Mediaboss Marketing

SALT LAKE CITY Eleven Republican candidates running to replace U.S. Rep. Jason Chaffetz said Friday theyd all like to scale back the U.S. governments spending and repeal President Barack Obamas health care law if theyre elected.

The candidates participated in two debates at an Orem high school on Friday night, with a top-tier debate involving the five candidates who polled highest among GOP delegates who will winnow the crowded field at a Saturday convention.

During the top-tier debate, the candidates made almost no mention an issue dominating Washington the widening probe into Russias election meddling, and possible ties between President Donald Trumps campaign and Russia.

One candidate, former state lawmaker Chris Herrod, referenced the investigations in his opening statement as he discussed his time teaching at universities in Ukraine in the 1990s and his familiarity with the former Soviet Union.

He called Russian President Vladimir Putin a very good chess player who has out-maneuvered the press.

We need to get over the talks of collusion and actually get to the issues at hand, Herrod said, which was met with applause.

A few candidates spoke of their admiration of Chaffetz, a Republican known for his hard-charging investigation of Democrat Hillary Clinton. When he announced his intention to resign at the end of June, citing a desire to be with his family, the pending vacancy in the heavily Republican 3rd Congressional District drew a number of lawmakers, lawyers and others who jumped at a chance to run in an open race considered a sure bet for the GOP.

The top-ranked candidates, which also included Provo Mayor John Curtis, state Sens. Deidre Henderson and Margaret Dayton, and Salt Lake City lawyer Stewart Peay, all spoke of wanting to repeal Utahs new Bears Ears National Monument or curbing the law that Obama used to declare the 1.3-million acre (5,300 square kilometers) monument in December.

Environmental groups and a coalition of tribal leaders say it gives needed protections to ancient ruins and sacred tribal lands, but many Utah Republicans consider the monument an overly broad, unnecessary layer of federal control that will hurt local economies by closing the area to new energy.

Henderson said the monument declaration was outrageous and an egregious land grab.

Dayton said the 1906 Antiquates Act, which allows presidents to declare monuments, has been abused by presidents and locked up too much land, including another southern Utah monument, the 1.9 million acre (7,700 square kilometers) Grand Staircase-Escalante.

That monument, created in 1996, closed off too much land that could have helped the local economy, including one of the countrys largest known coal reserves, Dayton said.

Peay said if he was elected, one of his first moves would be to introduce a bill giving Utah an exemption from the Antiquities Act similar to carve-outs requiring Congress to approve any new monuments in Alaska or Wyoming.

The candidates were all asked which federal programs theyd cut and gave very similar answers, describing deep cuts or the elimination of the U.S. Department of Education and reforms to Social Security.

Republicans will trim the packed field at Saturdays convention, where about 1,000 GOP delegates will settle on one candidate. That person will advance to an August primary election, where theyll compete against candidates who opted to gather voter signatures.

Curtis took both routes.

Tanner Ainge, a son of Boston Celtics general manager and former Brigham Young University basketball standout Danny Ainge, is skipping the convention but competing in the primary election. Because Tanner Ainge is skipping the delegate convention, he wasnt invited to participate in Friday nights debate.

The six lower-polling candidates who appeared in the earlier debate largely agreed on the issues and earned applause for calls to repeal Obamas health care law and balance the federal budget.

Those candidates included political activist Debbie Aldrich, state Rep. Brad Daw of Orem, lawyer Damian Kidd, defense contractor Paul Fife, Murray resident Shayne Row and Keith Kuder, an emergency roadside assistance advocate.

Utah Democrats will narrow their field of three candidates at their own convention Saturday.

See the rest here:
Republicans running to replace Chaffetz to debate Friday night - Daily Herald

Here are some offenses that can get you killed by a hate crime these days in America the Broken:

And you know the national mood has taken a turn toward the surreal when MSNBCs Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski who helped make fellow New Yorker Donald Trump the GOP nominee and now constantly ratchet up the hate by insulting, attacking and mocking Trump and his supporters call on the country to bring down the temperature.

While I consider myself center-right, due largely to an upbringing in the farmland of Central California and the fact that Im part of a community of Mexican-Americans who are less liberal than you might think, my relationship with the GOP is not good.

When writing about immigration, I hammer Republicans for either being racist, pandering to racists, or tolerating racism in their ranks. I was Never Trump before it was cool in fact, from the moment two years ago this week, when Donald Trump declared his candidacy and then declared people like my Mexican grandfather rapists and criminals in order to scare up votes from white people. In the last 24 months, Ive called Trump every name in the book even if, after he was elected, I caught grief from hardcore lefties for acknowledging reality and calling him president.

But my low opinion of the GOP doesnt prevent me from recognizing evil when it rears its head on the left and condemning the liberals who stoke it.

#RepublicanLivesMatter.

After this weeks ghastly attack on Republican members of Congress while they were practicing for a charity baseball game a cowardly hate crime that wounded five people, including House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La. we must hold liberals and Democrats accountable for the times they go too far.

And, in the era of Trump, they often go too far. Its as if the lefties feel that Trump supporters are such a subhuman life form that they can be attacked without mercy. Whether these sanctimonious bullies are in Congress, the media, Hollywood or academia, theyre much too comfortable with demonizing conservatives, pandering to those who demonize conservatives, or tolerating those in their ranks who demonize conservatives.

When Ivanka Trump casually said recently that she was shocked at the level of viciousness encountered by her father and her family, the left responded, well, viciously by attacking the first daughter for daring to even raise the issue.

On late-night talk shows or Sunday morning television or star-studded awards ceremonies, this modus operandi has become a shorthand way for condescending liberals and Democrats many of whom are coastal elites to show the folks in flyover country, and those of us who were raised on farms and ranches, that theyre better, smarter, more enlightened and sophisticated than we are.

Just like Republicans resist claiming the racists among them, Democrats refuse to take responsibility for a wayward disciple like James T. Hodgkinson. The gunman who was shot to death by heroic Capitol Police officers assigned to Scalises security detail was a left-wing extremist who volunteered for Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, harshly criticized Trump and other Republicans, and parroted Democratic Party talking points. He frequently wrote angry letters to newspapers and posted anti-Republican rants on social media and left behind a paper trail longer and wider than a three-lane-highway.

When asked to contemplate the possibility that their vitriolic rhetoric against Republicans inspired this terrible and bigoted act of violence in the same way that liberals insisted, in 1995, that conservative talk radio had inspired the Oklahoma City bombing Democrats parse words and split hairs, make excuses and change the subject. It wasnt their hate speech that caused this, they say. But guns. Or mental illness.

I even heard a few sickos on Facebook say how poetic it was that Republican members of Congress would find themselves sprayed with bullets, and ducking for cover, given their support for the National Rifle Association.

And lets not forget the bighearted humanitarian who, after the shooting, sent Rep. Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y., a threatening email with the charming subject line: One down, 216 to go.

This nightmare is not over. Our society is made up of different political views that have been delicately stitched together over many decades. And now it is coming apart at the seams.

Ruben Navarrette is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.

Published June 17, 2017, midnight in: baseball game, Donald Trump, hate crime, James Hodgkinson, Joe Scarborough, liberals, mika brzezinski, Rep. Steve Scalise, shooting

Originally posted here:
Ruben Navarrette Jr: Liberals must bring down the temperature - The Spokesman-Review

Hot off announcing the first deal with an individual province under a new national framework signed earlier in the week, Jean-Yves Duclos gamely tried to paint it as the start of a process that will lead to affordable child care for all.

Eventually, well get to universality, the federal Minister of Families, Children and Social Development insisted in an interview on Friday in Toronto, and there is no tension between that goal and the sort of agreement he had just unveiled alongside his counterpart in Kathleen Wynnes government. Sure, federal funds $435-million for Ontario over three years, in this case will mostly go toward daycare subsidies for relatively few low-income or socially challenged families. But all the coming collaboration, he said, will create momentum leading to more far-reaching investment.

Maybe it will, one day. Just not with the urgency briefly displayed by a different federal Liberal regime over a decade ago.

In 2005, as Mr. Duclos is surely tired of being reminded, Paul Martin pledged $5-billion more than five years to launch a national commitment comparable to Quebecs subsidized daycare for all. Even though access and affordability have become more dire since then monthly costs for infants approaching $2,000 in some cities, if parents can find spaces Justin Trudeaus government is offering less money annually ($7.5-billion over 11 years) targeted more narrowly.

The scaled-back ambition, as some parents have to consider leaving jobs because they scarcely earn enough to cover daycare alone, may be incongruous with both Mr. Trudeaus much-ballyhooed feminism and his endless talk of the middle class and those seeking to join it.

But plenty has changed in the Liberals calculus about universal daycares merits since last they were in office some policy-related, much of it political.

Mr. Duclos, a respected economist new to politics, was more inclined to cite the policy considerations. He pointed out, for instance, that data around early learning and child care in Canada is both scarce and of poor quality.

Some of the new federal cash is being allocated toward information-gathering, to help with the momentum.

His main defence against complaints that the governments investment is too modest is that Ottawa is spending much more on child care now than back in Mr. Martins day that is, if one counts not just direct investment, but also more general transfer payments to the provinces, tax deductions, and the Canada Child Benefit.

Its that last one a centrepiece of the Liberals 2015 election platform that speaks to where politics come in.

After Stephen Harper replaced Mr. Martins plan with his Universal Child Care Benefit, Mr. Trudeau could have made the case to voters that Mr. Martin was right and Mr. Harper wrong, since daycare costs for many Canadians had continued to skyrocket such that the monthly benefit offered only a drop in the bucket. Instead, the Liberals effectively embraced Mr. Harpers premise that parents rather than government should decide where money goes introducing their own version of the benefit that costs billions more annually, with more for lower- and middle-income earners and less for the top 10 per cent.

Given that they do not generally share Mr. Harpers ideological aversion to social-policy interventionism, the Liberals were tacitly acknowledging that they considered universal daycare a political loser. And they certainly were not alone in assessing that, even though daycare is a pressing problem in many Canadians lives, it is hard to persuade enough voters a political party can provide a necessary, activist fix.

Even as Tom Mulcair ran in that 2015 campaign on something akin to what Mr. Martin had introduced, members of his NDP campaign team acknowledged their research showed it did not resonate with a sufficient number of their target voters. And as with the Liberals 10 years earlier, who lost to the Tories, the results seemed to bear that out, at least at the national level. (The recent platform of British Columbias New Democrats, on the verge of leading a minority government, included $10/day daycare.)

The big challenge is convincing any voter they would benefit personally. Confidence in governments to deliver big, long-term programs is low to begin with. No parents grappling with daycare costs as universal coverage was announced would expect it to be in place in time to help them. And few of the future parents who would benefit would likely have it top of mind when voting.

In the interview, Mr. Duclos said that when he spoke to a seniors group this week, he was surprised to find support for the new federal-provincial plan, among people attuned to their sons and daughters child-care challenges.

That raised the prospect that at some point, if affordability keeps getting worse and worse, the multiplier effect from each parent struggling to make ends meet will be enough to compel a more comprehensive response.

But for now, Mr. Trudeaus Liberals are settling for enough on daycare to ease their social consciences and prevent the NDP from accusing them of not doing anything.

What they are doing should not be shrugged off as Mr. Duclos argued, it makes sense to start with investment in high-need families likely to reap the most benefit from easier daycare access. Its just a much slower start than the one their party had last decade, before it ran into an electoral wall.

Follow Adam Radwanski on Twitter: @aradwanski

Read the original here:
For Trudeau's Liberals, universal daycare is a distant dream - The Globe and Mail

Leading Democrats in the U.S. Congress have warned President Donald Trump against firing the Justice Department special counsel who is investigating alleged Russian meddling in the presidential election.

After a close Trump associate earlier this week said Trump was "considering" firing Robert Mueller, who was appointed special counsel last month, the White House said Trump had no intention to do so though Trump has the "right" to do so.

Still, since Trump fired former FBI Director James Comey, who was overseeing the Russia probe little more than a month ago, the White House comments have stirred concern among members of Congress that Mueller might get the same treatment if the investigation goes against the president.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is also investigating the ties between Russia and the Trump campaign, said on June 16 she was "increasingly concerned" Trump would try to fire not only Mueller, but also the man who appointed him, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

"The message the president is sending through his tweets is that he believes the rule of law doesn't apply to him, and that anyone who thinks otherwise will be fired," Feinstein said.

"He's in for a rude awakening" if he thinks he can shut down the investigation that way, she added. "Even his staunchest supporters will balk at such a blatant effort to subvert the law."

Although the president is unlikely to be indicted if Mueller's investigation finds any criminal wrongdoing, Mueller's findings could lead to calls for impeachment in Congress, where a few Democrats are already pushing for impeachment.

Democrats note that after the Justice Department appointed a special prosecutor to investigate the Watergate break-in during the in the 1970s, then-President Richard Nixon ordered the department to fire the special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, prompting his attorney general and deputy attorney general both to resign in what became known as the "Saturday Night Massacre."

Nixon later resigned rather than face impeachment.

The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee on June 16 called on Congress to "unite to stop" Trump if he tried to fire Rosenstein or Mueller.

Trump "believes that he has the power to fire anyone in government he chooses and for any reason," said Representative Adam Schiff, whose committee is also investigating Russia-Trump ties.

Trump has fueled the concern in Congress by repeatedly calling the congressional and executive investigations into his campaign's ties with Russia a "witch-hunt."

"You are witnessing the single greatest WITCH HUNT in American political history -- led by some very bad and conflicted people!" Trump tweeted on June 16.

This week, Trump also attacked what he called a "phony story" in The Washington Post that said Mueller's investigation had been expanded to include an inquiry into whether Trump's firing of Comey amounted to an illegal attempt to obstruct justice.

The tweets reflect Trump's increasing anger over the investigations, which Trump believes are biased against him and are aimed at forcing him out of the presidency, the Associated Press reported on June 16, citing anonymous White House aides.

Feinstein said an angry Trump had "embarked on an effort to undermine anyone with the ability to bring any misdeeds to light," and the Senate shouldn't let that happen.

Link:
US Democrats Warn Trump Against Firing Special Counsel Mueller - RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty

Story Highlights

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- More than a decade into her tenure as chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel has a 2-to-1 more positive image among U.S. Democrats than among Republicans. Fifty-five percent of Democrats say they have a favorable opinion, compared with 23% of Republicans. Many Americans (41%) say they don't know enough about her to have an opinion.

Americans Have Mixed Reaction to German Chancellor Angela Merkel

Do you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of German Chancellor Angela Merkel?

These findings, from a June 7-11 Gallup poll, represent Gallup's first measure of Merkel's image in the U.S.

Merkel, a former research scientist, has been in power since late 2005, when George W. Bush was in the White House. The two leaders enjoyed good relations while Bush was in office, and that goodwill continued when Barack Obama became president. Obama said Merkel was his "closest international partner" during his eight years in the White House. Merkel was Time magazine's "Person of the Year" in 2015 in recognition of her stewardship over a troubled European Union economy.

Earlier this year, Merkel traveled to Washington to meet with President Donald Trump. She also interacted with the president during the G-7 summit last month. The summit was contentious due to Trump's refusal to back the Paris climate agreement, which took effect last year.

Perhaps reflecting Merkel's distant relationship with Trump and her closer ties to Obama, Democrats' views of Merkel are much more positive than Republicans'. A majority of Democrats (55%) have a favorable opinion of the German chancellor, while 10% have an unfavorable opinion. Independents' views (37% favorable, 21% unfavorable) are roughly the same as the national average.

This support among U.S. Democrats is unique partly because Merkel's Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union party is considered "right of center" in Germany -- though Merkel's close association with Obama may endear her to Democrats in the U.S. despite her political leanings in Germany.

The last time Gallup asked about a German chancellor was when Gerhard Schroeder had just been re-elected in 2002 after a single four-year term, far less than Merkel's 11-year tenure today. At that time, 16% in the U.S. viewed Schroeder favorably and 22% unfavorably, with 62% expressing no opinion.

Postgraduates Favor Merkel Most

Americans' familiarity with Merkel varies by education level. While 20% of those with postgraduate education have never heard of or have no opinion of Merkel, this jumps to 54% among those with a high school diploma or less.

Americans' Favorable Ratings of Angela Merkel, by Education

Those with more education are significantly more likely than those with less education to view Merkel favorably.

Bottom Line

Despite the U.S. media covering Angela Merkel more often over the past few months, more than two in five U.S. adults do not know who she is or have no opinion of her. She is likely to remain in the news throughout 2017, and beyond, if her party wins the German federal election on Sept. 24.

Merkel is a pivotal figure in the current struggles over the future of the European Union. She will act as the point person for the EU when it negotiates the United Kingdom's departure after the 2016 Brexit vote.

Trump's opponents and critics have described Angela Merkel as "the leader of the free world" since he took office. It remains to be seen, however, if this so-called free world leader will ever become a household name in the United States.

Results for this Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted June 7-11, 2017, with a random sample of 1,009 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. For results based on the total sample of national adults, the margin of sampling error is 4 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. All reported margins of sampling error include computed design effects for weighting.

Each sample of national adults includes a minimum quota of 70% cellphone respondents and 30% landline respondents, with additional minimum quotas by time zone within region. Landline and cellular telephone numbers are selected using random-digit-dial methods.

View survey methodology, complete question responses and trends.

Learn more about how the Gallup Poll Social Series works.

Here is the original post:
Angela Merkel Viewed More Positively Among Democrats Than GOP - Gallup