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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

So much for unity not that it was ever a probability after the election of Donald Trump.

Trump did his share to undermine it. Before he took office, he managed to get into a pointless battle with U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., the civil rights icon; alarm European allies and irritate adversaries like China.

It was enough to give dozens of Democrats an excuse to refuse to attend the inaugural. But Trump is not the only reason for the toxic divisions.

Why Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election is still being hotly debated. But to those of us who arent in the Washington bubble or members of the media or government elite, it continues to become clearer with every week that passes.

Let us count the ways.

Start with the absurd claim that liberals are big supporters of diversity and thats why they have to attack conservative Trump voters. No. Liberals are enemies of diversity.

Sure, they practically demand quotas on things like gender, gender identity, race, sexual preference and ethnic background. But that kind of surface diversity is the only kind they will tolerate. Alleged liberals are contemptuous and hostile to a diversity of thought or belief.

Before the election, Clinton famously called half of Trump supporters a basket of deplorables. Not the best line for somebody who said she was going to campaign for every vote.

But she was only reflecting how her supporters feel that those who dont pledge allegiance to their agenda are knuckle-draggers.

The litany of insults became so common that it became a badge of honor. Clinton opponents turned it into an acronym: SIXHIRB sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist and bigoted.

As Clinton and President Obama said a number of times, those who disagree with them are not who we are as Americans.

Got that? You dont belong in America. No wonder the heartland was willing to vote for anybody but Hillary.

Then there is arrogance. Obama campaigned and got media coverage for Hillary on the theme that I will not be on the ballot, but everything weve done is going to be on the ballot.

After Trump won, he said, I believe that we have better ideas. But I also believe that good ideas dont matter if people dont hear them.

Didnt hear them? When they were on the news every night? In his view, its impossible for anyone with a brain to disagree with him if they listen to him.

I witnessed that mindset multiple times at the local government level. People would come before a city council seeking something and if they didnt get their way they would insist that the council members didnt listen to us.

In Obamaworld and Clintonworld, the thinking is the same. They dont believe it is possible to hear what they are saying, consider it, then reject it.

Perhaps it is Obama, Clinton and their supporters who are not listening.

Progressives view cultural conservatives not as people with valid opinions but as an unenlightened alien species that needs to be told how to vote or not allowed to vote.

That arrogance trickles down to social media. Liberals talk about how divisive conservatives are, but more of them unfriend Facebook friends who defend Trump than the other way around.

There is incivility. They complain that Trump is not civil, and most of the time theyre right. But they are as ugly or worse than he is.

Slate columnist and CBS analyst Jamelle Boule wrote: There is no such thing as a good Trump voter. People voted for a racist who promised racist outcomes. They dont deserve your empathy.

Check out the video of the woman who threw a toddler-level tantrum when members of Wisconsins Electoral College delegation met to certify the results for Trump.

You sold out our country, the woman screamed. Every one of you, youre pathetic. You dont deserve to be in America. This is my America! This is MY America!

I hope those two, and thousands of others, remembered to pick up their Love Trumps Hate signs after expressing themselves with the kind of dignity and compassion they claim to be all about.

And then there is hypocrisy: Recall how Clinton supporters, confident that she would win, worried aloud that the loser would contest the results and undermine not just confidence in the system but democracy itself? They were right. It just wasnt Trump.

Film propagandist Michael Moore, cinemas most successful purveyor of fake news, offered to pay the $1,000 fine for any faithless Republican elector who would vote against the will of the majority in his or her state. Moore is worth an estimated $50 million.

Imagine the reverse that Clinton lost the popular vote but won on electoral votes, and a conservative multimillionaire offered to cover the fines of any electors who voted against her.

Remember how ferocious they were about how the Supreme Court needed a replacement for the late Justice Antonin Scalia? Now they say they are prepared to block any high court nominees for perhaps all of the Trump presidency.

There is more, but you get the idea. America is divided deeply divided. But it is not all the fault of Trump or his supporters.

Read more from the original source:
Taylor Armerding: Liberals also to blame for political divide - Joplin Globe

If you needed evidence of the complete arrogance the B.C. government is capable of displaying on the issue of campaign financing, Advanced Education Minister Andrew Wilkinson was happy to provide it this week.

The Liberals recent disclosure that it had raised $12.5-million in 2016, most of it on the backs of wealthy corporations and the richest people in the province, has fanned the flames once again around the issue of reforming an area of our electoral system that has become embarrassingly out of sync with the rest of the country.

While corporate and union donations, as well as cash-for-access dinners have been outlawed in most of Canada, here they continue to be embraced by the governing party. The degree to which B.C. remains a morally corrupt outlier on this front was recently the subject of a piece in The New York Times, no less.

Read more: B.C. NDP renews call for ban on corporate, union donations

Read more: B.C. Liberals post donations online; party raised $12.5-million in 2016

Read more: Controversial fundraiser leaves B.C. NDP as guilty as the Liberals

If you imagined this bit of unpleasant publicity might have at least made the B.C. Liberals twinge with regret, pause for even a slight second about their insistence on allowing big-city elites to have an outsized role in determining elections in the province, you would have imagined wrong.

We dont have limits in British Columbia and thats how it has been working now for decades, Mr. Wilkinson said proudly this week, when he was pushed to answer questions on the topic. Its a system that works and we believe that transparency is the issue.

In other words people: shut up.

Premier Christy Clark, who has remained uncharacteristically silent amid the latest uproar around the issue, has also been fond of saying that the system as is works. Who could deny that? But works for whom? It most certainly works for the pro-business Liberals, who have benefited enormously from it. They wont change because they believe, perhaps rightly, that this issue is not a priority for the vast swath of the public.

The Liberals dont care what is ethically right. That is the last thing they are concerned about. They care about winning, keeping power, at any cost. Period. Only when they judge that their grasp on the levers of government are threatened do they move on an issue.

Consequently, after months and months of doing nothing about the runaway housing market for fear of upsetting their donor friends in the development and real estate industries, the government had to move because of the public unrest the issue was creating. That clamour was viewed to be a risk to the partys electoral chances.

So, Ms. Clark reluctantly introduced a 15-per-cent foreign buyers tax. A bold move to get out in front of a serious issue it was not. A desperate decision to satisfy the braying mob is more like it.

But back to electoral reform.

One cant be but amused by the Liberals signature defence of the system as it exists: that they are transparent about how much money they bring in and who donates. What a ridiculous and pathetic justification that is.

First, the fact that the party is disclosing donations ahead of when Elections BC would make them public means nothing. The information is going to come out eventually anyway. So what if you make it public a few months ahead of that time. What does that change? Absolutely nothing.

The same applies to the real time reporting of donations, the Liberals have introduced with so much fanfare. So what if you disclose which millionaires have donated to your party in a 10-day period? Id be more interested in the party revealing who was at the latest $10,000-a-plate dinner the Premier sat down at in the dining room of a party supporter.

That is called cash for access, access everyday members of the public dont enjoy, could never enjoy. And that should never be the case. Select citizens should never enjoy more entre with those who run the province based on the size of their bank account, and the influence they wield.

But that is whats happening in B.C. The provincial Liberals cater to the ruling class. It is a symbiotic relationship. Here is some money to help ensure you guys stay in power, in return these millionaire donors get the government, and the policies that help ensure they continue to pad their massive bank accounts.

There is nothing about this of which the B.C. Liberals should be proud. It is a system that enriches the elites and perpetuates a power structure that ignores the average Joe and Jane.

Follow Gary Mason on Twitter: @garymasonglobe

Read the rest here:
BC Liberals display arrogance on the issue of campaign financing - The Globe and Mail

Ottawa Sun

Liberals will tax campground out of business Ottawa Sun However, now the Liberal government is unfairly targeting campground owners and other small operations by saying that they're too small to be a small business. Campground owners, they say, don't have enough employees to qualify. They are doing this ... and more »

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Liberals will tax campground out of business - Ottawa Sun

So much for unity not that it was ever a probability after the unprecedented election of Donald Trump.

Trump did his share to undermine it, of course. Before he took office this week, he managed to get into a pointless battle with U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., the civil rights icon; alarm European allies; and irritate adversaries like China.

It was enough to give dozens of Democrats an excuse, as if they needed one, to refuse to attend the inaugural. But Trump is not the only reason for the toxic divisions at the launch of his presidency.

Why Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election is still being hotly debated. But to those of us who arent in the Washington bubble or members of the media or government elite, it continues to become clearer with every week that passes.

Let us count the ways.

Start with the absurd claim that liberals are big supporters of diversity and thats why they have to attack conservative Trump voters. No, theyre not. Liberals are enemies of diversity.

Sure, they practically demand quotas on things like gender, gender identity, race, sexual preference and ethnic background. But that kind of surface diversity is the only kind they will tolerate. Alleged liberals or progressives (their preferred term) are both contemptuous and hostile to a diversity of thought or belief.

Before the election, Clinton famously called half of Trump supporters a basket of deplorables. Not the best line for somebody who claimed she was going to campaign for every vote.

But she was only reflecting how her supporters feel, that those who dont pledge allegiance to the Democratic agenda are essentially knuckle-draggers.

The litany of insults became so common that it became a badge of honor for Clinton opponents. They turned it into an acronym: SIXHIRB - sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist and bigoted.

As Clinton and President Obama said a number of times, those who disagree with them are not who we are as Americans.

Got that? You dont even belong in America. No wonder the heartland was willing to vote for anybody but Hillary.

Then there is arrogance. Obama campaigned - and got wall-to-wall media coverage - for Hillary on the theme that I will not be on the ballot, but everything weve done is going to be on the ballot.

Then, after Trump won, he said, I believe that we have better ideas. But I also believe that good ideas dont matter if people dont hear them.

Didnt hear them? When they were on the news every night? The reality is that, in his view, its impossible for anyone with a brain to disagree with him if they listen to him.

I witnessed that mindset multiple times at the local government level. People would come before a city council seeking something a policy change, rejection of a proposed development and if they didnt get their way they would insist that the council members didnt listen to us.

In Obamaworld and Clintonworld, the thinking is the same. They dont believe it is possible to hear what they are saying, consider it, then reject it.

Perhaps it is Obama, Clinton and their supporters who are not listening.

Progressives view cultural conservatives not as people with valid political opinions but as an unenlightened, exotic alien species who need to be told how to vote or not allowed to vote.

That arrogance trickles down to social media. Liberals forever talk about how divisive conservatives are, but more of them unfriend their Facebook friends who defend Trump than the other way around.

There is incivility. They complain that Trump is not civil, and most of the time theyre right. But then they are as ugly or worse than he is.

There is a saying, backed up by vast evidence, that conservatives think liberals are wrong. Liberals think conservatives are evil.

Slate columnist and CBS analyst Jamelle Boule wrote, there is no such thing as a good Trump voter. People voted for a racist who promised racist outcomes. They dont deserve your empathy.

Check out the video of the woman who threw a toddler-level tantrum when members of Wisconsins Electoral College delegation met to certify the results for Trump.

You sold out our country, the woman screamed. Every one of you, youre pathetic. You dont deserve to be in America. This is my America! This is MY America!

I hope those two, and thousands of others, remembered to pick up their Love Trumps Hate signs after expressing themselves with the kind of dignity and compassion they claim to be all about.

And then there is hypocrisy: Recall how Clinton supporters, confident that she would win, worried aloud that the loser would contest the results and undermine not just confidence in the system but democracy itself? They were right. It just wasnt Trump.

Film propagandist Michael Moore, cinemas most successful purveyor of fake news, offered to pay the $1,000 fine for any faithless Republican elector who would vote against the will of the majority in his or her state. Moore is worth an estimated $50 million.

Imagine the reverse that Clinton lost the popular vote but won on electoral votes, and a conservative multi-millionaire offered to cover the fines of any electors who voted against her.

Remember how ferocious they were about how the Supreme Court needed a replacement for the late Justice Antonin Scalia? Now they say they are prepared to block any high court nominees for perhaps all of the Trump presidency.

There is more, but you get the idea. America is divided deeply divided. But it is not all the fault of Trump or his supporters.

Taylor Armerding is an independent columnist. Contact him at t.armerding@verizon.net.

Read more from the original source:
Liberals deserve blame for toxic divide - Weatherford Democrat