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It has been over a week since the U.K. election that left the political establishment reeling in Britain and around the world. And though Prime Minister Theresa May will remain in office for now Jeremy Corbyn was correct when he said last week that the election had changed the face of British politics.

The snap election that was supposed to have crushed Corbyn and the Labour Party once and for all has instead re-energized the British left, while throwing serious doubt on the Conservative Partys future. When Theresa May arrogantlycalled the election inApril, polls indicated thather Conservative Party would win by ahistoric landslide, and the British press which has been fiercely against Corbyn since he was elected as leader of the Labour Party two years ago ran giddy headlines predicting the death of his party.There was no doubt whether May and the Tories would win a majority;it was only a matter of how massive that majority would be.

But if we have learned anything over the past year, with the election of U.S. President Donald Trump and the Brexitreferendum resultlast summer, it is that absolutely nothing is certain in this populist age. May was expectedto Crush the Saboteurs, as the Daily Mails front page readafter herannouncement in April,but instead she ended up crushing her own party, which lost its majority in the House of Commons after leading by more than20 points just amonth earlier.

Meanwhile, the unconventionaland unelectable Corbyn, who has beensmeared and misrepresented by the British media for the past two years and who has faced repeated mutinies within his own party generated the highest turnout for a U.K. election since 1997and won a larger share of the popular vote than Tony Blair did in 2005.It was an even bigger upset than last years Brexit shocker.

Even Labour Party members and Corbynites had been resigned to the Tories winning back theirmajority; their goal had been simply to keep thatmajority as slim as possible and to not be completely humiliated. But Theresa May was the only one humiliated on election day,while the leftist Labour leader wasclearlyvindicated after years of abuse.

And Corbyns political success will be felt far beyond the shores of Great Britain. For weeks and months to come pundits and politicalstrategistswill continue to ask themselves how this happened, and many will no doubt try to spin anddistortwhat happened last week. But the answer is simple: The old-school socialist triumphed because he ran an effective grassroots campaign with a compellingmessage that offered principled leadership and a progressive platform togalvanize the working-class and young people of Britain. Though Labour clearly benefited from Mays poorly run campaign, there is little doubt thatLabours progressive manifestowas essential toits parliamentary gains.

Before the election, Corbyns approval ratings were in the gutter after years of his beingmaligned by the British press.Ananalysisof 2016 by The Independent foundthat more than 75 percent of press coverage had misrepresented Corbyn (and his views), while more than half of the (purportedly neutral) news articles were critical or antagonistic in tone, compared to two thirds of all editorials and opinion pieces.

By contrast, the British public was broadlysupportive ofCorbyns actual policies. According to apoll byThe Independent, along with aMay surveyby ComRes for the Daily Mirror,the major policies featured in Labours general election manifesto earned strong support from the British public, while the right-wing Tory manifesto was widely rejected. It is not surprising then that the candidates approval ratings changed places during the election, as their policies were publicized.According to the latest pollingby YouGov, Mays approval ratings have plummeted to Corbyns pre-election levels,while the Labour leaders ratings have surged.

It is already quite clear how last weeks election has changed politics in the U.K., but its outcome has also been felt across the Atlantic.

Much has already been saidabout the obvious parallels between Corbyns Labour Party success and the rise of Sen. Bernie Sanders in the U.S. and what the Britishelectionmeans for Americanpolitics. Like Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders was seen by the commentariatas a fringe socialist kook who was completely unelectable and like Corbyn, he created a mass movement that appealed to working people and young voters in particular. Sanders was by far the most popular candidate among millennials in the 2016 election, while Corbyns Labour Party won 63percent of aged 18 to 34 and increased voter turnout for 18- to 25-year-olds from 45percent in 2015 to about72percent last week, according to exit polls from Sky data. Similar to the scenario in the U.K., the majority of Americans tend to support Sanders social democratic policies, including his support for Medicare for all and raising taxes on the rich.

Of course, theresat least one obvious difference between the two progressivepoliticians: While Corbyn has been personally unpopular in his country,Sanderscontinues to rank asthe most popularpolitician in the United States. Moreover, Sanders consistently outperformed Hillary Clinton in the polls against Donald Trump last year and would have likely defeated the Republican billionairehandily barring a major spoiler candidate like Michael Bloomberg.

This reality continues to infuriate many establishment Democrats, who have inevitablytried to dismiss and downplay Corbyns success in Britain, noting that Labour still didnt win a majority of itsown. If a centrist Blairite wereleading the party, they insist (with no empirical basis whatsoever), then he or she would have been elected prime minister, say centrist Democrats. The same people who were gloating about Labours anticipatedruin just a month ago and using itas evidence that a populist shift to the left would be disastrous for the Democratic Party are now spinning Labourshistoric accomplishment to fit their narrative.Clearly there is a lot of denial going onhere. The Blairites and Clintonites cannot bring themselves to admit that third way centrism isa relic of the neoliberal 1990s. They refuse to see the writing on the wall, even as it stares at themdirectly.

In a column for The New York Times on Tuesday, Sen. Sanderswrote that the British election should be a lesson for the Democratic Party to stop clinging to an overly cautious, centrist ideology.

He wrote, There is never one reason elections are won or lost, adding, but there is widespread agreement that momentum shifted to Labour after it released a very progressive manifesto that generated much enthusiasm among young people and workers. . . . The [Democratic] partys main thrust must be to make politics relevant to those who have given up on democracy and bring millions of new voters into the political process.

A few days earlier at the Peoples Summit in Chicago, Sandersdiscussed the U.K. election during aspeech, noting that Labour won those seats not by moving to the right but by standing up to the ruling class of the U.K. Healso reiteratedthat Trump didnt win the election,the Democratic Party lost the election. It seems clear that if the Democratic Party wantsto start winning elections again,it should pay careful attention to what iscurrently happening in Britain.

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Sorry, centrist liberals, the politics of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn are the progressive path forward - Salon

Here are some offenses that can get you killed by a hate crime these days in America the Broken:

And you know the national mood has taken a turn toward the surreal when MSNBCs Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski who helped make fellow New Yorker Donald Trump the GOP nominee and now constantly ratchet up the hate by insulting, attacking and mocking Trump and his supporters call on the country to bring down the temperature.

While I consider myself center-right, due largely to an upbringing in the farmland of Central California and the fact that Im part of a community of Mexican-Americans who are less liberal than you might think, my relationship with the GOP is not good.

When writing about immigration, I hammer Republicans for either being racist, pandering to racists, or tolerating racism in their ranks. I was Never Trump before it was cool in fact, from the moment two years ago this week, when Donald Trump declared his candidacy and then declared people like my Mexican grandfather rapists and criminals in order to scare up votes from white people. In the last 24 months, Ive called Trump every name in the book even if, after he was elected, I caught grief from hardcore lefties for acknowledging reality and calling him president.

But my low opinion of the GOP doesnt prevent me from recognizing evil when it rears its head on the left and condemning the liberals who stoke it.

#RepublicanLivesMatter.

After this weeks ghastly attack on Republican members of Congress while they were practicing for a charity baseball game a cowardly hate crime that wounded five people, including House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La. we must hold liberals and Democrats accountable for the times they go too far.

And, in the era of Trump, they often go too far. Its as if the lefties feel that Trump supporters are such a subhuman life form that they can be attacked without mercy. Whether these sanctimonious bullies are in Congress, the media, Hollywood or academia, theyre much too comfortable with demonizing conservatives, pandering to those who demonize conservatives, or tolerating those in their ranks who demonize conservatives.

When Ivanka Trump casually said recently that she was shocked at the level of viciousness encountered by her father and her family, the left responded, well, viciously by attacking the first daughter for daring to even raise the issue.

On late-night talk shows or Sunday morning television or star-studded awards ceremonies, this modus operandi has become a shorthand way for condescending liberals and Democrats many of whom are coastal elites to show the folks in flyover country, and those of us who were raised on farms and ranches, that theyre better, smarter, more enlightened and sophisticated than we are.

Just like Republicans resist claiming the racists among them, Democrats refuse to take responsibility for a wayward disciple like James T. Hodgkinson. The gunman who was shot to death by heroic Capitol Police officers assigned to Scalises security detail was a left-wing extremist who volunteered for Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, harshly criticized Trump and other Republicans, and parroted Democratic Party talking points. He frequently wrote angry letters to newspapers and posted anti-Republican rants on social media and left behind a paper trail longer and wider than a three-lane-highway.

When asked to contemplate the possibility that their vitriolic rhetoric against Republicans inspired this terrible and bigoted act of violence in the same way that liberals insisted, in 1995, that conservative talk radio had inspired the Oklahoma City bombing Democrats parse words and split hairs, make excuses and change the subject. It wasnt their hate speech that caused this, they say. But guns. Or mental illness.

I even heard a few sickos on Facebook say how poetic it was that Republican members of Congress would find themselves sprayed with bullets, and ducking for cover, given their support for the National Rifle Association.

And lets not forget the bighearted humanitarian who, after the shooting, sent Rep. Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y., a threatening email with the charming subject line: One down, 216 to go.

This nightmare is not over. Our society is made up of different political views that have been delicately stitched together over many decades. And now it is coming apart at the seams.

Ruben Navarrette is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.

Published June 17, 2017, midnight in: baseball game, Donald Trump, hate crime, James Hodgkinson, Joe Scarborough, liberals, mika brzezinski, Rep. Steve Scalise, shooting

Originally posted here:
Ruben Navarrette Jr: Liberals must bring down the temperature - The Spokesman-Review

Hot off announcing the first deal with an individual province under a new national framework signed earlier in the week, Jean-Yves Duclos gamely tried to paint it as the start of a process that will lead to affordable child care for all.

Eventually, well get to universality, the federal Minister of Families, Children and Social Development insisted in an interview on Friday in Toronto, and there is no tension between that goal and the sort of agreement he had just unveiled alongside his counterpart in Kathleen Wynnes government. Sure, federal funds $435-million for Ontario over three years, in this case will mostly go toward daycare subsidies for relatively few low-income or socially challenged families. But all the coming collaboration, he said, will create momentum leading to more far-reaching investment.

Maybe it will, one day. Just not with the urgency briefly displayed by a different federal Liberal regime over a decade ago.

In 2005, as Mr. Duclos is surely tired of being reminded, Paul Martin pledged $5-billion more than five years to launch a national commitment comparable to Quebecs subsidized daycare for all. Even though access and affordability have become more dire since then monthly costs for infants approaching $2,000 in some cities, if parents can find spaces Justin Trudeaus government is offering less money annually ($7.5-billion over 11 years) targeted more narrowly.

The scaled-back ambition, as some parents have to consider leaving jobs because they scarcely earn enough to cover daycare alone, may be incongruous with both Mr. Trudeaus much-ballyhooed feminism and his endless talk of the middle class and those seeking to join it.

But plenty has changed in the Liberals calculus about universal daycares merits since last they were in office some policy-related, much of it political.

Mr. Duclos, a respected economist new to politics, was more inclined to cite the policy considerations. He pointed out, for instance, that data around early learning and child care in Canada is both scarce and of poor quality.

Some of the new federal cash is being allocated toward information-gathering, to help with the momentum.

His main defence against complaints that the governments investment is too modest is that Ottawa is spending much more on child care now than back in Mr. Martins day that is, if one counts not just direct investment, but also more general transfer payments to the provinces, tax deductions, and the Canada Child Benefit.

Its that last one a centrepiece of the Liberals 2015 election platform that speaks to where politics come in.

After Stephen Harper replaced Mr. Martins plan with his Universal Child Care Benefit, Mr. Trudeau could have made the case to voters that Mr. Martin was right and Mr. Harper wrong, since daycare costs for many Canadians had continued to skyrocket such that the monthly benefit offered only a drop in the bucket. Instead, the Liberals effectively embraced Mr. Harpers premise that parents rather than government should decide where money goes introducing their own version of the benefit that costs billions more annually, with more for lower- and middle-income earners and less for the top 10 per cent.

Given that they do not generally share Mr. Harpers ideological aversion to social-policy interventionism, the Liberals were tacitly acknowledging that they considered universal daycare a political loser. And they certainly were not alone in assessing that, even though daycare is a pressing problem in many Canadians lives, it is hard to persuade enough voters a political party can provide a necessary, activist fix.

Even as Tom Mulcair ran in that 2015 campaign on something akin to what Mr. Martin had introduced, members of his NDP campaign team acknowledged their research showed it did not resonate with a sufficient number of their target voters. And as with the Liberals 10 years earlier, who lost to the Tories, the results seemed to bear that out, at least at the national level. (The recent platform of British Columbias New Democrats, on the verge of leading a minority government, included $10/day daycare.)

The big challenge is convincing any voter they would benefit personally. Confidence in governments to deliver big, long-term programs is low to begin with. No parents grappling with daycare costs as universal coverage was announced would expect it to be in place in time to help them. And few of the future parents who would benefit would likely have it top of mind when voting.

In the interview, Mr. Duclos said that when he spoke to a seniors group this week, he was surprised to find support for the new federal-provincial plan, among people attuned to their sons and daughters child-care challenges.

That raised the prospect that at some point, if affordability keeps getting worse and worse, the multiplier effect from each parent struggling to make ends meet will be enough to compel a more comprehensive response.

But for now, Mr. Trudeaus Liberals are settling for enough on daycare to ease their social consciences and prevent the NDP from accusing them of not doing anything.

What they are doing should not be shrugged off as Mr. Duclos argued, it makes sense to start with investment in high-need families likely to reap the most benefit from easier daycare access. Its just a much slower start than the one their party had last decade, before it ran into an electoral wall.

Follow Adam Radwanski on Twitter: @aradwanski

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For Trudeau's Liberals, universal daycare is a distant dream - The Globe and Mail

Robert Mueller at an installation ceremony at FBI Headquarters in Washington.

By Charles Dharapak/AP/REX/Shutterstock.

Among Washingtons white-collar defense bar, whether Donald Trump was under personal investigation was not a matter of if, but when: There plainly is a question of obstruction, a lawyer who served in a previous administration said in an interview, shortly after it was reported that special counsel Robert Mueller appeared to be building an obstruction case against the president. Prosecutors are not going to leave anything like this untouched . . . they have to look at it. They have no choice.

But, in terms of the law, the path forward is anything but clear. To begin with, whether a sitting president can even be indicted is a matter of legal debate. The notion is this: if you allowed a president to be indicted, any U.S. attorney in any place in the country for political reasons could indict the president, and that would cause havoc, white-collar lawyer Robert Bennett, who represented Bill Clinton in the Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky scandals, explained to me. The remedy would be for the Justice Department or the special counsel to turn over the evidence to Congress and they would initiate an impeachment proceeding and then there would be a trial in the Senate with the chief justice presiding.

And, while Trump admitted on national television that he fired F.B.I. Director James Comey to hinder the Russia investigation, it is a long way from [Robert Mueller] taking a look at it to making [a] case, one leading Washington defense lawyer said. All those complications, difficulties, burdens that a prosecutor has to make in such a case still are there. Mueller, whom Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed as special counsel in the Russia probe last month, and his team would have to prove that Trumps actions were driven by corrupt intentthat he knowingly and willfully tried to thwart the F.B.I. investigation.

This corrupt intent is what remains to be shownhe has to be concealing something. In the opinion of several attorneys I spoke to, Trumps reported request that he hoped Comey could see his way to letting this go, letting Flynn go, in reference to former national-security adviser Mike Flynn, and his subsequent decision to fire the F.B.I. director dont, on their own, meet this standard. Its just not a garden-variety obstruction case, the D.C. defense lawyer continued, after noting the constitutional protections a president has to fire subordinates. I cant think ofand I dont believe one existsa case in which counterintelligence and criminal law investigation have merged or overlapped the way that they have in this case . . . I think it is a very delicate and difficult puzzle to put together for that reason.

Bennett echoed the sentiment. Of course I am not in a position to know all of the evidence, but right now I dont see where you would have a good case or a strong case on obstruction of justice.

One key to the puzzle, say attorneys, is whether Trump or someone else gave any assurances to Flynn or other subjects of the investigation, such as the presidents campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Trump is reported to have called Flynn after hed been fired and told him to stay strong, but otherwise this is a dark area. We have looked at what he said to people that could help influence the course of the investigation, but we havent looked at the question of what understanding he might have reached with the beneficiaries, the former White House lawyer said.

[Trump] is a prosecutors dream because he keeps talking.

While William Jeffress, a D.C. trial attorney who represented I. Lewis Scooter Libby in the investigation into the leak of Valerie Plames identity under George W. Bush, understands firsthand the risks of perjury and obstruction charges in political scandalsthe fate that befell Libbyhe believes that based on Trumps actions to date, Muellers ability to build a viable obstruction case against Trump could hinge on what he uncovers about the Trump campaigns Kremlin ties. The question is what evidence is there of collaboration between the Russians and the Trump campaign. That is what we dont know now, Jeffress said. If there is evidence out there that there was collaboration and Mr. Trump knew it, and against that background he was seeking to influence the investigation, hes got a problem . . . If they wind up not producing evidence of that, I think that affects their obstruction charges as well because you wouldnt be in a position to say that they were trying to keep people quiet.

To determine what, if any, coordination occurred between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin during the 2016 election, Mueller is assembling an all-star legal team. He has hired a dozen top-notch legal minds to help him in the probe, including Michael Dreeben, a leading expert on criminal law, Andrew Weissmann, who rose to prominence for his work on complex cases against New York mobsters and Enron executives, and Lisa Page, an F.B.I. lawyer with experience in organized crime. Already Muellers team has reportedly begun digging into the business and financial dealings of Flynn, Manafort, and Trumps son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner.

Critics on the left, and even some on the right, have been quick to highlight parallels between Watergate and the Russian melodrama captivating Capitol Hill. Most recently, amid rumors that Trump might fire Mueller, comparisons were drawn to the Saturday Night Massacre. But the D.C. defense attorney argued that Trumps actions have yet to bubble up to Nixons level of infamy. To be fair to Trump, he said Watergate encompassed a much greater and more expansive set of acts, direct acts by the president to interfere in an ongoing investigation than we have seen so far.

He did, however, also stress that Trump has been, and likely will continue to be, his own worst legal nightmare. For a prosecutor, there is a clear pattern to Trumps fulminations against anyone involved in the F.B.I. probe, from Comey to Mueller to Rosenstein, in turn. In effect, he supplied evidence against himself I guess is the ironic part of all this. In one sense, he is a prosecutors dream because he keeps talking.

In this respect, Trumps personal lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, has followed the presidents leadwhich is precisely the opposite of how defense attorneys ordinarily like to relate to their clients. They have already violated all the rules of dealing with this thing, so I dont know that there is much left for them to do tactically except to let it play out, the defense lawyer said of Trumps legal team. Its like they ratify these things and they make it harder for the investigators to look the other way or ignore . . . they are making one mistake after another.

So while Mueller may not yet have enough to build a case, the president is continually supplying new material. As the former White House lawyer said, Trumps capacity for making it a lot worsethrough his choice of counsel, choice of tacticsshouldnt be underestimated.

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Sorry, Liberals: There's No Shortcut to Indicting Donald Trump - Vanity Fair

I wrote that in 2011, in the wake of the horrific shooting of Rep. Gabby Giffords that killed six people. At the time, we didn't know if Jared Loughner had any self-proclaimed political "motivations," and it turned out he was severely mentally disturbed. That didn't stop Democrats and liberals in the press from blaming Republicans and their "heated rhetoric" for the shootings. Now the shoe is on the other foot. James Hodgkinson -- a volunteer for Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign and anti-Trump socialist, according to his social media -- sought out Republican lawmakers on Wednesday at a practice for a charity baseball game, taking aim at members of Congress and severely injuring one, as well as a Capitol Hill police officer and two others. His motives seem far clearer than Loughner's, whose journals revealed an incoherent maze of anti-God, anti-government paranoia and affection for gold currency and apocalyptic conspiracy theories. Hodgkinson's Facebook page alone offers a treasure trove of evidence that he simply believed Republicans and the Trump agenda must be stopped. Rep. Rodney Davis, an Illinois Republican who survived the shooting, was ready to concede that "This could be the first political rhetorical terrorist attack."

And yet, as tempting as it is for Republicans to blame liberals for Hodgkinson's attack, we still must resist blaming political rhetoric for the ginned-up whims of a madman. Murder is murder: Focusing solely on why he claims he did it, no matter whose argument that may serve, doesn't benefit anyone.

One of the first casualties of politically charged tragedies like this one is consistency.

Some Republicans, who are always quick to insist that right-wing ideology, angry rhetoric and even the unprecedentedly divisive language that President Trump used on the campaign trail are not to blame for individual actions, are loosening their grip on that mantra.

Of course, back in 2011, Gingrich was one of the first to slam liberals for blaming the Giffords shooting on conservative rhetoric.

He was right, then, at least.

"Nobody can honestly express surprise that such a tragedy finally occurred. ... Congresswoman Giffords publicly expressed concerns when Sarah Palin, on her website, placed her district in the crosshairs of a rifle -- and identified her by name below the image -- as an encouragement to Palin supporters to eliminate her from Congress." He further insisted the burden was on Sen. John McCain to do more:

"As the elder statesman of Arizona politics, McCain needs to stand up and denounce the increasingly violent rhetoric coming from the right wing and exert his influence to create a civil political environment in his state."

Others on the left were likewise quick to blame Trump for inciting violence and are just as quick to denounce any connections between Hodgkinson and left-wing rhetoric.

He makes no mention at all of the violence at anti-Trump rallies but does anecdotally (and irrelevantly) offer that "Not once, publicly or privately, did a single person in a single meeting I was a part of ever suggest, explicitly or implicitly, that someone should go do what James Hodgkinson allegedly did today."

And then, with almost impressive inconsistency, King suggests it's once again Trump's rhetoric, not the left's, that created a climate in which a lunatic would go after Republicans. Try to make sense of that one.

This isn't to say that rhetoric is meaningless. This is a terrific time, if a tragic one, to call for a lowering of the temperature on both sides. That, first and foremost, should come from our leaders, and that should start with President Trump.

In trying times like these, it's admittedly difficult to keep our heads cool and our voices sane. But it's also imperative that we do. Consistency in our arguments, regardless of whose politics is benefiting from the situation, is the very least we should demand.

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Republicans, resist the temptation to blame liberals for this tragedy - CNN