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Betsy Johnson

SEASIDE In a rallying speech to district attorneys from across Oregon, state Sen. Betsy Johnson on Wednesday chastised House Majority Leader Jennifer Williamson and other progressives for their support of recently passed criminal justice bills.

One bill part of a larger effort to limit racial profiling by police and the justice system will classify first-time, low-level possession of illegal drugs such as heroin and methamphetamine as misdemeanors. Another intended to help curb an upward trend of prison use among women will lower presumptive prison sentences for theft and identity theft by nearly a third. Both bills await the signature of Gov. Kate Brown, who already has voiced her support.

Johnson spoke at the Seaside Civic and Convention Center to prosecutors gathered for a dinner reception, part of the Oregon District Attorneys Associations three-day summer conference.

If the safety and justice crowd keeps winning, there will be no safety, and there will be no justice especially for the poorer classes who are often preyed upon by criminals, Johnson said. To progressives, a victim and a criminal are moral equals.

Johnson, D-Scappoose, was the sole Senate Democrat to vote against the racial profiling bill and one of two to vote against the bill addressing women in prison.

Were looking the other way when drug addicts commit first-degree theft and identity theft, she said. And the victims? Theyre paying for these treatment programs and wraparound services.

While most Democrats and some Republicans across the country have conceded the war on drugs has failed, Johnson offered an alternative theory.

Actually, its been quite successful in the hands of the progressives, she said. They have used it to create one campaign after another to push their agenda.

Poke at House leadership

Johnson also excoriated Williamson, D-Portland, on several occasions during her nearly 20-minute speech for staunchly supporting both bills.

Johnson said her support for the bills was politically motivated and that, as a former defense attorney, the majority leader is not motivated to fight for crime victims.

Johnson, known for being more practical than idealogical, has a lengthy history of being thorny to fellow Democrats. She has blocked a number of bills by siding with Republicans and even considered switching to the Independent Party of Oregon in 2015.

She also has backed prosecutors throughout her time in the Legislature. In her speech, she praised Kevin Neely, a lobbyist for district attorneys who fought against the drug bills.

Prior to her speech Wednesday night, the district attorneys association surprised her with its Policymaker of the Year award.

She is the Oregon Legislatures most vocal and supportive advocate of prosecutors, said Rick Wesenberg, the Douglas County district attorney and the associations president.

Johnson challenged prosecutors to organize and fight back against progressives, who she says have put them on the ropes. She suggested sending out press releases to local constituents when they believe certain bills passed in the Legislature may make it more difficult to punish crimes.

What kind of world are we headed for when district attorneys are expected to act like defense attorneys? Johnson said. Who will stand up for victims? Not Jennifer Williamson and the Oregon Legislature.

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Sen. Johnson chides progressives on crime bills - Daily Astorian

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(JTA) An influential progressive political action committee denounced a bipartisan measuretargeting boycotts of Israel and its settlements.

MoveOn.org, an influential liberal public policy advocacy group and PAC that raises money for progressive political candidates, criticized the Israel Anti-Boycott Act on Twitter.

Regardless how you feel about BDS, Congress must reject action to criminalize free speech and peaceful protest. The Democrats in House and Senate must say no to H.R. 1697/S. 720, MoveOn.org tweeted, referring to the House and Senate versions of the bill.

Free speech and peaceful protest are integral to democracy, the group added.

The bill, introduced in March in both the House and the Senate,would expand 1970s-era laws that make illegal compliance with boycotts of Israel sponsored by governments laws inspired at the time by the Arab League boycott of Israel, to include boycotts backed by international organizations.Those adhering to boycotts would be subject to fines.

It also targets efforts by the United Nations and the European Union to distinguish between products manufactured in Israel and West Bank settlements.

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Moveon.org Calls On Progressives To KIll Anti-BDS Bill - Forward

Arnold Ahlert Jul. 20, 2017

Since the principles undergirding Americas founding are beyond mortal law, they are beyond the reach of the progressives and the administrative state. Hence the war on the founding values, beliefs, and traditions was and is intended to, among other things, stop legitimate inquiry into and teaching of first principles or purposes. They are to be made intellectually and culturally off-limits. Consequently, what is left is only one acceptable and overarching agenda the progressive agenda. Mark Levin, from his book, Rediscovering Americanism: And the Tyranny of Progressivism

Perhaps nothing is more toxic than a progressive ideology that has become the default position that millions of unwilling people are expected to oblige. And nothing facilitates that forced subservience more than political correctness.

Yet what, precisely, is political correctness? It is totalitarianism promoted as morality.

Thus one is not merely wrong for challenging the progressive status quo on same-sex marriage, transgenderism, white privilege, illegal immigration, global warming, hate speech, or a host of other leftist causes. One is evil, and the appropriate label defining what particular evil is applied: homophobic, transphobic, racist, nativist, anti-science, fascist, etc.

Labeling one as evil as opposed to wrong is critical. Wrong leaves room for debate. Evil makes debate unnecessary and entrenches the progressive default position as a result.

It is an ever-expanding entrenchment. Words can have a powerful effect on your nervous system, insists Northeastern University psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett. Certain types of adversity, even those involving no physical contact, can make you sick, alter your brain even kill neurons and shorten your life.

What to do? The scientific findings I described above provide empirical guidance for which kinds of controversial speech should and shouldnt be acceptable on campus and in civil society, Barrett asserts. In short, the answer depends on whether the speech is abusive or merely offensive.

And who gets to define which is which? There is a difference between permitting a culture of casual brutality and entertaining an opinion you strongly oppose, she states. The former is a danger to a civil society (and to our health); the latter is the lifeblood of democracy. Thus, Barrett insists, its reasonable to completely prevent provocateur and hatemonger Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking on campus because hes abusive, while political scientist Charles Murray is acceptable because you might find his view to be repugnant and misguided, but its only offensive.

In other words, what Barrett and her fellow progressives define as abusive must be rendered intellectually and culturally off-limits.

Attacks on the First Amendment are merely the tip of the progressive spear. Reality itself must also be aligned to suit progressive sensibilities. In Wales, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) is demanding that higher education teachers undergo gender diversity training, warning that the failure to use proper pronouns to address non-binary persons could precipitate legal action.

Jasper Williams, LGBT+ officer for NUS Wales, reveals the unbridled arrogance behind the effort. She singles out a teacher who couldnt get anything that wasnt male or female, telling BBC News he made comments making it sound like non-binary genders [are] made up and like a fantasy idea.

Thus by implication, biological and chromosomal realities are now fantasy ideas that must be rendered inoperable by force of law. The same force of law the Obama administration unilaterally imposed on schools around the entire nation when it insisted Title IX of the 1964 Civil Rights Act gave transgender students the right to use restrooms and locker rooms matching their gender identities using the threat of withholding federal education funds as a hammer to enforce its guidelines. The Trump administration rescinded the directive, but there is no doubt progressives will reinstate it if they regain power.

As far as progressives are concerned, the transgender science is settled.

And theyve got the documentation to prove it. The evidence is clear the American Left succeeded in lobbying the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to eliminate some of the sexual identity disorders from their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), columnist Mark A. Hewitt explains.

The end game is also clear. If you get enough votes, he adds, you can negate, soften, redefine, and ultimately legitimize any of the mental disorders.

Toward what end? To achieve a radical break from Americas heritage, Levin asserts, further explaining progressive ideology is an elitist-driven counterrevolution to the American Revolution, in which the sovereignty of the individual, natural law, natural rights, and the civil society built on a foundation of thousands of years of enlightened thinking and human experience would be drastically altered and even abandoned for an ideological agenda broadly characterized as historical progress.

As Victor Davis Hanson explains, such progress has brought the nation to a dangerous climax in which the consequences of globalization, the growth of the deep state, changing demographics, open borders, the rise of a geographic apartheid between blue and red states, and the institutionalization of a permanent coastal political and culture elite and the reaction to all that are tearing apart the country.

And yet again, the progressive default position dominates, irrespective of the consequences. It does not matter that the ossified European social model does not work and leads to collective decline in the standard of living, Hanson states. The world knows that from seeing the implosion of Venezuela and Cuba, or the gradual decline of the EU and the wreckage of its Mediterranean members, or the plight of blue states such as Illinois and California.

Despite this plethora of evidence, Hanson believes the near-religious idea of egalitarianism progressives cherish has all but won the war against liberty.

Hanson is somewhat in error. Egalitarianism is a means to an end. The end is suppression of the masses by all-knowing elitists who grant themselves the near-religious power of enforcing equality of outcome and enjoying the unequal bounty engendered by their noble tyranny. Elitists who come to a unanimous conclusion regarding a historical record replete with ossified social models, collective declines and societal wreckage:

The wrong people were in charge.

And the war is not over. Far from progress, the trajectory of progressives toward indolence, malice, violence, and unrestrained sexuality is as old as society, columnist E.M. Cadwaladr asserts. It is just paganism with cell phones added.

It is paganism that may ultimately be fatal. Through some process of increasing entropy, failed memory management, or unanticipated side effects, the status quo the one dominated by the Left is collapsing, writes PJ Medias Richard Fernandez.

Fernandez attributes that collapse to a higher power. God killed the Left, he asserts. Of course one could legitimately use some other term. Reality, consequences, the laws of nature, economics, even truth will do.

So will terms like natural law, natural rights and civil society, all of which will prove far more enduring than progressive ideology.

Why? Because only God is God, Cadwaladr explains. Politicians, pundits, and opinion makers are not.

Thus, progressive efforts to create utopia are nothing more than monumental hubris. And when that hubris is rejected by a horde of deplorables, it explains why so many formerly tolerant progressives are now full of anger and hate and why Liberty and first principles will ultimately prevail.

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Defeating Progressive Ideology - Patriot Post

Liberals don't just hate President Trump; lots of them don't even like the idea of being in the company of his supporters.

That's the big takeaway from a new Pew Research Center survey, which is just the latest indicator of our remarkably tribal and partisan politics. And when it comes to Trump, it's difficult to overstate just how tribal the left is and how much distaste he engenders. Indeed, that distaste apparently extends even to people whodecided they would like to vote for Trump.

The poll shows almost half of liberal Democrats 47 percent say that if a friend supported Trump, it would actually put a strain on their friendship. Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters more broadly, the number is 35 percent. White and more-educated Democrats are more likely to feel that it's tough to even be friends with a Trump supporter.

And while partisanshipand tribalism are pretty bipartisan things in American politics today, Democrats are actually substantially less able to countenancefriends who supported the wrong candidate:Just 13 percent of Republicans say a friend's support of Hillary Clinton would strain their relationship.

Part of the reason for the imbalance is likely that liberals tend to live in more homogeneous places and don't even associate with conservatives. Another Pew study last year showed a whopping47 percent of people who planned to vote for Clinton didn't have any close friends who were Trump supporters. By contrast, 31 percent of Trump supporters said they didn't have any friends who backed Clinton.

Because of the way our population is sorted, with liberals clustered in urban areas and Republicans more spread out, Democrats tend to be more insulated from dissenting political voices. So perhaps it's no surprise that they don't hear and don't want to hear those voices coming from their friends' mouths.

The prevalent belief on the left that Trump isn't just a bad president or person, but is also racist, xenophobic and misogynistic is undoubtedly at play here too. And at one point during the 2016 presidential campaign, Clinton even suggested half of Trump's supportersweredeplorables who were also racist or xenophobic or misogynistic. (Her campaign later clarified that she meant only people at Trump's rallies. But still.)

Despite that, it's noteworthy just how many people think supporting the nominee of a major American political party reflects poorly upon the people they know. Fully 46 percent of Americans who voted for president chose Trump, and that isn't really an acceptable position for a friend to take for half of liberal Democrats.

One final data point from the new Pew study: 68 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters say they find it stressful and frustrating to talk to people who have a different opinion of Trump. About half 52 percent of Republican and GOP-leaning voters say the same.

When people ask why politicians in Washington can't get along, this is why: Americans can't even talk to each other about politics anymore withoutgetting flustered.

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Nearly half of liberals don't even like to be around Trump supporters - Washington Post

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Former Guantanamo Bay prisoner Omar Khadr, 30, is seen in Mississauga, Ont., on July 6, 2017.

Support for the Liberal government is still strong among Canadians, despite backlash following the Omar Khadr settlement.

A poll conducted by Abacus Data found that if an election was held today, 43 per cent of decided voters would vote for the Liberal Party, while 31 per cent would vote for Conservatives, and 16 per cent would opt for the NDP. For context, Liberals garnered 40 per cent of votes to win the October 2015 federal election.

Thursdays poll, which was conducted after news broke of the governments$10.5-million settlementwith Khadr, reveals 48 per cent of Canadians approve of Justin Trudeaus government while 34 per cent disapprove.

WATCH:Trudeau remains firm that paying out Omar Khadr the better option

Many Canadians have voiced outrage that the Liberal government granted Khadr a Canadian citizen who spent 10 years in Guantanamo Bay settlement money and an apology for any wrongful treatment.

But Abacus Datas CEO David Coletto explained the aftermath of the Khadr controversy hasnt changed much for the government.

So far, even in the direct aftermath of the decision to settle with Omar Khadr, we find little evidence of a shift in public affinity for the PM or the federal government, he said in a press release.

READ MORE:Canadians donate to family of slain U.S. soldier in wake of Omar Khadr settlement

Despite a series of difficult decisions by the federal government, we find little evidence that Canadians feel any worse about the government today than they did in May.

Approval of the government is mostly uniform across the country, except for thePrairie provinces Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan where more respondents disapprove than approve of the Liberals.

READ MORE:Fake news broadcast by media-bashing Tory MP deleted from Facebook

The highest approval rating is in Atlantic Canada at 60 per cent. The lowest is in Alberta at 37 per cent.

The Abacus Data report goes on to say that reasons for support largely centre on the economy, which many Canadians believe is picking up steam. About 68 per cent of Canadians believe the economy is growing the highest number since the 2015 election.

WATCH:Tory leader Andrew Scheer talks Omar Khadr

Coletto noted that these results confirm a new era of Canadian politics, where the governments performance is constantly compared to U.S. President Donald Trumps administration. He explained that this leaves the Conservatives with a complicated task.

READ MORE:Omar Khadr payout: 71% of Canadians say government made the wrong call

Very few Canadians are looking for a Canadian version of Trump or even Trump-lite, he said.

So, the choice for Conservative politicians is how to criticize this governments fairly popular agenda, distance itself from the Trump administration, while at the same time offering a positive alternative to Trudeau and his team.

While the Khadr case may not have affected Trudeaus approval or support, a recent poll by the Angus Reid Institute did find that most Canadians disapproved of Trudeaus handling of the case.

WATCH:Judge dismisses request to freeze Omar Khadrs assets

According to the July poll, 71 per cent of Canadiansthink the Liberal government should have fought a legal case with Khadr rather than settling out of court. They added it should have been left to the courts to decide if Khadr was wrongfully imprisoned.

Only 29 per cent of Canadians thought the Liberals did the right thing by offering an apology and compensation to Khadr.

The Abacus Data poll was conducted online between July 14 and 18, 2017, and completed by 2,036 Canadians. The poll is considered accurate+/- 2.2%, 19 times out of 20.

2017Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

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Liberals' support still strong despite Khadr settlement: poll - Globalnews.ca