monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Quote:

The evidence seems to show, rather, that the increasing strength of the climate case has made no dent whatsoever on the US conservative movement’s denial. Whatever their opinions might be sensitive to, it is not the work of scientists.

...For decades, the case that climate change is a threat has grown stronger and deeper. It has had no effect whatsoever on the trajectory of the US conservative movement. Here at the tail end of all those papers and reviews and meta-reviews, all those explainers and videos and infographics, we have an administration appointing idiots who say things like “the climate has always changed” to lead the agency in charge of climate research.

...For years, US political and media elites have treated GOP climate denialism as a kind of peculiarity, an idiosyncrasy, occasionally to be mocked or “fact-checked” but mostly, like climate change itself, to be politely ignored.

Now it seems climate denial was a canary in the coal mine, harbinger of a more thoroughgoing alienation from mainstream understanding of the world, leaving the right “unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science,” as Ornstein and Mann so memorably put it.

Vox

Controlling information is a fundamental tool of authoritarian/totalitarian regimes. I don't know of any greater problem facing America than this isolation of a sector of the population within it's epistemological bubble.

Rush Limbaugh will be evacuating South Florida, just days after the popular conservative radio host claimed that Hurricane Irma would not hit the United States and that scientists and the liberal media were hyping up the hurricane as proof of their global warming “lie.”

The proof there is no just and all powerful god is that this guy has not been crushed into slime by a falling piano.

vomitous

To conservatives who have distrusted Trump all along, this proved their suspicion that the president was not a true conservative.

This isn't just Trumpian - the VRWC (Vast Right Wing Conspiracy) has been working on this for years!

If you look around the web over the last week, it is glaringly evident that the (Russian?) plan to distract from Trump by resurrecting the undead political corpse of H. Clinton has enjoyed a good deal of success. Clinton, rather than President Plump, has become the center of way too many political discussions.

More than 60% of President Trump’s primary voters said they were uneasy with social changes that have made the U.S. more diverse and tolerant, versus 35% of Republicans who supported other primary candidates

Republicans who voted for Mr. Trump in the 2016 primary approve almost unanimously of the job he is doing as president, with some 98% backing him. But his approval rating among Republicans who voted for other primary candidates stands at 66%.

The divisions that emerge in the poll help explain persistent tensions between Mr. Trump and GOP leaders in Congress, who generally came from the ranks of Republicans who resisted his unorthodox candidacy in the 2016 campaign.

GOP primary voters split on one prominent Trump issue: immigration.

Among those who voted for Mr. Trump in the primaries, 59% said immigration weakens the U.S. Among primary voters who backed other candidates, the same proportion, 59%, said immigration strengthens the nation.

Immigration was a far more central issue to Trump supporters than to other Republicans: 50% of Trump primary voters said the immigration issue had an impact on how they voted, while 24% of other GOP primary voters said immigration factored into their vote.

Republicans splintered over views of their own party. Among Trump primary voters, 75% said they have positive feelings about the party; only 58% of other GOP voters felt positively about the party.

And primary-season divisions linger in Democrats’ views of their own party. The survey found that 84% of people who supported Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary had a positive view of the party. Just 53% of those who supported Bernie Sanders had a positive view.

blatham, regarding "I don't know of any greater problem facing America", I will reply to this part. Unfortunately, the next step after "Controlling information" of "authoritarian/totalitarian regimes" is to then put out their own lies as fact without now a means of rebuttal.

Sadly, this is currently trying to be achieved also; by control of:

1) the press
2) centers of higher learning
3) and, centers of researchwThis isn't just Trumpian - the VRWC (Vast Right Wing Conspiracy) has been working on this for years!

U.S. political divisions reach far beyond Washington policy to fall along economic, cultural, geographical and educational lines. But more importantly, the polarization predates the rise of President Donald Trump, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey has found.

The wide gulf is visible in an array of issues and attitudes: Democrats are twice as likely to say they never go to church as are Republicans, and they are eight times as likely to favor action on climate change. One-third of Republicans say they support the National Rifle Association, while just 4% of Democrats do. More than three-quarters of Democrats, but less than one-third of Republicans, said they felt comfortable with societal changes that have made the U.S. more diverse, the poll revealed.

One measure of how much more polarized the electorate is than a generation ago can be found in views of the president. Eight months into the 1950s presidency of Republican Dwight Eisenhower, 60% of Democrats approved of the job he was doing. That level of cross-party support for a new president remained above 40% until Bill Clinton, when only 20% of Republicans approved of his performance after eight months in 1993. For Barack Obama, Republican support dropped to 16% at this point in his presidency in 2009.

Trump’s job-approval rating among Americans overall has remained in recent months at about 40%, but just 8% of Democrats approve of the job he is doing, the survey found. By contrast, 80% of Republicans approve.

Fully 80% of those surveyed saw the country as mainly or totally divided. But Democrats and independents tended to see the division as rooted in economics—the income gap between the rich and the poor. Republicans saw the split as political, with people divided based on their party affiliation and the media outlets they prefer.

this bit seems odd to me

Quote:
Republicans splintered over views of their own party. Among Trump primary voters, 75% said they have positive feelings about the party; only 58% of other GOP voters felt positively about the party.


some kind of cognitive dissonance being worked out there

___

it's a WSJ poll/article so not mentioned about results on the Democrat side

Quote:
And primary-season divisions linger in Democrats’ views of their own party. The survey found that 84% of people who supported Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary had a positive view of the party. Just 53% of those who supported Bernie Sanders had a positive view.

this bit seems odd to me

Quote:

Quote:
Republicans splintered over views of their own party. Among Trump primary voters, 75% said they have positive feelings about the party; only 58% of other GOP voters felt positively about the party.

some kind of cognitive dissonance being worked out there

voters with Bernie, who lost to HR in the primaries, are worried about the future of the party.

Two NC Republicans say they accidentally asked the Supreme Court to end gerrymandering