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Tuesday night, Sen. Bernie Sanders (DVt.) and Rep. John Conyers (DMich.) met with a crowd of 2,000 at the Fellowship Chapel in Detroit to discuss their new bill on universal healthcare. The event also became a rally for progressive values as cheers of Bernie 2020 came from the audience along with multiple standing ovations.

Conyers said his Medicare for All bill now has 117 cosponsors. He emphasized the government needs to combat high youth unemployment rates as well.

"There are two fundamental human rights in our great democracy: everyone should have health care from the minute they're born, and then of course, after you get born, you got to get a job," he said.

Conyers also discussed water activism, referencing instances when Detroits water has been shut off, stating it was a U.N. human rights violation.

Sanders touched upon the Charlottesville violence, as he criticized President Donald Trumps both sides argument. What was scary to U.S. citizens, he said, is that the United States has seen Nazis and white supremacists before, but have never seen a president Democrat or Republican who could not condemn them.

There are no nice Nazis, he said.

Sanders moved on to echo Conyers speech on universal healthcare. He also added the government should invest in education to combat youth unemployment and automatically register 18 year olds to vote, arguing his ideals are not radical if other countries do them as well.

During the Q&A session, an audience member asked if progressives should make their own party, leaving behind the Democrats and Republicans. Sanders, who is the longest running Independent senator in the United States, said while he welcome critiques of the Democrat party, it would not be accurate to equate them to the Republicans.

Dont lump Democrats and Republicans together, he said, explaining he made the choice to work with Democrats so the conservative party does not have another four years. He also emphasized the wish for the Democrats to open to the working class.

Vibha Venkatesha, a Wayne State University 2015 alum, said she came to the townhall interested in hearing about Sanders and Conyers healthcare policies. She wanted to see more about the Medicare for All push.

A lot of Democrats rally about keeping the Affordable Care Actwhich I agree with and I am on the Affordable Care ActI really wanted to see if there is any push to go beyond that, she said.

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Progressives rally in Detroit at Bernie Sanders, John Conyers townhall - The Michigan Daily

Paul Waldman, a senior writer for the American Prospect and a contributor to the Washington Posts Plum Line column, is out with a melodramatic performance piece tied to excerpts from Hillary Clintons forthcoming book. It was headlined: Has Hillary Clinton abased herself sufficiently to satisfy her critics?

The column instantly received praise from Democratic strategists and commentators for its unsubtle attack on people, whom Neera Tanden, Joan Walsh, or Mark Moulitsas might have labeled alt-left (except now that President Donald Trump used it to draw a false equivalency with white supremacists in Charlottesville, theyre a bit more careful when it comes to deploying it).

The central argument is that Clinton is repeatedly asked to apologize for failing to defeat Trump because she is a woman. Presidential candidates Mitt Romney, John McCain, John Kerry, or Al Gore never had to get down on their knees and beg forgiveness for their failures every time they appeared in public after losing their presidential elections.

He also argues Clinton has taken responsibility for her failure, and yet, it is not good enough for reporters. Much of the piece is spent on the mainstream media and how cable news spent time on a book by Peter Schweitzer called Clinton Cash, which made Clinton look corrupt. And of course, there were the damn emailsan orgy of coverage of Clintons emails.

Waldmans performance piece is undermined by the fact that he is not specific at all when claiming that there are people demanding a ritual begging of forgiveness from Hillary Clinton.

One can gather that people who share Waldmans perspective are upset about the media and how they covered Clinton, and they believe this played a significant role in the outcome of the 2016 Election. But then the column should be headlined: Has Hillary Clinton abased herself sufficiently to satisfy the media? Instead, it is abstractly aimed at critics.

Are these Trump supporters? Progressives or Democratic socialists who still fervently back Senator Bernie Sanders? Communists or full-blooded socialists? Is this a left-wing problem or a right-wing problem or both?

Maybe, Waldman and others are convinced the problem is so pervasive that it does not matter who is doing it. However, there are next to no critics named, and the only example offered is Clinton Cash, which the New York Times and Washington Post struck a deal to cover, even though it contained several falsehoods about the extent of the Bill and Hillary Clintons corruption.

This would not be a topic of discussion currently if Clinton was not in the early stages of hyping her book, What Happened, on her election campaign. She wants the public to see her campaign from her perspective, but consequently, that is going to result in critics questioning her assertions because that is what people do with politicians.

Waldman would have Sanders progressives and others with valid critiques silence themselves because apparently there is some need to guard Clinton from being perpetually vulnerable. Waldmans framing implies she is not a strong enough woman to stand up for herself, even though she was one of the most powerful Democratic politicians in the recent United States history.

This argument is born from the same detestable and intellectually dishonest place that birthed the Bernie Bro label used to smear those who challenged Clinton from the left during the election. In fact, Waldman wrote a piece for the American Prospect on June 27, 2016, called The Last Bernie Bro?

Waldman invoked the reports of Sanders supporters willing to vote for Trump. He also added, How many Sanders supporters are there who wont decide to vote for Clinton until Bernie says its OK to do so? The number gets smaller every day. And if he waits long enough, he could find that almost none of them are still waiting with him.

He ostentatiously quotes an excerpt (that is new) from her forthcoming book: Every day that I was a candidate for president, I knew that millions of people were counting on me, and I couldnt bear the idea of letting them down but I did. I couldnt get the job done, and Ill have to live with that for the rest of my life.

Waldman jibes, Is that abject enough for you?

It is as if all the statements people made that Waldman and other Democrats despise must be apologized for retroactively because the public now has a truly clear-cut statement from Clinton that she had a job to do and did not succeed.

On top of that, Waldman neglects to include statements like, I take responsibility for every decision I made, but thats not why I lost, which she uttered at the Code Conference in June. She blamed the Russian government, WikiLeaks, and Trump for weaponizing information, and concocted a kooky unsubstantiated theory about voters in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania doing Google searches for WikiLeaks to find fake news on the released emails.

Clinton contended the Democratic National Committees data operation was mediocre to poor, nonexistent, [and] wrong. She maintained she had to fund the operation to keep it from dying.

Andrew Therriault, the former DNC director of data science, reacted, Irony of her bashing DNC data: our models never had MI/WI/PA looking even close to safe. Her team thought they knew better.

He added, Also, thats pretty precious when she couldnt have raised all [her money for campaigning] without the DNCs higher limits as a laundering vehicle.

Why must anyone engage in a crass form of paternalism, this pseudo-feminist thinking that cheapens feminism, and ignore this aspect of Clintons responses to critics?

Every candidate, even those who win, makes lots of mistakes. There are no perfect campaigns, Waldman rationalizes. He concludes with a sentence that suggests the last thing we should care about is whether Clinton apologizes sufficiently for losing.

This really is not about Clinton. She can write a book, go on tour, and tell all the world about why she thinks she lost. She has nothing meaningful to offer anyone struggling to resist Trump nor does she have a meaningful alternative to his insidious agenda.

Clinton has crawled out from her cabin in the woods every couple of months to collect a hefty check for a speaking engagement and rekindle another round of arguments over the 2016 Election. That does not help anyone, but certainly, there are people like Waldman, who are far more comfortable debating the past than imagining and contemplating what to do for the future.

Democrats may think Waldman is performing some kind of meaningful service by fending off villainous critics. But what Waldman is doing is ensuring a comments thread at Plum Line remains populated with liberal Democrats, who bicker with Trump supporters and Sanders progressives so the Washington Post can keep up clicks and ad revenue. What he is really doing is ensuring that people squabble on social media and generate interest in his piece so the Post can justify keeping Waldman employed as a regular contributor.

And the effect is that the spectrum of permissible debate about the Democratic Partys neoliberal politics, and the politicians it promotes, remains narrow so that pundits who cheer this piece are not forced out of their establishment comfort zone.

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Have Hillary Clinton Supporters Tormented Progressives Enough To Satisfy Themselves? - Shadowproof (blog)

A statue of Confederate commanding general Robert E. Lee is seen in the crypt of the US Capitol in Washington, DC on August 24, 2017.

AFP/Getty Images

A daily roundup of the biggest stories in right-wing media.

The monuments debate dominated conservative discourse on Thursday. At National Review, Victor Davis Hanson argued that liberals are unwilling to take down monuments to their racist historical figures:

Liberal icon and Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren pushed for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II while he was Californias attorney general. President Woodrow Wilson ensured that the Armed Forces were not integrated. He also segregated civil-service agencies.

Why, then, does Princeton University still cling to its Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs? To honor a progressive who did a great deal of harm to African-American causes? ...

At the Daily Caller, Rob Shimshock reported that a Canadian teachers union would like to remove the name of Canadas first prime minister from Ontario schools:

The Blazes Jon Street noted that former U.N. ambassador Andrew Youngs opposition to removing Confederate monuments, which he articulated in interviews with CNNs Anderson Cooper and NBCs Chuck Todd, telling the latter that Klan supporters of Confederate monuments are almost the poorest of the poor. Youngs argument for why Confederate monuments should stay in place echo the argument that President Donald Trump made throughout the 2016 campaign, which was that the forgotten man and forgotten woman in the West Virginia coal mines or the Michigan factory would be forgotten no more, Street wrote.

Multiple outlets ran posts on a New York Times article reporting that Hispanic and black students are more underrepresented at elite colleges now than they were 35 years ago. The NYT found that black students only made up 9 percent of freshman students, while Hispanic students represented 15 percent of students at Ivy League Schools, the Daily Callers Amber Randall wrote. White students enrollment also went down, while the percent of Asian-American students on the Ivy League campuses increased slightly. National Reviews David French:

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Today in Conservative Media: Are the Liberals Ever Going to Admit They Have a Racist Past Too? - Slate Magazine (blog)

In that guide, the S.P.L.C. claims that I am a propagandist far outside the political mainstream and warns journalists to avoid my damaging misinformation. These groundless smears are deeply offensive, as I have dedicated much of my adult life to calling out the true extremists: organizations such as Al Qaeda and ISIS. Yet you will look in vain for the S.P.L.C.s Field Guide to Muslim Extremists. No such list exists.

Thats a shame, because Islamic extremism a movement that aims to impose a caliphate and Sharia law by violent means is as toxic as white supremacy. In the past two decades, it has certainly been responsible for many more deaths.

Like neo-Nazis, Islamic extremists despise liberalism. They deny the equality of the sexes, justify wife-beating and, in some cases, even the enslavement of female unbelievers. The Islamic State and groups like it regularly murder gay people in the most heinous ways. Islamic extremists are also virulently anti-Semitic, like the Nazis before them. And like todays American Nazis, they brandish swastikas, chant slurs and peddle conspiracy theories.

The terrible consequences of Islamic extremism are on display on a weekly basis around the world. In the days after Charlottesville, five men in Barcelona used a van and knives to kill 14 and injure scores of innocent people. Another Islamic extremist went on a stabbing rampage in Finland. In wealthy societies like the United States, most plots to kill in the name of Islamist supremacy are foiled. But poorer societies in the developing world lack the means to do that, which is why the majority of victims of the extremists are in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan and Syria.

It is not surprising that, when I point out such facts, I am viciously attacked and threatened by those who are dedicated to Islamic extremism. But it has always struck me as odd that so many supposed liberals in the West take their side rather than mine, as happened three years ago, when Brandeis University rescinded their offer to me of an honorary degree. I would have expected a civil-rights organization supposedly committed to justice to speak out against those who would oppress women, gays and people of other faiths. But the S.P.L.C. has nothing to say about Islamic extremists; only about their opponents.

Another voice the S.P.L.C. has tried to silence is that of Maajid Nawaz, who was included in the same field guide as me. (He is suing the organization for defamation.) Mr. Nawaz has written extensively about his past as an Islamic extremist in England and Egypt, just as Ive written about my time in the Muslim Brotherhood as a teenager. For the past decade, he has run Quilliam, an organization dedicated to countering Islamic extremism in Britain and elsewhere, notably in Pakistan.

I met Mr. Nawaz in 2010 at a debate in New York City, where the subject was the nature of Islam. Our passionate disagreement was on full display: Mr. Nawaz is a secular Muslim, whereas I am not a believer any longer. Yet we both agreed the path to a successful reformation of Islam lies in more debate, more scrutiny and more critical thinking. It is exactly these activities that our opponents, now including the S.P.L.C., describe as extremism.

Cui bono? That question is nearly always the right one to ask of organizations like the S.P.L.C. Who really benefits from their activities? Repeatedly, and for more than a decade, journalists at publications ranging from Harpers to Politico to The Nation to The Weekly Standard have pointed out that the centers founders seem more interested in profiting off the anxieties and white guilt of Northern liberals than in upholding the civil rights of poor Southerners, or anyone else. Theres a less cynical explanation, though, which is that liberals are deeply and increasingly uncomfortable with calling out Islamic extremism for fear of being smeared as Islamophobic, or worse.

Regardless, the S.P.L.C.s decision to target those who speak up for the civil rights of Muslims is a travesty.

Muslims today cannot freely debate the role of their religion in most Muslim-majority countries, where the charges of heresy or apostasy can mean a death sentence or a lynch mob. Here in the West, too, free discussion of Islam is getting harder not least because Islamic organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations pounce on any criticism of Islam, branding it hate speech, the modern word for heresy. Unwittingly or not, the S.P.L.C. is abetting Islamic extremists by branding critical thinkers like Mr. Nawaz and me extremists.

Taking a stand against the neo-Nazi display we saw in Charlottesville is an impulse that should be cheered and Apple, JP Morgan and the Hollywood A-list can and should do more to counter political violence and intolerance in all its forms. But they need to find more trustworthy and deserving partners to work with than the S.P.L.C.

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of an organization. It is the Council on American-Islamic Relations, not the Council of American Islamic Relations.

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Why Is the Southern Poverty Law Center Targeting Liberals? - The ... - New York Times

The WA Liberals moderate faction, aligned with deputy federal leader Julie Bishop, is pushing for changes in the state partys preselection process. Photograph: James Ross/AAP

The West Australian Liberal party is facing a potentially bruising fight over its preselection process, with members trying to replicate the voting reforms championed by Tony Abbott in New South Wales.

A special meeting of the partys state executive was held in Perth on Wednesday evening to discuss the reform proposals but the fiery meeting ended in disagreement.

As a consequence, the partys state conference on 2 September will now be asked to consider whether more rank-and-file Liberal party members ought to be allowed to vote in preselection contests, without first having agreed on the proposed model.

It is unclear whether the members pushing for reform will have the numbers at the state conference. They will need 75% of votes to be successful.

The reform push is coming from WA moderates aligned with the deputy federal Liberal leader, Julie Bishop, and Senator Linda Reynolds. If they are successful, it will dilute the power of the dominant WA conservative faction led by the finance minister, Mathias Cormann, and Liberal state MPs Nick Goiran and Peter Collier.

The moderates reform push has gained considerable traction since last month, when the Liberal partys NSW convention passed a motion championed by Abbott to grant members the right to vote in preselection contests.

Interestingly, the push for change in NSW came from Abbott-led conservatives, not moderates, because Abbott has long been trying to dilute the influence of party moderates in the preselection process in the state.

Candidates in WA are currently chosen by a committee of delegates appointed by branches but the state conference next month will be asked to vote on a proposal to change the preselection process.

One motion will propose amending the partys constitution to give all members (of at least 18 months standing) the right to vote in a plebiscite for candidates and senior office bearers.

The plebiscite motion is being heavily pushed by the moderates. It was written by Andrew Reynolds, the brother of Senator Reynolds.

A second, alternative, motion will propose retaining the existing preselection arrangements but also allowing a greater number of branch-appointed delegates to vote.

Liberal party members have told Guardian Australia it will be difficult but not impossible for the plebiscite proposal to get 75% of the votes at the state conference.

The prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, is scheduled to attend the conference on 2 September, as is Abbott.

At the NSW Liberal party convention last month, Turnbull spoke in favour of plebiscites as a way of giving more power to members and building the partys membership base. He described plebiscites as a fundamental element of party democracy.

Abbott, who has been criticising the direction of the federal government under Turnbull, said afterwards: Now we can go forward as one united party.

Abbott also told reporters that those who opposed his one member, one vote motions were advocating fake democracy.

A key proponent of the NSW reforms, the Warringah electoral conference president and powerbroker, Walter Villatora, said last month the NSW party membership had clearly spoken and the reforms would make NSW the most democratic division in Australia.

Abbott is in WA this week and will be speaking at the Samuel Griffiths Society conference in Perth on Saturday.

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WA Liberals braced for bruising contest over preselection process - The Guardian