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Paul Chabot is a native Californian who stood for Congress last year as a Republican, in a district near Los Angeles. After his defeat, he decided the only option was to move to Texas.

Californias become a lost cause, he said. I was born and raised there when it was a Republican state. Ronald Reagan was from there, Nixon was from there, we had great schools back in the 70s and 80s, low crime, great paying jobs. Now its a 180, its a complete opposite of that.

I lost to a very liberal Democrat that the people elected and I came to the conclusion that you cant help people who dont want to help themselves. That really was the end of it for us in California. We realised then that the majority of the people around us no longer shared the same values that my wife and I believe in.

Chabot, his wife Brenda and their four young children relocated to Collin County, which covers some of the most affluent and manicured suburbs of Dallas and where a four-bed home can be yours for under $350,000. And all 38 elected officials, from the sheriff to the district attorney to the tax assessor-collector, are Republicans.

In California we always jokingly said, If this state goes to hell well end up moving to Texas. And a lot of people say it and some people actually do it, Chabot said.

He is now a player in a long-running and freshly escalated ideological and economic battle between Americas most populous liberal and conservative states.

A new adoption law that critics describe as anti-LGBTQ has prompted California to ban state-funded trips to Texas. Chabots strategy is quite the opposite. In May he launched Conservative Move slogan: Helping Families Move Right a company to help fellow sufferers flee their liberal hellscapes and find asylum in the warm, red glow of suburban north Texas.

Its not the same state it was 30, 40, 50 years ago. So you have a base who are frustrated with California and want out

The 43-year-old said the response has been fast and furious: about a thousand expressions of interest, three-quarters of them from Californians.

The people who are contacting us are very upset with state politics, he said. They might have been a lifelong Californian like I was, but theyre saying the state doesnt represent me any more, its not the same state it was 30, 40, 50 years ago. So you have a base of people who are just frustrated with California and want out.

A couple of years ago, he said, he saw a news article that declared the fast-growing county seat of McKinney to be the finest place to live in the US.

As a Californian what I love here is that theres no state income tax, the politics here supports the second amendment, they dont support sanctuary cities or any of that stuff that weve dealt with in California and Texas is very tough on crime. They also have excellent schools where we are, Chabot said.

He is surrounded by Californian ex-pats, he said: My neighbour across the street, my mail man, the guy at Home Depot in the plumbing department, the police officer I met in a coffee shop.

According to a Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) analysis of American Community Survey data, 502,978 people older than 25 moved from California to Texas between 2005 and 2015. Some 290,214 people went the other way. Texas was the top destination for Californians, and vice-versa.

With 27 million Texas residents and 39 million in California, the figures suggest that roughly 1.1% of Texans over 25 moved to California and 1.3% of Californians moved to Texas over that decade. That hardly depicts a flood, or a clear winner in a rivalry that has come to symbolise the growing divide between right and left in the country as a whole. But it is a philosophical gulf that will become even more entrenched geographically if Chabots business flourishes.

There is scant evidence that politics is a main migration factor. Hans Johnson, of the PPIC, said the data indicates economic and family reasons are key drivers.

Housing prices in California have escalated quite rapidly over the last five years and that of course will push more people out of the state, he said.

As a Sacramento Bee headline put it in March: California exports its poor to Texas, other states, while wealthier people move in.

When he was governor of Texas, as the oil and gas boom helped the state prosper despite the recession of the late 2000s, Rick Perry voiced radio advertisements seeking to woo Californian businesses an effort that the Democratic governor, Jerry Brown, termed barely a fart.

They can laugh at Californias travel ban to Texas but itll be more than a travel ban from one state

With a Republican in the White House, California now makes an appealing scapegoat for Texas politicians who fired up their base by disparaging Barack Obama.

Its funny how the very state that is so adamantly against keeping terrorists out of our country they oppose the presidents travel ban now wants to keep Californians out of Texas, a spokesman for Texas attorney general Ken Paxton told the Houston Chronicle. I guess thats California logic.

But an energy industry downturn has hurt Texas economy, and though Arizona and North Carolina endured boycotts in recent years for legislation perceived as discriminatory, Texas is likely to pass a bathroom bill this summer to limit restroom access for transgender people. In protest at a new immigration law, the American Immigration Lawyers Association has switched its 2018 conference from the Dallas area to San Francisco.

They can laugh at Californias travel ban to Texas but itll be more than a travel ban from one state, said Sylvia Garcia, a Democratic state senator from Houston. Itll be more states and it will be more companies who do not want to relocate here and it will be more conferences and more visitors who wont want to come here.

While Texas lawmakers fulminate against liberal values with the rallying cry, Dont California our Texas!, the states biggest cities have turned bluer, most obviously Austin, where Silicon Valley giants such as Google and Facebook have a significant presence. Last November, Hillary Clinton secured more than 54% of the vote in Dallas, Houston, Austin and San Antonio, even though Donald Trump won Texas easily.

Tanya Santillan, a 30-year-old attorney originally from northern California, moved to Houston last year from Washington DC. Especially as a Mexican American in the current environment, she said, she is cautious about discussing politics in her adopted state, but Houston has been a pleasant surprise.

You always come in with a preconceived notion that its going to be super-conservative, maybe more racism, a lot more backward-thinking, more religious. You dont necessarily expect for there to be as much diversity as there is, and I think Houston, its a bubble inside of Texas, people are a lot more progressive. I think maybe if I lived in a smaller town than Houston my experience would be completely different.

When I first mentioned to some of my friends that I was moving to Houston, they just kind of asked, like, Why?'

Santillan has a pragmatic attitude. This is where you get the most for your money, she said, and the political climate is not enough to disincentivise you to move there.

Kyle Loftis has a similar view. The 34-year-old grew up in southern California and lived in San Francisco before moving to Houston four years ago. He works for a parking company and said the transition was smooth.

When I first mentioned to some of my friends that I was moving to Houston, they just kind of asked, like, Why? Why would you move to Texas? he said.

There were a few jokes about Texas being gun country and all that kind of stuff, but nothing too bad, really. I would say it was just more of a little bit of confusion, like, Why are you moving out there? You can get a job here.

But the Bay Area is notoriously expensive. My biggest thing was just the affordability. The cost of living is just far lower in Texas, Loftis said.

Another transplant from the Bay Area to Houston, Chris Pedersen, a 34-year-old who works in the oil and gas industry said the cost of living in California was getting ridiculous. Its become very problematic.

My grandma lives in a two-bedroom, two-bath townhouse [20 miles south of San Francisco] which just got appraised for a million dollars. Its crazy. We just closed on a house actually a week ago, were moving in as we speak, and its half of that, and its a great neighborhood, great house. Theres no way we would have been able to afford it in California.

Do I agree with all the Texas politics, no. But do I agree with all the Californian politics, not at all. Youll have your challenges wherever.

Read this article:
Your place or mine? Texas liberals and California conservatives swap states - The Guardian

It is the unwarranted invasion of individual privacy which is reprehended, and to be, so far as possible, prevented. There are persons who may reasonable claim as a right, protection from the notoriety entailed by being made the victims of journalistic enterprise.

Samuel D. Warren, Louis D. Brandeis, December 15, 1890, Harvard Law Review

It is Fourth of July time. It is time to remember two of the most important constitutional protections that we need to worry about now more than ever: The First Amendment protection of the free press and the right to privacy, two issues that seem to, but actually do not, conflict with one another.

The excerpt from the law review article above was written 127 years ago by Professors Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis Brandeis (the latter became one of the great Supreme Court justices). It provided the intellectual foundation for the right to privacy protection that, 75years later, the U.S. Supreme Court found existed in our constitution implicitly but not explicitly.

The right to privacy has become an important value for liberals in recent years. So how is it possible that with all reviews about the new documentary that focuses on the Hogan case, Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press, directed by the respected Brian Knappenberger (which I have not yet seen), the right to privacy issues involved in the case are virtually ignored?

Meanwhile, the reviews almost exclusively address concerns by liberals that the $140 million verdict against Gawker, which was put out of business due to the size of the verdict, and the way it was financed, represents a threat to First Amendment and press freedoms.

The documentary is largely about the case filed by Terry Jean Bollea, better known by his WWE name, Hulk Hogan. Gawker obtained a copy of Bollea having sex with a woman in his home and posted it online. Bollea won his huge verdict against Gawker because the jury believed this video published by Gawker, while literally true, was not about a newsworthy act by a public figure, but rather, a private act by a private person.

Thus, the jury voted that Gawker was not justified in violating Bolleas privacy rights by posting the video online and embarrassing him for no newsworthy reason. They rejected the notion that Gawker was entitled to any First Amendment protections. Of course, the jury verdict can be debated. There may be too much subjectivity in the legal standards, such as what is newsworthy or of public interest.

Meanwhile, rather than engaging in a healthy and much-needed debate as to where First Amendment protections end and the right to privacy begins, liberal reviewers and commentators have focused a lot their attention on attacking Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur (and early investor in Facebook and PayPal), who provided the financing to Bollea to allow him to sue and afford the costs of the litigation to protect his privacy rights. Without Thiel, Bollea could not have afforded to fight for his right to privacy and win.

Thiel happens to be a conservative, libertarian and a Trump supporter. His politics are always mentioned in the reviews and critiques of his financing of Bolleas case.If he were a liberal Democrat, would the criticisms of Thiel by these rights be the same? I doubt it. (I am, by the way, a liberal Democrat and proud of it).

I certainly worry about small news organizations on the right and left that are vulnerable to expensive defense costs when lawsuits are filed against them, even though what was published was true and accurate, but, so does Thiel.

He told the New York Times in an interview that he has donated money to the Committee to Protect Journalists and stated: I refuse to believe that journalism means massive privacy violations. I think much more highly of journalists than that. Its precisely because I respect journalists that I do not believe they are endangered by fighting back against Gawker [to protect privacy rights].

Liberals should be able to care about protecting both First Amendment and media freedoms as well as privacy rights. It is hypocritical to support financial backing by wealthy liberals in cases we like but attack the motives of financiers in cases we dont like.

Lanny Davis is co-founder of both the Washington law firm Davis Goldberg Galper PLLC and Trident DMG, a strategic media firm specializing in crisis management. He served as special counsel to former President Clinton from 1996 to 1998 and is a regular columnist for The Hill newspaper. He is a friend of Peter Thiel.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.

Continue reading here:
Liberals can't just rally for free press and ignore privacy rights | TheHill - The Hill (blog)

Updated July 04, 2017 06:25:57

The Liberal Party has strongly rejected Tony Abbott's claim it is "haemorrhaging members", as tensions rise over the former prime minister's push to change the way candidates are preselected.

Mr Abbott made the claim while arguing the NSW division needed to empower its members and give them a vote in preselections.

"We're haemorrhaging members in every state but it's a particular problem in NSW because we've got this dreadful situation where we have got factionalists and lobbyists who seem to be controlling the party," Mr Abbott told Sydney's 2GB radio.

"The best way to liberate our party from factional control, the best way to liberate our party from the lobbyists, is to give every single member a vote."

Nationally, the Liberal Party's membership has plateaued at around 50,000 and the ABC has been told the NSW division membership stands at around 11,000.

While that is substantially less than it once was, sources say the numbers have remained steady over the past five years or so and have even had a bump or "modest increase" in recent times.

"Mr Abbott's claim should be treated with a grain of salt," a senior source said.

The battle over Mr Abbott's "one member, one vote", or plebiscite preselections push will come to a head later this month at a specially convened conference to debate the future of the NSW division.

Currently, candidates in NSW are preselected by a mix of party officials and branch representatives.

Mr Abbott's hard-right faction argues a plebiscite model will empower members and neuter the power of factional warlords.

But the moderates to which Malcolm Turnbull is aligned are more wary, fearing the change could see NSW return to its "bad old days" of branch-stacking, as has been the case in Victoria.

They also argue Victoria, which introduced a plebiscite model in 2008, has not seen a dramatic increase in its membership.

One source said a plebiscite was not the "panacea" to solving the party's membership problem.

But this issue is about more than party democratisation. It is a battle for control between a divided right and a dominant left, and it is being pitched, by some, as a proxy war between Mr Abbott and Mr Turnbull.

That is despite the fact Mr Turnbull is broadly supportive of the plebiscite idea.

Government frontbencher Angus Taylor, who supports Mr Abbott's push, told Liberal Party members on the weekend the change must not be seen through the prism of "Turnbull versus Abbott, or Abbott versus Turnbull".

Liberal MPs are reasonably optimistic a compromise will be reached this month.

But those on the moderate side argue there must be safeguards against branch-stacking, including limiting voting rights to those who have been members for a certain amount of time, and ensuring the state executive retains some say over the process.

Topics: federal-government, government-and-politics, political-parties, liberals, nsw

First posted July 03, 2017 19:43:59

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Liberals deny Tony Abbott's claim party is 'haemorrhaging members' amid preselection argument - ABC Online

A Nationals senator is "fed up" with his coalition partners and wants the Liberal Party to stop its infighting.

John Williams on Tuesday reminded the Liberal Party that "division is death", saying the debates, fuelled by the likes of Tony Abbott and Christopher Pyne, are taking away from the government's achievements.

"That is very frustrating, it is very annoying and I'm just fed up with it," he told ABC radio.

Senator Williams said the "in-house arguments" and their coverage in the media meant Bill Shorten and the Labor Party were getting a free ride.

He urged Mr Abbott, who keeps rearing his head in set speeches to offer free advice, to be more of a team player.

"As we were with Tony when he was prime minister," the senator said.

"I certainly was - we had a couple of disagreements on the odd occasion but I think Tony needs to just fit into the team."

He also cited Mr Pyne's remarks to a Liberal Federal Council afterparty in which he claimed same-sex marriage could be achieved sooner than people think.

Senator Williams warned any change to the government's plebiscite policy would be in breach of the Liberal's agreement with the Nationals.

"What would happen then - I don't know for sure," he said.

Mr Abbott addressed a Victorian Liberal Party branch meeting in Michael Sukkar's electorate on Monday night.

Mr Sukkar defended the guest speaker's appearance, saying it was a long-standing and routine invitation.

"It was a good meeting but I don't think it was anything particularly exciting to be honest," he told Sky News.

A Guardian Essential poll on Tuesday shows 43 per cent of the more than 1000 surveyed believe Mr Abbott should resign from parliament.

Read the original here:
Nats senator 'fed up' with Liberals blues - NEWS.com.au

The battle over school reform makes for some very odd allies and even stranger adversaries.

rangizz via Shutterstock

The school reform issue ought to split up conservatives as badly as it does liberals. But it doesnt. I cant figure that out.

No matter which side looks at it, school reform turns on the same fundamental question: Can a poor, minority kid from a chaotic background be as smart as accomplished in school as a rich, white kid from a nice home? If so, why arent public schools closing that gap?

Conservatives ought to have as much to fight about with each other over that question as liberals. But I dont hear it. Not where I live.

In East Dallas, its almost always the liberals going after each other. Many of my neighbors and friends are teachers. They tend to be liberals, and you know how we are. We liberals agree wholeheartedly on a whole menu of issues, hyperlocal to intergalactic, but that stops at school reform. There, we split, often with drama.

And here in this space, the drama goes on: I get a lot of sincere questions from a certain kind of reader asking me how I can be so right on some issues yet be such a Trumpian, corporate lackey fool on school reform. I dont know that I think the question about me is very interesting if its inconsistency you want, Ive got plenty more where that came from but Im beginning to think the way we all approach the topic is something for the whole city to ponder.

First of all, I bet were in for some long-overdue national attention on school reform. Were pretty far away geographically and culturally from the coastal and Northeastern media beats where most big news happens, so it takes us a while to get noticed. But the fact is that Dallas is a national leader on many school reform issues. Recently The New York Times took note of some of the programs left behind by former Dallas school Superintendent Mike Miles.

I wrote about the piece, mainly to point to the one thing the Times didnt notice, probably because it was too local: Many of the programs the Times thought were cool in Dallas are in danger of retrenchment. The reforms here are in danger of being undermined because the anti-school reform forces are close to taking back the kingdom.

The Miles-era school reforms are protected by a razor-thin, one-vote margin on the school board. An anti-reform candidate came close to reversing that margin in the recent school board elections, only to be defeated in a runoff, an event greeted by huge sighs of relief from worried reformers.

We are about to get more national attention soon, especially for our merit pay reforms, which were designed to resolve mistakes made earlier in other cities, and for our Accelerating Campus Excellence schools, where the merit pay system is used to achieve increasingly stunning results in schools where kids supposedly are toughest to teach.

Those reforms, especially ACE, lie very close to the hot wires that seem to short-circuit whenever liberals get onto this topic. The ACE program takes me back to my reporting roots on this story, 20 years ago when George W. Bush was governor of Texas.

I was new at the Observer and set out to do a story about how the Bush Republicans were destroying the Dallas public school system. I dont remember why that was my working thesis. Somebody I knew just told me they were.

I couldnt get that story to make. Somewhat distressingly for me, Bush had all these really smart people around him on school issues, like future Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, who I think was still Margaret La Montagne at that time, and a bunch of super-sharp people from the Houston school district.

Every time I tried to ask them why they wanted to destroy the Dallas public school system what had the Dallas school system ever done to them? they steered me to even smarter people they thought I needed to talk to, and thats how I found my way to William S. Sanders in Tennessee. Sanders is a statistician who started out knowing not one thing about education, as he explained it to me. He discovered that Tennessee had amassed an enormous 10-year trove of data from statewide achievement tests that nobody had ever looked at. He asked for and got permission to mess around with the data.

Since, by his own admission, Sanders knew nothing about education and did not work in the field, I asked him why he wanted to work with the Tennessee school achievement data. He said, Because it was a whole bunch of numbers.

He and his colleagues churned up an explosively original insightout of those numbers. First of all, their findings took a cherished belief of liberals so dearly and fiercely held that I have decided it may even be at the core of liberalism and turned it on its head. I am talking about the belief that achievement in school and even performance later in life are driven and shaped mainly by external forces.

Until Sanders dove into those numbers, all of the numbers that anybody knew about tended to buttress the liberal belief that achievement in school and in life are driven almost entirely by social class, economic status, family status, vicissitudes of the economy and even the tax structure. When you married all of those factors to race, according to this view, you wound up with a bulletproof deterministic equation to predict everything. Demography became God.

The Sanders research reaffirmed that all of those factors are important in predicting achievement so important as predictors that they must also be taken in some degree as causal, which was already known. Sanders discovery was that none of those things was the most important thing. Something else in the numbers could trump even demographics.

Margaret Spellings

LBJ Library

The good teacher. A kid with all of the worst predictors going against him the kid from the bottom of every barrel learned significantly more in a year than he was supposed to learn if he wound up in the class of the good teacher. And the good teacher was consistently good. The kids always did better, no matter where they came from.

The opposite was true for the bad teachers. Their kids did worse than they were predicted to do, and they always did worse, year after year.

The people I talked to who were working for Bush on education issues were on fire with a single conviction: If you could find out what made the good teachers good and the bad teachers bad, and if you could distill only a portion of that into something teachers could be taught, then theoretically you ought to be able to come up with a way to teach kids that would have a shot at trumping demographics.

If you could teach poor kids to read as well as affluent kids, then you could change the nature of our society in profound and enduring ways. I sensed in those people back then a very intense conviction that I continue to find today in school reform activists: the belief that if such a thing can be done, it is a great social sin not to get it done.

They had a simpler, clearer way of saying it: Reading is the new civil right.

The school reform issue continues to divide us on a long, deep equator. It divides us between those people who think poor kids can be just as smart as affluent kids and those people who still believe demography is God.

Some of the people who maintain their faith in demography are liberals. They say poor outcomes in life are driven by poverty, and you cant fix anything until you end poverty. Others who dont believe in the reform movement believe that nonwhite children are born less smart than white children and nothing can change that. But the nonbelievers all wind up in the same vessel the Good Ship Status Quo.

Among the reformers I have gotten to know, there is plenty of acknowledgement that mistakes have been made in the reform effort. But great victories are being achieved as well, like the programs The New York Times noticed recently in Dallas.

Those victories ACE schools, for example are proof that, absent some kind of damage, babies are born equal. Then its up to us what sort of chance we give them.

Is it liberal or conservative to recognize fundamental equality and the supreme importance of the individual? I dont think I know any more. I know we liberals fight about it more, maybe because more of us get our paychecks from schools. But this much is sure: As Dallas moves farther down the path to reform, as it must, we who live here will all be forced to look deeper into our core beliefs.

See the rest here:
Can't Tell Liberals from Conservatives in Dallas School Reform Debate - Dallas Observer