trump is serious!!!!!

[Scooter]

[Scooter]

They forgot to mention Lord Dampnut saying that the Clinton Foundation should return all money received from Saudi Arabia because they want to enslave women and kill gays. But this week, the Saudis pledged $100 million to Ivanka's foundation, and that's hunky dory.

I'm sure wes will be along any time now to explain to us less insightful beings how none of this is hypocrisy.

[Bicycle Bill]

They forgot to mention Lord Dampnut saying that the Clinton Foundation should return all money received from Saudi Arabia because they want to enslave women and kill gays. But this week, the Saudis pledged $100 million to Ivanka's foundation, and that's hunky dory.

I'm sure wes will be along any time now to explain to us less insightful beings how none of this is hypocrisy.

I sure hope so.  I'm in desperate need of a good laugh right about now.

-"BB"-

[Scooter]

But they never will. No doubt wes will be here to explain how an $800 billion cut is actually an expansion of Medicaid.

[Scooter]

[ex-khobar Andy]

I don't subscribe to the Financial Times so I can't get past their paywall. But I did have to laugh at this teaser for an article:

Donald Trump places his bets on Iranian isolation

It is possible the US president overstates his ability to broker a Mideast peace deal.

Ya think? Must subscribe to access this cutting edge stuff. Only $11.77 per week.

[Econoline]

I think we'd all be better off if he'd opted for a brain...or, even better, a heart.

[BoSoxGal]

He hasn't got any courage either - just arrogance and greed.

[RayThom]

And did you see Lord Dampnut's curtsy and bow as the honor was bestowed? What a tough guy.

[Scooter]

[BoSoxGal]

Oh, Trudeau!

[Scooter]

[BoSoxGal]

[Lord Jim]

Donald Trump’s Base Is Shrinking

A widely held tenet of the current conventional wisdom is that while President Trump might not be popular overall, he has a high floor on his support. Trump’s sizable and enthusiastic base — perhaps 35 to 40 percent of the country — won’t abandon him any time soon, the theory goes, and they don’t necessarily care about some of the controversies that the “mainstream media” treats as game-changing developments.

It’s an entirely reasonable theory. We live in a highly partisan epoch, and voters are usually loyal to politicians from their party. Trump endured a lot of turbulence in the general election but stuck it out to win the Electoral College. The media doesn’t always guess right about which stories will resonate with voters.

But the theory isn’t supported by the evidence. To the contrary, Trump’s base seems to be eroding. There’s been a considerable decline in the number of Americans who strongly approve of Trump, from a peak of around 30 percent in February to just 21 or 22 percent of the electorate now. (The decline in Trump’s strong approval ratings is larger than the overall decline in his approval ratings, in fact.) Far from having unconditional love from his base, Trump has already lost almost a third of his strong support. And voters who strongly disapprove of Trump outnumber those who strongly approve of him by about a 2-to-1 ratio, which could presage an “enthusiasm gap” that works against Trump at the midterms. The data suggests, in particular, that the GOP’s initial attempt (and failure) in March to pass its unpopular health care bill may have cost Trump with his core supporters.

These estimates come from the collection of polls we use for FiveThirtyEight’s approval ratings tracker. Many approval-rating polls give respondents four options: strongly approve, somewhat approve, somewhat disapprove and strongly disapprove. Ordinarily, we only estimate Trump’s overall approval and disapproval. But we went back and collected this more detailed data for all polls for which it was available, and then we reran our approval ratings program to output numbers for all four approval categories instead of the usual two.1 Here are Trump’s strongly approve and somewhat approve ratings from shortly after the start of his term2 through this Tuesday:



After a slight uptick in the first two to three weeks of his term, Trump’s strong approval ratings have headed downward. But it hasn’t been a steady decline. Instead, they fell considerably from about 29 percent on March 6 — when Republicans introduced their health care bill — to around 24 percent on April 1, shortly after the GOP pulled the bill from the House floor. They then remained stable for much of April, before beginning to fall again this month after the reintroduction (and House passage) of the health care bill and after Trump fired FBI director James Comey on May 9. As of Tuesday, just 21.4 percent of Americans strongly approved of Trump’s performance.

The share of Americans who somewhat approve of Trump’s performance has actually increased slightly, however, from about 16 percent in early February to 17.9 percent as of Tuesday. In part, this probably reflects voters who once strongly approved of Trump and who have now downgraded him to the somewhat approve category. (Trump’s strongly approve and somewhat approve numbers have been inversely correlated so far, meaning that as one has risen, the other has tended to fall.) A potential problem for Trump is that in the event of continued White House turmoil, the next step for these somewhat approve voters would be to move toward disapproval of the president.



During last year’s presidential primaries, Trump received about 14 million votes out of a total of 62 million cast between the two parties, which works out to 23 percent of the total. So perhaps it’s not a coincidence that 20 to 25 percent of the country still strongly supports Trump; they were with him from the start.

But 20 to 25 percent isn’t all that large a base — obviously not enough to win general elections on its own. Instead, Trump won the White House because most Republicans who initially supported another GOP candidate in the primary wound up backing him in the November election. Trump has always had his share of reluctant supporters, and their ranks have been growing as the number of strong supporters has decreased. If those reluctant Trump supporters shift to being reluctant opponents instead, he’ll be in a lot of trouble,3 with consequences ranging from a midterm wave against Republicans to an increased likelihood of impeachment.

So while there’s risk to Democrats in underestimating Trump’s resiliency, there’s an equal or perhaps greater risk to Republicans in thinking Trump’s immune from political gravity.

If you look beneath the surface of Trump’s approval ratings, you find not hidden strength but greater weakness than the topline numbers imply.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/do ... shrinking/

I've long held the position that while the conventional wisdom has put Trump's base of support at around 35%, that because he's only had any supporters at all among the public for less than two years, that it was an open question as to just how low his "rock bottom" level of support might actually be.

And more bad news for Trump in the latest poll from Non-Fake News FOX:

Donald Trump's Approval Rating Sinks As White Voters, Republicans Withdraw Support

President Donald Trump's approval rating fell sharply this week as some of the folks who voted for him in droves have begun to back away from the leader who has been plagued by controversy during his brief but rocky tenure in the White House, according to a new poll this week. The survey from Fox News found just 40 percent of voters approved of Trump's job performance, a 5 percentage point slide from where it stood in the same poll last month. Disapproval also rose 5 percentage points to 53 percent.

"Some of the drop in approval comes from Republicans," noted Fox News in its write-up of the survey. In their poll, Trump's support among GOP voters had hovered between 84 percent and 87 percent during his tenure in the White House, but in the new survey that fell to 81 percent. Fifty-three percent of white voters without a college degree approved of the job Trump has done, a decrease of 9 percentage points in just one month.

White voters overall were split on Trump, with 48 percent approving of his job performance and 48 percent disapproving, according to the Fox News poll. In the election, 66 percent of whites without college degree and 57 percent of whites overall voted for Trump, according to CNN's exit polls.

A few potential issues white working class voters might have with the Trump presidency: 44 percent don't support the Republican health care bill backed by the former reality TV star and 50 percent thought he wouldn't actually get a wall built along the southern border of the U.S., one of his key promises during the campaign.

According to the Fox News poll, voters overall were skeptical of Trump's firing of former FBI Director James Comey. By a margin of 60 percent to 29 percent, voters believed the president got rid of Comey for self-serving reasons—namely the FBI's investigation into his administration's potential ties with Russia—versus firing him for harming the bureau.

The Fox News poll interviewed 1,011 registered voters through telephone calls from May 21 through May 23. It had a margin of error of 3 percentage points for the full sample.

The latest poll isn't the first to find white working class voters and Republicans have begun to jump off the Trump train just four months into its planned four-year trip. A Reuters/Ipsos poll last week found disapproval of Trump among Republicans jumped 7 percentage points to 23 percent. A Quinnipiac University survey this month found support among whites without a college degree had dropped 10 percentage points in just one month to 47 percent.

http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-la ... ort-615787

[BoSoxGal]

That's good news!

[wesw]

it s so funny that you still think that people have any faith in polls.

[Lord Jim]

There are 535 people who work in a white-domed building on Pennsylvania Ave. who have a lot of faith in them...

For good reason; they generally prove to be quite accurate (The national polls in the last Presidential election were dead on the money)

As it is reflected in the polling that more and more of the Trump supporters are start to regain their grip on reality, (not you of course, but those at least willing to consider actual facts) this will have a positive effect on the behavior of the Republicans who work in that domed building...

[Scooter]

[Burning Petard]

Hiding in plain sight. see the story in today's NY Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/28/busi ... -arms.html

From the story: 'In the United States, the Trump Organization took Mr. Davies’s coat of arms for its own, making one small adjustment — replacing the word “Integritas,” Latin for integrity, with “Trump.”'

Once again, for all those who have been paying attention, the Trump organization has been admitting they have no integrity.

And by the way, calling this a 'family crest' is a barbarism. It is a coat of arms. The previous owners of the Mar-a-logo property, the family of Joseph Edward Davies were properly granted this coat of arms by the British college of heralds in 1939. The Donald simply assumed it.
'The Crest' is the part of the coat of arms that was symbolically mounted on top of the helmet --that gloved hand holding the spear.

snailgate

[Bicycle Bill]

In this case Trump is only doing the same things American business and interests have been doing for years.

For example, do you think that all those bottles of fizzy wine that get popped on New Year's Eve are actually champagne?  Hell, no.  Champagne can truthfully only come from the Champagne region of France, just like a true Asti spumante can only come from the Asti region of Italy, and there are actually treaties and trade agreements in Europe dedicated to this.  Sure, other vineyards in other locations can produce "sparkling wine"; they can use the same type of grape and ferment, bottle, and store it in exactly the same manner; they can even label it "méthode champenoise" if they want to .... but that does not make it a true champagne and they cannot legally call it "champagne".

But like I said, not to Americans.  To us, so long as it fizzes and it isn't coming out of a bottle labeled "7-up" it's champagne.  And if this is going to run afoul of another country's laws, well then, we'll just make up one of our own.  Thus, enter 26 U.S. Code § 5388 - Designation of wines.

Trump is just following a long-standing practice of appropriating whatever he wants and daring someone to do something about it — which (at least in his case) no one does because
A) they know that he has a shit-pot full of money to spend on lawyers and
B) because of 'A' they are aware that, win or lose, it will mean a long, drawn-out, and expensive trip through the legal system.

-"BB"-