"The partisan split in America is the highest it's been in two decades, with Republicans and Democrats holding vastly disparate views on race, immigration and the role of government, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center."
"Pew has been measuring attitudes on policy issues and political values dating back to 1994, and its latest check-in finds — perhaps unsurprisingly — that Americans are more divided than ever."
"The fact that Republicans and Democrats differ on these fundamental issues is probably not a surprise, but the magnitude of the difference is striking, and particularly how the differences have grown in recent years and where they've grown," Carroll Doherty, Pew's director of political research and one of the authors of the study, told NPR."
Redistributing wealth from the rich (states) to the poor (states). What a novel concept. What will politicians think up next?
People forget at New York State has Wall Street and the largest metropolitan region in the nation. Of course, we will be sending a lot of the excess tax money from Wall Street to help people in poorer states, who have a lot less then New York residents who live high on the hog. Governor Nelson Rockefeller used to complain about this a lot -- and that was back when New York State was the most populated and by far the wealthiest. So it's not shocking people still complain about it.
"Compared to other recent presidents, news reports about President Trump have been more focused on his personality than his policy, and are more likely to carry negative assessments of his actions, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center's Journalism Project."
"For the first nine months of his administration, observers have had occasion to wonder — and wonder, and wonder, and wonder — how exactly Donald Trump would manage to handle a real crisis imposed by external events rather than his own impulsiveness. The answer is now apparent in the blackened streets of San Juan and the villages of interior Puerto Rico that more than a week after Hurricane Maria struck remain without access to food or clean water."
"To an extent, the United States of America held up surprisingly well from Inauguration Day until September 20th or so. The ongoing degradation of American civic institutions, at a minimum, did not have an immediate negative impact on the typical person’s life."
"But the world is beginning to draw a straight line from the devastation in Puerto Rico straight to the White House. Trump’s instinct so far is to turn the island’s devastation into another front in culture war politics, a strategy that could help his own political career survive."
"Barack Obama, the president who presided over the regulation of Wall Street after the financial crisis struck, has seemingly learned the opposite lesson. On Monday it was reported by Bloomberg that Obama in August accepted $400,000 for a speech he delivered to Northern Trust Corporation, a wealth management bank. That was followed last week by a speech to the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm. It had also been previously reported that Obama was receiving $400,000 from the bond firm Cantor Fitzgerald to speak at a health care conference later this month.
There are some major differences between Clinton’s situation and Obama’s. Clinton was ramping up to run for president in a decidedly anti-establishment year—“anger at the financial industry had been building for years,” Clinton acknowledges in her book—while Obama is returning to private life, with no clear political future. But while Clinton may have learned (too late) that Democratic leaders are under intense pressure to repair an image that has been tarnished by accusations of elitism and corruption, Obama doesn’t seem to have received the memo."
"[In 1969], Richard Nixon was on the verge of making these economists’ dream a reality by enacting an unconditional income for all poor families. It would have been a massive step forward in the War on Poverty, guaranteeing a family of four $1,600 a year, equivalent to roughly $10,000 in 2016."
"First, however, Nixon needed some evidence. Tens of millions of dollars were budgeted to provide a basic income for more than 8,500 Americans in cities around the country. The researchers wanted to answer three questions: (1) Would people work significantly less with a guaranteed income?; (2) Would the program cost too much?; and (3) Would it prove politically unfeasible?"
"A tractor-trailer driver found himself in an unusual situation Wednesday morning because of what the driver said was a GPS error."
"Ventnor City Police Chief Doug Biagi said an officer spotted an 18-wheel tractor trailer the near Washington Avenue section of the Boardwalk around 5:30 a.m. Wednesday."
"According to the police chief, this is the second time in two months that a truck has come down the boardwalk in Ventnor. The first time was a building supply truck back in July."