Thursday, March 12, 2026
Most In U.S. Want Government To Reduce The Wealth Gap
The chart above reflects the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between March 6th and 9th of a nationwide sample of 1,563 adults (including 1,405 registered voters). The margin of error is 3.4 points for adults and 3.2 points for registered voters.
Public Opposes Trump On Iran (And Wants Iranians To Choose Their Leaders - Not Trump)
The charts above reflect the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between March 6th and 9th of a nationwide sample of 1,563 adults (including 1,405 registered voters). The margin of error is 3.4 points for adults and 3.2 points for registered voters.
The Most Tragic Failure Is That The U.S. Is Being Led By A Rogue President
From Robert Reich:
As we reach the 12th day of the war in Iran — with death and destruction rippling throughout the Middle East — it’s important to bear in mind where the real failure of this lies.
So far, at least 2,000 people have been killed, including 175 Iranian schoolchildren, and seven American service members. At least 140 U.S. service members have been wounded, several critically. The final tallies on both sides will almost certainly be far higher.
Soaring oil and gas prices in the U.S. are inevitably hitting the poor and working class much harder than the affluent.
We’re spending huge resources on this war — so far, roughly $1 billion per day, or $41,666,667 per hour, $11,574 per second.
These are resources that could be better spent improving the lives of the American people.
Americans need health care. Affordable housing. Child care and elder care. Better schools. We want our basic needs met. But the government has said we “can’t afford” these things.
Yet supposedly we can afford nearly $1 trillion for the Pentagon. Trump now says the Pentagon needs $500 billion more.
The tragic failure at the center of this devastation is not that most Americans have succumbed to war fever. To the contrary, poll after poll shows that most Americans do not support this war.
In fact, this is the first war America has entered in modern times without a majority in support.
The real failure is that the richest and most powerful nation in the world — the nation that has led the world since World War II and that established the postwar international order emphasizing multilateralism, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law — is now being led by a rogue president who rejects all these values.
One man has decided for himself to make this war. One lone person has initiated this mayhem without gaining Congress’s approval, without getting the approval of allies, without even articulating a clear reason for it.
The lone person who sits in the Oval Office has no endgame for this war, hasn’t given a consistent answer for what “victory” will require, and doesn’t appear to know what he’s doing.
One single individual is now wreaking havoc — lives lost, energy prices soaring, our treasury being emptied, our own needs overlooked, and potential future terrorism unleashed on this and other lands for years to come.
This war marks an overwhelming failure of American democracy. It is ultimately our failure.
Wednesday, March 11, 2026
U.S. Public Still Opposes Trump's War With Iran
The charts above are from the Quinnipiac University Poll -- done between March 6th and 8th of a nationwide sample of 1,002 registered voters, with a 3.8 point margin of error.
Most Voters Think Artificial Intelligence Risks Outweigh Benefits
The chart above reflects the results of the NBC News Poll -- done between February 27th and March 3rd of a nationwide sample of 1,000 registered voters, with a 3.1 point margin of error.
A Majority Of Americans See Their Fellow Citizens As Morally Bad
A survey released last Thursday by the Pew Research Center finds that 53 percent of American adults describe the morality and ethics of our fellow citizens as “bad” (ranging from “somewhat bad” to “very bad”).
This puts Americans way out front of other nations on the we-hate-our-compatriots scale. In the 24 other countries polled by Pew, most people called their fellow citizens somewhat good or very good.
At the opposite end of the spectrum from the United States is Canada, where 92 percent say their fellow Canadians are good, while just 7 percent say they’re bad.
Why are we so down on our fellow citizens? It may have something to do with our politics. . . .
Once Trump took office, dislike of our fellow citizens soared.
Before he entered the White House, 47 percent of Republican and 35 percent of Democrats said people in the opposing party were “immoral.”
By 2022, after years of Trump’s venom: 72 percent of Republicans and 63 percent of Democrats called people in the opposing party “immoral.”
Since he’s been back in the Oval, it’s got even worse.
After Charlie Kirk was assassinated last September, Trump blamed a “radical left bunch of lunatics” for the killing. Vice President JD Vance, parroting Trump, vowed to “punish these radical leftist lunatics.”
As Democratic Senator Chris Murphy noted at the time, “Kirk’s assassination could have united Americans against political violence, but the Trump camp seems to be preparing a campaign to destroy opponents.”
When a federal judge ruled in March that Trump didn’t have authority to send National Guard troops into Los Angeles, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly — in language typical of what we hear from the Trump regime — called him a “rogue judge” and claimed Trump “saved Los Angeles” from “deranged leftist lunatics sowing mass chaos.”
After ICE agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Kristi Noem, Trump’s former secretary of Homeland Security, called the two of them “domestic terrorists.”
Since then, the Department of Homeland Security has sent out a steady stream of tweets — catching some 380 million views on X — claiming that its agents have been under attack by U.S. citizens whom it describes as “terrorists,” “rioters,” and “agitators,” and asserting, among other things, that “Americans are fed up with rampant criminality ruling this country.”
Meanwhile, Trump has been threatening to cut off funding for various programs that help poor Americans, by vilifying them as “fraudsters” and withholding money from Democratic-led states.
A few days ago, Vance charged that Medicaid and food assistance programs were rife with fraud perpetrated by “bad actors in our society … who take the goodwill and trust of the American taxpayers and use it against us, [who] decide to make themselves rich.”
For almost a decade, Trump has told us that certain other Americans should be feared: among them, Democrats, liberals, Mexican Americans, Muslim Americans, Black Americans, transgender people, and LGBTQ+ people. All are presumed to be the “enemy within.”
As Barack Obama said at Jesse Jackson’s memorial on March 6, “Each day, we’re told by those in high office to fear each other and to turn on each other, and that some Americans count more than others, and that some don’t even count at all.”
Is it any surprise that a majority of Americans now describe the morality of other Americans as “bad?”
But I can’t help wonder: How much of our distrust and resentment is the byproduct of something more fundamental that’s been unfolding in America for over four decades — something Trump took exploited but that would have invited a hateful demagogue like Trump eventually: the increasing concentration of wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands?
Trump took advantage of anger and distrust that had been building for years — at a system increasingly seen as rigged against most of us.
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