PGT: President-Elect Donald J Trump

[Fuzz]

Originally Posted by DuffMan

Does that 72k take into account the billionaires money, that was mentioned above?
right to work is stupid, can't believe Conservatives are dumb enough to think it's a good idea. It's basically turning job conditions that illegal workers normally have, no benefits, no security, low wages, no safety regulations etc. etc. and turning them into jobs for patriotic Americans.

Interestingly a quick calculation I just tried, and maybe my numbers are off...

If you take 50 million voters averaging $60 000, then add in 500 people making $1Billion (there are 536 billionaires in the US) you get an average of about $70 000. Now, obviously most of the billionaires aren't making $1 billion a year, and they aren't all voting republican. But it shows how much a few people can distort the average. Average is such a bad stat to use.

[Fuzz]

Further to that....

Spoiler!

http://www.forbes.com/sites/katiasav.../#197746b7717e

[CorsiHockeyLeague]

I believe 72k was the median income Trump voter, not the mean.

[Senator Clay Davis]

Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague

I believe 72k was the median income Trump voter, not the mean.

Correct you are. Now that was from the primaries way back in May, but you would safely assume the primary voter is the core voter. Here's the article

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/...class-support/

[Bootsy]

Not sure if this belongs here or the climate change thread

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/...ticle33240616/

[Thor]

lol boy he cleaned up that swamp real good!

[Flash Walken]

Americans’ trust in media is at historic lows, yet profits for many cable and network news stations have reached record highs. Is this a market failure or the press we deserve?

Blaming the media has long been a favorite American pastime, but the most recent Gallop national survey — showing trust in the press at an all time low for the second time in three years — at 32% — indicates a problem greater than the tidal regularity of campaign season rhetoric and points to an urgent need to review the state of journalism in America.

Commercial media, operating on a for-profit model, are the dominant force in the American press. Despite the exponential growth of channels and platforms for distributing content, over 90% of all mass media (film, books, music, newspapers, magazines and television) are produced by just six corporate sources, down from fifty in 1980. While much ink has been spilled foretelling the death of television in the internet age, commercial tv broadcasting still accounts for the most common source of news for Americans. Television is very much alive and successfully competing for the attention of a sizable, albeit shrinking audience — and more importantly, still leading the national discussion.

The most viewed event in the 2015 campaign was the first Republican debate, attracting nearly 24 million viewers (about seven percent of the population) — vastly more than comparable primary debate turnout in recent years. The first general election debate broke over 80 million in viewers. Most of the attention has centered around the bombastic campaign rhetoric of Donald Trump: Every program that Trump has appeared on has benefitted financially — the Fox News and CNN debates were the most watched in each of those network’s histories, late-night talk show hosts Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel each scored their most watched shows ever with Trump as a guest; Saturday Night Live, despite the controversy and protest, considered the decision to invite Trump as the week’s celebrity guest ratings gold.

A study by Tyndall Report, a media research group, illustrates the preference for spectacle goes beyond cable news and late night entertainment. In 2015, among the big three network stations — ABC, NBC & CBS — Trump’s campaign received 234 minutes of on air reporting compared to ten minutes during the same period for Bernie Sanders, a snub referred to by his supporters as the “Bernie blackout.”

The campaigns themselves are a sort of free market enterprise in the press’ view — a great deal of time and energy focused on who raised the most money, which traditionally has been required to fund staff and outreach, but most importantly to purchase advertising to brand their campaign, repeat their catchphrases, attack opponents and get their message out to as many voters as possible. It is here where the conflicts between commercial tv news and capital intensive campaigns become most vivid.

The comparison between Bernie Sanders and Trump are especially fitting, not with regard to the substance of their messages, but because as each candidate offered a similar narrative to news stations — running “outsider” campaigns while having the most enthusiastic turnout at public events of their opponents. It is hard to deny that Sanders events were the most photogenic — a seeming goldmine for the press to endlessly ride.

As far as ratings and advertising revenue go, Trump was a blessing to the business of news. To its substance, he has been a revealing case study on the contradictions of profit and public interest.

Presently, competition between commercial media outlets has come in the form of news broadcasts increasingly favoring spectacle over substance. Over the last decade, numerous layoffs and closures of foreign bureaus and investigative wings at newspapers, network and cable stations have been replaced by entertainment news, self-help and human interest stories. The Tyndall report shows a precipitous drop in coverage of domestic and foreign issues, nearly half of what it was as recently as the 1980s, while coverage of crime has increased 4-fold, despite a continued and steady decline in crime during the intervening decades.

The media itself, no monolith, has shown signs of discontent and self reflection, with some attempts to reign in the spectacle with fact-checks and assertive journalism.

But the tidal shift in the coverage of Trump from fawning self interested curiosity to righteous condemnation only had the effect of reinforcing the mistrust for media already present — left, center and right.

For politicians in this climate of public mistrust, however, lambasting the press has evolved from a caricatured verbal tick into a winning public relations strategy, and somehow in spite of constant lamenting, the business of news is thriving.

A study by the non-profit, non-partisan group Free Press, conducted by media scholars from NYU, asserts that America journalism is experiencing a “classic case of market failure,” a problem America is uniquely vulnerable to because of its disproportionate reliance on commercial media and chronically underfunded public broadcasting.

https://medium.com/@k.zare/profiting...07d#.3ptpia1nt

[nik-]

It's the same as the congress approval ratings. It's everyone else's media/news outlet/congressman that's the bad one. Not the ones I use!

[Flash Walken]

Originally Posted by nik-

It's the same as the congress approval ratings. It's everyone else's media/news outlet/congressman that's the bad one. Not the ones I use!

uhm, not really...

[ernie]

Originally Posted by Flash Walken

uhm, not really...

I get what the poster is saying. Congress approval ratings are at all time lows but for the most part people just keep on voting back in the same people. Incumbents usually win.

in 2014, congress had a 15% approval rating. 95% of incumbents were voted back in.

Senate had the same rate in 2014.

The House since '64 has never been lower than a 85% re-election rate from what I can see. Senate typically a bit lower with a drop in the late 70's early 80's to sub 60%....but it quickly climbed back up.

[nik-]

Yes, that's what I'm saying. Everything is apparently awful, yet people keep making the same choices. No one thinks their choices are the problem.

[Senator Clay Davis]

As far as conflicts of interest go, isn't appointing something to a department they are currently suing a bit of one?

[Senator Clay Davis]

So Linda McMahon has finally made it, she's Small Business Administrator Chief or some such crap. Lol it's going to be even more hilarious then we could have predicted.

Edit: The gifs in this thread are amazing, as are almost all of them in Twitter comments.

https://twitter.com/CNBC/status/806608589309825026

[worth]

I read your post and then was like, "Whose Linda McMahon, Vince McMahon's wife?" Then I googled, then I was right.

[DuffMan]

This will be the best reality show ever.

[DuffMan]

better than Inhoffe

President-elect Donald Trump is planning to nominate Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt – an outspoken critic of the EPA – to lead the environmental agency, a senior transition source confirmed to Fox News.

Pruitt may be the most controversial pick of the four.
Pruitt, 48, has been a reliable booster of the fossil fuel industry and a critic of what he derides as the EPA's "activist agenda."

Representing his state as attorney general since 2011, Pruitt has repeatedly sued the EPA to roll back environmental regulations and other health protections. He joined with other Republican attorneys general in opposing the Clean Power Plan, which seeks to limit planet-warming carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants. Pruitt has argued that curbing carbon emissions would trample the sovereignty of state governments, drive up electricity rates, threaten the reliability of the nation's power grid and "create economic havoc."

His installment, if confirmed, would mark a significant break with the current EPA approach toward global warming.
In an opinion article published earlier this year by National Review, Pruitt suggested the debate over global warming "is far from settled" and claimed "scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind."

"Respect for private property rights have allowed our nation to thrive, but with the recently finalized rule, farmers, ranchers, developers, industry and individual property owners will now be subject to the unpredictable, unsound and often byzantine regulatory regime of the EPA," Pruitt said last year.

[DuffMan]

I can't seem to edit my post above, (it is just blank, in edit screen), but anyways, maybe this will help Trump bring back coal jobs.

[photon]

The blank edit has something to do with Firefox, the forum Javascript editor, and certain characters, bug in the editor code I assume.

[DuffMan]

I'm using IE though, not FF

[HotHotHeat]

I hadn't thought about this until now... But Trump's state of the union addresses are going to be quite something.