Institutional decay

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And of course, all the climate denial has had its effect on the respect that science commends in society..

But years of Trump-like rhetoric seems to have taken its toll. A new survey from the Pew Research Center found that just 32 percent of respondents believe that climate science is guided by the "best available evidence" most of the time. Meanwhile, large majorities of respondents say that climate research is influence at least some of the time by the scientists' political beliefs and efforts to advance their careers.
All of this helps explain why, according to Pew, just 21 percent of respondent have "a great deal" of confidence that scientists will act in the best interests of the public. Of course, that doesn't mean the public trusts Trump. In the same survey, just 4 percent of respondents had a great deal of confidence in the nation's business leaders..

Here's What Donald Trump Really Thinks of America's Scientists | Mother Jones

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You would think that the Investor Business Daily would be quite happy with the Obama government. After all, stock and bond markets have displayed some awesome returns, a staggering contrast with the slash and burn times of the previous government. 

You would be wrong though. The IBD is extraordinarily partisan. It's editorial pages are a non-stop Obama and Democrats bashing place, without anything coming in between. The're right up there with attacking American institutions for political gain, in this case, like the FBI, arguing it has become an arm of the Democratic Party:

Of particular relevance are the so-called side agreements signed by the FBI with high-level Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson as part of the investigation. It's important to note that both of these aides were in the thick of things in Hillaryland, and surely knew much about Clinton's likely illegal use of a private server and her exposure of U.S. secrets. Those side deals essentially tied the hands of the bureau in its investigation. And that was the FBI Director James Comey's intent all along -- to keep from having to do what it knew should be done, and that is indict Hillary Clinton for repeated "careless" violations of national security law, and for subsequently lying about them to the FBI and Congress.

Is The FBI Now An Arm Of The Democratic Party? | Stock News & Stock Market Analysis - IBD

It begs belief how the IBD somehow 'knows' Comey's intent (to prevent Clinton from being indicted). You'll have to be able to read his mind, basically. And how likely is this? James Comey is a Republican, he was nominated by George Bush. The immunity deals are nothing special anyway, and Clinton was hardly the only one using a private mail server. 

And the article is all innuendo.

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At the heart of this institutional decay is hate TV, aka Fox News. But at least some chickens come back to roost, or so it seems..

The simple truth is the GOP followed Fox News into the ethical and moral abyss long ago. And the GOP did so willingly. Seduced by the millions of dollars (billions of dollars?) worth of free airtime that Fox News provides the party each year, and aroused by the channel’s unvarnished hate rhetoric and its fever swamp attacks, Republicans abdicated party leadership to the now-disgraced Roger Ailes, who then turned around and helped crown Trump the Fox News mascot/presidential nominee.

This train wreck, this dumpster fire, this…..thing now on display in the form of the Trump campaign represents the logical conclusion for a party that decided to walk away from governance and embrace the bottom-of-the-barrel offerings cooked up by Fox News. For a party that opted to nominate in Trump someone who scooped up all that Fox hate rhetoric and made it the very cornerstone of his campaign. And yes, that includes dangerous insurrectionism and the racist smear that Obama’s a foreign-born terrorist sympathizer.  

Lots of Republicans have since stood by Trump despite the fact he’s repeatedly denigrated women, African-Americans, Latinos, and the disabled, among others. That’s how the party arrived at its current crisis.

The funny thing is we tried to warn them.

Four years ago, I wrote about how Fox News was destroying the Republican Party. But no, back then I never imagined we’d be witnessing this kind of public disintegration of the Republican Party’s presidential nominee in 2016.

And that’s what makes this unraveling so stunning. It’s not that the campaign apparatus has fallen apart. It’s not that Trump’s team misread the electorate. It’s that the GOP candidate has fully revealed himself to be a loathsome person who has surrounded himself with equally loathsome people. First and foremost among them is former Fox News chief Roger Ailes, who was forced out this summer amidst a sexual harassment firestorm.
Please keep in mind:

During July, we learned that women claimed men who worked in positions of power at Fox News (namely Ailes, but not exclusively) groped women, kissed women against their will, made wildly inappropriate sexual comments (“Are you wearing any panties? I wish you weren't”), asked about female employees’ sex lives, pressured younger women to date older men in the office, made “jokes” about liking having women on their knees, promised promotions in exchange for sex, and cut short careers of women who took offense.

And yes, Fox News general counsel Dianne Brandi and Ailes’ deputy Bill Shine were accused of trying to cover up their former boss’ behavior. (Shine has since been promoted to Fox News co-president.)

Twenty years ago on Friday, the same day the predatory Trump tapes were released, Fox News made its national debut, on October 7, 1996. Over the last two decades Fox News has forever changed American politics. And right now, the Republican Party is paying the biggest price..

The Reckoning Arrives For Trump, Fox News, And The GOP

Some family values. 

We're not so optimistic as the writer of the article. While they're unlikely to win the Presidency (at least this time around), the hate against everything Democrats stand for, the non-stop vilification of otherwise fine American institutions isn't going away anytime soon.

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The beat goes on..

"Dead people generally vote for Democrats instead of Republicans," Giuliani said on CNN’s State of the Union with Jake Tapper, insinuating that American cities are hotbeds of widespread voter fraud. "If you want me to tell you that I think the elections of Philadelphia and Chicago are going to be fair, I would have to be a moron to say that."

This is flatly wrong. Despite Giuliani’s dystopian fever dreams, election experts are clear that voter fraud is extraordinary rare, had no impact on the 2012 race, and isn’t expected to be a problem in 2016. As Tapper correctly pointed out, even the Republican Party of Philadelphia agreed that there was no voter fraud in the city.



But the big problem with Giuliani’s comments is not just that they’re factually incorrect. (Does he remember being elected mayor of New York City twice?) It’s that they’re contributing to the dangerous and widespread delegitimization of the electoral process — one that’s being dramatically amplified as we barrel toward Election Day.

Rudy Giuliani: Democrats commit election fraud because they “control the inner-cities” - Vox

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And you could wait for this..

As Election Day approaches and the polls continue to look dire for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, he is pinning the blame on everything except himself. “We’re going to beat the rigged system; we’re going to beat the rigged election,” Trump said at a rally in New Hampshire on Saturday. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) also told the crowd that “they are attempting to rig this election.” Trump’s supporters are taking his “rigged” system rhetoric and accusations of lying by the media to their implied conclusion: revolt. Most of the grumblings and musings of rebellion have come from everyday Trump voters, but on Saturday, Trump surrogate and Milwaukee Sheriff David A. Clarke, an elected law official, tweeted that it’s “pitchforks and torches time” with a (stock) photo of an angry mob.

Sheriff openly calls for riots as Trump says election is ‘rigged’

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A comprehensive study of more than 1 billion ballots cast in elections from 2000 to 2014 found just 31 credible allegations of voter impersonation fraud at the polls. Iowa’s Republican Secretary of State conducted a two-year investigation into voter fraud. He found, at most, 134 incidents out of nearly 1.6 million votes cast. None of these incidents involved voter impersonation at the polls.

So voter fraud is quite rare. And one particular kind of voter fraud — voter impersonation at the polls — is so rare that it virtually does not exist.

The party of voter suppression awakens to the monster it created

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Lies pay off big time..

She didn't vote for President Obama because she thought he was a Muslim (he's not). Now she worries Hillary Clinton will take away her ability to own a gun. "His background was Muslim," she told CNNMoney over lunch at Diner 23 in Waverly, Ohio, a small town in southern Ohio that is divided almost 50/50 between Republicans and Democrats. When pressed, Newberry admits it could have been information that wasn't true, "but it set in my mind."

She's suspicious of Obama's faith and loyalty to America. But she's extremely thankful to him for bailing her out. Obama's Hardest Hit Fund (known as "Save the Dream" in Ohio) paid about a year's worth of her mortgage after the financial crisis. "If it hadn't been for that, I would have lost my home a long time ago," she said.

Newberry describes herself as a "life-long Democrat." But she didn't vote for Obama, and won't vote for Clinton. Trump appeals to her because he's a successful businessman. She hopes he'll bring higher paying jobs. Just $2 or $3 an hour would make a difference for her.

She wishes there were more forms of government help for her. But she's abandoning the Democrats. It's a theme CNN has heard over and over again in the Rust Belt: Working class whites blame Washington, but want more government aid.

Meet 'Joe the Plumber' of 2016 - Oct. 18, 2016

• If you repeat often enough that Obama is a Muslim (as if that would be a disaster anyway, the US supposedly has religious freedom), some people are going to believe it.
  
• Hillary isn't going to take away all guns, just introduce some sensible regulations, but fear-mongering pays off.
  
• If you really think Trump is a successful businessman and that qualifies him for running the country, well, that's one thing. But thinking good paying jobs will come back with a mixture of trickling down economics and protectionism.. good luck to that.
  
• They can blame Washington, but perhaps they should be more specific and blame Republican obstructionism. They're not going to get more government aid out of them, quite the contrary..
  

It's a sad picture...

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These Trumpians are so easily duped they simply want to be duped..

From The New Republic:

To see how this works, look no further than the following two incidents from Monday. The first one began on Sunday with this tweet:

[/url] Follow
raandy @randygdub
i love working at the post office in Columbus, Ohio and ripping up absentee ballots that vote for trump
5:09 PM - 16 Oct 2016

•  2,1932,193 Retweets
  
• 5,1455,145 likes
  

Anyone who took the time to scroll through @randygdub’s timelinewould have gotten the joke. But a befuddled right-wing blogger at Gateway Pundit got taken in by it, and, without doing even a moment’s due diligence, claimed, “POSTAL WORKER Brags Online About Destroying Trump Ballots.”

Betsy Woodruff of The Daily Beast explored the full depth of the ensuing failure, but the short version is that Matt Drudge linked to the completely false blog post and Rush Limbaugh passed it along from there as gospel to his millions of listeners. The post has been updated (“So this Twitter user now says his tweet was a joke.”), but also has amassed more than 70,000 Facebook likes and 16,000 tweets.

So severe was the outcry that Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted, who has admirably criticized Trump for calling the integrity of our elections into question, promised to get to the bottom of this obvious hoax, for the benefit of Drudge and Limbaugh’s gullible followers.

 Follow
Jon Husted 

✔@JonHusted
I’ve contacted @USPS about posts alleging destruction of absentee ballots. We’ll get the #facts & if true, hold anyone guilty accountable
7:19 PM - 17 Oct 2016

•  8888 Retweets
  
•  131131 likes
  

 Follow
Jon Husted 

✔@JonHusted
Of course we expect it is not true, but we take all allegations seriously. USPS said they were investigating it, which is appropriate. https://twitter.com/jonhusted/status/788142441681588225 …
10:33 PM - 17 Oct 2016

•  88 Retweets
  
•   1414 likes
  

Even if Trump weren’t already doing his best to convince his supporters the election will be stolen from him, his allies in the existing right-wing media would do it on his behalf to great effect. That’s because conservative media is already heavily Trumpified, and was so before Trump came along.

The other aforementioned incident involves Senator John McCain, whopromised a Philadelphia-based talk radio host that Republicans “will be united against any Supreme Court nominee that Hillary Clinton, if she were president, would put up. I promise you.”

This is either a promise to provoke a legitimation crisis, or a promise that won’t be kept. In either case, it is symptomatic of the ways conservative media pushes Republican elected officials to pander to conservative voters—with maximal commitments to prevent imaginary apocalypses, precipitating either political crises or disaffection in right-wing ranks.
McCain ultimately walked back the promise in an official statement from his communications director, but the damage was done, and it was done because—I repeat—conservative media is already heavily Trumpified, and was so before Trump came along.

If and when Hillary Clinton becomes president, the right-wing media, which has brooked some dissent from a handful of anti-Trump conservatives, will reunite in opposition to Clinton’s agenda, her nominees, and perhaps even the idea that she should be impeached.

[url=https://twitter.com/SteveDeaceShow] Follow
Steve Deace 

✔@SteveDeaceShow
To hold on to their congressional majorities, Republicans should promise voters they'll impeach Hillary by 2018.
9:10 PM - 17 Oct 2016

•  8888 Retweets
  
•   170170 likes
  

When she inevitably logs victories against Republicans in Congress—by reshaping the Supreme Court, for instance, or avoiding impeachment—it will be treated as capitulation by the conservative media, which will promote savior figures who, like Trump, promise to succeed where the Republican establishment failed. Those figures will become the Republican Party’s de facto future leaders—including, perhaps, its next presidential nominee—unless current ones figure out a way to break the cycle that spat out Trump for good. But between Drudge and Limbaugh and Breitbart and Fox News and their useful feeders like Gateway Pundit, they have their work cut out for them. The elbow room that existed for Trump within the party does not exist in its crowded market of media organs.

Trump won the GOP nomination because the conservative media was already heavily Trumpified, and a Trump media conglomerate makes no sense because the conservative media will remain Trumpified once the election is over.

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Further evidence how the right has created an alternative universe..

Here is Krugman:

Mistrust of Data

Like Claudia Sahm, I was struck by polling results indicating that around half of Trump supporters completely distrust official data — although maybe a bit less surprised, since I’ve been living in that world for years. In particular, the failure of high inflation to materialize led quite a few people on the right side of the political spectrum — including the likes of Niall Ferguson — to insist that the numbers were being cooked, so this is neither a new phenomenon nor one restricted to Trump types.

As it happened, there was a very easy answer to the inflation truthers: quite aside from the absurdity of claiming a conspiracy at the BLS, we had independent estimates such as the Billion Prices Index that closely matched official data. And there’s similar independent evidence for a lot of the things where people now claim that official numbers are skewed. For example, the Gallup Healthways index provides independent confirmation of the huge gains in insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act.

But aside from validity, what explains this distrust of statistics? Is it because peoples’ own experience clashes with what they’re being told? I don’t think so. In fact, when people are asked about personal outcomes, not about “the economy,” the story they tell is a lot like the official numbers. From that poll about Trumpian distrust of the data:



So people are feeling better, in line with what the data say, but claim that the economy is getting worse. Hard to believe that this isn’t political, a case of going with the party line in the teeth of personal experience.

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The longer Donald Trump is the center of American discourse, the more we sound like Russians. Our news sounds more Russian, the way we think about our government is more Russian, and what we accept as fact starts to slip away. Trump is fomenting conspiracy theories and delegitimizing the media and the government.

Russia watchers know well that that's a Kremlin tactic. The way the Russian government maintains control of information is not by forcing a story down its peoples' throats, but by spreading a million stories everywhere so no one believes anything. The Kremlin maintains control by destroying trust in institutions until there's nothing left to have faith in.

So when Melania Trump says that the discovery of her husband's disgusting comments about women to Billy Bush a decade ago were part of a left-wing conspiracy, we're becoming more Russian. When Trump says that Hillary Clinton is part of an international conspiracy of bankers, we're becoming more Russian. When Trump embraces conspiracy theories championed by the permanently paranoid radio host Alex Jones, we're becoming more Russian.

Trump conspiracy theories are a Kremlin tactic - Business Insider