Stephan: I hear a lot of people talking about the role of "independents" in the upcoming election. But how true is that? What do we actually know about independents? The Pew Research Center did the heavy lifting on those questions and has provided us with some real data. Here it is.
Among the public overall, 38% describe themselves as independents, while 31% are Democrats and 26% call themselves Republicans, according to Pew Research Center surveys conducted in 2018. These shares have changed only modestly in recent years, but the proportion of independents is higher than it was from 2000-2008, when no more than about a third of the public identified as independents. (For more on partisan identification over time, see the 2018 report “Wide Gender Gap, Growing Educational Divide in Voters’ Party Identification.”)
An overwhelming majority of independents (81%) continue to “lean” toward either the Republican Party or the Democratic Party. Among the public overall, 17% are Democratic-leaning independents, while 13% lean toward the Republican Party. […]
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Thursday, March 21st, 2019
Charles W. Thurston , - CleanTechnica
Stephan: While Trump and the Republican Congress are doing everything in their power through corporate socialism to keep the carbon energy industry alive, much of the rest of the world is going in the opposite direction. Here is the latest from Australia.
Australia is adding one mega-solar project equivalent per month, with the current installed base of 10 gigawatts projected to double by the end of 2020. The latest mega-solar project is the 333 megawatt Darlington Point Solar Farm headed for Griffith, New South Wales, according to Array Technologies, which is providing the single-axis trackers for the project.
Australia’s solar industry virtually rocketed during 2018, when 1.5 gigawatt (GW) of solar came online, roughly 10 times as much solar as came online in 2017 (around 150 MW), according to SunWize Solar Consultants. “You can reasonably expect that 2019 will set another record volume for solar farms commissioned,” the consultant projected in February.
Most of the Australian solar growth in generation capacity is coming from the utility segment. Although, commercial, industrial, and residential installs also continue at record paces, according to the Australian PV Institute (APVI). Australia now has over 10.1 GW of solar installed, capable of delivering 14.6 terawatt-hours of electricity per year and meeting more than 5.5% of Australia’s energy demand, the organization reckons.
Global demand for solar trackers continues to grow rapidly in locations with higher irradiance […]
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Thursday, March 21st, 2019
Stephan: For a person who lives in a world where facts matter the Trump media is through the looking glass. But, even by those standards, the alt-right take on what happened in New Zealand is gobsmacking. Really. These people believe this crap, as they will tell you.
Rush Limbaugh
RUSH LIMBAUGH (HOST): The terrorist had published a manifesto and the manifesto includes the claim from the terrorist shooter that he’s not a conservative, that he’s not a Christian, that he identifies as an eco-fascist, and he adds that he disagrees with Trump on politics.
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The idea that there is far more crazed right-wing terrorism in America than there is any other kind is nothing more than a media narrative manufactured out of whole cloth, and it’s just waiting for events like this to take place, and this is what happens, folks. I don’t know, you probably get up and you see this news story and you just — in addition to all of the emotion you have over the sheer shock, terror, and horror of it all, then you realize you’re going to face a whole day of the politicization of it. You realize you’re going to face a whole day of Donald Trump being blamed for it, or you being blamed for it, or things you believe in being blamed for it.
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Another thing […]
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Wednesday, March 20th, 2019
Jonathan Chait, - New York Magazine - Intelligencer
Stephan: Over the past week, I have had a number of readers write to tell me that there are so many stories of Trump criminality, as one reader said, "that seems to be all that's on the news anymore," that they have become lost in the miasma. They have asked me to either write or find a story that lays out what is known about the Mueller Collusion case so that it all makes sense. I started to write it, but then found Jonathan Chait's essay, and felt that he has done the job very well. So here it is.
But remember this is only what is public, Mueller knows much more.
The anticipated conclusion of Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia has given way to a broad sense of anticlimax. Media coverage has fixated on the potential that Mueller will produce new revelations of impeachable conduct, emphasizing heavily the expectation he will not. This belief simply shows how the case has already been proven and it simply has not registered.
A great many intelligent people who hold no brief for Trump have nonetheless refused to believe that he is hiding some deep, dark secrets regarding Russia. As more and more evidence has appeared over the last two and a half years, that bloc of skeptics has melted away but failed to disappear completely.
The cause of this incredulity, I have come to suspect, lies in the vast distance the mind must travel between the normal patterns of American politics and the fantastical crimes being alleged. The Russia scandal seems to hint at a reality of fiction or paranoia, a baroque conspiracy in which the leader of the free world has been compromised by a mafiocracy with an economy smaller than South Korea’s.
The flaw lies […]
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Independents often are portrayed as political free agents with the potential to alleviate the nation’s rigid partisan divisions. Yet the reality is that most independents are not all that “independent” politically. And the small share of Americans who are truly independent – less than 10% of the public has no partisan leaning – stand out for their low level of interest in politics.
