Author: Les

Retired from manufacturing management in 2012. Currently an active semi retired NASM Certified Personal Trainer. Exercise, philosophy, politics, government, science, and family occupies my non working and sleeping hours. Destroying the rancid acrimony that exists between conservatives and liberals, an acrimony destroying the very fabric of our society, is the ends to which this site dedicates itself.

The Donald Keeps Sliding…

It certainly appears Trump is on a fast track to completely tanking. He really, really, REALLY needs to pull his head out of his alternative reality. But, given Trump’s yuuuuuge ego and overly inflated self-image it is very unlikely he will ever accept his shortcomings, which are many and yuuuuuge, and make the attempt to do what he needs to do to be a successful president.

Looking forward to next weeks Gallup poll numbers.

Since he announced his candidacy, there have been a grand total of seven polls collected by Huffington Post Pollster in which half the country views President Trump favorably. That’s seven polls out of 514, 1.4 percent of the total.

That didn’t matter, thanks in part to Hillary Clinton also being seen more negatively than positively by the time the election rolled around. And it doesn’t really matter now, because the metric on which Trump is now judged is not favorability but job approval.

Is Trump doing a good job as president? At his exhausting/tive news conference Thursday, he suggested that he was, pointing to a recent survey from Rasmussen Reports that showed him with 55 percent approval. Over the course of 2016, though, Trump developed a bad habit of cherry-picking poll results that cast him in a favorable light, and that’s where Rasmussen falls. There have been 138 polls of Trump’s job approval since he took office; in 42 of those, he’s at or above 50 percent. That’s better than his favorability numbers, to be sure, at 30.4 percent. But it’s also the minority.

Full Gallup Poll BELOW THE FOLD

 

Jewish Community Centers Being Terrorized By Phone…

With Donald J. Trump’s campaign and rise to power  threats made to Jewish Community Centers have increased as well. 48 JCCs in 27 states and one Canadian province received upwards of 60 bomb threats during January. The majority of the threats were made during three days: January 9, 18 and 31. Several JCCs, including Orlando’s, received multiple threats.

Is this simply coincidental? Or did the tone of the Trump campaign and inauguration, with its obvious appeal to xenophobia and America First nationalism, encourage overt anti-Semitism and anti Muslim  activity? It certainly is plausible that the increase is at least partially the result of the tone set by Trump.

(CNN) – Samantha Taylor was at Orlando’s Jewish Community Center for a morning meeting when she heard reports of a bomb threat crackle from the director’s walkie-talkie.

Her daughter attends preschool there; she ran to the classroom and evacuated with the students and teachers.
While police and bomb-sniffing dogs searched the building for several hours, the teachers kept the children calm and happy at a safe spot down the street, Taylor said. No explosives were found.
 
 
On the same day, January 4, an Orlando Chabad center also received a threatening call, marking the first trickle in what would soon swell to waves of calls menacing Jewish institutions across the country.
 
In a statement, the FBI said the bureau and the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division are “investigating possible civil rights violations in connections with threats to Jewish Community Centers across the country.”
 
The JTA, a Jewish news agency, says it has obtained a recording of one of the calls. On it, the caller says a C-4 bomb has been placed in the JCC and that “a large number of Jews are going to be slaughtered.”
 
Several JCC sources said the FBI has told them it is investigating the calls as hate crimes. Online, another term has circulated: “telephone terrorism.”
 
“I’ve been in the business for 20-plus years, and this is unprecedented,” said Paul Goldenberg, national director of the Secure Community Network, which advises Jewish organizations on security. “It’s more methodical than meets the eye.”
No bombs have been found, but Jewish leaders hesitate to label the calls “hoaxes.” The chaos and terror the calls have caused are real, as are more tangible consequences.
 
JCCs across the country are bolstering security and holding town halls to calm frightened parents. Still, several centers have seen students withdraw from their early childhood education programs, typically reliable sources of revenue. As a result, some are slashing budgets, cutting staff and holding emergency fundraisers.
Making America Great Again does not, and should not, include this kind of rising hatred towards certain religious, ethnic, or cultural groups that differs from our own. Our fellow Americans, indeed fellow human beings do not deserve this.
Trump should be speaking out against hate, not turning a blind eye to it or inadvertently and indirectly encouraging it through words and action.

New York City Experiencing Rise In Hate Crimes…

POLITICO – There were 56 hate crimes reported in New York City as of Sunday, Feb. 12, up from just 31 incidents over the same time period last year, according to figures released today by the New York Police Department.

The increase was led by a rise in anti-Semitic crimes, which jumped from 13 to 28. No other category of hate crime was in double digits.

The uptick follows a national trend, in which activists and police are fielding more reports of hate crimes, which began last year. In early November, New York City police officials reported 314 hate crimes to that point in the year, surpassing the 309 that had been reported in all of 2015. (In one incident, an off-duty NYPD officer and Brooklyn native, who is Muslim, was attacked, along with her teenage son.)

SKIP

Some critics cast doubt on local tallies of hate crimes, preferring the annual figures released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, since they apply one standard definition of a hate crime to incidents that take place throughout the nation’s various police districts.

HateCrimesNYCFeb122017

Could it be possible that the increase is related to the xenophoba and nationalism the Trump phenomenon usered into America?