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At the election, Malcolm Turnbull resisted running a tough negative campaign focusing on Bill Shorten.

Remember that large sinkhole that appeared this week in Point Piper, the suburb of Malcolm Turnbulls harbourside mansion?

The gaping ground presented particular difficulties for local authorities. Contractors and investigators arrived, but it couldnt be quickly filled in because the cause remained unclear. So as an interim measure it was lined with black plastic.

The hole became an obvious metaphor for Turnbulls situation. The year has started with the government staring at an abyss, far from sure it can avoid being swallowed into it. In this first parliamentary week, some plastic has been rolled out but permanent repair looms as a complex task.

Coalition MPs left Canberra after riding a roller coaster of political emotions.

On Tuesday senator Cory Bernardi had depressed and angered colleagues by walking away from the Liberals to form his own conservative party. But a day later the troops spirits soared at the spectacle of mongrel Malcolm savaging Bill Shorten as a hypocrite, a parasite, and a social-climbing sycophant, with knees under billionaires tables, sipping Cristal.

(This has been dubbed by Labor as the know-your-place speech. Shadow Treasurer Chris Bowen apparently doesnt have to be told his place he had to ask Tanya Plibersek what Cristal was.)

Its amazing how 10 minutes can change the whole morale of the team, said one Liberal MP, although there are varying opinions on how it will go down among ordinary voters, who mostly hate the gutter wrestling of politics. Another Liberal member said Turnbull had needed to fire up the base.

By weeks end, partly because of their better mood, even the Bernardi defection had come to seem less significant than it had initially appeared to many Liberals.

On Thursday Turnbull returned to his personal attack on Shorten, this time outside the House. He wants to play the politics of envy but yet hes been a sycophant to the billionaires of Melbourne for years and years, he told reporters.

He went on: Politics is about many issues. It is about policies, it is about character, it is about strength of character.

And to pre-empt the obvious question of his own dealings with billionaires: I back myself. I am my own man. I cant be bought by anyone. I dont suck up to billionaires. I look them in the eye and when I need to I take them on.

Years ago the character of then Labor leader Mark Latham came under intense scrutiny, to his disadvantage. To have ones character blackened can be lethal for a leader.

The government has prodded and probed around character in relation to Shorten but so far without much damage to him.

It thought its big chance was when he was appearing before the trade union royal commission. There were issues about deals done by his Australian Workers Union, and his long-term non-disclosure of a big donation when he was running for parliament. But little stuck politically.

At the election, Turnbull resisted running a tough negative campaign focusing on Shorten. When the result was so close, he came under fire from some Liberals for failing to do so. They were unconvinced by the argument that the research had shown people wanted positives. Perhaps it was an opportunity permanently missed.

That Shorten has had an element of teflon about him is deeply frustrating to the government.

Shorten himself is said to have been taken aback and somewhat rattled by the ferocity of Turnbulls Wednesday attack. He knows as well as anyone that he has critics within Labor who would privately agree with more than a little of the Prime Ministers critique, and that Anthony Albanese remains an ambitious alternative if things were to go bad for him.

The leadership of neither Turnbull nor Shorten is currently under threat, but given recent history each has a keen eye to his own back.

One major difference in their respective situations is that Shortens internal critics are publicly silent, while Turnbulls enemies, most notably Tony Abbott, are out in the media all the time.

Labor is not having public arguments among its own about policy. Turnbull is challenged on a regular basis, just a few days ago by reported pressure from moderates over same-sex marriage. With a one-seat majority, hes periodically subjected to threats from the Nationals George Christensen, who this week tweeted he would support Bob Katters bill for a commission of inquiry into banks.

And now in the media there is speculation about his leadership, though the form guides just underline the inadequacies of the alternatives.

Apart from denigrating his opponent, Turnbull this week was trying to deal with his sinkhole by projecting two messages: that the government understands and wants to help with the cost-of-living pressures faced by families, and that it has heard and taken on board the publics disgust about politicians having their noses in the taxpayer trough. But neither message can cut through effectively with the constant distractions and noise.

Legislation was brought forward to reform child care, to the benefit of lower and middle income families. And Turnbull and ministers continued to strongly push energy security, again highlighted by the latest blackout in South Australia.

But the political pluses of the child care changes compete with the political negatives of savings being extracted from family tax benefits; anyway, Turnbull chose to drown out the child care policy with his blast at Shorten. The energy message suffers from the Coalitons lack of a clear, comprehensive and convincing policy of its own.

The government is again tackling politicians entitlements which Turnbull wants to call work expenses - but the problem is that a cynical public is likely to just go Oh yeah? The political damage from revelations of abuse is always greater than the credit received for any remedial action.

When Liberal MPs come down from the high of watching their leaders roasting of Shorten, they will be back to looking at the polls, and whether they show any sign of improving. This week Newspoll had the Coalition trailing Labor 46-54%; in Essential it was 47-53%. Turnbull made bad polling numbers central in spearing Abbott. Now they are becoming a weapon against him.

Excerpt from:
Grattan on Friday: Liberals get high on bubbles and billionaires - The Conversation AU

Before the presidential election, when Hillary Clinton looked to be cruising to a victory, a cottage industry of fake and misleading news reports found an eager audience on many conservative Americans social media feeds.

Now, nearly three months after President Trumps stunning victory, same kind of alarmist, click-bait headlines, along with their false news reports, are becoming increasingly prevalent on liberal Americans feeds.

There was the fake photo of Mr. Trump, purportedly showing him standing with his parents, both dressed in the white robes and symbols of the Ku Klux Klan. There was the misleading story of Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch, who was said to have founded a group in high school called the Fascism Forever Club. There was the viral photo of a boy handcuffed at Dulles airport near Washington after the presidents immigration ban last week it was a fake, taken in 2015.

Recommended: Trump's 12 biggest executive actions, explained

The term fake news has become one of the most charged political terms in the emerging rough-and-ready digital era of the Trump presidency. He uses the term almost daily, charging mainstream news outlets such as CNN and The New York Times with trafficking in fiction and even outright lies. At the same time, he spreads falsehoods, like his claim Tuesday that the murder rate in our country is the highest its been in 47 years.In fact, the murder rate is near historic lows.

The confusion and misinformation creates and environment where it is increasingly normal to accept facts only if they conform to one's own worldview. But something else is at work, as well,many observers say. The penchant to believe fake news is often rooted in a deep-seated feeling of alarm and powerlessness.

Of course, when you feel disempowered, you want to strike back with everything you got, and you feel like the whole world is against you, says Brooke Binkowski, managing editor of Snopes, a fact-checking website that has debunked many of the false stories circulating around the internet.

People who think theyve been pushed out of the political world as it is right now are going to be susceptible to misinformation theyre going to focus on whatever makes them feel better, she says.

Right now, thats liberals. Ms. Binkowski says she has seen an uptick in liberals sharing misleading stories on their news feeds. Others agree.

For more news videos visit Yahoo View, available now on iOS and Android.

Certainly, you can see more examples in the kind of stuff that people of the left are now fascinated by, says Judith Donath, a faculty fellow at The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Liberals were not being terribly alarmist before the election, but now theres this nonstop sense of emergency.... You dont really want to stop and smell the flowers, because you think that if I miss something, disaster might happen.

A CONVERGENCE OF CRISES

Before the election, fake news stories abounded on conservative feeds, according to a number of studies. Headlines claiming that Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump or that President Obama had banned the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools were shared hundreds of thousands of times. The most notorious fake news story the fabricated story that Mrs. Clinton was tied to a child sex ring at a Washington pizza parlor led an armed man to investigate and fire a shot during business hours.

The trend represents a perfect storm of several crises converging, many scholars say.

Theres the platform crisis of social media as a news distributor, there is the industrial crisis of mainstream journalistic venues closing and downscaling, and there is the larger cultural crises of the epistemological devaluation of verifiable truth, says Aram Sinnreich, professor at American Universitys School of Communication in Washington. Then theres also the political crisis with opportunistic public officials and voters both privileging politically convenient stories over truthful ones.

Fake news has generally trended conservative. In the last three months before the election, 17 of the top 20 most-shared fake news stories favored Trump, according to a study by Buzzfeed last November.Andover the same period, fake news stories favoring Trump got 30 million shares quadruple the number of shares for fake news posts favoring Clinton, according to a study released last month by economists Matthew Gentzkow of Stanford University and Hunt Allcott of New York University.

The recent spike in fake news stories on the left can be attributed to the enormous increase in the number of liberals now seeking information from all sources, says Professor Donath, also the former director of the Sociable Media Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab. That trend has also bolstered mainstream newspapers including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, whichhave each seen their circulations surge after the election.

So if you have a huge multiplier in the news people are consuming, while keeping the same percentage of these outlets that really arent trustworthy, youd of course have more of the fake stuff, says Donath.

And new fake stories keep circulating. An article from AlternativeMediaSyndicate.com last week claimed that police officers had burned the camps of indigenous activists fighting the Dakota Access pipeline at Standing Rock. The story, which included an image of burning tipis from a 2007 HBO film, was shared nearly 300,000 times on Facebook.

Other fake stories on liberal feeds included a LearnProgress.org piece that reported falsely that first lady Melania Trump was selling jewelry on the White House website. And a number of stories stemmed from an unverified Twitter account, @RoguePOTUSStaff, which purports to offer secret information from rogue White House staffers. The account is followed by more than 650,000 people.

TRUMP'S OWN TAKE ON FAKE NEWS

For his part, Trump has appropriated the term fake news but changed its meaning.

On Monday, the president tweeted, Any negative polls are fake news, just like the CNN, ABC, NBC polls in the election. Sorry, people want border security and extreme vetting.

His statement Tuesday appears to confuse the rise in the murder rate with the murder rate. While the 2015 murder rate was 4.9 per 100,000 people less than half of what it was in 1991 it is up from 4.4 percent in 2014. That was the largest one-year jump in 50 years.

On Feb. 2, Trump went so far as to post a fake news storyto his official Facebook page. The story claimed that Kuwait issuedits own Trump-esque visa ban for five Muslim-majority countries.Smart! Trump tagged his post. And as of noon Tuesday, the still-live post had been liked over 250,000 times, and shared nearly 70,000 times. The alt-right websites Breitbart, Infowars, and Sputnik were also among those who cited the story.

This despite the fact that the Kuwaiti foreign ministry on Friday said that it categorically denies these claims and affirms that these reported nationalities ... have big communities in Kuwait and enjoy full rights,Reuters reported.

In the end, the proliferation of fake news could be a boon for traditional journalism, as the surge in circulation numbers suggest.

Its almost a theater of the absurd, but if you listen to what the majority of the public is saying, they prefer to have legitimized news, says Kevin Smith, deputy director ofThe Kiplinger Program in Public Affairs Journalismat the Ohio State University in Columbus. This isnt about, when they go low we go high ... its about going straight. We need to keep that impartial review of whats going on.

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Originally posted here:
Why 'fake news' is now ensnaring liberals - Yahoo - Yahoo News

(Peter Stevenson,Gillian Brockell/The Washington Post)

By Jason Murray By Jason Murray February 8 at 9:56 AM

Jason Murray is a partner at the law firm Bartlit Beck Herman Palenchar & Scott in Denver.

Many liberals will be tempted to instinctively oppose Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuchs confirmation because he is a self-proclaimed conservative, or because he was nominated by a divisive (even dangerous) president, or because of the shameful way that President Barack Obamas nominee for the same vacancy was denied fair consideration.

Succumbing to this impulse, though understandable, would be a mistake. Gorsuch will make an exceptional Supreme Court justice. He possesses a rare combination of intelligence, humility and integrity, not to mention a fierce commitment to the rule of law. In fact, he is remarkably similar on these metrics to Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan.

I had the pleasure of serving year-long stints as a law clerk for both Gorsuch (at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit) and Kagan (at the Supreme Court). Putting the two of them in a room together would be a recipe for vigorous though congenial political disagreement. But despite these differences of politics, both my former bosses share a profound commitment to the rule of law. That commitment means that all litigants before them are treated evenhandedly, and that the cases they hear are judged only on the strength of the legal arguments, without regard to partisan politics.

It is not hard to find examples of Gorsuch reaching politically liberal results, including upholding environmental regulations (Energy and Environment Legal Institute v. EPEL), protecting the autonomy of tribal governments (Ute Indian Tribe v. Utah) and upholding the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches (United States v. Carloss). In his commitment to law over politics, he is similar to Kagan, who famously sided with conservatives to invalidate portions of the Affordable Care Act.

Both Gorsuch and Kagan consistently emphasized to us law clerks that, if we werent telling them when we thought their instincts on a case were wrong, we werent doing our jobs. For both, the goal was to reach the correct legal result, rather than advance any political partys agenda. As Gorsuch has said, A judge who likes every outcome he reaches is very likely a bad judge, stretching for results he prefers rather than those the law demands.

This zeal for the rule of law gives me every confidence that Gorsuch, like Kagan, will stand firm against any effort by the Trump administration to abuse executive power. For instance, in one notable case, Gorsuch ruled against the government when it denied legal status to an undocumented immigrant by retroactively applying new rules that contradicted prior judicial interpretation of the immigration laws. He cautioned that when unchecked by independent courts exercising the job of declaring the laws meaning, executives throughout history [have] sought to exploit ambiguous laws as a license for their own prerogative. Gorsuchs opinion is a much-needed clarion call against executive usurpation of the judicial power to interpret the law.

In times like these, liberals should welcome a nominee like Gorsuch who is honest, principled and committed to safeguarding the rule of law.

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Liberals should welcome Gorsuch. Like Kagan, he puts law before politics. - Washington Post

Liberals blast Dem leaders for inviting moderate voice to party retreat Sacramento Bee As Democratic members of the House of Representatives gathered for a retreat in Baltimore, a coalition of progressive advocates scolded party leaders for inviting Third Way, pinning Hillary Clinton's loss on the center-left think tank's ideas and ... and more »

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Liberals blast Dem leaders for inviting moderate voice to party retreat - Sacramento Bee

Liberals have at their disposal three kinds of arguments against confirming Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.

They can say that the mainstream judicial conservatism that he undoubtedly represents is dangerously wrong. A lot of liberals probably believe this. But most people find that argument unreasonable, so few liberals make it.

They can say that Gorsuch should not be confirmed to keep Republicans from being rewarded for their refusal even to consider President Barack Obamas nomination of Judge Merrick Garland for the same seat on the Supreme Court. But voters didnt much care about Garlands plight last year, when his nomination was live, and are unlikely to care more about it now.

This leaves door number three: Liberals can pretend that Gorsuch is a far-right extremist. Many liberals are rushing right in.

Unfortunately, Judge Gorsuch has proven to have a judicial philosophy outside of the mainstream and time and again has subjugated individual rights to those of corporations, says Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York.

She cites Gorsuchs ruling that the Hobby Lobby craft-store chain should be able to refuse to offer employee health coverage for contraceptives that its evangelical Christian owners oppose. Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio also claims that Gorsuch proved he was far outside of the judicial mainstream in treating corporations as people.

Yet only two of the nine justices on the Supreme Court sided with these senators in denying that corporations could qualify for protection under religious-liberty statutes. Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan, both Democratic appointees, voted against Hobby Lobby, but refused to endorse that argument. So whos really out of the mainstream?

Senator Ron Wyden tweets that Gorsuch represents a breathtaking retreat from the notion that Americans have fundamental Constitutional rights and harkens back to the days when politicians restricted a peoples rights on a whim. You can read this in one of two ways. Perhaps the Oregon Democrat is saying Gorsuch does not believe that the Constitution protects any fundamental rights. But there is no evidence at all that Gorsuch takes that absurd view and abundant evidence against it.

Or maybe Wyden is saying he believes the Constitution protects some specific fundamental rights that Gorsuch does not see in the document. Gorsuch does not, for example, believe that the Constitution protects a right to assisted suicide. (The Supreme Court has never held that it does.) Perhaps Wyden disagrees. But if Wyden means only that Gorsuch would rule differently than Wyden would like, he is using deliberately hyperbolic language to describe a banal disagreement.

Nan Aron, the head of an influential liberal organization called the Alliance for Justice, sent out an email after Gorsuchs nomination saying: He is critical of laws that ensure workers rights and safety, guarantee equal opportunity, safeguard consumers and investors, ensure the safety of food and drugs, and protect our environment.

No, he isnt. He has, however, said that when federal agencies issue regulations for those and other purposes, courts should make sure those regulations are authorized in laws passed by Congress. Aron would have you believe that enforcing a law is the same thing as undermining it.

Aron also said, Gorsuchprotects police officers who use excessive force. What Gorsuch actually did was cite a unanimous Supreme Court decision that protects police officers unless they are plainly incompetent or knowingly break the law.

Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, says, What saddens me the most as a mom and a grandmother, though, is his hostility towards children in school, children with autism. She claims that Gorsuch ruled that the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act doesnt apply to them.

Pelosi will be much happier when she realizes Gorsuch never ruled that way. He did rule that the law did not entitle the parents of a child with autism to the specific assistance they sought. It was a unanimous decision of three judges, including one appointed by Clinton, and it expressed sympathy for the family.

I dont mean to paint all liberals with the same brush. Some of them are noting that he is exactly the reasonable and judicious pick he appears to be. Others are working hard to distort his record -- and in the process discrediting only themselves.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story: Ramesh Ponnuru at rponnuru@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Katy Roberts at kroberts29@bloomberg.net

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Liberals Have No Case Against Gorsuch - Bloomberg View