Bill Madden

Polls

InteractivePolls

2028 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION Harris: 49.9% (+10.5) Rubio: 39.4% — Newsom: 47.9% (+8.6) Rubio: 39.3% — AOC: 46.8% (+8.8) Rubio: 38.0% — Smith: 43.9% (+4.9) Rubio: 39.0% — H. Biden: 44.3% (+4.8) Rubio: 39.5%

@TPSIOfficial

Hunter\

StatisticUrban

Gallup's new poll finds Americans continue to sour on LGBT issues relative to 2022. The share of Americans who say: - Same-sex marriage is valid: Down 6 pts - Gay/lesbian relations morally acceptable: Down 9 pts - Changing one’s gender morally acceptable: Down 8, to just 38%

NBC News - 49% of registered voters say they prefer to see Democrats control Congress as a result of this year’s elections, compared to 44% who prefer Republican control and 7% who are unsure.

Four day work week

Congressional Insider  - Major trials of a four-day, no-pay-cut workweek report stable or higher productivity alongside sharp drops in burnout and stress. Microsoft Japan’s pilot showed roughly a 40% productivity jump after cutting Fridays, driven by fewer meetings and leaner workflows.

Large multi-company studies in the United Kingdom and elsewhere found most employers chose to keep the shorter week because performance held up or improved. Researchers warn the evidence is still early and drawn from willing “early adopter” firms, not every factory floor or hospital ward.

Voting

Newsworthy News -   Fox News reported that Republican investigators found noncitizens on New Jersey voter rolls and that a majority of those identified were affiliated with the Democratic Party.

Election-law sources say federal law prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections, but the public record cited here does not prove a statewide pattern. New Jersey officials say eligible voters should still be protected, and the state provides election-protection resources for reporting problems.

Courts strike down key set of tariffs

Newsworthy News -   Courts have struck down a key set of Trump tariffs as unlawful, triggering a potential $166 billion refund battle — and the administration is fighting hard to keep as much of that revenue as possible.

The U.S. Court of International Trade ruled certain Trump tariffs unlawful, setting up a massive refund dispute estimated at up to $166 billion.

The Trump administration is appealing the refund order, arguing relief should be limited to the specific companies that successfully sued — not every importer who paid the tariffs.

More than 330,000 importers and roughly 53 million trade entries could potentially qualify for refunds if courts side with a broad repayment approach.

Tariff revenues have been substantial — reaching roughly $30 billion per month by August 2025 — making any large-scale refund a significant fiscal event.

Word

Marriage

Primary sources include Bowling Green State University, The National Bureau of Economic Research, and USAFacts

Data for this graph comes primarily form The National Bureau of Economic Research and the United States Congress Joint Economic Committee

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Mary Trump on her uncle

Mary Trump - Here’s what I need you to understand about my uncle: Donald is a weak man.

That might seem like an odd thing to say about somebody who holds such a powerful position, but that’s exactly the danger. Every day, as Donald deteriorates – psychologically, emotionally, and cognitively – he grows more desperate, increasing the risk to the rest of us.

Strong people do not rig the system in their favor. They don’t silence critics. They don’t seek to control the institutions designed to hold them accountable. Donald does all of those things — because he has to, and he knows it. His behavior isn’t evidence of strength – it’s evidence of its absence.

The comprehensiveness with which Donald and the complicit Republican party are attempting to dismantle our institutions and take away our rights, in service to maintaining their hold on power and self‑enrichment, should also make clear what is at stake.

Under Donald’s so‑called leadership, the Republicans in Congress have stood by while our nation’s alliances have become strained; illegal wars have been started; and our institutions have been weakened and, in some cases, dismantled entirely.

I believe we are going to prevail. But when corrupt leaders like Donald and the sycophantic enablers in his inner circle go unchecked or unchallenged, they can do enormous damage. The antidote is to assemble a coalition of people who refuse to look away and are willing to take action.

Immigration

NPR - For decades, the Small Business Administration has granted loans to immigrants who are legal permanent residents in the United States.  But in March, the U.S. small-business agency stopped approving loans to firms that are not fully owned by U.S. citizens, a first in its history. 

Congressional Insider  -  A retired National Guard veteran says immigration agents detained his Honduran wife during a routine check-in in Dallas, leaving their family in shock. Homeland Security says she entered the country illegally and has a long-standing deportation order, showing how old cases now drive new arrests.  

The veteran says his wife returned in 2018 so their U.S.-born son could get serious medical care, highlighting real family and health pressures.  This case reflects a wider Trump-era shift, where spouses of service members are no longer shielded and both sides feel the system serves elites, not families.

Health

NY Times -   Doctors around the country say they are seeing more cases of serious, sometimes life-threatening illnesses that vaccines have long kept at bay, including whooping cough and bacterial infections that can cause pneumonia or meningitis.

The concern among doctors comes on the heels of a resurgence of measles nationwide, fueled by distrust in vaccines that grew during the Covid-19 pandemic, and that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Trump have amplified. Public health experts have long seen measles as a harbinger: Because it is so exceptionally contagious, it can be the first disease to spike as vaccination rates broadly decline, and a sign of more to come.

For some of these diseases, national data show clear and substantial increases in recent years; for others, the increases are small, or there are anecdotal indications from doctors on the ground of increases that public statistics don’t currently confirm.

While most children recover, these diseases aren’t benign. Many children endure extended hospitalizations. Some infections can be fatal.

ICE

The Guardian -   Raids last summer brought a massive influx of ICE and border patrol agents, as well as an unprecedented incursion of national guard troops, into Los Angeles, which is home to the largest undocumented population of any US city. Angelenos took to the streets in protest. Several immigrants died while being chased down. Lawyers scrambled to locate and help detained people before Immigration and Customs Enforcement swiftly transferred them out of state, or removed them from the country. Mutual aid networks sprang up across the region to help immigrants who were too afraid to leave their homes.

The raids also marked a turning point in the Trump administration’s immigration crusade. The caravans of agents who swept through LA, seizing workers at car washes and garment warehouses and raiding churches eventually moved on to Chicago, Portland, Washington DC and Minneapolis, escalating their tactics at each stop.

One year later, Los Angeles has been left with some scars, some open wounds. Many Angelenos’ lives have been permanently changed....

Angelenos have adapted, they have adjusted and they have persevered, said Elizabeth Brennan of the Warehouse Workers Resource Center, a local advocacy group: “But if you start to look close, it’s like we have little missing teeth, everywhere.”

Polls

2028 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION Newsom: 50.8% (+11.9) Vance: 39.6% — Harris: 49.4% (+11.1) Vance: 38.3% — AOC: 48.4% (+8.8) Vance: 39.6% — Stephen A. Smith: 46.8% (+8.0) JD Vance: 38.7% — Hunter Biden: 44.2% (+4.3) Vance: 39.9%

Interactive Polls

Postal Service Seeks to Block Mail Ballots in States Resisting Trump Demands

NY Times -    The U.S. Postal Service has proposed a new rule that would allow it to refuse to deliver mail ballots in states that don’t turn over voter rolls to the federal government.

The rule, proposed last week, is vaguely written but appears to establish broad authority for the agency to intervene in the mail voting process. It calls on states to compile lists of mail voters that Postal Service employees would use to screen ballots for eligibility. If states refuse to comply, the agency could refuse to send their mail ballots.

Democrats and voting-rights groups say the proposed rule is clear evidence that the Trump administration is trying to unconstitutionally intrude on state-run elections.

Withholding some mail services in states where voters rely heavily on mail balloting could affect millions of Americans. And most of those affected would likely be Democrats, who disproportionately vote by mail because more Republicans have been convinced by Mr. Trump’s unfounded claims that mail balloting is not reliable and invites fraud. Screening mail ballots for voter eligibility, meanwhile, would amount to an unprecedented, and potentially unconstitutional, involvement of the federal government in the administration of elections. The proposed rule is vague, however, so it is unclear how the screening would work.

Climate change

The Guardian -   The FIFA tournament is being played across 16 host cities, including 11 in the US. That includes southern cities such as Miami, Houston, Dallas and Atlanta, where temperatures during games could top 85F or even 90F.

The matches come as forecasts show much of the US facing above-normal temperatures....Heat is the deadliest form of extreme weather. Workers at previous World Cups have suffered and even died in sweltering heat, and experts warn this year’s tournament could be the hottest since the first in 1930.

Thousands of World Cup workers are expected to labor in conditions exceeding recommended heat-exposure limits, putting them at risk of heat exhaustion and other illnesses, according to a study published this week.

“If you think about the delivery people, the law enforcement, firefighters, EMTs, people selling concessions or collecting tickets, a whole network of people are going to face heat-related hazards,” said Andrew Grundstein, a geographer and climatologist at the University of Georgia who led the study.

Inside Climate News -   The starry night sky has always anchored humanity’s sense of place in a vast universe. It’s a map guiding travelers, a calendar for migrations and harvests, a wellspring of stories. But a surge of commercial satellite launches into the upper fringes of Earth’s atmosphere threatens the relationship between people and the celestial commons by crowding the night sky and polluting the atmosphere, scientists warn. 

Research shows potential impacts on Earth’s climate, including a 2025 paper led by a NASA scientist that found accumulations of metal particles from satellites disintegrating in the upper atmosphere can alter temperatures and wind flows, with ripple effects on surface climate patterns.

More than 15,000 active and inactive satellites orbit Earth, up from under 1,000 at the start of the century, and scientists estimate that hundreds of them are overhead at any given hour over North America and Europe. Now several companies want to launch huge fleets of satellites over the next 10 to 20 years, pending regulatory approval and financing.

Tales from the attic: Retrieving the republic

Thirteen years ago, and several years before Trump became president,  your editor wrote a piece about recovering from the sad condition of our republic. Here is one of a number of excerpts.

Find some useful precedents. Umbria, a section of Italy north of Rome, for example, has been remarkably indifferent to 500 years of its history. The Umbrians have been invaded, burned, or bullied by the Etruscans, Roman Empire, Goths, Longobards, Charlemagne, Pippin the Short, the Vatican, Mussolini, the German Nazis, and, most recently, the World Trade Organization. Umbria has managed not only to survive but keep its culture, a reminder of the durability of the human spirit during history's tumults, an extremely comforting thought to an American these days.

We don't have to go that far back, though. Consider the novel, 1984. Orwell saw it coming, only his timing was off a bit. The dystopia described in 1984 is so overwhelming that one almost forgets that most residents of Oceana didn't live in it. Orwell gives the breakdown. Only about two percent were in the Inner Party and another 13% in the Outer Party. The rest, numbering some 100 million, were the proles....

As we move towards - and even surpass - the fictional bad dreams of Orwell or Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World,', it is helpful to remember that these nightmares were mainly the curse of the elites and rather than those who lived in the quaint primitive manner of humans. 

This bifurcation of society into a weak, struggling, but sane, mass and a manic depressive elite that is alternately vicious and afraid, unlimited and imprisoned, foreshadows what we find today - an elite willing, on the one hand, to occupy any corner of the world and, on the other, terrified of young men with minimal weapons.

Many years ago some people built castles and walled cities and moats to keep the bad guys out. It worked for a while, but sooner or later spies and assassins figured out how to get across the moats and opponents learned how to climb the walls and send balls of fire into protected compounds. The Florentines even catapulted dead donkeys and feces over the town wall during their siege of Siena.

The people who built castles and walled cities and moats are all dead now and their efforts at security seem puny and ultimately futile as we visit their unintended monuments to the vanity of human presumption.

Yet like the castle-dwellers behind the moat, the elite is now spending huge sums to put themselves inside a prison of our own making...

Strange as it may seem, it is in this dismal dichotomy between countryside and the political and economic capitals that the hope for saving America's soul resides. The geographical and conceptual parochialism of the castle dwellers who have made this mess leaves vast acres of our land still free in which to nurture hopes, dreams, and perhaps even to foster the eventual eviction of those who have done us such wrong.

Eric Paul Gros-Dubois of Southern Methodist University has described Orwell's underclass this way:

"The Proles were the poorest of the groups, but in most regards were the most cheerful and optimistic. The Proles were also the freest of all the groups. Proles could do as they pleased."

Donald Trump

NY Times - In Iowa, Presiden Trump’s choice for governor was defeated in a Republican primary.   In Washington, Trump faced a revolt over his choice for acting director of national intelligence, while a handful of lawmakers from his party are feeling newly emboldened to buck him.

In the Middle East, the war between the United States and Iran grinded on as confusion persisted about a possible peace deal. Americans, unhappy with high gas prices, remain sour on the conflict — and on Trump.

Trump has had a rough start to the month of June, after a spring in which he won crushing victories over Republicans who have crossed him and watched his party gain an edge in the national redistricting war.

This week, he addressed the latest spike in prices, and gave a remark that doubled as a gift to Democratic ad makers. “I love it, the numbers were great,” Trump told reporters. “I love the inflation.”

Why no impeachment drive?

Ralph Nader -   The majority of people favor firing Trump and the massive number of blatant, impeachable acts by the lawless, corrupt, violent, unstable, dangerous Tyrant Trump increases by the day. If it helps the passive Democratic Party leadership, constitutional law specialists agree that were the Founding Fathers (who signed the Declaration of Independence and crafted the Constitution against would-be monarchs) here today, not one would oppose Impeachment.

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries and Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Party’s leaders in the House and Senate respectively, know all the ways Trump is wrecking America. They know that the Democrats in the House and Senate overwhelmingly want to impeach Trump. So, what’s the problem with these two men, and their weak Democratic National Committee?

Why do they constantly whine, “Now is not the Time,” “We don’t have the votes,” “Wait until after the midterm elections” which they know Trump has his Trumpsters working overtime to disrupt? These are not the real reasons; they are pretexts.  Trump, the burgeoning arsonist of our Republic and the Constitution for which it stands, should not be given one day more without being confronted by a fast-rising national impeachment movement. Along with a growing majority of Americans, the powerful New York City Bar Task Force declared in a March 9, 2026 report that Trump should be immediately impeached. This from a Bar dominated by corporate lawyers, no less.

Why then is the Party leadership so cowardly and corrupt?

1. They are antidemocratic control freaks quite comfortable contracting out their campaigns to corporate-conflicted, incompetent consultants. This is a long-building drive of political immolation. Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich said  “…The Democratic Party. It’s Dead,” after the 2000 election in a Washington Post op-ed.

These control freaks have excluded the input and voter turnout proposals of progressive citizen groups and progressive labor unions, which could have shown them how to landslide the worst GOP ever in election after election. 

2. By definition, control freaks do not like electoral mandates from the public. These Democrats want to win elections their way — raise lots of money, including from corporate PACs and Wall Street, run on a very few issues distinguishing them from the Republicans, and declare they are NOT Trump the vengeful, wild outlaw.  People want candidates who are fighters, specifically for their rights and interests not slick politicians giving them double talk.

Imagine if Democratic candidates pushed for “Medicare for All” instead of inadequate Obamacare or fought for an adequate living wage instead of not even raising the federal minimum wage when the Dems controlled both houses of Congress and had a Democratic president?

3. The Articles of Impeachment (H.Res.1155) introduced by Representative John Larson (D-CT)—viewed hostilely by Jeffries—offer a mechanism to check Trump’s unbridled destruction of our democracy and “kitchen-table” necessities.  Impeachment shines a spotlight on a host of reform agendas that the ossified Democratic leadership does not want to address, unlike restive younger Democratic candidates, some of whom are winning upset primaries. For example, Trump is starting his own wars, without the authority of Congress — a prime impeachable offense. However, AIPAC, the Israeli-government-can-do-no-wrong lobby embedded in the Party, and the giant weapons manufacturers like Boeing, General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin support Trump’s war making abuses. While pocketing campaign donations from these lobbies, the Democratic Party has no interest in Mr. Larson’s Article of Impeachment regarding Trump unconstitutionally initiating war as a belligerent or co-belligerent against Iran, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Nigeria, and Gaza without constitutionally required congressional authorization.

A similar aversion extends to the “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” clause of the Constitution. This would open up a can of worms for The Democrats because Democratic Presidents have failed to faithfully execute the law by ignoring waves of corporate crime, hundreds of billions of dollars in commercial billing fraud, including on Medicare and Medicaid,  refusing to push for adequate corporate enforcement budgets, bankrolling huge corporate welfare schemes and allowing the tax code to be turned into Swiss cheese riddled with loopholes for the rich and powerful, and supporting the construction of nuclear power plants that are targets for terrorists, hazardous, and extremely costly compared to renewable wind, solar and geothermal energy.

The Democratic leadership doesn’t want the November election to be about the concentration of power abuses by plutocrats who have been inflicting so many injustices, crimes and anxieties on the American people, reducing their livelihoods and public services...

Small wonder that the huge number of Americans who despise Trump also do not trust the Democratic Party, which the media describes month-after-month as being in disarray. Repeatedly, people ask “What does the Democratic Party stand for?” ...