Monthly Archives: February 2017

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which is weighing the appeal concerning President Donald Trump's executive order on immigration, is the federal appeals court conservatives have long ridiculed as the "nutty 9th" or the "9th Circus."

Covering a huge swath of territory nine western states plus Guam the San Francisco-based court handles far more cases than any other federal appeals court, including some rulings that have invoked furor from conservatives over the years. Among them: finding that the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional, that the "don't ask, don't tell" policy on gays in the military was problematic long before President Barack Obama's administration ended it, and that states can force pharmacies to dispense emergency contraceptives.

But some legal scholars say the 9th Circuit's liberal reputation is overblown and that the court has moved to the middle as some of President Jimmy Carter's appointees who were considered extremely liberal have taken semi-retired "senior" status or passed away. A Democratic Congress nearly doubled the number of judges on the court during Carter's tenure, and his appointees faced easy confirmation in the Senate.

President George W. Bush appointed six of the court's 25 active judges, but 18 have been appointed by Democrats, though the seven appointed by President Barack Obama are generally considered moderate, said University of Richmond Law School Professor Carl Tobias.

Tobias called the notion that the 9th Circuit is liberal "dated." Arthur Hellman, a federal courts scholar at University of Pittsburgh Law School, said the picture of where the court stands in relation to other circuits has become muddier.

"The reputation is certainly deserved based on the history of the last 40 years or so," Hellman said Monday. "It's been more liberal, by which we mean more sympathetic to habeas petitioners, civil rights plaintiffs, anti-trust cases, immigration cases. But it's less of an outlier now than it was."

That history has prompted repeated, unsuccessful efforts to split the 9th Circuit most recently in proposals filed this year by Arizona's congressional delegation. A bill introduced last week by Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake would put Arizona in a new 12th Circuit with Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Nevada and Washington while leaving California, Hawaii and Oregon plus Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands in the 9th Circuit.

A House version previously introduced by Reps. Andy Biggs and four other Arizona Republican representatives would leave Washington in the 9th Circuit.

In a news release, Biggs said his aim was "to free Arizona from the burdensome and undue influence of the 9th Circuit Court."

"As a promise to my constituents last year, I introduced this bill to protect Arizona from a federal circuit court that does not reflect the values nor laws of our state," he said. "The Ninth Circuit cannot handle the number of states currently entrapped within its jurisdiction, causing access to justice to be delayed."

Tobias said that while the 9th Circuit could use more judges, it makes little sense to split the circuit. California generates so many cases that the 9th is always going to have a heavy workload it handled 11,888 of the 56,244 cases handled by all federal appeals courts in the 12 months ending last June. And Tobias said he doesn't consider the sort of judicial gerrymandering Biggs seeks as a valid reason to split the court.

Judge Alex Kozinski, the circuit's former chief judge, once joked in a New York Times interview that far from splitting the 9th, he was hoping to acquire more territory. He had his sights on Utah, for the good skiing, he said.

The three judges weighing Trump's travel ban are on the case by virtue of having been randomly assigned to the circuit's motions panel for this month. Senior Circuit Judge William C. Canby Jr. was appointed by Carter in 1980; Senior Circuit Judge Richard R. Clifton was appointed by Bush in 2002; and Circuit Judge Michelle T. Friedland was appointed by Obama in 2014.

Canby, who is based in Phoenix, was a first lieutenant in the Air Force in the 1950s before becoming a Peace Corps administrator in Ethiopia and Uganda in the 1960s. Clifton, who keeps his chambers in Honolulu, came to the bench from private practice, as did Friedland, who is based in San Francisco.

They were scheduled to hear arguments by phone Tuesday on whether to maintain a temporary restraining order issued by Seattle U.S. District Judge James L. Robart that blocked enforcement of the travel ban concerning seven majority-Muslim nations.

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Scholars: 'Liberal' Reputation of 9th Circuit Overblown - ABC News

Demagogues like Donald Trump thrive on simplicity. One of the keys to his ascendancy has been the lumping together of his many enemies into a single entity, a group to blame for all the economic anxiety and cultural dispossession felt by a vocal subset of his constituency. And so, various strains of right-wing anger have for some time now been congealing around a single vague word: liberal.

As a political philosophy, liberalism is an untidy confection. But Im pretty sure I am one, at least in part because I subscribe to liberalisms first principlethat everyone has a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Insofar as I advocate for equality, reason and individual freedom, I guess that makes me the special snowflake sneered at by a billion alt-right Twitter accounts.

And, like all self-identifying liberals in the age of Trump, recent events have plunged me into a sea of doubt. Which is why I think its important to say this: As well as being a liberal, I am also a xenophobe.

That statement requires some immediate qualification. I am not your garden-variety racist. I do not cultivate hatreds based on skin color or nationality. I do not have an Aryan Viking or a colored egg as my Twitter avatar. A child of the 1980s, and an urbanite, pluralism is part of my cultural inheritance. But the truth is that, for someone who has spent the last decade as a travel writer and literary cheerleader for foreign people and places, I often have a hard time transcending stark cultural differences.

I think its important to say this: As well as being a liberal, I am also a xenophobe.Some examples from my rap-sheet include a month in China, during which my girlfriends red hair invited the kind of swivel-eyed scrutiny you might expect if shed had two heads, was enough to turn me against the entire country. The disdain for punctuality common to Latin America and Africa drives me to distraction. In abject fulfillment of the British stereotype, the worlds widespread inability to queue drives me to silent, haughty outrage. Whilst I am adept at reciting the worlds capital cities, Im also an authority on being judgmental.

Such observations dont generally make the final copy of daily opinion columns, but theres nothing especially novel or incendiary about them. (I suspect few members of the liberal chattering classes can watch the Broadway classic Avenue Q without a wry, self-conscious chuckle at the musicals most famous number, Everybodys a little bit racist.) However, at a time when liberalism as a concept is under attackwhen half of America is blaming it for all the worlds problems, and the other half are catastrophizing about the implications of its demisethis mea culpa may help formulate a better understanding of what liberalism is, and why it is in crisis today.

Crucially, the idea that a liberal can also be a bigot presupposes that a persons politics do not depend on the purity of their soul, but rather on the extent to which their anxiety about human nature supersedes their susceptibility to prejudice. Or, to put it more simply, being liberal does not necessarily make you a better person. It just means you believe base humanity is flawed and needs to be contained within a framework of social mores and ethical absolutes.

Liberalism, wrote the controversial philosopher Slavoj Zizek, is sustained by a profound pessimism about human nature. Where the nostalgic conservative sees a past of white picket fences and peaceful cultural homogeneity, the liberal sees centuries of genocide, sectarian war, colonization and enslavement. A right-winger might call it hysteria. A liberal would call it a rational reading of human fallibility. Viewed through this pessimists lens, political correctness is a safeguard, a levee against the dark rivers of our intolerant tribalism.To put it more simply, being liberal does not necessarily make you a better person.

Against this backdrop, a person opposed to liberal ideals comes across as either willfully foolish or worse. Liberals dont brand such people as racist because we think they are. We brand them as racist because we know they are. Because deep down, we know we are too.

And thats the problem. The central weakness of modern liberalism is that the self-criticism required in order to disown this instinctive bias has become a form of blindnessof our own moral imperfection, and of our tendency to offer a prescription for society to which we ourselves struggle to adhere. Three months on from Trumps election victory, and with the anti-liberal backlash continuing to shape politics across western democracies, the vulnerabilities in this picture grow starker by the day.

In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill, among the founding fathers of modern liberalism, wrote that Whatever crushes individuality is despotism. But it seems unlikely that he could ever have imagined how future generations would see, in the ideology he championed, a haunting echo of that same oppression. What emerged as a philosophy of opposition to structural prejudice started to grow sclerotic the moment it assumed the mantle of orthodoxy. The resultan inflexible dogma rooted in secularism and identity politicshas ended up provoking the vengeance of those who feel marginalized by it.

While many liberals complain about the implications of anthropogenic climate change, how many of us refuse to fly?Often, the accusations of hypocrisy marshaled in opposition to liberal points of view are more absurd than effectivewitness, to name one recent example, the thousands of Trump apologists disparaging womens marchers on the premise that those same people hadnt been holding weekly sit-ins to protest the treatment of women in Saudi Arabia. Yet the overarching criticism is valid, for how many liberals can say with sincerity that they are immune to instinctive bias? Can any of us truly claim that we feel as much sympathy for thousands of innocent Syrians immolated by Assads barrel-bombs as we do for European terror victims? While many liberals complain about the implications of anthropogenic climate change, how many of us refuse to fly?

Indeed, the words do as I say, not as I do could be the catchphrase for the entire liberal orderfrom the everyday leftie who decries gentrification while secretly celebrating the increased value of their house to figureheads we eulogize. As people around the world lamented the end of Barack Obamas administration, many pointed out that the man elected US president on a tide of hope and optimism, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize within months of taking office, vacated the White House as the first American president in history to have been at war for every day of his tenure. It doesnt require a huge leap of empathy to understand how someone anathematized to his politics might have seen, in the deluge of liberal tears that accompanied his departure, evidence of an intractable contradiction.

None of this is to say that social liberalism needs to be disavowed. The Trump era, if anything, looks set to demonstrate its importance anew. And while populists would have us believe that 2016 heralded the start of liberalisms downfall, we must keep faith that most people, if pushed, would choose a more self-aware liberal future to Steve Bannons nihilistic vision of religious war.None of this is to say that social liberalism needs to be disavowed.

But as todays progressives confront a newly energized right-wing populism, we must recognize the shortcomings in liberalism that have led us to this juncture. We should be able to acknowledge that, in seeking absolution for our worst instincts, we may have overcompensated by acquiescing to a status quo that has overseen rampant inequality and catastrophic foreign wars. And we should admit that the reactionary ideas fueling the right-wing surgenativism, nationalism, and American exceptionalism among themare understandable, albeit execrable, responses to our transparent balancing act. Trump is sticking a middle finger up to a liberal consensus teetering on feet of clay.

Everyone carries a shadow, wrote the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, and the less it is embodied in the individuals conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. It seems likely, were he alive today, that Jung might suspect liberals of possessing the biggest shadows of all. Perhaps we need to embrace our shadows before we can properly push them away.

Follow Henry on Twitter at @henrywismayer. Learn how to write for Quartz Ideas. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

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All liberals are hypocrites. I know because I am one - Quartz

Cory Bernardi says he did not support the decision to change prime minister from Tony Abbott to Malcolm Turnbull, and he does not agree with the idea of changing again. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP

Cory Bernardi has fired a parting shot at his former conservative colleagues, including Tony Abbott, declaring he was being used in a proxy war against Malcolm Turnbull in the build-up to his departure from the Liberal party.

In an interview with Guardian Australias Politics Live podcast, Bernardi said he did not want his split from the Liberal party to be any sort of trigger point for the destabilisation of Turnbulls prime ministership by his conservative opponents.

Bernardi said he had opposed moves to remove Abbott as prime minister in 2015, and despite his significant philosophical differences with Malcolm Turnbull, any move against him would be wrong too.

Acknowledging that some conservatives were intent on using his departure as fresh material to weaken Turnbull, Bernardi said categorically he did not want his defection to be used for political purposes.

Its the principle, Bernardi said on Tuesday night. You have an elected prime minister, and they are getting rolled because of the polls, or because of poor decisions. They are collective decisions of the cabinet. They are collective decisions of the party room, and they are hurt and they are terrible, but youve got to be prepared to fight.

It is the principle for me in that entire thing.

And where I resented some of the things you have suggested [about positioning by conservatives] is I was being used in a proxy war, and in my dealings with the [press] gallery over the last 12 months, I have made it abundantly clear, I am not involved in this I am not doing anyone elses bidding.

If I am the rebel Senator ... it is not because I am carrying a torch for anyone else. I dont want to see a change of leadership, its always been about the policy.

Abbotts office has been contacted for comment.

Bernardis comments about the Coalitions corrosive internals come after his statement to the Senate on Tuesday confirming his attention to resign from the Liberal party and start a new conservative political movement.

Former colleagues rounded on the South Australian over the course of Tuesday, arguing it was a complete betrayal of the voters of South Australia to stand for election as a Liberal Senator for a six year term, only to quit the party just over six months in.

Bernardi told Guardian Australia on Tuesday evening he had been inspired to launch his own insurgency after watching Donald Trumps successful grassroots campaign in the United States, but he said he had no interest in importing Trumps political tactics into the Australian landscape, such as decrying coverage he didnt approve of as fake news, or trying to muddy up facts.

He also suggested he could compete with One Nation successfully for the conservative vote, and many conservative leaning people looking for a political alternative would be reassured by his long history within the Liberal party.

In the interview, Bernardi shrugged off an apparent lack of interest from his close friend, the mining magnate Gina Rinehart, in bankrolling his new political movement.

Bernardi said he was looking to fund his organisation through many small donations from activists prepared to sign on to Australian Conservatives, which he was prepared to disclose in real time.

He said the sustainability of a political organisation is driven by memberships and the grass roots.

If I can get thousands upon thousands of people contributing modest amounts of money historically thats been the strength for my political fundraising, Bernardi said.

Ive tried to build relationships with people over a very long period of time. I have a weekly blog that goes out. Some of those people will be disappointed [about what Ive done] but there will be tens of thousands of people who will celebrate this decision and they are very supportive of me because Ive become their voice in the parliament.

I know who they are, Ive established a relationship. I can take the temperature of a great many conservatives in the nation very, very quickly.

He also signalled his donations above the disclosure threshold would be revealed publicly continuously, within 24 hours, rather than waiting 12 months for the legal requirement.

I dont know why people want to hide this.

Continued here:

Cory Bernardi says he resents being used in Liberal party 'proxy war' - The Guardian

Dave Berg Published 11:04 a.m. ET Feb. 6, 2017 | Updated 19 hours ago

Kate McKinnon and Hillary Clinton on SNL on Oct. 3, 2015.(Photo: Dana Edelson, AP)

The Trump administration regularly challenges the legitimacy of mainstream journalists, claiming theyall but openly favored Hillary Clinton during the recent presidential election. Many of Trump's supporters agreeand have turned to other news sources, such as Fox News, talk radio hosts and social media networks.

But thatrejection of the mainstream news media is only part of a larger story. Conservativesare wary of the entire liberal entertainment media, especially late-night comedians. While Jay Leno and Johnny Carson used to skewer both sides of the political spectrum with equal glee, todays hosts dish up humor that is anything but even-handed. Instead, they seem to be on a mission to destroy Trump and the Republican Party, doing monologues that often sound more like anti-Trump diatribes. In fairness, Jimmy Fallons only agenda is to entertain, but he is a notable exception.

As a result, many conservatives are clicking off the late-night showsand switching instead to right-leaning media, which is increasingly offering comedic material to fill the void left by the professional comedians. Some of the jokes are really funny. The go-to meme is mainstream journalisms bias against Trump such asPulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist Michael Ramirezs depiction of an anchorman delivering these words: In other disturbing news President Donald Trump is doing what he promised in his campaign.

Nothing bothers conservatives more than liberals who sanctimoniously preach the virtues of tolerancebut dont take their own advice. Chicks on The Right recently ran a photo of a scowling woman pointing an elongated index finger with this caption: Im a tolerant liberal!Agree with me or else youre a racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, redneck, gun toting, America loving bigot.

USA TODAY

Hillary's late-night TV pals aren't funny: Dave Berg

USA TODAY

'Designated Survivor' misleads on Michigan: Column

When Clinton referred to half of Trumps supporters as a basket of deplorables during a campaign fundraiser, she unknowingly struck the rawest conservative nerve of all. Trumpsters" immediately saw this as confirmation that Clinton wasnt just talking about their candidate. She was wagging her menacing index finger at them as well.

This campaign game-changer was lost on most of the late-night joke writers, who saw it only as another opportunity to satirize Trump and his supporters. James Corden joked thatTrumps supporters wanted Clinton to apologize and also explain what deplorable means. But conservatives embraced the phrase as a badge of honor.Trump made an entrance at a Miami rally with a big screen image of French revolutionaries from the musical Les Miserables projected behind him. But the title was changed to Les Deplorables.

Retailers began selling T-shirts with funny versions of the meme, such as Team Deplorable and Friends Dont Let Friends Join the Basket of Deplorables.

One of Trumps inaugural balls was even called the Deploraball.

Hollywood celebrities provide some of the richest material. Not all of them, just the self-important, preachy, hypocritical ones. When the dour, pedantic actors at the nationally televised Screen Actors Guild Awards bashed Trump non-stop, Fox News'Tucker Carlson quipped: This spells trouble ahead for the new administration becausewhen you lose Hollywood, you dont just lose Hollywood. You also lose Santa Monica and some parts of Pacific Palisades. And thats not good. Conservative satirist Ann Coulter tweeted: Big rally last night by SAG Sharia Activist Group.

USA TODAY

Pay no attention to the Gorsuch hysteria: Christian Schneider

POLICING THE USA:Alook at race, justice, media

Talk show host Chelsea Handler smugly told Varietythat she wouldnt interview Melania Trump because she can barely speak English. It was an odd thing for her to say, as the first ladywould be a great get for Handlers struggling show. Besides, Trump speaks five languages, and Handler doesnt even have a college degree. The irony was not lost on the first ladys supporters, who vented on Twitter.

From @mljackson12, "Perhaps Chelsea should give the interviewin French, German or Serbian? No wait Slovenian." And @ms_erika74, "Chelsea Handler speaksfluent vodka, thats about it."

Homegrown conservative humor has filled a need that late-night comedians have ignored for too long. They have done so at their own peril, as they will inevitably be facing stiffer competition from comedy shows hosted by comedians who understand the political sensibilities of people in the vast red political landscape of the country.

Dave Berg, author ofBehind the Curtain: An Insiders View of Jay Lenos Tonight Show, co-produced the show for 18 years. Follow him on Twitter @TonightShowDave.

You can readdiverse opinions from ourBoard of Contributorsand other writers ontheOpinion front page,on Twitter@USATOpinionand in our dailyOpinion newsletter.To submit a letter, comment or column, check oursubmission guidelines.

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Conservatives reject liberal humor in Trump era: Dave Berg - USA TODAY