Mediaboss Marketing

Updated January 23, 2017 10:14:53

Gladys Berejiklian is expected to become the 45th Premier of New South Wales after a Liberal partyroom meeting this morning.

The Liberal partyroom will meet at 10:00am (AEDT) to formally vote in its new leader.

Ms Berejiklian left her Northbridge home earlier this morning and caught a bus to her parliamentary office, with media crews on her tail.

She is the deputy leader and Treasurer and is the only person to put up her hand to take over from Mike Baird who resigned unexpectedly last Thursday.

She is a moderate and hails from the left of the party.

She secured support by striking a deal with the right of the party to install Finance Minister Dominic Perrottet as her deputy.

He is also expected to be voted in today during the meeting.

Ms Berejiklian will become the first Liberal female Premier of New South Wales and the second woman to hold the office.

She comes to the job with 13 years' experience in Parliament, holding the positions of Transport Minister and then Treasurer since the last election.

There are two years left of the Government's current term before voters return to the polls.

Mr Baird announced his retirement last Thursday, after a year defined by angry protests and backlashes against a number of controversial policies.

Once the country's most popular politician, these policies on issues such as greyhound racing and council amalgamations, ultimately led to a steep drop in his popularity.

Mr Baird also fell out of favour with young people and businesses who vigorously opposed laws that forced licensed venues in the Sydney CBD and Kings Cross to close their doors earlier.

The State Opposition Leader Luke Foley said the incoming premier needed to turn the focus away from transport and onto health and education.

Mr Foley said Ms Berejiklian's record as treasurer had seen the state invest heavily in transport infrastructure, at the expense of other sectors.

"We have a problem with ever-lengthening hospital and waiting times, overcrowding of our schools, declining literacy and numeracy results and the destruction of the TAFE sector," he said.

"The new premier must bring a focus on service delivery, particularly in the areas of health and education."

Topics: government-and-politics, liberals, state-parliament, sydney-2000, nsw

First posted January 23, 2017 07:16:41

Continue reading here:
Gladys Berejiklian expected to become NSW Premier as Liberals meet to decide Mike Baird's successor - ABC Online

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.

Read the original here:
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:

Read the original:
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.

This article is printed with the permission of the author(s). Opinions expressed herein are the sole responsibility of the articles author(s), or of the person(s) or organization(s) quoted therein, and do not necessarily represent those of American Clarion or Dakota Voice LLC.

Comment Rules: Please confine comments to salient ones that add to the topic; Profanity is not allowed and will be deleted; Spam, copied statements and other material not comprised of the readers own opinion will be deleted.

Carrie K. Hutchens

Read the original here:
Look Out: Hysterical Liberals on the Attack - American Clarion