Monthly Archives: March 2017

Charlotte Observer

NC's HB2 compromise called 'fake repeal,' angers liberals and conservatives alike Charlotte Observer Opponents both liberal and conservative lined up quickly Thursday to lambaste North Carolina lawmakers for repealing the state's controversial bathroom bill House Bill 2. The compromise re-set bathroom access for transgender people back to pre ... and more »

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NC's HB2 compromise called 'fake repeal,' angers liberals and conservatives alike - Charlotte Observer

Premier Philippe Couillard says a former Liberal fundraiser who is banned for life from the federal Liberal party had no involvement in his 2013 leadership campaign.

Couillard was forced to answer questions about his linkto Marc-Yvan Ct after a story in theFrench-language Journal de Montralalleged Ct played a role in his campaign for the Quebec Liberal Party's top job.

"We had heard that he wanted to play a role. That's why I decided immediately, even before I started the campaign, to meet him and tell him don't do this, I don't want you to play a role," Couillard told reporters.

These days Ct is seen as toxic in political circles. Last year he was arrested by the province's anti-corruption squad and faces multiple charges related to illegal campaign financing.

Former Prime Minister Paul Martin banned him from the federal Liberals for life because ofhis involvement in the federal sponsorship scandal.

The Journal de Montralobtaineda series of e-mails between provincial Liberalorganizers and Ct.

Marc-Yvan Ct, who served as Liberal MNA for 14 years, was banned for life from the federal Liberal Party because of his involvement in the sponsorship scandal. (Radio-Canada)

In one message, the husband of a former Liberal candidate, Yves Goudreau, asks Ct for the names of delegates from the Charlevoix riding association in order to get them to backCouillardin the leadership vote.

A longtime Liberal party organizer also emailed Ct after Couillard won the leadership in 2013. Lise Grondin wrote, "Even if you were in the shadows, kudos to you for always being there ... again and again.... Stay with us. We're going to need it. In friendship. XX."

The premier says Grondin had nothing to do with his leadership campaign.

In another e-mail, dated after Couillard was elected leader, Ct's assistant wrote, "Jose Lvesque from Philippe Couillard's office" needed to speak with him. Lvesque was theorganizer on Couillard's leadership campaignresponsible for eastern Quebec, and she now works in the office of the party whip.

Couillard saidLvesque told him the subject "had nothing to do with political organization, whether it's at the party level or from the leadership race." He would not say why Lvesque contacted Ct.

The opposition parties believe there are sufficient questions about Ct's possible involvement to warrant legislative hearings.

"We need some answers from Philippe Couillard," saidCoalition Avenir Qubec leader Franois Legault.

Couillard said such an exercise would turn into a political circus.

Parti Qubcois leader Jean-Franois Lise saidthe latest revelations raise questions about the Liberal Party and its ethics.

"We feel the only remedy to this bad series of ethical lapses is that the Liberals will be put out of their misery in the next election and pushed way back in opposition," Lise said.

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Premier denies disgraced Liberal bagman involved in 2013 leadership campaign - CBC.ca

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau avoided a question today about why the Liberal Party hired his close friend Tom Pitfield to train people to use the party's database.

CTV News reported Wednesday that the Liberals hired Pitfield's company, Data Sciences, to help campaigns use the database, known as Liberalist -- including provincial Liberal campaigns.

Speaking at an event in Brampton, Ont., Trudeau was asked how he responds to allegations of cronyism over the contract for Data Sciences. Rather than answering directly, he talked about the Liberals' outreach in the 2015 election campaign.

"The Liberal Party of Canada reached out to more Canadians than had ever been reached out to in the past," Trudeau said.

"Through a multiple of ways -- digital, social media, advertising, door-to-door connections -- we were more effective than any other political party has ever been at gathering people into a movement that engaged them in the political process, that used the cutting-edge tools to build that kind of conversation and dialogue.

Some of that engagement involves Pitfield training candidates to use the party's sophisticated voter-tracking software.

Pitfield's wife, Anna Gainey, is the Liberal Party's president. The party says she recused herself from any decisions involving Pitfield's company.

And Pitfield said he was hired not through his connections but because his company is a world leader in digital engagement.

Data Sciences isn't Pitfield's only political venture. In 2015, Pitfield helped start Training For Progress. The program is intended to teach students how to organize progressive political campaigns.

Pitfield left the organization's board in mid-2015, a spokeswoman for Training For Progress said in an email to CTV News.

"The organization is a not-for-profit, volunteer-run initiative. No salaries, fees or payments are or were paid to any directors," Meghan Mcachern said.

"We don't have staff -- it's purely run as a volunteer initiative."

Participants are charged a fee "to recoup our costs (room rental, projector, etc.)," she added.

The online curriculum shows the school taught students how to the use Liberalist, though Mcachern says Training For Progress runs "a variety of sessions to a variety of audiences."

"The programs we do are open to volunteers and campaigners of all stripes, from all levels of politics and government and a variety of not-for-profit groups. We also work with a number of different platforms and tools that help connect with Canadians," she said.

Pitfield also continues to run Data Sciences and Canada 2020, a think tank that puts on policy conferences, often featuring government cabinet ministers.

Canada2020 is already a source of Opposition concern.

Canadians will look at this overall and see a common thread here, quite frankly, that the prime ministers friends seem well oiled and taken care of, said Conservative MP Alex Nuttall.

New Democrat MP Don Davies shared his criticism.

"That kind of insider business dealing, when it happens inside the Liberal Party, doesn't give Canadians confidence that the same kind of approach won't be taken with their public tax dollars," he said.

With a report from CTVs Glen McGregor in Ottawa

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PM won't clarify business ties between friend, Liberal Party - CTV News

Along with film dissection (though the two certainly arent mutually exclusive), the Bret Easton Ellis Podcast has been keenly interested in the changing face of the Left and increasing mono-ideology of the collective discourse on social media.

It was odd then, when, after returning from a hiatus, it did not really look at the election of Donald Trump, which seemed in many ways to be a symptom of the alienation that this delete your account style of communication caused.

That changed this week, with the author delivering a 35-minute monologue about the recent election and the responses to it in Hollywood and among his liberal friends.

Some of my friends and acquaintances, as well as my millennial boyfriend Ive been living with for the past seven years, are now undergoing the last spasms, the death throes, hopefully, of a kind of new liberal psychosis that was is/afflicting many members of the Left, he told listeners. The building that inhabited the old school, identity-politics obsessed, neoliberal elitists was/is being deconstructed by - actually - both sides."

Discussing the disruptive nature of Trump, who Ellis does not support, and his campaign, he noted that it had: levelled the press and made them look like some kind of old school anachronism unable to understand the new playbook that the disrupters had devised, and that the press was now trying to deal with, flailing about and hectoring and, yes, wasting everybodys time by taking everything so damned literally, while the anarchists in the shadows smiled to themselves, awaiting their turn."

Liberalism used to be about freedom, but now its about a kind of warped moral authority that is actually part of the moral superiority movement, he continued.

This faction of the Left is touchingly now known as The Resistance. Oh yes, The Resistance - what is this resistance? There are posters all around my neighbourhood in West Hollywood urging me to Resist. Resist. Resist.

Some of us, who did not vote for Trump and located exactly who he was decades ago - I wrote about this in American Psycho [in which Trump is serial killer Patrick Batemans hero] - some of us had been wondering, 'resist what exactly? And whos telling us to resist whatever? The people who voted for the candidate who lost? Im supposed to listen to them? What am I supposed to be resisting?'

Well Im certainly resisting the childish meltdowns Ive been witnessing at dinners and on social media and on late night TV and too many times in my own home in the aftermath of Donald Trumps victory last November [] In fact, many of these people I knew who were disappointed in the Trump victory and moved on, were also appalled by the childlike liberal disbelief of their own party that was manifesting itself in embarrassing ways, with so many morning-after posts titled hysterically What am I going to tell my daughter?!

You can listen to the podcast in full here.

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Bret Easton Ellis: 'Liberalism used to be about freedom, now it's about warped moral authority' - The Independent

The dream burns bright in countless liberal hearts and minds: President Donald Trump embraces one too many fever-swamp conspiracy theories, tweets one too many palpable falsehoods, threatens a nuclear attack on Mexico for not paying for the wall. A terrified Cabinet meets in Vice President Mike Pences home at the Naval Observatory, and, in a written declaration to the speaker of the House and president pro tempore of the Senate, that the president is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.

And just like that, Trump is dispatched to Trump Tower, or Mar-a-Lago, and Pence becomes acting president of the United States. Right?

Story Continued Below

Yesassuming its a movie or a TV series or a Netflix or Amazon offering. This process, set down in Section 4 of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, has been one of Hollywoods favorite plot devices to spice up a political melodrama. As a real-life possibility, it requires a leap away from reality into a realm even Trump has delivered us; at least, not yet.

***

To understand why this particular liberal fantasy is so misguided, lets take a walk down memory lane. The core purpose of the 50-year-old 25th Amendment was not aimed at presidential incapacity at all; rather, it was to cure a constitutional defect that America had experienced repeatedly through much of its history: When a president died, and the vice president moved to the Oval Office, there was no mechanism to replace the second-in-commandwho, after all, is elected, rather than appointed. (All the Constitution says, in Article II, Section 1, Clause 6, is this: [T]he Congress may by Law provide for the Case of Removal, Death, Resignation or Inability, both of the President and Vice President.)

Often, that vacancy lasted for years. William Henry Harrison and Abraham Lincoln each died a month into their terms (Harrisons first; Lincolns second); James Garfield was assassinated less than a year into his term; William McKinley was killed months into his second. Harry Truman served all but three months of FDRs fourth. (After the 1946 midterms, that vacancy meant that, had anything happened to Truman, the presidency would be assumed by House Speaker Joseph Martina Republican.)

But it was the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 that spotlighted the need for a fixin stark, almost morbid terms. When Lyndon B. Johnson took the rostrum in the House of Representatives on Nov. 27 to reassure a shaken nation, viewers were treated to distinctly unsettling sight. There was Johnson, who had barely survived a 1955 heart attack. Behind him sat John McCormack, the speaker of the Housea frail, almost sepulchral 71-year-old who was next in line. Next to him was President Pro Temp Carl Hayden, an 88-year-old who appeared incapable of independent motion.

This was powerful visual evidence that the vice presidency should not be left vacant. Senator Birch Bayh and Rep. Emanuel Celler went to work drafting a constitutional amendment establishing a new process for selecting a veep.

But they realized there was a second issue to be dealt with. What if JFK had survived the shooting, but was left in a coma? What if LBJ had a second heart attack that left him comatose? What if he, or a future president, suffered a severe stroke, as Woodrow Wilson had in September 1919, leaving his wife Edith, in the words of one historian, to shield Woodrow from interlopers and embark on a bedside government that essentially excluded Wilsons staff, the Cabinet and the Congress. Andmost problematicwhat if a president decided that he or she had recoveredbut others in the administration thought otherwise?

To meet such a crisis, Section 4 of the 25th Amendment set up a mechanism. If a majority of the Cabinet and the vice president thought the president unable to perform his duties (yes, the amendment was gender-specific), they would so advise the congressional leaders. If the president disagreed, the two houses of Congress would convene within 48 hours and debate the issue over the next three weeks. Unless a two-thirds majority of both houses agreed that the president was indeed incapacitatedthe same supermajority required to overturn a veto or to convict an impeached president in the Senatehe would resume the office.

In the 50 years since the 25th Amendment was ratified, its been used twice to fill a vice presidential vacancy: when Gerald Ford replaced the disgraced Spiro Agnew in October 1973, and when Nelson Rockefeller replaced Ford in 1974. And on six occasions, the president has invoked the 25th Amendment to (very temporarily) designate his veep as acting president, always during routine medical procedures like a colonoscopy. But its never been invoked when the president himself was non compos, most notably when Ronald Reagan was in surgery after the 1982 assassination attempt. When Howard Baker became Reagans chief of staff in 1987, according to the historian Edmund Morris, some of the presidents aides warned Baker that the 25th Amendment might be needed, given Reagans alleged mental fuzziness. When Baker and his staff met with Reagan, he showed no such signs, and the matter was dropped.

***

So where have the more melodramatic implications of the 25th Amendment seen the light of day? Just where melodrama is most appropriate: in fiction. For writers, the constitutionally plausible possibility of backroom machinations, double-and-triple-crosses, the powerful mix of high principle and naked ambition, has been irresistible for the better part of four decades.

William Safire, Nixon speechwriter and New York Times columnist, was the first to use the device in his 1977 novel, Full Disclosure. After President Sven Erikson is blinded in an assassination attempt, disloyal Treasury Secretary T. Roy Bannerman attempts to use the 25th Amendment to force him from office and replace him with a feckless vice president who would be Bannermans puppet. But in more recent times, as political settings have taken a prominent place on the screen, the venerable 25th has become almost as familiar as the Lincoln Memorial.

In the season four finale of The West Wing, President Josiah Bartlets daughter Zoey is kidnapped. Realizing that he is too distraught to focus on the demands of the office, he invokes the 25th Amendment; since his vice president has quit in a sex scandal, it means the office will be filled by the Republican Speaker of the House, who ends the episodeand the seasonby telling the president, You are relieved. (Bartlet gets the office back at the start of season five; the speaker has no intention of pulling off a coup.)

That was a nuanced, one-off use of the amendment. In the long-running series 24, the 25th almost became a cast member. President David Palmers vice president and cabinet forced him from office because he would not retaliate against the alleged perpetrators of a terrorist plot. Then they learned the allegation was false, so the acting president turned the office back over to Palmer who was laid low a few hours later by a biological attack, so the amendment was invoked again. The next president, John Keeler, was wounded when the bad guys shot up Air Force One, so the presidency fell to the traitorous Charles Logan. A few twists and turns later, David Palmers brother Wayne was elected president. Three months later, he was the victim of another terrorist attack, leaving him comatose. This plot line goes to Defcon 1literallywhen the acting veep orders a nuclear hit on another suspected terrorist site; a loyal Palmer aide then wakes Palmer up from his coma, who immediately tells Congress hes fit to serve. The Cabinet deadlocks, undeadlocks, Palmer gets the post back and then drops dead at a news conference.

The 25th was also a featured player in season two of Scandal, when President Fitzgerald Grant is shot while arriving for his 50th birthday party. When his vice president, Sally Langston, tries to assume power, shes thrown into a bunker by White House chief of staff Cyrus Beene, but Langston somehow manages to gather the Cabinet and invoke Section 4. (Over the course of the season, the constitutional controversy tends to be outweighed by forgeries, plots, counterplots, traitorous moles and a lot of heavy breathing.)

***

So now let us return to Planet Earth. It is highly unlikely that we will see Reince Priebus locking Mike Pence in the Situation Room anytime soon, or that Nikki Haley and Rick Perry will be squaring off against each other for that crucial tie-breaking vote, or that Trump will decide, you know, I need a couple of months off to get my groove back, so Im invoking Section 4; best of luck, Mike. The notion that Pence and a Cabinet majority will look at Trumps next tweets or telephonic fulminations and decide hes not fit for the job is beyond absurdity.

To see how just how unlikely such a move is, look at this recent piece by Jack Farrell in Politico Magazine about President Richard M. Nixons behavior in 1970. In the midst of a shooting war in Vietnam, and a Cold War on constant simmer, Nixon was often abusing alcohol and prescription drugs, leading to stretches of incoherence and irrationality. No one around him even raised the specter of invoking the 25th Amendment. And while the plot lines of 24 and Scandal are bizarre, they do illustrate why the 25th Amendment demands a supermajority of Congress if the president insists hes able: It is insurance against a coup.

The mechanism, in short, is an In Case of Emergency, Break Glass provision. If a president showed up one morning unable to communicate, or curled up in a fugue state, the Constitution gives his vice president and Cabinet the power to avoid a crisis. Absent such a disaster, any thought of invoking it is best left to the writers room somewhere around Sunset and Vine.

Jeff Greenfield is a five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst and author.

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A Liberal Fantasy Ripped from a Hollywood Script - POLITICO Magazine

More than 90 political scientists have signed an open letter calling for the blacklisting of studies done by Virginia professors who estimated that thousands, and perhaps millions, of noncitizens register to vote and vote illegally in U.S. elections.

Political science professor Jesse Richman of Old Dominion University in Norfolk is one of three academics who have produced research on noncitizen voting. The research has irked liberal professors who contend that their surveys show that zero of some 20 million noncitizens vote in the U.S.

The anti-Richman study professors circulated an open letter that states: The scholarly political science community has generally rejected the findings in the Richman et al. study and we believe it should not be cited or used in any debate over fraudulent voting.

Mr. Richman discussed the open letter in his ODU blog entry, titled Why I would sign the open letter if it were true.

Im not signing it because it contains several critical distortions and mistakes, Mr. Richman wrote.

President Trump contends that millions voted illegally in the 2016 election, and most backed Democrat Hillary Clinton. He says he plans to appoint a task force to investigate.

Mr. Richman has accused the Trump team of misconstruing his studies, and says there was not enough noncitizen voting to change Mrs. Clintons popular vote success. But he stands by his teams basic finding that a significant number of noncitizens illegally register to vote.

Conservative activists are driving the anti-fraud vote movement, without much help from establishment Republicans.

Mr. Richman and his associates relied heavily on the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), spearheaded by Harvard professor Stephen Ansolabehere, other scholars and the polling firm You.Gov. The biennial study on voters and their views is produced by a consortium of 28 universities. Its lengthy questionnaire inquires about voters citizenship status, and a significant number of respondents anonymously acknowledged they were not citizens when they voted.

The most frequent journalistic synopsis of Mr. Richmans studies is that 38,000 to as many as 2.8 million noncitizens voted in the 2008 presidential election.

I agree with the authors of the letter that the upper end of this interval may have played an unfortunate role in the presidents rhetoric, Mr. Richman wrote. I have, as noted above, attempted to push back against this. I will continue to do so as I think it is important that people not get fooled by an extreme upper end estimate that is almost certainly way way way too high.

Mr. Ansolabehere and others wrote in a 2015 rebuttal to Mr. Richman and his fellow researchers that the CCES sample size of people who said they were noncitizens was too small, and that respondents in some cases had changed their status from noncitizen to citizen. Mr. Ansolabehere did not sign the open letter.

Mr. Richman responded to the rebuttal: These critical tests lack statistical power. He has published a point-by-point explanation for why he and his colleagues work is basically sound.

We show that even if their response error argument is correct, there is still significant evidence of non-citizen participation in the U.S. electoral system, Mr. Richman wrote.

Separate from the CCES study, a 2013 National Hispanic Survey found that 13 percent of noncitizen Hispanics said they were registered to vote. Within the margin of error, that percentage could mean that 800,000 to 2.2 million noncitizen Hispanics are registered, based on U.S. Census Bureau statistics for that demographic, a nonprofit research group told The Washington Times.

There are firm examples of noncitizen voting.

The Times earlier this month reported on a civil lawsuit filed by voters against Frederick County, Maryland.

The plaintiffs acquired documents and could compare lists of disqualified noncitizens for jury duty with voter registration rolls. The research found that nearly 180 noncitizens were registered to vote in 2007, 2008 and 2009, and that 63 actually voted. What a more comprehensive analysis of voter rolls would show is unknown since Maryland does not do such cross-checking.

In Virginia, the Public Interest Legal Foundation discovered that 1,000 noncitizens registered to vote in six countries and two cities. Of them, 200 voted.

Mr. Richman ended his blog post by saying that academics should debate all studies rather than boycott them.

Ultimately, I believe that the debate over fraudulent voting can best advance through a thoughtful exchange of views rather than an attempt to discourage citation or consideration of any study, he said.

Tom Fitton, president of the watchdog group Judicial Watch, whichoperates an anti-voter fraud unit, backed Mr. Richmans findings.

The Left is desperate to preserve the ability to steal elections, so a blacklist of inconvenient but valid research would be par for the course, Mr. Fitton said in an email. Judicial Watch has analyzed the study and believe it to be solid research.

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Noncitizens voting research irks liberal professors - Washington Times

A number of senior Labour and opposition politicians are calling for a cross-party alliance. In a bid to hold the Conservative government to account as Brexit negotiations kick off, party grandees are urging their leaders to put party politics to one side and work together.

The former Labour minister Chris Mullin believes that the only way forward is an eventual pact between Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens not to oppose each other in marginal seats.

Given the loss of Scotland, itwill be difficult for any party that is not the Conservative party to form a government on its own in the foreseeable future," Mullin argues, but headmits, no doubt tribalists on both sides will find this upsetting and laments that, it may take three or four election defeats for the penny to drop.

But there are other Labour and Liberal grandees who are envisaging such a future for Britains progressive parties.

The Lib Dem peer and former party leader Ming Campbell predicts that there could be some pressure after the 2020 election for Labour MPs to look at SDP Mark II, and reveals, a real sense among the left and the centre-left that the only way Conservative hegemony is going to be undermined is for a far higher degree of cooperation.

The Gang of Fours David Owen, a former Labour foreign secretary who co-founded the SDP, warns Labour that it must face up to reality and proudly and completely coherently agree to work with the SNP.

It is perfectly legitimate for the Labour party to work with them, he tells me. We have to live with that reality. You have to be ready to talk to them. You wont agree with them on separation but you can agree on many other areas, or you certainly should be trying.

The Labour peer and former home secretary Charles Clarke agrees that Labour must open up an alliance with the SNP on fighting for Britain to remain in the single market, calling it an opportunity thats just opened. He criticises his party for having completely failed to deal with how we relate to the SNP during the 2015 election campaign, saying, Ed Miliband completely messed that up.

The SNP will still be a bigfactor after the 2020 general election, Clarke says. Therefore we have to find a way to deal with them if were interested in being in power after the election.

Clarke also advises his party to make pacts with the Lib Dems ahead of the election in individual constituencies in the southwest up to London.

We should help the Lib Dems to win some of those seats, a dozen of those seats back from the Tories, he argues. I think a seat-by-seat examination in certain seats which would weaken the Tory position is worth thinking about. There are a few seats where us not running or being broadly supportive of the Lib Dems might reduce the number of Tory seats.

The peer and former Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown agrees that such cooperation could help reduce the Tory majority. When leader, he worked informally in the Nineties with then opposition leader Tony Blair to coordinate their challenge to the Conservative government.

Were quite like we were in 1992 when Tony Blair and I started working together but with bells on, Ashdown tells me. We have to do something quite similar to what Blair and I did, we have to create the mood of a sort of space, where people of an intelligent focus can gather I think this is going to be done much more organically than organisationally.

Ashdown describes methods of cooperation, including the cross-party Cook-Maclennan Agreement on constitutional reform, uniting on Scottish devolution, a coordinated approach to PMQs, and publishing a list 50 constituenciesin the Daily Mirror before the 1997 election, outlining seats where Labour and Lib Dem voters should tactically vote for one another to defeat Tory candidates.

We created the climate of an expectation of cooperation, Ashdown recalls. Pursuing the spirit of this time, he has set up a movement called More United, which urges cross-party support of candidates and campaigns that subscribe to progressive values.

He reveals thatTory Central Office are pretty hostile to the idea, Mr Corbyn is pretty hostile to the idea, but there are Conservative and Labour MPs who are talking about participating in the process.

Indeed, my colleagueGeorge reveals in his report for the magazine this week that a close ally of George Osborne has approached the Lib Dem leader Tim Farron about forming a new centrist party called The Democrats. Its an idea that the former chancellor had reportedly already pitched to Labour MPs.

Labour peer and former cabinet minister Tessa Jowell says this is the moment to build a different kind of progressive activism and progressive alliance, as people are engaging in movements more than parties. But she says politicians should be wary of reaching out for what is too easily defined as an elite metropolitan solution which can also be seen as simply another power grab.

She warns against a Were going to have a new party, heres the board, heres the doorplate, and now youre invited to join approach. Talk of a new party is for the birds without reach and without groundedness and we have no evidence of that at the moment.

A senior politician who wished not to be named echoes Jowells caution. The problem is that if youre surrounded by a group of people who think that greater cooperation is necessary and possible people who all think the same as you then theres a terrible temptation to think that everyone thinks the same as you, they say.

They warn against looking back at the halcyon days of Blairs cooperation with the Lib Dems. Its worth remembering they fell out eventually! Most political marriages end in divorce, dont they?

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Senior Labour and Liberal Democrat politicians call for a ... - New Statesman