View from the North: Canada’s Citizenship Question

While “a politically divisive debate continues to rage” in the United States over a Census question on citizenship, Canada’s census has been asking about it since 1901, reports CBC’s Kathleen Harris. The long form asks, “Of what country is this person a citizen?” and allows three answers: “Canada, by birth,” “Canada, by naturalization” or “Other country — specify.” And for all the US fears that “the question would discourage immigrants from participating in the census,” the Canadian government’s “data quality assessment indicators have not flagged any issues specifically related to the citizenship question.” More: “The Library of Parliament could not find any significant debate, controversy or court case related to the inclusion of a citizenship question on the Canadian census form.”

2020 watch: Williamson’s a Lot Like Trump

Marianne Williamson’s campaign is based on the same “feel-good, self-help life coaching” President Trump harnessed in 2016, except Trump’s “version of it just happened to translate better into politics,” snarks the Washington Examiner’s Eddie Scarry. The “aspirational nature” of both campaigns is clear: Williamson’s call to make America “the best place in the world for a child to grow up” and harkening to a time when politics “included the people, and included imagination, and included great dreams, and included great plans” is a lot like “Make America Great Again.” And where Williamson worked with Oprah Winfrey, Trump grew up attending a church whose “head pastor was Norman Vincent Peale” — the author of “The Power of Positive Thinking.” Williamson isn’t any “sunnier” than the president; she is just “greener.”

From the right: A Way To Save Local Journalism

The rising tide of newsroom layoffs, closings and forced mergers tells us that “local newspapers, the first line of democratic accountability for local government, are in free fall,” Howard Husock frets in The New York Times. Yet this “threat to democracy” could become “an opportunity for public media” with revision of the Public Broadcasting Act, a “major redirection toward support of local journalism by freeing funds that currently go toward purposes that the private media market now provides.” Local journalism outlets are needed more than ever before “to provide the oxygen of information that binds local communities.” But they need the resources to “produce their own original content.” That requires a shift in government funding: “The world has changed — so should public media.”

Iconoclast: Progressives’ Non-Case Against Biden

Progressives make a weird case against Joe Biden, notes Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic, attacking not his “electability” or “what he is likely to do in office,” but instead, the “problematic” way “he presents himself and his ideas.” When Biden boasted of finding “some civility” in working with segregationist Democrats, Cory Booker slammed “the pain his words are dredging up for many Americans.” Kamala Harris’ assault on busing is a dispute only about “whether federally mandated busing was a sound policy almost 50 years ago. They have no similar difference on federal civil-rights policy today.” By pretending “Biden is too cringeworthy to be the nominee,” they “betray their inability to make a persuasive substantive case” against him.

From the Right: Dependency Plummeting Under Trump

The good news on the jobs market comes with an added bonus, John Merline points out at Issues & Insights: “a sharp trend away from dependency on federal welfare and other benefits.” That includes a drop in food-stamp enrollment of “nearly 1.2 million” so far this year and “more than 6.7 million” since President Trump took office. Plus, workers on Social Security Disability are down 3.6 percent under Trump, to the lowest since August 2011. Enrollment in Medicaid, ObamaCare and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families have all dropped, too. “In a less biased news media world,” he argues, “the decline in government dependency would be front-page news.” Yet the left “treats any declining benefit programs as a problem that needs to be fixed — usually by expanding these programs.”

— compiled by Ashley Allen & Mark Cunningham