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Posted February 11, 2017 17:25:02

The WA Greens say polling shows 33 per cent of Liberal voters will not support the party if it does a preferences deal with One Nation.

The results of the Essential poll of 2,000 people have been revealed as the Liberal Party State Executive considers the issue.

Upper House candidate for North Metropolitan region Alison Xamon said the Greens were putting One Nation last, and so should the Liberals.

"One Nation has no place in this Parliament and the last thing they need is any leg-ups from the Liberal Party," she said.

"They need to be completely rethinking how they're approaching their dealings with One Nation we're not doing any deals with One Nation, and in fact we are putting One Nation last and recommending our voters put One Nation last."

Ms Xamon rejected suggestions Pauline Hanson's party had changed.

"One Nation is as racist as they always were," she said.

"They've always attacked the first Australians, Aboriginal Australians, they've attacked people who have come here from Asia, they're attacking the Jewish community, and now they're attacking people from Islamic backgrounds," she said.

"It's not acceptable, we are a multicultural country, this is something which should be celebrated and cohesion needs to be protected and One Nation has no place here.

"I'll be very, very clear Pauline Hanson does not speak for me."

The Greens used their state election campaign launch to announce their policy on donations reform, claiming wealthy interest groups and vested interests were undermining the political system.

Ms Xamon said the Greens wanted to limit lobbyists' powers and the influence of developers.

"We need to have dramatic reform of our donations laws and that's something that the Greens are going very hard on," she said.

"We want to have a banning of donations particularly from for-profit corporations, mining companies, polluters because we think that that's twisting the policies of government."

Ms Xamon said the Greens would continue to seek reform in other key areas.

"Making sure that we have sustainable cities, looking at renewable energy targets, sustainability around water and housing and transport are really critically important," she said.

"But also making sure that we've got different approaches to law and order, and ensuring that we've got appropriate services for people who are in need, particularly people with mental illness, people with disability, tackling racism.

"We need to really rethink the way we're approaching jobs and training and worker safety."

The Greens currently only have two members in the Legislative Council, and none in the Legislative Assembly.

The party suffered a swing against it in the 2013 election.

Ms Xamon said she was confident the party would improve its position.

"Every single party has its ebbs and flows, and there's no doubt at all certainly since 2013, the Greens vote has continued to climb back up again, we're expecting we're going to have pretty good representation in the West Australian Parliament," she said.

Topics: greens, one-nation, polls, government-and-politics, elections, liberals, wa

View original post here:
WA election: Greens say One Nation preference deal will lose Liberals votes - ABC Online

February 10, 2017 NEW YORKWhen Supreme Court nominee Judge Neil Gorsuch chose the words disheartening and demoralizing to describe attacks on the integrity of the federal judiciary this week, many took them to be a cautious but not-so-subtle message to Senate Democrats.

Navigating the noreasters of Washingtons confirmation process means winning over at least eight Democrats. And with those two words, Judge Gorsuch appeared to be distancing himself from President Trump, carefully asserting his own independence and demonstrating a willingness to stand up to the man who nominated him.

Yet even before the saga over the meaning and original intent of the nominees words began to unfold on Thursday with President Trump arguing that the media was misinterpreting his words many liberals were already making this case for the deeply conservative jurist, calling Mr. Trumps nominee one of the most independent-minded judges in the country.

It is a difficult pivot for many Democrats to make. Republican senators refusal even to schedule a hearing for President Obamas nominee, Judge Merrick Garland, last year still rankles. But some are wondering how far to take the fight when Gorsuch, in some ways, presents a relatively attractive conservative option.

Of all the judges President Trump could have nominated, Gorsuch seems to me as good as anybody, liberal or conservative, who would stand up to unlawful actions by the Trump administration, if need be, says Daniel Epps, a professor at Washington University Law School in St. Louis, who puts himself on the liberal side of jurisprudence.

Hes someone who seems to believe in a fairly robust role for the judicial branch in checking the legality of the actions of the other branches, adds Professor Epps, who, like Gorsuch, once clerked for Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. So theres reason for optimism, I think, in that hes not going to just be a reflexive vote for conservative opinions in every case.

Like the late Justice Antonin Scalia, whose seat he will take if confirmed, Gorsuch has often ruled in favor of criminal defendants over the government rulings not uncommon for strict textualists and their razor-close readings of the statutory texts.

And unlike many other federal judges, Gorsuch has been a fierce critic of the so-called Chevron doctrine, which holds that judges should generally defer to the executive branch and its agencies when they have any reasonable interpretation of federal statutes.

That basically gives people comfort that didn't have comfort, said Sen. Joe Manchin, the conservative Democrat from West Virginia after meeting Gorsuch. That has helped him in his quest for confirmation, he said.

Yet Gorsuch has come to Washington at a rancorous political moment and will face vehement Democratic opposition.

Certainly, the base of the Democratic party is saying, You absolutely must stand strong against Trumps nominees, even if you dont have the numbers, says F. Michael Higginbotham, the Joseph Curtis Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore School of Law. What kind of message does it send to the Republicans, and to the country, if there are then no political consequences, if you believe what the Republicans did to Judge Garland was wrong? And youre not willing to stand up to that?

Indeed, many Democratic senators believe the Supreme Court seat was stolen last year, when Senate Republicans refused to even hold a hearing for Judge Garland for 293 days.

Theres no doubt that Judge Gorsuch is well qualified and a person of integrity, says David Cohen, a professor at Drexel Universitys Thomas R. Kline School of Law in Philadelphia. But my own personal view is that liberal Democrats who think thats good enough for him to get a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court are basically rolling over and playing dead in a game in which Republicans are playing in a very dirty way.

Or, as Dahlia Lithwick, a senior editor at Slate put it recently, it would be like holding out a cupcake at a knife fight.

For them, the perfect scenario would be Democrats blocking Gorsuchs nomination, forcing Trump to come back with a more moderate nominee like Garland.

Its an unlikely gamble, and one with profound risks, however, many experts say.

Republicans could nix the cloture rule, the basis for the filibuster and the 60-vote threshold to hold a vote, allowing Gorsuch to join the high court with only 50 votes. That could fundamentally undermine the Senates larger role as a body that demands bipartisan compromise.

Moreover, looking ahead to possible Supreme Court retirements, Trump could easily appoint much more hardline conservative, leaving the Supreme Court with a five- to six-seat majority that could last a generation. That is a more important battle, some say.

This is part of the strategic calculus that makes me think this is such hard question, says Epps at Washington University. On the one hand, Senate Democrats can say, What McConnell did with Garland was just ridiculous. But youve got to be thinking ahead to the next battle. And, yeah, in a world in which the filibuster has been nuked, then maybe it will be a lot easier for Republicans to fill any vacancy with whoever they want.

Gorsuch is facing a perilous moment in his confirmation. Trump this week lashed out against the judicial branch, demeaning the district court judge who first blocked his travel ban, calling him a so-called judge and his opinion ridiculous.

Then the president lashed out against the Ninth Circuit court panel hearing his emergency appeal, calling its proceedings disgraceful even before it ruled 3-to-0 on Thursday to continue to block his order.

The White House insisted on Thursday that Gorsuchs words, disheartening and demoralizing, were not referring to the presidents outburst, even though at least two senators and a White House official said they were.

One of the senators, Nebraska Republican Ben Sasse, even said the nominee got pretty passionate about Trumps attack of the judiciary.

"People all across the political spectrum should love the fact that he's going to be a warrior for a constitutional system of executive restraint and limits," Senator Sasse said.

Read the rest here:
'Disheartening'? Some liberals warm up to Trump Supreme Court pick. - Christian Science Monitor

Trumps victory is virtually incomprehensible without a reading on the dynamics of white identity and national formation. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images

The first two weeks of the Trump presidency ought to be engraved in our memories as if in granite. We are witness to three simultaneous crises: a crisis of the working class, which, fractured by race, region, citizenship status and religious belief, lacks political cohesion or organisational representation.

Then we have a crisis of the ruling class, which was bullied and backed into a corner by a megalomaniacal kleptocrat who stole their candy, and who has no respect for the core institutions of class rule or for the stories his class brothers and sisters tell each other about the delights of the prevailing world order.

And a crisis of the state, in which far-right ideologues, autocrats and theocrats, having captured the governing apparatus, are rapidly concentrating power in the executive while bureaucrats scramble toward either dissent and defiance or appeasement and accommodation.

In response to these crises, a highly consequential debate about the direction of the Democratic party rages among academics, pundits and politicians. Sparked by the Columbia University professor Mark Lilla in a New York Times opinion piece, this debate is most active among liberals, but ranges both rightward and leftward as well.

The controversy focuses on the role of identity politics in Hillary Clintons presidential defeat. Essentially, the debate turns on whether the Democratic party and Clinton, in their embrace of racial, religious and sexual minorities, forsook working-class white people, who responded to their abandonment by casting their votes for Trump.

According to this perspective, the journey back from the devastation of 2016 requires that the party take an indefinite break from identity politics to concentrate on winning back economically squeezed white workers. Theres a leftish version of this line an economic fundamentalism that posits that bread-and-butter issues trump all others. The classic liberal version, seemingly reasonably, demands the subordination of the part to the whole, the interests of particular groups to the national interest.

Both boil down to the same thing: its time to subordinate the rights claims of various interest groups to an economic agenda that prioritises solving the distress of white workers. Only this adjustment will create the conditions for Democrats to make gains in congressional and state-wide races and retake the White House in 2020. (Or, in the leftish version, only this adjustment will set the foundation for building a successful workers movement.)

Where the Democratic party lands on this issue matters enormously. The traction this analysis gains will impact the flow of attention and resources of the party, liberal thinktanks and liberal philanthropy, as well as the focus of progressive organisations. It is likely to determine how the Democratic party positions itself relative to 2018 and 2020, and whether that positioning has the intended effect of creating a sufficiently broad electoral coalition to roll back Trumpism. With so much at stake, it is worth taking a moment to examine what might be problematic about analyses that lay 2016s rout of the Democratic party at the feet of identity politics.

Its never a good idea to enter willingly into a frame your opponent has constructed to entrap you. The term identity politics is part of a whole vocabulary including thought police, politically correct, and liberal elites, whose main intention is to undermine the legitimacy of liberal and left politics. Uncritically adopting the identity politics language of the right is the equivalent of dropping our guard and waltzing on to their terrain. Masters tools, masters house, anyone? We need to recognise a toxic frame when we see one and refuse to be a party to its proliferation.

Setting aside questions of language and framing, there is in fact an expression of identity politics core to the evolution of our nation and critical to how we understand the current juncture. White identity and nation-building have been bound together since way before the founding fathers and the drafting of our framing documents. The rest of us have had to fight our way into the body politic. Or, in the case of Indian nations, make the best of a spectacularly unequal and uneasy standoff.

The conceptual contrast between white Christians and red savages underwrote relentless territorial expansion and genocide. Between white Christians and black savages, the enslavement of Africans and the appropriation of their bodies, their labour, their progeny; between brown savages and white Christians, the taking of the south-west; between the yellow peril and white patriotic Americans, various exclusions, internments, property appropriations and ghettoisations.

This is not to project the racial sensibilities of today back onto social and political environments that operated on completely different sets of assumptions but to reckon with the degree to which the nation-building project has been, at the same time, a white identity formation project. Until we collectively get this, some will continue to deny the white rights subtext of Make America Great Again, or be surprised at how powerfully it resonated. Trumps victory is virtually incomprehensible without a reading on the dynamics of white identity and national formation. The liberal inquiry into the role of identity politics in Clintons loss is pointed in a direction diametrically opposite to where one might find answers.

This is not an argument against addressing the concerns and economic anxieties of white workers. It is an argument for:

(1) addressing those concerns as a component part of a larger story about the declining fortunes of the class as a whole;

(2) refusing to make concessions to racism, heterosexism, xenophobia, Christian supremacy, or misogyny while addressing those concerns;

(3) being clear that the displacement of white economic anxiety on to black people and immigrants is neither warranted nor wise;

(4) being clear that the postwar deal of expanding economic fortunes for a wide swath of white workers is completely off the table; what is on the table is the search for new forms of multiracial, multiethnic, multigendered worker organising that applies itself to the riddle of how to effectively extract significant concessions from 21st century capital;

(5) understanding that the work of addressing the economic and social concerns of white workers, and winning them away from thoroughly reactionary politics, is not principally an issue of crafting the best messages and communications strategies to produce results in the next election cycle, but a long-term, no-short-cuts proposition to which a battalion of people and organisations will need to devote their lives.

A liberal imagination perversely fixated on the alleged excesses of identity politics forgets that social movements of the marginalised are the spark and spur of democracy. The abolitionist movement and the civil rights movement extended democratic rights to the formerly enslaved and perpetually reviled, removing a deep moral stain from the nation. The womens movement unleashed the potential and talent of half the countrys population.

While the small-minded argue about bathrooms and pronouns, transgender activists, at great risk to themselves, have gifted us with a far more capacious understanding of the evolving spectrum of gender identities and expressions. None of these movements is done. Each has advanced not just the interests of a singular identity group, but also the ambit of freedom for all. Most assuredly, the generation that stepped forward in the wake of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown will not stand down just because some liberals are having a panic attack.

We are all navigating treacherous terrain, seeking a way forward. At least some of us know that not a single development over the past period indicates that the way forward requires that we abandon our freedom dreams. To the contrary.

Read the rest here:
Liberals, don't fall into the right's 'identity politics' trap - The Guardian

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Democratic residents of Washington, D.C., arent willing to share their homes with President Donald Trump supporters, according to a Friday report from The New York Times.

Thelocal housing page on Craigslist.com is full of Democrats who arent open to sharing their living quarters with anyone who supports Trump or Republicans.

If youre racist, sexist, homophobic, or a Trump supporter, please dont respond, one open-minded couple posted in their craigslist ad. We wont get along.

A woman even went so far as to put her disdain for the president on the title of her ad, Trump supporters this isnt the house for you, (no, seriously).

Please no Imperial Sympathizers, Borg, Vogons, Lannisters (some exceptions), Sith, or Trump supporters, Kevin Kemp wrote, comparing supporters of Trump with derided antagonists in fiction. As a black man, Black Lives Matter is sort of important to me, and Trump supporters arent known for their fondness of that movement.

Despite Democrats attempts to keep Trump supporters from coming to D.C., several Republican haunts report surging business, including the Old Ebbitt Grill that resides just one block away from the White House.

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'No Trump Clause': City Liberals Discriminating Based On Politics - Daily Caller

President Donald Trumps words have been horrid, from liberals standpoint.

But three weeks in, things arent so bad in lib-land. Republicans are in disarray on repealing the Affordable Care Act, which citizens increasingly like, and President Trump says the GOP now may not have a bill until 2018. Courts are toying with Trumps Justice Department over his grandstanding emergency ban on people from countries that have never sent the U.S. an adult terrorist. Stuff he has done approving oil pipelines, ordering more study of a regulation designed to keep financial advisers from ripping off clients is mostly talk.

By mid-February 2009, Barack Obama was within days of passing a major tax cut, was restructuring General Motors, galvanizing clean-energy and digital-medicine industries through the stimulus, and was well underway on financial-services reform. By mid-2010, all that, plus Obamacare, was law.

So should Democrats calm down? Yes and no. Yes, because Trumps not getting much of anywhere on issues that matter most. But, really, no.

No, because keeping the heat on has pushed Trumps disapproval rating to 54% in Gallup surveys. In other surveys by Quinnipiac University, voters said Trump is wrong on repeal of Obamacare, refugees, climate change, even his beloved Mexican-border wall.

And no, because heat makes Trump obsess over minutiae and make unforced errors, like wasting three of his first four of his first 100 days in office debating the size of his inaugural crowd and spending days going on about appellate-court judges he says politicize immigration. Thats rich, coming from one who publicly said Muslim ban so many times not even Rudy Giuliani denied his intent.

Read: Appeals court upholds suspension of Trumps immigrant ban

Keeping heat on plays to the presidents lack of discipline and makes him do kid-with-ADHD things like griping about his daughters clothing line getting dropped by Nordstrom a tweet the president launched Wednesday when he was supposed to be in an intelligence briefing. Nordstrom shares rose 4% JWN, -1.21% , in a shock to everyone who doesnt read MarketWatch: We pointed out weeks ago that markets are learning to blow Trump off.

For liberals, a distracted Donald is a weak Donald, who did nothing important Wednesday and signed some empty executive orders Thursday. He was too busy claiming a political rival lied about Trumps own Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, throwing the president under the bus, only to have his own staff confirm Gorsuchs comments.

Liberals should hope Trump spending four years throwing meat to 35% of voters who think the Keystone XL pipeline is a jobs program (35 full-time jobs once up and running!), coal mining is the industry of the future, and Uhmurkas hidin in fear from refugees who are Obamas Muslim cousins innyway.

And, Australia!

Liberals will always have Australia.

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) is dealing with pressure from both President Donald Trump and Democrats over issues including trade, infrastructure spending and the controversial Trump travel ban. WSJ's Gerald F. Seib outlines how Sen. Schumer can navigate this tricky terrain over the next four years. Photo: AP

For Trump to do damage a Democratic president cant easily undo in 2021, hed need enough self-discipline to craft a sensible replacement for the Affordable Care Act. Ted Cruz scored rhetorical points about subsidized health care remaining expensive in a debate with Bernie Sanders this week but wait for the price of unsubsidized insurance the GOP thinks can replace it, all so people earning $250,000 a year and up can get a less-than-1% tax cut.

Trump said Thursday hell have a phenomenal tax announcement in a few weeks, but coming from him that could mean anything. And the next shiny butterfly may yet distract him.

For Trump to do real damage, hed cut corporate taxes in some way that doesnt add as much as $17,000 to imported-car prices, as a study from auto-industry researchers Baum and Associates projects. That plan would also boost prices for cheap Wal-Mart clothing, not to mention Ivankas classy Chinese-made duds.

Or hed figure out how to gut Dodd-Frank financial reforms without making it an obvious sap to Goldman Sachs. Then hope no less-savvy Goldman wannabe goes belly-up by 2020.

Instead, Mr. President, liberals demand you propose things that are obviously bonkers. Send marshals (or, troops!) to Chicago to help cut a murder rate lower than in the 1990s. Send more troops to Mexico to hunt bad hombres. Have your attorney general fight nonexistent voter fraud. Comp Japans Prime Minister at Mar-a-Lago! Better, charge him rack rate, like the WWII loser Japan is.

That way, you can spend time on these things, not gutting health-insurance markets or divvying up Syria with your new bruh Vladimir Putin.

And theyd like you to tweet all day long. Especially during intelligence briefings. About Nordstrom, or judges throwing your plans out faster than you can stack the Supreme Court.

Or the National Park Services coverup of photos proving your inaugural crowd was bigger than President Obamas, but got lost and went to Area 51.

I checked with Sen. Elizabeth Warren you know, Pocahontas? and she swears this would be splendid, much like telling Frances president you want a refund on NATO defense spending, which you already did.

I explained that its nuts. I warned her!

Nevertheless, she persisted.

Read more from the original source:
Opinion: Should liberals calm down about President Trump? - MarketWatch