A new poll from FairVote & finds 65% of IL Dems support ranked choice voting
March 21, 2026
Meanwhile. . .
Polls
A new Daily Mail/JL Partners poll shows Trump’s approval rating slipping to 42 percent, the lowest level recorded in that survey series—a development that comes at a precarious moment for Republicans heading toward the 2026 midterm elections.
Thr WRECK America Act
Chris Bowers, Bowers News Media - Under current Senate rules, legislation not passed through the reconciliation process (the SAVE Act is not eligible to be passed through reconciliation) is subject to the 60-vote cloture rule commonly known as the filibuster. Republicans only have 53 votes in the Senate, and only one Democrat is even considering supporting it. Plus, there are actually some Republicans who oppose it, such as Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Mitch McConnell. While Senate rules could be changed with a simple 51-vote majority, Republicans are nowhere close to achieving that, according to Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune.
Will Vance run?
Headline USA - Vice President JD Vance has been widely assumed to be the frontrunner to be the Republican presidential candidate in 2028, but sources say backlash from the Iran war and an impending new baby might be giving him second thoughts. “While the political impact of the war could be significant, Vance has maintained in recent private conversations that he hasn’t yet decided whether he will seek the presidential nomination for 2028,” the Washington Post reported Thursday, citing two people who’ve talked to Vance about the matter.
“One of those people cited Vance’s fourth child, due this summer, and said the vice president has put a priority on his family life and is unlikely to make a final decision until he and Usha Vance see how another baby affects their lives.”
Immigration
New Republic - President Donald Trump is reportedly realizing that his sweeping, murderous “mass deportation” policy might not be a good idea. The Wall Street Journal wrote Thursday that after speaking with advisers—and his wife—Trump has begun to cool on the draconian campaign. He’s complained about the bad press he received under Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino and former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and chief of staff Susie Wiles and border czar Tom Homan have apparently attempted to temper the federal militia optics of ICE and Customs and Border Protection. Trump has apparently realized the negative connotation of “mass deportations” and wants Republicans to talk more about “criminals.”
Donald Trump
Ralph Nader - Unstable Tyrant Trump is running out of lies, fantasies, and promises to break. An NBC interview of a Pennsylvania woman next to a gas station signals the trend. The reporter asked her what she would say to President Trump. She answered: “You are a worthless pile of s—”. He then asked her how many times she voted for him. She replied: “Three times. That was my bad. Apparently, I’m an idiot.”
Trump regime and the law
Jon Passantino - On Friday afternoon, a federal judge delivered a stinging rebuke to Pete Hegseth’s escalating war on the press—striking down the Pentagon’s sweeping effort to control who gets to report the news.
In a 40-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman ruled that the draconian press credentialing policy engineered by Hegseth and his leadership team, turning the Pentagon into a cozy safe space hidden from scrutiny, was flatly unconstitutional. The judge highlighted Donald Trump’s foreign wars and the importance of reporting for the public’s understanding of the entanglements.
“Especially in light of the country's recent incursion into Venezuela and its ongoing war with Iran, it is more important than ever that the public have access to information from a variety of perspectives about what its government is doing—so that the public can support government policies, if it wants to support them; protest, if it wants to protest; and decide based on full, complete, and open information who they are going to vote for in the next election,” Friedman wrote.
Friday's ruling was a long time coming and Status has been documenting the road to it. Since last spring, we've tracked Hegseth's systematic campaign against press independence step by step: the revocation of hallway access, the unprecedented credentialing restrictions, the banishment of journalists who refused to comply, and their replacement with MAGA influencers cosplaying as reporters.
Economic Development, Climate Justice, and Prosperous Communities in the 21st Century
Greg Gerritt - Climate change is not like other political and transient disasters. Delay just makes it worse, and makes it much harder to repair the damage when the political will is found. Our inability to truly integrate the changing climate and what we need to do to avoid disasters into our economic planning simply follows from all of the other idiotic things we do when the ruling class uses neoliberalism and running the economy for the oligarchy as our economic development strategy. Here is the manual for prosperity on the planet we actually inhabit, not the one the rich imagine.
Putin
Hartmann Report - Putin offered to stop sharing intel with Iran if the US just cuts off Ukraine so he can kill as many people there as possible. This is going to be a tough one for Trump, since he’s been Putin’s guy for decades and pretty much always does exactly what Putin tells him to; he’s even hung Putin’s picture in the White House along with the pictures of past American presidents as a gesture of groveling homage. But there’s still strong support for Ukraine in Congress, even among a majority of Republicans, and, as Politico notes: “[T]he sheer existence of such a proposal has sparked concern among European diplomats, who worry Moscow is trying to drive a wedge between Europe and the U.S. at a critical moment for transatlantic relations.”
As if Putin hasn’t already succeeded — with his regular secret phone calls with Trump — in driving a wedge between the US and Europe. Trump is now constantly trash-talking the EU, NATO, and Zelenskyy using language that’s almost always nearly identical to Putin’s. Trump thought he was a great war tactician and strategist and could, with his fellow corrupt politician Bibi Netanyahu, try what no American president had before been stupid enough to do and attack Iran. It backfired (as, apparently, General Caine predicted) and now he’s frantic, so get ready for this to get a hell of lot messier as Trump’s now bringing a new warship and thousands of marines into the Gulf while Bibi gleefully escalates into a bloody killing spree against civilians in both Lebanon and Iran, much like he did in Gaza. Only this time, Trump and America will own this war…
Iran
NBC News - For the first time since the U.S. launched a war on Iran, this week top intelligence officials spoke publicly about the conflict. But their testimony before Congress contradicted President Donald Trump’s statements about the potential consequences and goals of the operation, challenging the White House’s effort to shape perceptions about the war.
In hearings on Wednesday and Thursday, intelligence chiefs told lawmakers that the White House was briefed about how Iran would likely retaliate against its neighbors if it came under attack, that Tehran could drive up oil prices and disrupt global supply chains, that regime change was not a goal of the war and that Israel appeared to have different objectives than Washington in the campaign. Their answers diverged from Trump’s public comments and failed to sync with some of the White House’s talking points about the widening conflict in the Middle East.
I think we’ve done the opposite. Clearly we’ve managed to raise the price of oil. Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz and threatened shipping through the strait, which raises the price of oil even more. But again, if you ask me what we’ve achieved: the problem is that the Trump administration has not really articulated any clear goals here, other than this nonsensical claim that we’re trying to prevent an Iranian nuclear weapon.
Iran was nowhere close to having the capability of producing a nuclear weapon. Our own intelligence services believe that Iran had not decided to pursue a nuclear weapon, even if they were keeping that option open. Unfortunately, I think this war could make that decision for them. So again, you ask what we’ve achieved—I think we’ve achieved, unfortunately, nothing good at all for the American people.
The Hilll - President Trump ruled out a ceasefire with Iran on Friday, telling reporters, “we’re not looking to do that.” “Look, we can have dialogue, but I don’t want to do a ceasefire,” Trump told reporters outside White House. “You don’t do a ceasefire when you’re obliterating the other side. They don’t have a navy. They don’t have an air force.”
“They don’t have any spotters. They don’t have antiaircraft. They don’t have radar, and their leaders have all been killed at every level,” he added.
March 20, 2026
CBS News to end radio shows
Washington Post - CBS News will end its nearly century-old radio service, CBS News Radio, and cut more jobs amid a rocky turnaround effort under its new top editor, former opinion journalist Bari Weiss.
Weiss and CBS News President Tom Cibrowski announced the cuts Friday morning in a pair of internal memos, which were reviewed by The Washington Post. They said staffers losing their jobs would be notified by the end of the day.
“Today, we informed our CBS News Radio team and approximately 700 affiliated stations that we will end the service on May 22, 2026,” wrote Weiss and Cibrowski, who have led the network since parent company Paramount Skydance acquired Weiss’s online publication, the Free Press, in October and named Weiss editor in chief.
“Unfortunately, this decision means that all positions within the CBS News Radio team are being eliminated.”
WRECK America Act
The SAVE America Act would be the most restrictive federal voting legislation in modern American history. Brennan Center research shows that more than 21 million Americans lack ready access to the documents the bill requires, roughly half of Americans don’t have a passport, and millions lack a certified copy of their birth certificate. The bill would also affect millions of women whose married names don’t match the names on their birth certificates or passports, requiring additional documentation just to update a registration after moving or changing a name. Younger voters and voters of color would be disproportionately affected.
Critically, the bill doesn’t just apply to new registrants. Any time a voter updates their registration, such as changing an address or switching a party affiliation, they must re-present these documents in person to an election official. Online and mail-in registration, which together account for the vast majority of Americans’ registrations today, would be effectively eliminated. The Campaign Legal Center describes this as functionally creating a new poll tax, requiring you to pay for documents you may not have, travel to an elections office that may be hours away, and do so before a deadline most people don’t track.
The bill also places election officials themselves at legal risk, with criminal penalties of up to five years for registering an applicant who fails to present the correct documentation, even if that applicant turns out to be a fully eligible citizen. It would require every state to submit its voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security, with no restrictions on how that data could be used thereafter. The Center for American Progress notes that if signed into law, it would take effect overnight, making the 2026 elections “practically unadministrable” for the local officials tasked with running them.
Like the redistricting arms race, the SAVE Act is a symptom of a deeper structural failure. The United States has no coherent national framework for voter registration. Rules vary dramatically by state, the burden of registration falls almost entirely on individual voters rather than the government, and the system is therefore perpetually vulnerable to manipulation by whoever controls the levers of election administration at any given moment.
Polls
How much do you think the following descriptions apply to Donald Trump? (% of U.S. adult citizens)
(Those who say a lot)
Arrogant: 65%
Opportunistic: 57%
Reckless: 56%
Dishonest: 54%
Corrupt: 54%
Hypocritical: 53%
Divisive: 51%
Insincere: 49%
Racist: 48%
Ineffective: 46%
Uninformed: 44%
A strong leader: 38%
Qualified: 35%
Intelligent: 35%
Competent: 34%
Authentic: 31%
Charismatic: 29%
A good communicator: 28%
Honest: 27%
Compassionate: 23%
Inspirational: 23%
Likable: 22%
Reuters - Some 65% of Americans believe President Trump will order troops into a large-scale ground war in Iran but only 7% support the idea, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll
A national sampling of 1,152 Democrats and left-leaning independents were asked which of 13 prominent names in the Democratic Party they would support in the 2028 presidential primary, and 31% chose Harris.
Harris’ numbers generally remain little changed from a similar October poll .... Harris also lost some support from female voters but gained some from male voters. Thirty percent of males surveyed chose Harris, compared to 28% in October, while 33% of females polled selected Harris, compared to 36% in October.
'The former vice president was least supported among respondents age 65 and older, with only 17% indicating they would vote for her. California Gov. Gavin Newsom bested Harris with this group, securing 21%.
As in October, however, the next-largest group of those surveyed — 18% of Democrats and 21% of independents — indicated they weren’t sure who they would choose. Otherwise, Newsom was the second-most popular candidate, with 16% support, followed by former Secretary of Transportation under the Biden administration, Pete Buttigieg, at 7%.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Buttigieg were neck and neck, as they were in October, with Ocasio-Cortez nabbing 6% of respondents’ support overall but falling from third to fourth among the names provided.
Warning over Social Security funds
Newsweek - A new warning over Social Security’s long-term finances says the program’s funds are on an unsustainable path, with analysts urging policymakers to better align revenues and spending to avoid steep benefit cuts.
A new analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) warned that Social Security’s retirement trust fund is projected to become insolvent in fiscal year 2032, triggering steep automatic benefit reductions if Congress does not take action.
The group’s brief—drawing on the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) latest baseline—said that aligning Social Security’s spending and revenues would ultimately strengthen the nation’s fiscal and economic outlook, and that abrupt, across-the-board cuts at insolvency would be highly disruptive for retirees.
A new analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) warned that Social Security’s retirement trust fund is projected to become insolvent in fiscal year 2032, triggering steep automatic benefit reductions if Congress does not take action.
The group’s brief—drawing on the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) latest baseline—said that aligning Social Security’s spending and revenues would ultimately strengthen the nation’s fiscal and economic outlook, and that abrupt, across-the-board cuts at insolvency would be highly disruptive for retirees.
Donald Trump
Newsweek - President Donald Trump has slipped down Forbes’ list of the world’s real-time billionaires after losing nearly $54 million–or 0.87 percent of his net worth—over the past week, as the stock for his social media company plunged.
Trump Media & Technology Group’s (TMTG) stock price plummeted to a record low of $8.66 a share on Thursday, according to Yahoo Finance data, down from over $20 a year earlier. The company also revealed earlier this month that it lost $712.1 million last year, generating only $3.7 million in revenue.
That is a lot worse than the figures the company reported in 2024, when Trump’s social media group made slightly less ($3.6 million) but lost far less money ($409 million).
Since his decision to run in the 2016 presidential election, Trump has centered his political identity on his financial success and his status as a well-known businessman and real estate mogul. In 2015, he boasted about being “really rich,” claiming a fortune of $9 billion, which more than doubled the $4.1 billion estimated by Forbes at the time, and suggesting he would use his financial savviness to make the country rich.
The president’s net worth has reportedly soared since his return to the White House in January 2025, with New Yorker writer David Kirkpatrick stating in an episode of NPR’s Planet Money that Trump has made almost $4 billion dollars “off of the presidency,” in the past year.
Weather
Newsweek - "Hazardous" winter weather could dump up to 18 inches of snow across three states, the National Weather Service (NWS) has warned, creating dangerous travel conditions and sharply reduced visibility. Alerts include winter storm warnings and winter weather advisories spanning large parts of Alaska, northern New York, and Vermont, with impacts ranging from heavy snowfall and blowing snow to slippery roads during peak travel hours.
Alcohol consumption & mortality
Newsweek - Researchers examined alcohol consumption patterns and mortality outcomes among 340,924 participants in the UK Biobank, a health database that tracked adults between 2006 and 2022.
Participants completed dietary questionnaires detailing how often and how much alcohol they typically consumed alcoholic beverages. Consumption was measured in grams of pure alcohol per day and per week...'
Participants were grouped into four categories based on intake. Those who drank less than 20 grams per week—about one-and-a-half standard drinks—were classified as never- or occasional drinkers. Low consumption was defined as between 20 grams per week and 20 grams per day for men, and between 20 grams per week and 10 grams per day for women. Moderate consumption ranged from 20 to 40 grams per day for men and 10 to 20 grams per day for women. High consumption exceeded 40 grams per day for men and 20 grams per day for women.
The findings showed that high alcohol intake was clearly associated with higher mortality. Compared with never- or occasional drinkers, heavy drinkers were 24 percent more likely to die from any cause, 36 percent more likely to die from cancer and 14 percent more likely to die from heart disease.
However, differences emerged with low and moderate alcohol drinkers. At these levels, consuming spirits, beer or cider was linked to a significantly higher risk of death than drinking never or occasionally. Wine stood out as an exception, as low to moderate wine consumption was associated with a significantly lower risk of death compared with abstaining or drinking occasionally.
Researchers also showed that moderate wine drinkers had a 21 percent lower risk of dying from heart-related causes than never- or occasional drinkers. In contrast, even low intake of spirits, beer or cider was associated with a 9 percent higher risk of cardiovascular death.
Word
The Nation - "It would be hard to describe the US as having a free press,” Jim Naureckas, longtime editor at the media-criticism organization Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting told me earlier this week. “The administration is openly calling for the punishment of media outlets based on the content of their coverage.” Even worse than the threats, he argued, was “the manipulation of regulations to concentrate media ownership in the hands of friends of the president. To have an openly authoritarian president picking and choosing which billionaires are going to have the stranglehold over information is a new level of censorship.”
Conflating Israel and Jews
Aaron Regunberg - In an ideal world, a backlash against Israel would be just that—nobody would conflate the Israeli government with the Jewish people as a whole. Americans who are rightly angry about what they’ve been seeing from Netanyahu’s regime should say, “Israel’s government killed tens of thousands of children in Gaza” or “Israel’s government dragged us into a nightmare conflict with Iran” or “Israel’s government murdered my family.” In an ideal world, nobody would say, “The Jews did these things.”
But we don’t live in that ideal world. And that’s in part because of the radically pro-Israel posture of the majority of mainstream Jewish institutions in our country.
These groups—of course the political organizations like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Anti-Defamation League, but also local community institutions (Jewish federations, professional groups, campus leaders, media outlets, and more)—have spent the last three years aggressively declaring that criticism of Israel equates to antisemitism, that anti-Zionist Jews are not real Jews, and that the American Jewish community will stand with Israel no matter what crimes the state commits. In short, they have been insisting that “Israel” and “Jews” should be conflated—or in the words of Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL president, “You cannot take the Zion out of Jewish identity, you cannot take the Zionism out of Judaism.”
Given that chorus from the very organizations and leaders who claim they represent the Jewish community, you don’t have to be a Nazi to start ascribing the Israeli regime’s horrifying conduct to all Jews. You just have to be a relatively low-information gentile who’s not familiar with the point of view of the growing majority of actual American Jews, who are increasingly critical of Israel but whose views are suppressed by our mainline institutions.
Pro-Putin blogger turns on his leader
-A prominent Russian blogger who made a name for himself doing the Kremlin’s bidding was sent to a psychiatric hospital after publicly turning on Vladimir Putin in a shocking manifesto earlier this week. Ilya Remeslo, a lawyer and former member of a Kremlin-controlled public advisory body, gained fame by targeting critics of the Russian president, most notably opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
But for reasons unknown, Remeslo suddenly had a very public change of heart this week, posting a scathing manifesto in which he called for Putin’s ouster and demanded he be tried for war crimes...
Remeslo’s unexpected flaying of Putin came at a particularly bad time for the Russian leader, who’s facing criticism from even some longtime supporters over his perceived abandonment of Russian allies Iran and Venezuela. Remeslo also tore into Putin for waging a “dead-end” war in Ukraine that he said was being fought “solely for the sake of Putin’s complexes.”
He called for the Russian leader to be put on trial as a war criminal and thief, blasting the strongman for his repression of media freedom and the internet.
Meanwhile . .
Getting high on marijuana doesn’t seem to help with anxiety, depression, or PTSD.
Axios - The U.S. national debt passed a record $39 trillion yesterday. The debt hit $38 trillion five months ago — and $37 trillion two months before that. MORE
U.S. scholars think U.S. now falls nearly halfway between liberal democracy and dictatorship.
NPR - Three major reports this month reveal that Trump has rapidly harmed American democracy since returning to the White House. Bright Line Watch, which surveys over 500 U.S. scholars, concluded that the U.S. now falls nearly halfway between liberal democracy and dictatorship. The organization's co-directors spoke to NPR exclusively ahead of the survey's publication next week. An annual V-Dem report dropped the U.S.'s democracy ranking from 20 to 51 among 179 countries. A Freedom House report released yesterday said that among free countries, the U.S. recorded some of the largest declines in political rights and civil liberties last year.
Immigrants
Daily Beast - The Cato Institute, an independent think-tank based in D.C., published figures on Wednesday on what it calls “the largest fraud in the history of the U.S. immigration system.”
The non-profit accuses Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and outgoing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem of charging a conservative estimate of $1.3 billion to migrants in fees for visa processing and other services they have precisely zero intention of providing.
The administration is allegedly continuing to impose those costs on prospective immigrants from more than 90 countries despite the fact that they are, as a result of the Trump administration’s policies, effectively “banned from receiving immigrant visas and immigrating permanently to the United States.”
Under Rubio’s leadership, officials at the State Department have apparently even gone so far as to issue internal guidance actively prohibiting staff from informing those migrants they stand no hope of success, because “this could be seen as pre-adjudication” on their applications.
Word
“I learned early on that it is never a good idea for a nation to strip an enemy so naked of its dignity that it feels that it has nothing left to lose. It usually comes back to haunt you.” - Thomas L. Friedman, NY Times opinion columnist
Iran
The Hill - Pentagon is speeding up the deployment of thousands of additional Marines and sailors to the Middle East amid speculation that the Trump administration could send troops into Iranian territory. The 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU), made up of at least 2,200 Marines, set off from San Diego aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Boxer on Wednesday, sooner than expected, according to multiple reports.
MS NOW - As the war in Iran approaches the three-week mark with no end in sight, lawmakers on Capitol Hill are at odds over one key matter: How will this end?
For many lawmakers — supporters and skeptics alike — the answer remains elusive. Much of the uncertainty stems from Iran’s ability to dictate the pace and scope of the conflict, as well as the administration’s failure to articulate a clear endgame.
“The problem is, they have no endgame at all,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “So we now have an open-ended conflict where Iran’s goal is to drag this out and make it as painful as possible for America and our partners.”
Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., another Foreign Relations member, said he’s sat in several classified briefings on the war and has not received a clear answer on how this conflict concludes. But he still had an answer to how it ends: “badly.” MORE
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)