Tag: Workweek and weekend

Upcoming political events in the Bay Area. Installation ceremonies begin at 7 a.m. Saturday, with installation itself starting at 10 a.m. Take-down from 4:30-8 p.m. Sunday. Immigrant rights protest: Sponsored by San Mateo Peace Action and the Raging Grannies. Collection plate proceeds will be given to the Oakland LGBTQ Center. Supervisor candidate forum: San Francisco District Six supervisor candidates Matt Haney, Christine Johnson and Sonja Trauss take part in a forum, sponsored by the East Cut Community Benefit District. 6:30-8 p.m., 101 Second St., San Francisco. 6:30-8 p.m., 2050 Center St., Berkeley. A complete list of rallies in the Bay Area and elsewhere in California is here. 1 p.m., San Francisco Main Library’s Koret Auditorium, 100 Larkin St. More information is here. Laborfest: 25th annual monthlong festival of labor-themed events, forums and cultural performances begins.

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KKTV) - Make politics fun again? Our news partners at The Gazette, teaming up with Colorado Politics and El Pomar's Forum for Civic Advancement, want to try! Drawing inspiration from a centuries-old Swiss tradition, The Gazette, Colorado Politics and El Pomar are launching their first annual Colorado Civic Barbecue this coming weekend. The idea is to give political opponents and the citizens they hope to govern a chance to break bread together in between debates. Essentially the Swiss have turned election day into a party, with sausages, pastries, yodeling and an oompah band. Everyone who shows up gets a say on whatever issues the town faces. All you have to do in some cantons to demonstrate your eligibility to vote is to bring your sword, bayonet or sidearm. After a period of spirited face-to-face, open-air debate, major town decisions are made by a show of hands.-Excerpt from Gazette article Leave the swords at home, but otherwise those behind the barbecue hope to match our high-altitude cousins in merriment! The barbecue will boast bluegrass music, delicious food, and a chance to rub elbows with gubernatorial candidates. The barbecue will be sandwiched in between a Republican primary debate in the morning and a Democratic primary debate in the afternoon.

It's Thursday, OP friends, and we're very ready for the weekend. President Trump officially announced where he'll meet Kim Jong Un, and candidates will be allowed to use their campaign funds on child care. Until that sweet, sweet time at the end of the workday on Friday, keep up with OnPolitics Today and get your friends to subscribe. June 12, here we come (Photo: Susan Walsh, AP) Hours after he welcomed home three Americans who had been detained in North Korea, President Trump announced his historic summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will take place in Singapore on June 12. "We will both try to make it a very special moment for World Peace!" tweeted the president, who will become the first sitting U.S. president to meet with a leader of North Korea. Candidates can use campaign money to pay for child care In a year when Sen. Tammy Duckworth can bring her infant daughter onto the Senate floor and record numbers of women are running for office, the Federal Election Commission said candidates can use their campaign funds for child care. Grechen Shirley had asked the commission whether she could use campaign funds to pay a caregiver for her two children, ages 2 and 3. “This is a landmark decision for women across the country," Grechen Shirley said. Elsewhere in politics

If you want to see timidity, rather, look across the ideological divide, to the Conservatives. Whether it is the Ontario Progressive Conservative party’s election platform, which promises to retain virtually every one of the Wynne government’s worst initiatives, or the micro-politics trickling out of the federal leader’s shop, this is a party that long ago gave up trying to change things much. Why, since 1935, have they lost two elections in three to the Liberals? By the conventional assumptions of politics, the splitting of the left-of-centre vote — at any rate, the non-Conservative vote — should have been fatal to the Liberals’ chances, delivering election after election to the Conservatives. By contrast, the Liberals have won 16 of the 25 elections since then, with an average 3.3-point margin of victory (from 1993 to 2000, vs. combined Progressive Conservative/Reform-Canadian Alliance vote) in the popular vote. Canadian politics are not easily mapped on a simple left-right axis, of course: language and region always play their part. Nevertheless, it is striking that, despite having to split the vote with the CCF/NDP, the Liberals’ electoral performance, far from deteriorating, improved. By the conventional assumptions of politics, the splitting of the left-of-centre vote — at any rate, the non-Conservative vote — should have been fatal to the Liberals’ chances, delivering election after election to the Conservatives The two parties, after all, while they have much in common, do not draw on the same undifferentiated mass of voters. At the same time, the broad philosophical sympathy between the two parties means they define the terms of debate, the default assumptions of public discussion, leaving the Tories permanently on the defensive, as the odd man out. In the three elections between 1993 and 2000, the combined vote-share of Reform (and its successor, the Canadian Alliance) and the PCs averaged 36.9 per cent of the popular vote.