monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

There is a good deal of hypocrisy in Americans complaining about others interfering in an election.

white man shoots people? he must be sick, let's get him help

health professionals warn that people should not draw a connection between mass shootings and mental illness.

"This is all a red herring," Liza Gold, a forensic psychiatrist at Georgetown University of Medicine and editor of the book, Gun Violence and Mental Illness said.

"The vast majority of mass shootings are not committed by the diagnosable mentally ill, no matter what politicians try to suggest," Gold said.

"Our country is in a state of denial about the real nature of gun violence and what we can do to decrease mortality."

Only about three to five percent of violent acts in the US are committed by individuals who have been diagnosed with a mental illness, and the percentage of crimes they commit with a gun "are lower than the national average for persons not diagnosed with mental illness," according to findings published in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 2015.

Studies have also found that the mentally ill are no more likely to become violent than a person without an illness, and that only one percent of violent acts committed by psychiatric patients involved killing a "target".

"If we were able to magically cure schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression, that would be wonderful, but overall violence would go down by only about four percent," according to Jeffrey Swanson, a professor in psychiatry and behavioural sciences at the Duke University School of Medicine, told ProPublica in 2014.

The National Rifle Association (NRA), the most powerful gun lobby in the US, has capitalised on the public perception of the mentally ill.

A former prosecutor who once worked alongside embattled Alabama GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore in the early 1980s told CNN it was "common knowledge" at the time that Moore dated high school girls.

"It was common knowledge that Roy dated high school girls, everyone we knew thought it was weird," former deputy district attorney Teresa Jones told CNN in comments aired Saturday. "We wondered why someone his age would hang out at high school football games and the mall ... but you really wouldn't say anything to someone like that."

The legislative failures marking President Trump’s first 10 months in office have conservative leaders worried that Republicans are squandering a rare chance to advance conservative policies while holding the House, the Senate and the White House.

Republicans have struggled to keep long-standing promises to conservatives, such as repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, or defunding Planned Parenthood. Republicans so far have zero legislative achievements in the almost 10 months that President Trump has been in office.

As their failures have piled up, a flood of Republicans in both the House and the Senate have announced that they will not seek re-election ahead of next year’s midterms. The Democratic landslide in Virginia’s elections on Tuesday has some Republicans fearing a wave election in 2018 that could lose them the House and possibly the Senate.

Grassroots conservatives, meanwhile, fear that years of work helping Republican politicians get elected will be for nothing, if Republicans lose the House in 2018 with little to show for their time in control.

The Daily Caller is a politically conservative American news and opinion website based in Washington, D.C. It was founded by political pundit Tucker Carlson, and Neil Patel, former adviser to former Vice President Dick Cheney.

“The policy failures of this Republican Congress are dispiriting voters nationwide. Conservatives have done their part to advance the policies that swept President Trump into office, but liberal Republicans are breaking their campaign promises to repeal Obamacare and oppose amnesty,” DeMint added.

Cooper's colleagues at the time (late 70s-early 80s) are coming out and saying everyone knew that he dated high schoolers

In Alabama itself, the Post reported on Friday, “Republican leaders mostly circled the wagons behind Moore.”

One Alabama Republican compared the relationship between Moore and the fourteen-year-old girl to that of Mary and Joseph, Jesus’ parents.

The Covington County G.O.P. chairman, William Blocker, was blunter, telling Daniel Dale, of the Toronto Star, “There is NO option to support Doug Jones, the Democratic nominee. When you do that, you are supporting the entire Democrat party.”

These defenses are shocking, but they square with Trump’s when it comes to the extremes to which partisanship now pushes people.

Many wonder how evangelical Christians, a core constituency for Moore in Alabama, will react. In the Trump era, Moore might have a chance at retaining support from these voters.

As Thomas Edsall recently noted, from 2011 to 2016, the percentage of white evangelical Protestants who believe that “an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life” shot up, from thirty to seventy-two per cent.

Evangelicals went from being the least forgiving religious group to being the most forgiving religious group.

“What happened in the interim?” Edsall asks. “The answer is obvious: the advent of Donald Trump.”

To justify their support of Trump, evangelicals apparently reassessed the importance they place on a politician’s personal morality. “It shows just how much a G.O.P.-leaning group was willing to rationalize Trump’s behavior,” John Sides, a political scientist at George Washington University, told me on Friday.


At the same time, Sides said, Trump’s rise has come at a time of intense debate among academics about the relationship between partisanship and ideology. The political scientists Shanto Iyengar, Gaurav Sood, and Yphtach Lelkes examined this issue in a 2012 paper called “Affect, Not Ideology: A Social Identity Perspective on Polarization.” As the political scientist Danny Hayes said of his peers’ work, “Instead of focusing on ideology and policy positions, Iyengar and his colleagues draw on a psychological concept called social identity theory.”

In other words: Americans identify with a party the way they do with a sports team or tribe.

Often, one’s hatred of an opposing tribe—what political scientists call “negative partisanship”—is enough to overcome any doubts about one’s own.


“It’s about affect and emotion,” Sides told me. “Partisanship induces motivated reasoning. We align our perceptions and beliefs to be consonant with our social identities.” Sides considered the comment from Blocker, the Alabama Republican official who could never consider voting for the Democrat running against Moore.

“That’s the tribalism that provides the incentive to excuse any kind of behavior,” Sides said.