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Iowa Poll: President Trump's popularity sky high among registered Republicans; more than three-fourths definitely plan to vote for him

© Copyright 2019, Des Moines Register and Tribune Co.

President Donald Trump enjoys widespread popularity among registered Republicans in Iowa, the first state that will cast preference votes in the 2020 presidential race, a new Iowa Poll shows.

The president's popularity has never been higher among registered Republicans who don't plan to attend the Democratic caucuses, the Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom Iowa Poll found.

His overall job approval is up 4 percentage points from March to 85%. The percentage of those who say they will definitely vote to re-elect him is up 9 percentage points to 76%.

“I think he’s doing a tremendous job, really, as far as I’m concerned,” said Wayne Sparker, an 82-year-old Lake Mills resident and poll respondent. "... I’ve been a Democrat all my life, but when he ran for office, when I could see what he was standing up for — for the borders and the different solutions he brought forth — I felt that I definitely needed to vote for him."

The findings come as the U.S. House of Representatives advances its impeachment inquiry into the president, an ongoing trade dispute with China and conflict over the way the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulates biofuels.

It also comes as a wave of Democratic presidential candidates floods the state — some seeking to convert disaffected Republicans and independents.

But these Republicans are sticking with the president, poll results show.

"A majority of every demographic group say they will definitely vote to re-elect the president, with the exception of moderates (47%)," said J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co. "All other groups stand with President Trump with strong majorities, not surprising given it is 76% overall."

Amy Potter, a 32-year-old Gilbert resident and poll respondent, said she doesn't pay attention to the daily ins and outs of politics, but she is a lifelong conservative and appreciates the thriving economy.

"At this current point in time, the way the housing market is and the way there are so many jobs available, I really do not believe America could be in a better place at all," she said.

Apologies for not providing a link - https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/iowa-poll/2019/11/18/iowa-poll-results-president-trump-popularity-sky-high-among-registered-republicans/4205580002/

For reference, you can always take a block of relevant text, and copy/paste it into a search engine. I've done that often enough :^)

Replace the head of Hong Kong with democratically elected leadership. Then do the same for China as a whole. Anything else doesn't fix the underlying problem. President Xi Jinping wasn't voted in by Chinese voters and there's no mechanism for kicking him out for the shenanigans going on in Hong Kong now. That's a huge part of the present Hong Kong problems.

The responses were almost invariably criticism of that claim and it's quite enlightening the approaches they used. The first reply was a discussion of the alleged unpopularity of the protests by noting that only 17% wanted independence (while ignoring that substantially more would want to not be extradited to the mainland just for saying the wrong thing). And since the protests were allegedly unpopular, thus, they shouldn't be able to impose drastic changes on a society.

The second lauded the Chinese election system because it kept the riff raff out. The third complained that democratic governments have protests too. Every single one of them mentioned the US in some way:

The US media has been unabashedly promoting the protests and protesters.

In regards to the Chinese voting system, it deserves some consideration. I think a big part of the reason our democratic systems have been failing is because of lowest common denominator issues. Democrats have to promise handouts to people, because it's how they've built their support. Reparations are the most visible example of this. We'll pay for you to vote for us! Even better, we're not paying you with our money! And the party platform is now increasingly frequently now turning into free everything, we'll sort out the implications or how to pay for it all later. Republicans, by contrast, end up proposing things like building a wall, even though if you magically zapped every single brown person out of the country today and split the US and Mexico by a few hundred miles of Pacific, I think it's improbable we'd see a dramatic improvement in conditions/wages for the labor class. It might help some but the gesture is largely symbolic, though the cost is anything but. In both cases it's simply appealing a lowest common denominator.

Yellow vest protesters (which I don't recall have ended yet, and have been sufficiently violent from both sides.) Protests for independence in Catalonia, national police showing up to beat down a local organised referendum. Kent State shootings

This foreshadows a deep discussion tree of duplicitous debate where all kinds of shifty rationalizations for Chinese and Hong Kong government action appear. China apparently can't handle democracy due to its culture - which as I noted at the time indicates the culture would be inferior (and ignoring Taiwan which has a functioning Chinese democracy). And these critics go over without any initial prompting from me the numerous glaring flaws of the US: corruption, terrible voters/candidates, awful media, lying and dishonesty, "red scare" witch hunts, partisanship, tragedy of the commons, prisoners per capita, and understanding of the Chinese culture(s) - while ignoring that China was worse at every single one of these except for the last two (maybe).

The point of that huge discussion of US/China comparisons is that it was both spontaneous introduced by a lot of the critics, and ignores that there's plenty of democracies where the US comes from. Even if you don't like the US or don't believe it's actually a democracy, there's others that have their shit together better like say Norway or Switzerland. Yet we see again and again when the Chinese government gets criticized in a story, so does the US government in comments.

This also happens in stories critical of Russia. For example, we have a recent bit [fixed a bad link I just noticed 5/19/2020] of Russian propaganda posted in Runaway's journal where invasion and annexation of the Crimea is glossed over in a peculiar revision of history. Consider these two dates:

Feb. 23, 2014: The date that NATO, Western diplomats, and the corporate media have chosen – disingenuously – as the beginning of recent European history, with silence about the coup orchestrated in Kyiv the day before. President Vladimir Putin returns to Moscow from the winter Olympics in Sochi; confers with advisers about Crimea, deciding – unlike Khrushchev in 1954 – to arrange a plebiscite to let the people of Crimea, most of whom strongly opposed the coup regime, decide their own future.

March 16, 2014: The official result from the voters in Crimea voted overwhelmingly for independence from Ukraine and to join Russia. Following the referendum, Crimea declared independence from Ukraine and asked to join the Russian Federation. On March 18, the Russian Federal Assembly ratified the incorporation of Crimea into Russia.

Where's the invasion of Crimea by the Russians on February 27? Strangely, it's not mentioned at all. We go from the silky weaseling of Putin deciding to "arrange a plebiscite" even though he has no authority to do so, to a smooth annexation of Crimea by Russia (unmentioned in this narrative is the ridiculously on-sided vote of 97% of the vote in favor). Notice also the attack on Nikita Khrushchev, whom is termed a "Ukrainian" while glossing over that Khrushchev was the First Secretary of the USSR and unlike Putin had the authority to decide that the Crimea would become part of the Ukraine.

Similar prevarication happens in the discussion of the shooting down of a passenger airline.

So what happened when I criticized this timeline as the over-the-top Russian propaganda that it was? Suddenly there was a great interest in the flaws of the US system in particular. The alleged 3% who allegedly voted against the Russian invasion were compared to the 5% or less who don't vote for a major party presidential candidate in the US. I was accused of spouting US propaganda (facts apparently don't matter). And so on. Runaway said something I think quite appropriate though grossly misapplied.

The point is, it gets tiresome when someone constantly condemns one party for the actions that another party gets away with, routinely. It smells of hypocrisy.

Here's my take. None of that is a valid excuse for evil and tyranny. Else I could just throw back in your face. "Russia and China do it, so my shifty country can do it too." Is that race to the bottom really what we want for our world?

Authoritarian societies like China or Russia can lie without consequence and people will automatically believe (or at least pretend to). It's a standard 1984 system where alignment with official rhetoric is more important than whether that rhetoric has any basis in truth. I'm not part of that system. I don't have to believe it, hence I don't.

https://original.antiwar.com/mcgovern/2019/11/14/ukraine-for-dummies/

At Wednesday’s debut of the impeachment hearings there was one issue upon which both sides of the aisle seemed to agree, and it was a comic-book caricature of reality.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff led off the proceedings with this: “In 2014, Russia invaded a United States ally, Ukraine, to reverse that nation’s embrace of the West, and to fulfill Vladimir Putin’s desire to rebuild a Russian empire…”

Five years ago, when Ukraine first came into the news, those Americans who thought Ukraine was an island in the Pacific can perhaps be forgiven. That members of the House Intelligence Committee don’t know – or pretend not to know – more accurate information about Ukraine is a scandal, and a consequential one.

As Professor Stephen Cohen has warned, if the impeachment process does not deal in objective fact, already high tensions with Russia are likely to become even more dangerous.

So here is a kind of primer for those who might be interested in some Ukraine history:

Late 1700s: Catherine the Great consolidated her rule; established Russia’s first and only warm-water naval base in Crimea.

In 1919, after the Bolshevik Revolution, Moscow defeated resistance in Ukraine and the country becomes one of 15 Republics of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

In 1954, after Stalin’s death the year before, Nikita Khrushchev, a Ukrainian, assumed power. Pandering to Ukrainian supporters, he unilaterally decreed that henceforth Crimea would be part of the Ukrainian SSR, not the Russian SSR. Since all 15 Republics of the USSR were under tight rule from Moscow, the switch was a distinction without much of a difference – until later, when the USSR fell apart.

Nov. 1989: Berlin wall down.

Dec. 2-3, 1989: President George H. W. Bush invites Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to summit talks in Malta; reassures him “the U.S. will not take advantage” of Soviet troubles in Eastern Europe. Bush had already been pushing the idea of a Europe whole and free, from Portugal to Vladivostok.

A Consequential Quid Pro Quo

Feb. 7-10, 1990: Secretary of State James Baker negotiates a quid pro quo; Soviet acceptance of the bitter pill of a reunited Germany (inside NATO), in return for an oral US promise not to enlarge NATO “one inch more” to the East.

Dec. 1991: the USSR falls apart. Suddenly it does matter that Khrushchev gave Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR; Moscow and Kyiv work out long-term arrangements for the Soviet navy to use the naval base at Sevastopol.

The quid pro quo began to unravel in October 1996 during the last weeks of President Bill Clinton’s campaign when he said he would welcome Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into NATO – the earlier promise to Moscow notwithstanding. Former US Ambassador to the USSR Jack Matlock, who took part in both the Bush-Gorbachev early-December 1989 summit in Malta and the Baker-Gorbachev discussions in early February 1990, has said, “The language used was absolute, including no ‘taking advantage’ by the US… I don’t see how anybody could view the subsequent expansion of NATO as anything but ‘taking advantage,’ particularly since, by then, Russia was hardly a credible threat.” (From 16 members in 1990, NATO has grown to 29 member states – the additional 13 all lie east of Germany.)

Feb. 1, 2008: Amid rumors of NATO planning to offer membership to Ukraine, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warns US Ambassador William Burns that “Nyet Means Nyet.” Russia will react strongly to any move to bring Ukraine or Georgia into NATO. Thanks to WikiLeaks, we have Burns’s original cable from embassy in Moscow.

April 3, 2008: Included in Final Declaration from NATO summit in Bucharest: “NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.”

Early September 2013: Putin helps Obama resist neocon demands to do “shock and awe” on Syria; Russians persuade President Bashar al-Assad to give up Syrian army chemical weapons for destruction on a US ship outfitted for chemical weapons destruction. Neocons are outraged over failing to mousetrap Obama into attacking Syria.

Meanwhile in Ukraine

Dec. 2013: In a speech to the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland says: “The United States has supported Ukraine’s European aspirations. … We have invested over $5 billion to assist Ukraine in these and other goals that will ensure a secure and prosperous and democratic Ukraine.”

Feb. 4, 2014: Amid rioting on the Maidan in Kiev, YouTube carries Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland’s last minute instructions to US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt regarding the US pick for new Ukrainian prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk (aka “Yats”) and other plans for the imminent coup d’etat in Kiev. (See: ) When Pyatt expresses concern about EU misgivings about mounting a coup, Nuland says “Fuck the EU.” She then apologizes to the EU a day or two later – for the profanity, not for the coup. She also says that Vice President Joe Biden will help “glue this thing together”, meaning the coup.

Feb. 22, 2014: Coup d’etat in Kyiv; appropriately labeled “the most blatant coup in history” by George Friedman, then President of the widely respected think-tank STRATFOR.

Feb. 23, 2014: The date that NATO, Western diplomats, and the corporate media have chosen – disingenuously – as the beginning of recent European history, with silence about the coup orchestrated in Kyiv the day before. President Vladimir Putin returns to Moscow from the winter Olympics in Sochi; confers with advisers about Crimea, deciding – unlike Khrushchev in 1954 – to arrange a plebiscite to let the people of Crimea, most of whom strongly opposed the coup regime, decide their own future.

March 16, 2014: The official result from the voters in Crimea voted overwhelmingly for independence from Ukraine and to join Russia. Following the referendum, Crimea declared independence from Ukraine and asked to join the Russian Federation. On March 18, the Russian Federal Assembly ratified the incorporation of Crimea into Russia.

In the following days, Putin made it immediately (and publicly) clear that Yatsenyuk’s early statement about Ukraine joining NATO and – even more important – the US/NATO plans to deploy ABM systems around Russia’s western periphery and in the Black Sea, were the prime motivating forces behind the post-referendum re-incorporation of Crimea into Russia.

No one with rudimentary knowledge of Russian history should have been surprised that Moscow would take no chances of letting NATO grab Crimea and Russia’s only warm-water naval base. The Nuland neocons seized on the opportunity to accuse Russia of aggression and told obedient European governments to follow suit. Washington could not persuade its European allies to impose stringent sanctions on Russia, though, until the downing of Malaysian Airlines MH17 over Ukraine.

Airplane Downed; 298 Killed

July 17, 2014: MH17 shot down

July 20, 2014: Secretary of State John Kerry told NBC’s David Gregory, “We picked up the imagery of this launch. We know the trajectory. We know where it came from. We know the timing. And it was exactly at the time that this aircraft disappeared from the radar.” The US, however, has not shared any evidence of this.

Given the way US intelligence collectors had been focused, laser-like, on that part of the Ukrainian-Russian border at that time, it is a near certainty that the US has highly relevant intelligence regarding what actually happened and who was most likely responsible. If that intelligence supported the accusations made by Kerry, it would almost certainly have been publicized.
Less than two weeks after the shoot-down, the Europeans were persuaded to impose sanctions that hurt their own businesses and economies about as much as they hurt Russia’s – and far more than they hurt the US There is no sign that, in succumbing to US pressure, the Europeans mustered the courage to ask for a peek at the “intelligence” Kerry bragged about on NBC TV.

Oct. 27, 2016: Putin speaks at the Valdai International Discussion Club.
How did the “growing trust” that Russian President Putin wrote about in his September 11, 2013 New York Times op-ed evaporate?

How did what Putin called his close “working and personal relationship with President Obama” change into today’s deep distrust and saber-rattling? A short three years later after the close collaboration to resolve the Syrian problem peacefully, Putin spoke of the “feverish” state of international relations and lamented: “My personal agreements with the President of the United States have not produced results.” And things have gone downhill from there.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27-year career as a CIA analyst includes serving as Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and preparer/briefer of the President’s Daily Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). This originally appeared at Consortium News.

Removing a splinter = surgery. $320 please.

This was about as simple and easy as a splinter gets. It was just one spine of a sand burr, in the foot, and it wasn't deep. No bleeding. No cutting done, no disinfectant used. They used a needleless syringe to apply a little suction, then tweezers to pull the thorn. Took all of 5 minutes.

(In case anyone is wondering why we even went to the doctor at all for such a trivial thing, it was maternal anxieties and histrionics. Maybe I should be thankful she didn't insist on going to the emergency or urgent care?)

Cost: $40 copay. At first. I thought that was plenty high, but that's just the cost for an office visit. The insurance is refusing to cover it, because the doctor was in network but is no longer. The doctor's office classified this as "surgery", and their fantasy list price is $320. The insurance reduced that to $136, and that's what the doctor's office is asking us to pay, in addition to the $40 we have already paid.

One of the infuriating things about this whole system is the calculated waste of time. Need information, need to dig into the details, and the medics aren't cooperative on that part. Just to learn of the existence and general idea of a medical cost code system, it's like that's secret knowledge. What code did they use? Why do I have to badger them to get that simple bit of info? Nowhere in all the Explanations of Benefits (EoB) was the code mentioned. I asked Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS), and they blamed it on their security policy, for my protection. I said I didn't want to be protected that way, and they have my permission to put the actual medical codes on the EoBs. Then they blamed HIPAA for why they couldn't do it. They flood us with info. It's disgusting how little of that info flood is to the point. That EoB is 9 pages long, and only the 1st page has anything specific, the rest is all boilerplate.

Anyway, this morning I was able to learn that the code for this is probably 10120. BCBS confirmed that the doc had indeed used that code. However, there are "subcodes", additional codes that can modify a main code, and the one of interest to me may be "52", which means "reduced services", meant for particularly simple cases, if I understand it aright. I called the doctor's office and asked them to resubmit the claim with that code, 10120-52. They got right on it. Hmmm. I don't know what that will do to the final cost. I asked BCBS, and they claimed they couldn't tell me. From what I read elsewhere, might be $60.

Wow!

I am stunned at the outpouring of encouragement and support from the SoylentNews community in response to On the Road to Recovery after a Minor Stroke.

To offer some perspective, my only social media activity is right here on SoylentNews. I am generally a private person and have not created an account on MySpace, FaceBook, Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn. In fact my only other social media activity was on Slashdot up until the SlashCott and the creation of SoylentNews.

There is, however, something special about this community which overcame my reluctance about posting personal information on-line. If anyone here learned something about strokes and therefore took steps to make a change in their life as a result, then I will know my efforts here were not in vain. I greatly appreciate the well-wishes and cannot thank you all enough. It has heartened my resolve and my hope that I may continue to serve this community for many more years to come!

Among the recommendations I have received during the course of my treatment and recuperation so far:

• Don't smoke
• Watch my diet (lowered fat and salt, more fruits and vegies)
• Exercise
• Regular checkups
• Watch for high blood pressure

Again, please accept my great thanks for all the support and encouragement!

A short sci-fi movie The Candidate by David Karlak
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FzdrPRmCLQ

I heard somewhere that in Law Vegas they now have drive through weddings!

Next idea: drive through divorces!

Now put those two drive through businesses on a circular road connected to a main road. You exit main road, go around the circle as many times as necessary, making stops at whichever drive through(s) you think is/are necessary, before exiting the loop and re-entering the main road again.

A convenient time saving innovative idea.

You could also add a drive through to get pre-nup's.

While I wait for the TLV3202s to arrive I've noticed that something odd has been happening to the Wi-Fi with my laptop. Since I live in a concrete house with four storeys Wi-Fi was something of a challenge to let it get around to everywhere it needs to go. I'm currently using a TP-Link Archer C7 as my main router, which is on the third floor, and unfortunately, it isn't powerful enough to transmit signal all the way to the second floor where I usually work. So I got a TP-Link RE450 range extender and put it in a spot near the stairwell to the third floor where it can get reasonable signal from the main router and transmit cleanly to the rest of the floor. So now I get 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz 802.11ac signal to all the places where I need it. It's worked fine this way since 2015 and I haven't gotten any firmware upgrades from TP-Link since.

Now, my laptop (A 2017-era System76 Galago Pro, given the designation galp2) has been running Pop OS 18.04 (System76's Ubuntu derivative) on my Galago Pro for some time, and it used to have no trouble connecting to the Wi-Fi setup I have at all. Until one day I noticed that it was failing to connect to the range extender and insisting on connecting to the main router, for which even the 2.4 GHz 802.11n signal is very weak on the second floor. Networking is very very slow that way of course. My laptop was the only device for which this was happening: my phone and tablet, and the gadgets used by my family all worked as they always have.

And so I updated to Pop OS 19.10 by going upstairs and connecting to the Wi-Fi router from there, but that didn't improve matters when I tried going downstairs again. I tried to diagnose the issue further by digging into the innards of wpa_supplicant but all I could find out was that for some reason it couldn't authenticate against the range extender ("RSN: failed to configure GTK"), and kept fiddling with the router and range extender config to no avail. Google was not very helpful here at all.

I tried to boot with the 5.0.0 kernel which was still provided as an option, and bam, Wi-Fi connectivity to the range extender was restored. So since I don't have the time or energy to go around chasing a solution that will get the 5.3.0 kernel's Intel Wi-Fi drivers to talk to the range extender properly again, I tried to get it to boot the old kernel by default. I wound up fiddling with the grub config, only to later figure out that 19.10 doesn't use grub anymore, but UEFI boot. Hopefully there'll be a kernel update which fixes the issue, but until then I'll be stuck on 5.0.0.

https://gabbard.house.gov/news/press-releases/rep-tulsi-gabbard-calls-federal-government-release-information-about-911
https://www.wmur.com/article/live-stream-tulsi-gabbard-new-hampshire-primary-filing/29696820

The actual text of the bill is brief:

Urging the release of information regarding the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks upon the United States.

Whereas tens of thousands of pages of documents relating to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, remain classified by the Federal Government;

Whereas the contents of these documents are necessary for a full public understanding of the events and circumstances surrounding the September 11, 2001, attacks upon the United States;

Whereas the decision to maintain the classified status of many of these documents prevents the people of the United States from having access to information about the attacks, including the involvement of certain foreign governments; and

Whereas the people of the United States and the families of the victims of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks deserve full and public disclosure of the events surrounding the attack: Now, therefore, be it

  Resolved, That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that—

(1) documents related to the events of September 11, 2001, should be declassified to the greatest extent possible; and

(2) the survivors, the families of the victims, and the people of the United States deserve answers about the events and circumstances surrounding the September 11, 2001, attacks upon the United States.