Monthly Archives: August 2021

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. Venetria K. Patton will become the Harry E. Preble Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign effective Aug. 2, pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees.

Patton is currently the head of the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at Purdue University. She has held several leadership roles at Purdue including Provost Fellow for Diversity and Inclusion and director of the African American Studies and Research Center. She previously was an associate professor of English and of African American studies at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is foundational to the mission of this great university, said Andreas C. Cangellaris, the vice chancellor for academic affairs and provost of the Urbana-Champaign campus. Professor Patton has a clear vision for advancing the college. With her rich and strong record of academic leadership, her enthusiasm for bolstering the colleges excellence in teaching, research, innovation and engagement, and her proven record of commitment to inclusive excellence, she will be a strong and effective leader.

Pattons teaching and research focus on African American and diasporic womens literature. She is the author of two monographs: The Grasp That Reaches Beyond the Grave: The Ancestral Call in Black Womens Texts and Women in Chains: The Legacy of Slavery in Black Womens Fiction. She is co-editor of Double-Take: A Revisionist Harlem Renaissance Anthology and editor of Background Readings for Teachers of American Literature. Her essays have appeared in numerous Black studies and womens studies journals.

She is the recipient of the Kenneth T. Kofmehl Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award at Purdue and the Annis Chaikin Sorensen Award for distinguished teaching in the arts and humanities and the College of Arts Distinguished Teaching Award, both from Nebraska, Lincoln. She holds a B.A. in English from the University of La Verne and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Riverside.

Patton was selected after a national search headed by Vikram Amar, the dean of the College of Law. Gene Robinson, who has led LAS as interim dean since July 2020, will resume leadership of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology.

LAS is the academic home of roughly one-third of the faculty and students at the university. With more than 1,500 classes offered each semester, more than 99% of undergraduate students take a class in LAS during their time at Illinois.

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Patton named College of Liberal Arts and Sciences dean - University of Illinois News

Media top headlines July 27

In media news today, PolitiFact declares that claim Biden, Harris distrusted COVID vaccine under Trump is 'false,' an ESPN writer says he was troubled by the American flag at the Tokyo Olympics, and Biden calls a reporter a 'pain in the neck' following her question about the vaccine mandate for VA front line workers.

NBC News anchor Chuck Todd dismissed the notion that there is a liberal bias in the media as a Republican talking point that has been repeated so many times that the left now believes it but he wishes his mainstream media colleagues fought back to combat the theory.

"I think objectivity and fairness are not the same thing in some ways. You cant define objectivity as sort of being equal, that we know. You cant balance the truth, that we know," Todd told The Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel when asked how he maintains a sense of fairness.

NBC News political director and "Meet the Press" moderator Chuck Todd dismissed the notion that there is a liberal bias in the media. (Photo by: William B. Plowman/NBC)

"So you have to be fair and have an open mind," Todd added. "Where we did get lost in this, and this sort of happened to mainstream media in particular, is that we did let Republican critics get in our heads, right?"

MAINSTREAM MEDIA CONTINUES TO FAIL US CITIES AMID CRIME SURGE: 'THEY REFUSE TO CALL OUT THE LIBERAL MAYORS'

Todd, the host of "Meet The Press" since 2014, then said conservatives claim there is "a liberal bias in the media" and implied the concept isnt accurate despite decades of mainstream media organizations favoring Democratic ideology and even suppressing news thats harmful to the left.

"The Republicans have been running on, Theres a liberal bias in the media," Todd said. "If you say something long enough, there are liberals who say theres a liberal bias in the media when you see polling now."

"I think Im one of those liberals," Patel responded.

"Right. The point is, if you say it enough, a lot of people believe it," Todd said.

CNN REMOVES THE TERM VIOLENT FROM ON-AIR GRAPHIC DESCRIBING PROTESTS IN WISCONSIN

"The Republicans have subsumed all of this and its turned into this. We should have fought back better in the mainstream media. We shouldnt [have] accepted the premise that there was liberal bias. We should have defended," Todd said. "I hear the attacks on fact checkers where they fact-check Republicans six times more than they fact-check Democrats. Yeah. Perhaps the Republicans are being factually incorrect more often than the Democrats."

Todd feels the mainstream media "overcorrected" the talking point that there is a liberal bias in the media.

"We ended up in this both-sides trope. We bought into the idea that, oh my God, were perceived as having a liberal bias," he said.

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Todd's remarks come on the heels of more mainstream figures like fellow NBC anchor Lester Holt who reject the notion of having to treat both sides of an issue equally, with Holt saying fairness was "overrated." While some observers appreciate the honesty of more reporters not pretending to be objective, others told Fox News that blending opinion and reporting undermines trust in journalism further.

Link:

NBC News Chuck Todd dismisses notion of a liberal bias in the media as GOP talking point that stuck - Fox News

The Sydney University Liberal Club is campaigning against the citys lockdown, directly contradicting Prime Minister Scott Morrisons edict that there is no alternative to the lockdown in NSW to get this under control.

The Club owns http://www.livewiththevirus.com.au, a website that is running a petition that has collected more than 11,000 signatures against the state governments disproportionate COVID-19 response and its measures. There is also a related social media channel.

One of the most senior members of the club, vice president of policy Abby Donaldson, is also an electorate officer for federal MP Jason Falinski.

Mr Falinski has argued publicly that his Sydney northern beaches electorate of Mackellar should be eased out of lockdown because of its relatively few cases compared to the citys south-west and west.

The MP has stated lockdowns should be limited to specific local government areas and that where it is safe to ease restrictions, in certain LGAs such as his own, this should occur.

Mr Falinski is one of a number of Liberal MPs who have advocated for a more learn to live with the virus approach to COVID-19, much as http://www.livewiththevirus.com.au advocates, particularly as vaccination rates rise. However, this view is at odds with national cabinets strong endorsement of short, sharp lockdowns to contain the Delta variant.

The NSW government has not implemented proposals such as these in full - though some local government areas are subject to stricter lockdowns - and it has flagged that some LGAs could see restrictions eased sooner than others in the future.

Liberal MPs Tim Wilson and Jason Falinski. Credit:Jason Falinski

The website states lockdowns should only be a last resort and that while a zero-transmission strategy might reduce COVID transmission, the drastic measures are not without cost. Politicians, riding the easy wave of popular opinion, want us to ignore that.

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Federal Liberal MP linked to student campaign to end the lockdown - Sydney Morning Herald

Shiv Sena MP Priyanka Chaturvedi on Friday wrote to IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw requesting him to take stringent action against a YouTube channel that ran a live auction of women of a particular community and an app that had posted pics of several women taken from their social media profiles without consent.

I request you to take urgent and strict actions to deal with such nuisance so as to protect the dignity of women of our society as any responsible government should, Chaturvedi wrote in a letter to Vaishnaw.

Flagging concerns about the lack of safe cyberspace for women, she said, The misuse of social and digital media to harass and attack the dignity of a woman is disheartening. In a country where women are struggling with gender bias, these incidents yet again lay bare the protection and safety of women, especially in cyberspace.

Describing the two cases, she said, A few months back, a YouTube channel Liberal Doge ran a live auction of women belonging to a particular community. People were bidding and rating women based on their physical appearance and wrote degrading comments. More recently, pictures of several women have been uploaded without their knowledge or consent on the app called Sulli Deals that had posted pictures of several women from various professions, including journalists, sourced from their social media websites.

Chaturvedi pointed out that the women targeted on the app faced threats, embarrassment and harassment, and said the purpose of the app was to degrade and humiliate women belonging to a particular community.

She also alleged that no real progress has been made so far despite the Delhi and Noida Police registering cases.

The lack of stringent efficient preventive laws and punishments for such cases only motivates perpetrators, she wrote, adding: It pains me to see that hardly any movement with regards to this case has been taken as of now despite the seriousness of it.

According to complaints lodged with the police in Delhi and Noida, pictures of several Muslim women have been uploaded without their consent on the app, which was created on GitHub, a popular hosting platform with a number of open-source codes. When a user selected the deal of the day option on the home screen, it displayed the picture of a woman.

Earlier, Congress MP Md Jawaid too had requested Union Home Minister Amit Shah to ensure that those found guilty in connection with photos of women being uploaded on an Sulli deals app were brought to book. He also said that 56 MPs across party lines have signed his letter demanding punishment for those found guilty.

Link:

Priyanka Chaturvedi writes to IT Minister seeking action against Sulli Deals, Liberal Doge - The Indian Express

Joe Biden probably knows more about picking judges than any new president in American history.

A longtime member and former chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden oversaw hundreds of judicial confirmations. He chaired the 1987 hearing that successfully convinced the Senate to reject Judge Robert Borks nomination to the Supreme Court; then presided over a far less successful hearing that preceded Justice Clarence Thomass confirmation in 1991.

As president, hes approached judicial selection with a seriousness of purpose that hasnt been seen in a Democratic White House since at least the Carter administration. With eight Biden judges currently sitting on the federal bench, including three court of appeals judges, Bidens appointed more judges at this point in his presidency than any newly elected president since Richard Nixon.

Bidens nominated 22 more, and he has the potential to shape much of the federal bench very rapidly. Currently, there are 82 vacancies throughout the federal judiciary, nearly 10 percent of the bench, although most of these vacancies are on relatively low-ranking district courts.

When I speak with liberal advocates jaded by years of failed efforts to get Democrats including the Obama White House to take judicial appointments as seriously as Republicans, their attitudes toward Biden range from measured enthusiasm to something approaching ecstasy. Though Biden received some criticism from his left for nominating two management-side employment lawyers to vacant seats in New Jersey, nearly all of the advocates that I spoke with were thrilled with Bidens overall record on judicial nominations.

Former Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold, who now leads the liberal American Constitution Society, told me that Bidens judicial confirmation efforts are off to a tremendous start. Daniel Goldberg of the Alliance for Justice, an organization that spent the Trump years producing research memos warning about the former presidents nominees, summarized his opinion of Bidens approach to judges in a single word: outstanding.

And yet, while liberal veterans of the judicial wars now have the president many of them have hoped for their entire career, Biden may have arrived five years too late. The sad reality for the new president is that hes likely to need every ounce of political skill and institutional knowledge that he gained after decades of confirming judges to pull the judiciary back from where his predecessor left it. And he may still fail to do so.

Biden had been president less than a week when the first Trump judge handed down a decision sabotaging one of his policies. The judge was Drew Tipton, a federal judge in Texas with only a few months of experience on the bench, and the sabotaged policy was a 100-day pause on deportations that the administration announced on Bidens first day in office.

Tiptons opinion explaining why he blocked the deportation moratorium flouted decades of precedent. And Tipton has hardly been the only judge to behave this way during Bidens still-young presidency.

J. Campbell Barker, another Trump judge in Texas, handed down a decision in February that, if taken seriously, could strip the federal government of its power to regulate the national housing market. In July, Judge Andrew Hanen, a judge whose nativist inclinations are so widely known that anti-immigrant plaintiffs seek out his courtroom to ensure they will receive a sympathetic hearing, struck down the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that allows hundreds of thousands of immigrants to remain in the country.

The Supreme Court spent the first days of summer busting unions, protecting conservative political donors, and gutting the Voting Rights Act. The Court also spent the last couple of years laying the groundwork to strip the Biden administration of much of its power to regulate the workplace, expand access to health care, and protect the environment.

President Biden, in other words, began his presidency deep in a hole. He faces a 6-3 conservative Supreme Court, and dozens of Trumps lower court judges eager to make a name for themselves (and potentially score a promotion in a future Republican administration) by undercutting Democratic policies. He is the heir to an Obama administration that, at least early on, treated judicial confirmations as an annoying distraction from other business, and to a Trump administration that treated the judiciary as its most lasting legacy.

And that legacy could include disrupting Bidens entire presidency.

President Barack Obamas judicial nominees faced several structural obstacles that do not hinder Bidens. When Obama took office, the filibuster enabled Republicans to block any nominee who didnt have supermajority support in the Senate, and it enabled the GOP to slow the Senates business to an excruciating crawl even when Democrats did have the 60 votes necessary to break a filibuster.

The Senate changed these rules to allow judges to be confirmed by a simple majority, and to limit the minority partys power to delay most confirmation votes.

Then-Senate Judiciary Chair Patrick Leahy (D-VT) like so many other Democrats who cling to their own idiosyncratic notions of how institutions should function at the expense of governance insisted on giving Republican senators veto power over anyone nominated to a federal judicial vacancy in their state by taking an unusually expansive view of a Senate tradition known as the blue slip. The current chair, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), will not allow Republicans to veto at least some of Bidens nominees, especially his nominees to powerful appellate courts.

Obama also had to fill a Supreme Court vacancy in his first year, which made it difficult for the White House or the Senate to pay as much attention to lower court nominees.

But even if Obama was dealt a more difficult hand on judicial confirmations than Biden, he played that hand terribly.

At least in the first year of his presidency, Obama staffed his White House with senior officials who either treated the process of shepherding judges to confirmation as a chore, or who lacked experience with judicial politics.

Rahm Emanuel, Obamas first chief of staff, reportedly told a room full of activists that he didnt give a fuck about judicial appointments. Greg Craig, Obamas first White House counsel, was a former State Department official who showed more interest in Obamas worthy, but failed, effort to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay than in choosing judges.

Obama, meanwhile, prevailed on Craig to hire Cassandra Butts, a personal friend and law school classmate of Obamas with a distinguished career on Capitol Hill and in left-of-center politics. (Disclosure: In 2015, I interned on the Center for American Progresss domestic policy team, which Butts led.) Craig made her his deputy overseeing judicial nominations.

Yet, while Butts was undoubtedly qualified to work in the White House, she had limited experience working in judicial politics. And her legislative background also fit in poorly in a White House counsels office that placed credentials such as a Supreme Court clerkship or practice at a white-shoe law firm on a pedestal. That appears to have diminished her influence.

The result of this mix of inexperience and indifference is that the early Obama White House was often slow to nominate judges. And it stumbled into traps that aides more familiar with judicial politics might have avoided.

Heres an example: About two months into Obamas presidency, the White House announced that it would nominate Indiana federal trial Judge David Hamilton to a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Hamilton was Obamas first judicial nominee, and the president intended to use Hamiltons nomination to extend an olive branch to Republicans.

The New York Times described Hamilton as someone who is said by lawyers to represent some of his states traditionally moderate strain. And Hamilton enjoyed the support of his home-state Republican Sen. Richard Lugar.

But, if the Obama White House had paid more attention to Hamiltons record as a federal district judge, they would have known that he was not the sort of judge who could be sold to Republicans as a peace offering.

Among other things, Hamilton blocked an Indiana law that effectively required most abortion patients to make two trips to a clinic before they could have an abortion. And he handed down a pair of religious freedom decisions that seemed designed to enrage Republican culture warriors. The first held that a state legislature could not open its session with a prayer to Jesus, because such a prayer preferences Christianity over other faiths. The second opinion explained that a prayer to Allah could be a permissible non-sectarian prayer, because Allah is merely the Arabic word for God.

The point is not that Hamilton was wrong in any of these decisions, or that he should not have been confirmed to the Seventh Circuit. Hamilton is an excellent judge, and the rule of law depends on judges who are willing to hand down decisions that may make them unpopular. But a White House staffed with veterans of past judicial confirmation fights would have understood that a judge with Hamiltons record on abortion and religion would trigger significant opposition from Republicans.

And trigger it he did. Republicans filibustered his nomination. When Hamilton was eventually confirmed, every Republican senator except for Lugar opposed him.

Though Obamas judicial confirmations effort grew more sophisticated later in his presidency, it never fully recovered from its early missteps. In eight years as president, Obama appointed only 55 federal appellate judges just one more than Trump appointed in only four years in the White House.

The charitable interpretation of the Obama White Houses early missteps is that it had a lot on its plate. It was trying to dig the nation out of a catastrophic recession, and didnt want to get bogged down in fights over judges. As Feingold told me, judicial nominations got put on the back burner during much of Obamas presidency.

But President Biden faces at least as many challenges as Obama did during his first term in office. Biden also is trying to revive a stalled economy, and hes doing so as the world seeks to curb what is hopefully a once-in-a-century pandemic. Plus, Biden faces an opposition party that increasingly views Democrats as illegitimate. Republicans worked hard to undermine Obamas policy agenda, but even the Obama-era Republican Party didnt try to sabotage an investigation into a violent attempt to overthrow the United States government and install Donald Trump as president.

And yet, with so many crises to confront at once, Biden has still confirmed more judges this early in his presidency than any other chief executive in the past half-century. Hes hired senior staff who understand judicial politics and take confirming judges very seriously. It is clear that the White House counsels office and the Oval Office consider this a high priority, said Feingold.

Having [White House Chief of Staff] Ron Klain in the White House has been about the best thing we could have hoped for when it comes to judicial nominations, according to Molly Coleman of the Peoples Parity Project, a group that organizes law students and young lawyers to unrig the legal system and build a justice system that values people over profits.

Klain oversaw President Bill Clintons judicial nominations efforts, including the confirmation of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Coleman told me that, when she took a course from Klain as a law student, it was clear that the future chief of staff took pride in the time he spent ushering Clintons nominees onto the bench.

Hes a far cry, in other words, from Rahm Emanuel. Klain has been one of the White Houses biggest cheerleaders for judicial confirmations.

White House counsel Dana Remus reached out to Democratic senators a month before Biden was president to enlist their local expertise in the often-arduous process of identifying judicial nominees from individual states. And the Biden White House also hired Paige Herwig, a former Senate Judiciary Committee staffer who also worked for the liberal judicial group Demand Justice, to oversee judicial nominations.

This is a team that knows what it is doing in picking and confirming judges.

When I spoke to liberal legal groups in 2020, I consistently heard that they had two requests from a Democratic White House regarding judges. They wanted nominees who were demographically diverse, but they also wanted nominees who had a diversity of experience working to benefit the least fortunate. A frequent complaint about President Obama was that he nominated too many partners at corporate law firms, and that he nominated too many prosecutors and not enough civil rights lawyers or public defenders.

Bidens transition team signaled that he would meet these requests a month before he took office. In a December 2020 letter to Democratic senators, Remus told those lawmakers that with respect to U.S. District Court positions, we are particularly focused on nominating individuals whose legal experiences have been historically underrepresented on the federal bench, including those who are public defenders, civil rights and legal aid attorneys, and those who represent Americans in every walk of life.

Thus far, the Biden White House has delivered on its goal of appointing judges from diverse backgrounds. One of Bidens first judicial appointments was Judge Zahid Quraishi, the first Muslim American to serve on the federal bench. In all of American history, only 11 Black women have served on a United States Court of Appeals. Three of them Judges Ketanji Brown Jackson, Candace Jackson-Akiwumi, and Tiffany Cunningham were appointed by Biden in the last six months.

Both Judges Jackson and Jackson-Akiwumi, moreover, are former public defenders, as is Eunice Lee, a Biden nominee to the Second Circuit. Myrna Prez, another Biden nominee to that court, directs the voting rights project at the Brennan Center for Justice. Jennifer Sung, a Biden nominee to the Ninth Circuit, is a former union organizer and union-side litigator.

People who in the past couldnt even contemplate being judges are now being nominated, Goldberg from the Alliance for Justice told me. In many cases (though not in every case), Biden is passing over the sort of high-dollar lawyers who are most likely to be politically connected in favor of more service-focused attorneys.

At least at the appellate level, moreover, the typical Biden nominee is someone who chose to spend much of their pre-judicial career in public service, despite having the sort of credentials that could have set them up for a much more lucrative career. Jackson, Jackson-Akiwumi, Lee, Prez, and Sung all clerked for a federal appellate judge an elite credential that is normally reserved for the most high-performing young lawyers and Jackson also clerked for Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.

And yet, for all of his early successes, it remains to be seen whether Biden can keep up the pace.

One other thing that unites Bidens nominees is that they largely hail from blue states with two Democratic senators. These are the easiest vacancies for a Democratic president to fill because allied lawmakers are more likely to cooperate with Biden in identifying potential nominees. But its also because of the legacy of an old patronage system that still gives senators outsized influence over nominees from their state.

Before the Jimmy Carter administration, the White House typically gave enormous deference to home-state senators when choosing federal judges indeed, the Senate Judiciary Committee would often refuse to hold a hearing on a nominee if the president tried to appoint someone other than the choice of the nominees home-state senator. President Carter weakened senators roles by setting up a now-defunct merit selection commission to select court of appeals judges, but senators continue to play an outsized role in choosing trial judges even to this day.

The primary mechanism for maintaining this patronage system is the blue slip, named after the blue pieces of paper home-state senators use to indicate whether they approve of a nominee. Under Sen. Leahy, home-state senators were allowed to veto any nominee to a federal judgeship in their state. But the committees current practice is to only allow senators to veto district judges, the lowest rank of federal judges who receive lifetime appointments.

But even a limited blue slip rule presents problems for Biden. Its hard to imagine that senators like Josh Hawley (R-MO), who threw a fist up in solidarity with the protesters that later attacked the US Capitol in a failed effort to overturn Bidens election, would consent to anyone nominated by Biden. And even many Republican senators who accept the results of the 2020 election are likely to prefer leaving an open judicial seat vacant to filling it with a Biden nominee.

Currently, there are vacant seats in Texas, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Alabama, and Florida, all of which have at least one Republican senator. Ultimately, it will be up to Senate Judiciary Chair Durbin to decide whether Republican senators should be allowed to veto nominees when they have no intention of letting Biden confirm anyone to a vacant seat.

A potentially even more difficult political problem for Biden is what he should do about Democratic senators who drag their feet when the White House seeks their input on potential nominees in their state. Or if they offer recommendations that do not comport with Bidens values. Biden could simply go around such senators, but doing so carries its own risks. Especially in a Senate where Democrats enjoy the narrowest possible majority, there are obvious reasons why the White House may be reluctant to anger a Democratic senator.

Theres also a final, more pragmatic reason why the White House may prefer to work with home-state senators if they can. Senators are more likely to be familiar with the lawyers in their state than the president and his aides, and thus may be able to suggest outstanding candidates who would otherwise be overlooked.

There are potential workarounds if a senator refuses to provide such input Zahra Mion with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund told me that in Florida weve already seen some state legislative members set up commissions to identify potential nominees, for example. But, because senators have historically advised presidents on judicial nominations, a senator is more likely to have already set up such a commission and established the relationships with their state bar that would allow them to provide good advice.

The elephant looming over Bidens effort to shape the bench is that theres always a degree of randomness to judicial selection. Biden and liberal democracy more broadly would stand on much stronger footing if Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg had lived just a few months longer, allowing Biden to choose her successor. And Justice Stephen Breyers decision to hold onto his seat, during what could be a very brief window in which Democrats control the Senate, could easily end in disaster for both the Democratic Party and democracy itself.

The conventional wisdom, Coleman, with the Peoples Parity Project, told me, is that we dont have the full four years to get nominees confirmed. We have until the midterms. And even that might be optimistic. If Republicans regain control of the Senate either through an election or through the death or departure of a Democratic senator GOP Leader Mitch McConnell is likely to impose the same near-total blockade on Bidens Supreme Court and appellate nominees that he imposed on Obama when McConnell had the power to do so.

McConnell has already suggested that no Biden Supreme Court nominee will be confirmed if Republicans take control of the Senate.

The other potential catastrophe looming over the Biden White House is what happens if the Supreme Court goes rogue, invalidating Bidens policies on the flimsiest legal arguments, or even permitting Republican state lawmakers to rig elections outright? Bidens signaled that hes not willing to add seats to the Supreme Court to ward off this problem, and its unlikely that Biden could get such a bill through Congress if he changes his mind. So his influence over the judiciary will ultimately be shaped by which judges leave the bench during his time in office.

Biden will need more than just a lifetime of experience confirming judges if he hopes to reverse Trumps impact on the judiciary. Hes also going to need a lot of luck.

Read more:

Bidens fight to de-Trumpify the Supreme Court and federal courts, explained - Vox.com

Kevin Falcon said he left politics because of his young family and, ironically, that same reason his kids and other B.C. youngsters brought him back.

Now 58, the former cabinet minister, family man and avid mountain biker who quit politics after 12 years in 2012 has since worked as a vice-president at Anthem Capital.

Falcon is running for the B.C. Liberal leadership, his second bid at the job. He was runner-up to Christy Clark in the 2011 leadership race and thinks big ideas could lead his party back into power.

Im thinking about peoples children and grandchildren and making sure that that generation of kids has the same sense of hope and optimism for the future that I had when I was a kid growing up in British Columbia, he told KTW in an interview during a July 29 visit to smoky Kamloops.

And Im very, very concerned that the direction the current government is taking us is going to erase a lot of those opportunities and diminish the optimism that people should have for the future.

Primarily, Falcon said, he is concerned about B.C.s economic future. The former finance minister, who touts private sector success as a means to run government programs, criticized NDP leadership for the provincial credit rating being downgraded, a $5.5-billion deficit and capital projects running over budget, including four-laning of the Trans Canada Highway east of Kamloops and BC Hydros Site C dam.

He said taxpayers work hard and expect financial discipline.

Im just not seeing any of that now and I think the trend line is very, very worrisome, Falcon said.

He repeatedly criticized NDP leadership, including Premier John Horgan appearing to back off a promise to deliver improved cancer care in Kamloops within this four-year mandate.

During the last election, Horgan matched a promise by the BC Liberals for an enhanced cancer centre (with radiation treatment) in Kamloops, but has since deferred to Health Minister Adrian Dix, who is only committing to a 10-year timeline.

However, the Horgan government had been largely commended for its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic though 2020 and obtained a majority to govern in last Octobers provincial election, during which former BC Liberal leader Andrew Wilkinson was criticized for underperforming.

After the Liberals secured only 28 seats in the election, calls were heard for review and renewal, including from Kamloops-South Thompson Liberal MLA Todd Stone. Stone is among those now backing Falcon. Stone said he endorsed Falcon because millions of British Columbians are depending on the party to get the leadership race right and there is too much at stake to take chances.

He said he and Falcon share similar values: family mentality (theyre both self-described girl-dads), hard-work, opportunity for everyone, free enterprise and taking risks and being rewarded.

Stone, who ran for the party leadership in 2018, said the province needs a leader with bold ideas around climate change, child care and housing affordability.

Hes tested, hes experienced, Stone said. Hes been the deputy premier, the finance minister, the transportation minister, the health minister. He knows his way around government. Hes going to be ready on day one. Ready on day one with a plan to build the party and ready on day one to take the fight to John Horgan or whoever the leader of the NDP is and take us into the next election and win.

Asked how he will convince people he is not tied to the Clark and Gordon Campbell eras, given the previous calls for renewal, Falcon said that while the BC Liberal governments were not perfect, he is proud of the partys fiscal report cards.

In the future, he wants to ensure diversity of candidates, including more women and young people regardless of sexual orientation or religion.

He said the party moving forward needs to have big ideas, which he said made it successful in the past. His big ideas include the environment, child care and mental-health and addictions solutions.

He cited the Liberals for introducing the carbon tax and said that while the NDP eliminated tolls on the Port Mann Bridge (Falcons project as transport minister) which was promised by Horgan in an election campaign, arguing it was unfair and costly to Lower Mainland residents environmentalists would say scrapping tolls was not the right decision.

Falcon supports $10 a day child care. However, he envisions it being not entirely public, but a combination of private, non-profit and public spaces.

Another idea put out by Falcon is changing the name of the BC Liberal Party. He does not have a proposed alternative, but said it would be done based on membership consultation.

Only because we often hear from a lot of our members that theres a lot of confusion around our name, he said, noting discrepancy between the BC Liberals, federal Liberals and BC Conservatives.

(The BC Liberals are a right of centre coalition, the successor to Social Credit, and are not affiliated with the federal Liberal Party of Canada.)

In the past, Falcon supported Maxime Bernier in his bid for the federal Conservative leadership, who later went on to resign from the party and form the far-right Peoples Party of Canada. Asked why he supported him at the time, Falcon said Bernier was putting forward big ideas and expanding the party to include the LGBTQ community.

But I have to be really clear about this, Falcon said. The day he left the Conservative Party and quit the party, he was dead to me. What I mean by that is once he left the party and started up this Peoples Party thing, Ive had nothing to do with him and Ive disowned everything hes been involved with since he was involved with the Conservative Party and I think its very unfortunate. Its almost, frankly, a bit embarrassing to me, but I have to accept my responsibility because I did support him back one day, but for reasons that I thought were important.

On the issue of electoral reform, Falcon said that issues been buried and supports the first past the post system. He criticized proposed elimination of protections on the number of rural seats.

BC Liberal members will vote for a new leader in February 2022 and Falcon has been referred by some pundits as the early frontrunner.

Also seeing the leadership are businessman Gavin Dew, MLAs Michael Lee and Ellis Ross and BC Chamber of Commerce CEO Val Litwin.

Perhaps a more significant challenge will be defeating the Horgan government. Falcon said the Horgan government has benefited from limited opposition during the pandemic and his true test will be when the pandemic is in the rearview mirror. Falcon noted issues of social disorder on streets, a sense of insecurity in neighbourhoods, mental- health and addictions resources and capital project expenditures.

He said he knows how to manage and execute large projects after his time as transportation minister. He met with Victoria Street West business owners prior to his interview with KTW and said vandalism and other problems are huge issues.

Falcon is on the board for Streettohome Foundation in Vancouver, which aids the homeless, and said housing is important, but proper 24-seven wraparound services are also needed. He said they were promised, but are not happening in Kamloops, which leads to community concern and, subsequently, a lack of community support for the vulnerable.

Falcon said mental-health and addictions issues require a much bolder response, including more effective addiction recovery programs. He said problems facing business owners on Victoria Street West are being replicated in other communities in B.C.

A real concern I have today is that the focus of the current government is more about how do we provide safe drugs to this population and theres not enough talk about how do we actually get them off of their addictions into recovery, so that they can become contributing members of society again, he said.

And I think that is a massive gap that we need to start talking about. Yes, we need safe drugs because we dont want people dying, for sure, but we cannot just have a system that is maintaining a lifestyle that is highly dangerous to the individuals that are addicted to very dangerous drugs.

Falcon is travelling around communities in British Columbia. While in Kamloops, he also met with business owners in order to hear firsthand how they have been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Kevin Falcon on return to B.C. politics and why he wants to lead the B.C. Liberals - Kamloops This Week