"Harry Potter" author J.K. Rowling on Friday delivered a passionate takedown of "liberal" men who profess progressive politics yet still call women vile and derogatory names when they disagree with them.

"Just unfollowed a man whom I thought was smart and funny, because he called Theresa May a whore," Rowling tweeted. "If you can't disagree with a woman without reaching for all those filthy old insults, screw you and your politics. I'm sick of liberal' men whose mask slips every time a woman displeases them, who reach immediately for crude and humiliating words associated with femaleness, act like old-school misogynists and then preen themselves as though they've been brave."

Rowling frequently tweets acerbically about President Trump and is a champion for liberal causes, yet her defense of May came after the British prime minister's Conservative Party suffered a major blow losing its majority in the House of Commons.

Rowling ended her tweetstorm with a reference to Pepe, the online mascot of the "alt-right" movement that dishes out vitriolic hate on Twitter, and said "liberal" men who attack women based on their "femaleness" are no better.

"I don't care whether we're talking about Theresa May or Nicola Sturgeon or Kate Hooey or Yvette Cooper or Hillary Clinton: femaleness is not a design flaw. If your immediate response to a woman who displeases you is to call her a synonym for her vulva, or compare her to a prostitute, then drop the pretence and own it: you're not a liberal. You're a few short steps away from some guy hiding behind a cartoon frog."

See more here:

JK Rowling attacks 'liberal' men who call women vile names online - Washington Examiner

Galvanised by the referendum Young anti-Brexit protesters at Downing Street, June 2016. Photograph: Isabel Infantes/PA

Before that other surprising election night the one back in 2015 that now seems a very long time ago it had seemed that Britain had become a political environment where it was impossible to build a secure majority for any party. For every gain in support from somewhere, a party would lose some from the other end of its electoral coalition.

In 2015, David Cameron proved that it could be done, at least for one election, and for a while the Conservatives under Theresa May looked to have found a way of building a big majority. Perhaps Brexit had unlocked a future that would consistently deliver one-party hegemony for the Conservatives. It looked like Labours vote was badly split between the liberal remainer tribe and the partys traditional supporters who favoured Brexit, who were ready to defect to the Conservatives. But, as it turned out, the coalition of support that the Tories had enjoyed during Mays honeymoon was also too broad to survive.

The Conservatives achieved some of their aims in the election. They did gain some white working-class seats from Labour in the north and midlands, winning some new territory in places such as Mansfield (Labour since 1923), and North East Derbyshire and Stoke-on-Trent South (both Labour since 1935). The raid on Labours leave-voting heartlands came away with some prizes but the very campaign messages that helped them win those seats alienated some of the Conservatives own former supporters.

The Conservative vote in 2010 and 2015 included many liberal, free-market, pro-European electors who were increasingly alarmed by the drift towards isolationism and hard Brexit; May had assumed that the Conservatives could take these people for granted given the threat of Jeremy Corbyn. The disquiet among those Cameron-style Tories was amplified by the feelings of Britains liberal tribe.

The Liberal Democrats had a poor election overall, with the Conservatives consolidating their hold on past strongholds such as Yeovil and running Tim Farron close in his own constituency. But they picked up shock wins in Bath and Oxford West & Abingdon, as well as restoring Vince Cable and Ed Davey to their south London constituencies.

Labours share fell in Oxford West, helping to eject a Conservative MP, while it soared in Oxford East. Labours first-time gains in Canterbury and Portsmouth South which they did not manage even in 1997 came with the help of falls in the Green and Lib Dem vote totals. It was a surprising resurrection of tactical voting and progressive alliances on the ground. It could be that the vilification of the remainers the sense that a part of society had been pushed into a corner encouraged them to vote and to maximise the power of their vote.

The outcome of the referendum, by demonstrating the power of a vote to do something radical in a way that many young people and disengaged liberals disliked, encouraged them to strike back against the complacent assumptions of the people with power. Perhaps also the freedom to do the unexpected and radical encouraged Scottish voters to embrace the Conservative and Unionist party. The Scottish Tories a milder breed for the most part than their English counterparts have a lot of power in the new parliament if they choose to use it.

Theresa May must be wishing that remain die-hards were indeed citizens of nowhere, because that would mean they couldnt vote. Among all the cross-currents of the election the youth vote that finally turned out, the Ukip-to-Conservative movement that happened but not as powerfully as most expected, the dramatic drop in the SNP vote was the revenge of liberal Britain. For the first time in many years, a party has paid a price for scorning the embattled liberal elite.

Excerpt from:

Britain's embattled 'liberal elite' has taken its revenge - The Guardian

Progressives want education, health care, and housing for everyone. And were the close-mindedones?

Protesters gather outside Republican Congressman Darrell Issas town-hall meeting in San Juan Capistrano, California, on June 3, 2017. (Reuters / Mike Blake)

If I have to read one more article blaming liberal condescension toward the red states and the white working class for the election of Trump, Im moving to Paris, France. These pieces started coming out even before the election and are still pouring down on our heads. Just within the last few weeks, the New Republic had Michael Tomasky deploring elite liberal suspicion of middle America for such red-state practices as churchgoing and gun owning and The New York Times had Joan Williams accusing Democrats of impugning the social honor of working-class whites by talking about them in demeaning and condescending ways, as exemplified by such phrases as flyover states, trailer trash, and plumbers butt. Plumbers butt? That was a new one for me. And thats not even counting the 92,346 feature stories about rural Trump voters and their heartwarming folkways. (I played by the rules, said retired rancher Tom Grady, 66, delving into the Daffodil Diners famous rhubarb pie. Why should I pay for some deadbeats trip to Europe?) Im still waiting for the deep dives into the hearts and minds of Clinton supporterswhat concerns motivated the 94 percent of black women voters who chose her? Is there nothing of interest there? For that matter, why dont we see explorations of the voters who made up the majority of Trumps base, people who are not miners or unemployed factory workers but regular Republicans, most quite well-fixed in life? (I would vote for Satan himself if he promised to cut my taxes, said Bill Thorberg, a 45-year-old dentist in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Im basically just selfish.) There are, after all, only around 75,000 coal miners in the entire country, and by now every one of them has been profiled in the Times.

In her fascinating recent book Strangers in Their Own Land, the brilliant sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild asks readers to climb the empathy wall and really try to understand the worldview of Trump votersas she did, spending over five years getting to know white Southern Louisianians, many of them Cajun, who have extreme free-market, anti-government Tea Party politics although they live in Cancer Alley, an area where the petrochemical industry, abetted by the Republican politicians they voted for, has destroyed nature, their communities and their health. Hochschild has a deep grasp of human complexity, and her subjects come across as lovely people, despite their politics. As she hoped, I came away with a better understanding of how kindly people could vote for cruel policies, and how people who dont think theyre racist actually are so.

But heres my question: Who is telling the Tea Partiers and Trump voters to empathize with the rest of us? Why is it all one way? Hochschilds subjects have plenty of demeaning preconceptions about liberals and blue-statersthat distant land of hippies, feminazis, and freeloaders of all kinds. Nor do they seem to have much interest in climbing the empathy wall, given that they voted for a racist misogynist who wants to throw 11 million people out of the country and ban people from our shores on the basis of religion (as he keeps admitting on Twitter, even as his administration argues in court that Islam has nothing to do with it). Furthermore, they are the ones who won, despite having almost 3 million fewer votes. Thanks to the founding fathers, red-staters have outsize power in both the Senate and the Electoral College, and with great power comes great responsibility. So shouldnt they be trying to figure out the strange polyglot population they now dominate from their strongholds in the South and Midwest? What about their stereotypes? How respectful or empathetic is the belief of millions of Trump voters, as established in polls and surveys, that women are more privileged than men, that increasing racial diversity in America is bad for the country, that the travel ban is necessary for national security? How realistic is the conviction, widespread among Trump supporters, that Hillary Clinton is a murderer, President Obama is a Kenyan communist and secret Muslim, and the plain-red cups that Starbucks uses at Christmastime are an insult to Christians? One of Hochschilds subjects complains that liberal commentators refer to people like him as a redneck. Ive listened to liberal commentators for decades and have never heard one use this word. But say it happened once or twice. Feminazi went straight from Rush Limbaughs mouth to general parlance. One of Hochschilds most charming subjects, a gospel singer and preachers wife, uses it like a normal word. Equating women who want their rights with the genocidal murder of millions? How is that not a vile insult?

Sorry, self-abasing pundits: If you go by actual deeds, liberals and leftists are the ones with empathy.

Im sure I have stereotypical views of people who live in red statesincluding forgetting that, as Tomasky points out, all those places have significant numbers of (churchgoing, gun-owning) liberals. I try not to be prejudicedmost people are pretty nice when you dont push their buttonsbut I probably have my fair share of biases. But so what? What difference does it make if I think believing in the Rapture is nuts, and hunting for pleasure is cruel? So what if I prefer opera to Elvis? What does that have to do with anything important? Empathy and respect are not about kowtowing to someones cultural and social preferences. Theyre about supporting policies that make peoples lives better, whether they share your values, or your tastes, or not.

How much empathy did Louisiana Republicans show when they electedand reelectedBobby Jindal, who, backed by Republican legislators, cut taxes, slashed spending on education, health care, and social programs and gave massive tax breaks to the very petrochemical companies that poisoned Republican voters themselves? In Oklahoma, a growing number of schools are now open only four days a weekvoters, ultimately, made the choice to cut taxes instead of pay for a decent education for the states children. You can go down the most uncontroversial list of social goodshospitals, libraries, schools, clean air and water, treatment for mentally ill people and drug addictsand Republican voters label them Big Government and oppose them. And when the consequences get too big to ignore, as with climate change, they choose to believe whatever nonsense Fox News is promoting that week, as if at least 97 percent of the worlds climate scientists are just elitists who think they know so much. True, by the time the world burns to a crisp, todays voters will mostly be dead, but wheres the empathy for their own grandchildren?

THE STAKES ARE HIGHER NOW THAN EVER. GET THE NATION IN YOUR INBOX.

Sorry, self-abasing liberal pundits: If you go by actual deeds, liberals and leftists are the ones with empathy. We want everyone to have health care, for example, even those Tea Partiers who in the debate over the Affordable Care Act loudly asserted that people who cant afford treatment should just die. We want everyone to be decently paid for their labor, no matter how low they wear their pantssomehow the party that claims to be the voice of working people has no problem with paying them so little theyre eligible for food stamps, which that same party wants to take away. We want college to be affordable for everyoneeven for the children of parents who didnt start saving for college when the pregnancy test came out positive. We want everyone to be free to worship as they pleaseincluding Muslimseven if we ourselves are nonbelievers.

What should matter in politics is what the government does. Everything else is just flattery, like George H.W. Bushs oft-cited love of pork rinds. Unfortunately, flattery gets you everywhere.

Read more:

Lack of Empathy Is Not the Problem - The Nation.

If the media werent so desperate to beat their anti-Trump drum, the only headlines wed see today would deliver harsh indictments of the Obama Justice Department.

In his testimony yesterday, former FBI Director James Comey dropped the bombshell that former Attorney General Loretta Lynch asked him to publicly lie to the American people about the investigation into Hillary Clintons emails.

Yet Democrats and liberal talking heads are solely focused on twisting Comeys testimony to impose their own negative narrative when the facts that just dont support them. Despite the huge disappointment to the liberal media machine, the testimony Thursday reaffirmed exactly what we already knew: at no point has there been any evidence of the alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian actors, nor any effort to impede the FBI investigation into the matter.

In a political atmosphere driven by unsubstantiated leaks it is often hard to cut through the constant, deafening din of unsourced rumors often reported as facts. The only way to cut through the noise was to have Comey himself to speak openly about the facts of the case. President Trump knew this, which is why he didnt invoke executive privilege and members of the administration encouraged Comeys testimony.

Democrats across the board have criticized Comeys decision making abilities, questioned his fitness for the job, or outright called for removal from his post. A large part of this, in the words of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., was due to the fact that they believed he had caved to political pressure in ways that might make him unfit to lead an independent FBI.

My friends on the left are right about one thing: an FBI director must insulate himself from political winds. Thursday, James Comey further underscored his inability to do just that. In fact, even members of the media admitted that Comey was extremely political and knew exactly what he was doing during his testimony in order to get a desired outcome.

What was even more alarming was Comeys admission that he intentionally leaked the memos he wrote in an attempt to compel the Department of Justice to appoint a special counsel. This outright confession of his manipulative intent is as out of the ordinary as it is proof that Comey has become nothing but another D.C. political operative.

This just reinforces that President Trumps decision to remove Comey from his post at the FBI was based solely on the overwhelming lack of public confidence in his inability to carry out the job.

From his gross misstatement of facts regarding evidence to his showboating throughout the entire Clinton email investigation, this is not a man that instills confidence in his judgment.

In fact, the most potentially damning indictment of Comeys judgment is the allegation that he used a crucial piece of information related to the Hillary Clinton investigation that he knew to be fabricated by Russian intelligence.

The pernicious influence of James Comeys carelessness has eroded all trust in his integrity and ability to lead.

For months Democrats have demanded answers from James Comey and Thursday they got the answer they are still reluctant to accept: there is no there there.

Yet they will continue to fan the flames of faux outrage, and their allies in the liberal media will dump fuel where there is no fire.

Brett M. Decker is a member of the White House Writers Group and best-selling author of The Conservative Case for Trump.

Read more from the original source:

Comey testimony: The liberal media ignores big questions about Obama's Justice Department - Fox News

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O9 TVW DUmkx?ws?n/!aS#{rPoBvss9u^gwpu~_}tv&RyU4z>.l+ pyS? Dp~j3w'9Rp}~46d}Pt?{@q|q'k?%CX(,h&0z4nLm/o$a5nO;:H{K`gbHYle%p+vLO9RrH-=R@o~rK]mo6+6 6$N8`a&o}LJ_d(E2u:5E2Li^>Wa?vS+^6(LH~22 N@i4F/o7g" @3h@~H`Fb'p87hC/AoisHs]`tQwppp^}r/}?'Iq|v:,xwh_UN '46#doojA5t#)2I(.uq*k^ lF,&KDHf=V %-hu,m]xJH^Z~G:,|B&5J&q^Km9o(66z|1X[<)=*x+Dr{w(Tsq_|MIP*K`3A+C::c whLPsW2Wn~-_yA=UxYB6Fy #4XXx#UhmfJ 1kw&]PAC3,)`&6oj-YVSt4)$4tK3s&?fb7CP |#LRz;/Tz~*:Vq$)$%Kw(T%Q]y@[c|Y8Sdbx51F$n#qE:W=+Ow,k.(upKRpfvL3UN/KJ_ Hu<"7W(`QiW5*=q):KeRY,%o7$nj hlEU cIkU:>Scbh@M)6uWZ DC{9XpMT>Hy)D.pOM-'Ywy!ADR[ ~-K{8XO|p{Ozi*x`iw}zmX0jEf-K9~OuINHegtky$Xtn'NSG*OcK!hlT)>X4~y<[$C r1/Ed@ms2[cjE.:|54c`(h iHp+E^ aXn8'[h,%+}0Qx8X(A2aXdw{~qJ#paMI0wyvP=~nbf+z(%Hkp8:V]62Q6bv>BlZKh-YhcGR|^)&gW(l^SvlH!]n0aN^(8d[KrBQ4@"Yy-^:ZV48x@<:I# x(Vf? ZBu0hEp|Y2@Q f$yKe DX2Qz{$L 00ebzWL"JHv!AC&^}jO"S}x>C"]`MQs1ua?Nx&,uXFht Kvd* sKrM'W%2- 7Ir 0k3/g@gc$499fFR'/h#[AB)}w)t`P,'APP=d#N_nb^>4m4w|g{=O/X]'l0HSNyiq.k_|$nAY`--OLU ykYr,/=zq-# n0W|!klo4 @[~~%A-ANb(K8RgqYg& #M0^(t78BVfJN3CD;NdJgH LQkuX<>%F~]:e

Read the rest here:

Election night offers little cheer for the Liberal Democrats - The Economist (blog)

So it was brilliant defeat after all. Labour lost their third successive general election, but for the first time since 2005, the party can feel they have the wind at their backs.

Yes, the numbers mean that the only viable government and even then that's using a very generous definition of "viable" is a Conservative one, propped up by the Unionist parties. English votes for English laws means that the Conservatives will still have a majority of 60 on English issues, but this is a government that is altogether weaker and more vulnerable than the one it replaced.

Don't underestimate the scale of the turnaround that Labour achieved after its disastrous local elections, either.

As far as Jeremy Corbyn is concerned personally, having increased both Labour's vote share and more importantly its seat share, he has a cast-iron right to have a second crack at the electorate if he so wants. Equally, if my maths is right, a Corbynite successor could now make the ballot without relying on the kindness of strangers.

But Corbyn hasn't just achieved an internal victory. (And let's take a moment to praise Theresa May, who has done what no one thought possible, and unified the Labour Party.) As I wrote immediately after the 2015 election, that defeat was very bad for Labour indeed. So bad that the party had lost two elections in one night. There were very few genuine marginals for them to gain and a number of their own seats were highly vulnerable.

Some of their own seats are still very vulnerable but Corbyn has created an electoral map with many more winnable seats than he inherited. Shipley is a marginal again. Chingford and Wood Green is a marginal for the first time in its history. The electoral path to power is still formidable. But no matter how bleak things look, Labour will know that having won Canterbury a seat that has been Conservative-held for so long that the last party leader to take it off the Tories was William Gladstone they can revitalise and regenerate their coalition.

The remarkable boost in turnout not only among the young, though we will have to wait for the full figures to emerge to start to draw real conclusions from it means that no party will feel as relaxed about offering thin gruel to young voters again. That will change British politics for the good and for ever.

As for the Liberal Democrats, as bruised as they will feel, they had a fantastic night too. The loss of their best performer in Nick Clegg, the miscalculation of wasting time and money trying to unseat Kate Hoey in Vauxhall while narrowly losing to Zac Goldsmith in Richmond Park, and the fall from first to third place in Southport, obscures a night in which their parliamentary party is larger and their talent pool is deeper. Their vote went down but it is more efficient. And to be frank, Clegg doesn't need to be in Parliament to make a splash.

But what the parties of the left and centre can now do is look at the next election, whenever it may be, with genuine hope.

Read the rest here:

Jeremy Corbyn has won a great victory and so have the Liberal ... - New Statesman

It is a strange world where a bakers dozen of seats can be regarded as some sort of deliverance but,of course, that is exactly where the Liberal Democrats have wound up. It is a mild advance on the 2015 disaster, and a very mixed one indeed.

When you get down to this sort of representation,quality is more important than quantity. Theobvious loss is Nick Clegg,meeting his nemesis at last after the tuition fees affair. The students in Sheffield Hallam, this time registered at the right address, managed to get to the polling stations in time.

The positive side of the ledger comprises the return of Sir Vince Cable, Jo Swinson and Ed Davey,plus the survival of Norman Lamb and only just party leaderTim Farron himself. It will now fall to Cableto fulfil the job of leader of the Anti-Brexit Party in Parliament where Remainers actually constitute an easy majority, whatever their party labels. In the Lords,perhaps, Clegg could play a prominent role in delivering a second referendum on the terms of the Brexit deal negotiated with the EU. A more consensual Brexitnowseems inevitable.

Former deputy PM Nick Clegg loses Sheffield Hallam to Labour

Yet the Lib Dems failed in so many ways to capitalise on the bruised 48 per cent of left behind Remainers. Outside the posh London suburbs and places such as Bath, they have been almost driven out of England, andpushed further to the Scottish fringe. There is little sign that they are anywhere near re-establishing in the rest of theCeltic fringe, especially the West Country.

Talk about a progressive alliance and the realignment of the centre left seems misplaced because the country has polarised and progressives have shifted to the left. Theres not much point in creating a grouping that would just get squeezed under this return to two party politics.

Jeremy Corbyn is consolidating the progressives,and even the Remainers, himselfeven though he personallyremains radical and Eurosceptic. He has found a way to mobilise people in a way that had been entirely unexpected, and his statist agenda is popular.

The Lib Dems have survived again. They arepolitical cockroaches, stubbornly surviving thenuclear attack under which they are continually placed by the the first-past-the-post electoral system.And theyvebeen through worse: the 1950s;1989.

Today, however, the Liberal Democratsdo look like a party without a purpose.

Continued here:

This unnecessary election has reduced the Liberal Democrats to a party without a purpose - The Independent

Some political moves are complex, requiring a delicate balancing of competing interests and priorities. Some are tough moral calls, with reasonable people disagreeing over the right course.

And then are those political moves that should be the equivalent of empty net goals. Theyre supposed to be an easy score. Theyre supposed to be hard to miss.

And yet, faced with such opportunities, the Trudeau government has often displayed a remarkable ability for seeing an open net, misfiring and instead scoring an own-goal.

Theres a discernable pattern of unforced errors, lapses in judgment, self-harming secrecy and worse. Coming from a PMO that sees itself as Mensas gift to Ottawa, its more than a little puzzling.

Consider the botched appointment of Madeleine Meilleur to the post of Official Languages Commissioner.

As a Franco-Ontarian and former Ontario cabinet minister, Ms. Meilleur is arguably well qualified for the position. But shes also a just-retired Liberal politician, being offered what is supposed to be a non-partisan job. And most importantly, the job the government tried to give her wasnt its to offer.

Read more: Madeleine Meilleur drops bid to be Canadas languages commissioner

The Official Languages Commissioner is an officer of Parliament. She reports to Parliament, not the government of the day. Traditionally, the appointment is made by across-the-aisle consensus, or something close to it. That the government didnt clear Ms. Meilleur with the opposition before announcing the appointment is hard to understand and impossible to justify which is why it provoked such an outcry.

Heritage Minister Mlanie Joly, who is ultimately responsible for putting forward a nominee and conducted the final round of interviews with prospective candidates, is surrounded by people who used to work for or with Ms. Meilleur. It turns out that Ms. Meilleur also spoke prior to her nomination with senior staff in the Prime Ministers Office, who also used to work at Queens Park.

The process that led to the appointment initially held in secret; later revealed amid public pressure has even drawn fire from minority language groups who fear the office has been tainted.

Theyre not far wrong; this has every appearance of a Liberal government looking after a member of its political family, while undermining its own claims to believe in greater parliamentary accountability and transparency.

This week, faced with the ongoing outcry, Ms. Meilleur withdrew her name from contention.

This should have been a simple, non-controversial, non-partisan appointment. The government transformed it into an own-goal.

And remarkably, this is not the Trudeau governments first such hubris-driven, self-inflicted wound.

There were those attempts plural to rewrite the rules of parliamentary procedure without all-party consensus.

There was that time the Liberals presented draft legislation clearly aimed at undermining the arms length Parliamentary Budget Officer.

And there is the ongoing controversy over the Prime Ministers Christmas vacation on the Aga Khans Caribbean island. The story began when the government refused to tell the media, and Canadians, where the PM was. The move was pretty much the definition of self-defeating: A sure sign that you have something to hide is that you are very visibly hiding it.

More recently, an entire Question Period was devoted to Mr. Trudeau repeatedly refusing to say whether hed been interviewed by the federal Ethics Commissioner about the trip.

In a related vein, the obvious solution to the controversy provoked by Liberal ministers holding secret pay-to-play fundraisers involving people who do business with his government would have been to stop them, immediately.

The newly-introduced Bill C-50 is an important step forward, as was the Liberal Party decision earlier this year to make its fundraising more transparent. Both go a long way to removing the secrecy around party fundraising. The government has ultimately moved in the right direction but first, it spent months exhausting all other options, while denying there was a problem.

The paradox is that this is a government that has at times demonstrated flexibility and shown a willingness to change its mind. Reversing course on the PBO legislation was the right thing to do, even if it required last-minute amendments in committee to do it.

But why not just take the right course, first?

The Liberals came to power promising radical transparency, and a clean break with practices they decried under former PM Stephen Harper. And yet, for all the Sunny Ways branding and all the carefully curated photo-ops, there are too many moments when the Trudeau government comes across as puzzlingly, insistently Harper-esque.

It is not a good look.

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Globe editorial: Another case of Liberal hubris and self-harm - The Globe and Mail