Category Archives: Liberal

In some ways, the new WA Liberal leadership team will serve as a counter to some of the biggest criticisms levelled against the party.

Ever since the party was annihilated at the 2017 election, the Liberals have been accused of lacking energy, young talent and fresh ideas a party full of relics from the Barnett years, according to critics.

But the Opposition can now counter that by pointing to a 33-year-old leader in Zak Kirkup a rookie by political standards, in his first term of Parliament, who even critics would acknowledge isn't lacking in drive and determination.

Also repeatedly criticised for having a 'women problem', with female representation in the partyroom sorely lacking, the Liberals can also point to new deputy leader Libby Mettam another relative newcomer to politics, having won her seat in 2014.

But despite those advantages, the new leadership has some giant hurdles to overcome with an election just around the corner, after Mr Kirkup was elected unopposed following Dean Nalder's withdrawal from the contest.

Labor is already sharpening its knives, describing Mr Kirkup as being on his "L-plates".

That is a line of attack that could be highly damaging, as WA continues to stare down a once-in-a-generation global pandemic.

"You have a failed minister and an untried new member of parliament," Deputy Premier Roger Cook said of the two contenders before Mr Nalder pulled out.

"A pandemic requires a government that is experienced."

The bar, though, will not be set too high for Mr Kirkup, given how grave the fears of Liberal MPs have been for some time.

Currently, the party holds just 13 of the 59 seats in the Legislative Assembly and that number could further plummet, according to some polls, with a host of marginal seats in danger.

With that in mind, simply holding ground might be seen by Liberals as something of a win and could ensure the party keeps Mr Kirkup on as opposition leader after March 13.

Still, Mr Kirkup insists he is in it to win it.

"Anyone who is standing to be leader should make sure that we are here to fight in every one of the 59 seats in the Lower House," he said.

But the fact that one of the most vulnerable Liberal seats is Mr Kirkup's own is a significant complicating factor.

He holds the seat of Dawesville by just over 300 votes and it is an electorate Labor will inevitably target, meaning Mr Kirkup will have to spend significant time defending his own territory.

That would be time he would be unable to spend campaigning in other seats, but Mr Kirkup has maintained he can find that balance.

"I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't think the people of Mandurah had my back," he said ahead of the partyroom meeting.

Both Mr Kirkup and Mr Nalder spoke of the need to unite the party, which during Ms Harvey's leadership was plagued by unhappy MPs who felt they had been sidelined.

Just how strong those divisions are was made abundantly clear in the minutes before the vote, when two retiring MPs former leader Mike Nahan and South Perth MP John McGrath called out what they saw as the excessive influence of powerbroker Peter Collier.

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Dr Nahan publicly called for both Mr Collier and Nedlands MP Bill Marmion to resign, while Mr McGrath said the events of Tuesday showed powerbrokers ran the party.

Healing those wounds and finding a way to unite ahead of the election campaign will be a crucial early task for Mr Kirkup.

So, too, will be convincing the public that Mr Kirkup has the experience to lead and ensuring colleagues believe he has the political nous to succeed.

Some MPs were left questioning the latter point after the Dawesville MP labelled Premier Mark McGowan "a princess" earlier this year.

But perhaps the biggest task will be making sure voters know who he is.

For more than a year now, Mr Kirkup has counted down the days until the election on his Twitter account and, this morning, that ticked down to 109 days.

It means he has just over three months to gain some name recognition in public and show himself to be a viable alternative to an historically popular premier.

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Zak Kirkup must unite a fractured WA Liberal Party and that may not even be his biggest task - ABC News

The teaching of liberal studies in Hong Kong schools will be changed to include more content about mainland China and less on current affairs while pupils will also be taught separately about national security issues, education chiefs say.

Following Chief Executive Carrie Lams Policy Address on Wednesday, the Education Bureau announced Thursday that the subject would be renamed, along with a series of other changes including halving the number of teaching hours devoted to it.

Introduced in 2009, liberal studies is one of the four core subjects in the senior secondary curriculum. It is aimed at developing critical thinking and enhancing social awareness.

But Lam and other pro-Beijing politicians say aspects of the education system helped fuel last years pro-democracy mass protests. Lam claimed in May that some people are feeding schoolchildren false and biased information and it was important to protect students from being poisoned.

Under the new plan, the curriculum will be reduced and grading changed to a pass/fail system. Liberal studies will still be a compulsory core subject but students will no longer have to conduct an associated project known as Independent Enquiry Study.

A list of suitable textbooks would be provided to schools after the bureau has screened them. According to Secretary for Education Kevin Yeung, the contents would now only include mature topics and the subject was not for news discussion.

Pupils would also have to join a study tour to mainland China as a part of the curriculum, but the tour would not be graded. Liberal studies would include more content on national education, but Yeung denied this meant the overall subject had become national education.

Details of the changes would be discussed with the Curriculum Development Council and the Hong Kong Examinations and Assessment Authority.

A now-resigned lawmaker for the education sector, Ip Kin-yuen, slammed the proposed changes for ignoring the report of the Task Force on Review of School Curriculum, which was released two months ago.

Why is there no study or evidence to support the proposal? Ip said. This is done so casually, there isnt even a document is the Education Bureau actually doing professional educational work? Or are they actually destroying the profession?

Ip said liberal studies had become the scapegoat for last years social unrest. They have to hide the responsibility of the governments misadministration for causing such uproar in society, he said.

As the subjects name suggests, liberal studies should be able to open up boundaries Through discussions, students can explore in-depth topics such as personal development and globalisation, Ip added. Theres no way that they should rule out [the discussion of] news.

In her policy address, Lam said the previous deviation from the subjects objective must be rectified so students could analyse contemporary issues in a rational manner and learn about the development of our nation, the Constitution, the Basic Law, the rule of law and so forth.

Earlier this year, the education bureau implemented a voluntary screening scheme for liberal studies textbooks, sparking concerns of self-censorship as publishers amended the textbooks. The phrase separation of powers was deleted and warnings added before content about civil disobedience.

Link:

Hong Kong liberal studies to be renamed and reformed more China content, less focus on current affairs - Hong Kong Free Press

Read: What do progressives do now?

The contradictory posturing of todays most powerful liberals is not fully attributable to the shock and disorientation brought about by the 2016 election; its roots go back to the Clinton era at leastthe period (not incidentally) when Democratic leaders formally abandoned their commitment to the New Deal and absorbed key parts of a Republican agenda.

American liberalism has always had a technocratic streak, but the disappointments experienced by liberals since the end of the 1960s enabled a new generation of more conservative Democrats to restructure the liberal coalition and redefine both its style and its political priorities. In the past few decades, the party has avoided embracing a clearly defined progressive program or engaging in the politics of confrontation. Whereas the consensus put in place by Franklin D. Roosevelt was achieved through open conflict with powerful forces in American society, the lodestars of the new liberalism became compromise and conciliation with the right. While FDR forged a lasting political settlement around welfarism and an activist state against the wishes of much of Americas corporate establishment, the Clinton administration would famously denounce the scourge of Big Government and declare the end of welfare as we know it. The Bill Clinton adviser Dick Morris even summed up the administrations strategy in a memo as follows: Fast-forward the Gingrich agenda.

Accordingly, key parts of the conservative agenda were absorbed into American liberalism, which would now make a virtue out of both bipartisan compromise and ideological triangulation.

This style found its ultimate expression in Barack Obama, who masterfully paired a sonorous rhetoric of optimism with, to paraphrase the political scientist Corey Robin, a moral minimalism that rendered Democrats not so much unprepared for a fight with their Republican foes as indisposed to the very idea of one. Beginning with the hopeful cadence of Yes we can! and ending, after a slew of congressional defeats, with the election of Donald Trump, the Obama era has served to convince many liberals of the need to compromise even furtheranything remotely ambitious being doomed to fail on the altars of conservative partisanship and Republican obstruction. (Rampant opposition to Medicare for All from centrist Democrats despite its considerable popularity has been justified on these grounds for years.)

Partly in response to the limitations of Obama-era liberalism, the left (notably, though not exclusively, in Bernie Sanderss two presidential campaigns) has embraced something like an inverse strategy: mobilizing around ambitious, popular policies and openly naming the forces and interests that stand in their way.

Derek Thompson: The millennials-verus-boomers fight divides the Democratic party

More here:

Why Liberals Pretend They Have No Power - The Atlantic

While Facebook continues to take heat over being a tinderbox for conservative media, data shows that liberal, civically engaged voices are winning out on Instagram and the engagement is even higher there than on Facebook.

Why it matters: The politics playing out on Instagram reflect a younger, more progressive generation. Many have left Facebook to their parents.

What's going on: A range of data from the Facebook-owned social media metrics platform CrowdTangle shows that liberal-leaning messaging flourishes on Instagram and that the top accounts generate even more engagement than on Facebook.

Be smart: Facebook has taken heat over the fact that many of its most-engaged accounts belong to right-wing voices. Four of the five Facebook accounts with the most engagement over the past month belong to President Trump, Fox News, Breitbart and Ben Shapiro, per CrowdTangle data.

Yes, but: It's worth noting that CrowdTangle doesn't measure engagement from personal pages only interactions on posts from pages that belong to public figures, groups, publishers, companies, etc. Its data represents only part of what's actually shared and engaged with, but it helps to spotlight major trends across both platforms.

The big picture: The 50 biggest voices on Instagram generated 4x more engagement than the 50 biggest on Facebook over the last month. And these numbers don't even include the massive engagement that Instagram Stories generate.

There are major differences in how the two platforms are used, which contribute to the prevailing political attitudes.

Between the lines: A generational divide between the platforms helps to explain the political usage. While many younger voters maintain Facebook accounts, they spend more time and engage more deeply on Instagram.

Go deeper: Instagram morphs into an information powerhouse

Original post:

The liberal election is happening on Instagram - Axios

For many, that frustration with liberal culture is a more powerful unifying force than any problems with Mr. Trump. There are a lot of conservative people who are put off by the outrage that Trump spews, but also by the reaction against Trump, Mr. Nadler continued. Theres an audience to assemble there.

The idea for the Babylon Bee was born of a frustration with the anemic realm of conservative comedy. Mr. Dillon, an entrepreneur who bought the site in 2018, was a fan of The Onion, and was gratified to see a similar wry tone applied by the religious right. He felt that conservatives often took themselves too seriously, and with satire they could take a closer look at their own hypocrisies and double standards. The site positioned itself as a cultural outsider from the start Babylon refers to the idea of exile, feeling politically homeless. The site was launched without outside funding by its founder Adam Ford and now runs primarily on advertising, though it also sells branded merchandise.

To the Babylon Bees leadership, there has never been a more important moment for satire. Political humor, the editors said, can often reveal the truths that get lost amid the spin and bias of so-called real news sites. One of Mr. Manns guiding principles, which he shares often with staff, is a quote from the critic G.K. Chesterton: Humor can get in under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle.

We wanted to communicate to a culture that it feels like no longer believes in truth, Mr. Mann said.

Their devotion to truth, Mr. Mann explained, means the Bee will continue to swipe at both political parties. We are one hundred percent committed to making fun of Trump, he said, but he does not buy into the idea that Mr. Trump is exceptionally bad.

If we make a joke about Trump being bad, its already been done a million times by the late night shows, he said. When people find the Babylon Bee they go, Hey this comedy makes fun of everybody, but its a little harder on the left, and when it makes fun of the right its not hateful. People can tell its loving humor.

Some media researchers believe that this willingness to mock both parties rarer in a climate where many mainstream comedic voices see the president as a disastrous leader, not a situation where jibes should be evenly distributed might be an important element to comedic success.

Originally posted here:

What The Babylon Bee Thinks Is So Funny About Liberals - The New York Times

SHELTER IN PLACEBy David Leavitt

Its late 2016, and Eva Lindquist is distraught. The chilly, exacting Upper West Side socialite has gathered a circle of sycophants at her Connecticut country house to witness her gnashing her veneers over the recent election of Donald Trump. Swirling her glass of wine, she remains puzzled and furious at the blithe acceptance of this apocalyptic event by her feckless husband, Bruce, a wealth manager, and her standard-issue Manhattan leisure-class coterie: the bickering artsy couple, the hanger-on magazine editor with no money, the diffident gay decorator. (All of the women seem to be some derivative of Iris Apfel.)

Eva is the kind of perennially aggrieved cosmopolitan who in movies is depicted aggressively slapping on body lotion before bed. Even as she cows the members of her social set, she remains the sun around which they orbit; her friends spend all of their time talking either to her or about her. Shes a tabula rasa, taut as piano wire as she tosses out withering rejoinders like beads at Mardi Gras. But she is also prescient, warning that Trump will manipulate the media to rip the country to shreds, even as her privileged petting zoo shrugs off all the doom and gloom.

The news isnt news anymore, she laments, its just pompous opinionating, the purpose of which is to keep us anxious, because these people know that as long as they can keep us anxious, as long as they dangle the carrot of consolation in front of us, theyve got us hooked. Theyre no different than the French papers in 1940, just more sophisticated. And more venal.

Determined not to be caught behind enemy lines, she impulsively buys a grand but tattered apartment in Venice. Its a decision that will fling the lives of her self-involved cabal hither and thither, like raindrops being shaken off an umbrella.

There is an art to writing about unlikable people while still engaging the reader to invest in their indulgence, vanity and, yes, happiness. Tracking the fallout wrought by Evas acquisition, Leavitt unfurls a droll drawing-room pastiche that evokes la dolce vita as Seinfeld episode. His boorish elites argue over the altruism of Barbara Kingsolver, whether Jean Rhys would have been anything without Ford Madox Ford, and the true symbolism of the pussy hat, all while dropping words like ouroboros and concupiscence in everyday conversation. Its Aaron Sorkin on steroids. And surprisingly compelling.

Leavitt has claimed John Cheever and Grace Paley as influences, and it shows here: His dissection of the pampered New Yorkers reaction to Trumps election, which they treat as a personal affront, is lethal and also kookily endearing. These poor rich people, wringing their hands at a country they no longer recognize, when what theyre truly mourning is the death of their own relevance. You can almost hear Elaine Stritch warbling The Ladies Who Lunch in the next apartment.

At one point, Aaron, a bitter, unemployed editor in Evas circle of faux bonhomie, tries to look at the bright side of the election. When writers start to feel oppressed again, he says, theyll start to write books worth reading instead of all of that idiotic upper-middle-class self-absorbed liberal navel-gazing crap we got when Obama was president. Leavitt, cleverly crafting a New Yorker cartoon in words, proves there is still some navel-gazing worth reading. His autopsy of the current liberal ennui is not particularly trenchant or surprising, but its certainly amusing. And in this ghastly year, cant we all use more of that?

Link:

The Plight of the Aggrieved, Rich Manhattan Liberal - The New York Times

John Green

WednesdayOct14,2020at2:16PM

A Liberal couple has been indicted in federal court in Topeka for a string of business robberies during September, including the Subway restaurant in Hutchinson.

Lekeith Markez Mosley, 29, and Shelbi Paige Ricks, 25, both of Liberal, are charged with three counts of robbery.

The indictment alleges the pair robbed the Subway at 711 N. Main St. first, on Sept. 6, and then the Family Dollar at 303 E. Kansas Ave. in Greensburg the next day.

The third robbery was at the Jimmy Johns restaurant, 1025 Southwest Wanamaker Road in Topeka on Sept. 27.

During the robberies in Hutchinson and Greensburg both wore cloth masks similar to masks worn to protect against COVID-19 and the man brandished a handgun, Hutchinson police previously reported.

Witnesses reported seeing them leaving the scene of the Dollar General robbery in a newer model white Dodge Ram pickup that was missing its gas tank door.

If convicted, they could face up to 20 years in federal prison and a fine up to $250,000 on each count. The FBI investigated. Assistant U.S. Attorney Jared Maag is prosecuting.

Read more from the original source:

Liberal couple indicted for Hutchinson, other robberies - The Hutchinson News

British Columbias two dominant political parties are backing liquefied natural gas development as part of their re-election campaign platforms.

The BC Liberals say they want to expedite LNG export projects, while the BC NDP has offered qualified support for LNG development, saying that any such effort must fit into the provincial climate plan and use world-leading regulations and technologies to cut methane.

Both positions stand in contrast to that of the BC Greens, whose leader Sonia Furstenau is against all new fossil fuel infrastructure and argues that a massive export project being built in Kitimat would blow by the provinces 2050 climate target.

On Oct. 13, the BC Liberals released their election platform declaring that, if elected, they would expedite LNG export projects.

We must ensure respect, certainty and clarity for employment in the natural resource sectors, it stated. Thriving natural resource industries are vital to sustaining our health care, education and other public services and B.C.s industries must be globally competitive in order to succeed.

The party platform said a BC Liberal government would speed up such projects by forging collaborative agreements with Indigenous groups involved in LNG and work with them to establish accelerated review and approval processes.

Meanwhile, the BC NDPs platform, released earlier, touted an LNG industry that meets B.C.s needs and conditions in a section on natural resources.

The platform references the $40-billion LNG Canada project, expected to transport natural gas supplied by the Coastal GasLink pipeline to markets in Asia. The NDP said that project is expected to feature one of the lowest GHG-emission intensities of any global LNG facility.

It shows that when people work together, we can balance our economic, environmental, social, and reconciliation priorities, reads the platform. This project will be comprehensively monitored to ensure it delivers on B.C.s conditions, including living up to our climate commitments.

Proponents of the project have said it will bring in $23 billion to the B.C. government, as well as jobs and economic activity to the province, and give a boost to the northern region. It also has support from the federal government; the Trudeau Liberals have given $275 million to the project.

But research is still being done on the sector's environmental benefits; for example, the claim that using natural gas will lower emissions because it will likely displace older coal-fired power plants since gas burns cleaner than coal.

Natural gas exploitation releases methane, which is 86 times as powerful as carbon dioxide in trapping heat in the atmosphere over a 20-year period. Studies have linked a rise in global methane levels with the boom in fracking. The oil and gas industry is the largest industrial contributor to methane emissions in Canada.

Last month, a study showed how newer gas plants in the United States were projected over their lifetimes to shave much of the gains off of U.S. coal plant shutdowns.

The study, first reported by HuffPost, said that when researchers included other factors, such as leaks of methane, this further reduced the potential emissions savings. Previous work has also shown that natural gas not only competes with coal power but with other energy sources, such as solar power.

In a statement, the BC NDP said it has been clear that any LNG development must fit into our climate plan.

CleanBC is the most ambitious climate plan in North America and any project must be consistent with our climate targets. We wont compromise those targets and have a legislated plan to address methane in partnership with the federal government, reads the statement.

Lastly, to make sure our reduction goals are being met, well employ world-leading regulations and technologies to detect and reduce harmful methane emissions.

But Furstenau argued the provinces CleanBC plan only gets three-quarters of the way to its 2030 targets.

Including LNG Canada, emissions from oil and gas production would exceed B.C.s 2050 target by 160 per cent, even if emissions from the rest of the economy were reduced to zero by 2035, she said.

The science is clear: We cannot keep building fossil fuel infrastructure that will pollute for many decades into the future if we are serious about avoiding a climate catastrophe. If the NDP is serious about climate action, it should cancel fossil fuel subsidies now.

Carl Meyer is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter with the National Observer, where this story first appeared.

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Here's where B.C. NDP and Liberals stand on LNG development - North Shore News

"It's pleasing the judgment has come down the way it has, because of course it's an unintended consequence of Labor's legislation that created this situation," said Sam McQuestin, Liberal Party state director.

The Coalition had taken the VEC to the Supreme Court in late February, asking for transfers from the Liberal Party to the Nationals not to be treated as political donations, and for payments between the two parties to be exempt from the cap on donations.

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Under the Coalition funding arrangement, first announced in 2008, the two parties operate joint tickets in the upper house and split the proceeds of the VEC reimbursement, with the Nationals receiving one-third and the Liberals receiving two-thirds of the money.

Following the last state election, the VEC indicated it would not pay the one-third share to the Nationals because Liberal Party candidates had occupied the bulk of the first-preference votes.

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Liberals, Nationals win court challenge on election funding - The Age

Four things happened at the October 12 Central Coast Council meeting, but leadership with open and honest transparency, wasnt one of them.

The meeting went from 6.30pm until 12.46am more than six hours of politics basically.

The Coast has a Council with six Labor councillors (Vincent, Hogan, Matthews, MacGregor, Mehrtens, Sundstrom) holding the balance of power, versus an Opposition of two Independents (Best, McLachlan) and the four Liberals (Pilon, Burke, Marquart, Gale).

Of the three other Independents (Greenaway, Holstein, Smith), two often side with Labor (Greenaway, Smith); although Cr Greenaway did vote with the Opposition at this meeting on the confidential item.

The lengthy October 12 meeting showed that no matter the extent of the crisis, the ability for the members of the two opposing groups to put aside their political point scoring and concentrate on working together is nil.

The problem for the community is that we have a Labor group in power saying one thing, the Liberal-dominated Opposition saying another, and the community doesnt have enough information yet to know who is telling the truth.

What we do know is that Council is facing a huge financial deficit, the size of which is hotly debated, but the publicly acknowledged figure is $89M for last financial year.

It also has an immediate cash flow problem and it has found an issue with its processes and accounting practices.

The Labor group is saying this cost blow-out is new information.

Independent Chris Holstein says he can no longer trust the staff to give the councillors correct information.

The Opposition is saying Council has been spending like drunken sailors from the beginning and havent listened to their warnings about this for three years and that this new information only adds to the problem.

The public has no detail yet of hinted new information, but it is bad, whatever it is.

A Mayoral Minute was given to councillors during the first few minutes of the meeting and it contained explosive information that the Mayor wanted dealt with, there and then, in camera, behind closed doors.

The councillors said that they had spent two hours together in briefings before the meeting and it wasnt fair that this information had not been given to them at that time.

The Mayor said that she had kept it secret because she didnt want it leaked to the media.

However, her move backfired, because the majority of councillors agreed with Cr Greg Best to defer the item and to deal with it next Monday night, October 19, when an extraordinary meeting will be held to deal with the backlog of items that were deferred from the October 12 meeting.

So, now, that information is with the 15 councillors for one week before they debate it.

We dont know what that information is about, but councillors said enough in open forum for us to believe that it will have a significant impact on the business.

The mind boggles with the possibilities of what this could be, but the councillors were well aware of legal restraints in talking about it in open debate, so Im not going to speculate.

The matter will come out eventually, whatever it is.

Adding to the speculation was the fact that the CEO Gary Murphy was not at the meeting.

No explanation was given on the night as to why he wasnt there, but the agenda included a Notice of Motion calling on councillors for a vote of no confidence in him. (See separate article)

Was he sick, as one councillor said?

The official press release issued said that he was on leave.

That left the Director of Water and Sewerage, Jamie Loader, in the role of acting CEO and acting chief financial officer (CFO) at the meeting.

The council is currently recruiting for a new CFO.

The Motion of no confidence failed.

Then, finally; some decisions.

Council made some decisions aimed at addressing the financial situation.

Those decisions are outlined in a press release from Council (see separate article).

The major new decision was to either borrow money from internal restricted funds or to get a $100M loan, or maybe both.

The Opposition did not agree with more spending, but they did not put forward alternate solutions.

The list of decisions is really about planning to make decisions to rein in the costs.

Councillors were invited to be part of the committees making the plans.

Cr Troy Marquart said Council couldnt plan to spend money that they didnt have.

The Minister for Local Government, Shelley Hancock, who will have to give permission for the internal borrowing, is also the Minister to call Council into Administration if she thought that was a better way forward.

Going on last nights performance, surely Administration is a tantalising option for a Liberal State Government which finds its Liberal councillors at Central Coast Council in Opposition and without the numbers to have any real power?

Merilyn Vale

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Administration is a tantalising option for a Liberal State Government - Central Coast Community News