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It was ten days after Election Day and most liberals were still in full blown crisis mode, wading their way through the fever dream of the post-Trump victory world. The week since the unthinkable had happened had been a whirlwind; the rallies, the recounts, the sense of chaos, loss, and most of all, deep uncertainty. What was certain, however, was the dreamy vision of a progressive American identity many had been so sure of the morning of November 8th had been snuffed out, quite literally overnight. The liberal vision of the election as a significant step towards a more perfect union, the glorious symbolism of the first woman president succeeding the first black president, the long awaited relish of defeating Trump himself, it was all gone. And in its wake was little more than brooding, self-affirmative groupthink about a flawed, bigoted America resistant to progress and pluralism. It was against this backdrop that Saturday Night Live, long a bastion of urban progressivism and fresh off months of mercilessly mocking of Trump and his team, aired The Bubble. The sketch detailed an eponymous planned community for liberals or like-minded freethinkers and no one else to seek refuge from the ravages of Trumps America. To borrow from a successful SNL character, The Bubble has everything: wine bars, raw milk, and WiFi that only connects to liberal blogs. In short, the sketch is chock full of small digs at the modern stereotypes of American liberals. But it goes even deeper. At one point, one of the communitys fictional spokesmen, a white man in Warby Parker glasses, declares that its members dont see color, but celebrate it, prompting an eye-roll from his black female cohort. At another, the starting rate for a one-bedroom apartment is mentioned to be $1.9 million. Even more significant than its playful parody of liberal idiosyncrasies is its nudging at white liberals on the more discomforting (and more politically relevant) issues of their racial insensitivity and economic privilege, suggesting they are not quite as egalitarian and open-minded as they believe.

Coming on the heels of an election whose shock outcome was attributed by many in the media to the supposed insularity of urban and progressive communities, the skit was widely circulated and well-received - across conservative media in particular. But lost in much of the post-November conversation about ideological provincialism, and conservatives celebration of liberals being pilloried for their own, is the stark difference in how the left and right views and attends to their own bubbles. The release this month of Jordan Peeles cinematic tour de force, Get Out, underscores the gaping, and growing, gap between liberals and conservatives ability to critique, confront, and laugh at their own imperfections.

To call Get Out racially charged would be an understatement. From the get-go, the film, premised on a black man meeting the family and entering the world of his white girlfriend, is racially volted, with the very opening scene alluding to Trayvon Martins killing. It is a testament to Peeles distinct talent as an artist that even as the the film descends into a frenzied, bizarre thriller it still manages to incorporate elements of satire, subtlety, and comic relief. Tracking closely with that descent is the tone and breadth of the films statement on race. While racial discrimination and insensitivity are present from early in the film, they initially come exclusively from expected sources Baby Boomer parents, white male police officers. The film is too laden with symbolism and meaning to fully address here, but there is one moment that particularly sticks out. While there are several big reveals, the most thrilling comes when it is revealed that Rose the white girlfriend who had theretofore been distinct from her family and friends racism is directly complicit in the racial subjugation plot of her family. The moment encapsulates the clear message underlying Get Out: that many, even most, of the ostensibly woke, craft-beer drinking liberals that populate SNLs Bubble do in fact reside on the same spectrum of racial oppression as the red state rubes from which they created the community to seek refuge. In itself, the delivery of this message by Peele is a watershed moment in American culture. Never before has such a message been given as big a megaphone or received as strong an affirmation (the film enjoys a 99 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes).

Receiving less attention but even more significant than the films content itself is what it tells us about bubbles and insularity. Given the films entire message is a strong criticism of progressives, in particular white progressives, it is significant it has been received positively by liberal critics and audiences alike. Get Out is the biggest indication yet that, for all the snowflake flak they get, American liberals choose to both create and expose themselves to artistic content that critiques themselves on some of the most emotional and explosive social issues, no less. Indeed, once one gets past the meme of liberal insularity and sensitivity, it becomes clear that the entire narrative is dubious at best and utterly fallacious at worst.

Think for a second about the last television show or movie created by, directed at, and critical of conservatives. Youll ponder in vain. They simply do not exist. Many on the right would indignantly protest that they are underrepresented in the studios and boardrooms of Hollywood and Manhattan, and this is at least partially true. But the past few years have seen a veritable explosion in conservative media. Mike Huckabee, for example, has produced nearly a dozen movies, including The Gift of Life, Gods Not Dead, and Gods Not Dead 2 (in case there was any ambiguity remaining). Kirk Camerons Saving Christmas, even after earning the dubious distinction of being ranked the worst movie of all time by IMDB, banked $2.5 million in 2014. Glenn Becks media flagship The Blaze is worth nearly $100 million and saw fit to construct a full-scale replication of the Oval Office from which Beck broadcast during the 2016 GOP primary. Just last year, Miracles from Heaven, a story of a chronically ill little girl who supposedly ascended to heaven and returned, grossed $70 million at the box office off a budget of $13 million. In other words, the capital is there. The tools are there. The audience is there. Conservatives simply choose not to utilize any of them to produce any content that is even remotely critical of any aspect of their ideology. Even Lena Dunham, the most reviled example of liberal decadence to the American right, looks like a bona fide Joan Rivers-Christopher Hitchens love child when compared to conservative media; her HBO opus Girls is itself centered around living caricatures of white, liberal millennials.

The separation between conservative and liberals is only underscored when one considers the yawning gap between the mainstream acceptability of their ideologies. Per polls from the past year and a half: 57% of Americans acknowledge human activity to be a driver behind climate change, 7 in 10 Americans support Roe v. Wade, 55% support increased gun control, and a (mind boggling) 88% support a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. In short, the entire modern conservative movement is organized around a series of political positions wholly out of step with middle America. Even if conservatives and liberals did live in equivalent bubbles, the latter would still be less isolated given they are overwhelmingly more in touch with the center of American society.

The bottom line: despite their frequent denigration of liberal safe spaces, and sensitivity, it is demonstrably true that conservatives live overwhelmingly more homogenous and insulated lives. The position du jour of many effete elites that conservatives and liberals alike exist in equally aloof two Americas flies in the face of all evidence and logic. In Trumps America, the left is producing and processing media that examines everything from innocuous idiosyncrasies to real, systemic hypocrisies. Meanwhile, conservatives are incapable of challenging even the most fantastical of statements by Trump and his advisors. From his claim of five million illegal immigrants voting in the presidential election to his recent allegation President Obama executed an intricate, secret, criminal conspiracy to wiretap him during the election, the grotesque falsehoods and absurdities of President Trump and the lack of pushback from any prominent conservative voice or elected official is a living, breathing embodiment of the unparalleled bubble around which modern conservatism is organized.

As the pain and shock of the morning of November 9th showed, progressives do have blind spots. Acknowledging that does not necessitate capitulating to bigots or admitting ones way of life is somehow inferior to a heartland conservatives. What it does take is self-awareness, honest self-appraisal, and a firm insistence on the concept of objective reality not coincidentally, all characteristics modern conservatives are lacking. They are also the precise tools that, if utilized, will lead progressives, and America as a whole, to the future we envisioned the morning of November 8th. With projects like Get Out, theres hope for that future.

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'Get Out' Is The Type Of Bubble-Burst Liberals Need - Huffington Post

Apr. 3, 2017 at 6:07 PM

Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Missouri, at a hearing Jan. 12.

At least 41 Democratic senators have publicly committed to filibuster President Trumps Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, leading to a probable showdown with Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

The filibuster might seem like payback for Democrats after Republicans refused to consider the nomination of then-President Obamas Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, for 293 days starting last year. Unlike Republicans last year, however, Democrats dont have all that much power. They arent in the majority and McConnell has strongly hinted that he could seek to eliminate the filibuster for Supreme Court picks if Gorsuch cant get 60 votes. Across a variety of surveys, moreover, a plurality of voters think the Senate should confirm Gorsuch, although a fair number of voters dont have an opinion either way. Therefore, Democrats political endgame is unclear.

Gorsuch is quite unpopular with liberal voters, however: By a 61-15 margin, they oppose his confirmation, according to a YouGov poll last week. Thus, the planned filibuster may simply be a sign of the liberal bases increasing influence over the Democratic coalition. The share of Democrats who identify as liberal has steadily increased over the past 10 years. According to the recently released Cooperative Congressional Election Study, 53 percent of Democratic voters identified as liberal last year. Until recently, it was rare to find surveys that showed liberals made up a majority of the party.

But to some extent, that 53 percent figure understates the case. The CCES also asked voters about whether theyd engaged in a variety of political activities, including donating to a candidate, attending a political meeting, working on behalf of a campaign or putting up a political sign. Among Democrats whod done at least one of those things a group Ill call politically active Democrats 69 percent identified as liberal. These were some of the voters who helped propel Bernie Sanders to almost two dozen primary and caucus victories last year.

Oftentimes these liberals are found in states where you might not necessarily expect them such as in the Mountain West, which was a strong region for Sanders last year. According to a regression analysis conducted on the CCES data, the proportion of politically active Democrats who identify as liberal is larger in states where candidate Trump fared poorly. But controlling for that, its also larger in states that have more white voters, and more college-educated voters. And its larger in the West than in the other political regions of the country. In the table below, Ive estimated the share of politically active Democrats in each state who identify as liberal. Since the sample sizes for some states are small, the estimates are based on a blend of the raw polling data from the CCES and the regression model I described above.

Source: Cooperative Congressional Election Study

Its not surprising that Washington, Oregon and Vermont are places where the liberal wing of the Democratic base dominates. But Idaho, where I estimate that 82 percent of politically active Democrats identify as liberal, and Utah, where I estimate that 80 percent do, also rate near the top. Its not that Idaho and Utah are blue states, obviously; theyre among the most Republican in the country. Nonetheless perhaps because a lot of moderate voters identify with the GOP in these states the few Democrats that remain are overwhelmingly liberal.

The same phenomenon holds in Montana, where I estimate that 76 percent of politically active Democrats are liberal. That may help to explain why Sen. Jon Tester of Montana says he will vote against Gorsuch, even though he faces a tough general election campaign next year. Whether or not Democrats would issue a primary challenge to Tester, who has generally sided with the party on key votes, is questionable. Nonetheless, hell be relying on his base for money, volunteers and a high turnout on Election Day. In Montana, the conservatives are conservative but the Democratic base is fairly liberal also.

By contrast, Democratic Sens. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who will vote to confirm Gorsuch, are on somewhat safer ground. Some 61 percent of politically active Democrats identify as liberal in North Dakota, while 57 percent do in West Virginia, according to this estimate. Those figures are almost certainly higher than they would have been a few years ago. But Heitkamp and Manchin probably face more risk from the general election than from a loss of support among their base.

Nor is the Democratic base all that liberal in the Mid-Atlantic region, including states such as Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey. Instead, even the party activists in these states can have a moderate, pro-establishment tilt. That may explain why senators such as Chris Coons of Delaware and Robert Menendez of New Jersey were slow to announce their positions on Gorsuch before eventually deciding to oppose him.

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The Gorsuch Filibuster Shows The Liberal Base's Clout - FiveThirtyEight

The Liberal government says it will not pursue mandatory or online voting for federal elections.

The Liberals had raised the ideas for consideration in their 2015 election platform and tasked the special committee on electoral reform with studying the possibilities.

But MPs on the special committee were divided on the merits of mandatory voting and concerned about the security of online voting, and recommended against pursuing either.

In a formal response to the committee's report, submitted on Monday, Minister of Democratic Institutions Karina Gouldsaid the government agrees with the committee.

"While Canadians feel that online voting in federal elections would have a positive effect on voter turnout, their support is contingent on assurances that online voting would not result in increased security risks,"Gould wrote."We agree."

A Liberal adviser publicly suggested mandatory voting in a 2014 paper.

Voting has been compulsory in Australia since 1924. Any eligible voter who does not cast a ballot must provide a valid excuse or pay a $20 fine. Turnout in the last Australian federal election was 95 per cent.

The Liberals say they are committed to finding other ways of encouraging voter turnout. Legislation currently before Parliament would allow citizens to use the voter information card for identification purposes at the polls and restore Elections Canada's ability to promote voting.

The Liberal response restates that the government won't be pursuing electoral reform, as Gould announced in February.

"The electoral system is foundational to any democratic system, and any changes to how we vote must have the broad support of Canadians," Gould writes.

"As stated in my mandate letter released publicly on February 1, 2017, 'A clear preference for a new electoral system, let alone a consensus, has not emerged. Furthermore, without a clear preference or a clear question, a referendum would not be in Canada's interest.' Changing the electoral system is not in my mandate as Minister of Democratic Institutions."

The electoral-reform debate hasn't entirely faded from view in the two months since Gould announced that change was not in her mandate.

NDP reform critic Nathan Cullen recently embarked on a national series of town hall meetings on the topic. And Fair Vote Canada, an organization that promotes proportional representation, participated in the recent set of byelections in hopes of "sending a strong message" to the Liberals.

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Liberals say no to mandatory and online voting - CBC.ca

There were no seat changes in Monday's federal byelections, but the governing Liberals took a hit in all five of the contested ridings marking their worst byelection performances so far under Justin Trudeau.

The Conservatives saw gains in three of the five ridingswhile the New Democrats took hits of their own in all but one, leaving the Conservatives as the winners of the night.

The Liberals held on to the three ridings they were defending (MarkhamThornhill, OttawaVanier and Saint-Laurent) while the Conservatives retained their two seats of Calgary Midnapore and Calgary Heritage, the latter being the old seat of former prime minister Stephen Harper.

But across the five ridings, the Liberals' vote share dropped by an average of 4.7 points. That was a steeper loss than the NDP's average 2.2-point decline. The Conservatives gained an average of 4.2 points compared to their supportin the 2015 federal election.

This is a reversal of the trends exhibited between the 2011 and 2015 votes, when the Liberals made gains in 13 of 15 byelections and the Conservatives suffered losses in all of them.

Granted, byelections can be largely driven by local issues.But being on the wrong side of the trend line does not bode well for future performance.

Turnout was low on Monday, ranging from 27.5 per cent in MarkhamThornhill to 34.1 per cent in OttawaVanier. Accordingly, the big parties lost votes in every riding and the Liberals lost vote share across the board.

Though the most significant decline for the Liberals occurred in OttawaVanier, the result for Mona Fortier (51.2 per cent of the vote, down 6.4 points) was better than the late Mauril Blanger's scores between 2004 and 2011, when the Liberals were either in opposition or reduced to a minority government.

Support for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Liberals fell from their 2015 election results in all five byelections Monday, including Calgary Midnapore, where Trudeau campaigned for candidate Haley Brown, right. (Jeff McIntosh/Canadian Press)

The nomination controversies in MarkhamThornhill and Saint-Laurent did not seem to have a disproportionate impact on Liberal fortunes, as the decreases suffered there by Mary Ng (down 4.4points to 51.3 per cent) and Emmanuella Lambropoulos (down 2.5 points to 59.1 per cent) were not notablydifferent than those in the other three ridings.

The Liberals were unable to maintain the gains made in Calgary in 2015 (whenthey won their first seats there since 1968), capturing21.7 per cent of the vote in Calgary Heritage (down 4.3 points)and just 17 per cent in Calgary Midnapore(down 5.7 points). Nevertheless, with the exception of 2015, those were the party's best results in the ridings since 1980and 1997, respectively.

With 71.5 per cent support for Bob Benzen in Calgary Heritage, up 7.7 points from 2015,and 77.2 per cent for Stephanie Kusie(+10.5) in Calgary Midnapore, the Conservatives made a renewed show of strength in two traditional strongholds. Kusie's score in Calgary Midnapore was the Conservatives' best in the riding since the merger of the Progressive Conservatives and Canadian Alliance in 2003.

Conservative candidate Stephanie Kusie celebrates with her husband James and son Edward after winning Calgary-Midnapore. (Todd Korol/Canadian Press)

The Conservatives also put up good numbers in MarkhamThornhill, the kind of GTA riding the Conservatives will need to win in the future to form a majority government. The party captured 39 per cent of the vote, up 6.7 points and their best performance since 1997 when the Liberals last lost the riding.

But the Conservatives put up worse results in two francophone ridings, OttawaVanier and Saint-Laurent. The party held its 19.5 per cent vote share in the Montreal seat. In OttawaVanier, the Conservatives were down 3.7 points, their worst performance there since 1968.

It is possible the Conservative leadership race has helped boost the party elsewhere, but the lack of French-language skills among the field of 14 candidates for the top job (including one of the front-runners, Kevin O'Leary) may not be doing the party favours in ridings with large francophone populations.

The New Democrats saw their vote drop most significantly in ridings that were primarily head-to-head contests between the Liberals and the Conservatives down 4.4 points in Calgary Heritage, 5.2 points in Calgary Midnapore and 7.2 points in MarkhamThornhill.

Their numbers in these three ridings were their worst since before Jack Layton took over the party in 2003.

The loss of 3.7 points in Saint-Laurent is not a good sign for the New Democrats in Quebec, where the party needs to regain some lustre.

But the results in OttawaVanier were far more positive for the NDP. The New Democrats gained 9.4 points, reaching 28.7 per cent andnearly matching their all-time best performance in the riding in 2011.

Liberal candidate Mona Fortier, centre, won the Ottawa-Vanier byelection. (Justin Tang/Canadian Press)

The Greens saw little change in their numbers with the exception of again of 5.6 points in Saint-Laurent, where their deputy leader, Daniel Green, was a candidate. The Bloc Qubcois, in its first electoral test under new leader Martine Ouellet, did little better in Saint-Laurent than the party did in 2015, but also no worse.

So the results of the byelections have something to please each of the opposition parties, with the Conservatives having the most to smile about in addition to their two wins.

On the government's side, theirthree comfortable victories might be little to worry about just yet.But if these byelections acted as a mid-term report card for the Liberals, they might want to return to their studies or risk failing the next test.

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Liberals lose support, Conservatives gain in status quo byelections - CBC.ca

OTTAWA Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau emerged unscathed from his first real test with voters on Monday as the incumbent party held onto power in five by-elections across the country, leaving Trudeau's Liberals with an undiminished majority in parliament.

As expected, none of the regional votes to elect members of parliament produced an upset, with Trudeau's Liberals retaining three seats in Montreal, Toronto and Ottawa and the opposition Conservatives holding onto two seats in Calgary, according to preliminary results from Elections Canada.

With the majority of votes counted in each race, all of the incumbent parties were leading by more than 10 percentage points and all had been projected as winner by the Canada Broadcasting Corp.

Still, the votes could be the last easy victory for the Liberals, who have enjoyed a long honeymoon with voters in part because both opposition parties are in the process of replacing their leaders ahead of a 2019 general election, when both Trudeau and members of the House of Commons face the electorate.

"I don't think it means anything at this stage because it was very predictable," said Nelson Wiseman, a political science professor at the University of Toronto.

"I think once the Conservatives select their new leader, you're going to see a boost in Conservative support - it happens after every leadership convention, and that goes on for a while ... so the more important by-elections will be those closer to 2019," Wiseman added.

A December poll showed Trudeau's approval rating remained high but was dropping amid rising dissatisfaction with the economy, and voter anger over a broken promise to reform the electoral process could eat into the government's popularity.

In addition, nearly half of Canadians want to deport people who are illegally crossing into Canada from the United States, and a similar number disapprove of how Trudeau is handling the influx, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll released in March.

(Reporting by Andrea Hopkins; Editing by Lisa Shumaker and Michael Perry)

ANKARA Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday called on Iraqi Kurds to lower the Kurdish flag in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, warning that failure to do so would damage their relations with Turkey.

CARACAS Venezuelan security forces quelled rowdy protesters with tear gas, water cannons and pepper spray in Caracas on Tuesday after blocking an opposition rally against unpopular socialist President Nicolas Maduro.

CAIRO Islamic State said on Tuesday the United States was drowning and "being run by an idiot".

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Canada Liberals unscathed as by-elections return status quo - Reuters