Category Archives: Liberal

All year long, struggles within Congress and the White House on health care, taxes, trade and infrastructure have highlighted deep fissures in the Trump-era GOP.

For the moment, they've obscured divisions within a Democratic opposition savoring the luxury of just attacking.

But those divisions will surface soon enough, as the 2018 mid-term election campaign accelerates and the 2020 presidential contest gets underway. And when they do, a recent examination of both parties suggests, they will produce some surprising Democratic beneficiaries.

The examination, by a team of analysts across the political spectrum for the Voter Study Group, shows how the surge of President Donald Trump's blue-collar backers has buffeted the GOP. They diverge from the party's traditional conservatism on taxes, spending and trade.

Democrats have their own fault lines, as the party's protracted 2016 primary battle made clear.

But the report concluded that the party's rank-and-file chose between establishment figure Hillary Clinton and self-styled revolutionary Bernie Sanders on the basis of style more than substance.

Though Sanders' supporters were more hostile to international trade agreements, they held similar views to Clinton's allies on core economic concerns such as income inequality and the importance of an activist government.

"Their voters were not all that different on most issues," wrote Lee Drutman, a fellow at the New America think tank who was part of the Voter Study Group team. "To the extent that the Democratic Party is divided, these divisions are more about faith in the political system and general disaffection than they are about issue positions."

Thus attitude may represent the key variable within Democratic politics over the next three years. Already, some Democrats have staked out divergent positions on how vehemently to resist the agenda of Trump and the GOP Congress.

After Democrat Jon Ossoff struck a temperate tone in his losing race for a Georgia House seat, some intraparty critics complained that he should have excoriated the president more. The recent fight for Virginia's Democratic gubernatorial nomination in which Sanders-backed former House Democrat Tom Perriello lost to Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam revolved around who had greater ability to produce change.

The Virginia outcome suggests that firebrands in the mold of Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren may have less momentum within the party than they assumed in the wake of Trump's triumph. Like the Republican president, each has drawn energy with angry complaints that the political system is rigged to the detriment of average Americans.

However hostile the party's feelings about Trump, their challenge may get even steeper the closer the nation draws to the 2020 presidential contest. David Axelrod, the chief strategist in Barack Obama's breakthrough 2008 victory, notes a recurrent pattern: Voters seek qualities in their next president that compensate for what they consider defects in the last one.

Thus in 2000, they embraced George W. Bush's vow to restore "honor and dignity" to a White House tarnished by Bill Clinton's scandal. In 2008, they turned to Obama's deliberation over Bush's "gut-player" style. In 2016, an electoral majority opted for the bombast of a wealthy outsider vowing to "make America great again."

"In 2020, there will be a market for an antidote to him," Axelrod said. That points toward a quieter, more thoughtful approach that places a higher premium on governing experience.

"There will be a receptivity to someone who offers big ideas about how to insure a fair shot and economic security for the broadest number of Americans in a rapidly changing economy, rather than promising a return to an irretrievable past," Axelrod said. "There will be a market for a more healing and unifying figure who can speak to our common values and concerns as Americans rather than mining resentment and sowing antagonism."

If he's right, harsh denunciations of the wealthiest 1 percent won't prove the most effective Democratic answer to Trump's denunciations of illegal immigrants. That dynamic would give an advantage to potential White House candidates with a more consensus-oriented message, such as Joe Biden or Cory Booker, rather than Sanders or Warren.

See the original post here:

Liberal firebrands may not be best hope for Democrats in Trump era - CNBC

On my first day at Michigan State University in 1992, a fellow student called me a "liberal" and I was shocked: as a Canadian who was often to the left of the social-democratic New Democratic Party, I identified "liberal" with the Liberal Party, a centre-right political party that had once imposed martial law in Canada.

As I lived in the USA off and on in the ensuing decades, I grew increasingly frustrated with the truncated US political spectrum, whose mainstream ran from far-right to center-right, with "liberal" being as far left as anyone dared to go. It's this bizarre situation that created an equivalence between Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, though Corbyn is far, far to the left of Sanders.

Writing in the New York Times Magazine, Nikil Saval describes a gradual shift in American politics, driven by a resurgent, insurgent, anti-establishment Democratic base who are demanding party leaders who stop kowtowing to big pharma, the finance industry, racist "war on poverty" types, surveillance agencies, and prison labor.

These left-wing activists reject and deplore the term "liberal," seeing it as "weak-minded, market-friendly centrist, wonky and technocratic and condescending to the working class."

Over the last few years, though and especially 2016 there has been a surge of the opposite phenomenon: Now the political left is expressing its hatred of liberals, too. For the committed leftist, the liberal is a weak-minded, market-friendly centrist, wonky and technocratic and condescending to the working class. The liberal is pious about diversity but ready to abandon any belief at the slightest drop in poll numbers a person who is, as the folk singer Phil Ochs once said, 10 degrees to the left of center in good times, 10 degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally. The anonymous Twitter account liberalism.txt is a relentless stream of images and retweets that supposedly illustrate this liberal vacuousness: say, the chief executive of Patagonias being hailed as a leader of corporate resistance to Trump, or Chelsea Clintons accusing Steve Bannon of fat shaming Sean Spicer.

This shift in terminology can be confusing, both politically and generationally as when baby boomers describe fervent supporters of Bernie Sanders as very liberal, unaware that young Sandersistas might find this vomit-inducing. It can also create common ground. Last year, the young (and left-leaning) writer Emmett Rensin published a widely read piece on Vox deriding liberals for their smug style; soon enough, one longtime adept of the right, National Reviews Ramesh Ponnuru, was expressing his partial approval, writing in Bloomberg View that what contemporary liberalism lacked most was humility. Here was a perspective common to both sides of the old spectrum: that liberals suffered from a serene, self-ratifying belief in their own reasonableness, and that it would spell their inevitable defeat.

Hated by the Right. Mocked by the Left. Who Wants to Be Liberal Anymore? [Nikil Saval/New York Times]

(Image: Photo illustration by Derek Brahney)

(via Naked Capitalism)

(Image: Big Wow Badges)

Trump is an infamously domineering handshaker, who uses the gesture to impose and humiliate. Sometimes, a wily Trudeau or muscular Macron will get the better of him, but theyre still playing his game. Agata Kornhauser-Duda isnt, drifting right past his outstretched lil smokies to greet Melania Trump instead, only turning to the orange morgellons monster []

In the wake of CNN threatening to out a critic if he does not limit his speech in the future, former federal prosecutor and First Amendment champion Ken White has published an eminently sensible post about the incoherence of the present moments views on free speech, and on the way that partisanship causes us to []

Louisiana Republican congressman Clay Higgins shot video of himself talking about the need for invincible U.S. powerwhile wandering the gas chamber at Auschwitz. In his five-minute ramble, Higgins explains the horrors that took place at the camp, where some 1.1m people, mostly Jews, where murdered by the Nazis during World War II. And that this []

Excel, Microsofts venerable spreadsheet program has some seriously powerful capabilities. But unless you know where to look in the maze of menus and toolbars, you probably leave the pivot tables and conditional formatting to your offices Excel guru. If you want to level up your skills and steal the title from the resident guru, take []

Entertaining bold changes in your career can feel like an abandonment of what youve worked for thus far, but this fallacious mindset can cost you a lot more in the long run than the time spent at your current gig. Change is constant, and building new skills outside of your typical wheelhouse will do much []

Immersive 3D sound is usually only possible with an array of surround-sound speakers, or by using headphones with Binaural audio content. And since most readily-available media is mastered for generic stereo, your Dolby 5.1 setup wont automagically add an extra dimension to your listening experience. But you can still simulate a rich audio environment with []

Excerpt from:

America is starting to realize that "liberal/conservative" labels exclude the left - Boing Boing

Despite his campaign comments to the contrary, President Donald Trump will apparently meet Friday for the first time with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G-20 summit in Germany.

If Trump fails to stand up to Putin and forcefully raise the issue of Russian interference in our elections, the Kremlin will conclude that he is too weak to stand up to them at all. That makes his statement todaythat no one really knows who was behind the hacking and dumping of Hillary Clinton's emailsmore than discouraging. Far from putting America first, if he continues to cling to this personal fiction, he will be elevating Russian interests above all others.

On the agenda should also be Russia's continued destabilization of Ukraine, Russia's propping up of Bashar al-Assad, and a clear declaration that the U.S. will not turn a blind eye to any potential Russian support of the Taliban or increased trade with North Korea.

There is little evidence, though that Trump plans to confront Putin on any of these serious matters. Instead, he may seek little more than the exchange of pleasantries and the usual claims of a fabulous meeting.

This would be a historic mistake, with damaging implications for our foreign policy for years to come. Because what the Russians have in mind goes well beyond interference in one election, or the restoration of Russian dominance in what it considers to be its sphere of influence into a profound challenge to a rules-based international order that has been of incalculable benefit to freedom-loving people around the world.

Last summer, what began as a Russian effort to gather foreign intelligence on candidates for the presidency of the United States became a very different kind of enterprise when Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to weaponize the data stolen by his intelligence services. Putins dumping of private stolen emails in an effort to influence the U.S. election was a breathtaking escalation of Russian interference in our internal affairs. It is vital that we understand both why he chose such a provocative course, and the new threat that the Russian government poses to the very idea of liberal democracy.

There is no question that Putin despised former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over her support of pro-democracy protesters who gathered by the tens of thousands in Moscow streets years earlier to protest his governments fraud and corruption. Putin was terrified by these mass protests and believed he saw the hidden hand of the Central Intelligence Agency behind them.

Putin understands innately that the only real threat to his regime will come from the streets, not from an election process where opposition leaders are continually jailed or killed, and where the state controls all the major media. Putin was more than aware Clinton would continue her strong support of sanctions over Russias invasion of Ukraine, and those sanctions are a keen threat to the regime specifically because they have slowed the Russian economy and made the prospect of popular opposition to Putin even greater.

Apart from opposing Clinton, there was every reason for the Russian government to prefer Donald Trump, who over the course of the campaign belittled NATO, celebrated Brexit and a further weakening of Europe, expressed a common purpose with Russia in Syria notwithstanding our very different interests on the survival of the Assad regime, and most significantly, made clear his willingness to revisit our economic sanctions on Russia.

But we would make a grave mistake to assume the Russian intervention was solely about hurting Clinton or helping Trump, or even its main object. Above all, Putin wanted to tear down American democracy just as he is assaulting other liberal democracies around the world. We are in a new battle of ideas, pitting not communism against capitalism, but authoritarianism against democracy and representative government. America must not shrink from its essential role as democracys champion.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, we lived in a world in which the number of people living in free societies was ever increasing. The triumph of liberal democracy in Europe seemed certain, and around the world, democratic change was often plodding but seemed inexorable.

Today, even with welcome victories for candidates like Emmanuel Macron, we may be at an inflection point in which we can no longer be assured that the number of people around the world who will enjoy the freedoms of speech, assembly and religion will increase. It may, in fact, contract. Putins autocratic model is on the rise in places like Poland, Hungary, Turkey, Egypt, the Philippines and elsewhere.

Get The Beast In Your Inbox!

Start and finish your day with the top stories from The Daily Beast.

A speedy, smart summary of all the news you need to know (and nothing you don't).

Subscribe

Thank You!

You are now subscribed to the Daily Digest and Cheat Sheet. We will not share your email with anyone for any reason.

The narrative Putin wishes to tell is that there is no such thing as democracy, not in Russia nor in the United States, and our commitment to human rights is mere hypocrisy. Putins aims are served when Trump baselessly accuses President Obama of illegally wiretapping him or when the President lashes out at a secretive deep state allegedly working against him.

Of all the praise heaped undeservedly on Putins leadership, none would have pleased him more than when Trump was asked during the campaign why he could not criticize Putin's assassinations of reformers and journalists, at home and abroad. Trump responded, Well, you think our country is so innocent?

The Trump Administration has decided that democracy and the promotion of human rights will no longer be a top priority and instead we will put America first. This fundamentally misapprehends the degree to which the success of democracy around the world is a core American interest.

When the President complements Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte on a massive campaign of extrajudicial killing, he is not advancing American values or interests only causing the rest of the world to turn away. We fought two world wars to make the world safe for democracy, because we recognized, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr., that a threat to democracy anywhere was a threat to democracy everywhere.

America is not a victim, as the President so often paints her, but the most powerful nation on earth and the greatest beneficiary of a liberal world order established at tremendous cost in American blood and treasure. That is a legacy to cherish and to defend.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) is the ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

See original here:

Schiff: Putin Aims to Take Down Liberal Democracy. To Put America First, Trump Must Stand Up to Him - Daily Beast

Archbishop Quinn used his platform to criticize American military intervention in Central America and to condemn nuclear war as inherently immoral; at one point, he called on Roman Catholics serving in the armed forces to defy any order to detonate a nuclear weapon.

He argued for greater openness in debating such doctrinal questions as contraception, the ordination of women and whether to allow divorced Catholics to receive the sacraments. In 1985, he appointed Sister Mary Bridget Flaherty as his chancellor, or manager of day-to-day operations. It was the highest position ever attained by a woman in a major diocese.

In moving to address the AIDS crisis, Archbishop Quinn donated a former convent to be used as a hospice and, through the social-services organization Catholic Charities, created a housing program to help AIDS patients remain in their apartments.

Archbishop Quinn held firm to church doctrine on abortion, opposing Roe v. Wade and campaigning for a constitutional amendment banning abortion. Our witness to the sanctity of human life cannot diminish and our effort cannot cease, he wrote in the Jesuit magazine America in 2009, referring to the grave moral evil inherent in abortion.

John Raphael Quinn was born on March 28, 1929, in Riverside, Calif., to Ralph Quinn and the former Elizabeth Carroll. He set his sights on the priesthood while serving as an altar boy there in St. Francis de Sales parish.

He enrolled in the Immaculate Heart Seminary in El Cajon, Calif., and completed his training at the Gregorian University in Rome. He was ordained as a priest for the diocese of San Diego in 1953, his third year of study, and received his licentiate in sacred theology the following year before taking up duties as an associate pastor in St. Georges Parish in Ontario, Calif.

After serving as vice rector and rector of the Immaculate Heart Seminary in San Diego, with two years as president of St. Francis College Seminary in El Cajon in between, he became auxiliary bishop of San Diego.

While attending a synod in Rome in 1980, Archbishop Quinn ruffled feathers by informing the assembled bishops that the church would have to address resistance to its doctrines forbidding contraception. He cited studies showing that 76 percent of Catholic women in the United States used contraceptive devices and that 71 percent of American priests did not regard the practice as a serious sin.

To quell the ensuing furor, he issued a statement explaining that he supported church doctrine. The intent of my speech was to suggest possible ways of making the churchs teaching on contraception better understood and more widely accepted, he said.

Some Vatican watchers, reading between the lines, saw his remarks as a move to push the church in a more liberal direction. That did not happen, and his outspokenness on the subject, and on the church hierarchy later on, might explain his failure to be named a cardinal.

All he did was ask that the church acknowledge the views of the laity on birth control, but that was the turning point, Richard McBrien, a professor of theology at Notre Dame, told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1995. He wasnt challenging church teachings. He was just acknowledging reality.

His last two years as archbishop were clouded by financial problems and allegations of sexual abuse and embezzlement leveled against two priests in the archdiocese. In response to damage wrought by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and expensive new building requirements, Archbishop Quinn closed more than a dozen churches, cut the staff of the archdiocese by 20 percent and sold the old archbishops residence.

After retiring at the end of 1995, he delivered a widely publicized address at Campion Hall, Oxford, in response to Pope John Paul IIs 1995 encyclical Ut Unum Sint (That they may be one), which invited suggestions on papal overhaul and ways to promote dialogue with other Christian denominations.

In his address, the archbishop argued for a spirit of criticism and open discussion. He targeted the papal curia, or governing body, which he described as a politburo that stifled free discussion and imposed its will, making bishops managers who only work under instructions rather than true witnesses of faith who teach in communion with the pope in the name of Christ.

He elaborated on his ideas in a book, The Reform of the Papacy: The Costly Call to Christian Unity, published in 1999. He was also the author of Ever Ancient, Ever New: Structures of Communion in the Church (2013).

Original post:

John R. Quinn, Archbishop and Liberal Voice in Church, Dies at 88 ... - New York Times

By John Sciulli/Getty Images.

Jo Miller doesnt need an Emmyshes already got three, thanks to her work on TV Academy darling The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Now an executive producer for Stewart descendant Samantha Bee's TBS series Full Frontal, Miller says shed love for her staff to snag an Emmy nod when nominations are revealed July 13not to mention a statuette. For her, though, its just not a big deal.

I honestly don't care; I really don't, she says in a phone interview. I get the lettersthey mean everything to me. They keep me getting up in the morningthe things I hear from the fans who love [the show], and who get it, and the articles written in college papers by college kids who find the show important and meaningful.

Its pretty much the answer youd expect a creative type to give when asked about awardsbut Miller sounds like she really means it. Still, Full Frontals omission from last years Emmy variety talk series category was particularly egregious. Many wondered why the buzzy new show got sidelined in favor of a nod toward Jerry Seinfelds long-running Comedians in Cars Getting Coffeewhich felt less topical than Sam Bee, to say the least.

Maybe Emmy voters, most of whom live in Los Angeles, had not yet caught wind of the New York-based newcomer; Full Frontal does, after all, air just once a week on a network that, at the time of the show's launch, was just dipping a toe into original programming. And before the show moved from Monday to Wednesday nights, Bee had just one days worth of headlines to distinguish her coverage from that of another Daily Show veteran: John Oliver, whose show airs on Sundays.

Theres one more possibilityone that, during last year's nomination season, seemed pretty hard to ignore. Bee is late nights only female host. Whether that factored into the snub or not, the optics werent great.

Whatever the reason that Full Frontal got overlooked in 2016, most comedy fans outside the TV Academy recognized that it was a shame. Bees weekly episodes offer a distinct voice within late nights increasing bevy of comedians and monologues. Her trademark rage and fearless candor are singular, and Bee can often be found chasing stories that others neglect to cover both light-hearted ones, like Ivanka Trumps book, and serious ones, like the current administrations apparent intent to destroy the environment. When asked what she thinks the series has brought to the late night landscape, Miller says, When we burst onto the scene back in February [of 2016], we said exactly what we thought. We never pulled punches, ever. And we never focus-grouped in our head and worried who'd like it, and who wouldn't like it, and how it would land, and who it would offend.

Ill leave it up to other people to say whether that influenced the other shows to do the same and maybe tip their rage and pain a little more than they might have before, Miller adds. But we were doing it forwhatlike nine months before the election? And I think it was appropriate then. Everyone knows it's appropriate now.

Miller wrote for The Daily Show from 2009 right up until Stewart's last episode in 2015. The prevailing wisdom there, she says, was, you have to keep your foot on the neck of the story, or it will eat you. Bees segments, which leave nothing on the tableand nothing unsaidclearly abide by that mantra as well.

Compared with other late-night audiences, especially on broadcast networks, Full Frontals viewership is relatively smallbut its pieces make an outsize impact. Bee beat Stephen Colbert to the punch by going to Russia first, for a fascinating set of interviews with pro-Trump Russian trolls. (Oliver went to Russia before either of them, but his trip was to interview Edward Snowden in 2015, and occurred before any election-related hacking came to light.) When plans for the traditional White House Correspondents Dinner started to fall apart after Trump was elected, it was Bee who jumped on the opportunity to provide some counter-programmingrounding up a sizable collection of celebrities, including Will Ferrell, who showed up in character as George W. Bush, to back her up at her Not the White House Correspondents' Dinner.

For the record, Miller says she never wishes that Full Frontal were a daily show. She would give her "left tit for a few more minutes of air time, but not a full hour: No one wants to watch an hour of comedy. Theres S.N.L., but you have musical guests and its variety. . . It seems like 30 minutes is the right length.

While Bee was often, reductively, labeled late-nights resident female host when the show launched, Miller thinks descriptions of the series have grown more nuanced since. (And Bees status as late-nights lone woman really is important: after all, its what makes her authoritative on subjects that male comedians cant hit in the same way.) The terms in which she's described by people who hate us are highly gendereddisturbingly misogynist. That is always going to be their take, she adds.

Miller saves her ire for another label. What annoys me more is that people who don't watch the show regularly call us liberal, she says. Which, if you watch the show, is not accurate. We are passionate about feminism, and civil rights, and justice, and black lives, and women's livesbut we're radical centrists. And were not party affiliated. I think youll find a lot of our values reflect left of center rather than right of center, but to characterize us as partisan or liberal is lazy and its just something that people do who dont watch the show. And I think its also galvanized by the right wing trolls who do hate us, and want a clickbait narrative. Thats more annoying than noticing Sam has a vagina. Because she actually does have a vagina.

The assumption of bias bothers her. That is annoying. Its a lazy way to dismiss somebodyto say, Oh, this is just a liberal spin. We have an office full of trained journalists here, and academics, who are very serious about following the truth wherever it leads us. I mentioned David Frum in previous interviewsmy opinions seem to be most closely aligned with his these days, and Sams a fan, too. So I think the fact that we are left of center just reflects where center has moved to these days. . . Black people shouldnt be shot for sitting in their cars should not be a partisan position.

On issues like gun control and reproductive rights, Miller says that Bee also comes down on the leftbut, she emphasized, none of our takes are automatic, and we never check to see who else espouses them.

The show has plenty of detractors on the left, as well as the right, Miller notes, perhaps because Bee has mocked Bernie Sanders diehards on multiple occasions. Even the shows fans dont agree with it 100 percent of the time, according to Millerwhich is why she doesnt believe that late night is the liberal echo chamber its sometimes claimed to be.

Being left of center, I guess, on the spectrum, helps with thatbecause in my experience, people who are right of center are able to laugh at things that shun their dogma a little more easily than people, at least from the far left, Miller said. When we went to the Republican convention, delegates were coming onto the bus and saying that they're fans. My family has Hannity on at any moment when my shows not on; they love the show. My neighbors upstate in a very red county are fans. Because they just think it's funny. They dont always agree with everything. I cant really speak for the dogmatic left. I don't think an enjoyment of humor is maybe the dominant thing there. . . We're Satan for sitting down with Glenn Beck.

Seth Meyers

John McEnroe and Diane von Furstenberg

Claire Bernard

Jimmy Buffett

Kelly Meyer, Carey Lowell, and Jean Pigozzi

Peggy and Mickey Drexler

Rhea Suh and Hasan Minhaj

PreviousNext

Seth Meyers

Photograph by Hannah Thomson.

John McEnroe and Diane von Furstenberg

Photograph by Hannah Thomson.

Claire Bernard

Photograph by Hannah Thomson.

Jimmy Buffett

Photograph by Hannah Thomson.

Cocktail service at the after-party.

Photograph by Hannah Thomson.

Andy and Betsy Kenny Lack and Imran Khan

Photograph by Hannah Thomson.

Robyn Todd Steinberg and David Steinberg

Photograph by Hannah Thomson.

Harvey Weinstein and Lloyd Blankfein

Photograph by Hannah Thomson.

A box of popcorn was placed at each seat ahead of the performance.

Photograph by Hannah Thomson.

John Oliver

Photograph by Hannah Thomson.

Mike Birbiglia

Photograph by Hannah Thomson.

A scene from the after-party, also held at 583 Park Avenue.

Photograph by Hannah Thomson.

Leslie Moonves, Tom Freston, and Bryant Gumbel

Photograph by Hannah Thomson.

Jane Buffett

Photograph by Hannah Thomson.

David Zaslav, Len Blavatnik, and Richard Plepler

Photograph by Hannah Thomson.

Ronald O. Perelman

Photograph by Hannah Thomson.

George Lopez

Photograph by Hannah Thomson.

Kelly Meyer, Carey Lowell, and Jean Pigozzi

Photograph by Hannah Thomson.

Peggy and Mickey Drexler

Photograph by Hannah Thomson.

Rhea Suh and Hasan Minhaj

Photograph by Hannah Thomson.

Read more:

Don't Call Full Frontal with Samantha Bee Liberal - Vanity Fair

Staff Reports

Strong starting pitching and some early runs helped Dodge City grab the first of a seven-inning double header versus the first place Liberal Beejays on Wednesday.

The second game of the double header ran too late for Thursday's paper but there will be a short recap of it in Friday's paper.

The extra game is for a rainout that occurred earlier this season.

With the win, the A's are now 18-8 this season and have won 12 of their last 13. With a win in the second game of the double header, the A's will get within a game and a half of first place in the Jayhawk League.

Starter Jacob Call went 6.1 innings allowing just one run on five hits with two strike outs.

Dodge City broke the 0-0 tie in the bottom of the third with a single from third baseman Tucker Rhode that scored second baseman Dakota Connors. First baseman Carlos Moseley followed up right after with a sac-fly to right field scoring center field Jake Malec making it 2-0 after three.

Liberal responded in the top of the next inning with a two-out solo homer off Call cutting the A's lead to one.

A sacrifice from Moseley in the bottom of the fifth scored Malec pushing the A's lead back to 3-1. An error from Beejays first baseman Robbie Young scored the final run of the game, giving Dodge City a 4-1 lead.

Three straight hits loaded the bases for Liberal with one out in the top of the seventh forcing a pitching change for the A's but a ground out and fly-out back-to-back stopped the Beejays insurgency and ended the game.

The A's will finish out their series with Liberal tonight at 7:30 at Cavalier Field.

See the original post here:

A's beat first place Liberal in doubleheader - Dodge City Daily Globe

The Liberal MP who tried to introduce a bill which would have given referenda to Scotland and Wales on devolution back in the early 70s has died at the age of 90 at his home in Newtonmore.

James Davidson represented the constituency of Aberdeenshire West from 1966-70 when he stood down for family health reasons.

His funeral will take place at St Brides Church, Newtonmore at 12 noon on Friday 14 July.

From Wikipedia:

Davidson was selected to fight Aberdeenshire West for the Liberals. During the1966 general election campaignone of Davidsons main policy points was the establishment of a development authority for the North East of Scotland (on the lines of theHighlands and Islands Development Board)and he was a strong advocate on behalf of small farmers and of improving communications in remote areas like the Highlands by improving road links to the major cities.He also campaigned for better air and sea links with Scandinavia.

Davidson was Liberal spokesman on foreign affairs and defence issues in Parliament, a particularly important brief given the ongoing war inVietnamand the arguments over Britains roleEast of Suez. In February 1967,he took a leading role in the opposition to the governments plans to raise fees for foreign students at British universities and introduced a Bill to give the people of Scotland and Wales referendums ondevolution.This was as part of the Liberal strategy to draw the sting of the increasing popularity of theScottish National Partyand re-establish the Liberal position on home rule all round with the Scottish electorate.

More:

James Davidson, former Liberal MP for West Aberdeenshire, dies at 90 - Liberal Democrat Voice

Liberalism, political doctrine that takes protecting and enhancing the freedom of the individual to be the central problem of politics. Liberals typically believe that government is necessary to protect individuals from being harmed by others; but they also recognize that government itself can pose a threat to liberty. As the revolutionary American pamphleteer Thomas Paine expressed it in Common Sense (1776), government is at best a necessary evil. Laws, judges, and police are needed to secure the individuals life and liberty, but their coercive power may also be turned against him. The problem, then, is to devise a system that gives government the power necessary to protect individual liberty but also prevents those who govern from abusing that power.

The problem is compounded when one asks whether this is all that government can or should do on behalf of individual freedom. Some liberalsthe so-called neoclassical liberals, or libertariansanswer that it is. Since the late 19th century, however, most liberals have insisted that the powers of government can promote as well as protect the freedom of the individual. According to modern liberalism, the chief task of governmentis to remove obstacles that prevent individuals from living freely or from fully realizing their potential. Such obstacles include poverty, disease, discrimination, and ignorance. The disagreement among liberals over whether government should promote individual freedom rather than merely protect it is reflected to some extent in the different prevailing conceptions of liberalism in the United States and Europe since the late 20th century. In the United States liberalism is associated with the welfare-state policies of the New Deal program of the Democratic administration of Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt, whereas in Europe it is more commonly associated with a commitment to limited government and laissez-faire economic policies (see below Contemporary liberalism).

This article discusses the political foundations and history of liberalism from the 17th century to the present. For coverage of classical and contemporary philosophical liberalism, see political philosophy. For biographies of individual philosophers, see John Locke; John Stuart Mill; John Rawls.

Liberalism is derived from two related features of Western culture. The first is the Wests preoccupation with individuality, as compared to the emphasis in other civilizations on status, caste, and tradition. Throughout much of history, the individual has been submerged in and subordinate to his clan, tribe, ethnic group, or kingdom. Liberalism is the culmination of developments in Western society that produced a sense of the importance of human individuality, a liberation of the individual from complete subservience to the group, and a relaxation of the tight hold of custom, law, and authority. In this respect, liberalism stands for the emancipation of the individual. See also individualism.

Liberalism also derives from the practice of adversariality in European political and economic life, a process in which institutionalized competitionsuch as the competition between different political parties in electoral contests, between prosecution and defense in adversary procedure, or between different producers in a market economy (see monopoly and competition)generates a dynamic social order. Adversarial systems have always been precarious, however, and it took a long time for the belief in adversariality to emerge from the more traditional view, traceable at least to Plato, that the state should be an organic structure, like a beehive, in which the different social classes cooperate by performing distinct yet complementary roles. The belief that competition is an essential part of a political system and that good government requires a vigorous opposition was still considered strange in most European countries in the early 19th century.

Underlying the liberal belief in adversariality is the conviction that human beings are essentially rational creatures capable of settling their political disputes through dialogue and compromise. This aspect of liberalism became particularly prominent in 20th-century projects aimed at eliminating war and resolving disagreements between states through organizations such as the League of Nations, the United Nations, and the International Court of Justice (World Court).

Liberalism has a close but sometimes uneasy relationship with democracy. At the centre of democratic doctrine is the belief that governments derive their authority from popular election; liberalism, on the other hand, is primarily concerned with the scope of governmental activity. Liberals often have been wary of democracy, then, because of fears that it might generate a tyranny by the majority. One might briskly say, therefore, that democracy looks after majorities and liberalism after unpopular minorities.

Test Your Knowledge

Structures of Government: Fact or Fiction?

Like other political doctrines, liberalism is highly sensitive to time and circumstance. Each countrys liberalism is different, and it changes in each generation. The historical development of liberalism over recent centuries has been a movement from mistrust of the states power on the ground that it tends to be misused, to a willingness to use the power of government to correct perceived inequities in the distribution of wealth resulting from economic competitioninequities that purportedly deprive some people of an equal opportunity to live freely. The expansion of governmental power and responsibility sought by liberals in the 20th century was clearly opposed to the contraction of government advocated by liberals a century earlier. In the 19th century liberals generally formed the party of business and the entrepreneurial middle class; for much of the 20th century they were more likely to work to restrict and regulate business in order to provide greater opportunities for labourers and consumers. In each case, however, the liberals inspiration was the same: a hostility to concentrations of power that threaten the freedom of the individual and prevent him from realizing his full potential, along with a willingness to reexamine and reform social institutions in the light of new needs. This willingness is tempered by an aversion to sudden, cataclysmic change, which is what sets off the liberal from the radical. It is this very eagerness to welcome and encourage useful change, however, that distinguishes the liberal from the conservative, who believes that change is at least as likely to result in loss as in gain.

Although liberal ideas were not noticeable in European politics until the early 16th century, liberalism has a considerable prehistory reaching back to the Middle Ages and even earlier. In the Middle Ages the rights and responsibilities of the individual were determined by his place in a hierarchical social system that placed great stress upon acquiescence and conformity. Under the impact of the slow commercialization and urbanization of Europe in the later Middle Ages, the intellectual ferment of the Renaissance, and the spread of Protestantism in the 16th century, the old feudal stratification of society gradually began to dissolve, leading to a fear of instability so powerful that monarchical absolutism was viewed as the only remedy to civil dissension. By the end of the 16th century, the authority of the papacy had been broken in most of northern Europe, and each ruler tried to consolidate the unity of his realm by enforcing conformity either to Roman Catholicism or to the rulers preferred version of Protestantism. These efforts culminated in the Thirty Years War (161848), which did immense damage to much of Europe. Where no creed succeeded in wholly extirpating its enemies, toleration was gradually accepted as the lesser of two evils; in some countries where one creed triumphed, it was accepted that too minute a concern with citizens beliefs was inimical to prosperity and good order.

Britannica Lists & Quizzes

Geography List

Health & Medicine Quiz

Literature & Language List

The ambitions of national rulers and the requirements of expanding industry and commerce led gradually to the adoption of economic policies based on mercantilism, a school of thought that advocated government intervention in a countrys economy to increase state wealth and power. However, as such intervention increasingly served established interests and inhibited enterprise, it was challenged by members of the newly emerging middle class. This challenge was a significant factor in the great revolutions that rocked England and France in the 17th and 18th centuriesmost notably the English Civil Wars (164251), the Glorious Revolution (1688), the American Revolution (177583), and the French Revolution (1789). Classical liberalism as an articulated creed is a result of those great collisions.

In the English Civil Wars, the absolutist king Charles I was defeated by the forces of Parliament and eventually executed. The Glorious Revolution resulted in the abdication and exile of James II and the establishment of a complex form of balanced government in which power was divided between the king, his ministers, and Parliament. In time this system would become a model for liberal political movements in other countries. The political ideas that helped to inspire these revolts were given formal expression in the work of the English philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. In Leviathan (1651), Hobbes argued that the absolute power of the sovereign was ultimately justified by the consent of the governed, who agreed, in a hypothetical social contract, to obey the sovereign in all matters in exchange for a guarantee of peace and security. Locke also held a social-contract theory of government, but he maintained that the parties to the contract could not reasonably place themselves under the absolute power of a ruler. Absolute rule, he argued, is at odds with the point and justification of political authority, which is that it is necessary to protect the person and property of individuals and to guarantee their natural rights to freedom of thought, speech, and worship. Significantly, Locke thought that revolution is justified when the sovereign fails to fulfill these obligations. Indeed, it appears that he began writing his major work of political theory, Two Treatises of Government (1690), precisely in order to justify the revolution of two years before.

By the time Locke had published his Treatises, politics in England had become a contest between two loosely related parties, the Whigs and the Tories. These parties were the ancestors of Britains modern Liberal Party and Conservative Party, respectively. Locke was a notable Whig, and it is conventional to view liberalism as derived from the attitudes of Whig aristocrats, who were often linked with commercial interests and who had an entrenched suspicion of the power of the monarchy. The Whigs dominated English politics from the death of Queen Anne in 1714 to the accession of King George III in 1760.

The early liberals, then, worked to free individuals from two forms of social constraintreligious conformity and aristocratic privilegethat had been maintained and enforced through the powers of government. The aim of the early liberals was thus to limit the power of government over the individual while holding it accountable to the governed. As Locke and others argued, this required a system of government based on majority rulethat is, one in which government executes the expressed will of a majority of the electorate. The chief institutional device for attaining this goal was the periodic election of legislators by popular vote and of a chief executive by popular vote or the vote of a legislative assembly.

But in answering the crucial question of who is to be the electorate, classical liberalism fell victim to ambivalence, torn between the great emancipating tendencies generated by the revolutions with which it was associated and middle-class fears that a wide or universal franchise would undermine private property. Benjamin Franklin spoke for the Whig liberalism of the Founding Fathers of the United States when he stated:

As to those who have no landed property in a county, the allowing them to vote for legislators is an impropriety. They are transient inhabitants, and not so connected with the welfare of the state, which they may quit when they please, as to qualify them properly for such privilege.

John Adams, in his Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (1787), was more explicit. If the majority were to control all branches of government, he declared, debts would be abolished first; taxes laid heavy on the rich, and not at all on others; and at last a downright equal division of everything be demanded and voted. French statesmen such as Franois Guizot and Adophe Thiers expressed similar sentiments well into the 19th century.

Most 18th- and 19th-century liberal politicians thus feared popular sovereignty; for a long time, consequently, they limited suffrage to property owners. In Britain even the important Reform Bill of 1867 did not completely abolish property qualifications for the right to vote. In France, despite the ideal of universal male suffrage proclaimed in 1789 and reaffirmed in the Revolutions of 1830, there were no more than 200,000 qualified voters in a population of about 30,000,000 during the reign of Louis-Philippe, the citizen king who had been installed by the ascendant bourgeoisie in 1830. In the United States, the brave language of the Declaration of Independence notwithstanding, it was not until 1860 that universal male suffrage prevailedfor whites. In most of Europe, universal male suffrage remained a remote ideal until late in the 19th century. Racial and sexual prejudice also served to limit the franchiseand, in the case of slavery in the United States, to deprive large numbers of people of virtually any hope of freedom. Efforts to extend the vote to women met with little success until the early years of the 20th century (see woman suffrage). Indeed, Switzerland, which is sometimes called the worlds oldest continuous democracy, did not grant full voting rights to women until 1971.

Despite the misgivings of men of the propertied classes, a slow but steady expansion of the franchise prevailed throughout Europe in the 19th centuryan expansion driven in large part by the liberal insistence that all men are created equal. But liberals also had to reconcile the principle of majority rule with the requirement that the power of the majority be limited. The problem was to accomplish this in a manner consistent with democratic principles. If hereditary elites were discredited, how could the power of the majority be checked without giving disproportionate power to property owners or to some other natural elite?

The liberal solution to the problem of limiting the powers of a democratic majority employed various devices. The first was the separation of powersi.e., the distribution of power between such functionally differentiated agencies of government as the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary. This arrangement, and the system of checks and balances by which it was accomplished, received its classic embodiment in the Constitution of the United States and its political justification in the Federalist papers (178788), by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. Of course, such a separation of powers also could have been achieved through a mixed constitutionthat is, one in which power is shared by, and governing functions appropriately differentiated between, a monarch, a hereditary chamber, and an elected assembly; this was in fact the system of government in Great Britain at the time of the American Revolution. The U.S. Constitution also contains elements of a mixed constitution, such as the division of the legislature into the popularly elected House of Representatives and the aristocratic Senate, the members of which originally were chosen by the state governments. But it was despotic kings and functionless aristocratsmore functionless in France than in Britainwho thwarted the interests and ambitions of the middle class, which turned, therefore, to the principle of majoritarianism.

The second part of the solution lay in using staggered periodic elections to make the decisions of any given majority subject to the concurrence of other majorities distributed over time. In the United States, for example, presidents are elected every four years and members of the House of Representatives every two years, and one-third of the Senate is elected every two years to terms of six years. Therefore, the majority that elects a president every four years or a House of Representatives every two years is different from the majority that elects one-third of the Senate two years earlier and the majority that elects another one-third of the Senate two years later. These bodies, in turn, are checked by the Constitution, which was approved and amended by earlier majorities. In Britain an act of Parliament immediately becomes part of the uncodified constitution; however, before acting on a highly controversial issue, Parliament must seek a popular mandate, which represents a majority other than the one that elected it. Thus, in a constitutional democracy, the power of a current majority is checked by the verdicts of majorities that precede and follow it.

The third part of the solution followed from liberalisms basic commitment to the freedom and integrity of the individual, which the limitation of power is, after all, meant to preserve. From the liberal perspective, the individual is not only a citizen who shares a social contract with his fellows but also a person with rights upon which the state may not encroach if majoritarianism is to be meaningful. A majority verdict can come about only if individuals are free to some extent to exchange their views. This involves, beyond the right to speak and write freely, the freedom to associate and organize and, above all, freedom from fear of reprisal. But the individual also has rights apart from his role as citizen. These rights secure his personal safety and hence his protection from arbitrary arrest and punishment. Beyond these rights are those that preserve large areas of privacy. In a liberal democracy there are affairs that do not concern the state. Such affairs may range from the practice of religion to the creation of art and the raising of children by their parents. For liberals of the 18th and 19th centuries they also included most of the activities through which individuals engage in production and trade. Eloquent declarations affirming such rights were embodied in the British Bill of Rights (1689), the U.S. Declaration of Independence (1776) and Constitution (ratified 1788), the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), and the basic documents of countries throughout the world that later used these declarations as their models. These documents and declarations asserted that freedom is more than the right to cast a vote in an occasional election; it is the fundamental right of people to live their own lives.

If the political foundations of liberalism were laid in Great Britain, so too were its economic foundations. By the 18th century parliamentary constraints were making it difficult for British monarchs to pursue the schemes of national aggrandizement favoured by most rulers on the Continent. These rulers fought for military supremacy, which required a strong economic base. Because the prevailing mercantilist theory understood international trade as a zero-sum gamein which gain for one country meant loss for anothernational governments intervened to determine prices, protect their industries from foreign competition, and avoid the sharing of economic information.

These practices soon came under liberal challenge. In France a group of thinkers known as the physiocrats argued that the best way to cultivate wealth is to allow unrestrained economic competition. Their advice to government was laissez faire, laissez passer (let it be, leave it alone). This laissez-faire doctrine found its most thorough and influential exposition in The Wealth of Nations (1776), by the Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith. Free trade benefits all parties, according to Smith, because competition leads to the production of more and better goods at lower prices. Leaving individuals free to pursue their self-interest in an exchange economy based upon a division of labour will necessarily enhance the welfare of the group as a whole. The self-seeking individual becomes harnessed to the public good because in an exchange economy he must serve others in order to serve himself. But it is only in a genuinely free market that this positive consequence is possible; any other arrangement, whether state control or monopoly, must lead to regimentation, exploitation, and economic stagnation.

Every economic system must determine not only what goods will be produced but also how those goods are to be apportioned, or distributed (see distribution of wealth and income). In a market economy both of these tasks are accomplished through the price mechanism. The theoretically free choices of individual buyers and sellers determine how the resources of societylabour, goods, and capitalshall be employed. These choices manifest themselves in bids and offers that together determine a commoditys price. Theoretically, when the demand for a commodity is great, prices rise, making it profitable for producers to increase the supply; as supply approximates demand, prices tend to fall until producers divert productive resources to other uses (see supply and demand). In this way the system achieves the closest possible match between what is desired and what is produced. Moreover, in the distribution of the wealth thereby produced, the system is said to assure a reward in proportion to merit. The assumption is that in a freely competitive economy in which no one is barred from engaging in economic activity, the income received from such activity is a fair measure of its value to society.

Presupposed in the foregoing account is a conception of human beings as economic animals rationally and self-interestedly engaged in minimizing costs and maximizing gains. Since each person knows his own interests better than anyone else does, his interests could only be hindered, and never enhanced, by government interference in his economic activities.

In concrete terms, classical liberal economists called for several major changes in the sphere of British and European economic organization. The first was the abolition of numerous feudal and mercantilist restrictions on countries manufacturing and internal commerce. The second was an end to the tariffs and restrictions that governments imposed on foreign imports to protect domestic producers. In rejecting the governments regulation of trade, classical economics was based firmly on a belief in the superiority of a self-regulating market. Quite apart from the cogency of their arguments, the views of Smith and his 19th-century English successors, the economist David Ricardo and the philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill, became increasingly convincing as Britains Industrial Revolution generated enormous new wealth and made that country into the workshop of the world. Free trade, it seemed, would make everyone prosperous.

In economic life as in politics, then, the guiding principle of classical liberalism became an undeviating insistence on limiting the power of government. The English philosopher Jeremy Bentham cogently summarized this view in his sole advice to the state: Be quiet. Others asserted that that government is best that governs least. Classical liberals freely acknowledged that government must provide education, sanitation, law enforcement, a postal system, and other public services that were beyond the capacity of any private agency. But liberals generally believed that, apart from these functions, government must not try to do for the individual what he is able to do for himself.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Bentham, the philosopher James Mill, and Jamess son John Stuart Mill applied classical economic principles to the political sphere. Invoking the doctrine of utilitarianismthe belief that something has value when it is useful or promotes happinessthey argued that the object of all legislation should be the greatest happiness of the greatest number. In evaluating what kind of government could best attain this objective, the utilitarians generally supported representative democracy, asserting that it was the best means by which government could promote the interests of the governed. Taking their cue from the notion of a market economy, the utilitarians called for a political system that would guarantee its citizens the maximum degree of individual freedom of choice and action consistent with efficient government and the preservation of social harmony. They advocated expanded education, enlarged suffrage, and periodic elections to ensure governments accountability to the governed. Although they had no use for the idea of natural rights, their defense of individual libertiesincluding the rights to freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of assemblylies at the heart of modern democracy. These liberties received their classic advocacy in John Stuart Mills On Liberty (1859), which argues on utilitarian grounds that the state may regulate individual behaviour only in cases where the interests of others would be perceptibly harmed.

The utilitarians thus succeeded in broadening the philosophical foundations of political liberalism while also providing a program of specific reformist goals for liberals to pursue. Their overall political philosophy was perhaps best stated in James Mills article Government, which was written for the supplement (181524) to the fourth through sixth editions of the Encyclopdia Britannica.

Original post:

liberalism | politics | Britannica.com

LIBERAL, Kan. Police in Liberal are investigating an early-morning July 4 aggravated robbery at the Love's Country Store in the 200 block of West Pancake Blvd.

Police say Liberal officers responded to an alarm at the store a little before 4 a.m. Tuesday. On the call, police say a witness reported a robbery in progress.

Liberal police and the Seward County Sheriff's Office set up a perimeter, but the suspect(s) were not immediately located, police say.

Police say investigators learned a masked man armed with a gun entered the store. They say the gun discharged, but no injuries were reported. Two employees were working at the time.

The man removed a safe from the store and escaped with an undisclosed amount of money, police say.

Investigators found evidence near the scene confirming the make and model of a suspect vehicle which was located at an area home Tuesday afternoon. Officers also found the damaged safe during a subsequent search of the residence, police say.

Investigators identified a person of interest in the robbery, but police say there have been no arrests.

Anyone with information about the robbery is asked to call the Liberal Police Department at 620-626-0150 or the Crime Hotline at 620-624-4000.

Read the rest here:

Police investigate armed robbery at Liberal business - KWCH

First it was removing ties in the House of Commons. Now a crusading MP is campaigning for his Parliamentary colleagues to refer to each other by their names, rather than constituencies.

Buoyed by his success in changing the dress code in the Commons, Tom Brake, a Liberal Democrat frontbencher, has written to the Speaker John Bercow proposing more modernisation changes.

Mr Brake wants MPs to be able to refer to each other by name rather than the convention that they are described as the member for their constituency, which can leave observers baffled.

He said: The mystery surrounding parliamentary process and procedures must be lifted. To avoid becoming the ancestor of all parliaments, our parliament needs to move with the times.

Being able to call Members of Parliament by their names would be a good starting point.

Mr Brake also wants the House of Commons to stop providing free snuff to...

View post:

Liberal Democrat MP demands to name his colleagues in new House of Commons modernisation drive - Telegraph.co.uk