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Liberals have at their disposal three kinds of arguments against confirming Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.

They can say that the mainstream judicial conservatism that he undoubtedly represents is dangerously wrong. A lot of liberals probably believe this. But most people find that argument unreasonable, so few liberals make it.

They can say that Gorsuch should not be confirmed to keep Republicans from being rewarded for their refusal even to consider President Barack Obamas nomination of Judge Merrick Garland for the same seat on the Supreme Court. But voters didnt much care about Garlands plight last year, when his nomination was live, and are unlikely to care more about it now.

This leaves door number three: Liberals can pretend that Gorsuch is a far-right extremist. Many liberals are rushing right in.

Unfortunately, Judge Gorsuch has proven to have a judicial philosophy outside of the mainstream and time and again has subjugated individual rights to those of corporations, says Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York.

She cites Gorsuchs ruling that the Hobby Lobby craft-store chain should be able to refuse to offer employee health coverage for contraceptives that its evangelical Christian owners oppose. Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio also claims that Gorsuch proved he was far outside of the judicial mainstream in treating corporations as people.

Yet only two of the nine justices on the Supreme Court sided with these senators in denying that corporations could qualify for protection under religious-liberty statutes. Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan, both Democratic appointees, voted against Hobby Lobby, but refused to endorse that argument. So whos really out of the mainstream?

Senator Ron Wyden tweets that Gorsuch represents a breathtaking retreat from the notion that Americans have fundamental Constitutional rights and harkens back to the days when politicians restricted a peoples rights on a whim. You can read this in one of two ways. Perhaps the Oregon Democrat is saying Gorsuch does not believe that the Constitution protects any fundamental rights. But there is no evidence at all that Gorsuch takes that absurd view and abundant evidence against it.

Or maybe Wyden is saying he believes the Constitution protects some specific fundamental rights that Gorsuch does not see in the document. Gorsuch does not, for example, believe that the Constitution protects a right to assisted suicide. (The Supreme Court has never held that it does.) Perhaps Wyden disagrees. But if Wyden means only that Gorsuch would rule differently than Wyden would like, he is using deliberately hyperbolic language to describe a banal disagreement.

Nan Aron, the head of an influential liberal organization called the Alliance for Justice, sent out an email after Gorsuchs nomination saying: He is critical of laws that ensure workers rights and safety, guarantee equal opportunity, safeguard consumers and investors, ensure the safety of food and drugs, and protect our environment.

No, he isnt. He has, however, said that when federal agencies issue regulations for those and other purposes, courts should make sure those regulations are authorized in laws passed by Congress. Aron would have you believe that enforcing a law is the same thing as undermining it.

Aron also said, Gorsuchprotects police officers who use excessive force. What Gorsuch actually did was cite a unanimous Supreme Court decision that protects police officers unless they are plainly incompetent or knowingly break the law.

Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, says, What saddens me the most as a mom and a grandmother, though, is his hostility towards children in school, children with autism. She claims that Gorsuch ruled that the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act doesnt apply to them.

Pelosi will be much happier when she realizes Gorsuch never ruled that way. He did rule that the law did not entitle the parents of a child with autism to the specific assistance they sought. It was a unanimous decision of three judges, including one appointed by Clinton, and it expressed sympathy for the family.

I dont mean to paint all liberals with the same brush. Some of them are noting that he is exactly the reasonable and judicious pick he appears to be. Others are working hard to distort his record -- and in the process discrediting only themselves.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story: Ramesh Ponnuru at rponnuru@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Katy Roberts at kroberts29@bloomberg.net

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Liberals Have No Case Against Gorsuch - Bloomberg View

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Donning dirty T-shirts that say things like nasty woman and resist, the melting snowflakes are fleeing this Orange Revolution for their latest safe space. But it is probably one that should come with a trigger warning for these tender little kiddies.

In droves, the precious political liberals and progressives are gobbling up copies of George Orwells dystopian novel 1984 about the perils of a totalitarian police state, according to The Washington Post.

The book reached No. 1 among fiction paperbacks in the Washington area, according to the paper. Just ahead of It Cant Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis, another throwback novel about a populist president [who] becomes a dictator.

Hmmm, I wonder what is going on here.

Are the kids finally waking up and after decades of blithe ignorance and deciding to finally educate themselves about social studies? Are they suddenly woke to the ancient questions such as Who should govern? and Where do rights come from?

Are they finally concerned about the dangers of a crushingly powerful and all-knowing Leviathan government that reaches into every aspect of peoples lives? Or, perhaps they are reading up in preparation for a visit to Cuba.

Probably not. But Orwell was a pretty smart guy and wrote some brilliant books. Most of us, of course, did not need to rush out and buy a copy of 1984 after Obamacare was jammed through Congress because, well, because we all still have our copies from when we first read it as teenagers.

The only reason there isnt an actual Obamacare in 1984 is that even Mr. Orwells considerable imagination could not conjure up something so diabolical and wrong.

A system that forces Little Sisters of the Poor to commit what they believe is murder. And then forces them to pay for it.

A system that gives the superstate access to all of your most personal medical information and forces you into medical situations whether you want them or not.

It is the same superstate that President Obama entrusted to spy on elderly people on Social Security who required help keeping their finances straight. If they are not able to balance their checkbooks on their own, they would be deemed mentally unfit and added to the federal list of criminals barred from purchasing weapons.

Seriously, Orwell was a piker compared with this crowd today.

Meanwhile, the federal government monitors Facebook and social media accounts of citizens to make sure they are paying taxes. Yet at the same time the feds have spectacularly failed to monitor social media of terrorists plotting to kill Americans and destroy the greatest force for freedom and individual liberty on the planet today.

The similarities between 1984 and the utopian dreams of self-proclaimed liberals and progressives today gross misnomers both are uncanny.

1984 features Newspeak, the propaganda of Oceania. Individualism and thoughtcrimes were prosecuted by the Thought Police. Today, we have political correctness to shut down debate.

Orwell had his Ministry of Truth, which lies about everything. Ministry of Love to run the torture program. Ministry of Plenty to handle rationing. And, best of all, the Ministry of Peace, which kept Oceana in the constant state of war.

Today, we have a Treasury Department filled with $20 trillion worth of IOUs.

We have an Energy Department that mainly handles spent nuclear fuel.

Our Health and Human Services ministry launches predawn raids on peaceful family farms suspected of selling fresh milk that has not been cooked to specific federal guidelines.

We have a Department of Education, which apparently hasnt been teaching social studies in 40 years.

Best of all, we have the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to arm Mexican thugs, terrorists and drug dealers with guns to be used against Americans.

Orwell had to make it up. We, literally, couldnt.

But just maybe, liberals today will rediscover their roots and reignite a deep suspicion of a large, all-powerful government. Perhaps by reading 1984 they will discover that any government so big that it can give you everything is so big that it will take everything away from you.

Somebody should make up some hats that say: Make Liberals Great Again.

Charles Hurt can be reached at churt@washingtontimes.com; follow him on Twitter via @charleshurt.

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'1984': Making liberals great again - Washington Times

February 7, 2017 Before the presidential election, when Hillary Clinton looked to be cruising to a victory, a cottage industry of fake and misleading news reports found an eager audience on many conservative Americans social media feeds.

Now, nearly three months after President Trumps stunning victory, same kind of alarmist, click-bait headlines, along with their false news reports, are becoming increasingly prevalent on liberal Americans feeds.

There was the fake photo of Mr. Trump, purportedly showing him standing with his parents, both dressed in the white robes and symbols of the Ku Klux Klan. There was the misleading story of Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch, who was said to have founded a group in high school called the Fascism Forever Club. There was the viral photo of a boy handcuffed at Dulles airport near Washington after the presidents immigration ban last week it was a fake, taken in 2015.

The term fake news has become one of the most charged political terms in the emerging rough-and-ready digital era of the Trump presidency. He uses the term almost daily, charging mainstream news outlets such as CNN and The New York Times with trafficking in fiction and even outright lies. At the same time, he spreads falsehoods, like his claim Tuesday that the murder rate in our country is the highest its been in 47 years.In fact, the murder rate is near historic lows.

The confusion and misinformation creates and environment where it is increasingly normal to accept facts only if they conform to one's own worldview. But something else is at work, as well,many observers say. The penchant to believe fake news is often rooted in a deep-seated feeling of alarm and powerlessness.

Of course, when you feel disempowered, you want to strike back with everything you got, and you feel like the whole world is against you, says Brooke Binkowski, managing editor of Snopes, a fact-checking website that has debunked many of the false stories circulating around the internet.

People who think theyve been pushed out of the political world as it is right now are going to be susceptible to misinformation theyre going to focus on whatever makes them feel better, she says.

Right now, thats liberals. Ms. Binkowski says she has seen an uptick in liberals sharing misleading stories on their news feeds. Others agree.

Certainly, you can see more examples in the kind of stuff that people of the left are now fascinated by, says Judith Donath, a faculty fellow at The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Liberals were not being terribly alarmist before the election, but now theres this nonstop sense of emergency.... You dont really want to stop and smell the flowers, because you think that if I miss something, disaster might happen.

Before the election, fake news stories abounded on conservative feeds, according to a number of studies. Headlines claiming that Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump or that President Obama had banned the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools were shared hundreds of thousands of times. The most notorious fake news story the fabricated story that Mrs. Clinton was tied to a child sex ring at a Washington pizza parlor led an armed man to investigate and fire a shot during business hours.

The trend represents a perfect storm of several crises converging, many scholars say.

Theres the platform crisis of social media as a news distributor, there is the industrial crisis of mainstream journalistic venues closing and downscaling, and there is the larger cultural crises of the epistemological devaluation of verifiable truth, says Aram Sinnreich, professor at American Universitys School of Communication in Washington. Then theres also the political crisis with opportunistic public officials and voters both privileging politically convenient stories over truthful ones.

Fake news has generally trended conservative. In the last three months before the election, 17 of the top 20 most-shared fake news stories favored Trump, according to a study by Buzzfeed last November.Andover the same period, fake news stories favoring Trump got 30 million shares quadruple the number of shares for fake news posts favoring Clinton, according to a study released last month by economists Matthew Gentzkow of Stanford University and Hunt Allcott of New York University.

The recent spike in fake news stories on the left can be attributed to the enormous increase in the number of liberals now seeking information from all sources, says Professor Donath, also the former director of the Sociable Media Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab. That trend has also bolstered mainstream newspapers including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, whichhave each seen their circulations surge after the election.

So if you have a huge multiplier in the news people are consuming, while keeping the same percentage of these outlets that really arent trustworthy, youd of course have more of the fake stuff, says Donath.

And new fake stories keep circulating. An article from AlternativeMediaSyndicate.com last week claimed that police officers had burned the camps of indigenous activists fighting the Dakota Access pipeline at Standing Rock. The story, which included an image of burning tipis from a 2007 HBO film, was shared nearly 300,000 times on Facebook.

Other fake stories on liberal feeds included a LearnProgress.org piece that reported falsely that first lady Melania Trump was selling jewelry on the White House website. And a number of stories stemmed from an unverified Twitter account, @RoguePOTUSStaff, which purports to offer secret information from rogue White House staffers. The account is followed by more than 650,000 people.

For his part, Trump has appropriated the term fake news but changed its meaning.

On Monday, the president tweeted, Any negative polls are fake news, just like the CNN, ABC, NBC polls in the election. Sorry, people want border security and extreme vetting.

His statement Tuesday appears to confuse the rise in the murder rate with the murder rate. While the 2015 murder rate was 4.9 per 100,000 people less than half of what it was in 1991 it is up from 4.4 percent in 2014. That was the largest one-year jump in 50 years.

On Feb. 2, Trump went so far as to post a fake news storyto his official Facebook page. The story claimed that Kuwait issuedits own Trump-esque visa ban for five Muslim-majority countries.Smart! Trump tagged his post. And as of noon Tuesday, the still-live post had been liked over 250,000 times, and shared nearly 70,000 times. The alt-right websites Breitbart, Infowars, and Sputnik were also among those who cited the story.

This despite the fact that the Kuwaiti foreign ministry on Friday said that it categorically denies these claims and affirms that these reported nationalities ... have big communities in Kuwait and enjoy full rights,Reuters reported.

In the end, the proliferation of fake news could be a boon for traditional journalism, as the surge in circulation numbers suggest.

Its almost a theater of the absurd, but if you listen to what the majority of the public is saying, they prefer to have legitimized news, says Kevin Smith, deputy director ofThe Kiplinger Program in Public Affairs Journalismat the Ohio State University in Columbus. This isnt about, when they go low we go high ... its about going straight. We need to keep that impartial review of whats going on.

Continued here:
Why 'fake news' is now ensnaring liberals - Christian Science Monitor

Have you talked to your liberal friends who dont follow politics today? Whats surprising are the number of liberals who seem genuinely surprised and shocked and horrified and enraged and all kinds of other emotions about the fact that 50 out of 52 Senate Republicans voted to confirm Betsy DeVos as education secretary.

Start with the fact that Republican senators are going to be naturally inclined to confirm a Republican presidents nominees. Move on to the fact that DeVos has spent her career working for school choice, and most Republican senators strongly support school choice.

I know this may shock you, my friends on the left, but most Senate Republicans dont particularly care how much teachers unions furiously denounce DeVos. The teachers unions are among the biggest financial supporters of Democrats. Opposition from teachers unions is a given for just about every Senate Republicans; theres no point in trying to reach out, build bridges, or reach compromise with someone who is determined to defeat you when your term is up.

Republican senators didnt find DeVoss belief that states and localities should set laws for guns in and around schools inherently disqualifying, and didnt find her comment about grizzly bears around schools in Wyoming so laughably absurd.

Senate Republicans dont particularly care if Kate McKinnon imitated DeVos on Saturday Night Live and it was glorious. They dont care that she was ridiculed by Jimmy Kimmel and Trevor Noah. Any Republican secretary of education nominee is going to be ridiculed by Jimmy Kimmel and Trevor Noah. Oh, there was a Facebook meme about Betsy DeVos that was shared a lot? Thats not the sort of thing that persuades a senator. (I see one of the disqualifying criticisms is DeVos never put her children in a public school. Neither did President Obama.)

What, the likes of Pat Toomey and Rob Portman, having just won reelection to a six-year term, should begin by alienating everyone who worked so hard to help them win reelection, and hand a victory to everybody who just spent the past two years trying to defeat them? Have you guys ever watched anything in politics ever before?

If a lot of Republicans in Virginia or New York or California had called up their senators offices urging a vote in favor of DeVos, do you think that Tim Kaine, Mark Warner, Chuck Schumer, Kirsten Gillibrand, Dianne Feinstein, or Kamala Harris would have changed their minds?

Eight years ago, most Republican senators voted for most of President Obamas nominees. The only nominees who faced significant opposition were Tim Geithner (34 votes), Kathleen Sebelius (31 votes), and Eric Holder (21 votes). Only six of Obamas picks required more than a voice vote. (There were 41 Republican senators at that time.)

Did that bipartisan outreach and conciliatory approach pay off for Republican senators? Did any liberal or progressive organization or voice salute those senators for their willingness to confirm President Obamas choices and get them on the job as quickly as possible? No, of course not. Ask a liberal today and theyll insist the Senate Republicans were the most obstructionist opposition party of all time.

In an environment where no outreach across the aisle is rewarded by the opposition, why are you surprised that theres so little of it?

In a highly charged partisan political environment, it takes a lot to get a senator to vote against their own party. Liberals want Republican senators to defy the Trump administration, but theres no particular upside for that senator. Its not like the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committees going to give them a pass, its not like grassroots progressives wont try to knock them out of office, its not like any praise from the news or entertainment wings of the media will be lasting or consequential. (Ask Jim Jeffords, Arlen Specter, or Charlie Crist.)

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Why Are Liberals Surprised by the Senate Confirmation of DeVos? - National Review

All liberals are hypocrites. I know because I am one Quartz But I'm pretty sure I am one, at least in part because I subscribe to liberalism's first principlethat everyone has a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And, like all self-identifying liberals in the age of Trump, recent events ...

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All liberals are hypocrites. I know because I am one - Quartz