Friday, October 31, 2025
Most Americans Don't Like Trump Demolishing The East Wing To Build A Ballroom
Voters Have A Low Opinion Of Most American Institutions
The chart above reflects the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between October24th and 27th of a nationwide sample of 1,476 registered voters, with a 3.1 point margin of error.
The Government Shutdown Continues (Because That Is What Trump Wants)
The government shutdown has gone on for about a month now, and so far, there is little prospect that it will end soon.
One might wonder why the congressional Republicans haven't tried to negotiate with their Democratic counterparts to find a solution. After all, the rising of ACA premiums (by an average of about 114%) will affect their constituents as much, if not more than those of Democrats. And the denial of SNAP benefits, which will begin on November 1st, will actually hurt red states more than blue states. Both of those things are sure to anger millions of voters.
But the Republicans refuse to negotiate, because Donald Trump has told them not to do that - and congressional Republicans wouldn't go to the bathroom without first getting Trump's permission.
During past shutdowns, presidents have either put pressure on Congress or encouraged comprise to end the stalemate. Not Trump. He even left the country during the shutdown.
That's because Trump likes the shutdown and will let it continue for as long as possible.
While the shutdown continues, Trump is the government. He can basically do what he wants without Congress intervening. In fact, Speaker Johnson (a Trump sycophant) won't even call the House of Representatives into session until the shutdown ends (or Trump tells him to do so).
And the shutdown lets Trump hide his bad economic numbers on inflation and jobs - since he has suspended government data reports while the shutdown is going on.
Trump will finally have to end the shutdown, but it won't happen until the angry blowback from voters is too much to ignore. That may be a while though, because right now Trump is enjoying it.
Thursday, October 30, 2025
Voters Think The GOP Has The Power To End The Shutdown
These charts are from the Navigator Poll -- done between October 23rd and 27th of a nationwide sample of 1,000 registered voters, with a 3.1 point margin of error.
Trump Is Creating An Authoritarian Police State
He’s now saying it out loud — blurring the line between his so-called “war” on alleged foreign drug smugglers and his war on the “enemy within” the United States. Both now involve the deployment of the U.S. military. Neither requires proof of wrongdoing.
That was his message yesterday when Trump told American troops in Japan that he would send “more than the National Guard” into cities to enforce his crackdowns on crime and immigration:
“We have cities that are troubled, we can’t have cities that are troubled. And we’re sending in our National Guard, and if we need more than the National Guard, we’ll send more than the National Guard, because we’re going to have safe cities … . We’re not going to have people killed in our cities. And whether people like that or not, that’s what we’re doing.”
In the same speech, Trump defended U.S. military strikes against suspected drug smugglers — more than a dozen on vessels from South America that have killed 57 people so far, without evidence they were actually smuggling drugs. (Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced yesterday that the military had carried out three more strikes on Monday.)
He repeatedly condemned Joe Biden. He told the troops that the 2020 election had been rigged. He savaged Democratic governors who have resisted the military in their cities.
“People don’t care if we send in our military, our National Guard,” Trump told the troops. “They just want to be safe.” Trump also called out the “fake news media,” and encouraged the troops to deride journalists.
This was the third politically-charged speech Trump has made to members of the U.S. armed forces within the month — following his late-September address to the military’s top brass and his self-described “rally” of U.S. Navy sailors in Virginia the following week.
Trump’s speech yesterday to American troops — seeking to justify the use of lethal force against anyone suspected of acting illegally, domestic or foreign — is his clearest statement yet about what’s really motivating him and his lapdogs.
He’s not seeking to stop drug smuggling, nor to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, nor to display the military might of America to world leaders, nor to extrude undocumented immigrants from the United States, nor rid the U.S. of alleged criminals.
These are all pretexts. His real goal is quite different.
In the short term, it is to intimidate Democratic mayors and governors and potential Democratic voters in order to suppress Democratic turnout in next fall’s midterm elections.
His long-term goal — shared by his sycophants Hegseth, Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, JD Vance, Kristi Noem, and Pam Bondi — is to turn America into a police state.
I don’t think it an exaggeration to say that Trump envisions himself as commander-in-chief of a domestic military force that would target alleged criminals (but not the white-collar sort), rid the nation of undocumented people, and remake America into a white, straight, male, Christian nation.
The good news is he’s now starting to say some of this in the open — directly to active-duty troops. He’s openly readying them for the role he wants them to play.
Essentially, he’s daring the top brass of the military to stop him. For now, they won’t. They’re worried and bewildered. He’s their commander-in-chief but they have an overriding responsibility to the nation to uphold democratic institutions, including the Constitution.
He’s also daring the rest of us to stop him — in the courts, in the now-defunct Congress, in the now-shuttered government. Also to stop him with our votes, our unwavering determination, and our nonviolent resistance.
Every American who shares the values for which American troops have been fighting and dying for almost 250 years, should join us on the side of democracy and against Trump’s emerging police state.
Wednesday, October 29, 2025
Only A Tiny Minority Oppose Bad Bunny Performing At The Super Bowl
"Four Things You Should Know About The Imminent Hunger Games"
The chart above shows the areas of the United States with the most households receiving SNAP (food stamp) benefits. Those benefits are set to stop in a couple of days because of the government shutdown.
Economist Paul Krugman tells us four things about the impending SNAP stoppage:
Here are four things you should know about the imminent hunger games.
This is a political decision — specifically, a Republican decision
Despite the government shutdown, the SNAP program isn’t out of money. In fact, it has $5 billion in contingency funds, intended as a reserve to be tapped in emergencies. And if the imminent cutoff of crucial food aid for 40 million people isn’t an emergency, what is? The Department of Agriculture, which runs the program, also has the ability to maintain funding for a while by shifting other funds around. But Donald Trump has — quite possibly illegally — told the department not to tap those funds.
Furthermore, the Republican majority in the Senate could maintain aid by waiving the filibuster on this issue. They have done this on other issues — for example, to roll back California’s electric vehicle standard. But for today’s Republican Party, blocking green energy is more important than keeping 40 million Americans from going hungry.
Furthermore, passing legislation to keep food aid flowing would require that Mike Johnson, the speaker, call the House back into session – something which he refuses to do. While we don’t know for sure the reason behind Johnson’s refusal, there is widespread speculation that it’s to avoid swearing in the newly elected Arizona congresswoman Adelina Grijalva, who would supply the crucial vote needed to force an overall vote on releasing the Epstein files. It sounds crazy to say that Republicans are making children go hungry to protect pedophiles, but it’s actually a reasonable interpretation of the situation.
The pain from lost food aid will, if anything, hurt Republican voters worse than Democrats
Republican strategy on the shutdown has rested on the premise that Democrats will eventually cave, based on several assumptions. First, G.O.P. strategists expected the public to blame Democrats for the impasse. Second, they thought that Democrats, who favor big government, would be anxious to resume federal spending. Lastly, I suspect that many Republicans simply assumed that SNAP beneficiaries are disproportionately Democrats.
So far, however, the shutdown impasse has developed not necessarily to the G.O.P.’s advantage. A plurality of Americans place more blame on Republicans than on Democrats. Moreover, given that Democrats have been more unified in their stance than the Republicans, it’s not at all obvious that Democrats will capitulate over the issue of reduced government spending.
What about the partisan affiliation of SNAP recipients? I’d be curious to see a survey of Republican legislators and activists on who they think the typical food aid recipient is. My bet is that they’re still under the influence of Ronald Reagan’s 1970s stereotypes, in which a “strapping young buck” buys T-bone steaks with food stamps. That is, MAGA probably views food stamps as a welfare program for urban nonwhites, including illegal immigrants.
Yet the evidence suggests that the program is most important to overwhelmingly white rural counties that strongly supported Trump. This is shown by the map at the top of this post, in which darker colors correspond to greater SNAP use.
Consider, for example, Owsley County in Kentucky. The county is 96 percent white, and last year it cast 88 percent of its votes for Trump. Also, 37 percent of residents are on SNAP.
So by refusing to maintain food aid, Republicans are hurting many of their own supporters.
The fact that Trump-supporting communities rely heavily on federal food aid raises another, even larger question: Why does the GOP want to cut food assistance generally? Apart from refusing to fund SNAP during the government shutdown, Republicans want to drastically cut back on food stamps over the long term. Indeed, savage cuts to SNAP are a key feature of the One Big Beautiful Bill passed earlier this year – cuts that were scheduled to happen after the midterm elections, not a few days from now.
Despite what Republicans believe, SNAP recipients aren’t malingerers
Why are Republicans hostile to a program that benefits tens of millions of Americans? Pay attention to right-wing rhetoric about food stamps and you’ll hear again and again assertions that SNAP beneficiaries are lazy malingerers — the “bums on welfare” who should be forced to go out and get jobs.
But that myth is punctured by a quick look at who gets SNAP. The fact is, the great majority of SNAP recipients can’t work: 40 percent are children; 18 percent are elderly; 11 percent are disabled. Furthermore, a majority of recipients who are capable of working do work. They are the working poor: their jobs just don’t pay enough, or offer sufficiently stable employment, to make ends meet without aid.
So efforts to force food stamp recipients to get jobs via work requirements or simply by cutting funding are doomed to failure. While it may be possible to push a handful of food stamp recipients into the labor force, any positive economic effects from such a push will be swamped by the negative effects of denying adequate nutrition and financial resources to children during a crucial part of their lives.
Food stamps are an investment in the future
Young children need adequate nutrition and in general need to grow up in households with adequate resources if they are to grow into healthy, productive adults.
In saying this I’m not making a vague assertion in line with liberal pieties. We have overwhelming empirical, statistical evidence that SNAP, by improving the lives of young children, is an extraordinarily effective way of investing in the future.
Where does this evidence come from? A pilot version of the modern food stamp program began in 1961, when an unemployed coal miner and his wife used food stamps to buy a can of pork and beans. The program was rolled out in earnest in 1964, as part of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. But the program didn’t immediately go into effect nationwide. Instead, it was gradually rolled out geographically over the course of a decade.
This gradual rollout provided a series of “natural experiments.” Economists can and have compared the life trajectories of Americans who, as children, benefited from food stamps with those of children with similar class and demographic characteristics whose families didn’t receive food aid.
The results are stunning. Children whose families received SNAP benefits grew up to become healthier, more productive adults than children whose families didn’t receive benefits. Spending money to help families with children is an extremely high-return investment in the nation’s future.
In fact, the evidence for large economic benefits from food stamps is far stronger than the evidence for payoffs from investment in physical infrastructure like roads, bridges and the power grid, although I favor those investments too. And the evidence that helping families with children is good for economic growth is infinitely better than the evidence for the efficacy of tax cuts for the rich, a central plank of conservative dogma — because there is no evidence that tax cuts boost growth.
Which brings us back to the impending cutoff of SNAP. It’s gratuitous: Republicans could easily avoid this cutoff if they wanted to. It’s cruel: Millions of Americans will suffer severely from the loss of food aid. And it’s destructive: Depriving children, in particular, of aid will cast a shadow on America’s economy and society for decades to come.
So of course the cutoff is going to happen. At this late date it’s hard to see how it can be avoided.
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