Sunday, April 19, 2026
Only 28% Of Voters Are MAGA Supporters
The chart above reflects the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between April 10th and 13th of a nationwide sample of 1,748 adults (including 1,573 registered voters). The margin of error is 3.1 points for adults and 3.0 points for registered voters.
The Most Important Issues For Voters
The chart above reflects the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between April 10th and 13th of a nationwide sample of 1,573 registered voters, with a 3 point margin of error.
It Could Take Months For Prices To Go Down After The Strait Opens - Here's Why
Donald Trump has given Americans the impression that once the Strait of Hormuz is opened the price of oil (and gasoline) will quickly return to pre-war prices. That is simply not true. Here, from CNN, is the truth:
Assuming the strait has truly reopened, a logistical nightmare is about to unfold.
Step one: Clearing the strait’s bottlenecks. That’s going to take a long time, since tankers move about as fast as you can ride a bicycle.
First, the 128 or so tankers stuck in the strait need to clear out, carrying around 160 million barrels of oil with them, according to Capital Economics. That will make way for empty tankers to enter the strait, load up and head back out.
A return to full tanker transit capacity could take up to three months, according to Victoria Grabenwöger, senior oil analyst at Kpler.
Step two: Drawing down stockpiles. Empty ships will first draw oil from the warehouses that have been filled up – because producers had nowhere else to put it.
The good news: Refiners were pragmatic about their storage and never fully filled their stockpiles. That should reduce some of the time it would otherwise take to reboot pumps. But fuller-than-typical inventories will nevertheless delay getting oil production back up to full capacity.
Step three: Restarting production. Middle Eastern oil wells were largely shut off during the war. Turning on production isn’t like flipping a switch. It’s a complex engineering challenge that involves serious physics and labor over up to several weeks.
Production will need to be restarted – slowly – to ensure reservoirs of crude don’t collapse, requiring re-drilling and substantial repairs. Water and gas injected into wells need to be rebalanced, which is a tricky business.
Because wells in the region are large and close to one another, restarting production will require significant coordination across companies and countries to ensure injected water and gas pressure remain consistent across multiple wells.
Step four: Making repairs. A number of refiners, natural gas producers and some oil producers were damaged during the war. Some repairs to the damaged critical infrastructure could take years to complete, oil companies said.
There’s a lot of oil go get back online: 12 million barrels per day of crude output and 3 million barrels of refined petroleum products have been shut across the Middle East – mostly in Saudi Arabia and Iraq, according to Kpler. That’s no easy feat.
All of that assumes the war is over and there are no further disruptions in the strait. And we all know what happens when you assume….
Saturday, April 18, 2026
Most Voters Blame Trump For The Rising Gas Prices
The chart above reflects the results of the Quinnipiac University Poll -- done between April 9th and 13th of a nationwide sample of 1,028 registered voters, with a 3.8 point margin of error.
Voters Are Very Angry About Prices And Inflation
The charts above are from the Change Research Poll -- done between April 3rd and 7th of a nationwide sample of 2,702 registered voters, with a 2.0 point margin of error.
Term Limits Is NOT The Answer To The Problems With Congress
Thom Hartmann (at The Hartmann Report) explains why term limits would be a very bad idea, and I agree with him. He writes:
Yesterday, I came home from the studio and turned on the TV to see an MSNOW host and her guest agree on how important it is that Democrats “unite around the issue of term limits” for members of Congress. Last week, the Democratic governor of a swing state said on my program that he was pushing for term limits.
In just the past 48 hours I’ve heard three different commentators on MSNOW and CNN speak of them as if term limits are the “solution” to “elderly” legislators or to the naked corruption that’s so rampant in DC.
This is the wrong issue for Democrats to be promoting now: term limits actually do more damage than good, which is why Republicans and the Heritage Foundation have been pushing them for decades.
For example, they’d get rid of good, effective, high-quality legislators like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden, Maxine Waters, Barbara Lee, and Pramila Jayapal, among others.
But the problem with term limits goes far deeper than that.
Unfortunately, term limits are popular because they seem like an easy fix to the corruption crisis in American politics (over 70 percent of Americans favor them) but in reality they simply hand more power over to giant corporations and the morbidly rich. Here’s how:
First, term limits shift the balance of power in a legislature from the legislators themselves to lobbyists, which is why corporate-friendly Republicans so often speak fondly of them.
Historically, when a new lawmaker comes into office, he or she will hook up with an old-timer who can show them the ropes, how to get around the building, where the metaphorical bodies are buried, and teach them how to make legislation.
With term limits, this institutional knowledge is largely stripped out of a legislative body, forcing new legislators to look elsewhere for help.
Because no Republican has ever, anywhere, suggested that lobbyists’ ability to work be term-limited, we have an actual experiment we can look to. Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, and South Dakota all have term limits.
Research has shown, repeatedly and unambiguously, that in those states with term limits the lobbyists end up filling the role of permanent infrastructure to mentor and guide new lawmakers, and thus have outsized power and influence, far greater than they had before the term limits were instituted.
Of course, lobbyists — and the billionaires and corporations that pay them — love this. It dramatically increases lobbyists’ power and influence, giving them an early and easy entrée into the personal and political lives of the individual legislators who, in those states with term limits, are forced to lean on them for guidance.
This simple reality is not lost on the GOP, which has been pushing these restrictions on service at the federal and state legislature level for years: term limits are law in 16 states, all as the result of heavy Republican PR efforts and lobbying during the George HW Bush presidency. . . .
In addition to strengthening the hand of lobbyists, term limits also prevent good people who aren’t independently wealthy from entering politics in the first place.
What rational person, particularly if they have kids, would take the risk of a job they know will end in six years when instead they could build a career in a field that guarantees them security and a decent retirement?
Also because of this dynamic, term limits encourage legislators to focus on their post-politics career while serving.
Many busily legislate favors for particular industries in the hope of being rewarded with a job when they leave office. This is just one of several ways term limits increase the level of and incentives for corruption.
Because term limits encourage independently wealthy people to enter politics and push out middle-class would-be career politicians like Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, they always shift the Overton window of legislatures — regardless of the party in power — to the right.
Probably the strongest argument against term limits, though, is that they’re fundamentally anti-democratic. In fact, we already have term limits: they’re called elections.
The decision about who represents the interests of a particular state or legislative district shouldn’t be held by some abstract law: it should be in the hands of the voters, and term limits deny voters this.
And, because term limits weaken the power of the legislative branch by producing a constant churn, they strengthen the power of the executive branch, a violation of the vital concept of checks-and-balances.
Even where governors or presidents are term-limited by law or constitution, the concentration of power in a single executive is inherently problematic, requiring a robust legislative branch to balance it. Term limits thus neuter a legislature’s ability to mount a muscular challenge to a governor or president grasping for excess power. . . .
For people who’ve never worked in politics or held elective office — which is most of us — term limits sound like a quick and easy answer for the complex problems of corruption and congressional dysfunction. But the only truly reasonable place for term limits to be applied are to the presidency (which we’ve already done) and the unelected members of the Supreme Court (18 years is generally suggested as an appropriate limit to their terms).
So, the next time you hear some politician or TV pundit proclaiming that term limits are the “best solution” to the “problem” of corruption or congressional dysfunction, consider their real agenda.
Unless they’re simply naïve or cynical, it’ll almost always be that they are or once were (before Trump) a Republican and just can’t help themselves.
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