Wednesday, April 08, 2026
Support Remains Strong For Abortion, Marriage Equality, And Affirmative Action
These charts reflect the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between March 27th and 30th of a nationwide sample of 1,679 adults (including 1,505 registered voters). The margin of error is 3.2 points for adults and 3.0 points for registered voters.
Republicans Have Caused Enough Damage - They Should Be Voted Out Of Power
The following is part of a post by Thom Hartmann at The Hartmann Report. I wholeheartedly agree with what he has written.
Trump is tearing America apart with his threats against Iran and comment that domestically, “It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.” He’s also succeeded in intentionally pitting Americans of different races, religions, and across the rural/urban divide against each other. . . .
While it’s worked to the advantage of the GOP, the fossil fuel and private prison industries, and the billionaire class for four decades or more, it’s extraordinarily dangerous to our nation and our children’s future.
That’s because a society can’t function when its people don’t have faith in its institutions, and it’s even more of a challenge for a democracy, a form of government which only exists “by the consent of the governed.” When people lose faith in their nation’s institutions, the result is both social and political chaos much like America is experiencing right now. . . .
Prior to Reagan’s presidency, 73% of Americans said they trusted the federal government to do the right thing “just about always” or “most of the time.” Pew found in 2024 that 85% of Americans said most elected officials “don’t care” what people like them think, and only 4% said the political system is working “extremely” or “very” well.
That’s absolutely unsustainable without radical change.
We’re also experiencing a crisis of confidence in America internationally, as nations that were formerly allies across the planet are now openly questioning whether they can ever again trust us after all the betrayals, trash-talking, and Putin-fluffing coming from Trump and his lickspittles.
Tariffs, destroying USAID, and silencing The Voice of America have devastated our soft power and credibility around the world, moving dozens of countries away from us and toward mostly China and Russia.
All of which raises the question: How did we get here and how do we get out of this mess?
Three factors that burst onto the scene in a big way in the 1960s led us to the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, which brought us to today’s crisis.
— The first was the invention of neoliberalism in the 1940s, as I lay out in my book The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America.
— This was followed by the creation of the Libertarian Party a few decades later as a lobbying vehicle against rent control by the real estate lobby.
— And, finally, in the 1980s a handful of fossil fuel billionaires jumping into politics to fund think tanks, media, and politicians who’d preach the doctrine that, as Reagan famously said, ”Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
Prior to these interventions, the New Deal consensus had brought Americans together around the idea that the purpose of government was, to quote the Constitution’s Preamble:
“[T]o form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”
Neoliberals, Libertarians, and rightwing petrobillionaires like David Koch (who ran for VP in 1980 on a ticket of shutting down pretty much all domestic spending, presaging Trump’s recent rant that the only legitimate function of government is to run the military) all began the refrain that government is essentially evil, because they all objected to paying taxes to “promote the general Welfare,” or losing profits to regulations that prevented harms to workers and average Americans.
An army of sycophants and spokesmen was mobilized from William F. Buckley to Rush Limbaugh to the “stars” of Fox “News” and its imitators. Soon, the word spread. As Limbaugh used to joke, social programs were actually evil because:
“What do you do for a man when he’s down? You kick him! Otherwise, he’ll never get up!”
Men with wealth beyond the imaginings of Midas were telling average white working Americans that it wasn’t the GOP’s tax cuts and Republicans’ destruction of unions that crushed them, but brown-skinned immigrants, women, and Black people who wanted to “steal” their jobs, invade their homes, and rape their daughters. . . .
By the end of the George W. Bush presidency (and his and Cheney’s lies that led us into bloody quagmires in Afghanistan and Iraq), most Americans had decided they couldn’t believe or trust our government. Then Trump came along and, presumably on Putin’s orders, told the world that we couldn’t be trusted internationally, either.
Just like with domestic politics, our nation can’t effectively function internationally if other nations also don’t have faith in our institutions. The Reagan Revolution, Donald Trump, and the Republican Party have destroyed both our faith and the world’s faith in the institutions of America and thus put our democracy at serious peril.
Part of that peril is that Donald Trump is now threatening to turn America into an “illiberal democracy” police state with rigged elections like Russia and Hungary. And it’s Americans’ cynicism that is his main weapon.
The solution is straightforward, and it appears we’re moving quickly in that direction, just like we did in 1932 as we woke up and chose to move out of the Republican Great Depression.
First, Americans must realize that these nihilistic ideologies promoted by billionaires and massive, monopolistic corporations are grounded in lies. We’re not a society of selfish individual consumers driven primarily by greed; we’ve historically been here for each other, and that’s why our government was first formed. It worked best during the 1933-1981 New Deal era, when the Middle Class went from around 10% of us up to around two-thirds of us. And it was crippled by the Reagan Revolution, which has cut it down to around 43% of us.
Second, the Democratic Party needs to re-embrace the social and economic goals of the New Deal and Great Society that brought us Social Security, the minimum wage, Medicare, Medicaid, free and cheap college, etc., etc. Put “we, the people” first and again restrain the toxic impulses of billionaires and corporations through appropriate taxation and regulation.
And third, we must repudiated the GOP’s corrupt ideology at the polls this fall and bring into office a new generation of FDR-style progressives who are committed to undoing Reagan’s, Bush’s, Musk’s and Trump’s damage and rebuilding American institutions so they’ll once again work for the average family.
It may seem like a big lift, but more and more Americans are waking up to the Great Grift billionaires and their Republican toadies have been running on us for the past half-century. A new America is possible!
Tuesday, April 07, 2026
Most Americans Don't Think Trump Is Teeling The Truth About The Iran War
The chart above reflects the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between March 27th and 30th of a nationwide sample of 1,679 adults (including 1,505 registered voters). The margin of error is 3.2 points for adults and 3.0 points for registered voters.
Doctors Are Not Testing Trump For Dementia - They're Monitoring His Dementia!
The following is part of a post by Catherine Bouris at The Daily Beast:
MS NOW medical analyst Dr. Vin Gupta has sounded the alarm about President Donald Trump’s health following Trump’s incendiary Easter Sunday Truth Social post.
“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!!” Trump, 79, wrote just after 8 a.m. on Sunday morning.
“Open the F---in’ Strait, you crazy b-----ds, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH!” he continued before adding, “Praise be to Allah.”
The president’s unusually inflammatory post prompted people to reiterate concerns about his well-being that many, including Gupta, have shared for months.
“Erratic. Can’t finish sentences. Often confused. Illogical train of thought. Word finding difficulties. Developing and worsening gradually over time,” Gupta wrote on X on Sunday afternoon.
“The President is exhibiting all the signs of dementia.”. . .
Gupta, a frequent guest on MS NOW as the network’s senior medical analyst, has voiced concerns about the president’s health for months.
After Trump’s visit to the World Economic Forum in Davos in February, Gupta reflected on the president’s family history of age-related dementia and claimed that he was seeing a “trend line” that “seems like it’s getting worse.”
The president’s father died in 1999 at the age of 93 from pneumonia that was complicated by Alzheimer’s disease. He had also been previously diagnosed with dementia.
The connection has also been made by Trump’s own niece, who told The Daily Beast Podcast in November that there are times she looks at Trump and sees her grandfather.
“I see that same look of confusion. I see that he does not always seem to be oriented to time and place. His short-term memory seems to be deteriorating.”
He also discussed theories that the 79-year-old is showing signs of Alzheimer’s disease or frontotemporal dementia, pointing out that much of the president’s behavior is “consistent with these diagnoses.”
“The acting out, behavior changes, lashing out, acting unreasonable,” Gupta said. “One could say this is his core fundamental personality based on what we’ve seen over, frankly, his entire adult life, but it’s getting worse.”
Gupta has also expressed concerns about the president’s unusual decision to brag about “acing” multiple cognitive tests, which are not typically offered to people whose mental fitness is sound.
“This is not the flex he thinks it is,” Gupta said after the president boasted about acing a cognitive exam for the third straight time. “You don’t do this every other day and use that as evidence that you’re cognitively there.”
“Those that tend to do Montreal [Cognitive Assessment Tool, or MoCA] tests with that level of frequency, usually we’re worried about the presence of early-stage dementia or cognitive impairment, so he might be ruling himself in to something that he doesn’t want to rule himself into.”
Psychologist Dr. John Gartner, who also highlighted the president’s increasingly erratic behavior as a sign of his decline, told The Daily Beast Podcast in December that undertaking the same cognitive assessment multiple times suggests that Trump’s doctors are monitoring dementia.
“You could maybe justify giving someone the MoCA once, just on their age, just as part of a physical. If you’re giving it to him three times, that means you’re not assessing dementia. That means you’re monitoring dementia,” Gartner said.
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