Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) told CNN’s John Berman that he believes President Trump loves his family so much that he paid off porn star Stormy Daniels—with whom he had an alleged extramarital affair shortly after his son Barron was born—"to protect them.“... " I honestly think this president loves his family,” he continued. “I think it has as much to do with trying not to have public discussions about something that is, for him, a private matter"

(Dare I say it? I am thinking:Trump Family Values)

By Natasha Burge @ TSS.com, Feb. 28

[....] The most antagonistic questioning occurred during my time attending university in the United States when I was what in the cross-cultural community is termed a “hidden immigrant” — someone who superficially appears to be the same as the surrounding culture but internally is profoundly different. Because of my white skin I had significant privileges not available to many immigrants, including the ability to try to blend in and avoid these questions altogether. I soon learned, however, that even doing that didn’t alleviate the dissonance I experienced being continually assumed to be something that in many ways I simply wasn’t. The relentless questioning and occasional instances of outright aggression served as reminders to me that transcultural individuals can be perceived as unwelcome challenges to essentialist approaches to identity formation.

But in the Manama souq, even when I’m speaking Arabic, these questions rarely arise because in transcultural spaces “individuals are assumed all to be different from each other to some degree; they are as various and diverse as they can be, want to be.” The souq is a space built on centuries of diversity and the threads of connection are so densely interwoven that notions of cultural or linguistic purity seem laughably absurd. “Some speak several languages fluently; some speak a couple, some many. Some speak smatterings of various languages. Everyone knows words, phrases, expressions, from various languages, people naturally blend them into the language they’re speaking. Hybrid languages proliferate.” In the souq, cultures funnel through individuals to be reshaped into any number of different expressions, which is evident in the medley of customs, languages, and styles of dress that can belong to a given person in any manner of combinations. Here, complex notions of home aren’t an academic exercise, they are the foundational truths around which people premise their lives [....]

A guide to the most—and least—politically open-minded counties in America. With interactive map of U.S. by county

By Amanda Ripley, Rekha Tenjarla & Angela Y. He @ The Atlantic.com, March 4

[....]The Atlantic asked PredictWise, a polling and analytics firm, to create a ranking of counties in the U.S. based on partisan prejudice (or what researchers call “affective polarization”). The result was surprising in several ways. First, while virtually all Americans have been exposed to hyper-partisan politicians, social-media echo chambers, and clickbait headlines, we found significant variations in Americans’ political ill will from place to place, regardless of party.

We might expect some groups to be particularly angry at their political opponents right now. Immigrants have been explicitly targeted by the current administration, for example; they might have the most cause for partisan bias right now. But that is not what we found [....]