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Kirsty Duncan, Justin Trudeaus Science Minister, is on the rampage against Canadas leading universities. Shes told them to improve diversity or else. Unless they meet their gender quotas for new research chairs, the federal government will yank their funding. Despite a decade of concerted hectoring, Canadas most prestigious researchers are still too non-Indigenous, too white, too abled and, especially, too male. Frankly, our country cannot reach its full potential if more than half of its people do not feel welcomed into the lab where their ideas, their talent and their ambition is needed, she sermonized.

At stake is hundreds of millions in grant money as well as the ability of expert hiring committees to make their own decisions. (Universities must sponsor the grant applications, which are nearly all approved by the federal funding bodies.) From now on, these committees will be overseen by phalanxes of bureaucrats whose job is to ensure that they come up with the right answers.

The governments emphasis on equity and diversity is central to its branding. Its 50-50 cabinet has won universal praise. But now it has embarked on a campaign of reverse discrimination that deeply undermines the concepts of fairness and excellence.

Academia isnt the only target. Since last fall, the Trudeau government has named 56 judges, of whom 33 or 59 per cent are women. (Women made up only 42 per cent of the applicants.) Its clear the Liberals will keep it up until the balance of judges is more to their liking. But at what cost? In the old days, it was offensive that people got judgeships just because they were Liberals or Tories, Ian Holloway, law dean at the University of Calgary, told The Globe and Mail. That helped breed contempt for the judiciary. What we dont want to do is replicate that in a different form.

The definition of equality has changed dramatically in recent times. Equality used to mean fairness. It meant that everybody should be treated equally, and that discrimination is not acceptable. But the new definition of equality is equal outcomes. And if outcomes arent equal, they must be adjusted until they are.

No one disagrees that our institutions should broadly reflect the society we live in. No one disagrees that disadvantaged people and underrepresented groups deserve a helping hand, and sometimes preferential treatment. Many businesses and public institutions have an unwritten rule: If all else is equal, hire the minority candidate.

But what if it isnt? What if fair hiring practices produce disparities in outcome as they inevitably do? For example, its mainly men who like hard sciences despite a generation of effort to encourage women. This effort has borne fruit. But it has not produced a massive change in womens career choices, which are overwhelmingly on the soft side. Theres also a sizable body of research showing that even women who are highly career-minded are less intent on attaining senior positions than men are.

On the face of it, the Canada Research Chair numbers dont look great. Women hold only 30 per cent of the 1,615 filled positions, a number that Ms. Duncan regards as dismal, and at some universities its much lower. Among the new applications, she notes disapprovingly that twice as many come from men. But these positions are heavily skewed toward hard sciences. Forty-five per cent are for natural sciences and engineering; 35 per cent are for health sciences; and just 20 per cent are for the social sciences and humanities.

But fair is no longer good enough. Only outcomes matter. The new quotas for Canada Research Chairs are: 31 per cent women, 15 per cent visible minorities, 4 per cent disabled, 1 per cent aboriginal. And woe to you if you do not comply.

Other institutions have gone much farther. At St. Michaels Hospital in Toronto, a document called Gender Equity Guidelines for Research Search Committees states, We are hoping to achieve recruitment of 50 per cent female scientists in the next 3-5 years, as well as to achieve 50 per cent female faculty in leadership positions in the next 5-7 years. Given the natural gender imbalance in science research, they might as well just post a sign saying: Men, dont bother! The document further states that all search committee members must take training in unconscious bias (an increasingly discredited idea), and that their work will be closely scrutinized by the diversity police to ensure the proper outcomes.

Im all for diversity. But these future researchers have important work to do. They could save lives. Dont we want people who can research and teach, instead of prove how diverse we are? I guess not. Weve got quotas to fill.

Follow us on Twitter: @GlobeDebate

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Liberals' reverse discrimination comes at a cost - The Globe and Mail

There was a very instructive moment this week amid all of the political messaging, applause and back-slapping involved in the arrival of the long-awaited Liberal foreign policy statement and defence review.

It happened when Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan was asked, in front of a sea of uniforms, to guarantee his exhaustive, occasionally thoughtful piece of policy homeworkwould survive beyond the life of the current government.

The report, after all,is supposed to be a 20-year document.

His response was somewhat awkward: "We as a government and future governments owe it to the Canadian Armed Forces that we fully fund the Canadian Armed Forces on a long-term footing."

Much of the post-policy coverage has, justifiably, focused on fiscal skepticism.

Do the Liberals have the money? If so, where is it? Will it add to the deficit? If so, by how much?

The answers were: Yes. Stay tuned. No. And see the previous answer.

The skepticism, however, has deep and tangled roots, some of them fresh in terms of the string of broken Liberal campaign promises; others stretch back decades where history is littered with well-crafted and some not-so-well-crafted defence policy plans.

The Trudeau government may have given Canadianssome crisp, well-honed ideas and fact-based conclusions in the report about a world in turmoil, many of which run contrary to what they campaigned on.

But what Sajjan's rather tentative call to arms indirectly exposed is perhaps the biggest failing of this latest endeavour and maybe even the ones that preceded it: The absence of clear, unambiguous, long-term political support.

So, forget about the budget for a minute. Think Parliament.

"Unless you do get a consensus, some kind of bipartisan consensus, which I think is possible, then this policy is going to be very short-lived," said Richard Cohen, a retired military officer who servedin the Canadian Forces and the British Army.

He should know.

A member of the military looks on as Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan unveils the Liberal government's long-awaited vision for expanding the Canadian Armed Forces Wednesday. (Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press)

As an adviser to former defence minister Peter MacKay, Cohen was one of the people who helped craft the ephemeral 2008 Conservative defence strategy document.

That 20-year plan survived a little less than 20 months from the time it was introduced, said Dave Perry, of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute.

TheConservative planwas sacrificed in a bid for abalanced budget, but in light of the toxic politics of the day succeeding governments, regardless of their political stripe, would have had a tough time swallowing even the more palatable portions.

The survival of this plan will depend on "whether there is cross-parliamentary and cross-partisan support," Perrysaid.

The two major overseas deployments in recent years have been either politically divisivethink Afghanistanor languished in misunderstood obscurity, such as Iraq.

The defence minister wasn't the only one in the spotlight this week.

Behind Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland's measured, sometimes chirpy, delivery of a major policy speech on Tuesdaywere some stark words and reality.

"To put it plainly: Canadian diplomacy and development sometimes require the backing of hard power," she saidin her speech.

Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland delivering a speech on Canada's foreign policy future in the House of Commons Tuesday. (Chris Wattie/Reuters)

The notion that Canada can no longer be entirely comfortable under the U.S. security umbrella is remarkable in its sobriety and significance.

Yet, it was politics as usual in the House of Commons after Sajjan delivered his plan.

"The previous government announced a lot of things, didn't put the kind of money forward in stable, long-term predictable ways,and that's what we've done," Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said answering opposition criticism.

What the Liberals haven't done is the kind of painful, political bridge-building that may be necessary in times that they themselves acknowledge are extraordinary, said Cohen.

"Neither [opposition]party is very supportive of the end result it seems to me," he said.

The Liberals would argue that both the Conservatives and NDP had their chance during the months of public consultations held during development of the policy.

And, in fairness, neither opposition party has shown any inclination towards ratcheting back the partisan rhetoric.

But Cohen argues the government has an extraordinary opportunity to take politics out of national defence and build some kind of long-term consensus in the implementation of its policy.

"I think this is a time when parties are moreor lessaligned on what they see in terms of our national goals. It is the means they are arguing about," he said. "I think it's possible to come to a consensus, but who knows, maybe it's too late."

Cohen said an overhaul of the House of Commons and senate defence committees,or creating some other kind of body,might provide a venue for bipartisan co-operation.

The almost-established parliamentary oversight committee on national security promised by the Liberals during the election could have provided such a bipartisan forum.

But defence is not included within its already sprawling mandate.

Link:
Cost is one question but partisan politics may undo Liberal defence plan - CBC.ca

Updated June 10, 2017 21:58:53

A $200,000 donation to the WA Liberal Party from a billionaire property developer with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party has raised questions, WA Deputy Premier Roger Cook says.

Dr Chau Chak Wing's company Kingold Group donated the sum to the WA branch of the Liberal Party in 2015/16.

Dr Chau, who is an Australian citizen, also made donations to the Labor Party federally.

Kingold is headquartered in Guangzhou, in southern China, and develops projects including international trade centres, commercial buildings, hotels, office and residential buildings.

A joint investigation by the ABC and Fairfax revealed earlier this week, that Dr Chau's links to the Chinese Government were referenced in a briefing by ASIO chief Duncan Lewis in 2015.

In secret meetings with senior federal administrative officials in the major parties, Mr Lewis warned of the risks associated with accepting foreign-linked donations.

The agency also reportedly briefed senior federal politicians including Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, his predecessor Tony Abbott, and Opposition Leader Bill Shorten.

Mr Cook on Saturday said it was important for all political parties to stick to the absolute spirit and letter of electoral laws.

"A $200,000 donation to a state branch of a political party is a hefty sum, and so you would have to ask questions in relation to the nature of that donation," he said.

"I hope what political parties are making sure is that while they acknowledge and accept political donations are a reality of our modern democratic system, and one that we rely on, that that in no way impacts upon the policies of the parties and it certainly does not impact in any way in terms of good government decisions when those parties are in Government."

WA Liberal Party director Andrew Cox said in a statement the party always conducted its fundraising in an ethical manner and fully adhered to state and federal electoral laws.

He said the Labor Party should tell the WA public how much the union movement donated to it, and what "political favours" were being provided in return.

The ABC was unable to reach Dr Chau for comment.

However he told The Australian newspaper on Friday that the media reports had caused him great distress.

"At no time have I sought to, or see any reason to, use an elaborate corporate structure to mask a donation to a political party," he said.

"Further, I have never sought or received any personal or commercial benefit in connection to a political donation.

"The most distressing allegation in recent days is that I am somehow acting as a conduit for information for the Chinese Communist Party, which risks jeopardising Australia's sovereignty.

"For clarity, I am not and have never been a member of the Chinese Communist Party, and I completely reject any suggestion I have acted in any way on behalf of, or under instruction from, that entity."

Dr Chau is a member of a provincial-level People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), and also owns a newspaper in China. The press in China are closely monitored and influenced by the central government.

Dr Chau also made donations to the federal Liberal Party of $560,000 in 2016, and $100,000 to the NSW branch.

He donated $200,000 to Labor federally.

Dr Chau has made donations to non-political causes in Australia, most notably $20 million for the construction of a business school at the University of Technology, named the "Chau Chak Wing building".

According to Kingold's website, Dr Chau hosted and attended events during Chinese Premier Li Keqiang's recent visit to Australia.

Notre Dame Politics and International Relations Associate Professor Martin Drum said foreign donations to political parties were banned by many Western countries but not on a state or federal level in Western Australia.

"When we don't know the structure that foreign entities operate under, their ownership structure, we don't understand the relationships they have with other overseas entities such as foreign governments, then there's extra cause for concern," he said.

Dr Drum said a recent federal parliamentary inquiry recommended foreign donations be banned.

He said under current rules entities could also make donations up to $13,200 to each political party in each state, and the federal party, without having to declare it publicly.

Watch the Four Corners report "Power and Influence" on ABC iview.

Topics: government-and-politics, elections, foreign-affairs, wa, australia

First posted June 10, 2017 19:52:03

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Chinese businessman subject of ASIO warning donated $200000 to WA Liberals - ABC Online

An electoral upset with no visionary leadership for resistance. An opposition party armed with new politics and control of multiple branches of government. The sudden demand for a new ideological paradigm to guide the party. And a once moribund media format put into service of spreading an ideological direction.

Though that describes the crisis facing Democrats in 2017, it also chronicles the very conditions in the early 1990s that gave rise to the conservative talk radio phenomenon. But in 2017, it's podcasters who are at the forefront of a leftist talk renaissance, with shows recently created or reinvigorated by the opportunity Trump's election poses for the left shows like Chapo Trap House, Delete Your Account, Street Fight Radio, District Sentinel Radio, By Any Means Necessary, What a Hell of A Way To Die, The Katie Halper Show and more.

For nearly three decades, right-wing talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage and more recently, Alex Jones have dominated Republican party politics, setting the tone and ideology for a generation of conservatives. Driven, at first, by the rise of Clintonism and alienated by what they considered left-of-center media like the New York Times and Washington Post, a then-new class of acerbic radio hosts vulgarians who told it like it was, and weren't afraid to be "politically incorrect" used shock and awe to build an ideologically uncompromising format. Vicious skits were designed to offend (Rush Limbaugh famously performed caller abortions, where he'd cut off cantankerous callers with sounds effects of a vacuum cleaner and tortured screaming) while a hardline anti-establishment narrative gave listeners a simpler framework through which to make sense of the complex power relations between politicians, big business and public interests.

Rush Limbaugh on May 3, 2007 in Novi, Michigan.

And, most importantly, these shows could often swing elections.

Now, the left wants in, and a new cohort of podcasts is taking advantage of the same style, vulgarity, irreverence and pure cathartic entertainment championed by the right to create a new, extreme progressive culture all while attempting to avoid the business failures epitomized by the long-bankrupt Air America, the left's initial attempt to respond to right-wing radio.

Amid a deep soul search about what Democrats can and should stand for in the age of Donald Trump identity politics, ideological purity, economic justice, etc. lefty podcasters are emerging to set the the terms of liberal debate. And they do so as the mainstream media and nominally liberally aligned media outlets twiddle their thumbs over their role in creating this mess.

"There needs to be a conversation among liberals about what their core ideology is, what they stand for and what's worth fighting for," Angelo Carusone, president of liberal media watchdog Media Matters For America, told Mic.

And if there were ever a time for leftists to define that conversation, it's now.

When Bryan Quinby was a cable installer in 2011, he had one listening option as he drove around Columbus, Ohio, hanging ladders and setting up new service: conservative talk radio. Quinby was a blue-collar miscreant, shoplifting organic groceries and doing comedy on the side. He was discovering leftist politics late in life, but his diet at the time was pure right wing, packed with Glenn Beck, Howard Stern and Opie and Anthony, shock jocks with a little anti-union, anti-"political correctness" sentiment blended in.

"I listened to those guys and I thought they were the news," he said. "They sounded just as intelligent to me as anybody else. It's only once you get away from them that some of their stuff starts to sound like bullshit."

But Quinby had no one else to turn to. It seemed like working-class people were only useful as a punching bag for liberals, whereas conservatives spoke in terms that made sense to him. Quinby was a comedian in a world where the blue-collar kings of comedy Jeff Foxworthy and Quinby's proletariat peer, Larry the Cable Guy were Republicans.

"The people in my ear at the time weren't leftists, and leftists weren't talking to me in a way that I felt like I could respond to," he said.

So when he got the chance to create something himself, he took it. Through the local comedy scene, he was set up with Brett Paine, another budding anarchist comedian. Paine thought Quinby was an "old, square guy," and Quinby thought Paine was a "young, hip asshole." But they had on-air chemistry and similar politics and so, with Quinby's cable installation money, they bought a cheap mixer and a few $60 microphones. They started recording a show called Street Fight Radio on an "old shitty computer" in Paine's basement and broadcasting it on the local community radio station, WCRS in Columbus, Ohio.

Paine and Quinby discussed single-payer healthcare, distrust of the police, the tyrants of small business and the racism of everyday retail interactions. On Street Fight, you can hear rants about why making fun of flat Earthers is classist, or a critique of the fundamental conservatism of the puritanical 12-step programs with which Quinby had some experience. They honed their routine over six years, and eventually started writing stand-up together. From the initial mutual distrust grew a familial relationship. On the weekend that Trump was inaugurated, they sold out a live stand-up show at Busboys and Poets in Washington, D.C.

"Our goal was to give the only thing we can give: to articulate the feelings of working class people in the middle of the country, and the practical things we can get to improve people's lives," Quinby said, describing the "street-level" politics of the show.

But their influence goes beyond just their audience: In February 2016, Quinby brought a crew of three Twitter friends on as guests to review 13 Hours, Michael Bay's movie about Benghazi. After the episode, the three self-proclaimed leftists who came on as guests Will Menaker, Felix Biederman and Matthew Christman figured they had enough on-air chemistry to try to record a few episodes on their own.

They started Chapo Trap House, one of the most rapidly growing, divisive and talked-about political podcasts of today and the de facto lead of the so-called "dirtbag left," a term later coined by co-host and leftist writer Amber A'Lee Frost, and codified by a New Yorker profile of the crew.

Quimby and Paine, however, are bona fide blue collar dirtbags in the traditional sense. They talk about working-class politics from the perspective of guys who've worked as dishwashers and telemarketers themselves. The Chapo crew instead uses crude language alongside their academic qualifications as firepower to rail about subjects like conservative punditry and the liberal obsession with Hamilton and The West Wing. They even have their own "dittoheads" (a term that originally described callers who wanted to air their agreement with Rush Limbaugh's show), the devout fans who've since been emboldened to pursue activism and openly air their grievances at the show's pantheon of common enemies. With Chapo, the "dirtbag" identity isn't so much about capitalism's grimy cast-offs, but rather describes an acerbic disposition against an establishment that would allegedly rather police intra-liberal discourse than fight for any tangible political goal.

The Chapo crew and their followers also engage in internal fights of their own, however mostly spiteful shit-flinging at centrist writers (often women defending Democrats like Hillary Clinton) and listeners will hear plentiful use of the slur "retard."

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in New York Thursday, June 1, 2017.

In fact, first against the wall for the Chapo gang aren't necessarily conservatives, but rather establishment Democrats or, in the Chapo hosts minds, the technocrats who traded New Deal progressivism for corporate money, making aesthetic overtures to the needs of the poor and people of color while delivering them nothing. In Chapo's estimation, Trumpism owes its greatest victory to the complacency of a political elite raised on soaring Aaron Sorkin monologues, who believed they could run the country on fundamentally conservative ideas of free markets and meritocracy while defining their ideology by who they're not (namely: Republicans).

As a result of their language and some of the people they've railed about, they've been accused both of misogyny and orchestrating Twitter pile-ons, but producer and co-host Brendan James said that impression of Chapo Trap House isn't grounded in reality.

"Just listen to the show," James told Mic. "You may not like it, but you'd probably realize that it's not what a couple of people who hate us say it is. There's such wild stuff out there about what we're supposedly all about, and it's relegated to a pretty excitable corner of a corner of Twitter."

But despite or perhaps because of the controversies and insularity, Chapo Trap House became the immediate frontrunner in leftist podcasting. In their first year in business, they've become the most lucrative crowdfunded podcast online, making over $62,000 a month from paying subscribers via Patreon. Nearly 14,000 people pay for premium access to extra episodes, but a conservative estimate of their audience overall would be 30,000 to 50,000 listeners per episode, or as high as 80,000 for more popular episodes. They've also landed the aforementioned profile in the New Yorker, performed in New York City, Boston, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and garnered a book deal with Touchstone Books for The Dirtbag Left Guide to the Revolution, billed as a manifesto for "a new vision of the left."

Unlike Quinby and Paine, Chapo isn't trying to provide an alternative to conservative talk radio for discussion-hungry blue collar liberals. Chapo targets a younger, far-left audience, and does so by taking on the liberal pundit class, Republican blowhards and psychologically tortured conservative op-ed writers.

"I want the left to win in this country, and part of that involves creating an alternate culture that's not mainstream," host Will Menaker said. "A very large cohort of people of my generation understand that political values we may have grown up with [are] inadequate to the times we live in."

Mainstream Democrats and liberals see the potential for podcasting, too. Both Bernie Sanders and Rep. Keith Ellison have launched their own shows; Hillary Clinton had one during her 2016 campaign.

One of the other ascendant podcast houses is Crooked Media (a reference to now-President Trumps oft-used insult about the press), which was started by former Obama White House staffers Jon Favreau, Tommy Vietor and Jon Lovett. (For all that Chapo's political bent is opposed to the Crooked Media ideology, Menaker said of the three former Obama guys' foray into podcasting: "Better that than the fucking Brookings Institute.").

Over the past few months, the three moved to Los Angeles to launch a series of shows, including their own Pod Save America (formerly the hit show Keeping It 1600), a podcast now tracking the Trump administration by D.C. insiders in exile, funded by the usual cast of plucky startups buying podcast ads (Blue Apron and Headspace among them). Favreau, Vietor and Lovett are decidedly establishment liberals compared to their hard-left counterparts, but they're similarly exasperated with the mainstream media's vacuousness.

For the sake of illustrating the inanity of cable news' response to Trump, Vietor described the classic debate format, unchanged during the new administration: the Trump surrogate contorting themselves to defend the latest tweet or foreign policy faux pas, and the often horrified liberal counterbalance.

"That's a useless way to consume news," Vietor said. "You emerge depressed and horrified about whats happening in our country. The process leaves you frustrated, and without knowing how to fix things."

Tommy Vietor at the White House in Washington on February 3, 2011.

That's part of their mission: fixing things. Pod Save America came out strong in defense of the Affordable Care Act, telling listeners to hit their congressional town halls to raise hell with Republicans who backed the American Health Care Act. To Vietor, it's a no-brainer that Americans are flocking to partisan media on both sides. They want to know how to take action. Cable news won't light the path, and for Democrats, it's obvious that party leadership is in disarray.

"No one is controlling the party right now," Vietor said. "The Clintons had been around a long time, but what we need is a whole new generation of leaders."

But even as liberals tear themselves apart re-litigating the 2016 primary, leftist entertainers are taking advantage of the energy of an upcoming generation of voters who espouse far-left political ideals and have little to no representation in mainstream media. Americans under the age of 30 view socialism more favorably than capitalism, and cast more primary and caucus votes for Bernie Sanders than Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump combined.

"If someone is conveying that they don't know what to do with their pent-up rage, or how to help out their community, we need to be able to jump in and say: 'We're here, here's what we're about and here's what we're going to do,'" Roqayah Chamseddine, who founded the podcast Delete Your Account, told Mic.

Chamseddine grew up in the Dallas-Fort Worth area with a liberal family that shouted back at conservative talk hosts as a pastime. As a Marxist Shia Muslim, Chamseddine never had her views represented in the media available to her.

Started as an idea she kicked around among union organizers, Delete Your Account began during the 2016 election season by calling out individual liberals who should "delete their accounts" (an oft-used response to someones bad tweets) by Chamseddine's thinking, the mawkish and the terrible, the bootlickers and the sellouts. But since Election Day, Delete Your Account has largely become a podcast about building worker solidarity and giving listeners the tools to organize in their communities.

Chamseddine isn't optimistic that liberals will pull to the left in time for the midterms: She believes that the far left has often been sidelined, ignored or outright stifled by mainstream Democrats. Still, she does have faith that the crisis of liberalism as represented by Trump's election victory mixed with a new generation shifting their politics to the left of the party, has created an opportunity for a wholesale changing of the guard.

As she puts it, "We've all wanted something like this, and what better time than when the Democratic party is crumbling?"

However, the new cohort of liberal podcasts is currently missing what might be the essential ingredients used by conservative talkers to influencing voters: terrestrial radio. Podcasts can build communities from the far-flung and dispossessed, but a local radio station capturing enough of its market can turn a primary or an election around.

"In a primary, you get low turnouts and ideological voters," Brian Rosenwald, a media historian writing a book on conservative talk radio, said. "The local hosts can talk about a race every day, and go after a congressman for years. The power comes from that, and the power legislatively comes with the power to shut the phones down."

Sam Seder, co-host of the podcast Ring of Fire, has an example from his stint at Air America, the liberal radio network that launched in the mid-aughts as a response to conservative talk radio and leftist outrage at the mainstream media over the Iraq War. Seder, whose podcast takes it name from his Air America show, says that, during a labor dispute with the Rockettes' musicians in 2005, the union took out ads on the local Air America station to try and force management into a negotiation. Within a few days, Seder recalled, the Rockettes were offered a compromise provided they took the ads off the air.

"The people working at Air America didn't understand what had just happened, because they weren't liberals or activists," Seder said. "Because the next thing you'd do [if you knew what you were doing] is go to every union in the country and say, 'Look at the power we have.' That's the power of terrestrial radio."

Despite being a petri dish for talent hosts in the early years included Rachel Maddow, Al Franken, Marc Maron, Chuck D and Janeane Garofalo and having money from liberal donors, Air America rapidly failed. Rosenwald said that Air America was set up for disaster from the beginning not because liberal talk radio doesn't work, but because the business was a disastrously mismanaged "three-ring circus." Ultimately, the network couldn't sell ads after ending up on the no-buy lists of prestige "blue chip" advertisers.

Al Franken during a 2004 Air America news conference in New York.

"We couldn't get corporate America to spend the ad dollars," former Air America executive Carl Ginsberg told Mic. "And there's only so much money you can get from the Ben & Jerry's of the world."

Of course, those revenue problems came before the broad acceptance of podcasting, before technology made recording shows cheaper and easier than ever before, before hyperpartisan Facebook pages were able to monetize outrage and before a slew of new potential streams of digital revenue developed beyond simple ad sales. Like every creative industry over the past decade, the internet created a space for bootstrapping, and for many podcasts in the new class of talk shows, the primary platform for revenue-generation is Patreon, a Kickstarter-like site where subscribers can pledge small, regular donations to creators.

The rankings of the top 30 Patreon accounts are currently dominated by podcasts of all stripes alongside ad-hoc news networks at one point, Chapo Trap House was ranked No. 1. By comparison, Rosenwald said a terrestrial radio show needs to reach about 3% to 5% of its potential listenership to justify its existence to executives. But a podcast with a couple hundred paying subscribers on Patreon can keep the lights on as long as their microphones and internet connections work.

Seder, like Rosenwald, doesn't buy the theory that Air America was a failure because talk radio doesn't work for liberals; he thinks it just didn't work in that moment, in part because of the financing issues. Seder said it could be high time that the project of liberal talk radio get another shot.

Chapo's Menaker said that he has "no fucking idea" how a fledgling ad hoc coalition of media leftists, self-proclaimed dirtbags, political organizers and comedians could eventually wield direct political influence. For now, his priority is crafting an entertaining show and building out business opportunities. Chapo Trap House currently has Brillstein Entertainment Partners as a management agency helping develop new projects and amass awareness in Los Angeles. The team is also launching a website as a home for the podcast, latest news and future endeavors, and is looking into expanding its brand to new formats "outside the medium of podcasts."

The Crooked Media team is adding more shows, like Pod Save the People (with activist DeRay McKesson at the helm) and With Friends Like These (hosted by MTV News correspondent and Wonkette founder Ana Marie Cox). Chamseddine is about to return from a haitus, and Delete Your Account is experimenting with subscriber-only content as the checks from Patreon continues to grow.

As for Brett Paine and Bryan Quinby of Street Fight, the increased visibility they got for being the godfathers of a young leftist movement has brought new interest to their own Patreon, and they're beginning to pay themselves a stipend for doing the show. They're booking their first New York City show, with stops in Milwaukee, Louisville and Atlanta on the way. Quinby believes that it won't be long before Patreon subscribers will support the hosts full-time.

In the meantime, the duo is planning a joint campaign to become the mayors of Columbus, Ohio. Quinby's doubtful that they have a chance to win, but they'll be holding show after show in the area functional campaign stops to raise enough hell about working-class issues like fair wages, over-policing and the full legalization of marijuana.

"We're proposing a $16 minimum wage, just so the Democrat has to explain why you're not worth $16 an hour," he said.

No matter the outcome, Quinby figures they'll be able to either expose the true politics of the local incumbents or possibly push them to the left like Limbaugh and his cohort cattle-prodded a generation or more of Republicans to the right.

It's a small push, for now. But it's a start.

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Liberals are playing just as dirty as conservatives did in the '90s and it sounds great - Mic

What's drawn less attention is how Trump's presidency has convinced liberals that every bad thing whispered about any Republican is, by default, true. Consider that in the last week alone, liberal outrage has been sparked on (at least) four occasions by alleged incidents that simply aren't accurate.

Didn't matter! By then, the idea of Republicans cracking beers while voting to take away health care from millions of people was already surging across the Internet. (Look at how many retweets Jaffe's original tweet received versus how many the second tweet got.)

Immediately following the passage of the AHCA last Thursday, a talking point emerged: If this bill became a law, being raped or sexually assaulted would qualify as pre-existing conditions and, therefore, would make it much harder for the victim to get health insurance.

"The notion that AHCA classifies rape or sexual assault as a preexisting condition, or that survivors would be denied coverage, is false...this claim relies on so many factors including unknown decisions by a handful of states and insurance companies that this talking point becomes almost meaningless."

The Federal Communications Commission announced that it was investigating complaints following late-night talk show host Stephen Colbert's controversial comments about President Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin.

In each of these four instances -- and all of these have been in the last week! -- liberals, fueled by Twitter outrage, jumped to conclusions that portrayed Trump and other Republicans in the poorest possible light. And, on each occasion, the fuller story either totally or mostly rebutted the version of the story the left had seized on.

Trump's presidency presents Democrats with lots and lots of legitimate issues on which to push back -- from the travel ban to the ongoing questions about Trump officials' ties to Russia to the president's refusal to release his tax returns.

By embracing every single tweet or whisper as yet another piece of full-proof evidence of just how terrible Republicans are, Democrats run the risk of appearing like the boy who cried wolf to the public -- and in the process taking some steam out of the very legitimate questions they are asking about the Trump administration.

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Donald Trump is turning liberals into conspiracy theorists ...