Tuesday, June 30, 2026
Pride In Being An American Is At A 21st Century Low
The chart above is from the Gallup Poll -- done between June 1st and 15th of a nationwide sample of 1,001 adults, with a 4 point margin of error.
The Most (And Least) Popular U.S. Politicians
The chart above is from the Strength in Numbers / Verasight Poll -- done between June 17th and 22nd of a nationwide sample of 2,087 adults, with a 2.2 point margin of error.
Talarico's Speech To Fellow Democrats At Their State Convention
The following is part of Democratic U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico's speech at the state Democratic Convention:
“Texans don’t like tyrants. And we don’t surrender easily.
We are strivers and builders and dreamers of all colors and creeds of all backgrounds and beliefs. It’s in our blood.
Texas is big. Big hair, big hearts, and big dreams. Our athletes are beloved across the globe. Cowboys, Astros, Spurs. Our musicians, our musicians are so iconic, they only need one name. Willie. Selena. Beyoncé.
But the current political landscape is too small for Texas. Texas used to be known for our hospitality…. Friendship across tribes, friendship across divides. That’s what makes Texas so great. We’re this big mash-up of all these different people, all these different cultures, all these different friends. Think about, think about Tejano music. If you’re listening to a Selena song, you’re hearing Spanish vocal styles from northern Mexico. But you’re also hearing polka dance rhythms from Czech and German immigrants. This uniquely…Texan ability to welcome new friends and new ideas has made us one of the most exciting and innovative states in the country.
We’re the state that put a man on the moon. We’re the state that pioneered ranching and energy and computers. We’re the state that gave this country Barbara Jordan, Ann Richards, LBJ, and the Great Society. We’re the state that put breakfast in a taco.
Today, we face a new threat. Our state is being taken over by a new kind of tyrant: billionaire megadonors. They’re not invading with an army. They’re just buying the system. The billionaires who own the social media algorithms, who own the cable news networks, who own the politicians fighting on our screens, they are turning neighbor against neighbor. Weakening that spirit of friendship that makes Texas so great. They divide us by party, by race, by gender, by religion, so we don’t notice that they’re picking our pockets. It is the oldest strategy in the world. Divide and conquer.
But, Texas will not be conquered.
Their puppets have the wrong state of mind. Their hearts and their dreams are just not big enough. We let these small men get their hands on our big state. You know the kind of people I’m talking about. The kind who make themselves feel big by making everyone else feel small.
These men, they took all the money and power they could grab, and they set out to shrink Texas down to their size. They’re shrinking our Texas economy with job-killing tariffs. They are shrinking our Texas public schools with private school voucher scams. They’re shrinking our healthcare, so it covers less and less. They’re shrinking our paychecks and how much those paychecks can buy. And they’re shrinking our power by attacking our God-given rights at the ballot box and redrawing our districts to keep themselves in power. They have been shrinking Texas for three decades now. But that ends this year in this election.
In November, we can make Texas big again. We can make Texas friendly again. We can make Texas, Texas, again. We have the chance to take back our state from those billionaire mega donors and their puppet politicians who stole it from us.
What would Sam Houston think about the small men who are shrinking Texas? What would Sam Houston, who put Texas before himself, say about Ken Paxton, who puts himself before Texas? What would Sam Houston say to all of us at this critical moment in Texas history? I think he would say, do right, and risk the consequences.
There’s an old country song by Gary P. Nunn, called ‘What I Like About Texas.’ In the song, he lists the rivers and the bluebonnets, the music and the food. But ultimately, he settles on one answer. He says it’s the spirit of the people who share this land. The spirit of Barbara Jordan. The spirit of my mom, the spirit that’s in this room. The feeling that we can accomplish whatever we want to.
This election shouldn’t be about the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. It should be about chasing a vision of what our state can be. Texas schools that are the envy of the nation. A Texas economy that is second to none, and Texas families that are stronger and healthier than ever before. It won’t happen overnight. But a giant state deserves giant dreams. We are— We are bigger than extremism. We’re bigger than partisanship. We’re bigger than corruption. Texas is bigger than all of those things. Because it’s not just a state. It’s a state of mind.
Texans don’t like tyrants. And we don’t surrender easily. Tonight, standing before you, to accept your nomination for the United States Senate, I make the same commitment to you that my ancestor made 200 years ago. Any duty that my bodily strength would enable me to perform, either in public or private, that would advance the cause of Texas, I feel anxious and ever ready to perform.”
Monday, June 29, 2026
The Country's 250th Birthday - A Time To Celebrate Or Mourn?
Robert Reich comments on the country's impending 250th birthday:
For the next seven days, most of America will be engaged in celebrating the birth of our nation 250 years ago.
Trump wants to use this occasion for his insatiable ego by putting his name and face everywhere he can. His grandiosity is boundless; his narcissism, loathsome.
Others may use the anniversary to celebrate the good things America has accomplished over two and a half centuries. Fine.
But a true understanding of where America has come at this point in our history would see the current danger to the ideals we’ve striven for — the wanton attacks on democracy, freedom, the rule of law, and equal opportunity, by people asserting white Christian nationalism.
That attack has been spearheaded by Trump and abetted by spineless Republicans in the House and Senate, a small-minded Supreme Court majority, and a blight of billionaires who are bankrolling much of this for personal gain. They are all traitors to those ideals.
America’s ideals have never been fully achieved, of course, but the effort to achieve them has been noble; it has inspired much of the world. That effort had been our nation’s purpose, the core of our moral authority.
Those ideals haven’t died, but the effort to achieve them is on life support.
I wish I could feel celebratory, but I don’t. To me, the darkness that has befallen our country doesn’t call for celebration or self-congratulation — not this week, nor as long as the darkness prevails. It calls for a clear-eyed determination to renew the effort to achieve our ideals — our moral rudder — and thereby take America back.
Instead of celebrating the 250th anniversary of America, I for one will be mourning the loss of our national purpose. I’ll be wearing a black armband to signify my sorrow.
Sunday, June 28, 2026
Public Says Going To War With Iran Was The Wrong Decision
The chart above reflects the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between June 19th and 22nd of a nationwide sample of 1,679 adults (including 1,517 registered voters). The margin of error is 3.3 points for adults and 3.1 points for registered voters.
Populism Is Back - And It's Growing Stronger In Both Political Parties
Robert Reich comments on the growing populist fervor in both political parties:
The most powerful force in both the Republican and Democratic Parties today is anti-establishment populism. It’s roughly similar to the late 19th century when the Populist Party challenged the dominance of corporate elites, national banks, and railroad monopolies, although this time I believe it will stick.
Among today’s Republicans, this has taken the form of Trump’s MAGA movement against immigrants, Black people, Muslims, “woke,” “DEI,” and especially Democratic “coastal elites” who are supposedly enabling these groups to overtake white Christian America.
Pitted against the Republican populists are “never-Trumpers” who cling to the older Republican virtues of fiscal austerity and isolationism.
Among Democrats, anti-establishment populism has taken the form of a movement against economic elites who are rigging the system against average working people. Its major proponents are Bernie Sanders, AOC, Zohran Mamdani, and other predominantly young Democratic politicians — such as Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, Janeese Lewis George, the presumptive mayor of Washington, D.C., and a bevy of newly-elected members of Congress from New York — Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Brad Lander.
Pitted against these economic populist in the Democratic Party are so-called “moderate” and corporate Democrats who pine after the party of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and seek at most incremental reforms of American capitalism.
In other words, the essential fissure inside American politics today doesn’t run horizontally from “right” to “left,” as those two poles have been defined since World War II.
It runs vertically from bottom to top.
Trump’s MAGA voters in the bottom view themselves through the lens of white Christian nationalism and believe the top has conspired to make them less dominant in American society.
Sanders’s, AOC’s, and Mamdani’s voters in the bottom view themselves through the lens of economic class and believe the top has conspired to rig the economy against them.
Both shifts have left the establishment behind. America’s corporate and financial elites love Trump’s tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks but feel uncomfortable with the white Christian nationalism now at the heart of the GOP.
They’re likewise content to deal with incremental reforms pushed by moderate Democrats but dislike the wealth taxes, rent-controls, single-payer health plans, and other safety-net expansions at the heart of the emerging Democratic Party.
I expect the establishment will fight to regain control of both parties.
One way will be to equate the populists with bigotry and extremism — in the GOP, to condemn the populists as racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, and fascist; in the emerging Democratic Party, to condemn the populists as antisemitic and communist.
There’s enough truth in both caricatures to cause many voters to back away from populism altogether.
But I urge cooler heads to see something else in the rising populism within both parties — a potential political alliance against the grotesque inequalities of income, wealth, and opportunity that have scarred modern America and fueled the populist anger in the first place.
The share of the U.S. economy going to working people is the lowest it’s been since 1947; the share going to corporate profits, the largest since 1950. One trillionaire and a brute of billionaires are now, in fact, running much of America.
Neither income nor wealth are zero-sum contests in which some people’s success can be achieved only at the cost of other people’s losses. But power is a zero-sum contest. And as power has gone to the top — and is has, whether we’re talking about the top 0.01 percent or 0.1 percent or 1 percent — everyone else has lost agency over their lives.
Both never-Trumper Republicans and “moderate” Democrats are struggling to articulate a message that isn’t just “we’re not Trump.” But given the gross inequalities in American society today, that’s a nearly impossible task.
Both Republican and Democratic establishments would be better served by overtly rejecting racism, xenophobia, and misogyny, as well as antisemitism and communism, while joining with populists to boldly change the system so that none of these were attractive. Make homes affordable, make healthcare accessible, put childcare and eldercare within reach of the average working family, and they won’t be.
Saturday, June 27, 2026
Trump Just Keeps Getting Humiliated (And That Makes Him Dangerous)
From Robert Reich:
Nothing makes Trump angrier than being humiliated. Humiliation involves public shame, which Trump’s malignant narcissism cannot abide.
But Trump is facing humiliation after humiliation. They’re causing him to lose his mind even faster than before.
The Iranian regime knows this, which is why it’s publicly humiliating Trump by contradicting everything he says about making progress on the peace talks.
Yesterday, Iran went further. It refuted Trump’s claim that Iran did not control the Strait of Hormuz, and that the strait was again open to shipping, by striking a container ship passing through the strait. Oil prices immediately jumped.
Meanwhile, American judges are humiliating Trump by ordering his name off the Kennedy Center, requiring that the center remain open, pausing work on his billionaire ballroom, threatening to stop his Arch de Trump, ending his slush fund, and vacating charges that Trump’s Justice [sic] Department has brought against Trump’s enemies.
Performing artists are humiliating him by pulling out of his so-called “Great American State Fair” on the National Mall because they don’t want any part in what’s become a Trump rally.
Congressional Republicans are humiliating him by rejecting his demands that they enact the “SAVE” Act (which would make it harder for millions of people to vote), pass his next reconciliation package, and blow up the Senate filibuster.
Four Senate Republicans even crossed party lines to back a war powers resolution directing Trump to halt military operations against Iran or seek congressional authorization to continue. Their support delivered a bipartisan rebuke to Trump’s handling of the war. (After lobbying by Trump, the Senate reversed its stance and rejected the resolution in a late-night vote.)
Turning 80 is itself a humiliation for Trump. Even if the media weren’t harping on it, his body is continuously reminding him that he’s the oldest president ever elected. Not to mention increasing calls from Democrats to invoke the 25th Amendment in light of Trump’s erratic behavior — including his feud with the pope, his doomsday threats on Truth Social, and his posting of an AI photo of himself as Jesus.
But the very worst type of humiliation for Trump is ridicule — as first became apparent in 2011 when Obama skewered him at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner by producing his birth certificate and saying Trump could “now get back to focusing on important issues like did we fake the moon landing?”
The audience roared. Trump fumed.
Trump can’t take ridicule — which is why he tried to get ABC to fire Jimmy Kimmel and gloated when CBS got rid of Stephen Colbert.
Yet late-night comedians are now having a field day with Trump’s algae-infested Reflecting Pool. Some are calling it the Strait of Warm Ooze.
The pile-up of humiliations is causing Trump to lash out at anyone and everyone, including his recent explosion at NBC correspondent Kristen Welker on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and Wednesday’s reported shouting match with Republican Senator Bill Cassidy during a closed-door lunch at the Capitol. The lunch came just after Trump dropped a bombshell by canceling plans to sign a bipartisan landmark housing affordability bill until he gets his way on the SAVE Act.
I’m tempted to enjoy the Trump humiliations. But I think it also important to note that as they mount, Trump is becoming even more erratic and dangerous. So beware.
Don't Fear The "S-Word" - It Just Means An Affordable Life For Everyone
The following is part of an excellent post by Thom Hartmann at The Hartmann Report:
On Tuesday night, the establishment wing of the Democratic Party got a message it would prefer to pretend it didn’t hear. In New York, Mamdani-backed progressives swept the congressional primaries, ousting two sitting Democratic congressmen and taking an open seat in a single evening. . . .
The corporate press and just about every Republican in the country will tell you these candidates are “socialists,” and they’ll spit the word the way you’d say “arsonist.” A little history clears the fog.
When a young public defender in upper Manhattan or a state assemblywoman in Brooklyn calls herself a democratic socialist today, she isn’t talking about Havana or the old Soviet Politburo (the way Republicans and much of the press want you to think). . . .
Strip away the scare word and what’s left is far more truly and anciently American than frightening: a country where a person who works forty hours a week, no matter how complicated or how humble that work might be, can afford a home and a car, take the family on a vacation every year, put the kids through school and college, see a doctor without going bankrupt, and retire with dignity.
That’s the entire “radical” program that Republicans, corporate Democrats, and our billionaire oligarchs are so flipped-out about.
Americans have wanted those things for a very long time. More than a hundred and twenty years ago, Teddy Roosevelt stood up and called it the Square Deal: a fair shot for the worker, the consumer, and the “honest businessman” against the trusts and the railroad barons who’d swallowed the economy whole.
Franklin Roosevelt built the scaffolding of it with the New Deal, Lyndon Johnson finished the second story with the Great Society, and for about three decades we actually had it. The middle class in the postwar years grew faster and richer than any middle class in the history of the world. By 1980, it was two-thirds of us with a single paycheck (it’s about 41% now, and takes two paychecks to get there). . . .
And then it was taken apart on purpose. As I lay out in The Hidden History of American the American Dream, the dismantling of that middle class wasn’t an unfortunate side effect of globalization or robots or some impersonal economic weather. It was a deliberate Republican neoliberal project that began with Ronald Reagan imitating Maggie Thatcher and following Heritage’s A Mandate for Leadership in 1981 and has been carried forward by both parties ever since.
The tools were straightforward. Going back to Taft-Hartley in 1947 and the spread of “right-to-work-for-less” laws Republicans and their corporate funders handed states and giant companies the power to strangle unions, and a worker without a union is a worker without leverage.
They froze the federal minimum wage at $7.25 an hour, where it has sat untouched since 2009. America’s oligarchs fought, decade after decade, to keep the United States the only wealthy nation on Earth without national healthcare, herding us instead into the arms of insurance conglomerates and hospital and physician monopolies, more and more of them now owned by private equity firms that treat a sick patient as a line item to be squeezed.
The result, as the nonpartisan RAND Corporation recently calculated, is that roughly $79 trillion has been pumped upward from the bottom ninety percent of Americans into the money bins of the morbidly rich top one percent since Reagan, and the middle class has sunk below 50% of us and is hanging on — now requiring two paychecks — by its fingernails.
In that same span the share of national income going to the bottom ninety percent fell from about two-thirds to less than half, we’ve watched the largest upward transfer of wealth in the history of the American republic all the way back to George Washington, and every dollar of it was a choice some oligarch or his wholly-owned politician made. . . . .
Republicans have to scream “socialism” at any candidate whose actual platform is “rent you can afford” and “a doctor you can see when you need to without going broke.” They can’t argue the economics (and their billionaire donors won’t let them even if they wanted to), so they change the subject to fear.
But the American people aren’t buying the GOP’s oligarchic bullshit anymore. The GOP got crushed in last year’s off-year elections on the simple issue of affordability — which I read as blowback against oligarchy. . . .
The Democratic base is trying hard to pull its party back toward its FDR and LBJ roots. . . .
What these voters keep saying they want is fighters against neoliberalism, fascism, and a return to the New Deal and Great Society.
The Republican Party, meanwhile, is bowing and scraping lower and lower to Trump, Project 2025, and their neofascist agenda. . . .
After forty-five years in the wilderness, Americans are reaching back for the Square Deal that Teddy Roosevelt promised and the New Deal and Great Society that FDR and LBJ delivered, and no amount of red-baiting about Havana is going to talk them out of it.
Democrats must choose to kick the oligarchs out and let the people back in.
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