads. Two hours of one movie can sometimes have a bigger impact on us than two weeks of our day-to-day lives at our jobs and homes. The kind of creative internal landscapes La La Land explores through Mia are, of course, not limited to the narrow selection of people Hollywood reveres, and the film itself fails to recognise that. But the idea that borders between our imaginations and our realities are more porous than we believe, and that art and life can have a tangible relationship, is a hopeful one for anyone who has felt that their life has been changed by an album, an old movie, a painting, or a TV show. Its an optimistic way of viewing the world one that is as open to the observer as the performer.

Here is the original post:

Goodbye to the liberal era - New Statesman

(Update: Adding voices of other critics)

The unlikely battle over the confirmation of Betsy DeVos as President Trumps nominee for education secretary is becoming even more pitched in the final days before a Senate vote with the airing of hundreds of thousands of dollars of advertisements attacking extreme liberals full of rage and hate who oppose her while protests against her were being staged around the country.

The controversy over the nomination of DeVos, a Michigan billionaire, is the most ferocious of any education secretary in the nearly 40-year history of the Education Department, and of any Trump nominee and it is only likely to deepen until there is a vote early next week on the Senate floor. The vote stands, it is believed, at 50-50, including two Republicans who have come out against DeVos despite enormous pressure from the GOP to support her. If no senator changes position, Vice President Pence would have to break the tie to confirm her.

Republican leaders and a White House spokesman said they are sure she will be confirmed, but her opponents are still hoping to persuade one Republican senator to switch sides this weekend. Senate offices in Washington and in the states have been swamped with phone calls and emails in some cases unprecedented numbers.

Supporters of DeVos say that she is a champion of school choice who wants to help students find the best educational opportunities and that the opposition is coming from partisan Democrats playing politics. Her critics say that her advocacy for charter schools and vouchers and support for religious schools shows her determination to privatize public education and that she is out of the mainstream even in the school choice world, evidenced by opposition to her from many supporters of school choice.

In the final days before the vote, the wrangling over the nomination is increasing and taking some unusual turns.

Advertisements began running on television in support of DeVos, with one of them saying:

Why is the radical left so full of rage and hate? They still cant accept that Trump won and they lost. Now extreme liberals like Elizabeth Warren are trying to stop Betsy DeVos from becoming secretary of education. DeVos angers the extreme left because she exposes their hypocrisy. DeVos wants low-income kids to have the same choices that liberal elitists have for their families. DeVos wants equal opportunity in education for all kids, and that makes angry liberals even angrier.

The ads are being paid for by a conservative group called America Next, which has both ads posted on its website, and is led by Bobby Jindal, the former Louisiana governor who had a short-lived campaign for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. The group is spending, according to Politico, a half-million dollars on the ads. They follow a digital pro-DeVos advertising campaign launched by America Rising Squared an arm of the Republican super PAC America Rising.

Although supporters of DeVos blame the opposition on Democrats and the two teachers unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, critics come from the political spectrum.

Some conservative Republicans oppose her in part because they say she supports the Common Core State Standards, though she says she doesnt; she is a strong ally of former Florida governor Jeb Bush who was a big Core supporter for years.

Parents with children with disabilities have come out against her, saying they dont believe she will protect their interests, and many school choice supporters, such as billionaire Eli Broad, who would have been expected to support her are in fact opposing her, saying they dont think she believes in public education. She says she does.

Hundreds of students and graduates from the Christian college she attended, Calvin College, wrote against her nomination too, saying she isnt qualified and didnt care enough about public schools.

Public education advocates, including parents and teachers, oppose the nomination, including the Network for Public Education and the Badass Teachers Association. Some of their members have been critical of the teachers unions.

Sandra Stotsky, no fan of the unions, opposes DeVoss nomination because she believes DeVos is a supporter of the Common Core, despite her statement that she isnt. Stotsky is professor emerita in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, and a strong critic of the Common Core State Standards. She had developed one of the countrys strongest sets of academic standards for K-12 students while serving as senior associate commissioner in the Massachusetts Department of Education from 1999-2003. Stotsky points to parent groups who have come out against DeVos because of the Common Core. For example, the South Dakota Citizens for Liberty wrote in a letter to Trump:

Your Secretary of Education Nominee, Betsy DeVos, has stated her position as being against Common Core, yet she has been a leader in pushing it, as have many other well-intentioned people. She champions Choice and Accountability. But if Choice is only among COMMON CORE compliant programs, the reality is, THIS IS NOT TRUE CHOICE.

Meanwhile protests are being held in cities across the country this weekend, some of them organized by teachers unions, to try to persuade at least one Republican senator to vote against her, which would tank the nomination. Among the protests on Saturday was one in Denver outside the office of Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), urging him to vote against he, and one in Verona, N.J., where hundreds gathered to protest DeVos:

On Friday, a few hundred people protested in front of the west Omaha offices of Sen. Deb Fischer(R-Neb.), asking her to do the same. Fischer was one Republican that DeVos critics had hoped would buck the GOP leadership on the vote because she has stated that she opposes vouchers, which DeVos supports, and is a strong supporter of public education, but the senator came out in support of DeVos.

There were protests in Kansas by teachers, parents and others urging Sen. Jerry Moran (R) to change his mind after he came out in support of DeVos, and in Philadelphia, protesters appeared at the offices of Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.) to try to persuade him to reverse his decision to vote for her. He said he wouldnt.

One teacher, Katherine Fritz, noting that DeVos had donated $55,800 to Toomeys campaign, started a tongue-in-cheek $60,050 fundraising effort to pay for Toomeys vote on GoFundMe.com. She actually got more than that, over$66,000 from almost4,000 people in two days, the website says. She wrote:

Betsy DeVos has never set foot in a classroom, did not send her children to public school, cannot distinguish between proficiency and growth, and thinks that guns should be allowed in schools in the event of grizzly attacks. That fictitious grizzly is about as qualified as Ms. DeVos to run the Department of Education.

If Betsy DeVos can buy Senator Toomeys vote, we should be allowed to do the same.

If, of course, Senator Toomey does not wish to accept any funds raised*, all money will be donated to Camp Sojourner, the Pennsylvania Arts Education Network, and the Childrens Literacy Initiative.

Other people started a GoFundMe.com campaigns to buy the votes of other senators who had accepted donations from DeVos, including Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Rob Portman (R-Ohio).

In Utah, the Salt Lake Tribune reported, a woman named Julia Silge couldnt get through to the office of her senator, Orrin G. Hatch (R), for weeks to talk about DeVos, so she bought a ham-and-pineapple pizza and tried to get it delivered to the office with a note saying, From a Salt Lake constituent in 84105: Please vote NO on Betsy DeVos. She is an inappropriate choice to lead our public schools.

Alas, it didnt get through, but the office saw the pizza order after she posted it on Twitter, the newspaper said.

A new element has entered the debate about DeVos whether the opposition to DeVos is sexist. The line goes that DeVos is being attacked by critics for being clueless about key education issues, which she displayed during her Jan. 17 confirmation hearing but other Cabinet nominees who have known next to nothing about their portfolios have been confirmed, such as neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who said he wasnt qualified to run a federal government department before he decided to accept Trumps offer to run the Department of Housing and Urban Development. However, Nikki Haley wasnt exactly an expert on foreign affairs when she, as governor of South Carolina, was tapped by Trump and confirmed by the Senate to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

See the original post:

Pro-DeVos ads air, saying 'liberal' critics are full of 'rage and hate,' as anti-DeVos protests are held - Washington Post

Ottawa Sun

Mona Fortier wins Liberal nomination for Ottawa-Vanier byelection Ottawa Sun According to Braeden Caley, the Liberal party's senior director of communications, the nomination meeting was on track to be the largest in Eastern Ontario in 30 years. Norm Newton has been a Liberal since high school, and was at the nomination meeting ... Mona Fortier wins Ottawa-Vanier Liberal nominationiPolitics.ca (subscription) Communications consultant Fortier wins hotly-contested Liberal nomination in Ottawa-Vanier with 1006 votesHill Times (subscription) Photos: Liberal candidate meeting for Ottawa-Vanier byelectionOttawa Citizen CBC.ca all 8 news articles »

See the original post here:

Mona Fortier wins Liberal nomination for Ottawa-Vanier byelection - Ottawa Sun