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Surrey-Panorama Liberal candidate Puneet Sandhar tops the charts for South Surrey

Financial disclosures published Aug. 15 show that BC Liberal Party candidates in South Surrey spent the most on the 2017 election compared to their counterparts.

Surrey-Panorama BC Liberal candidate Puneet Sandhar led the pack, spending $171,542 to lose the May 9 election to NDP MLA Jinny Sims, who tallied $100,521 in expenses.

The biggest discrepancy between the two candidates was Sandhars $55,462 bill on media advertising, compared to Sims $2,210. Sandhar also spent $67,153 on newsletters and promotional material, while Sims spent $29,003.

Sandhars bill was paid in full by the BC Liberal Party. Sims fundraised nearly $13,000 of her expenses, with the BC NDP picking up the rest.

Sandhars bill was nearly doubled by a party colleague in a more northern part of the city. Surreys biggest-spending candidate was former BC Liberal cabinet minister Peter Fassbender, who dropped more than $317,000 to lose his Surrey-Fleetwood seat to BC NDP Jagrup Brar. Brar spent about $96,000.

Surrey-South BC Liberal MLA Stephanie Cadieux spent $68,037 to secure the newly created seat, while her opponent, NDP candidate John Silviera, spent $19,690.

Cadieux whos bill was fully covered by the BC Liberal Party spent $13,200 on media advertising and $19,128 on newsletters and promotional material.

Surrey-White Rock BC Liberal MLA Tracy Redies spent $76,215 to win the election. Her nearest opponent, New Democrat Niovi Patsicakis, spent $23,858.

Redies spent $15,244 on promotional material and $12,350 on media advertising, her two largest expenses. Patsicakis spent $120 on media advertising and $7,504 on promotional material.

Redies campaign was funded almost entirely by the BC Liberal Party. Patsicakis raised $1,459 and chipped in $727.70 out of her own pocket for her campaign; the rest of her bill was paid for by the NDP.

Surrey-Cloverdale BC Liberal MLA Marvin Hunt spent 15 times as much as the ridings next highest spender. According to the disclosures, Hunt spent $84,308 to NDP candidate Rebecca Smiths $4,860. Hunt spent $11,612 on media advertising while Smith spent $588. Hunt spent nearly $16,000 for promotional material and Smith claimed just under $1,300.

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South Surrey BC Liberals spend the most in election - Surrey Now-Leader

And heres Eric Boehlert of Shareblue, the social media network that was created by David Brock to help lead the online resistance to Trump:

Liberals often use alt-left to describe progressives they consider rude or with whom they have Twitter beef; it is personal animus disguised as politics. James Wolcott, writing in Vanity Fair in March, captured the general spirit of disdain and irritation:

Disillusionment with Obamas presidency, loathing of Hillary Clinton, disgust with identity politics, and a craving for a climactic reckoning that will clear the stage for a bold tomorrow have created a kinship between the alt-right and an alt-left. Theyre not kissin cousins, but they caterwaul some of the same tunes in different keys.

The events of Charlottesville should clarify that the only tune the so-called alt-left is singing is that it hates fascists. And yet Markos Moulitsas, founder of what is supposed to be one of the most progressive blogs in the world, decided to regurgitate red-baiting canards the very day a white supremacist killed a counter-protester:

The function of the term alt-left is to collapse the distinction between the activist left and the racist right. Thats why reactionaries like Sean Hannity use it. Thats why Donald Trump has taken it up. We are likely to hear a lot more about the alt-left in the coming months and yearsand if liberals continue to use it, they will be doing the right-wings work.

So it is time for the entire left to permanently retire the term. It insults the dead and the work the left is doing to stop the rise of fascism in our country. It serves the cause of the right wing, amplifying its noxious tactics of delegitimization. These liberals have invested a lot of energy in an effort to discredit anyone sitting to their left. They are so furious, so disturbed by the emergence of this invigorated movement, that they paint them with the brush of fascismeven while the very people they vilify are on the streets fighting the Ku Klux Klan. In so doing, they have served the purposes of Donald Trump and no one else.

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Liberals Helped Create Trump's New Bogeyman, the Alt-Left - New Republic

Donald Trump speaks at a rally in Nashville, Tennessee. Photograph: Mark Humphrey/AP

Did I tell you Donald Trump is a vulgar, foul-mouthed, meat-faced, 71-year-old redneck buffoon? To be honest, he is a fossil-fuel guzzling, Big Mac-eating, pussy-grabbing, racist dick. He has hubris syndrome with paranoid narcissistic disorder. Do you read his tweets? The English is dreadful. How can a man run the country who is so uncouth, with that hair, those ties, those baggy suits? He is a Baathist generalissimo, the president of a banana republic. He is anti-Christ. There. Does that make you feel better?

All the above phrases are culled from a brief Google scan on the current American president. They reflect a melange of national shame, liberal trauma, snobbery and class hatred. They extend across the Atlantic and around the world. They assume two things. One is that Trump is so appalling it is inconceivable he could win a second term in office. The other is that deploying the same language as he did to win office is the best way to send him packing.

I hope the first is true, but I am not sure about the second. The comparison this week between Trumps scripted and spontaneous reactions to the Charlottesville riot spoke volumes of his technique and his appeal. He failed to fully address the one aspect of the riot where attacking the left might have had traction, its Orwellian history scrubbing of the Confederate hero General Robert E Lee. Instead he used the occasion to denigrate the alt-left, and ramp up his appeal not just to the alt-right but to the silent right that, perhaps ashamedly, sympathises with it.

Trump made it almost arrogantly clear that his formally scripted criticism of the right was merely to appease Washingtons liberal elite. He promptly erased it in the sort of street fight with the media that his followers love. Every time this happens, Fox, Drudge, Breitbart and his social media operators gleefully edit clips and feed them to his millions of supporters. A BBC documentary by Jamie Bartlett this week showed how Trump may be a gastronomic and sartorial throwback, but he is a master at social media. The 1990s thesis that the internet would turn the world into one vast lovable, liberal community has never looked less likely than today. It plays into the hands of the political polarisers.

Trumps approval rating is at a historic low for a first-year president of 34%. Republicans are almost as appalled by him as Democrats, since they fear he may lose them votes in next years mid-terms. This is even though they have not done badly in recent byelections. Hence the two former Bush presidents issuing a joint statement denouncing racismtoday. The basis of Trumps second-term appeal is already emerging: the tried and tested technique (see Margaret Thatcher) of taking on his own government and keeping up the fight.

Eliminating Trump will depend not on making liberal America feel good, but on detaching him from the bulk of his conservative support. The battle will not be for the elusive centre of American opinion, an entity that political scientists such as Jonathan Haidt and others have declared non-existent. It will be over a group that both Trump and the failed Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders identified as the white working class, urban as much as rural. Sanders did astonishingly well, given his socialist credentials.

Forty-two per cent of American adults are classified as white working class. For two decades they have seen incomes shrink in favour, as they see it, of welfare recipients, identity groups, graduates and the rich. Defining them as racist xenophobes and deplorables, as did Hillary Clinton, when they craved jobs and income security, was a sign of the class cluelessness, analysed by Joan Williams in the bestseller White Working Class. Written like a Victorian explorer encountering unknown tribes on the Congo, it has joined JD Vances Hillbilly Elegy in charting the origins of Trumps appeal.

Tolerating Trump may stick in the craw, but it must be counter-productive to feed his paranoia

These people made up the bulk of the 63 million who voted for Trump. Insulting him insults them. When the insults carry a tinge of cultural, intellectual and class superiority, they bite deep. As Edward Luttwak points out in the Times Literary Supplement, liberal America finds it hard to believe that since the crash the median American family cannot any longer afford a new car. That is the key to Trumpism, not the loud-mouthed spoilt brat but the word JOBS with which he ends his tweets.

In New York recently I read in the New York Times each day pages of columns competing with each other not just in criticising but in jeering at their president, to the point where I could understand his paranoia. Articles in the New Yorker discussed his mental health, his impeachment or his dismissal for incapacity under the constitutions 25th amendment. It was all preaching to the converted.

Meanwhile a deafening wall descended somewhere beyond the Hudson river, where there lay a frightened, puzzled, increasingly poor America, one that had put its faith in a man who seemed to speak its language and address its fears. No one was reaching out to them, calmly explaining that others than Trump felt their pain. Trump does not appeal to the Republican wealth nexus, as did Ronald Reagan. He appeals to those whom the left thought were its own, and whom it has long neglected. Hence perhaps the fury that lies behind the insults.

Trump is easily depicted as a man whose narcissism renders him unsuited to the presidency. He is testing Americas constitutional power balance to the limit. Pundits assume that his ineptitude will be curbed by the grown-ups now gathered around him and by the weight of congressional opposition. Either by unforeseen accident, or by the rise of rivals, they predict he will be a one-term nightmare.

But Trump and his supporters thrive on the venom of their liberal tormentors. The old maxim should apply: think what your enemy most wants you to do, and do the opposite. Tolerating Trump may stick in the craw, but it must be counter-productive to feed his paranoia, to behave exactly as his lieutenants want his critics to behave, like the liberal snobs that obsess him.

If Trump wins again, it will be by convincing voters the system still cares nothing for them. He will say that it will be an eight-year job to bring his anarchic rage to bear on a smug establishment, and let him finish the job. I would rather not help him to that ambition.

Read more:
With every sneer, liberals just make Trump stronger - The Guardian

As for many of the great questions of our times, an explanation can be found in Russian classical literature. In this case, Fyodor Dostoyevskys novella The Double. It is the story of a government clerk who winds up in the madhouse after meeting his doppelgnger a man who looks like him and speaks like him, but who displays all the charm and self-confidence that the tortured protagonist lacks. The doppelgnger in Dostoyevskys story does not drive the protagonist insane just because they look alike but because he makes the protagonist realize what it is he doesnt like about himself. And such it is with the United States and Russia today.

The Soviet Union terrorized the West for most of the 20th century in part because it was so radically different. There was ostensibly no God, no private property and no political pluralism. America could be Sovietized only by losing the war against Communism. Mr. Putins Russia, by contrast, frightens Americans because they know that the United States and Russia should be very different, but many of the pathologies present in Russia can also be found in the United States. What disturbs liberal America is not that Russia will run the world far from it. Rather, the fear, whether liberals fully recognize it or not, is that the United States has started to resemble Russia.

It was the Kremlin that for the past two decades tried to explain away its problems and failures by blaming foreign meddling. Now America is doing the same. Everything that liberal Americans dislike Mr. Trumps electoral victory, the reverse of the process of democratization in the world and the decline of American power are viewed as the results of Mr. Putins plottings.

For liberal Americans, Russia is rightfully a frightening example of how authoritarian rule can function within the institutional framework of a democracy. Russias managed democracy provides a vivid illustration of how institutions and practices that originally emancipated citizens from the whim of unaccountable rulers can be refashioned to effectively disenfranchise citizens (even while allowing them to vote).

Russia also embodies what politics can look like when the elites are completely divorced from the people. It is not only a highly unequal society but also one in which rising inequality is normal, and a handful of very rich and politically unaccountable rulers have managed to stay on top without having to use much violence. The privileged few do not need to dominate or control their fellow citizens; they can simply ignore them like an irrelevant nuisance.

It may take a while before working-class Americans start to realize that while the American economy is dramatically different from that of Russia, the technological revolution led by Silicon Valley could in time tilt Western societies toward authoritarian politics in the same way that an abundance of natural resources has made Mr. Putins regime possible. Robots not unlike post-Soviet citizens are not that interested in democracy.

For many years, Americans were able to look at Russia and its social and political problems and see a country stuck in the past, perhaps someday to develop into a modern country like the United States. But thats no longer the prevailing attitude. Now, whether they realize it or not, many Americans fear that when they look at Russia they are looking at the future. What is most disturbing is that it could be their future, too.

Ivan Krastev is the chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies, a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, a contributing opinion writer and the author, most recently, of After Europe.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on August 17, 2017, on Page A1 of the National edition with the headline: For America, a disturbing resemblance.

Read more from the original source:
Why Are American Liberals So Afraid of Russia? - New York Times

It should be obvious by now that I (and most conservatives) do not understand how liberals and leftists think. I know what they think; I just dont know how they think. Liberals and leftists have many ideas that baffle me. So, I have a question for our liberal friends: Am I ignorant or are you ignorant? Thats not a joke question; its legitimate. I ask because I must be missing something in that I do not understand how you liberals come to believe and accept the ideas that you believe and accept. Please tell me why in the world you listen to, believe in, and adhere to the leftist nonsense spouted endlessly by liberal politicians and by the leftist media. Here are a few examples of what Im talking about.

WE HEAR endless reports about climate change. The latest from the global warming zealots is they have concluded that household pets are a significant cause of global warming. Yes, these eco-Nazis claim that your little Fluffy and playful Fido are evil because your pets contribute to global warming. A research project by UCLA has determined that the meat based diets of household pets produces carbon emissions equivalent to 13.6 million automobiles per year. (The Sacramento Bee, Aug 2, 2017; How Your Pet is Contributing to Global Warming.) The implication is that you should get rid of your pets. Heres a better suggestion, lets get rid of the wacko leftists, or at least, not listen to their nonsense.

ANOTHER EXAMPLE: Democrats and other Leftists constantly shout that Republicans want to suppress the votes of seniors and minorities. We are hearing these shouts and screams right now because President Trump created a commission to investigate whether voter fraud occurred in the 2016 election. It must have because the Dems and leftists keep screaming Russia, Russia, Russia. And just last week an ABC affiliate reported that 11 counties in California have more registered voters than people eligible to vote in those counties. The Dems in California tell us that theres nothing wrong if a county has more registered voters than eligible voters. However, if Republicans want to determine if any voting irregularities occurred the shout is Voter suppression. The libs never tell us how requiring someone to show an ID card or to prove theyre a citizen is voter suppression, nonetheless they keep screaming it. Demanding a voter show a photo IDs ensures only legal, registered voters will vote. Obviously, Dems and Leftists think that minorities and seniors are too stupid to obtain an ID card because they keep telling us the difficulty of minorities obtaining an ID card. I dont understand how these minority groups and seniors keep agreeing to being called stupid.

MY FINAL example is Planned Parenthood (PP). According to a new PP guideline for parents, Children as young as 4 are not too young to be told that gender and sex are different and that their genitals dont indicate their gender. The guideline continues, Genitals do not definitively establish gender, and that children can make that decision based on your values and how you talk with your child. This is a version of CHILD ABUSE and leftist poppycock at its worst. These people should be locked up, not listened to. Ill repeat what I said in a previous article, if a gender troubled individual wants to live in his/her own fantasy, thats fine; just dont ask the rest of us to buy into your wackiness. Now these insane people are dragging children as young as four into their Looking Glass world. How do our liberal friends keep listening to such insanity, and who are the real science deniers?

SHIFTING TO local events, kudos to Eddie Rowland, District 2 Commissioner. In case you missed the Aug 2 Reporter, Commissioner Rowland gave a full report on his first 100 days as our newest commissioner. Any newly elected official, from dog catcher to president, has a steep learning curve. That is no different for our commissioners. Rowland came into office with a good plan to spin him up on all the county departments and then went about implementing his plan. His report was a reminder of the numerous departments and offices in our county. Reading it, I was reminded that we expect a lot from our elected officials and usually do not give them the time to learn before we start criticizing, or appreciate the time they spend serving the public. Eddie, keep up the good work. Im sure youll have some good advice for the new District 4 commissioner whomever that will be.

THERE HAS been some recent discussion about the quality of the sexual education at Mary Persons HS. From the MCR July 26 article, MPHS uses the Choosing the Best program for its sex education. At a recent board of education meeting, Lindsey and Sharon Kinsella, 2016 MPHS graduates, petitioned the board to change its sex education curriculum. I applaud these ladies for being passionate about improving the MPHS sex education. Specifically, the women claimed the current curriculum does not provide the comprehensive information needed. I equally applaud Jason Hickman, current student at MPHS, for his letter (Aug 2: What motivates sex ed critics?) in response to the controversy. To use a clich, the proof is in the pudding. According to school officials, Choosing the Best is abstinence based and has been taught for over a decade. The Monroe County Pregnancy Center stated that from 2003-2010 pregnancy rates for girls 15-17 years old dropped by 56% from 30.5 to 13.3 per 1,000. During the same period, the high school graduation rate rose from 50 percent to 85 percent. Based on these figures, I agree with Jason, keep the current curriculum.

MONDAY, AUG. 21 is a total solar eclipse. I was fortunate enough to have seen the last solar eclipse in the United States back in 1979. A total eclipse is a MUST SEE event. DO NOT miss it. Call in sick, skip school, or promise to work on Saturday - do whatever it takes to get into the path of totality. Then, pray for clear skies; youll be amazed.

Weekly Quote: Based on strikingly irrational beliefs and emotions, modern liberals relentlessly undermine the most important principles on which our freedoms were founded, - Dr. Lyle Rossiter, author of The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness.

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JUST THE WAY IT IS: How do liberals think, or do they? - Monroe County Reporter