Saturday, August 01, 2026
Fox News Poll Has Talarico Leading Paxton (And Gov Race Within A Point)
The charts above reflect the results of the Fox News Poll -- done between July 23rd and 27th of a sample of 1,006 registered voters in Texas. The poll's margin of error is 3 points.
The U.S. Labor Force Is Shrinking (And That's Not Good)
Robert Reich comments on our shrinking labor force:
This month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the labor participation rate — the percentage of people of working age who are working or actively looking for work — is now down to 61.5 percent. That’s 0.6 percentage points lower than it was at the first of the year.
In other words, the U.S. economy has lost 1 million workers since January.
It’s the lowest level of labor participation in 50 years outside the pandemic.
The official unemployment rate is 4.2 percent, which is considered relatively good. But don’t be fooled. That’s 4.2 percent of people who are working or actively seeking work. If you add in all the people who are no longer working or seeking work, the official rate would be far higher.
What accounts for the disappearance of so many workers? Some baby boomers have taken early retirement. Some workers have been caught up in Trump’s undocumented dragnet.
But the biggest reason is the scarcity of stable, well-paying jobs.
Lots of people have concluded it’s not worth it. The cost commuting to — or paying for childcare in order to hold down — a shitty and insecure job has led them to give up on paid work altogether. They’re living more simply, moving in with parents or friends or adult children, or just doing without.
The best measure of how America is doing isn’t the unemployment rate, or the stock market, or the rate of economic growth, or the inflation rate, or the average wage.
It’s how well most Americans are living. The reality is that most Americans are struggling.
Our History Is Too Important To Let The Trump Regime Rewrite It
The following is part of an excellent article by Thom Hartmann at The Hartmann Report:
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
— George Orwell, 1984
It seemed so trivial. Trump ordered the Interior Department to post signs along the walkways leading up to several of the museums that make up the Smithsonian system in Washington, DC warning people that they’d find “inaccurate information” therein. It was based on a bizarre “report” written by the White House’s Domestic Policy Council and released without fanfare on the 4th of July.
The Council itself was packed with Trump with leftovers from rightwing think tanks and activist groups like American Compass, Heritage, the Manhattan Institute, and Stephen Miller’s America First Policy Institute.
It claims that the American Museum of American History has displays that cover the fights for women’s and civil rights and to end slavery along with the positive role immigrants, women, and queer people have played in our country, which it finds deplorable and un-American. It wrote that Smithsonian leadership and museum curators:
“…have directed the museum’s mission away from historical education and scholarship of a shared national inheritance to be celebrated, and toward extreme political activism, rooted in Marxism, to divide, dispirit and discourage Americans. … [And have] denigrated and displaced whites, males, Christians and Americans” while focusing on “race in areas where it has little to no historical relevance.”
Wild, over-the-top bullshit complaints that our museums are accurately portraying American history notwithstanding, this is far more sinister and dire than it seems.
Pretty much every dictator in history, both ancient and modern, has rewritten his nation’s history because, as Orwell noted, those who control the past can use it to reprogram the future.
Dictators and wannabe dictators rewrite the past to legitimize their rule, typically portraying themselves as representing the inevitable culmination of history, as the nation’s savior (“I, alone, can fix it!”), and as the rightful heir to a mythical glorious tradition like Trump is doing by trying to reinvent America as an exclusively white Christian nation.
In the process, they typically erase their rivals (Trump has replaced Biden’s picture in the White House with a photo of an autopen), reframe negatively their political opponents (ditto), and use the threat of erasure from history as a weapon against their own allies to keep them bowing and scraping (ditto). . . .
The simple reality is that in democracies it’s historians, journalists, courts, archives, universities, and scholars who write history and can challenge official narratives. Debate is expected, and interpretations can change as new evidence comes to light, like we saw here recently with the 1619 Project.
In dictatorships, on the other hand, the state typically monopolizes education, media, and archives, suppresses competing interpretations of history, and punishes those who publicly contradict the official version.
All of which is why it’s so important that we don’t treat the efforts by Trump and his neofascist lickspittles to rewrite America’s history into a sanitized white male supremacist mold as if it’s just some sort of aberration or sick joke.
This is serious stuff, and serious people within this administration are dedicated to destroying our and — particularly — our children’s understanding of the truly revolutionary and progressive history of this nation.
They’re trying to induce a national amnesia, stretching back through the history of the Klan, the Civil War, and even the American Revolution.
We must push back against them boldly and loudly, and when they’re gone we’re going to have a huge job cleaning up the fascist mess they’re making.
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