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Actor Robert De Niro, in case you didnt know, is also a constitutional scholar.

The Goodfellas star thinks President Trump will flout the Constitution because he will likely start a war in order to stay in the White House for 12 years.

Hes going to be history at one point, though hed love to be president for life, De Niro recently told The Daily Beast. He jokes about it. I think that if he became president for a second term, hed try to have a third term, and let smarter people manipulate it into getting us into some kind of altercation: a war.

The presidential historian bloviated on. The only other president who served a third term was [Franklin D.] Roosevelt because he was in a war, and this fool would go and start something. This was what [film director] Marty Scorsese was saying, and I said, Marty, I never thought of that. I never thought hed go for a third term if there was a war or something, De Niro said.

CNNs S.E. Cupp, who hosts a weekend show called Unfiltered, recently took to Twitter to pass along the theory that Trump will try to demand a third term.

Remember when [New York City Mayor Michael R.] Bloomberg demanded a third term as mayor and got it? she asked her 415,000 followers. Trump will do the same. Beware, the same autocratic impulses

And Trump-hating director Michael Moore said much the same thing earlier this year. (Its interesting that the liberals who spout these conspiracy theories are all giving Trump at least another term, warning that the problems only begin when he tries to snatch a third term.)

Last June, Trump fed the fires.

The good news is that at the end of 6 years, after America has been made GREAT again and I leave the beautiful White House (do you think the people would demand that I stay longer? KEEP AMERICA GREAT), he tweeted.

The conspiracy theory has exploded since Trump ordered an airstrike to take out the worlds No. 1 terrorist, Qassem Soleimani, a major general in Irans Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and commander of its Quds Force, a division responsible for extraterritorial military and clandestine operations.

De Niro, its worth pointing out, starred in a movie called Wag the Dog, about a president, seeking reelection, who faces scandal and is extricated by declaring war against Albania. The film was released a month before news of President Clintons affair with Monica Lewinsky broke when Clinton initiated two anti-terrorism bombing campaigns in the subsequent year of impeachment. Some wags in the media said the embattled president was trying to wag the dog.

So now, with Trump mired in his own impeachment furor, speculation is swirling that he, too, is trying to wag the dog.

Even though tensions between the U.S. and Iran have quieted in the last few days, Trump is well aware of the strategy, designed to bring about a swell of national pride and a rally round the flag effect that could help an incumbent (although the effect is usually short lived).

During President Obamas tenure, Trump repeatedly predicted that Obama would attack Iran in order to help him get reelected. He first warned about such a nefarious plan in 2011, tweeting that Obama will attack Iran in the not too distant future because it will help him win the election.

@BarackObama will attack Iran in order to get re-elected, Trump tweeted in January 2012. In July, he tweeted: Just as I predicted, @BarackObama is preparing a possible attack on Iran right before November. Right before the election, he tweeted: Dont let Obama play the Iran card in order to start a war in order to get elected be careful Republicans!

While Obama could have been could have been trying to start a war with Iran to win election (a spurious theory at best), what the amateur constitutional scholars like De Niro and Ms. Cupp and Moore dont seem to know is that Trump cant start a war to secure a third term.

Theres something called the 22nd Amendment, which says a person can only serve two elected terms as president.

No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once, says the amendment, which was passed after Roosevelt had won third and fourth terms, a move that broke custom but no constitutional limit at the time.

End of story.

Will someone please let De Niro know?

*Joseph Curl ran the Drudge Report from 2010 to 2014 and covered the White House for a dozen years. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and on Twitter at @JosephCurl. A version of this article ran previously in The Washington Times.

Read more:
CURL: Liberals Terrified That Trump Will Try To Sneak A Third Term - The Daily Wire

The Liberals promised in their 2019 budget to work toward creating a national school-food program and have reached out to provinces, territories and key stakeholders over the past months.

Ellen O'Nan/The Associated Press

The federal Liberals are being told to avoid creating a one-size-fits-all national school-food program to replace the existing patchwork of efforts to feed hungry children.

The Liberals promised in their 2019 budget to work toward creating such a program and have reached out to provinces, territories and key stakeholders over the past months.

The design of a new program will provide answers to lingering questions about how soon the program kicks off, how big it will be when it begins, which children will qualify and what meals theyll receive.

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Federal officials have been told to provide provinces, territories and even schools themselves with the latitude needed to deliver programs that meet local needs, said Joanne Bays, co-founder of Farm to Cafeteria Canada. The group seeks to get locally produced food into public institutions kitchens, starting with schools.

The main message was go slow and Canada needs a recipe for success, said Ms. Bays, whose organization receives federal funding to run and evaluate a food program in dozens of schools.

We have lots of other places we can look to see what they have done, but we need to pilot these things in Canada and evaluate and come up with our own unique formula.

Canada is the only member of the Group of Seven countries with large economies that doesnt have a national school-food program.

Instead, there are thousands of food programs for the roughly five million children enrolled in public elementary and secondary schools programs often run by community groups with financial help from governments and charities.

Feeding all school-aged children could cost billions each year, depending on whether funding would provide snacks, breakfast or lunch, or more than one of those. Its a steep budget ask, and also potentially too ambitious for the current system to handle.

Instead, as a start, the Coalition for Healthy School Food has asked the Liberals for $360-million in this years budget to expand existing local programs and grow slowly, similar to what the Liberals did with their child-care spending.

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No one at this moment, I think, is interested in the federal government coming in and funding a brand-new top-down program, for a variety of reasons, said Debbie Field, the coalitions co-ordinator.

Not even that it would be expensive, but primarily it would erase what is on the ground, which would be a bad idea.

A national program would likely require cost-sharing with provinces and territories. Negotiating funding deals would delay any large social program, as the Liberals have found with their housing and child-care strategies.

And those agreements and associated spending were approved when the Liberals had a majority in the House of Commons, which they lost in the October election.

Ms. Field said she isnt concerned the politics of a minority Parliament will get in the way of funding and creating a national program because of cross-party support for the idea at the federal and provincial levels.

Ms. Bays said any federal spending would be more than covered through reduced health-care spending and increased economic activity for local farmers.

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The latest figures from Statistics Canada show that 8.7 per cent of Canadian households, or almost 1.25 million homes, are considered food insecure, meaning they dont have enough money to afford, or otherwise cant get, the amount and variety of food needed for a healthy lifestyle.

In June, ahead of a meeting with stakeholders, the then-minister of social development Jean-Yves Duclos was told that coming to school hungry could be the result of income, lengthy commutes, early-morning sports practices, or just busy morning family routines. That was in a briefing note, obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act.

The reasons explain why groups want the Liberals to work toward a universal program that isnt based solely on income: Poverty isnt the only reason some children dont eat.

Ms. Bayss group is conducting 21 round tables in every province and territory to get a better sense of how a program should be framed, particularly for Indigenous communities.

Continuing talks with federal officials are important, she said, because the more people feel that theyre engaged in whats being put out there, the more successful that program is going to be.

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Liberals set table for national school-food program, warned to avoid top-down approach - The Globe and Mail

Leave it to politics to turn a show as mundane as Project Runway into the subject of a brief scandal.

During the latest episode of the long-running show, in which aspiring designers compete against each other, one of them took criticism of his boring design as a chance to get a little salty.

I cannot see Karlie wearing it anywhere, honestly, one judge said of the outfit, referring to host and judge Karlie Kloss.

To that, contestant Tyler Neasloney responded, Not even to dinner with the Kushners?

For context, Klosss husband is Joshua Kushner, brother to Jared Kushner, who is a senior adviser to his father-in-law, President Trump.

Kloss, however, had been dating Kushner since 2012, long before Trump's campaign. The couple is also vocally liberal. Kloss is pro-Hillary Clinton, pro-Planned Parenthood, and pro-gun control. According to reports, the rest of the Kushners dont like her very much.

So after Neasloneys comment, Kloss looked understandably shocked. Thats your husband, Neasloney noted, as if the comment werent politically charged.

Keep it to the challenge, Kloss responded.

The clip went viral, with plenty of liberals on social media applauding Neasloney for his snark. The way he ended her, one commenter gushed.

Apparently, it doesnt matter that Kloss is a Democrat who appears to be estranged from the Trump-y side of the family. Its been hard to marry into the Kushner family, she said this summer. But I choose to focus on the values that I share with my husband, and those are the same liberal values that I was raised with and that have guided me throughout my life.

So why dont liberals love her? Because she doesnt spend every waking moment trashing her pro-Trump family, la George Conway. Conways public sparring with wife and presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway has made him something of a resistance hero, and its even inspired a Saturday Night Live skit. Liberals accept Conway because hes willing to sacrifice family loyalty for loyalty to their political orthodoxy.

Until Kloss starts trashing the Kushners on Twitter, she will be loathed for prioritizing her family over her liberal ideals.

Read more:
Liberals hate Karlie Kloss for the same reason they love George Conway - Washington Examiner

Last Oct. 21, Canadians elected a minority government for the fourth time this century. And while past minorities in Canada have lasted on average slightly over one year and a half, there is a general feeling that, barring a major scandal, this legislature could last way beyond that mark considering the Bloc and NDP both hold the balance of power, and that the Conservatives are now searching for a new leader.

Nevertheless, five polling firms have published voting intention polls in the past month, and their data have generally converged (see list of all federal pollshere). Here is a quick recap:

(Note that Nanos federal numbers are publishedbehind a paywalland are therefore not shown here.)

What do all these polls have in common? They all show the NDP and the leaderless Greens polling modestly above their 2019 election results. With the Greens expected to nominate a new leader in 2020, it will be interesting to see how (or whether) it will affect voting intentions. Should the governing Liberals disappoint green-leaning voters in the next 12 months, we could witness a significant shift in voting intentionswhich could dramatically flip the national seat projections.

Adding these poll results to the 338Canada electoral model, here is the updatedpopular vote projection:

On the graph above, the coloured bars indicate the 95 per cent confidence interval and the black dots, the latest poll results (AR: Angus Reid; LE: Lger; AD: Abacus Data; EK: EKOS).

Once again, the Liberals and Conservatives remain in a statistical tie with support from nearly a third of the electorate apiece. The NDPs average stands just below 18 per cent and the Greens hold steady at 8 per cent. The Bloc Qubcois is at 30 per cent in Quebec (7 per cent nationally).

By breaking down the levels of support by provinces and regions, we calculate the following338Canada seat projection:

Unsurprisingly, considering voting intentions have not moved much since October, these seat averages remain close to those of the election results:

Even though the Conservatives will most likely be without a permanent leader for the better part of 2020 (more on that below), these numbers suggest a snap spring or summer election would be incredibly risky for the Liberals: The Bloc has coalesced a significant fraction of CAQ-leaning Quebec nationalists (andFranois Legaults approval ratings of latehave been higher than any Quebec Premier in the past 30 years); the NDPs core base remains strong, and the Greens should be able to improve their standingsespecially with a new leader. Hence, with the Conservative supportsfloormost likely around 30 to 32 per cent nationally, the Liberals have little to no room to grow in the short term.

About the Conservatives: With Andrew Scheer announcing his resignation as leader in mid-December, one might have thought the party would organize a quick, 2018 Ontario PC-style leadership race. In 2018, Patrick Brown resigned from the PC leadership in late January and Doug Ford was designated PC leader on March 11, 2018, so a snap leadership race and conventioncanbe done. However, it was announced before Christmas that the CPCs policy convention scheduled for April 2020 in Toronto has been postponed to November 2020 (and moved to Quebec City). Whether the new CPC leader will be chosen before then is not known for now.

There is always room for improvement, but it has been a fairly good year for Canadian pollsters: the Alberta, P.E.I., Newfoundland and Labrador and Manitoba provincial elections yielded mostly expected results, and the federal election was almost called spot on. In 2020, we look forward to several significant leadership races: federal Tories and Greens, the Quebec and Ontario provincial Liberal parties, the Parti Qubcois, and the B.C. Greens. We will also keep an eye on the Saskatchewan general election scheduled for Nov. 2.

Oh, and we will take an occasional peek at whats going on south of the border.

Happy new year, dear readers.

Continue reading here:
The year-end 338Canada projection: Nowhere to go for the Liberals - Maclean's

How miserable are you feeling as you contemplate 2020? Putting aside our individual circumstances, the answer is often closely linked with how we are minded politically. A series of body blows to centrist thinking since the honeymoon period after the cold war gave way to a financial crisis and bitter backwash, followed by the arrival of Donald Trump and a gaggle of nationalist-populists around the globe. Add a resounding Boris Johnson majority at home, midwifing a Brexit on untrammelled terms and liberal grumpiness has its reasons.

But it feels like the right moment to ask whether the gloom-deploying strategy has been so smart. A far-left Labour party served up a recipe of predictions of disaster to dim the fairy lights of the holiday season and suffered calamity at the polls. More broadly, liberals (and not just the Lib Dem kind) need to think about how unattractively miserable they have become and what they might do about it.

One key reason Johnson has prevailed is his ambition and direction. This is being linked with a less attractive character trait, namely recklessness. But here is a politician who has carefully exploited Barnumesque moments to emphasise that he is different from the dreary run of his peers. Some people deem that innately hilarious; others find the antics and confection of his speeches wearing a man-child in leaders clothing.

Still, it would require a political tin ear not to heed his appeal to parts of the country that rejected his partys forebears with such gusto.

North-west Durham, where I grew up, and nearby Bishop Auckland (which has acquired Agincourt significance for victorious Conservatives) are two such fiefs. They switched political course in large part because they were fed up waiting for the Brexit moment to come and because of the not unreasonable view that if you feel left behind in an area where for decades the only language has been Labour, it makes sense to change the language.

A stalwart Labour-voting friend in a Durham constituency told me a couple of weeks before the election that he kept encountering people who were considering switching intentions because Johnson was someone you could sit down for a beer and have a laugh with.

Back in the enclosed political drawing room of Remainy central London, the denunciations of his moral turpitude were a repeated theme. I wish he would just go away, snapped one acquaintance (pointlessly, it turned out).

Reality check it was Anna Soubrys Independent Group for Change that shut up shop at the end of 2019. When I email a prominent Tory defector to the Lib Dems to ask what comes next, he replies simply: Time to do something else. Sands today shift extremely fast and perceptions can differ widely, even before we reach the extremes of politics. Where Johnsons critics saw egregious moral weakness, an on-off relationship with the truth and a threadbare promise to deliver more spending while dealing with the economic and logistical challenges of leaving the EU, a lot of other people disagree. As one of his cabinet puts it: Boris is a personal Rorschach test, in which the inkblot takes on multiple meanings.

Enthusiasm, even if misdirected, is more alluring than bearing a grudge about someone elses vision. Yet the tentacles of pessimism have spread much more broadly among liberals, who traditionally believed in harnessing the best of human endeavour. Liberalism acknowledges the continuing fight of individuals and society against overweening power or obscurantism, but it also needs determination and flexibility.

Does the language of centrist progressives still say this with any gusto? Or is it locked into predicting disasters? The overuse of catastrophic to describe a range of Brexit outcomes is followed by a new contender in the cliche charts deeply troubling (in which the deeply bit means something happened that one had not predicted and is thus confused about).

If the BBC gets unfairly into hot water on charges of skewed impartiality, I might suggest to commissioners, including my beloved bosses at Radio 4, that the tone and range of ideas can tip too easily into woe is us. As much as we relish the Greta Thunberg blasts on climate warnings and lawyers giving stern takes on how democracies might perish, it does reflect a mindset captured by the Pet Shop Boys satirical Miserabilism: Make sure youre always frowning/ It shows the world that youve got substance and depth.

Somehow, the Conservatives have acquired a key liberal trait and vice versa. Tories have long been aligned to a view of mankind with roots in stoicism and gradual change. Yet the leap to leave the EU was also a moment when headstrong instinct prevailed over caution.

Liberals (in the British tradition) flourished politically as the Whig party, embracing institutional and social reform. Even when they miscalculated or sometimes failed (as in the liberal interventions of the early 2000s), the guiding desire was to engage with an evolving world. This did not always make them right, but it did make them a force to be reckoned with in democracies and on the international stage.

These days, the general mode of communication is a miffed sense of being rejected, while telling everyone they were right all along and you will one day realise this. I keep thinking back to Jo Swinsons election night speech, which wanted to tell us that she stood by an open, welcoming, inclusive society (so far, so good), but ended blaming nationalism for eviscerating her party, rather than a poorly thought through Brexit strategy. After a rollicking SNP defeat, we can forgive a bad note or two, but that sourness needs to be dealt with by her successors or anyone with an intention to revive a third force between the far poles of British politics.

Just telling voters that they are the dupes of some vague but regrettable force does not feel open about why the progressive project is struggling in Britain and beyond. Battered centrists, who exist across the parties and beyond them, will need to respond to a new political settlement. They may have to bite their tongues as the prime minister, seeing a changed Conservative landscape before him, boosts investment in the north of England and entrenches in political territories that the centre-left deemed, in the fond but patrician language of Blairism, our people.

The projected reopening of the Newcastle-Ashington-Blyth railway line to boost deprived towns isolated by poor infrastructure will serve as a symbolic moment for the Johnson re-engagement with northern lands (and a useful fillip for more devolution, since the idea was hatched locally, before the election).

Such prospects also offer openings for local people, since they demand attention to the kind of detail and practical decision-making that centrists have long cared about how projects work in practice, the consequences and opportunities for communities and environmental protections. Decentralising will encourage fresh thinking about how to reboot sagging projects such as the city academies for areas outside the metropolis and strategies for public sector revival that go beyond raising spending levels. That is the kind of progress liberals should hold the government to delivering, when the honeymoon is over.

To recover relevance, liberalism needs to change the way it sounds and how it thinks about itself, to make the arguments that matter on how societies heal and flourish, the balance of state and market, and the need to engage voters fully on climate change without alienating them by preachiness. Too many of these arguments will go unheard if the overall tone is self-pity and Bregret. A Greek chorus telling us how awfully the national drama is going will not sell tickets to the great progressive revival.

Lesson one: cheer up a bit. Then figure out how to take on the battle of ideas that still counts.

Anne McElvoy is senior editor at the Economist and presents Across the Red Lines on Radio 4

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Theres a lesson in Boris Johnsons jolliness. Liberal miserabilism is a turn-off - The Guardian