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"It should drive home how health care is personal, not political," Sen. Debbie Stabenow said. | AP Photo

Liberal activists on Wednesday hit pause on their all-out battle to thwart Republicans trying to fast track an Obamacare repeal-and-replace plan through the Senate.

But Democratic lawmakers and outside groups say the mass shooting that wounded House Majority Whip Steve Scalise cant slow down the overall effort.

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Indivisible, the liberal organizer behind many of this years emotion-filled town hall demonstrations against GOP lawmakers, postponed a Facebook event scheduled for Wednesday night and is not pushing in-district events for Wednesday and Thursday.

The groups local chapter in the district of Scalise, who remained in critical condition late Wednesday after being shot in the hip, urged its members to forego pressure campaigns in lieu of focusing their day on supporting Scalise and his staff.

We are letting folks know that there is going to be heightened security, and they should be really conscious of the state of mind of members of Congress and their staff, which is totally reasonable, Indivisible executive director Ezra Levin told POLITICO. Theyre being personally affected by this.

MoveOn.org, a leader in organizing against the GOPs Obamacare repeal plans, limited its social media messaging after the shooting to a singular statement that didnt mention President Donald Trump.

Our thoughts are w/those shot at congressional baseball practice, the group tweeted. Gun violence is ongoing crisis. Political violence is never acceptable.

The activists found themselves in a particularly delicate situation given that the gunman, James T. Hodgkinson of Belleville, Ill., volunteered for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) presidential campaign and espoused far-left beliefs on social media, prompting an outcry from some Trump allies who blamed liberal passions for the shooting.

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Sanders swiftly condemned Hodgkinson on Wednesday, lamenting his despicable act and declaring that real change can only come about through nonviolent action.

But even as outside groups pulled back from public events on Wednesday, Democratic lawmakers continued to push the message gingerly that Senate Republicans are playing a dangerous game by trying to gut Obamacare.

I dont know that you can ask people to take the passion out of this issue, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said of the Obamacare battle. We all need to be better about how we treat each other and the language we use, but this is a life-and-death issue.

The shooting "doesn't change the fact that there have been no hearings" on the Senate GOP's Obamacare repeal plan and Democrats as well as the public have "not seen the bill," said Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow, a member of Democratic leadership.

"Everybody who was hurt today had the opportunity to go to the hospital," Stabenow added, including one victim from her home state. "It should drive home how health care is personal, not political."

One operative involved in the repeal debate, speaking candidly on condition of anonymity, said that "generally, folks in the health care advocacy community are going to take their cue from what Republicans in the Senate are doing."

If tomorrow morning they're holding hearings or sending a bill to [the Congressional Budget Office], you will see groups gear back up for that debate. If the Senate says, 'we're on pause,' I think people will pause."

And although the House canceled its votes on Wednesday and responded to the shooting with notable bipartisan comity, business in the Senate largely proceeded as usual albeit with a strong show of bipartisan support for new sanctions on Russia. The Senate GOP is still pressing to hold a vote on its to-be-released health care plan as soon as this month, before members leave Washington for a week-long July 4 recess.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) agreed that the violent attack on Scalise, which also wounded a staffer, a lobbyist, and two members of Capitol Police, should serve as a reminder to turn down the volume of political rhetoric. But he noted that Republicans are doing their own part to foment division by excluding Democrats entirely from their health care process.

Political sentiment "should never have been turned up starting in 2009 and 2010, the height of the tea party-fueled opposition to the Affordable Care Act, Manchin said. "Its been bad all the way through. Someones got to say, well, enoughs enough. Itd be a lot nicer if theyd just sit down and work with us, and wed get a bill."

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More here:
Liberals ease up on health care fight for a moment - Politico

Yesterday on our VIP live webcast, we talked briefly about the sources of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), which I argue predates Trump and would likely be present if any other Republican, even mild-mannered Jeb Bush, were in the White House right now. TDS has its roots in thelazypresumption that liberalism represents the side of history, as though History is a self-conscious thing with only one direction. This presumption is, in fact, a secular version of divine Providence. Hence for liberals, when they lose elections, the fault is not theirs or their candidates, but represents some kind of ghastly mistake if not a fraud against history. Cue up Russians, dirty tricks, hanging chads, whatever. A large portion of the left has not accepted the legitimacy of each Republican president starting with Nixon.

If you want to see this at work, I refer you to a book out in March from Ruy Tiexeira of the Center for American Progress, The Optimistic Left: Why the 21st Century Will Be Better Than You Think. Ive met Ruy a couple of times, and unlike many people on the left he is a pleasant human being to know. In fact we once had a long lunch discussing some ideas for a conference we might do together, but both got too busy to follow up. I think Ruy is on to something in this book, namely, that liberalism became a dark and pessimistic creed starting in the 1960s and 1970s, and that this has been debilitating to liberalism. His publisher sent me the advance galleys of the book last fall, which I put in my reading stack and didnt get back to, until I saw Damon Linker of The Week take after Teixeria in a recent column, saying that Because his optimism inspires such complacency, Teixeira is a dangerous man for Democrats to have around.

Well now. I decided to pick up the galleys and have a look. And while I think much of the book is creditable even if mistaken on policy, there were two early sentences that brought me up short, starting with this one on page 1: . . . Democrats have won three straight presidential elections. . . Wait, what the hell is he talking about? Is he talking about FDR in 1940? I thought this book was about current times.

Then, page 3: Barack Obamas two presidential victories were followed by routs in the Congressional elections of 2010 and 2014, and new president Hillary Clinton. . . (Emphasis added.) Ahnow I get it. Of course books have to be written with long lead times and anticipate events to some extent, but if youre a liberal and you think History is on your side, and you believe the polls (I did) that Hillary was a lock to beat Donald Trump, then the comedown after losing to Donald Trump must be the psychic equivalent to withdrawals after you run out of heroin.

Once upon a time, liberals like John Stuart Mill understood that the progress of civilization was not necessarily an irreversible process, and todays left is doing its best to prove Mill was right.

The rest is here:
Why Are Liberals Always So Upset? - Power Line (blog)

Another back and forth between British Columbia's political parties was sparked this week after theB.C. Liberals said it was not their job to provide any help forthe NDP and Green alliance gaining power in the B.C. Legislature.

"The government, current, is going to put forward a Speaker. Good. That Speaker should be in place as a non-partisan for the term of the parliament," said NDP Leader John Horganin a joint press conference with Green Leader Andrew Weaver on Wednesday.

Christy Clark has indicated her party would put forward an MLA to run as Speaker next week when the legislature is brought back in session.

But whenasked about whether a Liberal Speaker would stay on following a potential lost confidence vote, Attorney General Andrew Wilkinson said it wasn't his party's job to help the opposition secure power.

"It's clear a stable government does not rely on floor crossersand rule changes and other parties for stability," said Wilkinson.

"If the Greens and NDP say they can bring stable government, they have to do it from within their own resources."

The first order of business for the legislature when it is recalled on June 22 will be to find a speaker.

Wilkinson would not say whether Liberals have been told not to stand for the job, but if the party does want to continue, governing convention is they will put forward a speaker.

But the Liberals have indicated that if they are defeated in a confidence motion the Speaker would resign leaving it up to the NDP or Green MLAs to run for the position and thereby creating the possibility of regular 43-43 vote splits.

"There are threats the Speaker may resign, again unheard of, because if you check the standing orders the Speaker of this house is to be elected for the term of the parliament," said Weaver.

"The only reason in this case would be partisan and the position is not supposed to be partisan ... the premier is afraid to let go and she is distracting and creating mischief."

Weaver says the "mischief" Clark is creating extends to thelegislature not reconvening until next week, and her desire that the Throne Speech be debated in full.

"What we are concerned is that the Liberals are making mischief with their delays and distractions rather than facing the people and having a change in government."

With files from The Canadian Press

Read the rest here:
BC Liberals say they won't have someone serve as Speaker in NDP government if they lose power - CBC.ca

By Berber Jin

After Trump announced Americas withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords on June 1, fear and concern dominated my social media newsfeeds. Many Stanford students shared New York Times articles warning of the dangers of climate change, and how Trumps decision to pull out threatened the future of the planet. On the day of Trumps announcement, the Times top four or five articles dealt with the ramifications of the deal. Such warnings were predictable, and as a regular Times reader myself, I initially shared similar sentiments. Other liberal news outlets followed suit.

So, I was shocked when, upon venturing to Fox News website, I was confronted with a very different headline: US aircraft carriers join Japanese forces off North Korean coast for military training. There were no fancy infographics about the melting Antarctic ice shelfonly a photo of naval warships conducting military exercises. In fact, you couldnt find any mention of the Paris Accords until you scrolled down the homepage.

Upon further perusal of conservative-leaning news sitesfrom Breitbart to the National ReviewI found coverage of Paris to be nowhere near the magnitude of the New York Times. Yet in the few articles that did cover the event, I found no hint of the warming denialism that liberals seem to believe of every conservative in the country. Instead, I found much more reasoned analyses of the situation than the Huffington Posts TRUMP TO PLANET: DROP DEAD headline, laughably complemented with a photo of planet Earth being consumed by flames.

Considering that the global market towards renewables is becoming more and more competitive, coupled with China and India rapidly adopting cleaning energy economies that would have met the Paris standards regardless of the agreement itself, many conservatives dont treat warming as the big issue. Instead, they see the violation of US sovereignty as the biggest issue in the climate agreement. I read convincing arguments that the Paris Accords placed an undue burden on America, forcing us to stifle economic growth in exchange for only a marginal reduction in US pollution.

Not for the first time, I found it was the right who had covered the issue fairly and reasonably, while the left leaned towards sensationalism.

Though Stanford students like to think of themselves as critical thinkersand deride Trumps tens of millions of supporters as hopelessly brainwashedour reaction to Paris suggests we should restrain our condescension.

The values of liberal ideologytreating global warming as a moral absolute, global citizenry and cosmopolitanism, and intellectual superiorityprevented and blinded us from seeing the Paris pullout as the rest of America did. For most US citizens, patriotism, national integrity, and financial stability matter more than transborder commitments to environmental morals.

These Americans rightly saw Paris not as a crucial fight against global warming, but as an agreement that hurt the country to no global gain.

Of course, differences in values can be healthy: when acknowledge and treated seriously, they can lead to important dialogue over pressing public policy issues. Yet in 2017, we have reached a new and dangerous extreme: we have become so convicted in the truth of liberalism that weve become unable to recognize such differing values. Instead of identifying and evaluating the drastically different approaches to the Paris Deal, we jumped to condemnations of the stupid, uneducated conservativea group of warming deniers who are supposedly anti-science and anti-progress.

Stanfords conviction in liberal ideology as ultimate truthand of any alternative value system as backwards or bigotedblinds us. Perhaps if the populist right were a minority with rapidly disappearing relevance on the national stage, such blindness wouldnt matter. Yet they are precisely the oppositeTrump conservatives control our country now, and they have a vision for America that fundamentally conflicts with our way of life.

This is not going to be another plea for empathy for flyover-country conservatives. The entire debate over whether to condemn or empathize with these voters is part of the problem. We continue to treat Trump supporters as a species to be analyzed behind the walls of academia. They are, to us, harmless: poor, backwards, white-lashing, and hopelessly brainwashed.

Situated at Stanford, we believe that we are at the forefront of change, pushing the boundaries of science, technology, activism, and public service. In our naive hope for a world rid of dying white racists and brimming with artificial intelligence and automation, most of us see the recent populist surge as only a temporary setback. After all, the demographics of the electorate are inevitably shifting in the Democrats favorright?

What we fail to see, however, is that we are no longer revolutionaries at the forefront of history. As we sip our Coupa chai and engage in intellectual banter about feminism, we see ourselves as progressives debating ideas that are far ahead of our timeideas that will become an American, and eventually a global reality.

But maybe it is the Trump-loving middle Americas that are the true revolutionaries.

In a recent op-ed for the New Republic, Michael Tomasky spoke of todays conservative movement as vanguardist. It is certainly acting like one. They first seized an election that was supposed to mark the culmination of liberal hegemony. Now, they are amazingly taking back the intellectual monopoly that the educated elite has on contemporary discourse. Everyday Americans are no longer turning to the Paul Krugmans of the world for commentary on politics and policy. Instead, they turn to anti-intellectual intellectuals like Steve Bannon, Curtis Yarvin, and Milo Yiannopoulos.

And the vanguard is expanding its ranks with zestpulling away millions of establishment Obama supporters toward populism, and coaxing in disaffected liberals from Irving Kristol to David Mamet.

Meanwhile, we liberal anti-vanguards have, in the words of Tomasky, become defensive and distrustful. In response to the 2016 election, we clung ever more closely to political correctness, feminism, and intersectionalityideas that are no longer products of the grassroots resistance, but rather products of a disaffected ivory-tower academia, adopted by the elite Left that the rest of the country increasingly despises.

Such ideas are not hated because conservatives are bigoted and backwards. Instead, they are hated because they are taught from within the classrooms of Horace Mann and Harker, of Stanford and the Ivies. They are hated because they do not emerge from organic experience. Rather, they are only accessible to the families that pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for their children to receive an elite education.

I am not saying we should give away these values to accommodate a vision of America that we oppose. However, it is time for us to recognize that we are no longer the revolutionaries. We are instead the reactionaries, struggling to adapt to, and even recognize, a country that is very much fighting against the establishment citizenry of which we are all very much a part. We can no longer dismiss Trumps America with scorn or pity them as basket cases. Instead, we must recognize the true danger they pose, and widen the appeal of our vision of America.

The narrative of an out-of-touch elite growing increasingly defensive amidst an increasingly insurgent and upset populace is one that we should all be familiar with: it has sparked the worlds greatest political revolutions. We are, hopefully, far from this. Yet a shift in our frame of reference is long overdue.

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World on Fire? Liberals are the New Reactionaries - Stanford Review

As parliamentarians prepare for the summer break and Conservative Leader Andrew Scheersettles into his new job, polls suggest the Liberals retaineda comfortable lead over theirrivals in the last quarter, haltinga steep decline in support suffered earlier this year.

In polls conducted between March1 and May 31, the Liberals averaged 40.7 per cent support among decided voters, a slight increase over where the party stood in the previous quarter.

That should come as a relief to Justin Trudeau, whose party dropped 6.8 points in popular support during the winter.

(Red: Liberals, Blue: Conservatives, Orange: NDP, Green: Greens, Teal: Bloc Qubcois) (Natale Holdway)

The Liberals declinedfor the third consecutive quarter in British Columbia, the Prairies and Atlantic Canada, but arestill polling above their2015 federal election result largely due to the gains the partyhas held in Quebec.

The Conservatives trailedwith 30.3 per cent support as the leadership race was coming to an end, a drop of 1.5 points from the previous quarter. The party balanced gains in the Prairies and Atlantic Canada with losses in Alberta, Ontario and B.C., wherethe Conservatives are still polling significantly below 2015 levels.

The New Democrats, in the midst of a leadership race of their own and who have gained 4.3 points over the last two quarters, were up to 17.6 per cent, their best quarterly result since the last election.

The party was boosted by gains in B.C., Ontario and Quebec, though the NDP is still below its 2015 election result in that province.

The Greens and Bloc Qubcoisaveraged 5.3 and 4.8 per cent support, respectively.

While it is too early to know what Scheer's short-term impact on the Conservatives' polling numbers will be, a few surveys have provided some hints.

Scheer, a Saskatchewan MP who beat a crowded field to takethe leadership in May, was previously the House Speaker. The 38-year-old narrowly defeated Quebec MPMaxime Bernierin the contest to replace former prime minister Stephen Harper

A Mainstreet/Postmedia poll gave the Conservatives a two-point bump with Scheer as leader. A Forum Research poll showed the Conservatives down one point compared to where they stood in April.

Neither of these shifts wasstatistically significant.

Nanos Research, which conducts a four-week rolling poll, published new numbers on Tuesday with half of the sample dating from after Scheer's leadership win. It put the Conservatives at 30.5 per cent, up from the 28.6 per cent Nanos pegged the party at just before Scheer took over.

But the sample still contains pre-Scheer data. More polls will be needed before Scheer's impact if any can be adequately judged.

Polls by Mainstreet and the Angus Reid Institute (ARI), however, suggest Scheer has work to do to become better known. Fully 63 per cent of respondents in Mainstreet's poll were not familiar with Scheer or were not sure of their opinion of him, while ARI put the number of Canadians who have either not heard of Scheer or who were only familiar with his name at 75 per cent.

Since the last quarter, the Liberals suffered their steepest declines in Quebec and Atlantic Canada.

The Liberals led with 42.4 per cent support in Quebec, down 2.3 points from the last quarter but still up almost seven points from the last election.

The NDP, at 19.2 per cent, was still six points below its election performance (the NDP-to-Liberal swing in Quebec remains the largest anywhere in the country) but has gained 4.9 points over the last two quarters.

At 19.7 per cent, the Bloc is polling narrowly above its 2015 election result. The party gained 1.5 points since the last quarter, suggesting new leader Martine Ouellet might have had only a small positive impact on the party's fortunes.

The Liberals dropped 7.5 points over three consecutive quarters in Atlantic Canada, falling to 54.7 per cent. The Conservatives, who picked up 5.5points over that time, were up to 24 per cent.

The Conservatives were down over three points in both B.C. and Alberta in the last quarter drops that a new Western Canadian leader may help to reverse.

The Conservatives were down to 24.4 per cent in B.C., putting them still well below their 2015 election result in the province.

The Liberals dropped for the third consecutive quarter in B.C. to 37.8 per cent (down 8.4 points over that time).

The New Democrats, at 25.8 per cent, gained 7.4 points over the last two quarters, perhaps buoyed by the provincial NDP'srecent success in B.C.

The Conservatives were down 3.3 points in Alberta to 56.7 per cent. The Liberals were over 30 points back at 26.3 per cent.

In Saskatchewan and Manitoba, the Conservatives gained for the third consecutive quarter to hit 43 per cent, followed by the Liberals at 32.6 per cent. The party has dropped 9.9 points over the last three quarters in the two provinces.

The Liberals led in Ontario with 43.9 per cent, followed by the Conservatives at 34.2 per cent. Compared to the previous quarter, the margin between the two parties widened by over four points.

But while the Liberals and Conservatives have been wobbling back-and-forth in the province, the New Democrats have made gains in three consecutive quarters, up 4.5 points over that period to hit 16.4 per cent nearly matching their 2015 election result in Ontario.

Altogether, the numbers suggest that the Liberals would have been able to secure another majority government in an election held in the last three months. In all likelihood, it would have been an expanded majority primarily thanks to inroads in Quebec at the expense of the NDP.

But the Conservatives would have held their own, roughly matching their 2015 result. If former interim leader Rona Ambrosewas hoping to "do no harm" before she handed the party off to her successor, she was successful. Any new Conservative gains or losses from here on out will be Scheer's alone.

These quarterly poll averages are based on the results of 14national and regional public opinion polls conducted between March 1 and May 31 2017 by eightdifferent pollsters, interviewing just under 23,000 Canadian adults using a variety of methodologies, including online panels, interactive voice response and telephone interviews.

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Liberals lead quarterly poll report as Andrew Scheer looks to boost Conservatives - CBC.ca