Donald Trump has insulted women, blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, and the disabled. It should not be surprising that the level of support for him among those groups is low. One group that he has not insulted (at least as far as I am aware) are Asian-Americans so one might expect that he is scoring relatively highly among them.
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Russia has recently been the target of attacks during the presidential campaign with the Democrats especially doing some major sabre rattling. On the Republican side, Mike Pence has also been harsh but Donald Trump has not been. One of the major issues in the campaign has been the threat of cyberwarfare and outrage that other countries would dare hack into US systems.
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What an ‘unshackled’ Donald Trump might look like is becoming clear. He is going full conspiracy truther. He says that the media, the polls, the debate commission, the justice system, and the GOP are all uniting with the Democrats to defeat him and even alleges that Republican speaker Paul Ryan has made a ‘sinister deal’ with his enemies
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In this clip from mid-September when Trump was ascendant, Samantha Bee argues that many elites, especially in the media, do not see the danger of Donald Trump’s rhetoric because they belong to a class that will not be harmed, though even that is becoming an increasingly dubious assumption given the escalation of his rhetoric.
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I came across a paper that looked at the vexing question of why we so often spill coffee when walking with a cup of it, and what might be done to prevent it. Of course, coffee shops give us lids but quite often we use actual mugs that do not come with lids. The research was stimulated when a physicist at a conference watched his colleagues walk gingerly while holding cups of coffee and started wondering about it.
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The disastrous last few days have resulted in a sudden realization among many in the Republican party establishment that Trump has become too toxic for them and a quarter of elected Republicans now say they cannot endorse him. The responses of those who had formally endorsed him has ranged from saying that they will not vote for him, to revocation of their prior endorsement but not saying they won’t vote for him, to some (like senate majority leader Mitch McConnell) simply saying that they condemn his remarks but not actually withdrawing support. The party chair Reince Priebus is the only one of the three main leaders still supporting Trump.
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These are among the sharpest political satirists around today and of course they addressed the Trump recording and the debate.
In my talk to the Sunday Assembly, I suggested that we may be entering what I called a post-religion era where irreligion (i.e., thinking of religion as irrelevant or unimportant, rather than being essential or hateful) may be replacing strong religious and anti-religious sentiment.
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One may think that the sensational events of the past week, such as the release of the Donald Trump recording and his ferocious performance in the last debate, would cause major swings in public opinion in support between the two candidates. But in the past, polls seem to shift by only small amounts even with major news breaking and it is not clear that those movements were due to any actual events like debates or are due to random drifts. The latest polls do seem to show more significant shifts with a large drop in support for Trump but if the past is any indication, we may see a regression to the mean and the gap with Hillary Clinton closing again.
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Nobody personifies the ‘Get off my lawn!’ sentiment better than Black and his latest rant is epic.
(This clip aired on October 5, 2015. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show outside the US, please see this earlier post. If the videos autoplay, please see here for a diagnosis and possible solutions.)