Daily Archives: February 13, 2017

Rich, Liberal Celebrities Lecture and Claim to Stand for 'We the People' at the 2017 Grammys NewsBusters (blog) The 59th Annual Grammy Awards wouldn't have been an awards show unless somebody went political. A Tribe called Quest led the predictable, tiresome left-wing takes, while singer Joy Villa went the surprising route at the Staples Center in Los Angeles ... and more »

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Rich, Liberal Celebrities Lecture and Claim to Stand for 'We the People' at the 2017 Grammys - NewsBusters (blog)

I am a liberal bubble. I am made in India and, like most of my kind, I am full of rhetoric. Shakespeare was referring to the likes of me when he wrote of lives full of sound and fury signifying nothing. Originally I was a British-American make, tough as a goatskin, ferocious in my certainties. Today I am a bubble, fragile, vulnerable, caught in the confusion of my times. Like any bubble, my surface tension makes me iridescent and attractive. It is my depths that need an exorcism.

My liberalism, when it began years ago, had a clear-cut agenda. I believed in the individual, in individualism, in the power of human rights, and the vision of the market. My eloquence was clear, my vision pellucid. Today a big part of me is fighting for survival, caught between ideologies of nationalism, an arid socialism, and a cannibalistic technocracy.

I wish I had the confidence of my predecessors, like Minoo Masani, Piloo Modi, and C Rajagopalachari. Read Rajajis Swarajya. It had a sense of clarity and contestation, the courage of marginality. Today even my journal and its name have been hijacked by jingoistic nationalists who confuse Swarajya (self-rule) with Swadesi (of ones country). My anxieties and fears have become bigger than my arguments. Part of me has almost become a still life to be admired in political museums, where it is featured as nostalgia. Part of me protests and complains too loudly, almost as a sheer act of survival. It is as if I claim in a delirious Cartesian way, I am paranoid, therefore I am.

My fears virtually make me. I had a great sense of being when the constitution was born. Our constitution has a touch of the liberal worldview built into it, incorporating the idea of rights and the sense of the individual. This and a sense of the idea of citizenship were great liberal contributors.

Then socialism took over, but in the Nehruvian years I still provided a leavening on the public sector, creating possibilities for democracy.

My liberalism survived as secularism, a weak kind of cosmopolitanism. My secularism was like a piece of English etiquette, more table manners than ethics. There was nothing sturdily political about it. Its hypocrisy and its rituals of political correctness, its loss of feel for religion, which is so deep-rooted in India, allowed Narendra Modi and the BJP to creep in.

Modi represents my biggest crisis and, for all his support for the market and corporates, he belongs to an illiberal India, which tramples on minorities, individual rights, and freedom of sexualityan India that thinks the deviant, the dissenting, the minoritarian, and the marginal have no claim to citizenship. Modi and his majoritarian regime made me silly, made me mix my metaphors, and equate him with Trump.

The idea is superficially attractive. To say that all caricatures are alike, that all such apparitions stem from the same source. Yet that is where our liberalism failed. It was more a theory of advertising than a profound sense of authoritarian evil. Our theory was produced in panic and, worse, what was produced in panic was appropriated by the BJP jingoists who paraded the possibility that Modi was an ancestor, a predecessor to Trump.

It appealed to ardent non-resident Indians who felt an urgent need for a certain kinship between India and the USA. It appealed to nationalists who felt that Make in India and America First arose from a similar pulpit. It appealed to sociologists who, without exploring the different cultural roots of the two gentlemen, found the cosmetic similarities appealing. I guess vulnerability, a sense of irrelevance, and a location in the paranoid produce a confusion that adds to a sense of illiteracy, creating idiot stereotypes that mislead, misinform and, turn the liberal dream from history into a dystopia. My analysis might be wrong but I hope my fears contain truths which need to be retold.

Modi is a moral challenge each individual must confront in his search for a decent society, which values the freedom of the individual. My fears may disappear like bubbles but that bubble is all I havea warning note by the concerned and the incompetent about an India that frightens all.

Today when Modi is messiah, the liberal message sounds silly. But I can wait; I, the bubble, might one day be a football scoring against a regime that has desacralised the individual. All I can do is hope, and offer you my silly fears as prophecies to be interpreted.

We welcome your comments at ideas.india@qz.com.

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India's liberal bubble has shrunk to irrelevance in the age of Narendra Modi - Quartz

Updated February 13, 2017 19:25:31

Several WA One Nation candidates say they will refuse to preference the Liberal Party, contrary to a statewide deal announced on the weekend.

The WA Liberals will preference One Nation above the Nationals in the Upper House in regional areas, with One Nation preferencing the Liberals in all Lower House seats in return.

High-profile One Nation candidate Margaret Dodd, who is contesting the Liberal-held seat of Scarborough for One Nation and is the mother of murdered teenager Hayley Dodd, today condemned the decision and accused the party of bullying its candidates.

Speaking outside a Perth court where her daughter's alleged murderer, Francis Wark, appeared today, Ms Dodd said she had "not been informed of any [preference] deal whatsoever, and I'm sure all the candidates haven't".

"I will make my own choices on who I will give my preferences to, and it certainly will not be the Liberal party," she said.

"The Liberal party will be at the bottom on the how to vote card."

Last month Ms Dodd backed Labor's "no body, no parole" promise to enact legislation where convicted murderers would not be eligible for parole unless they had cooperated with police to locate their victims' remains.

She had long campaigned for the law change, and said she was backing the Labor pledge because she felt the Liberal Government treated victims of crime as "second-class citizens".

"I was told by One Nation they support no body, no parole. We all know that Liberals don't," an angry Ms Dodd said today.

"We all know that Liberals want to sell off Western Power. One Nation doesn't, so what the hell is going on?

"I encourage other members of One Nation to stand up, do not be bullied and do not be dictated to.

"I will not be part of a dictatorship."

One Nation Upper House candidate Charles Smith is also refusing to preference the Liberals.

In a post titled "Re Preferences" on his official Facebook page, Mr Smith urged voters to put the Liberals last.

"If you do not like the Liberals as I don't mark them last!" the post reads

One Nation's Moore candidate Jim Kelly and South Metropolitan candidate Philip Scott also used their Facebook pages to urge voters to choose their own preferences.

Meanwhile, Premier Colin Barnett declared he was not a racist, and denied the preference deal would effectively hand Pauline Hanson's party control of WA's Upper House.

"I am anything but a racist and I will be judged on my values and my standards as will the Liberal Party, that's my accountability, I'm not accountable for One Nation," he told ABC Radio Perth.

But political consultant and so-called "preference whisperer" Glenn Druery said the deal was a "very bad" one for the Liberals and showed they were "desperate to cling onto government".

He said most Australians found One Nation's racist views abhorrent, and the deal would lead to Liberal voters abandoning the party.

"This was a ridiculous, a silly desperate deal by a Liberal party that is no doubt about to lose government and this deal will just stick another torpedo into the side of an already sinking ship," he told ABC Radio Perth.

However, it was a good deal for One Nation, Mr Druery said, and could lead to the party picking up six to nine Upper House seats and gain the balance of power.

Labor has confirmed it will preference One Nation last in all seats in both houses of Parliament, with state secretary Patrick Gorman describing the Liberals' deal as "sneaky and desperate".

"This is a deal, hammered out behind closed doors, that is all about tricking One Nation voters into re-electing Colin Barnett," he said in a statement.

"Make no mistake: a vote for One Nation is a vote for the Liberal Party."

Topics: elections, political-parties, minor-parties, wa

First posted February 13, 2017 12:50:58

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WA One Nation candidates refuse to preference Liberals - ABC Online

So far in 2017, so conservative. Cory Bernardi, Pauline Hanson, Tony Abbott, all dominating political coverage, despite one being Australia's worst former prime minister since Kevin Rudd.

Why should conservatives get all the notice? Granted it's far easier for someone on the hard right to provoke his way to an easy headline, with an attack on Islam here, a backbencher dig at the "current" prime minister there.

Throwing bombs, even those you don't believe in, is the straightforward route to national headlines. No strategy for winning attention beats inciting anger. There's a reason the tabloids prefer shouty upper-case font on their front pages.

But the news devoted to Bernardi, the delusional hard-right deserter, won for swindling those voters of South Australia who thought they were electing a Liberal rather than a rat, perfectly illustrates why political bomb-throwers do what they do.

The ultimate in ego-driven attention-seeking is to leave the party that gave you a political career to set up your own "movement" with scant regard for the damage done in the process.

And scant regard for reality. Bernardi uttered this sentence in the Senate, apparently without shame: "It is not in the interests of our nation to yield to the temptation of personality politics, which shrink the debate to the opinion of the few whilst compromising the good sense and values of the many."

How remarkable to utter those words and have the self-regard to think they apply to you.

It must be so liberating to claim to speak for the majority when your fearful, hard-hearted constituency is both small and already well served both by One Nation and the right fringe of the coalition Bernardi just deserted. That reality is likely to strike him hard in the face at the end of his term, five-and-half years and $1.1 million in parliamentary salary payments from now.

In the meantime, the race to the right within the government or at least the fear of doing anything to antagonise the internal haters from Eric Abetz in the south to George Christensen in the north puts the small-l liberal voter in an ever-more difficult position.

Where to turn if you're liberal on both social and economic issues? Which party to pick if you both favour marriage equality, and want attention devoted to attacking the return of the anti-trade brigade, the rise of a disturbing neo-protectionism?

Labor? The Coalition? The Greens?

No option is even merely adequate, let alone perfect. The Liberals are in permanent thrall to the protectionist Nationals who make up the coalition numbers, some of whom have social positions which to describe as antiquated is insulting to antiques.

Labor might have progressive social policies, and a far more sensible position on climate change, but Bill Shorten's rhetoric on trade is appalling.

The leader of the Greens is charismatic, many of its social policies are attractively pragmatic, but its protectionist outlook and secondary consideration for matters economic put many small-l liberal voters entirely off. As does its internal war between the hard left and those devoted environmentalists who live in the real economic world.

No political home for the centrist liberal is comfortable in Australia right now. It's tempting to suggest a break-away party for the centre. Not the pragmatic centre of the deal-making, compromising Nick Xenophon Team, but a principled liberal party, one that is actually liberal free in trade and life rather than the one held hostage by conservatives but still masquerading under the name. One that is reasonable in the exercise of its principles, one that doesn't suffer from delusions that the market is never wrong, or that income tax is theft. A reasonable liberal party in the centre of Australian politics.

What do we want? Reasonable middle-of-the-road policies. When do we want them? Introduced at an incremental pace.

The obvious problem with that idea is few people pay attention to the reasonable person in public debate, even if they agree with the reasonable position espoused. And even if they did, break-away parties usually decline to be mere flotsam on the political sea.

The depressing likelihood is that the turmoil of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd-Abbott-Turnbull era will end only as soon as one of the major parties lives by the cardinal rule of stable political dominance. Keep the middle.

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Small-l liberal voters have been abandoned in the race to the right - The Sydney Morning Herald

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Conservatives reached for the easy cudgel when the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an order temporarily barring enforcement of key provisions in President Donald Trumps executive order on refugees the nutty 9th, critics say, is the most overturned court in the country.

The argumentstems from data gathered from a 2010 American Bar Association study, which found the 9th Circuit was reversed 80 percent of the time on Supreme Court review between 1999 and 2008. The statistic has long been used to bludgeon rulings with which conservatives disagree, or to advance arguments for breaking the unwieldy 9th down into smaller courts.

Americans should be skeptical of both the statistic itself and what it suggests, as a wide range of factors can explain why the 9th slightly outpaces other courts on the reversal rate percentage.

In the first place, theres good reason to question how useful the statistic is. The data concerns only those cases taken up for review by the Supreme Court. It gives no sense of how often a court is getting cases wrong, as the high court doesnt review rulings simply because they are incorrect.

In addition, the statistic gives no sense of how a circuit fares on the Supreme Courts shadow docket or the range of orders and summary decisions that defy its normal procedural regularity, as University of Chicago Law School professor William Baude defines it in his authoritative study of the subject. Among other things, such cases would include instances when a lower court order is overturned without briefing or argument (called a grant, vacate, and remand or simply GVR), a metric highly relevant to measuring how often a particular circuit court is mucking things up.

Its also clear that, while the 9th Circuit has the second-highest rate of reversal among the federal appeals courts, it isnt dramatically outside the mainstream. Between 1999 and 2008, all of the circuits had reversal rates of at least 55 percent at the Supreme Court,a study by lawyer Roy E. Hofershows. Eleven had reversal rates of at least 60 percent, and six were above 70 percent. While 80 percent is undeniably high, it isnt appreciably larger than other courts, all of which struggle under the Supreme Courts scrutiny.

At least some of this can be attributed to the volume of cases the 9th Circuit hears each year. In any given year, it adjudicates approximately 12,000 cases. The next largest circuit court hears approximately 6,000. Whats more, 27 percent of the courts cases between 1999 and 2008 came to the Supreme Court by way of the 9th, the study shows. While volume is not at all dispositive, the burgeoning number of cases heard by the court is much more likely to create conflicts in law with other circuit courts, heightening the chance for Supreme Court review. It also makes the 9th much more likely to generate the elusive appropriate case or a controversy the justices are interested in resolving, provided the right fact posture or plaintiff vehicle is present.

Professor Carl Tobias of the University of Richmond School of Law, an expert in federal courts, says volume alone cannot explain the 9ths high reversal rate, but believes it has some effect.

With more cases there could be more outliers, more potential to catch Supreme Court interest, or perhaps more possibilities to be wrong due to heavy caseloads, he told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Or consider cases where the Supreme Court decides to depart from a settled course of interpretation shared by all the circuits, as with the exculpatory no,' he added. As a matter of numbers, the 9th Circuit, generating more decisions, is somewhat more likely to be the vehicle for the SCOTUS decision. But theres no good reason why that outcome should be reported as 9th circuit reversed rather than everybody reversed.'

Dr.Susan Brodie Haire, professor of political science at the University of Georgia who studies federal courts, says several other factors limit the statistics utility.

For example, the number of cases the high court takes up per year from each of the appeals courts is fairly small, such that it might not be possible to extrapolate any real insight from them. If you look at the numeratorand denominator, the numbers are very small when you consider the 9th Circuits caseload, averaging around 12,000 annually over the past few years, she told TheDCNF. In the 2015-2016 term, just eight out of thousands of 9th Circuit decisions were overturned.

She further explained that we shouldnt expect proportionality among the circuits.

The figures are just so small, she said. I suppose you could aggregate over several terms and compare how circuits fare relative to one another, buteven then it loses a little bit of meaning, given the small numbers of cases heard by the Supreme Court.

She pointed to the example of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which had just three cases reviewed by the high court during the 2015-2016 term. As such, its reversal rate changes considerably with every case.

Theres no way they can be proportional, she added.

She further explained that the 9th Circuit,which extends from the Grand Canyon in Arizona, to the far reaches of Alaska, to the remote Northern Mariana Islands in the central Pacific, represents a diverse legal and social ecosystem more likely to generate controversy warranting Supreme Court attention.

If you look at the organization of the circuits, the geographic area covered by the 9th Circuit represents a lot of complex economic and social arrangements, she said. Relative to other courts of appeal, it is very heterogeneous, in terms of the laws, policies, and population. So part of it is volume, but part of it does reflect the geographic area.

A group of Republican senators is backing legislation that would split the 9th Circuit into smaller, separate jurisdictions. The effort is led by GOP Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, who argues the courts lengthy docket on the has slowed the pace of justice.

With regard to the court, its just access to justice, Flake said. Its docket is more than twice as big as the next biggest circuit. This has been a long time coming, and hopefully we can make some progress finally.

Legislation breaking up the court for administrative and logistical reasons could gain traction with Democrats.

The problem has always been that is has a very large and somewhat unwieldy geographic area and caseload, so the question is whether theres an effective way to deal with those appeals, Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut said, according to The Hill. Id have to see those details.

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The 9th Circuit's Reversal Rate Has Nothing To Do With 'Liberal Judges' - Daily Caller