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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

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For Trudeau's Liberals, universal daycare is a distant dream - The Globe and Mail

Robert Mueller at an installation ceremony at FBI Headquarters in Washington.

By Charles Dharapak/AP/REX/Shutterstock.

Among Washingtons white-collar defense bar, whether Donald Trump was under personal investigation was not a matter of if, but when: There plainly is a question of obstruction, a lawyer who served in a previous administration said in an interview, shortly after it was reported that special counsel Robert Mueller appeared to be building an obstruction case against the president. Prosecutors are not going to leave anything like this untouched . . . they have to look at it. They have no choice.

But, in terms of the law, the path forward is anything but clear. To begin with, whether a sitting president can even be indicted is a matter of legal debate. The notion is this: if you allowed a president to be indicted, any U.S. attorney in any place in the country for political reasons could indict the president, and that would cause havoc, white-collar lawyer Robert Bennett, who represented Bill Clinton in the Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky scandals, explained to me. The remedy would be for the Justice Department or the special counsel to turn over the evidence to Congress and they would initiate an impeachment proceeding and then there would be a trial in the Senate with the chief justice presiding.

And, while Trump admitted on national television that he fired F.B.I. Director James Comey to hinder the Russia investigation, it is a long way from [Robert Mueller] taking a look at it to making [a] case, one leading Washington defense lawyer said. All those complications, difficulties, burdens that a prosecutor has to make in such a case still are there. Mueller, whom Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed as special counsel in the Russia probe last month, and his team would have to prove that Trumps actions were driven by corrupt intentthat he knowingly and willfully tried to thwart the F.B.I. investigation.

This corrupt intent is what remains to be shownhe has to be concealing something. In the opinion of several attorneys I spoke to, Trumps reported request that he hoped Comey could see his way to letting this go, letting Flynn go, in reference to former national-security adviser Mike Flynn, and his subsequent decision to fire the F.B.I. director dont, on their own, meet this standard. Its just not a garden-variety obstruction case, the D.C. defense lawyer continued, after noting the constitutional protections a president has to fire subordinates. I cant think ofand I dont believe one existsa case in which counterintelligence and criminal law investigation have merged or overlapped the way that they have in this case . . . I think it is a very delicate and difficult puzzle to put together for that reason.

Bennett echoed the sentiment. Of course I am not in a position to know all of the evidence, but right now I dont see where you would have a good case or a strong case on obstruction of justice.

One key to the puzzle, say attorneys, is whether Trump or someone else gave any assurances to Flynn or other subjects of the investigation, such as the presidents campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Trump is reported to have called Flynn after hed been fired and told him to stay strong, but otherwise this is a dark area. We have looked at what he said to people that could help influence the course of the investigation, but we havent looked at the question of what understanding he might have reached with the beneficiaries, the former White House lawyer said.

[Trump] is a prosecutors dream because he keeps talking.

While William Jeffress, a D.C. trial attorney who represented I. Lewis Scooter Libby in the investigation into the leak of Valerie Plames identity under George W. Bush, understands firsthand the risks of perjury and obstruction charges in political scandalsthe fate that befell Libbyhe believes that based on Trumps actions to date, Muellers ability to build a viable obstruction case against Trump could hinge on what he uncovers about the Trump campaigns Kremlin ties. The question is what evidence is there of collaboration between the Russians and the Trump campaign. That is what we dont know now, Jeffress said. If there is evidence out there that there was collaboration and Mr. Trump knew it, and against that background he was seeking to influence the investigation, hes got a problem . . . If they wind up not producing evidence of that, I think that affects their obstruction charges as well because you wouldnt be in a position to say that they were trying to keep people quiet.

To determine what, if any, coordination occurred between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin during the 2016 election, Mueller is assembling an all-star legal team. He has hired a dozen top-notch legal minds to help him in the probe, including Michael Dreeben, a leading expert on criminal law, Andrew Weissmann, who rose to prominence for his work on complex cases against New York mobsters and Enron executives, and Lisa Page, an F.B.I. lawyer with experience in organized crime. Already Muellers team has reportedly begun digging into the business and financial dealings of Flynn, Manafort, and Trumps son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner.

Critics on the left, and even some on the right, have been quick to highlight parallels between Watergate and the Russian melodrama captivating Capitol Hill. Most recently, amid rumors that Trump might fire Mueller, comparisons were drawn to the Saturday Night Massacre. But the D.C. defense attorney argued that Trumps actions have yet to bubble up to Nixons level of infamy. To be fair to Trump, he said Watergate encompassed a much greater and more expansive set of acts, direct acts by the president to interfere in an ongoing investigation than we have seen so far.

He did, however, also stress that Trump has been, and likely will continue to be, his own worst legal nightmare. For a prosecutor, there is a clear pattern to Trumps fulminations against anyone involved in the F.B.I. probe, from Comey to Mueller to Rosenstein, in turn. In effect, he supplied evidence against himself I guess is the ironic part of all this. In one sense, he is a prosecutors dream because he keeps talking.

In this respect, Trumps personal lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, has followed the presidents leadwhich is precisely the opposite of how defense attorneys ordinarily like to relate to their clients. They have already violated all the rules of dealing with this thing, so I dont know that there is much left for them to do tactically except to let it play out, the defense lawyer said of Trumps legal team. Its like they ratify these things and they make it harder for the investigators to look the other way or ignore . . . they are making one mistake after another.

So while Mueller may not yet have enough to build a case, the president is continually supplying new material. As the former White House lawyer said, Trumps capacity for making it a lot worsethrough his choice of counsel, choice of tacticsshouldnt be underestimated.

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Sorry, Liberals: There's No Shortcut to Indicting Donald Trump - Vanity Fair

I wrote that in 2011, in the wake of the horrific shooting of Rep. Gabby Giffords that killed six people. At the time, we didn't know if Jared Loughner had any self-proclaimed political "motivations," and it turned out he was severely mentally disturbed. That didn't stop Democrats and liberals in the press from blaming Republicans and their "heated rhetoric" for the shootings. Now the shoe is on the other foot. James Hodgkinson -- a volunteer for Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign and anti-Trump socialist, according to his social media -- sought out Republican lawmakers on Wednesday at a practice for a charity baseball game, taking aim at members of Congress and severely injuring one, as well as a Capitol Hill police officer and two others. His motives seem far clearer than Loughner's, whose journals revealed an incoherent maze of anti-God, anti-government paranoia and affection for gold currency and apocalyptic conspiracy theories. Hodgkinson's Facebook page alone offers a treasure trove of evidence that he simply believed Republicans and the Trump agenda must be stopped. Rep. Rodney Davis, an Illinois Republican who survived the shooting, was ready to concede that "This could be the first political rhetorical terrorist attack."

And yet, as tempting as it is for Republicans to blame liberals for Hodgkinson's attack, we still must resist blaming political rhetoric for the ginned-up whims of a madman. Murder is murder: Focusing solely on why he claims he did it, no matter whose argument that may serve, doesn't benefit anyone.

One of the first casualties of politically charged tragedies like this one is consistency.

Some Republicans, who are always quick to insist that right-wing ideology, angry rhetoric and even the unprecedentedly divisive language that President Trump used on the campaign trail are not to blame for individual actions, are loosening their grip on that mantra.

Of course, back in 2011, Gingrich was one of the first to slam liberals for blaming the Giffords shooting on conservative rhetoric.

He was right, then, at least.

"Nobody can honestly express surprise that such a tragedy finally occurred. ... Congresswoman Giffords publicly expressed concerns when Sarah Palin, on her website, placed her district in the crosshairs of a rifle -- and identified her by name below the image -- as an encouragement to Palin supporters to eliminate her from Congress." He further insisted the burden was on Sen. John McCain to do more:

"As the elder statesman of Arizona politics, McCain needs to stand up and denounce the increasingly violent rhetoric coming from the right wing and exert his influence to create a civil political environment in his state."

Others on the left were likewise quick to blame Trump for inciting violence and are just as quick to denounce any connections between Hodgkinson and left-wing rhetoric.

He makes no mention at all of the violence at anti-Trump rallies but does anecdotally (and irrelevantly) offer that "Not once, publicly or privately, did a single person in a single meeting I was a part of ever suggest, explicitly or implicitly, that someone should go do what James Hodgkinson allegedly did today."

And then, with almost impressive inconsistency, King suggests it's once again Trump's rhetoric, not the left's, that created a climate in which a lunatic would go after Republicans. Try to make sense of that one.

This isn't to say that rhetoric is meaningless. This is a terrific time, if a tragic one, to call for a lowering of the temperature on both sides. That, first and foremost, should come from our leaders, and that should start with President Trump.

In trying times like these, it's admittedly difficult to keep our heads cool and our voices sane. But it's also imperative that we do. Consistency in our arguments, regardless of whose politics is benefiting from the situation, is the very least we should demand.

More:
Republicans, resist the temptation to blame liberals for this tragedy - CNN

Matthew Tuiningas Calvins Political Theology and the Public Engagement of the Church aims to be more than an historical study of Calvins two kingdoms political theology. Tuininga wants to demonstrate that Calvins theology is a neglected resource for contemporary Christian political engagement.

According to Calvin, Christ rules everything in order to transform all things into a future heavenly kingdom. In the present age, humanity is governed by two sharply differentiated orders or governments: the spiritual government of the Church, which anticipates the age to come, and the order of political life, which exists to preserve temporal life. The former has the power to restore humans to spiritual righteousness, true virtue, and eternal life, whereas the latter can only establish outward, civil, and temporal versions of the same. Church and state are both ruled by the ascended Christ, and the two kingdoms overlap and interpenetrate, but the distinction enables Calvin to limit church authority to word and sacraments, and to maintain a sober realism about the limitations of temporal power.

Calvins refusal to draw simplistic political inferences from Scripture, his use of natural law, his insistence on the Churchs independence from political power, and his recognition of the limits of both temporal and spiritual kingdoms are valuable resources for Christians living in secular societies. Calvin provides resources for a substantive Christian critique of the ideal of Christendom.

Calvin the political theologian is definitely worth reading, and Tuiningas detailed exposition of Calvins two kingdoms theology is valuable. His effort to apply Calvin to contemporary politics is less successful.

Near the beginning of the book, Tuininga takes brief notice of recent theological critiques of liberalism, but its not clear he has grasped the objections. He defines liberal democracy as a system of representative, democratic government erected to protect rights in accord with the rule of law under a system of checks and balances that includes the separation of church and state.Virtually none of liberalisms theological critics objects to these forms and procedures as such. Their complaint isnt against representative government or voting or freedom of speech and association. No one advocates a fusion of Church and state.

Rather, theyclaim that such a formal, procedural description masks the basic thrust of liberalism. Liberalisms stated aim is to construct a society without substantive commitments, leaving everyone free to choose whatever his or her or hir own may be. Liberalisms common good is to protect society from adopting any single vision of the common good. Thats a deviation from classical and traditional Christian politics (including Calvins), which sought to orchestrate common life toward a common endthe cultivation of virtue or the glory of God. In factand this is the other side of the critiqueliberal societies do have substantive commitments. The liberal state pretends to be a referee, but beneath the striped shirt it wears the jersey of the home team. Under the cover of neutrality, liberal order embodies, encourages, and sometimes enforces an anthropology, ecclesiology, and vision of the good society that is often starkly at odds with Christian faith. Tuininga never confronts that line of analysis.

The big challenge for someone who wants to enlist Calvin in a defense of liberalism is, well, Calvin himself, who is often, as Tuininga admits, illiberal in theory and in practice. Much to his credit, Tuininga attempts to face this challenge head-on. He acknowledges that, for Calvin, civil rulers are responsible for the care of religion and that rulers ought to consecrate their work to the promotion of Christs kingdom (Calvins words). With certain qualifications, Calvin even defends capital punishment for false teachers. That, to put it mildly, aint liberal.

More broadly, Calvin teaches that civil government exists for something more than the protection of individual choice. On one hand, civil order isnt to enforce true virtue; yet, on the other hand, the civil ruler ought to promote true religion. One would have thought that true religion had some relation to true virtue. Tuininga is right that Calvin never claims that civil government is a means of grace by which God justifies or sanctifies human beings, but who ever thought otherwise? Besides, Tuininga admits that Calvin believes that civil coercion may be an indirect aid to sanctification (my emphasis) and that civil government should attend to spiritual realities, the conscience, the soul, piety, and the inner mind. Because Tuininga hasnt grappled with the theological critique of liberalism, he doesnt fully recognize the anti-liberal force of Calvins positions.

To sustain his argument, Tuininga has to save Calvin from himself, skimming off the illiberal husk to get to the liberal-friendly kernel. Whenever the two Calvins are in conflict, Tuininga argues that the liberal-leaning is more foundational. Its not convincing, because the tension is largely of Tuiningas making. Still, it is testimony to his care as a scholar that he presents enough evidence to sustain a thesis diametrically opposed to his own. The Calvin Tuininga portrays might easily be enlisted as a critic of liberalism and a spokesman for a modified, Protestant Christendom.

Peter J. Leithart is President ofTheopolis Institute.

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Is Calvin Among the Liberals? - First Things (blog)