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Nia (center) and Lonia Brown traveled from California to join the Women's March on Washington. Meg Kelly/NPR hide caption

Nia (center) and Lonia Brown traveled from California to join the Women's March on Washington.

Donald Trump took the oath of office on Friday before a crowd speckled with red, many of them wearing the campaign's famous "Make America Great Again" hats.

Saturday's Women's March on Washington in downtown D.C. drew a crowd with vastly different political beliefs, but there was one similarity, as the sea of people was peppered with pink, cat-eared "pussyhats." The (mostly) homemade hats were a sly reference to lewd comments Trump made in a 2005 Access Hollywood tape leaked a month before the election. And they also echoed some of the traits that experts said made the Trump hat so effective for the winning candidate.

Marchers on Saturday said they liked the hat because it unified them around one general message.

"I think this woman who put this together is frickin' brilliant and a genius because it's such a political, simple statement: a pink hat, and all you have is the pussycat ears," said Mellicent Dyane, 50, a casting director from New York City, wearing a neon pink hat as she watched the rally. "It speaks volumes."

Ayla, 6, Jeff and Kaari Lynch gather on Boston Common during the Boston Women's March for America on Saturday. Maddie Meyer/Getty Images hide caption

Ayla, 6, Jeff and Kaari Lynch gather on Boston Common during the Boston Women's March for America on Saturday.

In that sense, the pussyhat has some of the same traits that made the "Make America Great Again" hat work: it sends a very particular political message, one that is simultaneously unifying and antagonistic.

The Trump "Make America Great Again" implies that somehow, someone (perhaps the political establishment, especially from the party in power for the last eight years) allowed America to no longer be great, and that the wearers are banding together to get that greatness back.

Despite not bearing a slogan, the "pussyhats" have their own clear target of criticism, explains one expert.

"It doesn't have the words on the hat like the 'Make America Great Hat' does, but the name of the hat evokes memories of this [Access Hollywood] tape that has a message that the people who made this want to convey," said Todd Davies, associate director of Stanford's Symbolic Systems program.

A protester holds a Donald Trump bobble-head donned with a tiny pink "pussy hat" during Saturday's march in D.C. Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

A protester holds a Donald Trump bobble-head donned with a tiny pink "pussy hat" during Saturday's march in D.C.

But the hats were intended also to be unifying for women (and the men who came to support the march). Following an election where Donald Trump effectively used masculinity as a campaign strategy, the pussyhats are unabashedly feminine, in that they are pink and homemade (not to mention that they reference a derogatory term for the female anatomy). That's by design: the "Pussyhat Project" website explains that "knitting and crochet are traditionally women's crafts," adding, "[knitting] circles are powerful gatherings of women."

The similarities don't end there. Both hats represent a kind of backlash: one by a group of people who believed they were ignored political outsiders, and the other by people who recently suffered a stinging election defeat.

Maryland Avenue was awash with pink between the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum and the U.S. Department of Education at the Women's March on Washington. Meg Kelly/NPR hide caption

In addition, simplicity is arguably a central goal of both hats, albeit to different ends. The Trump hat's plain red background with white Times New Roman lettering "represented [an] everyman sensibility," as FastCo Design's Dianna Budds explained this year. Likewise, most pussyhat patterns are simple one article promised viewers they could learn how to sew a hat "in the time it actually takes to ironically watch The Bachelor" allowing some crafters to crank out and distribute many.

While the red caps and pink knit hats invite comparison, they aren't perfect analogues of each other; the homemade pussyhats, in shades ranging from fuchsia to powder pink to mauve (and a few that weren't pink at all) were naturally not as uniform as the mass-produced Trump hats.

Again, the Pussyhat Project characterizes that as a feature rather than a bug, allowing people to be unique and diverse in their designs. (Likewise, the homemade hats helped people connect with one another marchers on Saturday reported getting hats from their grandmothers, wives, state legislators, and even strangers on the street.)

Importantly, though, the pussyhat has a long way to go to reach the power that the Trump hat has. Extolling the red trucker hat as the "symbol of the year 2016," Davies wrote about what made it stick.

(Left to right) Melissa Breen, Laura Jamison, Sandy Cuza and Kathryn Wehrmann chat while sporting matching pink hats in support of the march. Becky Harlan/NPR hide caption

"Lots of things can be symbols," he said. "but relatively few things actually are. Being a symbol is an acquired status that gets established through use."

The pussyhats could simply become a memento for marchers, as opposed to something they continually wear. After all, Trump rallies gave supporters regular reasons to get together and don their hats, eventually making the caps familiar to many Americans. The pink hats very easily might never reach that point.

At least for now, the pussyhats and trucker hats fulfill the basic role of identifying tribes. Saturday afternoon, red-hatted families ate in restaurants alongside pink-hatted marchers. Without even talking, they knew exactly which team they were on.

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With 'Pussyhats,' Liberals Get Their Own Version Of The Red Trucker Hat - NPR

I doubt that they have hit bottom yet, but liberals cant get much lower than smearing Donald Trumps ten-year-old son, Barron.

Katie Rich apparently is a writer for Saturday Night Live. I havent seen that show since the 1970s, but people say its no longer funny. If Ms. Rich is any indication, I can believe that is true. This is what she had to say on Twitter about ten-year-old Barron:

She wasnt the only one. Here are a few more, courtesy of Independent Journal Review:

Note the 289 retweets and 1,414 likes.

This guy is a senior writer at Fox Sports:

A professional writer who flunks both spelling and grammar. Why is it, by the way, that so many sports writers are crazed leftists? Seems odd, but its true.

This woman writes for National Post:

Not all liberals are crazed haters, of course, but an amazing number of them are. For all the insults they hurl at Donald Trump, they never pause to look in the mirror.

This, however, will cheer you up. A liberal who attended the inaugurationas a protester, I assumeemits a howl of anguish as Trump is sworn in. You can watch it over and over, it never gets old:

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How Low Can Liberals Go? - Power Line (blog)

Justin Trudeau and his ministers will gather next week for a cabinet retreat in Calgary, site of a Liberal breakthrough in the last election that will soon be put to the test in a pair of byelections.

The Liberals won two seats in Calgary in 2015 the party's first victories in the city in almost 50 years and Trudeau's team will look to take advantage of its time there on Monday and Tuesday to build on that progress.

Campaigns to fill the seats vacated by former prime minister Stephen Harper and Jason Kenney need to be kicked off soon. The deadline in Harper's Calgary Heritage riding is Feb. 25 and in Kenney's Midnapore it's March 22.

But the call could come much sooner than that. There is also a vacancy in OttawaVanierafter the death of Liberal MP Mauril Blanger last summer. The byelection call there needs to be made by Feb. 19, and the government is likely to schedule the vote in the two Calgary ridingson the same day.

Though the Liberals are long shots to win either of thetwo Calgaryseats, the party is in a better position to compete for them than has been the case for almost half a century.

The Liberals captured 33 per cent of the vote acrossthe city in 2015, nearly matching the party's share of the vote in Quebec. The last time the Liberals posted that level of support or won a seat in Calgary was in 1968, Pierre Trudeau's first election as Liberal leader.

The 1968 election was a good one for the Liberals in Calgary, as they took 45 per cent of ballots cast just a few pointsbehind the Progressive Conservatives.

But that support dropped to the mid-20s over the next four elections under PierreTrudeau and collapsed in the 1980s as the National Energy Program sank Liberal fortunes in Western Canada.

Under Pierre Trudeau, Liberal support in Calgary fell during the 1970s and then collapsed in the 1980s because of the National Energy Program. (Canadian Press)

Liberal support rebounded somewhat under Jean Chrtien the Liberals captured 25 per cent of the vote in Calgary in 1997 before falling again in the 2000s. In 2008 and 2011, the Liberals took just 14 per cent of the vote.

The city has long been a stronghold for the Conservatives. Between 1968 and 2011, the party and its predecessors never took less than60 per cent of the vote. But in 2015, Conservative support fell 10 points to 56 per cent, itslowest share of the vote in Calgary since 1968.

The Liberals captured 24.5 per cent of the vote in Alberta in the last election. The most recent polls in the province suggest that support has held firm or even grown two polls conducted by Abacus Data and Forum Research in December put the Liberals at 29 or 32 per cent in Alberta.

The partyposted higher numbers in last year's byelection in Medicine HatCardstonWarner, boosting its support by 7.7 points in a contest won by the Conservatives.

But Calgary Heritage and Calgary Midnapore will be difficult tests. Harper won his riding by 38 points and Kenney took his by 44. These were both below-average ridings for the Liberals in Calgary. Of the 10 in the city, Calgary Heritage ranked as the eighth best for the Liberals and Calgary Midnapore was the worst.

Former prime minister Stephen Harper's seat in Calgary will soon be up for grabs in a byelection. (Reuters)

Still, the 23 per cent of the vote the Liberals took in Calgary Midnapore and the 26 per cent secured in Calgary Heritage represented the best performance by the Liberals in southern Calgary since 1979. The Liberals will be looking to build on those results, particularly now that the Conservatives won't have such high-profile candidatesas Harper and Kenney on the ballots.

The byelections will also provide some indication as to the impact of a series of decisions and statements made by the prime minister directly related to Alberta's oil industry, which is headquarteredin Calgary: the approval of the Kinder Morgan pipeline into B.C. but the rejection of Northern Gateway,the Liberal plan to put a price on carbonand Trudeau's recent statement at a town hall that the Alberta oilsands need to be "phased out."

It all makes the Liberals' cabinet retreat in Calgary nicely timedfor the government. The prime minister will want to make sure he putshis time in Cowtownto good use.

Continue reading here:
Liberal cabinet retreat in Calgary well-timed as electoral tests loom - CBC.ca

Its amusing watching the hysterical liberals rushing to attack any who disagree (even slightly) with them. They are, after all, the all knowing the all righteous and theyll provide the comments taken out of context & half truths to prove it. Some will even provide known #FakeNews to prove they are right and the the well-informed are wrong. Such students of 1984 they must be, except we know the game plan we read the book!

I was accused of being a Trump apologist by one of the liberal critters. Im not. I am, however, a defender of truth & justice. Lie about him and I am going to speak up. No one should be surprised. Its not like I havent told people they were spreading lies about Hillary and Obama, when I saw they were. After all, lies are lies no matter who they are told on and no lie should be told on anyone.

Irrational radical liberals need to be told to sit down and shut up!

Yes, I said that.

I meant that.

Its time to bring sanity back into our world and letting irrational radical liberals rattle on, spread falsehoods, attack anything that doesnt move exactly as they decide is the way to move does nothing to make that happen.

Hysterical liberals are on the attack, but today is the day that proves how irrelevant they are becoming. Today, Donald J. Trump will become the 45th President of the USA in spite of all they have done to make sure he wouldnt be. Yes, today Donald J. Trump will be what they said he never could be President Donald J. Trump.

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Carrie K. Hutchens

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Look Out: Hysterical Liberals on the Attack - American Clarion

Media and social media liberals have been breathless the past two days over the contrast between the relatively small crowds for President Trumps inauguration and (1) the large crowds at President Obamas 2009 inauguration and (2) the large crowds gathering in DC and a number of other big, liberal cities across the country for todays Womens March, which purports to be a popular movement against Trump but which has pointedly excluded pro-life women. Three points to bear in mind.

One, it was not long ago at all as recently as the afternoon of Election Day when liberals were broadly united in scorning crowd sizes as a measure of popularity. As you may recall, a number of pundits had pointed to the crowds drawn by Mitt Romney in 2012 and Sarah Palin in 2008 as a sign of Republican enthusiasm, and they decisively lost the argument to Nate Silver and other data analysts who derided the idea that crowd sizes trumped polls. In 2016, Trump drew yuge crowds all across the country, and he and his supporters bragged about them incessantly. While polls were still a better way of looking at the world than crowd sizes, those crowds did speak to how he activated a particularly devoted segment of the electorate, and certainly everyone on the Democratic side was united all the way through the election in snarking at the significance of Trumps crowds. Its hard to credit the sincerity of those same people now getting excited about crowd sizes.

Two, there are obvious reasons of geography, demographics, and history why Obama in 2009 in particular drew large crowds for his inauguration, and Trump did not. Obama was enormously popular in DC and its surrounding areas, winning well over 90% of the vote in the District and carrying Maryland and Northern Virginia by wide margins; Trump did especially badly in those areas in the primaries and the general election. Its always easier to get people to show up to an event within an hours drive than to travel in from Michigan or Iowa or Western Pennsylvania. Thats doubly true of poor and working-class people who cant easily take multiple days off of work and pay for hotel rooms and travel (Obamas inauguration was on a Tuesday in 2009, a Sunday in 2013; Trumps was on a Friday). And of course, todays marches are hard to compare, since theyre distributed across the country and held on a Saturday. Also, its hardly surprising that Obama drew big crowds in 2009, given that a lot of people who knew or cared little about his politics were inspired by the simple fact of inaugurating the first African-American president. It was already true that Hillary won tremendous support in the big cities of America, while Trump did unusually poorly there and unusually well in rural areas, so you would expect that marches and demonstrations held in big, media-friendly cities would paint an asymmetrical portrait of a nation of Hillary backers.

Three, the liberal and media enthusiasm for touting large crowds as a sign of popular sentiment is roughly 100% certain to evaporate completely next Friday when the March for Life comes to Washington to commemorate the anniversary of Roe v. Wade and pray and protest for its reversal and the extension of legal protection to all human life in the United States. Held annually for four decades, the March for Life routinely draws massive crowds in DC, as well as local events across the nation, and just as routinely gets a tiny fraction of the media coverage that is being lavished on todays marches.

Crowd sizes for the March for Life are impossible to ascertain with certainty, in part because of the enormity of the crowds, and in part because the Park Service stopped doing official crowd-size estimates following a threatened lawsuit from Louis Farrakhan twenty years ago. The Wikipedia page for the March, collecting a number of news reports, offers this:

Between 2003 and 2009, the march had an attendance of around 250,000,[2] but this number has since increased. The 2011 and 2012 marches drew an estimated 400,000 each, the 2013 march drew an estimated 650,000.[3][4]

Now, organizers of events on all sides of the political spectrum tend to overstate crowd sizes, todays and the March for Life included; thats precisely why Farrakhanobjected when the Park Servicecounted a lotless than a million men for his Million Man March. But even discounting some of that 650,000 high-end figure, virtually any reliable source on the March for Life acknowledges the sprawling size of the annual turnout, year in and year out, including busloads arriving from Catholic parishes and colleges across the country. But the media annually yawns and treats this simply as a ho-hum part of the annual DC landscape, not as a sign of broad popular resistance, after all these years, to the brutality of abortion, and tends to bury the story far from the front page. I can predict with great confidence that they will do so again this year.

Is Trump an unusually unpopular new president? Yes, absolutely he is, by any number of polling measurements; even a great many of his hold-my-nose-and-stop-Hillary voters remain skeptical of the man. Is he likely to be a galvanizing force that allows the Democrats to regroup and reorganize? Probably. And the ability to draw crowds to todays marches could be the start of that process, as it was for the Tea Party in 2009. It could also be a dead end of preaching to the converted and dividing into increasingly narrow ideological factions, as Occupy Wall Street was. It wont achieve much of anything if the people marching today are almost all people who already voted for Hillary. That all remains to be seen. Democrats may end up learning nothing at all from 2016, and needing to learn nothing, if Trump turns out to be a disaster in office. But the ability to draw crowds consisting mainly of people in big cities who were already reliable Democratic voters doesnt necessarily tell us very much we didnt already know. And dont expect the people telling you otherwise to get excited about the crowds at the March for Life.

Read more from the original source:
Crowd Sizes Matter To The Media Only When The Cause is Liberal - National Review