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Ayaan Hirsi Ali criticized what she considered the "apologetic attitude" some liberals around the world have toward identifying the religious component to Islamic terrorism.

Ali, a women rights activist who was raised Muslim in Somalia but later became an apostate, called such a mindset "masochistic and stupid."

She said on "Tucker Carlson Tonight" that radical Islamic terrorists "don't go to liberals and say thank you so much, we'll stop terrorizing you" because of some on the left refuse to identify terrorism's religious component.

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Islamists only seek a Sharia-compliant world, Ali said, in the wake of Wednesday's attack in London, a city with progressive leadership, "and whoever is in their way is their enemy."

She said anyone who does not understand that should not be legislating policy.

Carlson said terror groups believe Westerners do not have moral standing to critique Islam, and Ali agreed, adding that they sometimes will consider fellow Muslims illegitimate if they do not comply with their belief system.

Ali said that President Trump's Youngstown, Ohio campaign speech first showed her that he took the terror threat seriously, and selectively praised his travel ban.

She said the ban was a good idea but was "clumsily" enacted.

"It's incredibly difficult to vet people coming from [those countries]," she said, maintaining that he should have consulted more lawyers and experts to root out any inefficiencies in the document.

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Hirsi Ali: Islamic Terrorists 'Don't Go to Liberals and Say Thank You ... - Fox News Insider

There is, in some precincts on the left, an earnest attempt to understand Trump voters, those strange creatures that are standing by their man, and figure out how the Democrats might win them back.

During the campaign I talked about Donald Democrats and how the billionaires appeal to working-class folks might help him win the election, as he did in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. The Dems used to be the party of the working class, but Trump made a connection that the party of global trade deals and climate change failed to forge.

Democrats often sound patronizing when speaking of Trump votersIts hard to win over voters whom youre insulting, New York Times columnist Nick Kristof wrote last month.

But now theres a counterargument emerging about Trump voters, which can be summarized thusly: Screw em.

This mad-as-hell view has been galvanized by reports that many Trump voters may lose their health insurance if the House version of ObamaCare repeal passes. The liberal gloaters say it serves them right.

From this perspective, those voters are too dumb to vote in their own economic self-interest and theyre probably gone for good. So its better to energize the Bernie Sanders base than to struggle to understand why many blue-collar Americans feel alienated from the Obama/Clinton party.

Frank Rich, the former Times columnist now with New York magazine, makes this argument in ridiculing what he calls Hillbilly Chic.

He questions whether pandering to Trump voters is another counterproductive detour into liberal guilt, self-flagellation, and political correctness. Rather than feeling everyones pain, might the time have at last come for Democrats to weaponize their anger instead of swallowing it?

Rich admits that the party is a wreck, with no power and most of its leaders of Social Security age. But he sees Trump voters as basically synonymous with the GOP:

That makes it all the more a fools errand for Democrats to fudge or abandon their own values to cater to the white-identity politics of the hard-core, often self-sabotaging Trump voters who helped drive the country into a ditch on Election Day. If we are free to loathe Trump, we are free to loathe his most loyal voters, who have put the rest of us at risk.

Sounds like Frank is weaponizing his own anger.

I just dont get the loathing, unless you subscribe to the view that anyone who supports Trump is by definition odious. If the Democrats write off everyone who backed Trump, even if it was because they didnt trust Hillary, arent they making it harder to put together an electoral majority of liberals and minorities?

Salon takes a different tack with a critical piece titled The Smug Style in American Politics. (There are photos of Rachel Maddow, Bill Maher and Keith Olbermann, though they have nothing to do with the article.)

The story by Conor Lynch says the Democratic view is of large numbers of American people voting against their apparent interests because of their ignorance and cultural backwardness.

After decades of watching millions of Americans vote for right-wing charlatans who advocated economic policies that serve the wealthy and screw everyone else, some liberals have basically given up on appealing to these perceived yokels, who seem to care more about criminalizing abortion and hoarding guns than obtaining health are and decent wages. They are dumb, credulous and often intolerant; so why should we progressive, rational, forward-thinking liberals sympathize or try to reason with them? Let them lose their health care; maybe theyll learn something this time around (though we all know they wont).

Lynch concludes that both parties have failed these voters and that cheering as people lose their health insurance may not be the best way to go about this.

Ya think?

We live in a divided country. And when Barack Obama won in 2008, some of those who opposed him tried to marginalize him and vowed to take our country back.

Do some in Obamas party want to do the same thing now? Blame not just the Republican president but the 60 million people who put him in the White House? Isnt that a big, well, smug?

Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of "MediaBuzz" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.

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Smugness watch: Some liberals say it's okay to hate Trump voters - Fox News

OTTAWA The future is coming at you, fast, and the Liberal government says it knows you're getting anxious and potentially angry.

Finance Minister Bill Morneau delivered a federal budget Wednesday that aims to get Canadians ready for a changing world and potentially shield the Liberals from the forces that brought U.S. President Donald Trump to power.

"Everyday folks who work hard to provide for their families are worried about the future," Morneau said in his speech to the House of Commons as he tabled the 2017 federal budget, the second since the Liberals formed a majority government in 2015.

"They're worried that rapid technological change, the seemingly never-ending need for new skills and growing demands on our time will mean that their kids won't have the same opportunities that they had. And who can blame them?" Morneau said.

After setting up the doom and the gloom, Morneau spoke of the good news: Canadians have always been able to adapt to changing circumstances.

The budget, which projects a deficit of $28.5 billion this coming fiscal year, including a contingency reserve, is designed to help them get there.

It includes about $5.2 billion for skills development as the government plans to help Canadians adapt their education and employment training to a diversifying economy at a time when the lower price of oil has meant the natural resource sector can no longer be counted on to provide jobs or sustain federal revenues.

Measures include letting out-of-work Canadians go back to school or receive new job training without having to give up their employment insurance benefits, a pilot project to test ways to make it easier for adults who have already been in the workforce to access student loans and grants and doing more to promote careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics to young people.

The Liberals do not just want to help Canadians find jobs in the future. They also want to try and bring that future about.

The budget commits nearly $3 billion to support innovation over the next five years and promises to develop an innovation and skills plan that will target six sectors the Liberal government see as good bets for spurring economic growth and creating well-paying jobs: advanced manufacturing, clean technology, the agri-food sector, digital industries, clean resources and health and bio-sciences.

As the Liberals work to ensure everyone can find a job in the new economy, they are also giving a boost to many who were left behind by the traditional one, such as women and those from indigenous communities.

The budget commits $7 billion over the next decade to help increase access to affordable child care, will allow women to begin maternity leave earlier and provides more financial support for those caring for an ill or aging relative all seen as ways to help increase the participation of women in the workforce.

The budget document, for the first time in Canadian history, also includes a section on how many of its measures impact men and women in different ways, with a promise to do a deeper gender-based analysis for the 2018 budget.

While this budget is relatively thin on net new spending, all these new promises still come with a cost, especially since the federal government is still footing the bill for the gigantic, ongoing commitments from last year.

Canadians can expect a five-cent increase in EI premiums in fiscal 2018-19, up to $1.68 per $100 of insurable earnings, with some of that additional cost coming from the measures that will give more people access to benefits.

The government is also looking for savings in other ways that will hit the pocketbooks of many Canadians, by eliminating the public transit tax credit, raising the tax on alcohol by two per cent beginning Thursday and changing the rules so that ride-sharing businesses, such as Uber, are subject to the same sales taxes as traditional taxis.

The deficit still remains nearly three times the $10-billion limit the Liberals promised in their campaign platform and while the budget's projections show it shrinking over time as the government expects economic growth to pick up steam, there is still no official word on when they expect to get back to balance.

This budget also removes a pledge to reduce the ratio of federal debt to GDP over the course of their mandate, which, after busting past their promise to eliminate the deficit by 2019, was the only fiscal target they had left.

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Joanna Smith, The Canadian Press

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Budget 2017: Liberals try to ease anxiety and get Canada ready for the future - BarrieToday

Financial Post

Philip Cross: The Liberals have become prisoners of their own, unwise budgeting Financial Post There are two major problems with the latest federal budget, starting with the Liberals' first budget in 2016. By immediately adopting that budget's full array of middle-class tax cuts and more spending on everything from the Canada Child Benefit to ...

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Philip Cross: The Liberals have become prisoners of their own, unwise budgeting - Financial Post

OTTAWA - The federal government plans to spend $7 billion over the next decade to help ease the burden of child care costs, part of a slew of new long-term spending targeting families.

The details outlined in Wednesday's federal budget estimated that child care spending could create 40,000 new, subsidized daycare spaces countrywide over the next three years, representing a bump of less than 10 per cent in the overall number of spaces, although it's unclear how the Liberals came to that figure.

The budget said the money could also help thousands of parents more easily enter the labour force, particularly women, much as it did in Quebec after that province introduced a subsidized daycare system.

The potential new spaces and reduced child care fees would come just in time for 2019, when the Trudeau Liberals face re-election, and build on the extra money the Liberals gave to families last year through a new child benefit. At a cost of about $23 billion a year, the income-tested child benefit eats up under 10 per cent of the federal budget.

The Liberals would also have a carrot to dangle in front of families during the election as the child care funding would hover around $550 million a year for the next five years and then jump to approximately $800 million annually between 2022 and 2028. That's about one third of what the Paul Martin Liberals promised provinces the last time the federal government made a significant foray into the child care system.

"It has been a long time since we've seen federal leadership in this area but we are disappointed the budget is not more ambitious in its spending especially at the start of the 10-year period," said Morna Ballantyne, executive director of the Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada.

Andrea Mrozek, director of the faith-based think-tank Cardus Family said the money acts as a form of "soft coercion" for families to send their children to daycare and mothers to get back to work faster than they may wish.

"Rather than expanding options that increase the good for particular families, the government paints families into a corner by favouring one particular option," she said.

Exactly how the money will be spent will be subject to negotiations between federal, provincial and territorial governments and on how much the federal government wants to push the provinces on the issue of affordability, said David Macdonald, senior economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives who studies child care costs.

Federal officials said the money could be spent on building child care centres, fee subsidies for parents, or wage subsidies for providers among other options to address the cost of child care that in some cities costs more than $20,000 a year. It's also unclear if the money will go to for-profit or home-based day cares.

NDP Leader Tom Mulcair said the budget doesn't promise new child care spaces, only the possibility of 40,000 even though there's a need for hundreds of thousands of spaces nationwide.

The child care spending is one of several measures the Liberals are enacting as part of a push to get more women into the workforce, and politically win over families who may have lingering financial concerns about how to pay the bills.

The budget extended parental leave to 18 months by spreading 12 months worth of payments over that time. And it lets expectant mothers begin claiming maternity benefits up to 12 weeks before their due date, an increase from the current eight weeks but short of the 15 weeks envisioned in a bill from Liberal MP Mark Gerretsen, which heads to committee for review starting Thursday.

The budget doesn't include dedicated leave for the second parent, something the Liberals had openly mused about doing. Nor does it increase parental leave benefits to make it easier for low-income earners to be able to afford to take leave.

The parental leave measures will cost the government about $30 million a year over the next five years. Moving up the start date on the maternity benefit will cost about $8.6 million more per year over the same period.

Those measures, among others, will require an increase in employment insurance premiums paid by workers and employers, starting next year.

The Liberals' second budget also expands eligibility for student loans and grants, so part-time students who support families can more easily access funding to help them enter or re-enter the workforce, at a cost of about $167 million over four years.

Both measures will be in place for the 2018-2019 academic year.

The budget also includes $287.2 million over three years starting next year for a pilot project to test changes to student loan and grant rules to help more adults return to school.

Follow @jpress on Twitter.

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Liberals pour billions in to child care in political bid to win over families - Calgary Herald