Overcast-gray this Thursday morning here on California’s north coast, a respite from the rainstorms sweeping the area this week.
Sunshine maybe tomorrow…

Peculiar and frightful the chart to the right, Republicans have gone insane — via HuffPost yesterday:

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s net favorable rating among Republicans has climbed by an astonishing 56 percentage points since July 2014, according to a new YouGov/Economist poll.

(Illustration found here).

And as you can see, a huge leap in love and brotherhood last July, and the marks just keeps on climbing — probably one of the worse of the direction-indicators for this country. Hard to believe, there it be.
Democrats’ feelings toward Putin is about right, and general on the historic curve — Vladimir’s net favorable rating among Demos is at -62 points, according to the poll, up/down from -54 two years ago.

Despite the enormous horror of Russian hacking — maybe a major, major US history event — the right-side of our political aisle is fucking, really-really fucked up.
Whoa, too!
What about this unraveling shit of hackery — via NBC News last night:

U.S. intelligence officials now believe with “a high level of confidence” that Russian President Vladimir Putin became personally involved in the covert Russian campaign to interfere in the U.S. presidential election, senior U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News.
Two senior officials with direct access to the information say new intelligence shows that Putin personally directed how hacked material from Democrats was leaked and otherwise used.
The intelligence came from diplomatic sources and spies working for U.S. allies, the officials said.
Putin’s objectives were multifaceted, a high-level intelligence source told NBC News.
What began as a “vendetta” against Hillary Clinton morphed into an effort to show corruption in American politics and to “split off key American allies by creating the image that [other countries] couldn’t depend on the U.S. to be a credible global leader anymore,” the official said.

Although the piece offered few concrete details, the story seems part of the larger scenario.

Yet small wonder — even the Russian people are wanting back the Soviet model.
Interesting and insightful, a new study which found that only 15-percent of Russians think their households have a better quality of life, compared with 30-percent in 2010. Only 9-ercent see their finances as better than four years ago.
Some details via the Guardian on Monday:

Just over half the respondents from former Soviet states also thought a return to a more authoritarian system would be a plus in some circumstances, said the findings from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the World Bank said.
…
The EBRD chief economist Sergei Guriev said the study also showed countries could only successfully transition from command economies to more open-market systems if that process was “perceived by the public as being fair and of benefit to the majority”.
“If the public does not see the benefits of the reforms they will ultimately not be successful,” he said.
Guriev said one of the biggest factors in people’s lower life satisfaction was losing their jobs.
Governments therefore needed to make sure workers learned new skills, he said.
He also said the the survey showed people’s appreciation of democracy and open market economics was wavering.
“Right now in most of our countries the majority doesn’t seem to prefer democracy over authoritarian rule, whereas in Germany 80% do,” Guriev said.
“That raises big, big questions. What has gone wrong and what should be done?”

T-Rumpster on a roll…

(Illustration out front: MC Escher’s ‘Scholastica,’ found here).