You can't submit without making a donation! And you can't click other. Man-that poll is a joke!

Wow - thanks for that!

Other worked for me...

That survey is really divisive. I thought Trump said he was going to bring us all together.

It nearly made my head explode to read that.

He's off to a good start, Terri!

49 percent of registered voters find Trump truthful according to the most recent Emerson College poll.

39 percent say the media is truthful.

But sure, everyone hates Trump and loves the media.

This link for the survey worked for me:

https://action.trump2016.com/trump-mms-survey/

"The national Emerson College poll was conducted February 5-6 under the Supervision of Professor Spencer Kimball. The sample consisted of only registered voters, n=617, with a margin of error (MOE) of +/- 3.9 percentage points. The national data was weighted by 2016 election results, gender, party affiliation, race, age and region. It is important to remember that subsets based on gender, age, party breakdown and school carry with them higher margins of error, as the sample size is reduced. Data was collected using an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system of landlines only."

All the other self reported disclaimers about this poll aside, who in the world answers surveys on landlines?

The Rasmussen poll he cited yesterday is also conducted by landlines and internet, far from a random sample. I had to laugh when he said his approval rating on Rasmussen was 55 and "rising". Where have we heard that before on HD Conversations? Well, Con Don, it was 57 a few weeks ago on Rasmussen's daily tracking poll. Were you never too good at math unless the numbers have a dollar sign in front of them?

But it doesn't surprise me if 49% find him truthful. People get their news from one source and nobody reads a newspaper anymore.

I too am in the exploding head camp.

Why did you change the topic, beagles? Don't you find the survey questions an attempt to make conservative voters so angry that they'll donate? They make me angry so he's succeeded in making anyone who reads it angry. Good job, Don!

Of course it's meant to do that mayflowers. Democrats are also certainly trying to make their base angry and keep their base angry too. It's called politics. Who cares? He's playing to his base and democrats are playing to their base and it all comes down to which is bigger in the states that matter in 2018 and 2020.

I didn't change the topic. There was a comment that everyone was being brought together against Trump. That's just not quite true.

I think when the media covers things, they seem to create the impression that Trump is a disaster, hated by everyone, and his presidency is imploding. I'm not so sure that's the case, is all.

Who cares??? WE care! He's the president to ALL of us now. He needs to stop playing to his deplorable base in the same ugly way he did during the primaries. He says he wants to unify the nation (and the world) but I've seen nothing that creates unity. I doubt there's anything he can do to create unity but he can stop putting bigger wedges between us.

It is a disaster when you campaign for the working middle class and then you fill your Cabinet with Wall Streeters. When you pick inexperienced people to head government agencies because you owe them a favor for the money they donated and because you love them because they kissed your narcissistic ass. When you pick your senior advisors from the ranks of white supremacist media and friends of Putin. No, not a disaster at all.

Shepard Smith shares our utter disgust at this presidency.

What are the democrats doing to create unity? The republicans have a majority in every branch of government. Are the democrats reaching across the aisle? Have the media and the democratic party made overtures towards giving Trump a chance to be president of everyone?

Unity is over. It is no more. It is dead and buried and has been for a long, long, long, long, long time.

Other than a brief period after 9/11, I can't think of a time we've actually had even a pretext of unity since before the days of Bill Clinton's impeachment.

Obama talked pretty about unity, just like Trump does, but then one of the very first things he did was ram through legislation on reconciliation with 0 republican votes that affected 1/6 of the economy, and when republicans objected to stuff he was doing, said "I won" and that was that.

And of course the people who already hated Trump think he's a disaster, Again, the question is whether there is enough of them in the right states to matter... Meanwhile there's a lot of excitement about some of his cabinet picks, even among NeverTrumpers on the right. Sure, there are a few bad ones (Bannon, Carson, Flynn), but also some really great choices too (Mulvaney, Pruitt, Price, Mattis)

Anyway, I don't feel like fighting, so I'll bow out of this thread now.

Beagles, why on earth is it up to us and/or the media to "make overtures" to Trump? He works for us, and so far he is doing a piss-poor job of representing us all. The man and his entourage are purposely causing as much division in this country as they can get away with. (Thank God for the 9th Circuit.)

He's keeping his campaign promises. He's not going to adopt the policies of the democrats, nor should he.

It seems like for a big portion of the population, "unity" just means doing what people on the left want (e.g. we need to create "unity" by giving Obama what he wants when he's the president, but now that Trump is the president, we need to create "unity" by giving up the things he campaigned on and being more like what the left wants him to be)

There's nothing he can do to reach out that would make anyone on the left happy, other than abandoning everything he campaigned on and magically transforming into a different person.

That's just not going to happen, so the choice now is for the democrats to either obstruct (which is what they'v chosen and that's fine) or reach across the aisle to find "unity."

Just as Obama said "he won." "Elections have consequences."

Ok, now I'm really bowing out and closing the thread. Have fun.

So ... Those who disagree with his putrid policies should just suck it up and reach out to him.

Sorry. That's absolutely not how it's going to work, and it's absurd to even suggest it. I and countless others are not going to sit idly by while he attempts to ruin us all.

No. I don't think so at all. I think you should obstruct the h*ll out of him, just like I thought republicans should obstruct the h*ll out of Obama.

But don't expect him to transform to satisfy you, any more than Obama transformed to satisfy republicans.

Sooner or later, we're going to have to realize half this country hates the values and ideals of the other half. And we're either going to have to allow for a LOT of federalism and cut the influence of the federal government MASSIVELY or are going to have to break up the country and hopefully do it before there's bloodshed.

And since I can't seem to stop responding, now I"m just going to close the thread and not come back. That's the only way I seem to be able to not get sucked into these conversations.

Oh, you'll come back to this thread.

You'll come back because you'll want to see this ridiculously cute kitten.

I don't think we hate each other. People do hate the extreme views of the other side. For instance, most people think that borders should be protected, immigrants should be vetted, etc. Instead, the radical left bellows "LET EVERYONE IN!" and the radical right bellows "DON"T LET ANYONE IN!". And then everyone gets caught up in the extremist drama. There are no moderate solutions and that is what is sickening.

Beaglesdoitbetter, I think the press is doing a LOUSY job of serving public, regardless of our present leadership crisis.

I learned in school that journalists were supposed to report news w/o editorializing. There was an editorial section to voice the paper's view but it was a section, not their entire theme. I found the campaign coverage 1000% biased pro or against either candidate rather than truly getting down in the trenches and finding out what people were thinking/feeling. Conservative and liberal media publicized polls that supported their views rather than people's voices and presented them as gospel. What happened??? You know what happened. The election outcome came as a surprise, esp. to the almighty political pundits. This isn't the only reason (and crisis is real and scary) but I do think the media is pissed b/c Trump managed to outsmart them. Additionally, Trump didn't pay gazillions for ads, he just went to twitter for free. Don't you think media is POd?

Every day when I turn on the morning news 50% is coverage of who said what on FB/twitter and the high rating kitty and baby videos. Really? I already have a phone where u can see the stuff so why are newscasters repeating? Short of it: laziness as they think of themselves as movie stars and much above getting down in the trenches like reporters of yesteryear used to do. Pay $25 to the average person to submit video news, much easier than doing real work.

i apologize for tangent but this is the closest thread I've seen to media accountability. I think that media is doing a LOUSY job and are in attack mode for being ridiculed. They are not helping.

I think some of the media are coming back into their own and they certainly are fired up and acting like old timey investigative reporters. It's kind of exciting for me to see a new wave of political activism sweeping the nation.

Gallup has a good historical perspective on job approval ratings (compared to most new prezes he is very low) but the shy trump approver may well be a reality which is being reflected more in the online/automatic polls than live surveys.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/204050/trump-job-approval-points-below-average-one-month-mark.aspx?utm_source=twitterbutton&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=sharing

I believe the playbook will be to distance the GOP and Pence from Trump/totally freakin weird Russia stuff as much as possible over the next month and then force Trump out for treason-ish reasons, likely deserved (I saw someone say Treason itself is like lupus, it's never treason), while the GOP tries to rise above it all. But they need to switch the narrative to focus entirely on Trump's failings first so as not to get caught in the crossfire. You can see this already in Fox News turning on Trump while pushing narrative that he lied to Pence and totally kept Pence out of the loop. Republican voters are extremely loyal and I believe they will go along with this play while Democrats try their best, unsuccessfully, to point out GOP enabled Trump.

The wildcard is base Trump supporters who are rabidly loyal and there is demonstrably literally nothing that would change their minds about Trump, so the GOP may or may not fracture with the Breitbart/Alt-right/illuminati/sovereign citizen/lizard-people crowd rebelling against the party leadership.

I predict there will be more alt-right related terrorism and insurrection. That genie is going to be very hard to stuff back in the bottle. But I'm not sure it will be very well organized unless Russia wants to really give them a hand, which totally would be in Russia's best interest but might be a bit of a waste of resources.

Meanwhile China's like "yeah boyyyyys! Party like it's 1953!" And our PM Trudeau should be on his knees thanking the good lord up above every night because his polling was in a nosedive and now shows signs of levelling out (yellow circle)

This is embarrassing to me. How is this relevant to anybody/anything? Can I believe this falls under truth seeking???

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2017/02/17/politics/donald-trump-make-america-great-again-iconic-hat/index.html?client=safari 

The "accountability survey" is bait click to get you on a GOP mailing list.

Robo has it exactly right.

Andy Borowitz's suggestion (with a bit of censoring for Gardenweb)

If you want to seriously LOL take this hilariously unhinged survey on Trump's site. Pro tip: at the end, when they ask you for your email address, I entered impeachtrump@fracking.com.

Ok, I came back to this thread one more time. But only to see Ida's kitten ;)

No, actually, the reason I opened this thread again is to give a prime example of why the media is a raging dumpster fire.

Let's look at today.

AP publishes an OMG report about Trump considering deploying 100,000 national guard members to round up immigrants.

WOW. Outrage. Holy cr*p

EXCEPT

1. The memo didn't say that (and they had the memo the whole time so it's not like they just got bad info)

2. The story the article was based on was a draft memo that never even made it to John Kelly

3. There's no evidence Trump was considering this idea, which didn't even actually exist as an idea, based on what the memo actually said.

Ok, well maybe it's just a one-off mistake.

Except, No.

1. We had the MLK bust that moved but didn't

2. Munchin's foreclosing on an old lady over .27 cents who never actually lost her home and which didn't actually involve Munchin's bank

3. I could go on and on.

Here's a list of a bunch of these kinds of stories.

http://thefederalist.com/2017/02/06/16-fake-news-stories-reporters-have-run-since-trump-won/

I think some of the media are coming back into their own and they certainly are fired up and acting like old timey investigative reporters.

Great. But don't think people on the right aren't asking, where were they for 8 years? Is the media going to go on vacation every time we have a democrat in office and then become "hard-hitting investigative news reporters" when a republican gets elected?

And is the definition of "hard hitting" news publishing thinly sourced stories based on unnamed "sources" and then correcting them a day later, with the original story getting shared thousands of times and the corrections getting shared hundreds of times?

The traditional media was all having a sad the other day b/c Trump took questions from Christian News Network and some conservative writer, I forget from where. They didn't say the questions were bad... they were complaining because the conservative writers got to ask the questions.

I could see how that would be frustrating, because I've been pretty d*rn annoyed for years that almost every single question ever asked is asked by a liberal reporter.

Not that I wasn't fascinated to hear NYT reporter Jeff Zeleny's hard-hitting question to Obama about what enchanted Obama the most about his first 100 days in office, or CNN's Dan Lothian's great question to Obama about whether he thought Republican presidential candidates were "uninformed, out of touch, or irresponsible." That was some GREAT journalism.

I predict there will be more alt-right related terrorism and insurrection.

What about left wing terrorism and insurrection? Was it righties setting fires at Berkeley?

I don't think we hate each other. People do hate the extreme views of the other side."

I didn't say we hate each other :) I said we hate the "values and ideals" of the other side... and we do, for the most part.

What about left wing terrorism and insurrection? Was it righties setting fires at Berkeley?

I was thinking less about fires/property damage which the earth/animal liberation groups seem to specialize in, and more about fertilizer bombs and mass killings.

I agree killing people was a left wing sorta thing in the 1960s (pendulum swing from being a right wing sorta thing in civil rights era) but you don't hear a lot about it from the left in the 2010s...this backgrounder from Council on Foreign Relations explains the four FBI "threat" categories.

http://www.cfr.org/terrorist-organizations-and-networks/militant-extremists-united-states/p9236

"The FBI divides domestic extremists into four broad categories, including left-wing, right-wing, single issue groups, and homegrown Islamic."

If you google FBI left wing terrorism you will get very little. They're pretty focused on islamic and right wing.

This rather disturbing study from the Southern Poverty Law Centre talks about the extent of domestic terrorism 2009-2015 very little of which seems to come from a radical left wing ideology.

https://www.splcenter.org/20150212/lone-wolf-report

"Almost half of the attacks during the period apparently were motivated by the ideology of the antigovernment “Patriot” movement, including “sovereign citizens,” whose movement has been described by the FBI as “domestic terrorist.” A little more than that (51%) came from ideologies of hate, ranging from white supremacy to misogyny to radical Islamism."

"In the last six years, incidents of domestic terrorism in the United States have been overwhelmingly carried out by solitary “lone wolves” or leaderless groups of just two people. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s study of the nature of these attacks is based on the following 63 incidents, which occurred between April 1, 2009, and Feb. 1, 2015. The list includes both terrorist attacks and foiled terrorist plots, as well as unplanned situations, such as traffic stops, where extremists were confronted by law enforcement officials and reacted with major violence. The ideologies driving the homegrown extremists in each incident are divided into two broad categories: “antigovernment,” meaning the perpetrators see the federal government as their chief enemy and generally subscribe to the tenets of the so-called “Patriot” movement; and “hate,” which encompasses hatred based on race, religion, gender, and sexual orientation, among others (jihadist attacks and anti-abortion violence are included in this category)."

If you google FBI left wing terrorism you will get very little. They're pretty focused on islamic and right wing.

Is that because of where they want to focus, or because that's really the big issue?

I don't consider SPLC a reliable source in any way, so would have to do more research on this subject before fully commenting one way or the other.But I think both far left and far right have their really bad apples.

Edited to say, a very quick Google search gives me some serious reason to doubt the veracity of SPLC claims.

It looks like their list of "right wing" terror (https://www.splcenter.org/20100126/terror-right), for example, includes

Micah Xavier Johnson who "wanted to “kill white people,” especially white officers. Johnson, who had expressed support for several black separatist groups on Facebook"

and

Gavin Eugene Long, 29

who was a member of the black sovereign group United Washitaw de Dugdahmoundyah Mu’ur Nation.

I don't really consider these to be "right-wingers" in any recognized sense.

And then you have things like this on the list:

Christopher Lacy who shoots California Highway Patrol officer Kenyon Youngstrom at close range... An investigation into Lacy’s background reveals a large amount of antigovernment “sovereign citizens” literature on several computers at his home.

But, this guy was also bipolar and do we actually know he was motivated by his "right-wing" ideology, or was he just crazy?

If I like "you" but hate your values and ideals, what do I in effect actually "like??"

Well, I like plenty of people on the left in real life and on this forum but strongly dislike their views on the state.

I also thought Obama was kind of a cool guy, but hated virtually every single action he took his president...

People are more than their politics.

That survey is ridiculous and so very biased. I submitted my email address as trumpsucks@gmail.com. Still laughing.

This is the most recent original document I could find from the FBI - 2002.
https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/news/testimony/the-terrorist-threat-confronting-the-united-states

Left wing and single issue groups are more on the property damage side.

That's pretty old :) I'd be curious to see unbiased recent research with a clear definition of what is classified as right vs. left. I'll have to look around more.

There's no question that if you classify single issue groups as left-wing such as animal liberation front, they have frequent attacks on property such as arson. However when you look at attacks that cause loss of life I am hard-pressed to find examples. As explained in the 2002 document, the left-wing groups right now seem to be less concerned with overthrowing the government and provoking a new world order and that seems to be the province of right wing groups right now, and left wing groups seem to be seeing themselves as more of protectors of citizenry/earth/animals. This has not always been the case and certainly the context in the 1980s was the reverse. Noted an interesting connection to my mind, the decline of violent left wing groups parallelled the decline of the Soviet union. Now it seems right wing are on the rise and their patron saint is likely getting quite a bit a help from the Soviet union as they are rising to a sentence.

In a more recent declassified document that examined terrorist threats from 2005 to 2007 they seem to point to white supremacist groups as potentially having the most widespread impact but they redact the group that they thought had the most dangerous potential.

Politically motivated shootings of cops, off the top of my head.. Scott in Tennesee. I think there were incidents in Dallas and NYC.

You may be right, or not, Robo, I honestly don't know the data.

My point is, there's a lot of "violence" on both far left and right. And in making my statement I don't exclude riots and property violence from being violent just b/c no one is dying... yet.

In fact, I would classify organized violence by people like Black Bloc, even if it is property damage only, as more politically impactful than some nutter who does a lone wolf attack because of idiocy he read on Stormfront (or wherever) [Not more tragic or "worse" but just more relevant in terms of what is being defined as political violence] YMMV.

Yes, one's mileage may vary. When I see Dylan Storm soaking up right wing propaganda about black on white crime, posting pictures of himself with the Confederate and Rhodesian flag (seriously?) and then going in and shooting nine people in a church, leaving one alive to tell his tale, and saying it was to avenge black people "raping our women," well the right wing extremists "political" rhetoric seems to work fairly well as far as inciting violence. Very few of the actual perpetrators of violence are "politically active" or have very sophisticated or fixed political views. They are basically unhinged and angry, any spark will do. BUT, the folks egging them on, that is another matter all together.