High overcast with occasional stretches of blue sky, but no sun yet.
We’re supposed to be clear this afternoon…

In living with natural weather, we’ve also had to ‘weather,’ as in ‘cope,’  with a terrifyingly-horrible presidential election cycle — all despite the reality.
This morning, Commerce Department data showed a 2.9-percent annualized increase in GDP, value of all goods and services produced, the biggest in two years.
Meanwhile, according to the latest CNN/ORC poll, 54-percent of Americans say things in the country today are going okay.
Even Obama’s in the good right now,  his approval rating at 54 percent, highest in eight years.

Seemingly, T-Rump reversed: ‘One legacy of Donald Trump might be to give Obama a better legacy — a reminder of the calmer, simpler time that we all lived in 18 months ago.’

(Illustration: M.C Escher’s ‘Three Spheres II,’ found here).

Biggest impact from the T-Rump dumpster fire, though, is the sharp crease in what was once called, ‘polite society,’ the tendency to at least have some fucking manners. No longer any semblance for standards of decency — bullshit lying  the bar.

Also yesterday, Pew Research released a lengthy, wide-ranging report on the election — this stood out at the start:

Donald Trump is widely seen as having little or no respect for Muslims, women, Hispanics and blacks.
Moreover, 56-percent of registered voters say that Trump has little or no respect for the “nation’s democratic institutions and traditions,” compared with 43-percent who say he has a great deal or fair amount of respect for democratic institutions and traditions.
…
The survey finds considerable evidence of the bitterness unleashed by the presidential campaign.
Dating back to 1988, no candidate, Democrat or Republican, has been viewed as more critical of their opponent than is Trump today (the question was not asked in 1992).
Currently, 62-percent of voters say Trump has been too personally critical of Clinton, which is about 10 percentage points higher than the previous peak (53-percent said that about Bob Dole in 1996, 52-percent for John Kerry in 2004).
Just 36-percent say he has not been too critical of Clinton.
…
An increasing share of voters believes that insulting political opponents is “sometimes fair game.”
Most voters (54-percent) say it is “never fair game” for politicians to insult their opponents, but 43-percent say insults are sometimes acceptable, up from 30-percent in March during the presidential primaries.

A complete, nasty business…weather.