monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Your constant parroting of other's words is testament to your inability to think for yourself. You're the most frightened person I've ever come across.

You should leave discussions like this to people who don't live in constant fear and can actually think for themselves.

You're a joke, a twisted caricature that's moved way beyond satire, nobody takes you seriously, not even fellow travellers like Finn.

You should stick to World of Warcraft, at least there you might have a chance of knowing what's going on.

I didn't say you are a Nazi,

you moron.

In a democracy, you cannot outlaw political parties without denying the right of the people to associate for political reasons.

A republic is a nation of laws rather than personalities, and our laws do not allow for the banning of political parties.

Those are the arguments against your lickspittle proposal to take steps to assure the crowning of President Plump as king.

Like so many clowns around here, without the straw man fallacy, you'd have nothing to say.

Some of us have seen this movie before. In my generation, when I was a teenage member of MSU’s SDS in the late 1960s, I remember the guy who was always yelling, “Kill the pigs,” and encouraging us to burn down the ROTC building on campus. In later years, I heard from old SDS colleagues that when they sued the police, they learned that the outspoken guy was a police officer and his friends were informants.

Hurricane zone, earthquake zones, flooding zones, etc...all of them I'm curious about opinions on.

Neo-Nazis think their Führer is allmighty.

Nobody is interested in anything you have to say, not even your fellow fascists, because you're an embarrassment.

Trump’s ‘USA’ Hat Criticized by Ethics Group and Those Who Don’t Like Ugly Hats

I did argue against your idiotic and fascistic proposal. You either lack the intellectual capacity to understand that, or you are unwilling to face up to the fascistic nature of your proposal. Which ain't no skin off my nose.

I don't read the fellow's posts

but it really is difficult to imagine a mind which has trouble with this most simple and basic differentiation between democracy and fascism.

Charles P. Pierce‏Verified account @CharlesPPierce 11h11 hours ago
Charles P. Pierce Retweeted Evan Rosenfeld
Mr. Mueller Is Pleased To Announce That It's On, Motherfckers.

Rightwing activists across the US have launched a nationwide campaign to undermine progressive politicians by depriving them of a major source of support and funding – public sector unions.

A network of conservative thinktanks with outposts in all 50 states has embarked on a “breakthrough” campaign designed to strike a “mortal blow” against the American left. The aim is to “defund and defang” unions representing government employees as the first step towards ensuring the permanent collapse of progressive politics.

The campaign carries a powerful echo of the populist creed espoused by Donald Trump. The president was propelled into the White House last November after unexpected victories in several previously Democratic rust belt states including Michigan and Wisconsin, both of which have endured withering attacks on trade unions in recent years.

The new assault is being spearheaded by the State Policy Network (SPN), an alliance of 66 state-based thinktanks, or “ideas factories” as it calls them, with a combined annual budget of $80m. As suggested by its slogan – “State solutions. National impact” – the group outlines an aim to construct a rightwing hegemony throughout the US, working from the bottom up.

WASHINGTON — With each crisis of the young Trump administration, reporters and pollsters have documented the steady support he continues to get from his most ardent backers, the roughly one in four Americans who consistently tell pollsters that they approve of his performance in office, agree with him on most issues and like his personality.

Tuesday night at a focus group in Pittsburgh, a group of reporters heard from a different slice of Trump voters — ones he's lost for now.



"Outrageous," "disappointed," "not ready" were among the adjectives that focus group members tossed out when asked for a single word to describe the president — and those were from the participants who had voted for him.

"He has got to be his own worst enemy," said Tony Sciullo, a lifelong Pittsburgh resident and a registered independent who works for an insurance agency and described Trump as an "abject disappointment."

"He's such an incredibly flawed individual who has articulated so many of the values that I hold dear," Sciullo said, adding that he almost wished Trump were on the other side of the political divide because of the damage he sees him doing to conservative causes.

Brian Rush, a registered Republican who works as a sales representative, voiced a slightly more supportive view.

"I'm still going to hold off judgment," he said. "I'm hoping things can turn around."

Trump "does want this country to be great," Rush said. He likened the administration to a once-new car that now has several dents and is "not running the way it should" while the mechanics "don't know exactly why."

Focus groups such as this one, which was conducted by veteran pollster Peter D. Hart as part of a project for Emory University, aren't polls; they provide insights into how people are thinking, not into how large a particular group may be. This group, which reporters could view remotely, included a dozen people — five who voted for Trump, six for Hillary Clinton and one who voted for neither. None of the five Trump voters said they currently approve of the president.

Numerous public polls provide insights into how common such views are.

Fewer deflated Trump voters exist than hard-core Trump backers: Most of those who voted for the president last year remain behind him. But the disappointed voters nonetheless could be critical in the future. Trump won each of the three states that provided his margin of victory — Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — by less than a percentage point. He carried Pennsylvania by slightly more than 44,000 votes out of roughly 6 million cast.

By comparison, the share of self-identified Republicans who say they approve of Trump's performance in office has dropped by about 10 percentage points, from the high 80 percent range to the high 70 percent range, since he took office, according to averages of publicly available polling. A significant slide in his approval among Republicans has occurred since early July, coinciding with the Senate's rejection last month of measures to repeal the Affordable Care Act and Trump's controversial comments this month about the violence surrounding neo-Nazi demonstrations in Charlottesville, Va.

That still gives Trump a big majority within his party — enough to intimidate some GOP elected officials. But presidents in the polarized political environment of the last few decades usually can count on support from 90 percent or more of their fellow partisans. That was true for President Barack Obama and for President George W. Bush for most of their tenures.

A recent survey by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that about one in five self-identified Republicans said they don't like the way Trump "conducts himself as president" while about half said they had mixed feelings, and about one-third said they liked what he does. Asked about his specific positions, roughly three in 10 Republicans said they agreed with Trump on only a few (22 percent) or no (8 percent) issues. Pew conducted the survey among 1,893 adults nationwide, Aug. 15 to 21; the margin of error is 2.9 percentage points in either direction.

Both the polling data and the focus group indicate that the way voters react to Trump's behavior and personality, not his positions on particular issues, drives the way they feel about him. A second Pew survey asked Trump supporters and opponents what they liked and disliked about him. On both sides, his personality dominated the results.

Among those who approved of Trump's performance in office, for example, about half listed aspects of his personality when asked what they liked about him. Only about one in eight cited a specific policy position.

Among those who disapproved of Trump's job performance, an even smaller share, 7 percent, mentioned specific policies, But nearly six in 10 said they disliked everything about him.

That survey was conducted online, using a panel of 4,971 adults chosen to reflect the demographics of the U.S. population; it has an estimated sampling error of 2.3 percentage points in either direction.

For both sides, Trump's use of Twitter has come to symbolize several aspects of his behavior — his pugnacity and willingness to quarrel with those he perceives as having slighted him; his tendency to blurt out what's on his mind, even if that might hurt his long-term objectives; and his unwillingness to be controlled by his handlers.

To many of his supporters, those traits indicate authenticity and Trump's willingness to take on the political establishment. To critics, including those within his own party, that same behavior conveys a sense of lack of discipline and chaos they find troubling.

"He apparently has a lot of time on his hands," Christina Lees, a registered independent who was one of the focus group's Trump voters, said when asked about his Twitter habit. He needs some restraint, she said.

"His tweeting is for his own ego," said David Turner, a Republican and another of the disaffected Trump voters. "His learning curve has been a little disappointing."

Clearly the Communist Party posseses ethics far superior to those of the Democratic Party.