Mediaboss Marketing

Famed lawyer Alan Dershowitz said Sunday that liberals had a special obligation to condemn bigotry on the left side of the political spectrum, just as President Trump did for those on the right who claim to speak on his behalf.

"I don't want to make moral equivalence," Dershowitz told AM 970's John Catsimatidis, responding to a question about the Charlottesville violence and the ensuing national conversation around race relations and Confederate monuments. "But having said that, that doesn't give a pass to the people on the hard left, who are themselves engaged in violence and also some bigotry of their own."

He continued, saying Confederate statues needed to be put in context -- for example, in a museum -- rather than simply being destroyed.

Turning to the Russian probe, Dershowitz said that special counsel Robert Mueller was endangering democracy because the investigation could criminalize politics.

"The idea of trying to create crimes just because we disagree with (President Trump) politically and target him really endangers democracy," Dershowitz said. "We should only be using the criminal justice system against obvious crimes, crimes that are not stretched and manufactured to fit a particular person."

Congress ought to have appointed a special committee like it did in the aftermath of Sept. 11, Dershowitz said.

"To give it to a special counsel means it goes behind closed doors to a grand jury where people are not represented, where things happen in darkness and secrecy," he said. "We don't know what's going on. We get leaks, but the leaks are selective leaks. They shouldn't happen."

Dershowitz added that former FBI director James Comey was one of the worst leakers and slammed him for setting "a very bad" precedent for those working with classified information.

Read the original:
Alan Dershowitz: Liberals have a special obligation to condemn bigotry of the Left - Washington Examiner

The B.C. NDP outpaced the B.C. Liberals in campaign donations leading up to the 2017 election, according to new reports from Elections BC. For some, the data signals a needto push political finance reform forward.

The Liberals have long brought in the most donations in B.C.politics, but thegap between the NDP and the Liberals began tonarrow in the 2013provincial election,when most pollsters suggested a win for the NDP.

Although polls were generally more cautious about predicting an NDP government this time around, the donationtrend favouring the NDP appears to have continued.

The reports show that the NDP brought in a total of $9,442,746, and the Liberals $7,934,581. The B.C. Green Party, which refused to accept corporate and union donations during its campaign, brought in $869,308.

According to the Elections BC report, about 40 percentof the NDP'sdonations came from unions duringthis most recent election,with individual donations a close second.

Almost 60 per cent of the donations for the Liberals came from corporations.

The numbers have been released amid ongoing pressure to reform the province's political donation system dubbed the "wild west" of political finance.

Attorney General David Eby says putting forward a bill with "very strict limits" on political donations will be his first priority as soon as the legislature sits in early September.

Dermod Travis, executive director of non-partisan group Integrity B.C., noted that some corporations, traditional Liberal supporters,appear to have switched their allegiance this year.

Notably, mining giant Teck and developer Aquilini Investments both donated to the NDP. The latter was the party's biggest corporate donor with a $100,000 donation in 2017.

"A lot of traditional donors to the B.C. Liberal party don't appear in the 2017 list,or if they appear it is a dramatically different size donation than before," Travis said.

Aquilini wasn't the only developer to donate to the NDP. Travis thinks that some in the industry may have switched loyalty because of policy shifts last year, in particular a 15 per taximposed onforeign homebuyers.

"I suspect they were not happy with the foreign tax and other measurements that the government had moved on under Christy Clark, and they took it out on the government through their bank account," Travissaid.

Christopher Cotton, a political economist at Queen's University whose work focuses on political finance reform, says it's not unusual for companies to support the party they think is best placed to win an election.

Cotton acknowledges that many believe thatdonations are made to curry specific political favours, but he says there is little evidence to support that this is widespread.

Instead, Cotton says there is more evidence to support the notionthat donations are madeto gain access to the party donatedto, in order to ensure a more favourable regulatory environment.

"You might want to have your foot in the door no matter which party it is," he said.

Despite the NDP's fundraising advantage this past election, Cotton thinks finance reform will still benefit the party in the long term.

"I don't see anything in the data to suggest that the NDP now has a permanent fundraising advantage over the Liberals," he said.

"The Liberalsalmost certainly continue to have more corporate support and are able to raise higher total donation over an entire election cycle than the NDP."

Whatever the reason for the donations to the NDP or the Liberals, both Cotton and Travis agree reform is necessary in B.C.

"B.C.is really behind the trend across Canada, across Western democracies, in terms of eliminating corporate and union money from politics," Cotton said.

"If nothing else this is creating the impression of corruption."

Political donation rules in Canada2:28

Until the reform bill is put forward and passes, the NDP continues to accept corporate, union and unlimited individual donations. Eby says that's because the Liberals are still amassing a "war chest" that could be used for years to come.

Part of the new bill, he says, will apply retroactively to donations received after the election.

"We want to make sure that the last election was the last big money election in B.C. and we will do that," Eby said.

The party is still deciding where to set limits for personal limits for donations. He says they currently range from $100 to about $3,000 across the country.

See the complete results of the CBC's analysis and download the raw datahere

With files fromCBCdata journalist TaraCarman

Visit link:
BC NDP outpace Liberals in donations leading up to 2017 elections - CBC.ca

A preference deal has been struck between traditional rivals Labor and Liberals.

Liberal mayoral candidate Cr Bob Geoghegan

A preference deal has been struck between traditional rivals Labor and Liberals ahead of Septembers Maitland Council election.

Labor will preference the Greens second then Liberals third, while the Liberalswill placeBrian Burkes independent team at number twoand then Labor.

Mayoral candidates Loretta Baker (Labor) and Bob Geoghegan (Liberal)conceded the deal was uncommon, but both said they had worked well together in the past.

It is a little unusual, CrGeoghegan said.

In other areas [Labor and Liberals] are at loggerheads, but in Maitland its different.

We know they have the interests of Maitland at heart.

CrGeoghegan said his decision was based on the character and behaviour of the candidates.

Cr Baker said the deal was not about party politics, but about the broader interests that were shared between the two.

Labor mayoral candidate Cr Loretta Baker

She said while they didnt always vote the same, they both worked hardfor Maitland residents.

Read the original here:
Labor and Liberals strike vote deal in Maitland Council Election 2017 - The Maitland Mercury

During the demonstrations in Charlottesville last weekend, hours before James Alex Fields Jr. plowed his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of counter-protesters on the street leaving one woman dead and many other people critically injured many centrists andliberals couldnt help but use the spectacle of neo-Nazis and fascists coming together on the streets for a cynical attack on the progressiveleft.

If the Bernie Bros wanted to make a show of force on behalf of progressive values,Saturdayin Charlottesville would be a good time,tweetedMieke Eoyang, the vice president of centrist think tank Third Way, implying that supporters of Bernie Sanders dont stand for progressive values where it really counts (i.e., in opposing racism and fascism). Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress, alsologged on to Twitterto take a swipe at those to her left:

We have actual fascists marching with torches. Maybe everyone on the progressive side could focus on the enemies of progress in front of us

— Neera Tanden? (@neeratanden) August 12, 2017

This remark was clearlyaimed at left-wingers who have been critical of the Democratic Party, with theimplication being that leftists are more interested in picking on liberals than fighting fascists, and have been helping the latter by dividingthe progressive side.

These comments and others like them were cynical and disingenuous for a number of reasons. They became particularly shameful after the terrorist attack that occurred later that day, as itwas left-wing activists from groups like theDemocratic Socialists of America(DSA), the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and Black Lives Matter who were on the front line protesting the neo-Nazis, and who ultimately put their bodies in harms way. Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old woman who lost her life in the attack,was aprogressive activistand Sanderssupporter; if we must put it in these terms, she was a Bernie Bro.

One day before the Charlottesville demonstrations, the Washington Posts Dana Milbank published acolumnpromoting the same Bernie Bro narrative that center-left liberalshave been spreading since last years Democratic primaries. In a piece slamming Bernie Bros and sisters (at least Milbank acknowledges that millions of women also supported Sanders), the Post columnist argued that progressives are coming to the Republican Partys rescueby sowing division in the Democratic Party and attempting to enact a purge of the ideologically impure. The left-wing purity police, continued Milbank, are emulating the mistakes of the Tea Party movement that made the Republican Party the ungovernable mess it is today.

Consistent throughout these centrist or liberal criticisms of the progressive left is the notion that leftists are inadvertently (or perhaps deliberately) helping those on the right, whether its Republicans in congress or armed fascists in Charlottesville. The Bernie Bro trope, which remains fashionableamong Beltway insiders even a year after being discredited, puts forward two seemingly contradictory ideas: first, that Sanders supporters are purity police who will never win elections because they are too rigidly dogmatic and progressive, and second, that Sanders supporters are mostly white malereactionaries who loved Bernie solely because he was a white man (anddetested Hillary Clinton because she was a woman).

The latter claim never had much validity, and wasdebunked back in early 2016when voter turnout and pollingdata revealed that support for Sanders was based more on age than gender or race. Younger adults, includingyoung women,overwhelmingly supportedthe Vermont senator over Clinton. Yet more than a year after the primaries ended, Clintonites remain committedto this fabrication. When progressives criticized potential 2020 Democratic candidates Sen. Kamala Harris and Sen. Cory Booker for their neoliberal politics last month, for example, some liberals reflexively charged the left with sexism and racism.

In an excellentarticleresponding to these allegations for Current Affairs, Briahna Joy Gray points out that some of the most prominent leftists criticizing centrist Democrats like Booker and Harris are, in fact, women and people of color.The bro stereotype entirely erased the perspectives of countless women and people of color who did not share the center-left political position, writes Gray, who notes that a simplistic and cynical version of identity politics has been used to derail progressives whose record of commitment to racial justice, gender equality, and LGBT issues has historically eclipsed that of the Democratic Party itself.

The second major tenet of the Bernie bro mythology that Bernie supporters engage in purity politics is less patently offensive, and on the surface more plausible. Progressives are, after all, passionate about their political beliefs, and care about whether a politician is genuine in his or her political convictions. But the notion that left-wingers are starry-eyed idealists who will rescue the GOP if they dont fall in line and play nice with the Democratic establishment has about as much veracity to it as the notion that Bernie supporters are a bunch of white male dude-bros. Indeed, many liberals seem to have already forgotten that it was the pragmatic leadership of the Democratic establishment that led to the nationwide collapse of the Democratic Party and to Donald Trump in the White House.

The reality is that theBernie bros and sisters are the pragmatic ones in this dispute, and have a much better understanding of the current populist mood in America. This has been on full display over the past several months, as liberals have become more and morehystericaland obsessed with Russia and the DNC hack,while progressives have made the fight for universal health care their No. 1 priority (next to resisting the Trump administration and neo-Nazis). ABloomberg surveyfrom last month revealed which side is more in tune with the American public: A plurality of Americans (35 percent) believe that health care is the most important issue facing the country, while only 6 percent think that our relationship with Russia is the top issue. Furthermore, polls indicatethat agrowing number of Americans a majority in many cases support universal health care.

It seems clear, then, that the progressiveleft is tryingtorescue the Democrats from themselves.It also appears that centrists and many liberalsare not interested in having an honest debate,and would rather smear progressives (e.g., the Bernie bros or the alt-left)than engage in good-faith discussion.Even after young progressives were killed and injured on the streets of Charlottesville protesting neo-Nazis, liberals continued their smear campaign:

The Alt Left, in their drive to smear the impurityof Clinton on economic justice issues, excused the racism and bigotry that is Trumpism,tweeteda prominent liberal and editor for the website Daily Koson Sunday.

Only when progressives unconditionallyembrace the hegemony of Democratic Party leaders and their neoliberal policies, it seems, will mainstream liberals stop smearing them.

Originally posted here:
Forget the liberal smears: Leftists aren't covertly aiding the alt-right they're battling it - Salon

The recent heartbreaking events in Virginia remind me that the way our brains work has its downsides.

Nervous systems love contrasts, thrive on them. Its one reason why your brain does fancier things than your liver. For example, there are both excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmitters, so that the brain never confuses hollering yes with hollering no, or go with stop. There are also on/off cellular mechanisms that cause neurons to go sharply silent after a burst of excitation, generating a contrast like the difference between shouting news and shutting up. Or in another neural realm: Touch a spot on your skin, stimulating a tactile receptor neuron there, and it silences the tactile neurons surrounding it sharpening the signal to identify precisely where the sensation is happening.

Crucially, the range of contrasts can change sometimes the brain must distinguish between extremes of, say, 1 versus 100, but sometimes the extremes range only from 1 versus 1.00001. And brain processes shift to accommodate that.

For example, your brain typically navigates sounds ranging from silence to sirens, but huddle among people whispering, and soon your brain is detecting minute differences in decibels. Sit in dim light, and your brain soon distinguishes among tiny gradations of light intensity. Leave that dark room, where youre distinguishing between 1 and 1.00001, so to speak, and go into sunlight: Things will shift back to 1 versus 100. Sometimes the range of what counts as pleasurable maxes out with the smell of a flower, sometimes it requires winning the lottery.

And thanks to that neural capacity for adaptation, sometimes the difference between 1 and 1.00001 can feel roughly as important as the difference between 1 and 100.

Many on the left have been concerning themselves of late with debates that can be summarized as 1 versus 1.00001. A professor, long supportive of his schools efforts at fostering diversity, objects to one proposed version of those efforts, and soon crowds of students are accusing him of the worst kinds of prejudices, chanting for his firing.

A theater director, with the best of progressive intentions, mounts a play that showcases what she advocates. Soon she is condemned for deigning to present material about the tribulations of an out-group not her own.

Controversies roil as to whether a painting that screams empathy for the pain of an Other represents homage or exploitation, whether a fashion statement is cultural appropriation or appreciation, whether the best response to a foul academic ideologue is to attend his lecture and counter him with facts, or to silence him.

These are valid issues, and their currency reflects the lefts admirable ability to be introspective. But these debates also display the lefts time-honored capacity to eat itself alive with turmoil over the difference between 1 and 1.00001.

And then along comes Charlottesville, and we are reminded about just how contrasting contrasts really can be, how vast the difference between 1 and 100 is, or in this case, 1 and negative infinity. We are reminded what it is like when KKK garb, swastikas and torches are marched through our streets. What it is like when one of the marchers floors a cars accelerator to hurtle into a crowd, leaving Heather Heyer dead. What it is like when, 70 years after 407,000 Americans died fighting Nazism, fascism and racial supremacy, we have a president who gives comfort to those malignancies. We are reminded what evil actually looks like.

It is time to readjust our brains to focus on the biggest of contrasts, to remember who the real enemy is, to use our intellect and passion to destroy it.

Neuroscientist Robert M. Sapolsky is a professor of biology, neurological sciences and neurosurgery at Stanford University. His latest book is Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook

The rest is here:
We saw evil in Charlottesville. Now liberals need to readjust their brains to stop it - Los Angeles Times