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Demonstrators gather outside of the U.S. Supreme Court after President Donald Trump announced Neil Gorsuch as his nominee to the Supreme Court on Jan. 31. | Getty

By Elana Schor

03/09/17 01:10 PM EST

Updated 03/09/17 04:10 PM EST

Liberal groups on Thursday launched a coordinated campaign to stoke Senate Democratic opposition to President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee, including planning a nationwide "day of action" on April 1.

The liberals' campaign, dubbed "The People's Defense," comes as activists prepare to make resistance to Judge Neil Gorsuch one of the top issues propelling millions of protesters into the streets since Inauguration Day. Senate Democrats have already responded to the growing energy of their base by mounting a historic blockade of Trump's most contentious Cabinet nominees, and liberal groups aim to add Gorsuch to the list.

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"What we're experiencing is a genuine gathering of massive energy across the country to say, we cannot allow someone handpicked by Donald Trump" to win a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court, said NARAL Pro-Choice America President Ilyse Hogue, whose pro-abortion-rights group is leading the anti-Gorsuch effort.

Hogue told reporters that she's "hearing a lot of 'He's a really nice guy'" responses to Gorsuch, who has benefited from positive meetings with several Democratic senators whose votes would be necessary to mount a successful filibuster of his nomination.

"That's way too low a bar for a jurist of the highest court of the land," Hogue added. "What we need to be focused on is his record."

The liberal groups hinted at their forthcoming efforts in a Monday letter, first reported by POLITICO, which urged Senate Democrats to "do better" in opposing Gorsuch.

Advocates described the anti-Gorsuch effort in a news release as "a hub of action to leverage the unprecedented grassroots activism that has been created by the Trump Administrations agenda and direct it towards defeating the Gorsuch nomination."

Among other left-leaning groups involved in the new campaign are the Center for American Progress Action Fund, CREDO Action, MoveOn.org Civic Action, the Service Employees International Union, the American Federation of Teachers, End Citizens United, EveryVoice, and Stand Up America.

Also helping roll out the anti-Gorsuch campaign on Thursday was Indivisible, the group founded by former Democratic congressional aides that has fast become a key player in teeing up tense town-hall confrontations between Republican lawmakers and their constituents. In a note to its supporters, Indivisible advised them to prepare for "a national day of action" against the nomination on April 1.

Conservative groups have already kicked off a multi-million-dollar TV ad campaign promoting Gorsuch and dismissed Thursday's announcement.

"These liberal activist groups have been totally ineffective in tarring Judge Gorsuch, and this desperate Hail Mary of a campaign won't change a thing," said Jeremy Adler, spokesman for the conservative advocacy group America Rising Squared. "Every day that goes by sees new and strengthening support for Judge Gorsuch from across the political spectrum because his credentials and record as a fair, thoughtful jurist are unimpeachable."

Hogue said that liberal groups are not planning TV ads but are instead aiming to match right-leaning groups' financial muscle with grassroots firepower.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Thursday that he expects the chamber to approve Gorsuch early next month, before senators leave Washington for a planned two-week recess on April 8.

Read the rest here:
Liberals launch new anti-Gorsuch campaign - Politico

The Trump era has produced a surplus of provocative and irresistible questions about American life for the chattering class to clamor over. The latest came in the form of an NYU experiment that used actors to recreate presidential debates between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton exactly as they happened, with one adjustment - their genders were swapped.

The intention, as explained by one NYU professor, was to confirm the "liberal assumption" that "no one would have accepted Trump's behavior from a woman, and that the male Clinton would seem like the much stronger candidate."

For most of the presidential campaign, liberals, including Barack Obama, tossed around that assumption as though it were an unimpeachable fact. When the Left-leaning experimenters at NYU put it to the test, however, their results contradicted it completely.

According to NYU professor Joe Salvatore, "People across the board were surprised that their expectations about what they were going to experience were upended." A New York Times reporter explained, "Most of the people there had watched the debates assuming that Ms. Clinton couldn't lose. This time they watched trying to figure out how Mr. Trump could have won."

To many performance-goers, the female Trump was likable, while the male Clinton was not.

For spectators of American politics, these results provide much material for digestion. At first blush, disentangling reactions to the experiment feels almost overwhelmingly complicated. But does it have to be that way?

Maybe it's simple. When you analyze everything through the prism of identity politics, your vision is clouded.

Because of the dominant perception that Clinton was unlikable, liberal supporters saw her as a victim of persistent sexism. When they experienced a man using her same words and embodying her same mannerisms, they saw the unlikability. If you remove the lens of presumed sexism, you see what everyone else sees.

Similarly, the Left complained that Trump's masculinity allowed him to get away with bluster and pomposity. But the female Trump in NYU's experiment got away with that same behavior just fine.

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Because liberals' standard package of presumptions about gender colored their perceptions of both candidates, they were left incapable of making accurate evaluations.

Truthfully, this experiment seems more like a lesson in how assumptions about gender impede our ability to understand reality, rather than inform it.

In an email to the Washington Examiner, American Enterprise Institute scholar Christina Hoff Sommers mused, "I'm not so sure this NYU play is a lesson about gender but about authenticity."

Sommers, an expert in gender and feminism who did not support Trump, assessed the results by explaining, "Mr. Trump whatever his failings spoke his mind. He was spontaneous, uncensored and funny. Tom Wolfe called him a 'lovable megalomaniac.' Ms. Clinton came off as scripted, focus-grouped, and supercilious."

"That's hard to love in either sex," Sommers concluded.

Also from the Washington Examiner

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Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.

Original post:
Liberals discover the limits of Clinton's likability - Washington Examiner

Washington Times

See no evil: Liberals refuse to see themselves as hypocrites Washington Times For too long, the liberal left has been hiding behind a guise of compassion and inclusivity. They claim to care about the forgotten man and pretend to have tolerance for people of all backgrounds, races, religions and political beliefs. Yet, time and ... 3 cops, pepper spray used in arrest of Sen. Tim Kaine's son near Trump rally at CapitolTwinCities.com-Pioneer Press Sen. Tim Kaine's son among several arrested after protesters disrupt Trump rally in MinnesotaWashington Post all 166 news articles »

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See no evil: Liberals refuse to see themselves as hypocrites - Washington Times

The progressive mob that disrupted Charles Murrays appearance last week at Middlebury College was protesting a 1994 book read by few if any of the protesters. Some of them denounced eugenics, thereby demonstrating an interesting ignorance: Eugenics controlled breeding to improve the heritable traits of human beings was a progressive cause.

In The Bell Curve, Murray, a social scientist at the American Enterprise Institute, and his co-author, Harvard University psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein, found worrisome evidence that American society was becoming cognitively stratified, with an increasingly affluent cognitive elite and a deteriorating quality of life for people at the bottom end of the cognitive ability distribution. They examined the consensus that, controlling for socioeconomic status and possible IQ test bias, cognitive ability is somewhat heritable, the black/white differential had narrowed and millions of blacks have higher IQs than millions of whites. The authors were resolutely agnostic concerning the roles of genes and the social environment. They said that even if there developed unequivocal evidence that genetics are part of the story, there would be no reason to treat individuals differently or to permit government regulation of procreation.

[Why Middleburys violent response to Charles Murray reminded me of the Little Rock Nine]

Middleburys mob was probably as ignorant of this as of the following: Between 1875 and 1925, when eugenics had many advocates, not all advocates were progressives but advocates were disproportionately progressives because eugenics coincided with progressivisms premises and agenda.

Progressives rejected the Founders natural-rights doctrine and conception of freedom. Progressives said freedom is not the natural capacity of individuals whose rights preexist government. Rather, freedom is something achieved, at different rates and to different degrees, by different races. Racialism was then seeking scientific validation, and Darwinian science had given rise to social Darwinism belief in the ascendance of the fittest in the ranking of races. The progressive theologian Walter Rauschenbusch argued that with modern science we can intelligently mold and guide the evolution in which we take part.

Progressivisms concept of freedom as something merely latent, and not equally latent, in human beings dictated rethinking the purpose and scope of government. Princeton University scholar Thomas C. Leonard, in his 2016 book Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics & American Economics in the Progressive Era, says progressives believed that scientific experts should be in societys saddle, determining the human hierarchy and appropriate social policies, including eugenics.

Economist Richard T. Ely, a founder of the American Economic Association and whose students at Johns Hopkins University included Woodrow Wilson, said God works through the state, which must be stern and not squeamish. Charles Van Hise, president of the University of Wisconsin, epicenter of intellectual progressivism, said: We know enough about eugenics so that if that knowledge were applied, the defective classes would disappear within a generation. Progress, said Ely, then at Wisconsin, depended on recognizing that there are certain human beings who are absolutely unfit, and should be prevented from a continuation of their kind. The mentally and physically disabled were deemed defectives.

In 1902, when Wilson became Princetons president, the final volume of his A History of the American People contrasted the sturdy stocks of the north of Europe with Southern and Eastern Europeans who had neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence. In 1907, Indiana became the first of more than 30 states to enact forcible sterilization laws. In 1911, now-Gov. Wilson signed New Jerseys, which applied to the hopelessly defective and criminal classes. In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Virginias law, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. writing in a letter that, in affirming the law requiring the sterilization of imbeciles, he was getting near to the first principle of real reform.

At the urging of Robert Yerkes, president of the American Psychological Association, during World War I the Army did intelligence testing of conscripts so that the nation could inventory its human stock as it does livestock. The Armys findings influenced Congresss postwar immigration restrictions and national quotas. Carl Brigham, a Princeton psychologist, said the Armys data demonstrated the intellectual superiority of our Nordic group over the Mediterranean, Alpine and Negro groups.

Progressives derided the Founders as unscientific for deriving natural rights from what progressives considered the fiction of a fixed human nature. But they asserted that races had fixed and importantly different natures calling for different social policies. Progressives resolved this contradiction when, like most Americans, they eschewed racialism the belief that the races are tidily distinct, each created independent of all others, each with fixed traits and capacities. Middleburys turbulent progressives should read Leonards book. After they have read Murrays.

Read more from George F. Wills archive or follow him on Facebook.

Continued here:
The liberals who loved eugenics - Washington Post

Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that's taken over our lives.

The president (almost) never apologizes.

I'm sorry, but this may upset some of you.

I have happened, you see, on research that chose to examine whether your political leanings make you more prone to apologies.

This research may have been stimulated by our sorry political times.

Indeed, Matthew Hornsey, from Australia's University of Queensland, told PsyPost on Tuesday: "My thinking on that had been influenced by casual observation of politics -- it just seemed that people on the left side of politics would issue public apologies more than conservatives."

Ah, but public apologies are different from, say, sincere apologies. They can be strategic, rather than real.

Science hasn't yet delved deeply enough into apologies. Studies have often focused on whether an apology exists, rather than how effective it might have been in achieving forgiveness or even rebuilding a little trust.

For an apology to be effective, one 2011 study concluded that you have to convince the other person that it won't happen again. Can anyone believe that from a politician?

Another study suggested that when you apologize matters too. It can be too late. In this 2013 study, a conversation of less than 10 minutes can tolerate a later apology. A longer conversation requires a much quicker "sorry."

Hornsey, whose study was first published in January, admitted to being fascinated that President Donald Trump, while campaigning, insisted he never apologized. Which, surprisingly, turned out not to be true.

The study looked at 2,130 people in seven countries -- Australia, Chile, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Peru and, look here, Russia.

It involved subjects writing down what they would say in situations that may have required an apology. The researchers concluded that not only are conservatives less prone to apology, but also less moved by someone else's apology.

Hornsey tried to offer initial explanations. It seems that conservatives are more hierarchical and accept power difference more readily. So if I hurt someone lower than me, ach, that's the way of the world.

Hornsey, though, says he'd like to go deeper into into examining whether conservatives simply see apologies as a sign of weakness.

"I also wonder if conservatives have a higher threshold for what they see to be offensive," he added.

I fear some conservatives may look at this and conclude that liberals are soft little things who pussyfoot around in their political correctness and bathe in apologizing for America.

I fear some liberals may retort that conservatives have neither decency nor self-awareness and are emotionally Neanderthal.

I fear we're may all be feeling very sorry if we carry on like this.

Technically Incorrect: Bringing you a fresh and irreverent take on tech.

Tech Enabled: CNET chronicles tech's role in providing new kinds of accessibility.

Originally posted here:
Liberals apologize more than conservatives, study says - CNET