By Ariel Edwards-Levy, Amy O’Kruk, and Kathryn Squyres CNN

(CNN) — Most Americans don’t have faith that their political leaders care what they have to say.

But if they had the chance to tell Washington something, a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS finds, they’d say plenty, much of it about the economy.

That was the most common response when Americans were asked to share in their own words what they’d tell President Donald Trump to make life in the US better.

Among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, 40% mentioned economic or cost-of-living concerns.

“My message to him right now would be, ‘Please take care of the economy because it’s awful,’” said Betty Glazebrook, a 78-year-old Trump voter from Massachusetts who spoke to CNN after taking the survey. “You know, being out of work now, I wonder down the road, you know, how will I survive? And I just don’t know what’s gonna happen.”

Nearly 4 in 10 Americans say that neither the president nor Democratic leadership is listening to people like them. Just 34% of US adults say that Trump cares even somewhat what they have to say and just 36% say that the leadership of the Democratic Party does.

Glazebrook said she feels like Trump cares more about himself than people like her, but she’s also unconvinced that Democrats have her best interests in mind. “I’m starting to feel like nobody does, honestly,” she said.

While Trump has often downplayed affordability as a concern, the issue remains top of mind for many voters and likely to dominate next year’s midterms. Mentions of the economy dwarf other political issues in the survey. Just 5% of Americans said their advice to Trump would touch on immigration with fewer still mentioning foreign policy.

Not all messages have to do with policy. Many simply want a chance to make their feelings about Trump known; 16% say they’d call on him to resign or leave office, while 8% say they’d pay him a compliment. Around 15% say Trump could most help Americans by changing something about his personal conduct, with 6% wanting him to modulate his tone or to be more respectful, thoughtful or presidential. A few say they would refuse to speak with him at all.

Many Americans also have advice for Democrats on how they should deal with Trump. Ten percent say Democratic leaders could most help by standing their ground or fighting harder against Trump or the GOP, while another 10% say they should instead focus more on compromising or working across the aisle.

The sentiment among the Democratic base is more clear-cut: 19% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say they’d tell their party’s leadership to take more of a stand compared with just 2% who say they’d advocate for greater compromise.

“Stop being gentle and palatable to the opposing side,” one Democratic-leaning independent from New Jersey in their 20s wrote in response to the survey. “They take extreme and aggressive measures to force change backwards, and when laws get broken, even constitutional ones, many remain silent. We should have an equal reaction to balance out the scales of power.”

That desire for increased forcefulness from their party doesn’t map as neatly onto a preferred set of political views. Few Democratic-aligned adults said that they’d share a message about the party’s ideological direction, and those who did were about equally as likely to suggest that the party should move to the left as they were to say it should become more moderate.

Many Americans, meanwhile, just want to feel like they’re being heard: 8% say they’d tell Democratic leaders to help people, listen to people, or put the people over partisan politics; 5% say they’d deliver a similar message to Trump.

“Take a step outside and look in your own neighborhood, your own backyard and see that who’s really struggling and who’s actually needing the help,” said

By John Fritze, CNN

(CNN) — The Supreme Court’s decision Tuesday blocking President Donald Trump from sending the National Guard into American cities is likely to raise a politically fraught debate about the president’s willingness to invoke a 19th-century law to deploy the regular military on American soil instead.

Throughout his campaign and in the early months of his second term, Trump and his aides repeatedly teased the idea of invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy the military for domestic purposes — a move that, while perhaps politically unpopular, would give him broad discretion to skirt the general prohibition on using the military domestically.

In its order Tuesday, the Supreme Court focused on another federal law Trump tried to use to federalize hundreds of members of the Illinois National Guard. That law allows a president to call up the guard if he is unable to execute the nation’s laws with the “regular forces.” Over dissent from three conservative justices, the Supreme Court ruled that Trump had not met that law’s requirements.

But the decision on the court’s emergency docket did not deal directly with other authorities Trump could attempt to use.

“As I read it, the court’s opinion does not address the president’s authority under the Insurrection Act,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a conservative who sided with the majority, wrote in a footnote. “One apparent ramification of the court’s opinion is that it could cause the president to use the US military more than the National Guard to protect federal personnel and property in the United States.”

That is a possibility that has lurked in the case at the Supreme Court for months as the administration has attempted to send National Guard troops into Democratic-run cities to help protect Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and facilities.

Trump has repeatedly flirted with invoking the Insurrection Act, which would give him broad authority to evade the restrictions on using the military domestically imposed by the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act.

“I’d do it if it’s necessary. So far it hasn’t been necessary,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office in October. “But we have an Insurrection Act for a reason.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In a statement after the court’s order Tuesday, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said that nothing in the Supreme Court’s decision detracts from the administration’s “core agenda” of ensuring that “rioters did not destroy federal buildings and property.”

The current version of the Insurrection Act was last invoked by President George H.W. Bush during the 1992 Los Angeles riots that followed the acquittal of four White police officers in the beating of Rodney King. Perhaps the best-known use of the Insurrection Act was in 1957, when President Dwight Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock to integrate its schools.

That order followed the Supreme Court’s historic decision three years earlier in Brown v. Board of Education that declared segregated schools unconstitutional.

William Banks, a Syracuse University law professor and expert on the Insurrection Act, told CNN that such a move would almost certainly be more polit

Por CNN Español

El Departamento de Justicia publica nuevo lote de archivos de Epstein. La Corte Suprema bloquea el despliegue de la Guardia Nacional en Chicago. Lo que los votantes dicen que quieren para Navidad. Esto es lo que debes saber para comenzar el día. Primero la verdad.

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En medio de la creciente tensión, y cuando el Gobierno de Trump ya lleva incautados dos buques petroleros, Venezuela anunció una ley que impone penas de entre 15 y 20 años de cárcel para quienes respalden “piratería y bloqueo” naval de Estados Unidos. En un acto transmitido por VTV, Nicolás Maduro detalló que la normativa se llama Ley para Garantizar la Libre Navegabilidad y Comercio contra la Piratería en los Mares del Mundo.

• EE.UU. asegura que impondrá sanciones “al máximo” a Venezuela tras bloqueo de petroleros
• ANÁLISIS: El nuevo plan de acorazados de Trump podría transformar la Marina estadounidense… o hundirla

El Departamento de Justicia publicó un nuevo lote de documentos relacionados con el delincuente sexual convicto Jeffrey Epstein, que incluyen muchas más menciones al presidente Donald Trump que los de la tanda de la semana pasada. Aquí hay cuatro conclusiones sobre la última publicación. (Análisis).

• Departamento de Justicia afirma que la carta firmada por ‘J. Epstein’ y que hace referencia a ‘nuestro presidente’ es falsa
• Read more

Stock_Koom // Shutterstock

Optimal growing conditions are a crucial component of what enables modern agriculture to continue delivering efficiently. As commercial growing needs evolve, having an alternative to open-field farming that allows you to control the microclimate and growth of crops or cannabis without seasonal or climate-related concerns is essential.

Well-optimized grow houses can contribute to year-round crop production and help develop faster growth cycles for healthier plants. For these reasons, learning to create and maintain a suitable environment for plants that offer high yields is important.

Here is Meritus Gas Partners‘ guide on how to maintain optimal conditions in your grow house, which elaborates on the science behind creating ideal grow house conditions and how to control the environment to ensure maximum yield.

What Are the Best Conditions for a Grow Room?

Understanding the best conditions for a grow room requires some basic knowledge about controlling the room’s environment. The ideal conditions for a specific grow room will depend on growth stages and the type of plant being grown. However, the key environmental factors to achieve the best conditions will always revolve around the following aspects:

• Light
• Temperature and humidity
• Carbon dioxide (CO2)
• Air circulation and ventilation

Meritus Gas Partners

Exploring Each Element of Your Grow House Environment

Optimal growing conditions are an important balancing act to get right. It can provide plants with an environment that encourages growth by replicating the conditions that help them thrive in their natural habitat. For grow houses, achieving this means exploring ways to replicate each important environmental factor indoors to cultivate those ideal growth conditions.

Below are the critical factors that go into maintaining optimal conditions and how they can be achieved in a well-crafted grow house environment.

Light

Optimal growing conditions indoors require lights that can imitate sunlight. These are used for photosynthesis — a process that green plants use to convert light, water and carbon dioxide into chemical energy, releasing dissolved oxygen in the process. To achieve photosynthesis, your plants will need to grow under a specific light spectrum, which mainly consists of blue and red light.

While different plants and phases will need

Sha Hanting // China News Service / VCG via Getty Images

You can count on it: When the Federal Reserve changes its interest rate, news headlines about mortgage rates will follow.

This cycle unfolds up to eight times a year, so many home shoppers get the idea that the Fed regulates mortgage rates.

Fed decisions affect mortgage rates, but the Fed doesn’t control mortgage rates directly. In fact, as Better discusses here, the Fed’s actions can have unpredictable effects on the rates new home buyers pay on their mortgage loans.

Does the Fed set mortgage interest rates?

The Federal Reserve is the most powerful financial institution in the U.S., and its decisions reverberate throughout the global economy, including the mortgage market.

When the Fed adjusts rates, it’s changing the Federal Funds Rate, which is the overnight interest rate banks charge each other when they lend reserve funds to manage their cash flow. This rate influences short-term borrowing costs throughout the economy, including rates on credit cards, auto loans, and home equity lines of credit (HELOCs).

But 30-year fixed mortgage rates are long-term rates. They’re shaped mostly by broader financial markets, not by the Fed’s policy committee.

What actually drives 30-year mortgage rates

Mortgage rates are closely tied to:

• U.S. Treasury yields, especially the 10-year Treasury.
• The price of mortgage-backed securities (MBS).
• Inflation and jobs data.
• Predictions about future economic growth.
• Demand for U.S. bonds globally.
• Risk premiums required by investors.

All this affects mortgage rates because a single home loan doesn’t exist in an economic vacuum. After a borrower closes a mortgage loan to buy a primary residence, the lender will often sell this loan into the secondary market.

Multiple mortgage loans get combined into mortgage-backed securities, a financial asset investors can buy and sell. Investors who buy mortgage-backed securities expect returns that compensate them for inflation risk, interest-rate risk, and the chance borrowers refinance earlier than expected.

Because of this expectation, mortgage rates come with future risks and payoffs already built into their pricing. The rate you pay on a home loan this month reflects what investors believe will happen to inflation, economic growth, and Fed policy over the next few years.

How do mortgage rates react when the Fed lowers its rate?

When the Fed cuts the Federal Funds Rate, as it did three times between September and December, many borrowers expect mortgage rates to fall immediately. Sometimes rates do fall, but not always.

One reason for this: The mortgage markets have