monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

I'm saying that being able to take into consideration people's grieviances -- or at the very least, pretend to -- is an important political skill, which Clinton was not particularly strong on.

"Always be sincere, even if you don't mean it."

Bernie would have lost the election and the popular vote.

He may have made a better president than Hillary (debateable), but he never would have won he election. Trump would have destroyed him.

Quote:

if that is the case - and they voted Democrat for many, many years - why/what changed? Ms. Clinton's messaging wasn't 'great but the change started earlier

It changed with civil rights era, the more rights blacks got, the more southern democrats turned republican. Also, some still today are democrats only to vote in the primary (a union thing I think) but they vote republican in the presidential.

Appalachia’s ties to the Democratic Party go back decades — especially in West Virginia, which only voted for a Republican presidential candidate twice from 1960 to 2000 (it went red in 1972 and 1984, elections where the Republican candidate carried 49 out of 50 states). The state has also voted for a Democratic Senator every year since 1960, and consistently elected Democratic House members until 2010.

These Democratically-led efforts were largely successful in the short term, breeding a deep appreciation for left-leaning presidents. Meanwhile, the region’s ubiquitous coalminers and steelworkers embraced unions as a mechanism for economic liberation, institutions which, in turn, generally encouraged members to support the Democratic Party.

But all that changed during the 2000 presidential election, when Democrat Al Gore lost West Virginia and most other sections of Appalachia to former president George W. Bush. This was partly because Republicans began targeting the region as an opportunity for growth, but by the time then-senator Barack Obama emerged as the Democratic nominee in 2008, a perfect storm of economics, creeping conservatism, and outright racism accelerated the region’s embrace of the GOP.

For example, Floyd county — an Appalachian coal county in Eastern Kentucky that voted for Democrat John Kerry in 2004 — boasted 27,789 registered Democrats in 2008, compared to just 2,856 Republicans. Yet John McCain edged out Obama there on Election Day that year, winning 7,741 votes to 7,530. By 2012, it wasn’t even close: Mitt Romney brought home 9,784 votes there in 2012, but only 4,733 supported Obama.

The story was similar throughout the region, where 366 Appalachian counties increased their Republican share of presidential votes from 2004 to 2008. In 2012, Obama lost 10 counties in the West Virginia Democratic primary to an imprisoned felon with a ponytail, who won 41 percent of the vote statewide — a moment that was largely interpreted as a protest vote against the president. When the general election rolled around, Obama became the first presidential candidate in history to lose all 55 counties in West Virginia.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) grilled FBI Director Christopher Wray at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Thursday.

Jordan focused on Peter Strzok, the top FBI official who was moved off Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation after he was found to have sent anti-President Trump text messagesJordan expressed doubts that Strzok was removed from Mueller's team simply because of the anti-Trump text messages.

"If you get kicked off the Mueller team for being anti-Trump, there wouldn't be anybody left on the Mueller team. There has to be more," he said.

it's a recent change and it's truly boggling
this is the stuff my friend R is looking into

Trump and the end of Obama's bitter 'war on coal'

What a difference presidential leadership can make, for good or ill, for an industry’s fortunes.

Before he was elected president, Barack Obama promised to bankrupt coal companies, and after eight years of his administration’s anti-energy policies, that pledge turned out to be one of the few promises he kept.

His policies contributed to massive job losses in coal country, the premature shuttering of vital coal-fired power plants, and were a factor in profitable coal companies being forced to file for bankruptcy.

As a candidate for president, Donald Trump promised he would enact policies that would end the “war on coal” launched by the Obama administration and congressional Democrats, halting or slowing the loss of jobs related to coal mining and coal-fired power plants, and he is doing just that.

Congratulations, I think you have managed to insult everyone.

Well, for my part, I was not particularly offended. I hear that sort of thing from otherwise decent Republicans all the time.

While many coal-fired power plants have closed because they are unable to compete with low-cost gas-fired power plants, dozens of coal-fired power plants and mines were shuttered prematurely under Obama due to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations, policies Trump has started to reverse.

For instance, in its first use of the Congressional Review Act under Trump, Congress halted a so-called “Stream Protection Rule” imposed by Obama that would have threatened over one-third of the nation’s coal-mining jobs. The Interior Department’s own reports show the rule was unnecessary, since coal mines have virtually no offsite impacts and lands are being restored successfully under existing federal and state regulations.

Trump’s early energy actions have paid job dividends in coal country. The Department of Labor reported mining jobs in America grew by 11,000 in March and by another 7,000 in May. In June, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said the United States had since the beginning of 2017 added more than 50,000 jobs throughout the coal supply and use chain.

Bernie would have lost the election and the popular vote.

He may have made a better president than Hillary (debateable), but he never would have won he election. Trump would have destroyed him.

Palestinians clash with Israeli forces in ‘day of rage’ protests

Thousands of Palestinians clashed with Israeli security forces on Friday in a “day of rage” called to protest against US President Donald Trump’s decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist faction that controls Gaza, and Hizbollah, the Lebanese militant group allied to Iran, have both called for a new uprising, or intifada, against Israel.

At least two Palestinians were killed as Israeli forces used live ammunition, tear gas and rubber bullets against protesters in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. More than 300 people were wounded in the clashes, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent.

The Israel Defense Forces said about 3,000 Palestinians were participating in “violent riots” in the West Bank and hundreds more along the border with Gaza. It said protesters threw firebombs and rocks at security forces, and rolled burning tyres towards them. During clashes along the Gaza border soldiers “fired selectively at two main instigators” and confirmed hitting them, the IDF said in a statement. 

In Jerusalem, men and women chanted slogans including “Trump go to hell” and “free Palestine, free Jerusalem” as they gathered after midday prayers at al-Aqsa mosque in the Old City.

But that's just one half of the plan. Once the tax bill is done, we get to phase II: an all-out war on the safety net. In an act of positively awe-inspiring shamelessness, they plan to argue that our high national debt demands that we cut back social programs, right after they voted to increase the debt by $1.5 trillion.

That's the rationale, but we know beyond any doubt that they don't really care about the debt. Republicans, and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan in particular, have long dreamed of taking a chainsaw to the social programs that emerged from the Great Society. Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps — it will all be on the chopping block. "We're going to have to get back next year at entitlement reform, which is how you tackle the debt and the deficit," says Ryan.

And we know Trump was/is a disliked persona.

CNN inaccurately reports Trump campaign had WikiLeaks sneak peek

CNN on Friday trumpeted that Congressional investigators obtained a mysterious 2016 email that was sent to Trump and other top aides, including Donald Trump Jr., which contained information on how to get a sneak peek at hacked information that WikiLeaks had acquired. The email, as CNN reported, offered a “decryption key” to access the files.

CNN turned information available to anyone on the planet with an Internet connection into secrets - and an implication WikiLeaks was offering to collude with Team Trump.

Compounding matters, CNN claimed that the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee said the panel was looking into the email and other news organizations quickly tried to match CNN’s report – CBS followed up with an inaccurate report of its own. The inaccurate story dominated CNN’s coverage until it was discredited.

CNN eventually issued a correction: “CNN's initial reporting of the date on an email sent to members of the Trump campaign about Wikileaks documents, which was confirmed by two sources to CNN, was incorrect. We have updated our story to include the correct date, and present the proper context for the timing of email."

No disciplinary action will be taken in the matter, a CNN official said in a tweet.