Donald Trump’s ascension to the Republican Party nomination and election as President of the United States in 2016 was a surprise to many political analysts. This article examines the notion that personal values played an important role in support for Trump. Using data from the Trump Similarity Values Test (N = 1825), a web based personality test that provides users with feedback on their similarity to Donald Trump, this article shows that personal values played a role in support for Donald Trump. First, people who supported Trump were more likely have a value profile characterized by low Altruism and high Power, Commerce, and Tradition. Second, people with a values profile similar to Trump’s (presumed) values profile were more likely to support Trump. These results held even after controlling for party affiliation and political ideology, indicating that personal values were an even stronger predictor of […]
Monday, January 14th, 2019
Matthew Chapman , - Alternet
Stephan: In the second decade of the 21st century the most powerful military nation on earth has a foreign policy dictated by a political-religious vision from 2,000 plus years ago.
Donald Trump's base is made up largely of the racist christofascists who believe this nonsense, indeed they take it as an article of faith, and many of the people around Trump including Pence and Pompeo believe it as well, as they have publicly stated.
I don't think Trump believes any of this for a moment, but I don't think he cares; it's just a way of binding the "base" to him. How do you feel about having your nation's foreign policy dictated by a religious cult who are shaping policy for the End Times and the Rapture?
Trump, Pence and christofascist pastors
President Donald Trump’s haphazard foreign policy is driven by a lot of factors. His rollbacks of free trade, for example, are motivated by his pathological obsession with America being “ripped off,” and his decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement was motivated by his desire to erase everything related to former President Barack Obama.
One of his more conventional, but no less disturbing, influences could be that of right-wing evangelism.
Trump’s close relationship with evangelical politicians and voters (or more specifically, white ones), is well-known. Vice President Mike Pence is a well-known fundamentalist culture warrior who tried to make it legal to refuse service to LGBTQ couples and vowed to consign abortion rights to “the ash heap of history.” Other senior members of his administration have hardline views about religion, like Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who has said she wants to use America’s schools to build “God’s Kingdom.”
One of the less-noticed influencers is Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, an evangelical Presbyterian who once […]
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Sunday, January 13th, 2019
VICTORIA GUIDA, - Politico
Stephan: I got an email from a reader in New Zealand today asking was the United States a country or a reality TV show? I couldn't answer because I didn't know.
In talking with people I get the sense most don't realize that if the Republican Senate had any sense of ethics or Constitutional responsibility, they would simply take their jobs seriously and override any Trump veto, and let people get back to work. Instead, we have this.
The shutdown – now in its 19th day — could also cost the U.S. government more than a billion dollars in lost productivity for 350,000 workers who are forced to stay home.
Credit: Alex Wong/Getty
As federal workers face the prospect of missed paychecks during the partial government shutdown, their financial reality is rippling into the broader economy.
The roughly 800,000 government employees who are either furloughed or working without pay will be forced to start slashing their consumer spending when paychecks don’t appear this week. Private-sector contractors and other workers tied to the government are already seeing damage from lost business.
And a hit to the nation’s financial standing is on the horizon with a warning from Fitch Ratings on Wednesday about downgrading the government’s credit rating if the shutdown persists.
Estimates from President Donald Trump’s chief economist peg the cost to the overall U.S. economy at about $1.2 billion for each week the shutdown persists. While that’s just 0.05 percentage points off the GDP growth rate, it could be among […]
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Sunday, January 13th, 2019
Aylin Woodward, - Insider
Stephan: The United States now run by a childish second rate mafia don, and a party of ethical weaklings is leaving the country, and the world, at the mercy of those who place greed above wellbeing.
This is what is happening to our world, folks. If this matters to you, you had better get active. Only mass citizen action and mass voting in 2020 is going to stop this. The Republican Party, in my opinion, is the most dangerous organization in the country.
Earth’s oceans absorb a whopping 93% of the extra heat that greenhouse gases trap in the atmosphere.
A new study has revealed that this absorption process is happening far faster than scientists had realized.
According to an analysis published in the journal Science, the world’s oceans are heating up 40% faster (on average) than the last estimatefrom the world’s scientific authority on climate, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
In one sense, the oceans’ heat-trapping abilities help us in the short term.
“If the ocean wasn’t absorbing as much heat, the surface of the land would heat up much faster than it is right now,” Malin Pinsky, an associate professor of ecology and natural resources at Rutgers University, told the New York Times. “In fact, the ocean is saving us from massive warming right now.”
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