"In 2002, Donald Trump was expected to be a savior for Rancho Palos Verdes. But over the next decade, he brought lawsuits and offended residents. It's a lesson in Trump's management style."
"GROSS: He's seen a lot of war, right. So do you have any idea what kind of war he's envisioning if we do go to war with North Korea? And I hate to even utter those words."
"FILKINS: Yeah, God forbid. I think there's a lot of different options. And, I mean, I've had some discussions about what those options are. I think they're all terrible. I think that the easy scenario to imagine - I mean, it's a terrible scenario - is the moment the United States strikes North Korea, say. And we're speaking only theoretically here. The North Koreans have at their disposal thousands of artillery rounds that are within striking range of Seoul. And I think, you know, metropolitan Seoul has how many people - 20 million people. And so you can imagine."
"President Donald Trump said he wanted what amounted to a nearly tenfold increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal during a gathering this past summer of the nation’s highest ranking national security leaders, according to three officials who were in the room.
Trump’s comments, the officials said, came in response to a briefing slide he was shown that charted the steady reduction of U.S. nuclear weapons since the late 1960s. Trump indicated he wanted a bigger stockpile, not the bottom position on that downward-sloping curve."
"In what may be the most depressing article I’ve read since the epithets “Rocket Man” and “Dotard” entered the global lexicon, The Harvard Crimson reports that public approval of nuclear weapons use remains strong in the United States. In an appearance at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Stanford University nuclear expert Scott Sagan cited an August study that shows 60 percent of Americans supporting a decision to use atomic bombs that killed 100,000 Iranian civilians, if it meant that 20,000 American soldiers weren’t sacrificed in a ground attack on Iran, the Crimson reported. And almost 60 percent of those surveyed supported a nuclear air strike that killed two million Iranian civilians, if it meant 20,000 American soldiers didn’t have to lose their lives in an invasion."
"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."