Toronto Sun | Liberals, stop the pearl-clutching Toronto Sun It's time the Liberals ended their pearl-clutching about Conservatives criticizing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's $10.5 million deal with Omar Khadr in the U.S. media. This based on allegations by Liberals like Trudeau Principal Secretary Gerald Butts ... CP Champion: 'New' citizenship guide shows Liberals are the copy cats Justin Trudeau had a choice on Khadr settlement: Scheer |
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BY: Bill McMorris July 26, 2017 1:12 pm
The leader of Pennsylvania's largest labor union said that his union will re-think its close ties to the Democratic Party.
Pennsylvania AFL-CIO President Rick Bloomingdale said the group did a poor job of listening to its members in the recent past, according to WSKG News. Bloomingdale embarked on a "listening tour" across the state following President Donald Trump's surprise victory in the state, which was in part inspired by blue collar workers. Bloomingdale said that his members feel "alienated" by liberalism.
"We may have gotten too close to one party," he said. "We should be for people who are for us, regardless of party label."
The Pennsylvania AFL-CIO worked hard to get Hillary Clinton and Democratic Senate nominee Katie McGinty elected in 2016. The union organized more than 10,000 volunteers and aimed to mobilize 450,000 voters to support the Democratic ticket, according to an October 26 press release. The union also sent out 580,000 mailers to union members and households touting Clinton's candidacy.
"Working people have been leading the fight in Pennsylvania to elect pro-worker candidates like Hillary Clinton and Katie McGinty. The GOTV efforts of the Pennsylvania labor movement in the home stretch will help ensure victory on Election Day," Bloomingdale said in theOctober statement.
After speaking with union rank and file, Bloomingdale said that the union's past strategy may have further alienated members. He said that union leadership plans to do a better job of listening to the concerns of their members, rather than attempting to dictate to them.
"I think we were speaking too much at them, rather than having conversations with them," he said.
Exit polls in Pennsylvania did not ask about union household status, as they did in other states, but a number of factors indicate that Trump appealed to blue collar workers. Trump won big in areas that have most acutely experienced factory closures and the decline in manufacturing, carrying 62 percent in the central region of the state, as well as 54 percent of voters in the west, according to the exit polls. Trump's opposition to free trade agreements also appealed to Pennsylvania votersa position he shares with the AFL-CIO and numerous other labor groups. Trump won 64 percent of voters who felt that international trade "takes away jobs;" those voters made up 53 percent of the electorate.
Continue reading here:
PA AFL-CIO Says Liberals Are Alienating Union Members - Washington Free Beacon
In a series of statements on Twitter, Trump attacked his own attorney general as "VERY weak" on investigating Hillary Clinton. And in claiming Ukraine tried to sabotage the election, Trump wondered, "where is the investigation A.G." Clearly, the president is feeling the heat of the investigation into whether Russia interfered in the 2016 election, and he resents the fact that Sessions, who recused himself from that investigation, can't intervene on his behalf. He likely wants Sessions gone so he can appoint an even bigger sycophant who will help him evade questions he doesn't want to answer and safeguard information he doesn't want to come out.
But Trump can't fire Sessions, at least not without creating a national scandal. Instead, he's apparently decided to publicly berate and humiliate the attorney general until he resigns and Trump can appoint a replacement.
It is a depressing spectacle. But liberals shouldn't be shedding any tears for Sessions. Sessions knew who Donald Trump was when he was running for president, and he liked it. He papered over Trump's racism because it enabled his own; he shrugged off Trump's authoritarian tendencies because he has a few himself.
Sessions was one of Trump's earliest and most enthusiastic supporters. He gladly threw his hand in with an incompetent, unstable candidate who more or less promised to set fire to bedrock American institutions and fundamental norms of politics and democracy. Then Sessions got burned. Boo hoo.
We are at a moment of democratic crisis, with a president whose relationship to a hostile foreign power is under investigation, who is actively trying to stymie that investigation and who remains obsessed with both cable news and his long-since-vanquished opponent, Hillary Clinton.
This same president is now clearly trying push out his attorney general so that he can end an investigation that could end up indicting him or members of his team or his family, a nearly unprecedented abuse of power and breach of public trust. That he does it by insulting the guy on Twitter is a move so vulgar and juvenile it's hard to believe it's coming from a sitting American president.
Observers of this White House are rightly worried about what happens next. In a saner political environment, the Republican Party would refuse to confirm any appointee they weren't confident would carry out a thorough and rigorous investigation into election interference. Unfortunately, we can't trust them to do even that very basic duty -- they confirmed Jeff Sessions, after all, who may have been a part of the potential collusion.
There is a very real fear that, when Sessions inevitably bows to his president's commands and jumps down from his administrative perch like a good lapdog, he will be replaced by someone even less trustworthy and even more obsequious.
But none of that makes Sessions a victim -- at least not of anyone but himself.
Read this article:
Trump has made liberals pity Jeff Sessions - CNN
Recently on HBOs Real Time, Bill Maher had this to say about the attack on Republican legislators: We would never really think this would happen on the left. We think of the right as the people who pick up guns and do crazy things like this.
And thats just what they think. Liberals are peaceful and conservatives are violent. Even those who take pride in their political incorrectness repeat it. But you dont have to be an American historian to know how little it holds up to the facts.
Every year on the anniversary of JFKs assassination, media people talk about right-wingers in Dallas. But the real shooter, Lee Harvey Oswald, was a Soviet sympathizer. And Robert Kennedys killer was a Palestinian radical.
Last year at the Super Bowl, America watched Beyonces half-time tribute to the Black Panthers, who loved their guns as much as any NRA fanatic, and used them enthusiastically.
The media did everything they could to make us forget about Barack Obamas friendship with fellow Chicagoans Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, both members of the bomb-wielding Weather Underground. This months Puerto Rican Day Parade controversy resurrected the 70s leftist terrorist group the FALN. Today we have the Antifa, whose black mask image has become an emblem of America 2017.
And just last month, Obama appeared on video at the Songwriters Hall of Fame to help induct Jay-Z, who once wrote these lines in his song Money, Cash, Hoes:
Money cash hoes money cash chicks what Sex murder and mayhem romance for the street Only wife of mines is a life of crime
Jay, you have been inspiring, Obama said, but he didnt mention how the millions of young men whove listened to Jay-Z and other rappers have been affected by lyrics such as Now if I kill you I probably do ten in the box / Come down on appeal then Im killin your pops (Reservoir Dogs).
It takes a strange act of the mind to overlook leftist violence in the American present and recent past. Its as if attributing deep hate to right-leaning people was a drug. An obvious addict is Bill Moyers, the former LBJ operative whos made a career out of sanctimonious exposes of conservative wrath. A few years ago, he spoke of how Conservative Talk Radio Incites Domestic Terrorism & Hate and last year during the campaign he warned,
Trump and his ilk would sweep the promise of America into the dustbin of history unless they are exposed now to the disinfectant of sunlight, the cleansing torch of truth. Nothing else can save us from the dark age of unreason that would arrive with the triumph of Donald Trump.
Whether its real (the softball shooter) or make-believe (Kathy Griffin), liberal violence in contemporary America is a fact. It would seem to be a natural focus for Moyers campaign against political hatred. But at his web site one can only find brief notices of the shooting in Alexandria that emphasize the bipartisan nature of wrath in the United States, citing another story on potential incitement of political violence by Democrats and Republicans, the right and the left, as well as a population research finding that Republicans and Democrats were indistinguishable in their support for political violence.
This all sounds like a cross-political appeal to reason, but in truth, its an effective way to push the liberal-peace and conservative-violence meme. When a lunatic with right-wing opinions goes on a rampage, it says something about the essence of conservatism. When a lunatic with left-wing opinions acts, it summons forth bipartisan expressions of civility. Conservative hate is conservative, but liberal hate isnt liberal at all.
Republicans and conservatives should recognize the across-the-divide call for unity as a hustle. The next time a right-wing crazy picks up his gun, the one-sided denunciations of conservative hate will come once more. Liberals pay themselves a compliment when they attribute vice to their adversaries, and they double down on back-patting when they (putatively) rise above politics after one of their own commits violence. Conservatives shouldnt help them do it.
They should instead proclaim that liberalism circa 2017 is not give peace a chance. It has a malicious streak, and all too many liberals dont just despise President Trump and everyone who voted for him, but also take pleasure in their spite.
Mark Bauerlein is an English professor at Emory University. engmb@emory.edu
Published: July 25, 2017 3:01 AM EDT | Updated: July 25, 2017 2:32 PM EDT
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A long history of violence among US liberals - Philly.com
OTTAWA The Liberal government has put a lot of effort into travelling to the United States to help ease the way into the North American Free Trade Agreement negotiations, but so far, a relatively small amount of money.
The Canadian Press tallied the travel expenses a dozen cabinet ministers excluding Prime Minister Justin Trudeau racked up in airfare, meals and accommodations for trips to Washington, D.C. and elsewhere south of the border since President Donald Trump came to power.
The total amount, with some caveats, was about $96,000 for 29 trips from mid-January to the end of May.
The travel included in this amount is just one part of a wider strategy to send federal cabinet ministers, parliamentary secretaries, MPs, senators, premiers, political staffers and government officials across the U.S. to secure face-to-face meetings with everyone from state legislators to Trump and those around him in the White House.
"Our government has worked hard to establish a constructive working relationship with all orders of the U.S. government, especially with the administration, and the president and his team directly," Cameron Ahmad, a spokesman for Trudeau, said in an emailed statement.
"We have been actively engaging in comprehensive outreach across the United States in order to build upon the strong relationship between our two countries and advance areas of mutual interest."
The data analysis was based on a list of trips by cabinet ministers that the office of Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland considered part of these efforts. Freeland is the lead minister on Canada-U.S. relations and the NAFTA talks.
The list was then cross-referenced with travel expenses disclosed under government transparency measures.
These early figures provide a snapshot of the ground game the Liberal government has been building to deal with one of its biggest priorities and challenges through forging relationships not only with the White House, but also members of Congress who will ultimately decide the fate of any new trade deal, and anyone else they might be listening to.
The list includes high-profile events such as when Freeland, alongside Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr, Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan and Andrew Leslie, the parliamentary secretary for Canada-U.S. relations, attended the inauguration of Trump in Washington, D.C.
It also counts trips to events the cabinet minister in question might have attended anyway, such as when International Development Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau went to Washington for the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group.
Trips that received little attention, such as when Government House Leader Bardish Chagger, who is also the minister of state for small business and tourism, went to Toledo, Ohio and Chicago, Ill. to discuss cross-border trade, were also on the list.
Liberal MP Wayne Easter, who is co-chair of the Canada-United States Inter-Parliamentary Group, said these meetings can help Canada set the facts straight and get its message across on thorny trade issues such as dairy and softwood lumber.
"I think if ever there was a time we had to deal with facts and clear facts, not the perception it's now," Easter said.
The analysis comes with some caveats.
There was no amount available for two trips Sajjan took to Washington, including to attend the inauguration, because he flew on a Challenger jet and his office did not have that information available.
There was also a handful of expense claims that lumped the cost associated with a visit to the U.S. in with other legs of a much larger trip.
The figures for trips taken since June 1 are not yet available, and neither are the costs associated with trips taken by the prime minister.
And each cabinet minister would also be travelling with at least a couple of staffers and officials, which would multiply the costs.
The numbers also exclude travel by everyone outside of cabinet, which has been quite extensive.
According to data provided by Freeland's office, overall there had been 78 visits to Washington plus 87 trips to 42 other cities, from Albany, N.Y. to Whitefish, Mont., as of last week, which is just part of the more than 315 individual contacts that have taken place as part of this outreach so far.
Earlier on HuffPost:
Read more:
Liberals Make 29 Trips In 6 Months Ahead Of NAFTA Talks - Huffington Post Canada