Sunday, May 31, 2026
Early Poll Has Talarico With A 3-Point Lead Over Paxton In Texas
The charts above are from the Texas Opinion Research Poll -- done on May 27th and 28th of 1,670 likely Texas voters, with a 2.8 point margin of error.
Saturday, May 30, 2026
Voters Want More Spending On Government Programs - Not Less
The chart above reflects the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between May22nd and 26th of a nationwide sample of 1,397 registered voters, with a 3.3 point margin of error.
Republicans Promised A Great Country For All - But Only Delivered It To The Rich
The following is just part of a post by Thom Hartmann at The Hartmann Report:
A new national survey of Americans finds that almost half of us (48%) say our lives are “lacking in fun” with fully 12% saying they can’t recall the last time they had an entire day they could simply enjoy. More than half (57%) said this was because they couldn’t afford to have fun, which makes perfect sense when you consider how 45 years of Reaganomics have destroyed the union movement and progressive taxation, and thus gutted the American middle class.
Like idiots, we Americans bought Reagan’s siren song hook, line, and sinker back in 1980. He told us prosperity would “trickle down” if we just abandoned the largely non-profit healthcare system we had nationwide (most states required hospitals and health insurance companies to be nonprofits), the unions that fought for us to have good pay and benefits, enforcement of anti-monopoly laws, free college, and subsidized housing.
Reagan put what’s sometimes called “the neoliberal agenda” (I wrote a book about it: The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America”) into place and no president, Republican or Democratic, has fully repealed it. We still have few union members, low taxes on billionaires and corporations, profitized healthcare and education, and stagnant wages for working class people.
All because we believed the Republicans and their billionaire backers and media owners. Consider how they’ve played three generations for fools:
Republicans told us if we just cut the top tax rate on the morbidly rich from the 74% it was at in 1980 down to 27% it would “trickle down” benefits to everybody else as, they said, the “job creators” would be unleashed on our economy.
Instead of a more general prosperity, we’ve now ended up with the greatest wealth and income inequality in the world, as over $70 trillion was transferred over 45 years from the bottom 90% to the top .1%, where it remains to this day. The middle class has gone from over 65% of us to fewer than half of us. It now takes 2 full-time wage earners to sustain the same lifestyle one could in 1980. . . .
Republicans told us that if we just stopped enforcing the anti-monopoly and anti-trust laws that had protected small businesses for nearly 100 years, there would be an explosion of innovation and opportunity as companies got bigger and better.
Instead, we’ve seen every industry in America become so consolidated that competition is dead, price gouging and profiteering reign, and it’s impossible to start or find small family-owned businesses anymore in downtowns, malls, and the suburbs. It’s all giant chains, many now owed by hedge funds or private equity. Few family or local businesses can compete against such giants.
Republicans told us that if we just changed the laws to let corporations pay their senior executives with stock (in addition to cash) they’d be “more invested” in the fate and future of the company and business would generally become healthier.
Instead, nearly every time a corporation initiates a stock buyback program, millions and often billions of dollars flow directly into the pockets of the main shareholders and executives while workers, the company, and society suffer the loss. . . .
Republicans told us we should hand our healthcare decisions not to our doctors but to bureaucratic insurance industry middlemen who’d would decide which of our doctor’s suggestions they’d approve and which they’d reject for payment. They said this will “lower costs and increase choice.”
In all of the entire developed world — all the OECD countries on 4 continents — there are only 500,000 medical bankruptcies a year. Every single one of them is here in America.
Republicans told us if we just got rid of our unions, then our bosses and the companies that employ them would give us better pay, more benefits, and real job security.
As everybody can see, they lied. And are working as hard as they can to prevent America from returning to the levels of unionization we had before Reagan’s Great Neoliberal Republican Experiment. . . .
The bottom line is that we — as a nation, voluntarily or involuntarily — have now had the full Republican experience, and every Zoomer paying attention knows it. It’s why they’re no longer listening to the Republican politicians who are continuing to try to sell us this bullshit.
We don’t want to hear Republicans sermonizing about deficits (that they themselves caused).
Or welfare (that they damaged and then exploited).
Or even whatever they’re calling “faith” these days, be it the death penalty, forcing raped women to give birth at the barrel of a gun, or burning books.
We’re over it, Republicans; we want fun and meaning back in our lives, rather than just working ourselves to death so Bezos and Zuck can buy new yachts.
The Straw The Broke His Legal/Political Back
The following is by Robert Reich:
When this history of the sordid and cruel megalomaniac who now occupies the Oval Office is written, it may well be that his deal with himself to set up a $1.8 billion fund for reimbursing anyone he feels was harmed by the federal government is chronicled as the final straw.
Why not Trump’s absurd tariffs, which are really import taxes passed on to consumers? Why not Trump’s needless war against Iran, which caused prices to soar and is unlikely to result in a better deal on its nuclear ambitions than struck by Obama? Why not his cruel ICE and Border Patrol dragnets? Why not the Epstein files or dozens of other lawless or outrageous things he’s done?
I think because almost everyone knows that the fund will be used to pay off Trump’s supporters — including the 1,500 who attacked the U.S. Capitol and then were imprisoned for it — and that paying them is a bridge too far.
This morning a federal judge barred the government from taking steps to launch the fund or processing payments at least until a hearing is held in June in a pending lawsuit challenging its legality.
The order came in a case brought by a group of individuals and entities who say they have faced partisan attacks by the Trump regime but who say they expect to be excluded from accessing the fund.
It’s unusual, to say the least, that such a group would be recognized by a court as having standing to bring such a suit, because their status is entirely speculative. They merely expect to be excluded. But such is the level of cynicism about the motives and processes of Trump that even a district court judge would automatically recognize the validity of such an expectation.
It is impossible to conceive that those who have been attacked by Trump’s Justice Department — such as former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Latitia James — would be compensated by Trump’s fund. Nor would the former federal prosecutor who claims he was fired for his work on the January 6 investigation, or people arrested while protesting immigration raids.
Other lawsuits challenging the fund have been filed in the District of Columbia and in California. But the interesting thing is it’s not just lawsuits and it’s not just Democrats. A number of prominent Republican lawmakers have publicly objected to the fund.
The fact that public money would be spent, and the fund would be entirely under Trump’s control, also figures in.
Remarkably, 35 former federal judges on Wednesday urged the judge who closed Trump’s case with the I.R.S. — the origin of the fund — to take another look at the terms of the deal. I can’t recall another instance of former judges petitioning a sitting judge to take another look at the terms of a settlement.
The stench of Trump’s self-dealing, compounded by the absurdity of him suing his own Justice Department for $10 billion — and the Department responding with a “deal” that would give him $1.8 billion to reward his supporters, and future immunity from IRS audits — seems to have tipped some set of cosmic scales.
The scales of justice and also the political scales. Republican members of Congress are hearing an uproar from their constituents about this, which persuaded many to leave town without acting on Trump’s second big reconciliation bill.
I asked earlier this week if Trump has finally overplayed his hand. I believe the cumulative effects of all his wanton and harmful initiatives over the last several months are now setting in. The $1.8 billion fund will be seen as the straw that broke Trump’s legal and political back — the act of hubris that illuminated all the other acts of hubris, the very emblem of Trump’s contempt for anything and everyone beyond himself and his own self-glorification.
Friday, May 29, 2026
Voters Think Congress Is Corrupt And Would Ban Them From Trading Stocks While In Office
The charts above reflect the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between May 22nd and 26th of a nationwide sample of 1,397 registered voters, with a 3.3 point margin of error.
The Dark Side Of Putting Police In Texas Schools
The following is part of an article by Clare Amari, Kristian Hernandez, and Asher Lehrer-Small in The New York Times:
SINCE THE MASSACRE at Robb Elementary in Uvalde in 2022, school districts across Texas have spent billions of dollars to station police officers on every campus in the state. The effort, the most ambitious in the nation, was intended to protect students from similar tragedies.
But the constant presence of officers has transformed the way many public schools manage discipline, subjecting students to heavy-handed police tactics for behavior that once would have landed them only in the principal’s office.
Officers in Texas displayed startling belligerence at times, grabbing or tackling students a fraction of their size over misconduct that often appeared to be minor. Children in elementary school, including one as young as 6, were handcuffed. Teenagers were arrested, charged with crimes and even jailed. In the most extreme cases, they wound up in hospitals, bruised or concussed, after being body-slammed or shocked by Tasers, which are prohibited in the state’s juvenile detention facilities but allowed in its public schools.
There is no comprehensive record of use-of-force incidents across the more than 1,000 public school districts in Texas. Many districts and police agencies declined to disclose their data to our journalists; others did not respond to public records requests. More than 200 provided some information, but in most cases, it was limited.
Still, by examining even that small share of records, our reporters identified more than 2,600 use-of-force incidents that occurred from January 2022 through December 2025. About 450 of those interactions were described in detailed reports, which we reviewed. We also watched video footage from over two dozen encounters.
The records provide a first-of-its-kind look at how Texas’ initiative around school policing has played out in districts large and small, urban and rural.
Many incidents began over misbehavior such as dress-code violations, vaping or schoolyard scraps. Officers, often summoned by principals or teachers, escalated some situations by shouting obscenities or insults. They used physical takedown tactics in about 60 situations when students ignored their commands, talked back or pulled away. . . .
In Texas, no state agency has the power to routinely review school officers’ actions and weigh in on possible overreach.
Lawmakers here have embraced school policing without establishing safeguards required for meaningful accountability, policing experts said. A 2019 law meant to keep officers out of “routine student discipline” does not define the term or detail repercussions for violations. Police departments in Texas are not required to report incidents of force in schools unless they shoot someone. . . .
A review of use-of-force policies from more than 200 school district police departments found that many were largely copied from those used by municipal police agencies. Some addressed how to handle livestock and animal control calls. Most provided no specific guidance on handling students. . . .
It was not until the 1980s and ’90s, amid concerns about drugs and violence, that the ranks of school officers began to swell. The 1999 shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado led to a larger rise.
Elsewhere in the country, school districts typically tapped the local sheriff’s office or police department for officers. Texas was unusual in that many districts formed their own departments instead.
As police presence in schools grew, some educators became wary of harsh punishment and practices that could push students into the criminal justice system. Even in law-and-order Texas, concerns seemed to break through. In 2019, the Legislature passed a law saying that school boards should not task officers with routine student discipline.
Then came Uvalde, the deadliest school shooting in Texas history, which claimed the lives of 19 students and two teachers.
A year later, in 2023, lawmakers passed legislation to require at least one licensed police officer at each of the state’s public schools. While other states had taken steps to increase school security, few relied as heavily on the police. . . .
In the two years that followed, statewide annual spending on school security rose to more than $1.3 billion from about $900 million.
Today, Texas is home to nearly 400 school district police departments, more than all other states combined. Most of the remaining districts have contracts with outside police agencies. The number of officers trained to work in schools — about 11,000 — exceeds the total number of police officers in at least two dozen states.
Most of what school officers do is mundane. They secure external doors, usher students through metal detectors and monitor hallways for fights. Some mentor students and offer advice.
But routine interactions have been punctuated at times by physical encounters. Officers grabbed or tackled students hundreds of times, data and records show. They used pepper spray in dozens of cases and shocked students with Tasers in at least nine incidents. On four occasions, reporters found, officers held teenagers at gunpoint. . . .
Students were left with bruises, scrapes or other injuries in nearly a quarter of the 450 cases reviewed by reporters. Two teenagers suffered concussions, according to medical records and an interview with one family’s lawyer.
About two dozen of the overall cases involved children in elementary school. In the Northside school district, an officer handcuffed a 6-year-old boy who kicked a school employee during a tantrum.
State law prohibits using restraints on children in fifth grade or below in all but the most dangerous situations. In a statement, the district said that the officer had perceived an “immediate risk of harm.”. . .
Across the state, officers directed obscenities, insults and threats at students just before or after using physical force, records and video footage show. . . .
In Texas, the state-mandated training for school police officers includes instruction in child psychology, conflict resolution and managing students with behavioral issues. But at only 20 hours, the program is half the minimum recommended by the National Association of School Resource Officers. Kentucky, which also mandates officers at all public schools, requires 120 hours.
Thursday, May 28, 2026
Trump Job Approval Is Record Low 34% In New Economist/YouGov Poll
The chart above reflects the result of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between May 22nd and 26th of a nationwide sample of 1,520 adults (including 1,397 registered voters). The margin of error is 3.6 points for adults and 3.3 points for registered voters.
Public Wants Presidential Tax Returns Made Public (And Don't Think Trump Pays His Taxes)
The charts above reflect the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between May 22nd and 26th of a nationwide sample of 1,520 adults (including 1,397 registered voters). The margin of error is 3.6 points for adults and 3.3 points for registered voters.
Trump And Democrats Both Get What They Wanted - Paxton As GOP Senate Nominee
The primary run-off is over in Texas. And the GOP nominee for the U.S. Senate is Ken Paxton, who ousted four-term Republican John Cornyn.
The election was not close. Paxton bested Cornyn by over 27 points.
The outcome made Donald Trump happy. Just a few days before the run-off, he had endorsed Paxton. Cornyn supported Trump and his policies about 90% of the time, but Paxton is a true Trump sycophant. He will support Trump 100% of the time, even if what Trump is doing is corrupt, illegal, or unconstitional.
The outcome also made Democrats happy. Instead of running against Cornyn (who likely would have won), they get an opponent with a lot of baggage - a man who has exhibited bot immoral and illegal behavior. And their candidate comes with almost no negative baggage at all (although Republicans will spend millions of corporate dark money dollars trying to paint him as some kind of radical).
It has been over 30 years since a Democrat won a statewide race in Texas. Texas is still a very red state, and it will not be easy for Democrat James Talarico to win the Senate race. But he has probably the best chance of any candidate in over 30 years.Talarico will be helped by the unpopularity of Donald Trump. His job approval is upside down even in bright red Texas - and most voters blame him for the poor economy, especially the rising prices on nearly everything. This could push Independents to vote for the Democratic candidate.
In my opinion, it's going to come down to turnout. The MAGA republicans will vote, and if turnout is sparse (like it usually is in a midterm election), Paxton will win. But if there is a massive turnout, then Talarico has a very good chance of winning.
Wednesday, May 27, 2026
New Strength In Numbers Poll Has Only Bad News For Trump/Republicans
The charts above are from the Strength in Numbers / Verasight Poll -- done on May 18th and 19th of a nationwide sample of 1,520 adults, with a 2.7 point margin of error.
Racism Is A Big Factor In Why The U.S. Doesn't Have A Better (And Cheaper) Healthcare System
The following is part of an excellent and thought-provoking post by Thom Hartmann at The Hartmann Report:
America has 51 billionaires who made their money from our profit-driven healthcare system, the only one in the developed world. It’s not only obscene that they’re taking so much money from so many of us who have so little; it’s also killing all of us.
We’re among the worst — and most expensive — healthcare systems in the developed world, with Thailand and Ecuador even beating us out.
And the reason it stays that way, according to a shocking new study, is because about half of all white people would rather inflict pain on all of us (including themselves) than allow for a system which may also benefit Black people.
If that sounds irrational, it is. But it’s also completely consistent with a history that includes white communities closing their own schools and swimming pools back in the 1960s when LBJ forced them to allow Black children in.
Sixty-six years ago, on a campaign swing through Tennessee, Lyndon Johnson turned to his press secretary Bill Moyers in a hotel room and explained, with the bluntness of a man who’d grown up watching it work in Texas, why America couldn’t have nice things.
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man,” LBJ said, “he won’t notice your picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
Moyers wrote about it years later in The Washington Post, and the line has been quoted ever since because it explained, in one sentence, the entire arc of “conservative” behavior from Reconstruction to Nixon to Reagan to Trump.
Last week, a pair of political scientists at the University of Delaware put empirical meat on the bones of what Johnson learned the hard way. Sumeyye Mine Iltekin Gocer and Joanne M. Miller, writing in the peer-reviewed journal Research and Politics, surveyed more than 700 white Americans and split them into two groups.
One group was asked whether white Americans were winning or losing politically. The other was asked whether white Americans were winning or losing compared to racial minorities. Both were then asked how they felt about economic redistribution programs like food stamps and Medicaid, the things that put food on tables and keep people from dying of treatable diseases.
The first group’s answers tracked roughly with their income and ideology. The second group, the ones prompted to think about race before answering, turned against redistribution across the board, even programs that would obviously benefit them, even when they themselves were poor.
The mere act of comparing themselves to Black and brown Americans made them willing to sacrifice their own healthcare, their own paycheck, their own kid’s future, as long as people of color were sacrificed too.
That’s the trap. That’s how a country with the largest economy in human history ends up as the only developed nation on Earth without universal healthcare, the only rich country where 600,000 people a year still go bankrupt because somebody in the family got sick, and where, alone among our peer nations, we’ve built an entire group of healthcare billionaires on the simple business model of denying claims and pocketing the difference.
There are now fifty-one of them. Fifty-one Americans whose ten-figure fortunes exist because we refused, decade after decade, to do what every other developed country figured out by the 1970s.
Becker’s Hospital Review crunched the latest Forbes list and counted them up: hospital chain heirs like Thomas Frist Jr. at $41.1 billion, medical-device dynasties like the Cooks and the Strykers, pharma fortunes, insurance fortunes, and a long tail of executives who got fabulously wealthy off the misery of people trying to pay for chemo.
Some who became morbidly rich off healthcare even went into politics like Senator Rick Scott, whose company committed the largest Medicare fraud in American history when he was CEO. Others simply pour millions into buying Republican politicians and judges to maintain the profitable status quo.
These billionaires exist nowhere else in the developed world for a simple reason: no other developed country has set up its healthcare system so that human sickness is a profit center.
From Nixon‘s Southern Strategy to Bush’s Willie Horton ads to Trump’s racist birtherism, scaring White people about Black people has been the go-to position of the GOP since the 1960s. And stopping “socialism” that may benefit Black or Hispanic people is at its core.
Canada doesn’t have hospital billionaires. France doesn’t have insurance billionaires. We do, and we have fifty-one of them, and the reason we do is the reason LBJ named in that hotel room.
The people who’d benefit most from a national healthcare system are the people who keep voting against it. Look at the map. Of the ten states that still refuse to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, seven are former Confederate states with large Black populations.
Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas have together left billions of federal dollars sitting on the table, billions that would have built rural clinics, kept hospitals open, paid for prenatal care, and saved roughly 1.5 million of their own citizens from going uninsured.
Their Republican legislators won’t take the money, their Republican governors campaign against the money, and their Republican voters keep electing the people who refuse the money, all because that money would also benefit the Black and Hispanic people who live in those states.
And the bodies pile up. Tennessee has the highest maternal mortality rate in the United States, 42.1 deaths per 100,000 live births averaged across 2019 to 2023, with Louisiana and Mississippi right behind.
The Commonwealth Fund found this past summer that Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Tennessee all have maternal death rates more than double those of California, Colorado, Massachusetts, and Minnesota.
Mississippi just declared a public health emergency over infant mortality because the state’s babies are dying at the rate of 9.7 per 1,000 live births, nearly double the national average, and for Black babies in Mississippi the rate is 15.2, which would be a national emergency in any country that wasn’t busy looking the other way.
Life expectancy tells the same story in the same racist handwriting. Mississippi sits dead last in the country at around 71 years, followed by West Virginia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Kentucky. . . .
LBJ laid out the con in a Tennessee hotel room in 1960. The Delaware researchers just confirmed it in 2026.
The only question left is whether we’ll act on what we now know, or whether somebody like me in the next generation will be writing the same article about the seventy-fifth healthcare billionaire and asking the same exhausted question about why we still can’t have what every other developed country built two generations ago.
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