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Edward B. Harmon| Guest columnist

We all need to get out more and seek views from numerous sources, especially those with which we differ. We shouldn't believe the groupthink that what we and our friends believe reflects the will of the people. And we need to stop ascribing evil motives to those with whom we disagree.

I take part in a weekly dialogue with other retirees. They are bright, well-spoken, generally courteous and very liberal. I am a conservative and enjoy the dialogue. It has taught me a lot but, at times, the discussions get a little frothy, despite a moderator, and reflect the tendency to extrapolateones views to voters at large.

For example, we had a discussion about the Parental Rights in Education bill. I support the bill. My view may have induced tachycardia in some and was described by some liberals as transphobic, bigoted, mean-spirited, anti-gay and worse.

My critics believed that nobody supported the bill, other than, to be kind, the evil folks. However, recent polling byPublic Opinion Strategies showed strong support among Americans who actually read the bill, and did not rely on characterizations and the screeds of the pundit class.

The pollfound respondents supported the language of the bill by a 61% to 26% margin overall, independents by 58% to 26%Democrats by 55% to 29%, Joe Biden voters by 53% to 30%, parents by 67% to 24%, suburban voters by 60% to 30%. Among Americans who know an LGBTQ person, the margin was 61% to 28%.

Again, these are people who read the actual text of the bill. I doubt Santa Claus would get such a plurality from 5-year-olds on Christmas Eve. The lesson is clear. Although liberal views may, for now, dominate Gainesville, education and reaching out to other and different sources may change that.

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Gov. Ron DeSantis is reviled by most of my fellow dialogue participants. They would likely vote for Hunter Biden, Andrew Cuomo or Harvey Weinsteinif they ran against him. Fair enough. but inpolling against the leading Democratic candidate, Charlie Crist, DeSantis is up by 55% to 34%.

In Florida in 2020, Donald Trump tripled his margin against Biden as compared to his margin against Hillary Clinton.Outside the cocoon, it looks like Florida, despite the caterwauling, is undergoing a structural politicalshift to rock-solid, common-sense conservatism.

Why? Let me help to explain.Floridians know how DeSantis handled COVID. A recent COVID study by the National Bureau of Economic Research is noteworthy. Among the top 10 states for success in handling COVID based upon the economy, education and mortality Florida is sixth, the only large state.

Florida is in the middle on mortality, and given its demographics, that is stellar, but is third for the least education loss (DeSantis stood up for the kids) and 13th in economic performance. Floridians seem to like low taxes, law-and-order, high growth, low unemployment, standing up for the children, protecting the unborn, principled and courageous leadership, the empowering of parents, school choice and integrity.

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This support does not make Floridians deplorables, but rather normal people who care about their futures and that of their children. Iknow liberals will not like these numbers and trends. However, until they get out of the tight circle of those who agree with them, reach out and change, the voters will continue to reject the ideologies that liberals surely believe have made Gainesville a model of great governance, courtesy among the elected, fiscal prudence and safety.

Voter ID laws are a great case study. Many wail at the existence of voter ID laws. Fair enough. But step aside from the comfort of a liberal-dominated discussion and consider that 36 states have voter ID laws on the books and six states have strict voter ID laws, which require that voters show a government-issued ID when they vote.

Despite all the frothing to the contrary, 68% of Americans favor strict voter ID laws, including 60% of independents and 50% of Democrats. By race, 70% of whites support them, 66% of Hispanics and 56% of African Americans. A truly amazing show of support for voter ID laws strict ones exists once we step outside the liberal echo chamber.

I hope Americans reach out to their political opponents, with respect, consider alternative sources for information, listen and learn.

Edward B. Harmon, a retired mergers and acquisitions attorney and law school professor, is a monthly contributor to the Sun. He lives in Gainesville.

Send a letter to the editor (up to 200 words) to letters@gainesville.com. Letters must include the writer's full name and city of residence. Additional guidelines for submitting letters and longer guest columns can be found at bit.ly/sunopinionguidelines.

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Gainesville residents need to step outside the liberal echo chamber - Gainesville Sun

In our corner of Kent, less than three miles from the sea, HM Coastguard helicopters are not an unusual sight. Especially in the spring and summer, we see them regularly, the distinctive red and white pattern standing out strongly against the blue sky as they head out to sea on their errands of mercy.

As with ambulances, one cannot help wondering which particular emergency they are attending this time. Given our proximity to Dover, and to the long flat beaches stretching south to Dungeness Point, it is not unlikely that they are part of efforts to ensure the safety of small migrant boats crossing the Channel from the French coast.

Most people on the liberal left are functionally pro-open borders

As recently as 2018, the boats were not a significant problem. Official figures record that 299 people were detected arriving on small boats. But by 2021, that many people were arriving every four days on average, with an annual total of 28,526. Since the start of this year over 6,000 people have crossed the Channel in small boats, a fourfold increase on the same period last year, with the peak crossing months of spring and summer still to come, suggesting that the total for 2022 will far exceed that for 2021.

This fast-growing problem is the background to the Tories new plan to resettle those who enter the country illegally in Rwanda. The scheme has proved controversial, to say the least, earning the government a rebuke from the Archbishop of Canterbury in his Easter Sunday sermon.

I dont particularly want to wade into the debate over the Rwanda scheme itself. It is noteworthy, however, how hard it is to have a good faith discussion of the Channel crisis, and indeed of immigration more broadly.

One of the governments defensive lines, employed by both the Prime Minister and Priti Patel, has been to ask what their critics would do instead. This is an effective riposte, because it cuts to the heart of liberal Britains dishonest equivocation about the maintenance of borders. The fact is that most people on the liberal left are functionally pro-open borders.

The word functionally is important here, because most of the kind of people I am talking about, if asked, would deny that they oppose border controls entirely. But heres the rub: if you ask them to articulate a limiting principle to their immigration liberalism, they will find it very hard to do so. If you doubt this, think about the questions that are barely ever clearly addressed in detail by pro-immigration voices.

Numbers were bound to grow in the absence of preventive action

What should be the maximum number of people permitted to settle in the UK each year? Should we be concerned that it is increasingly difficult to deport those with no right to be here, and indeed foreign criminals (in the year to September 2021, the Home Office only managed 2,380 deportations, down from over 20,000 in 2004)? What is an acceptable level of exogenous population growth at a time when there is an acute and worsening housing crisis? Should we worry at all about the cultural and social effects of ongoing rapid demographic change? Are there particular kinds of immigrants that we need more than others?

Different people, reflecting carefully on the inevitable trade-offs of politics, will inevitably come up with different answers to these complex questions. And for immigration liberals, that is the problem. To accept the legitimacy of such reflection transforms the immigration debate into a normal political discussion, where costs and benefits are weighed and priorities considered, rather than an arena for haughty moralising.

Such moralising is easy and high-status in the circles in which educated Britons tend to move. All the same, it does not actually solve anything, especially when applied to the Channel crisis. Many immigration enthusiasts dont even accept that the boats constitute a crisis. In summer 2020, David Aaronovitch tweeted that a few thousand migrants coming here on little boats was not a big problem. Admittedly the totals were lower then; nevertheless, it did not require much talent for prognostication to see that numbers were bound to grow in the absence of preventive action.

Even as things stand, I have had people say to me that they arent really bothered by the crossings, that a few tens of thousands is a drop in the ocean for a total British population in excess of 65 million. This is perhaps a reasonable point of view to hold, although the costs of housing and feeding those individuals are not small but again, we do not hear what the upper limit might be. When should we start caring? Answer comes there none.

The costs of the Rwanda programme have been heavily criticised. Once more, however, there is an element of bad faith in operation here. The governments intention is clearly that removing illegal arrivals to Rwanda will have a sufficient deterrent effect that the numbers attempting the crossing will fall, and so the future costs will be significantly less.

It is also the case that the costs are not that high by comparison with the social, cultural and financial costs of accepting tens of thousands of young men and the Channel migrants are overwhelmingly male entering the country illegally, in perpetuity. Needless to say, this aspect is simply not engaged with in most negative commentary on the governments plan. Nor do critics seem to mind the injustice involved in letting asylum seekers who break the law skip the queue at the expense of those who follow the rules.

The tragedy of all this obfuscation and avoidance is that it makes it more difficult to find solutions. Even on immigration liberals own terms, they need to acknowledge the seriousness of the situation in the Channel before they can persuade people that they have a better solution than the government if indeed they do have one that amounts to more than clichs about more legal routes and more co-operation with the French. We do not have a government of immigration restrictionists or fiery nativists the number of non-EU visas granted is at an all-time high following Brexit and a debate that pretends we have is useless and pointless.

See the article here:
Why won't liberals tell the truth about immigration? | Niall Gooch - The Critic

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What are the driving factors behind the PM's preselection 'captain's picks', notably those with limited prior political interest?

How do you get to be a captain's pick in Scott Morrison's Liberal Party?

This week, the civil war simmering over the preselection of candidates became very public, sparked by the case of Katherine Deves, Morrison's pick for the seat of Warringah.

How Deves emerged from utter obscurity to national prominence -- and provoked a spectacular meltdown of the NSW Liberals -- is a mystery.How do you become a prime minister's pick for a one-time blue-ribbon Liberal seat when you weren't even a member of the party six months ago? We have a stab at solving that mystery later.

Choose what you pay and your level of coverage.

David Hardaker

Investigations Editor @d_hardaker

David has an extensive career as a journalist and broadcaster, primarily at the ABC where he worked on flagship programs such as Four Corners, 7.30, Foreign Correspondent, AM and PM. He spent eight years reporting in the Middle East and can speak Arabic.

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The outrage expressed by liberals after a judge nixed the federal mask mandate exemplifies their consistent need to control aspects of people's lives, former Rush Limbaugh guest host Ken Matthews said.

Airlines and other interstate transit modes including Amtrak also dropped their mandate policies in concert with the ruling.

During Tuesday's episode of his syndicated program "The Ken Matthews Show," Matthews said the ruling, handed down by Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, essentially declared the "ends cannot justify the means" in a federal order.

"You cannot break the law in pursuit of something you believe is the right thing to do. That's not how it works when there's a Constitution," Matthews said.

He went on to point to the veritable outrage being seen and heard nationwide from liberals who were angered at the Trump-appointed jurist for striking down what they saw as an infallible public health requirement.

FLASHBACK: EIB'S MATTHEWS CLOSES OUT LIMBAUGH SHOW ON A HIGH NOTE AS SEXTON, TRAVIS TAKE OVER

President Biden (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

"There's a lot of middle-aged woke White men crying today it could be an allergy attack," he joked, adding that there is nothing in Mizelle's ruling that precludes anyone from continuing to mask up on Amtrak or on an airplane.

Online, some critics of the ruling declared that they would not feel safe until a "vaccine-for-all" was required, including for children under 5 years old." Other critics voiced support for boycotts of airlines that relented on their mask policies after the ruling.

Matthews suggested such outrage exemplifies that liberals will demand other people believe what they believe and do what they are doing:

"We're right back to Square-1 with the liberals," he said. "Their thing is you must do what I do you must agree with me, confirm me, validate me, and do exactly what I do or else therell be trouble that's the 21st century leftist right there."

FURIOUS LIBERALS REVOLT AFTER TRUMP-APPOINTED JUDGE TOSSES MASK MANDATE FOR AIR TRAVEL

An airplane lands. (iStock)

He added that the sentiment has been true throughout the pandemic, pointing to heavy-handed, unilateral mandates that shuttered small businesses and family restaurants in 2020.

"You get governors like Tom Wolf [in Pennsylvania] or Gretchen Whitmer [in Michigan] you cannot allow these people to take this power," he said.

In Matthews' home state of Pennsylvania, businesses were categorized into two groups by the Department of Community & Economic Development (DCED) as "life-sustaining" or not -- and those that were not considered such by Harrisburg were forced closed.

"And were still playing games with masks even when the courts say you can't do it," he said. "One you cannot break the law in order to achieve an illegal outcome even if you think it's the right thing to do and two the CDC never scientifically justified their mandate."

WHP radio host Ken Matthews joins talk radio host Rush Limbaugh in his Palm Beach studio. Credit: Ken Matthews (Ken Matthews)

In her ruling, Mizelle determined that the mandate violated the Administrative Procedure Act by being outside the scope of the CDC's authority, was "arbitrary" and "capricious" and not going through the required notice and comment period for federal rulemaking.

"The context of [the statute] indicates that sanitation and other measures refer to measures that clean something, not ones that keep something clean," Mizelle wrote. "Wearing a mask cleans nothing."

Fox News' Andrew Miller contributed to this report.

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Conservative radio host unloads on liberals' need for control exemplified in outrage over mask mandate ruling - Fox News

The Ontario election race appears to be tightening ahead of the formal start of the campaign, with one new poll putting the Liberals only four points back of Doug Fords Progressive Conservative party.

The Abacus Data survey of 1,500 Ontarians found that 36 per cent of decided voters plan to cast a ballot for Fords PC party in June, compared to 32 per cent who intend to vote for Steven Del Ducas Liberal party and 23 per cent who said they would vote for Andrea Horwath and the NDP. About six per cent of respondents indicated that they vote for the Green party while four per cent said that they would vote for another party entirely.

The Liberals are up four points from a similar survey conducted in January while the Tories are down one point and the NDP are down two points.

In a release accompanying the poll results, Abascus Data CEO David Coletto said the Liberals do appear to be within striking distance in the hypothetical ballot, but he cautioned that they still have a lot of work to do if they are going to win the election, starting with the profile of their leader.

The poll found that nearly six out of 10 Ontarians (59 per cent) expressed a degree of unfamiliarity with Del Duca. Only 39 per cent said that they were unfamiliar with Horwath and only 15 per cent said that of Ford.

Ford also had a considerable advantage when it came to personal popularity.

Approximately 41 per cent of respondents said that they had a positive impression of the PC leader, up nine points since January.

About 31 per cent of respondents said that they had a positive impression of Horwath, compared to 30 per cent who said that they had a negative impression.

Del Duca was the only leader of the three main parties with a negative score. About 22 per cent of respondents said that they had a positive impression of him but 27 per cent said that they had a negative impression. A further 27 per cent expressed a neutral opinion of the Liberal leader.

Meanwhile, when it came to who would make the best premier 35 per cent of respondents identified Ford as their pick. Horwath was chosen by 17 per cent of respondents and Del Duca was chosen by 12 per cent of respondents.

Steven Del Duca remains unknown to a large portion of the electorate and those that do have an impression of him are more likely to view him negatively than positively. He is well back in third when respondents are asked who will make the best premier, Coletto noted in the release. What is unknown at this point is whether vote intention will align more closely with the perceived best premier or whether the Liberals can hold onto their support despite how people feel about Mr. Del Duca.

Abacus has been tracking Fords popularity at regular intervals throughout his time in office.

The 41 per cent of respondents who said that they had a positive impression of the PC leader in its latest poll marks his highest level of support since May, 2020.

It is also a significant reversal from this time last year when only 28 per cent of respondents said that they had a positive impression of him.

Looking ahead to the election campaign, which is likely to start next month, the cost of living was top of mind for many voters with 52 per cent of respondents identifying it as a ballot box issue. Other top issues included housing affordability (36 per cent), improving the healthcare system (33 per cent) and taxes (30 per cent).

Interestingly fewer than one out of four voters (22 per cent) identified the COVID-19 pandemic as a key issue.

The cost of living is top of mind for more voters as housing, healthcare, and taxes round out the list of top issues. The PCs and Doug Ford have a natural advantage on that matter but are not immune to criticism about how their government has handled the issue, Coletto said. While about half of Ontarians definitely want a change in government, the desire for change isnt at a level where a PC re-election is in peril. The federal Liberals faced a similar environment in the lead-up to that vote.

The survey was conducted between April 14 and 19.

It is considered accurate to within 2.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

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Ontario election 2022: New poll puts PCs and Liberals only 4 points apart | CTV News - CTV News Toronto