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Police in West Hartford say a Connecticut man wrote threatening anti-Trump graffiti on an elementary school with the hope it would look like liberal hate speech.

The Hartford Courant reports 32-year-old West Hartford resident Steven Marks has been ordered to stay off Morley Elementary School property.

Hes charged with third-degree criminal mischief and breach of peace, and a judge will hear his case Aug. 2.

Police say Marks wrote several phrases threatening President Donald Trump and praising the left on areas of the playground June 15.

Police say Marks told officers he vandalized the school in West Hartford out of anger toward liberals.

Marks previously told the Courant he was sorry, saying it was a stupid thing.

He declined to comment after his recent court appearance.

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Man writes anti-Trump graffiti hoping 'liberals' would be blamed - Wisconsin Gazette (blog)

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Donald Trump's presidency is a disaster. But it's a disaster that may teach liberals a valuable moral lesson.

Most liberals tend to view morality in horizontal terms as a matter of securing and protecting the rights of free and equal individuals. This leads liberals to emphasize procedures and processes that ensure fairness for all. Many other liberals, especially those primarily concerned about issues wrapped up with identity politics, highlight another horizontal aspect of morality: recognition of the value and worth of different groups. This goes beyond equal rights to demand that fellow citizens and the government itself actively affirm the goodness of different ways of life. People don't merely have rights that give them the freedom to live as they wish. They actually deserve to enjoy positive affirmation in the public square.

Leaving aside the very real and important conflicts between these two constellations of liberal moral concern, they both presume and seek to enforce equality or egalitarianism. That's why I've described them as fostering a horizontal vision of morality.

But egalitarianism doesn't exhaust moral experience. On the contrary, morality also has a different dimension one having to do not with equality but with inequality, distinction, nobility, elevation, sanctity, excellence, and virtue. This vertical aspect of morality is absolutely crucial for understanding politics, but liberals tend to neglect it or at least took it for granted until Trump became president.

Trump morally offends liberals in many ways. A number of them have to do with horizontal concerns: offenses against the rights of various individuals and groups, such as the poor, minorities, immigrants, and Muslims. The liberal response to these offenses is to reaffirm the transgressed rights and attack the president for his divisiveness, cruelty, and failure to affirm equality for all.

Then there are Trump's myriad offenses against the rule of law. In response to these, liberals reaffirm the principle and insist that the president be held to the same exacting standards that have applied to his predecessors. Again, equality is the norm and the measure, across presidential administrations over time.

But there's another way that Trump offends liberals (as well as many on the center-right): with his angry and insulting tweets, attacks on the press, and continuous stream of lies. What makes this behavior so bad? Charles Blow of The New York Times spoke for many in a recent column that used a series of terms one now regularly hears tripping from liberal lips: "We must remind ourselves that Trump's very presence in the White House defiles it and the institution of the presidency. Rather than rising to the honor of the office, Trump has lowered the office with his whiny, fragile, vindictive pettiness."

Every italicized word is a term of distinction, referring to and presuming the possibility of making vertical moral distinctions: pure and defiled, rising and falling, honorable and dishonorable, higher and lower. The same kind of distinctions are implied every time someone describes Trump's actions or statements as "unpresidential." Since he's the president, the claim would seem to be self-refuting unless, that is, we believe that the office of the presidency itself, apart from the behavior of any particular president, is honorable, noble, elevated, exalted, something to which we rightly look up and from which a particular president can diverge or fall short.

There are many ways to conceive of and think about such vertical moral distinctions. Aristotle treated them as woven into the fabric of political life and because human beings are political animals, he also assumed they were woven into the fabric of human life, where they could be studied to teach us crucially important lessons about the longings that most powerfully move the human soul. Meanwhile, the political-theological traditions within Judeo-Christianity appeal to the God divinely revealed in the Bible to explain, limit, and complete these vertical moral intuitions. In our time, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has devised his own empirically grounded theory of moral foundations that gives vertical moral distinctions their due.

The liberal political tradition from Hobbes to Rawls, by contrast, has always been suspicious of the vertical dimension of morality, worrying that it fosters aristocratic and illiberal passions that decent politics must constrain, thwart, or channel into less publicly dangerous pursuits. Yet the most thoughtful liberal thinkers have also understood that decent politics necessarily presupposes that citizens affirm the reality of such distinctions.

For those liberals inclined to forget the need for them, or to complacently assume that they will always be there to draw on and elevate public life, the jarring experience of living under President Trump is a potent reminder of just how crucially important (and fragile) vertical moral distinctions really are. It also demonstrates that transgressions of vertical ideals can feel just as wrong just as much a violation of an intrinsic standard of right as transgressions against horizontal-egalitarian notions of equal dignity before the law.

If the nation's bracing experience of life with a profoundly unpresidential president manages to open liberals to the importance of the vertical dimension of morality, it will have had at least one positive result.

See more here:
What liberals can learn about morality from Donald Trump - The Week Magazine

A country afraid of words.

The late, great George Carlin first famously spoke of the seven words you can never say on TV in 1972.

Since then, some of those words have changed. Television has changed. If were talking HBO, Showtime or Netflix, you can say whatever you want.

But when it comes to political discourse on television and in our personal lives, we seem to have strangely embraced a new set of words that we are, for some reason, not allowed to say.

They are words like lie, liar, bigot and stupid.

This is a dangerous prospect.

Im not suggesting that every political discussion should devolve into name-calling or that we shouldnt be respectful of others. But I am suggesting that we should call lies lies, bigots bigots, insincere people insincere, and stupid or baseless accusations stupid.

Carlin, of course, once also noted that we have no more stupid people in this country; everybody has a learning disorder.

But, kidding aside, stupid notions and stupid policies can have actual effects and should be condemned as stupid, not simply different. When someone presents alternative facts, another person should alternate from the usual civil discourse. For some reason, weve gotten rid of shame when shaming is often helpful.

Weve allowed the dishonest to continue to be dishonest without any fear of repercussions. Jeffrey Lord, Boris Epshteyn, Kellyanne Conway, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and their ilk can continually dissemble on live TV without any concern that anyone will call them out on it.

They dont have different points of view; theyre just plain dishonest and greedy people looking to benefit from their dishonesty.

Liberals have made the mistake of tolerating dishonesty for too long. We tolerate it so much, in fact, that were often dishonest with ourselves: wed like to believe that the Trump supporters we know our friends, coworkers, and relatives somehow arent bigots.

Yet the rational part of us knows that they either agreed with Trumps racist, bigoted and misogynistic statements and policies or those statements and policies didnt bother them enough not to vote for him.

Heck, Trump was a key figure in the birther movement; he said he wanted to ban all Muslims from entering the country (and, no, he did not say temporarily) and is currently pursuing that policy; he said would consider having a registry for Muslims; he said that Mexico was sending us rapists; that a judge of Mexican descent couldnt be impartial and that he liked to grab womens private parts. Yet we pretend that his supporters somehow arent bigoted. It doesnt make sense and we know it.

During the presidential campaign, I talked about the War on Truth, and now it is clear that it is indeed an all-out war, with Trump consistently attacking and discrediting reliable media and sending out his minions to do the same.

Liberals have woken up to this fact, yet they still dont know how to combat it. The Republican disinformation machines of Breitbart, Fox News, Newsmax, et al, plus Trumps own Twitter account, have created a scenario in which we are no longer battling on the same field, yet liberals keep acting as if opponents motives are just as pure as theirs and that they are just as informed.

But were not debating David Frum, George Will, or William F. Buckley anymore.

I have a crazy idea: When Kayleigh McEnany or Jason Miller or Sean Hannity lies, we should call them on it not later or off-screen, but right to their faces the moment they do it.

Weve entered this dystopian world wherein being a bigot or a liar is OK, but calling someone a bigot or liar is not.

Respect is something thats earned. Youre not supposed to respect anothers opinion when its insincere or based on prejudice. If you pretend to respect opinions that you know are dishonest, you yourself are being dishonest.

Liberals have to stop congratulating themselves for being so civil and concentrate instead on being 100 percent honest.

FDR famously declared (about the monied interests) that they are unanimous in their hate for me and I welcome their hatred. He didnt sit around and worry over hurting his opponent's feelings. And his successor, Give em Hell Harry Truman, was no different, once stating, I never gave anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.

Liberals should learn how to give a little hell.

Ross Rosenfeld is a political pundit who has written for Newsday, the New York Daily News, Charles Scribner's, MacMillan, Newsweek.com, Primedia and The Hill.

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

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It's time liberals start calling out conservatives for 'alternative facts' - The Hill (blog)

For at least two and a half centuries, Americans have argued over the proper size and scope of a central government. Though the abuses of power by a distant monarch and legislature sparked our revolt against England, and though Americans have always remained suspicious of putting too much authority in the hands of our own federal government, the general drift over the years has been toward more centralized power, and thus more centralized decision-making over important issues.

But we may have hit peak centralization.

The very election of Donald Trump spoke to the extreme contempt with which many Americans have come to hold the federal government. Many Americans held their noses while voting like never before, out of a sense of desperation that the candidacy of Hillary Clinton the embodiment of the political class that earned their contempt represented a point of no return regarding the concentration of power. From health care to immigration to energy to the judiciary (and the host of issues it considers from the First Amendment to the Second and beyond) a Clinton presidency could have locked into place that drift toward centralization. Instead, most conservatives and independents cast their lot with a man who at least offered a chance at preventing that.

But to many liberals now, Trumps presidency represents a terrifying mirror image of what the right had feared. They see his actions and attempted actions as a retrogression to be Resisted.Such is their anti-Trump fervor that his presidency appears to be sparking a serious rethinking of their long-held appreciation for federal power. I suggested somewhat tongue-in-cheek right after the election that this should happen. The clearest and perhaps most prominent example that it may actually be coming true can be found within this essay in Politico by the urbanist Richard Florida. Here is the key excerpt:

Its time to confront a simple but stunning fact: When it comes to urban policy and much else, the federal government is the wrong vehicle for getting things done and for getting them done right. Whether it is controlled by the left or the right, no single top-down, one-size-fits-all strategy can address the desires and needs of a country as geographically, culturally and economically divided as America. Big cities and metropolitan regions, far-flung exurbs, suburbs and rural areas are very different kinds of places, with vastly different desires and needs.

If we are ever going to rebuild our cities and our nation as a whole, including our suburbs and rural areas, there is really only one way forward, and it does not and cannot start in Washington. It can only come from our many and varied communities, who know best how to address and solve their own problems and build their own economies. And if that sounds like going back to an old-fashioned, conservative conception of how federalism should work a kind of extreme localism to address the sorts of issues liberals worry about, so be it. America needs nothing less than a revolution in how we govern ourselves, or well only end up poorer, angrier and more divided.

Read the whole thing, but this excerpt neatly summarizes what conservatives have long argued. The thinking is old-fashioned only in the sense liberals have long since deluded themselves into believing more-centralized power could only be good, because it would inevitably be used to achieve their desired ends. That might have been true as long as the right was chiefly devoted to limiting and devolving federal power. But with a president coming from the right who instead is quite interested in seeing what he can do with this large federal hammer the left spent decades fashioning, it seems some liberals are suddenly gaining a Strange New Respect for returning power to those governments closest to the people. Threatening to withhold federal funds to coerce acquiescence to federal prerogatives is apparently less appealing when it comes to sanctuary cities harboring illegal immigrants rather than (as Obamacare attempted) states refusing to expand Medicaid. It seems to have taken Trump to demonstrate to liberals what Reagan meant when he said a government powerful enough to give you what you want is also powerful enough to take it away.

I dont want to overstate this nascent trend, if we can yet call it a trend (Florida names other liberals who agree with him later in his essay). You of course still hear many liberals whose response to Trump on, say, health care is to elect Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren in 2020 and get on with the mission of single payer. But the more honest liberals surely recognize what this sentiment amounts to: Get Better Leaders.

The problem is Get Better Leaders is neither a political philosophy nor much of a plan. For one, its fraught with risk, as the election of Trump seems to have shown. And consider the possibility, if a strong-federal-government right truly becomes ascendant, that what follows Trump is not better but perish the thought, gentle progressivist reader! worse. If you dont want a president who can so terrify you with his actions, the best answer is not to have such a powerful president (and executive branch and federal government more generally). More fundamentally, Get Better Leaders is the very conceit of governance our Founding Fathers rejected because of their appropriately dim view of human nature.

It would be ironic if what it took for the left to acknowledge the wisdom of the rights arguments for less-centralized governance were not the arguments themselves, but a president coming from the right who wields power like one from the left. I guess seeing really is believing.

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Opinion: How Trump is prodding liberals to agree with conservatism ... - MyAJC (blog)

Canadas Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (L) and Finance Minister Bill Morneau walk to the House of Commons to deliver the budget on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, March 22, 2016. (Patrick Doyle/Reuters)

The Liberals campaigned on a platform that promised a short-lived period in which their government would run modest deficits. After incurring an accumulated deficit of $25 billion over 2016-19, the Liberals promised to return the budget to balance by 2019-20, the fourth year of their mandate. Instead of balancing the budget throughout their mandateas both the Conservatives and NDP were promisingthe Liberals would hold fast to two fiscal anchors of their choosing, as they stated in their costing planin 2015:

(Liberal.ca)

Yeah, well, not so much:

Neither of those promises is going to be delivered by 2019-20. According to the latest long-term projection provided by the Department of Finance, these objectives are scheduled to be achieved sometime between 2040 and 2050, which means approximately never. Fortunately for the cause of responsible governance, the federal Liberals have accepted responsibility for their failure to keep their word and are sufficiently shamefaced about the whole mess that theres not much point in investigating the matter any further.

Just kidding! The Liberals are blaming everything and everyone elseincluding their Conservative predecessorsfor the current state of public finances. So in this post, Im going to try and figure out what happened.

READ MORE:The unmasking of Bill Morneau, caped budget crusader

The Liberals standard talking point is that the larger-than-expected deficit is a result of slower-than projected economic growth. But as far as I can tell, this is only a partial explanation, accounting for roughly one quarter of the deterioration in the federal budget balance. Roughly three quarters of the increase in the federal deficit can be explained by the fact that the Liberals are spending much more than what they said they would during the election.

The idea that poor economic performance is to blame for the deficit is difficult to reconcile with near-record-low unemployment rates, but there is still something to it. The 2015 LPC platform used the economic baseline set out in the Conservatives 2015 budget. As new data have come in, these projectionsbased on an average of private-sector forecastshave been revised steadily downwards. But its important to understand how and why this has happened, and it comes down to making the distinction between nominal and real GDP.

READ MORE:A budget for make benefit glorious economy of Canada

When it comes to forecasting the revenue numbers that show up in the budget, nominal GDP is what matters: economic activity measured in current dollars. But an increase or a decrease in nominal GDP doesnt necessarily reflect an increase or decrease in real economic activitythings like output, employment and household purchasing power. If the only thing that happened in the economy was that the prices of all goods and services went up, nominal GDP would increase, even if real economic activity stayed constant. Of course, the mirror scenario can also happen: an increase in real economic activity will increase nominal GDP, even if prices stay the same.

Its useful to break down nominal GDP into its real and price components:

Nominal GDP = Real GDP x Price Level

When referring the GDP, the price level is often referred to as the deflator: to obtain real GDP, you deflate nominal GDP by dividing by the price levelthe deflator. If you take the growth rates of both sides of this equation, this relationship becomes

Growth in Nominal GDP = Real GDP Growth + Inflation

So theres a two-part explanation to lower-than-projected growth in nominal GDP:

It turns out that the price level story is actually more important than the one involving real economic activity. According to the most recent projections in the 2017 budget, most of the shortfall in nominal GDP is due to lower-than-projected inflation. Real GDP over 2016-20 is projected to come in 2.1 per cent lower than projected in 2015, while the GDP deflator is expected to be on average 2.4 per cent less than projected. The average shortfall in nominal GDP is the sum of these two components: 2.1 + 2.4 = 4.5 per cent.

(My excel file going through the various projections with risk adjustments stripped out is available here.)

Theres no great mystery about the effects of lower-than-expected real GDP growth on the budget balance: it leads to lower revenues and a deteriorating budget balance. But what about lower-than-expected inflation rates in the GDP deflator?

I think its easier to explain and understand if we ask the opposite question: what if inflation had come in higher than expected? If this were the case, then the government would be well within its rights to say something like this:

We committed ourselves to purchasing a certain quantity of goods and services. The price of respecting this commitment has gone up more than we expected, and so we will be spending more than we projectedin nominal termsto carry out our obligations. Higher inflation has also increased revenues above what had been projected, so this increase in nominal spending will not affect the budget balance in real terms or expressed as a percentage of GDP.

There is nothing wrong with this sort of statement: what matters is real economic activity, and adjusting nominal expenditures in response to a pure price change is the proper thing to do.

But of course, thats not what has happened: prices are coming in lower than expected. If you thinkas I dothat the above statement makes sense in a context of higher-than-expected prices, then this is what youd expect a government to say when prices come in below projection:

We committed ourselves to purchasing a certain quantity of goods and services. The price of respecting this commitment has gone up less than we expected, and so we will be spending less than we projectedin nominal termsto carry out our obligations. Lower inflation has also reduced revenues below what had been projected, so this reduction in nominal spending will not affect the budget balance in real terms or expressed as a percentage of GDP.

Here is where the Liberals have tripped up. Instead of adjusting nominal spending down as inflation came in below projection, the path of nominal expenditures has been revised upwards in the first two Liberal budgets. Real levels of spending are higher than what the Liberals had promised.

READ MORE:21 ways the federal budget will hit Canadians wallets

We now have to make a detour to note that the Liberals never actually set out what their revenue and spending commitments were in the last election. Their costing was set out in terms of the 2015 budget balance baseline (with adjustments), where items were added and subtracted to obtain a projection for the budget balance over 2016-20: no numbers for revenues or spending were provided that could be used as a basis for comparison with what came later.

In this excel file, Ive tried to fill that gap, using the original 2015 budget baseline as a starting point, adding the Liberals risk adjustments, and then classifying the various proposals in the Liberal platform as either revenue or expenditure measures. For example, the canceling of the Universal Child Care Benefit is a revenue increase (the UCCB was a tax credit), the introduction of the Canada Child Benefit is a revenue decrease (the CCB is also a tax credit), the Middle Class Tax Cut is a revenue reduction, and so on. The final budget balances reproduce the projections in the Liberals platform. (Some of these revenue/spending classifications are judgment calls, so if you see an item that Ive misclassified, Ill be pleased to make the necessary changes.)

This table summarizes nominal revenue and spending projections in the Liberal platform and in their two budgets:

Although Ive broken the numbers down for each year, Ill try to keep things as simple as possible by talking only about the four-year totals for 2016-2020. Total nominal spending as projected in the 2017 budget ($1 240.1 billion) is four per cent less than the total projected in the platform ($1 292.4 billion)a gap slightly less than 4.5 per cent average shortfall in nominal GDP. On the spending side, the projected total of $1 229.8 billion is 2.5 per cent higher than projected in the platform.

Lets look at the primary balance, which is the difference between revenues and spendingthat is, the balance with debt service payments excluded. Revenues in the 2017 budget are $52.3 billion lower than in the platform, and spending is $30.3 billion higher, for a total reduction in the primary balance of $82.6 billion over 2016-20. The Liberal government would presumably argue that since most of this reduction52.3 out of 82.6, or 63 per centcomes from revenue side, revenues are the principal culprit in the deterioration of the federal budget balance.

But this story leaves out the part where prices undershot the projection. If the Liberals wanted to maintain their spending commitments in real termswhich is what mattersthey should have reduced nominal spending below the targets set out in their platform. Because prices came in under projection, and because nominal spending has actually increased over the platform commitments, real federal government spending is running 5.1 per cent higher on average than what the Liberals promised during the election.

By the same token, lower-than-projected prices also means that the shortfall in real revenues is less than the shortfall of nominal revenues. Real revenues are running 1.6 per cent on average below projection, compared to 4 per cent in nominal terms.

In constant 2007 dollar terms, the 2016-20 primary balance is $68.7 billion below what was projected in the Liberal platform. Of that, some $51.2 billion, or about three-quarters, is due to real expenditures running above projection. Translated back to nominal terms, the Liberals are spending about $15 billion dollars a year more than they had promised to spend during the election campaign. Put another way, the Liberals would have to cut spending by about fiveper cent a year to bring real expenditures down to the commitments in their platform. And put yet another way, the 2016-20 federal deficit would be reduced by two-thirds if the Liberals had stuck to their spending commitments in real terms.

It should be noted that the conclusion here is not that spending has increased under the Liberals: the obvious retort to that claim is that increased spending is a campaign commitment that the Liberals have a mandate to carry out. The point is that real federal spending has increased to levels significantly greater than what the Liberals had promised in 2015.

MORE ABOUTTHE FEDERAL BUDGET:

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The Liberals are spending far more than they said they would - Macleans.ca