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Say new rules needed for race financing, including their own

Campaign finance records for political leadership campaigns remain outside the reach of Elections Newfoundland and Labrador.

Liberal leadership candidates answer questions at the leadership convention in this 2013 file photo. Telelgram file photo

The Liberals are promising to amend the law and change financing for leadership runs, despite the fact that Liberals received big, anonymous donations and were the biggest spenders, when looking at the Liberal race of 2013 and the most recent Progressive Conservative race in 2014.

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Union contributions key to NDP financing

As reported, candidates in the last Liberal contest said they operated under the rules as decided upon by the party.

That is why, for example, the public disclosure ultimately issued by candidate Paul Antle reads Company 1, Company 2 and Individual 1, Individual 2, as opposed to citing real names. Donors were not told up front their donations might be disclosed.

That lack of disclosure would be a no-no under the laws governing a general election, but is allowed in leadership races here.

Some candidates ran hefty expenditures. The ultimate winner, DwightBall, spent $312,733 on his campaign, MHA Cathy Bennett $411,000 and Antle $438,000. Smaller amounts in the Liberal leadership race were spent by Danny Dumaresque, at $32,850 and then there was MHA Jim Bennett.

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Liberals promising to change law for leaderships

A few weeks ago they were dead even, but a new Forum Research poll has the federal Liberals now leading the Conservatives by a healthy seven point margin.

The public opinion survey found the Liberals have 39 per cent support, compared to 32 per cent for Prime Minister Stephen Harpers Conservatives.

The Opposition NDP are at 17 per cent.

A Forum poll two weeks ago had Conservatives and Liberals at 35 and 34 per cent respectively a tie when the polls margin of error is factored in and the NDP at 20 per cent support.

Forum president Lorne Bozinoff attributed the Tories drop in fortunes in the latest poll to two events former foreign affairs minister John Bairds sudden departure from cabinet last week, and MP Eve Adams decision to cross the floor from the Conservatives to Justin Trudeaus Liberals this week.

It is clear Mr. Harper has had a very bad week, starting with the loss of John Baird, a genuinely popular minister in a government not blessed with many popular ministers, Bozinoff said in a statement.

In addition, while Eve Adams defection, which happened in the middle of our field period, can be seen as much a boon to the Conservatives as the Liberals, she is yet another partisan leaving the government with an election imminent, Bozinoff added.

Based on the new seat distribution in Parliament, which grows to 338 for the federal election this fall, the poll results would have the Liberals capturing a 24-seat majority of 194 seats, compared to 112 for the Conservatives and 30 for the NDP.

The poll two weeks ago translated into a slim minority for the Conservatives 145 seats to 125 for the Liberals and 61 for the NDP, factoring in the new seat distribution.

The latest Forum poll was conducted Monday and Tuesday with a sample size of 1,018 randomly selected Canadian voters, who participated in an interactive voice response telephone survey.

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Federal Liberals lead Conservatives comfortably in new poll

Lauren Giordano/The Atlantic

A unified theory of why political satire is biased toward, and talk radio is biased against, liberals in America.

S

oon after Jon Stewart arrived at The Daily Show in 1999, the world around him began to change. First, George W. Bush moved into the White House. Then came 9/11, and YouTube, and the advent of viral videos. Over the years, Stewart and his cohort mastered the very difficult task of sorting through all the news quickly and turning it around into biting, relevant satire that worked both for television and the Internet.

Now, as Stewart prepares to leave the show, the brand of comedy he helped invent is stronger than ever. Stephen Colbert is getting ready to bring his deadpan smirk to The Late Show. Bill Maher is continuing to provoke pundits and politicians with his blunt punch lines. John Olivers Last Week Tonight is about to celebrate the end of a wildly popular first year. Stewart has yet to announce his post-Daily Show plans, but even if he retires, the genre seems more than capable of carrying on without him.

Stewart, Colbert, Maher, Oliver and co. belong to a type of late-night satire thats typically characterized as liberal, skewering Republicans (and, less frequently, Democrats) for absurd statements or pompousness or flagrant hypocrisy. The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Funny Or Die, and The Onion, while not partisan organs, all clearly have a left-of-center orientation, wrote Jonathan Chait in The New Republic in 2011.This categorization, though, begs the question of why the form has no equal on the other side of the ideological spectrum. Some self-identified conservative comics argue that the biased liberal media hasnt given them a chance to thrive. Others point out that Obama is a more difficult target than his Republican predecessor: He was the first African-American president, which meant comedians have had to tip-toe around anything with racial connotations, and his restrained personality has made him difficult to parody.

But six years in, Obamas party has been thoroughly trounced in the midterms and publicly excoriated by right-wing politicians, yet theres a dearth of conservative satirists taking aim, even though the niche-targeted structure of cable media today should make it relatively easy for them to find an audience. After all, it would have been difficult for Stewart or Colbert to find an audience during the era when three broadcast stations competed for the entire country and couldn't afford to alienate too many viewers. But cable TV news programs need only find a niche viewership. Why then, hasnt a conservative Daily Show found its own place on Fox?

So if liberals are such vulnerable targets for humor, why do relatively few conservative comedians seem to be taking aim at them?

O

ne explanation is simply that proportionately fewer people with broadly conservative sensibilities choose to become comedians. Just as liberals dominate academia, journalism, and other writing professions, there are nearly three times as many liberal- as conservative-minded people in the creative arts according to a recent study. Alison Dagnes, a professor of political science at Shippensburg University, argues that the same personality traits that shape political preferences also guide the choice of professions. These tendencies just get more pronounced in the case of comedy, which usually requires years of irregular income, late hours, and travel, as well as a certain tolerance for crudeness and heckling.

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Waiting for the Conservative Jon Stewart

Interim Tory Leader scolds Liberals
Interim Progressive Conservative Leader Jim Wilson turns up the attack on the Liberal government as the spring session of the legislature is to begin Tuesday.

By: Toronto Star

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Interim Tory Leader scolds Liberals - Video

After trying and failing to make the Koch brothers the focus of the mid-term election, Democrats are digging deeper into the billionaire brothers operations to combat their prodigious fundraising and making them the focus once again of the 2016 election.

Representatives of several powerful Democratic groups from unions to abortion rights activists and environmentalists gathered behind closed doors on Tuesday to take the next steps in plotting a strategy for dealing with Charles and David Kochs plan to raise and spend more than $889 million over the next two years.

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They emerged with a commitment to expand their rapid-response and research teams to fight back against the Kochs political agenda, according to attendees. And the host of the meeting, the well-funded opposition-research group American Bridge, has been pouring resources into a series of state reports that will focus on the Koch brothers business practices environmental record, layoffs and outsourcing and their impact in key states such as Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Ohio and Wisconsin for Democrats to use in campaigns nationwide.

There was only one problem: Pro-Democratic outside groups representing some of the same interests spent millions in 2014 trying to draw attention to the Kochs and lost almost every election in which they intervened. But with a more collaborative and thorough approach this time around, outside groups and party leaders are hoping that their anti-Koch strategy will move voters in 2016.

At the meeting Tuesday evening, representatives from groups such as AFL-CIO, Center for American Progress, Americans for Responsible Solutions, Correct the Record and Planned Parenthood heard from experts including Paul Tencher who served as campaign manager for now-Sen. Gary Peters and Guy Molyneux of Hart Research, who presented polling data showing that direct attacks on the Koch brothers could be effective.

Facing criticism from some within the party after millions of dollars spent on anti-Koch ads yielded few wins, Democrats have repeatedly used Peters 2014 race in Michigan as the prime example of how their Koch messaging can be successful.

Tencher gave a presentation to the roughly 70 attendees, explaining how the campaign was able to hit Peters opponent, Terri Lynn Land, by connecting her to the Koch brothers and encouraged groups to use the strategy more in 2016.

Outside groups involved in the race also hammered Land using the same approach. For example, the super PAC created by mega donor, environmentalist Tom Steyer spent heavily on ads in Michigan connecting the piles of petroleum coke contaminating the Detroit River area to the Koch brothers and Land.

At this weeks meeting, attendees said Democrats were in agreement that although they lost the Senate and several seats in the House, the Koch strategy was not to blame. Its not a black and white thing, said Ben Ray, spokesman for American Bridge.

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Liberals' secret Koch strategy