Day: December 16, 2016

Interesting Factoids About the 2016 Election

Buck Banks

56

The Cook Political Report compiles 56 interesting observations about the 2016 presidential election. Here’s a sample: Trump won the White House by winning 76 percent of counties with a Cracker Barrel Old Country Store and 22 percent of counties with a Whole Foods Market. This 54-percent gap is the widest ever recorded. When Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, it was 19 percent; when George W. Bush was elected in 2000, it was 31 percent; and when Barack Obama was elected in 2008, it was 43 percent.

Trump Is a Threat to Democracy

Buck Banks

Mr. Trump is not the first American politician with authoritarian tendencies. (Other notable authoritarians include Gov. Huey Long of Louisiana and Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.) But he is the first in modern American history to be elected president. This is not necessarily because Americans have grown more authoritarian (the United States electorate has always had an authoritarian streak). Rather it’s because the institutional filters that we assumed would protect us from extremists, like the party nomination system and the news media, failed.

— Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

Trump Cabinet’s Combined Wealth Equal to 43 Million Poorest Families in U.S.

Buck Banks

$9.5 billion

Combined wealth of the 17 people President-elect Donald Trump has selected for his cabinet or for posts with cabinet rank, with several positions still unfilled, reports Quartz. “This collection of wealth is greater than that of the 43 million least wealthy American households combined—over one third of the 126 million households total in the U.S. … Affluence of this magnitude in a U.S. presidential cabinet is unprecedented.”

Help USS The Deplorables Set Sail

Buck Banks

IMG_5807.JPGI’m usually not much of a joiner or a petition signer, but when there’s an issue I believe in, I will get behind it 100 percent.

So it is with a petition recently posted to the “We the People” site run by the White House. Someone called “D.S” has posted a petition to name the next available U.S. Navy ship USS The Deplorables. D.S. doesn’t go into a lot of detail, but suggests the name is “To honor those citizens who rose up to defend America and The Constitution from the globalists.”

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