Daily Archives: May 30, 2017

Weaver, left, and Horgan were spotted together on Sunday, laughing it up at a rugby match (CP)

It was a day for surprises in British Columbia. The Liberals 16-year run in power in the province appears to have come to a dramatic end. The Greens, made kingmakers after clinching a record three seats in the provinces May 9 election, finally tipped their hand: in a surprise Monday press conference, leader Andrew Weaver and the NDPs John Horgan announced their intent to create what they call a stable minority government.

The twoleaders, both of them Boomers raised on the southern end of Vancouver Island, grinnedwildly, repeatedly making nice for the camerasWeaver having apparently forgiven Horgan for the explosive temper he complained of just weeks ago. The Green leader, a Cambridge-educated university professor who can appear uncomfortable under the Klieg lights, looked relaxed, elated by the turn of events. If anyone it was Horgan, B.C.s putative next premier, who seemed ill at ease, his voice catching as he began speaking to reporters.

Horgan once told Macleans hed never met a more fierce opponent than Christy Clark, the Liberal leader. And the new deal gives their progressive alliance 44 votes on confidence motions; thats just one more than the Liberals, who took 43 seats in the recent election. The agreement runs four years. But thats assuming no scandals, frustrations or cancer scares threaten their hold on power (Weaver told reporters today he came very, very close to a deal with Liberals).

Indeed, with a one-vote plurality, stable seems like quite the stretch. But semantics were hardly top of mind this afternoon. Among the more pressing questions: what exactly happens to the premier, who declared victory in a rousing, fist-pumping speech on election night in Vancouver? It seems Clark was asking the same thing.

RELATED: Why the B.C. Green party should be wary of a coalition

Politics being the cruel game that it is, Clark appears to have found out she was being turfed at the same time everyone else in the province did. Both Horgan and Weaverwho met with Liberal negotiators late last nightmade clear they had not phoned Clark to give her the heads-up. Weaver, who told reporters hed made up his mind to side with the New Democrats this morning, said Clark was trying to call him as he headed in to the 2 p.m. PDT presser in Victoria.

For now, Clark is keeping her options open. Her office rushed out a statement 15 minutes after the surprise announcement. In recent days, we have made every effort to reach a governing agreement while standing firm on our core beliefs, it began. As the incumbent government, and the party with the most seats in the legislature, we have a responsibility to carefully consider our next steps. Clark added she will have more to say tomorrow.

Fighting words those may be, but the reality is: the gig is up. Clark could attempt to table a Throne Speech and budget, but it will be defeated, unless she somehow manages to turn an NDP MLA. She could ask Lt. Gov. Judith Guichon to call an election, but with a viable governing alternative waiting in the wings, that request would surely be denied. She could try to run the clock by declining to recall the assembly before summer, hoping angst over pipelines, progressive governance and a new voting system hit a boil, then go to Guichon, pointing to a hopelessly divided populace.

Sure she can, political scientist David Moscrop admits, a play he describes as Harper-ish. But he considers it unlikely. UBC political scientist Max Cameron notes the Clark government will run out of money by September, so must convene the legislature by [fall] at the latest. Both Moscrop and Cameron expect she will resign. For them, the only remaining question is when.

Weaver and Horganat Mondays media briefing outside the assembly in Victoria. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chad Hipolito

A single term, and an election decided by just nine votes, is an ugly coda for a politician as talented as she. On the stump, none is better. Clark can claim four back-to-back balanced budgets. No province in the federation has a lower unemployment rate. B.C. has almost never been so wealthy. And the party managed to raise a staggering $36 million since the last electionroughly four times more than their opponents. This allowed them to employ full-time campaign staff in swing ridings almost since the last election. They could wrap newspapers with ads mocked up to look like front pages, and flood social media with Liberal ads. The NDP, meanwhile, were running a deficit every month and had to skip pre-election planning. They couldnt afford it.

RELATED: What happens next in B.C.

Post-mortems will begin tomorrow. But a deep dive wont be needed. In badly misjudging the public temperament on B.C.s out-of-control party financing laws, the Liberals wasted every advantage. Clark refused, even after the RCMP began investigating a fundraising scandal involving Liberal lobbyists just six weeks out from the vote, to put in place even the simplest reforms, like banning corporate, union and foreign donations, something the NDP is promising to do on Day One.

Consider the outcome in Courtenay-Comox, the Vancouver Island riding the Liberals lost on election night by just nine votes (amended upon recount to 13, and eventually widened to 189 after absentee ballots were counted). Local resident Leah McCullough was so furious over the Liberals refusal to stop accepting unlimited corporate donations; to stop staging $15,000 fundraising dinners; to stop accepting money from the same multi-national corporations that were bidding for contracts and applying for licenses, that she ran for the B.C. Conservatives. The party has no leader, no money and no hope of forming government in the foreseeable future.

People think the Liberals would have won the riding if there hadnt been a Conservative candidate on the ballot, McCullough told the Province newspaper.Theyre probably right, but they have only themselves to blame.I watched them rake in millions from real-estate developers while the cost of housing went through the roof. And I decided to do something about it. McCullough paid out of pocket to run her campaign.

She added: No matter how it all ends up, they will have to look at themselves, how they have governed and how they have treated people.

More here:

NDP-Green pact lowers curtain on B.C. Liberal reign - Macleans.ca

"First Black Bachelorette shines in debut, but is America ready for interracial love?" When NBC executives tweeted that question last week, what exactly did they expect the answer to be? Were they hoping for some racial unrest to boost their primetime ratings? Have they noticed Kanye West and Kim Kardashian together recently? And what year is it at Rockefeller Center anyway?

For the rest of us it's 2017, a half-century since Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court decision that invalidated state laws prohibiting interracial marriage. The notion that we still need to ask whether Americans are ready to accept interracial relationships seems patently absurd.

Last week Pew released a poll showing that one in six newlyweds are married to someone of a different race. And it will be no surprise if the Bachelorette, Texas lawyer Rachel Lindsay, winds up with someone white or Asian or Hispanic since "the most dramatic increases in intermarriage have occurred among black newlyweds." According to Pew, "Since 1980, the share who married someone of a different race or ethnicity has more than tripled from 5% to 18%."

Despite the obvious fact that romantic relationships between people of different races are simply a fact of life in this country, a number of articles about the study zeroed in on differences in attitudes toward interracial marriage that Pew researchers found in a survey earlier this spring. The New York Times, for instance, noted that "Roughly half of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents see intermarriage as a good thing for society. For Republicans and GOP-leaning independents, less than 1 in 3 saw marriages between races and ethnicities as a good thing for society." A story on NPR also reported on this this "stark split" along political lines. The San Francisco Chronicle pointed out the disparity with a piece titled, "As Intermarriage Spreads, Fault Lines Exposed."

It is easy to imagine liberal elites shaking their heads and sighing at these numbers. And no doubt their worst fears were confirmed when they saw that "Among Americans who live in urban areas, 45% say [interracial marriage] is a good thing for society, as do 38% of those in the suburbs; lower shares among those living in rural areas share this view (24%)." Yes, those folks in middle America, once again clinging to their guns, their religion, and their outdated racial views.

But the truth is that most Americans (52 percent) simply believe that intermarriage "doesn't make much difference for our society." (That's true of 60 percent of Republicans and 63 percent of people who live in rural areas.) In other words, more than half of Americans couldn't care less who you marry. While liberals think we should run out and congratulate every interracial couple we see (and tell them their children are beautiful), most Americans think you should marry whomever you want. Which is probably how we ended up with a president whose third wife is a Slovenian supermodel.

It's correct that in order for intermarriage to be made legal, Americans did have to recognize the humanity of other races, but at this point, their attitude is much more "live and let live." Sure, it's nice to think that Americans have come to fully embrace the idea that people who look different from them are worthy of finding marital happiness, but the truth may be slightly less noble.

The reason that interracial marriage became common, that no-fault divorce became ubiquitous, that gay marriage was legalized, and that we will probably get state-recognized polygamy and various other romantic arrangements is because Americans increasingly think what goes on in your bedroom is your own damn business.

There are plenty of conservatives who will argue that this attitude is problematicnot because they oppose interracial marriage, but because they believe that the public has an interest in stable, two-parent families. They think reasonably enough that we absolutely should care who it is our neighbors are marrying if we care about the welfare of families in our community. But frankly for most Americans, that horse has left the barn.

Liberals, on the other hand will not be satisfied until every American praises people who marry outside their race and encourages their children to do the same. Indeed, if Republicans or folks from rural areas do not see the interracial marriages of their neighbors as something that is benefiting the country as a whole, they might as well be racists in this formulation.

Of course there are reasons to think that interracial marriage, like any kind of racial or ethnic assimilation, might improve the fabric of our country. But the truth is that these marriages will happen anyway. Once the legal barriers to racial mixing came down, interracial marriage became mostly a matter of opportunity. As any marriage expert will tell you, we date and wed the people with whom we go to school and work. Or perhaps the people who appear on reality shows with us.

See the article here:

Interracial Marriage and the Liberal Mind - The Weekly Standard

CNN host Fareed Zakaria is a frequent and vocal critic of President Donald Trump, but even he had to admit that liberal intolerance to conservative voices is a hypocritical and growing epidemic. He made the assessment in a monologue on his show Sunday.

Were at the height of commencement season and people are imparting their words of wisdom on newly minted graduates, Zakaria began. I was honored to give the commencement at Bucknell this year. But at Notre Dame, where Vice President Mike Pence was giving the commencement address, the ceremonies were interrupted by a hundred students who turned their backs on Pence and walked out in protest.

A few weeks earlier, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy Devos was booed while giving the commencement address at Bethune-Cookman University, he said. I talked about this issue at Bucknell and I wanted to share those thoughts here.

American universities these days seem to be committed to every kind of diversity except intellectual diversity, he continued. Conservative voices and views, already a besieged minority, are being silenced entirely.

The campus thought police have gone after serious conservative thinkers like Sarah MacDonald and Charles Murray, he explained, as well as firebrands like Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter. Some were uninvited, others booed, interrupted and intimidated.

Its strange that this is happening on college campuses that promised to give their undergraduates a liberal education, Zakaria continued. The word liberal in this context has nothing to do with todays partisan language, but refers instead to the Latin root, pertaining to liberty. And at the heart of liberty in the Western world has been freedom of speech. From the beginning, people understood that this meant protecting and listening to speech with which you disagreed.

Freedom of speech and thought is not just for warm, fuzzy ideas that we find comfortable. Its for ideas that we find offensive, Zakaria said.

There is, as we all know, a kind of anti-intellectualism on the right these days. Denial of facts, of reason, of science. But there is also an anti-intellectualism on the left. An attitude of self-righteousness that says we are so pure, we are so morally superior, we cannot bear to hear an idea with which we disagree.

Liberals think they are tolerant, but often they arent, Zakaria concluded.

Campus protests seem to have increased in number and rancor, especially in the Trump age after so many progressives believed they were going to win the election. But recently even some on the left have begun to question if the violent protests are proportional to the political opponent they are decrying.

Read the rest here:

CNN host slaps down liberal intolerance and close-mindedness ... - TheBlaze.com

One hears about right-wing media sites, like Breitbart, InfoWars, and Gateway Pundit, spreading conservative conspiracy theories almost on a daily basis. The latest comes from Fox Newss Sean Hannity who kept talking about the debunked theory that Seth Rich, a staffer at the Democratic National Committee who was shot dead near his Washington, D.C. home, had supplied DNC documents to WikiLeaks and was killed for it. While those stories get covered extensively by mainstream media, a Dartmouth professor is concerned that liberal conspiracy theories are also being spread across social media.

In an interview with New Hampshire Public Radio last week,Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth College and New York Times contributor, explained there are many conspiracy theories or fake news stories about President Donald Trump and his possible campaign connections to Russia.

Im seeing a disturbing trend of people taking the very serious and real questions about Russian interference and using that as a pretext for all sorts of wild and unsupported conspiracy theories. These are often coming from internet personalities and people who work on social media, but theyre infiltrating into the discourse more generally through liberal elites who are amplifying them. So were seeing a spread of these claims out into the mainstream in a way that I think is potentially worrisome.

He points to several examples in the past few weeks of the spread of misinformation online that has reached a mainstream audience. On Lawrence ODonnells MSNBC show The Last Word, he gave legs to the theory that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the chemical weapons massacre in Syria to help Trumps popularity ratings by encouraging him to launch a missile strike.

Its important to remember Democrats spent the last eight years complaining about the birther myth and all sorts of conspiracy theories around Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and now just a few months later, here we are, Nyhan said.

The rise of liberal conspiracy websites or social media personalities, especially on anything related to Trump and Russia, has been analyzed by a few media outlets.

Liberals desperate to believe that the right conspiracy will take down Donald Trump promote their own purveyors of fake news, wrote Sarah Jones of The New Republic.

By embracing every single tweet or whisper as yet another piece of full-proof evidence of just how terrible Republicans are, Democrats run the risk of appearing like the boy who cried wolf to the public and in the process taking some steam out of the very legitimate questions they are asking about the Trump administration, wrote Chris Cillizza of CNN.

Voxs Zack Beauchamp calls it the Russiasphere.

They worry that the unfounded speculation and paranoia that infect the Russiasphere risk pushing liberals into the same black hole of conspiracy-mongering and fact-free insinuation that conservatives fell into during the Obama years. The fear is that this pollutes the party itself, derailing and discrediting the legitimate investigation into Russia investigation. It also risks degrading the Democratic Party helping elevate shameless hucksters who know nothing about policy but are willing to spread misinformation in the service of gaining power.

Another theory was spread after Republicans passed the American Health Care Act earlier this month. A reporter tweeted about a large supply of beer in the Capitol. Liberals took that ammo and fired off theories that spread like wildfire on social media that the beer was going to a GOP meeting celebrating the bills passage.

The theory was later found to be false, and even though the reporter tweeted a correction, that tweet only got a handful of retweets.Mics headline is indicative of the early coverage: Republicans celebrated taking away Americans health insurance with cases of beer. (The millennial news site has since changed the headline to: Reports of beer delivery to GOP health care celebration called into question.)

But Nyhan said the damage was already done.

People are looking for bits of factual information that seem to confirm a pre-existing narrative. This is the problem with confirmation bias, he said. Were seeing that sort of pattern in much more serious circumstances when it comes to the Russia investigation where every piece of information that comes out is being spun and interpreted in the worst possible ways, and in some cases, were seeing outright fabrication and speculation being reported and amplified.

Not everyone is convinced, though, that leftist conspiracy theories are being spread as much as conservative ones. Jeet Heer of The New Republic wrote a counterargument analysis saying while theres no denying that conspiracy theories are spread on the left, only the Democratic Party acts responsibly when faced with politically convenient, but obviously fantastic, stories.

There still exists a feedback loop on the left, so when a prominent person falls for a conspiracy theory, they are challenged by the media and willing to correct themselves, he wrote. Conversely, conservatives tend to adhere to a no apologies ethos that makes admitting error verboten.

In a survey administered by Survey Sampling International immediately after the election (Nov. 7-10, 2016), found that partisans conspiratorial predispositions can vary depending on which party holds political power. Democrats conspiracy scores increased significantly compared with a previous survey in July 2016.

The percentage of Democrats who agreed on average with the conspiracy claims in the scale increased from 27 percent before the election to 32 percent after the election. By contrast, Republicans willingness to endorse conspiratorial claims declined after the election over all, decreasing the percentage of Republicans who agreed on average with the false statements from 28 percent to 19 percent.

Nyhan said everyoneplays a part in spreading misinformation and more people should be willing to publicly correct themselves if they get a fact wrong or spread a debunked theory.

We all can take some responsibility for this in the kinds of information we share on social media, he said. Were all potentially complicit in the spread of misinformation. Everyone will be fooled. Thats part of the medium, for better or for worse.What Ive been disappointed to see is how many people dont exercise the appropriate care in what they do amplify and fail to correct the record when the information theyve circulated turns out to be wrong.

Follow Kyle on Twitter.

Sign up for NH Journals must-read morning political newsletter.

Here is the original post:

Dartmouth Professor Concerned About Spread of Liberal Conspiracy Theories on Social Media - InsideSources

Liberal MP Tim Wilson has blamed his colleagues' unwillingness to act on same-sex marriage for the "national silliness"that has erupted over tennis legend Margaret Court's boycott of Qantas.

He was responding tocalls forMelbourne's Margaret Court Arena to be renamed after Court, a staunch Christian, vowed not to fly with the national carrier because its gay chief executive, Alan Joyce, is a prominent backer of marriage equality.

Mr Wilson - who is himself gay and one of several Liberal MPs pushing for a free vote on same-sex marriage - was opposed to banishing Court's name from the stadium, describing the ideaas an example of "ridiculous behaviour" by activists.

"What we're seeing now is a dehumanising ofpeople if you disagree with them," he told Sky News on Tuesday night. "It isn't justaboutcensoring and silencing, it's actually about questioning the legitimacy of your place in society."

But in a rebuke of his colleagues' intransigence on the issue, Mr Wilson said the frustration with Court partly reflected a frustration with the Federal Parliament for failing to legalise same-sex marriage despite enormous public support.

"I think a lot of what's happening at the moment is people are expressing their frustration in other ways because the issue isn't being resolved," Mr Wilson said.

"Frankly, the discussion around marriage for same-sex couples has descended into a kind of national silliness where people are just taking more and more extreme and absurd positions because they're not actually debating the issue.

"They're not actually debating resolution of the issue becausethe Parliament won't deal with it. So I think we've got to be mindful that that is part of the reason why we're seeing this type of ridiculous behaviour."

That type of hysteria would continue "if we keep not dealing with it and finding a sensible way through", Mr Wilson said.

Such a route would involve protections for people who disagreed with same-sex marriage to ensure they would not face "persecution", he said.

The Coalition tried to legislate for a plebiscite on same-sex marriage last year, but it was blocked in the Senate by Labor, the Greens and parts of the crossbench.

Since, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has refused to countenance a free vote on the issue, despite calls from a handful of Liberal MPs.

The Court controversy flourished with contributions from tennis stars Casey Dellacqua, who told Court "enough is enough", andSam Stosur, who hinted at a player boycott of Margaret Court Arena at next year's Australian Open.

On Monday, Court said she was the victim of "bullying" because of her belief that marriage should be between a man and a woman.

"I have nothing against gay people, we have them in our church and Ihelp them," she told Sky News.

"[But] God made man for woman and woman for man ... and go multiply the earth. Well you know that two men can't multiply the earth andtwo women can't.

"I have nothing against people with their life, if they want to lead a life like that. But this is a Judaeo-Christian nation and Ibelieve we should protect marriage because we have natural laws - when a policeman says stop we stop."

Visit link:

Liberal MP Tim Wilson blames colleagues for 'national silliness' over Margaret Court comments - The Sydney Morning Herald

Ramesh Ponnuru: Liberal blind spots Pittsburgh Post-Gazette That use of we refers to the Wellesley community as a cozy liberal monoculture. It erases any conservatives, or Nixon or Trump supporters, in the graduating class. Which is a little rich considering that she also decries the idea of a closed society ... and more »

Go here to read the rest:

Ramesh Ponnuru: Liberal blind spots - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Rush Limbaugh roundly mocked Mark Zuckerberg on his radio show Friday because of what he saw as a left-wing commemoration speech the Facebook founder gave.

Mark Zuckerberg, Rush explained, the founder of Facebook you know, he dropped out of Harvard. He was at Harvard. He dropped out of there because Facebook took off. So he went out to California and did what he did to build Facebook up. So he went back, went back to Cambridge, Massachusetts, yesterday to do the commencement address. Are you ready for this? The 366th commencement.

Zuckerberg thinks that everybody ought to have an identical income, he continued, that we need to have a what does he call it a universal basic income. Well talk about how to pay for it later. But we need as many people as possible running around not worrying about how to pay the bills. Thats when you get real creativity. Thats in the second bite. Here is the first. Mark Zuckerberg, commencement, Harvard yesterday.

There is something wrong with our system, Zuckerberg said in the recorded sound byte, when I can leave here and make billions of dollars and

Wait, wait, stop the tape, Limbaugh interrupted. Mark Zuckerberg, dont give me some woman here. Its Mark Zuckerberg. Youre not playing the right bite. That was a woman, right? Oh, really? Oh, jeez. Oh, its too long. Theres too much time gone by to bleep that, aw, jeez.

Well, thats what happens when you have artificial hearing, he said. Honest to God, it sounded like a female editor at some liberal magazine. Okay. Friday, cue the thing back up. Gee, I thought it was a girl. Ah, its embarrassing.

Limbaugh has just recently been under fire for his comments praising the studly and manly Greg Gianforte for assaulting a reporter before the Montana special election for the openU.S. House seat. Gianforte later apologized to the reporter and to his supporters for the incident after winning the election.

Go here to read the rest:

Rush Limbaugh: Mark Zuckerberg sounds like a 'girl' editor at a liberal magazine - TheBlaze.com

"The word liberal in this context has nothing to do with today's partisan language, but refers instead to the Latin root, pertaining to liberty. And at the heart of liberty in the Western world has been freedom of speech. From the beginning, people understood that this meant protecting and listening to speech with which you disagreed," Zakaria argued.

That means, he said, not drowning out "the ideas that we find offensive."

In addition, Zakaria noted what he called "an anti-intellectualism" on the left.

"It's an attitude of self-righteousness that says we are so pure, we're so morally superior, we cannot bear to hear an idea with which we disagree," he said.

"Liberals think they are tolerant but often they aren't," he added.

No one, he continued, "has a monopoly on right or virtue."

In fact, it is only by being open to hearing opposing views that people on both sides of the political spectrum can learn something, Zakaria said.

"By talking seriously and respectfully about agreements and disagreements, we can come together in a common conversation," he said.

"Recognizing that while we seem so far apart, we do actually have a common destiny."

Original post:

Fareed Zakaria: Liberals think they're tolerant, but they're not - CNN