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NATIONAL POLL By CNN/SSRS

Pres. Trump Approve: 36% (-27) Disapprove: 63% —— • White: 45-55 (-10) • Black: 21-79 (-58) • Hispanic: 22-77 (-55) — • GOP: 82-18 (+64) • Dem: 5-95 (-90) • Indie: 26-73 (-47) — • College: 28-71 (-43) • No college: 41-58 (-17) --- • Age 18-34: 25-74 (-49) • Age 35-49: 35-64 (-29) • Age 50-64: 46-53 (-7) • Age 42-58 (-16) — • White College: 32-68 (-36) • White no college: 54-46 (+8) — • Men: 40-60 (-20) • Women: 33-66 (-33) https://

Newsweek - A survey by The Washington Post, ABC News and Ipsos, found that 60 percent of U.S. adults disapprove of the president while 39 percent approve of him, leaving him with a net approval rating of -21 percentage points.

Student loan defaults leap

Newsweek - Student loan delinquency has climbed to roughly 25 percent of borrowers with payments due during the first year of the current Trump administration, according to new analysis.

Researchers from The Century Foundation and Protect Borrowers said the sharp rise in missed payments, nearly triple the pre-coronavirus pandemic rate, has pushed millions into default risk and lowered credit scores, warning of broader financial fallout for households and colleges facing higher nonpayment rates. 

More than 42 million Americans hold student loan debts, according to the Education Data Initiative.

The analysis estimated nearly 9 million borrowers, about one in five, are in default, exposing them to potential wage garnishment and tax refund offsets, though some federal collection tools have been paused.

Being in default on a student loan generally means you have failed to make payments for an extended period and the loan is considered seriously delinquent. For most federal student loans issued by the U.S. Department of Education, a borrower enters default after 270 days, about nine months, of nonpayment.

The delinquency rate for borrowers with payments due reached about 25 percent, nearly three times the 2019 rate, after the end of the pandemic-era protections and subsequent policy changes during 2025. 

If AI makes human labor obsolete, who decides who gets to eat?

Judge Bars Release of Special Counsel Report on Trump’s Mishandling of Documents

NY Times - A Trump-appointed federal judge on Monday permanently barred the Justice Department from releasing a report by the special counsel Jack Smith detailing President Trump’s mishandling of reams of classified documents after he left the White House in 2021.

The ruling by the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, was her latest effort in the past several months to keep the public from seeing Mr. Smith’s sprawling report — one of the most significant parts of his twin prosecutions of Mr. Trump that has yet to see the light of the day.

The order, issued from Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., slammed Mr. Smith for the “brazen stratagem” of drafting his report even after Judge Cannon had dismissed the classified documents case in July 2024 and found that he had been improperly appointed to his post as special counsel.

Money

NY Times - Washington is one of just nine states that does not tax income, and over the years, that has been a lure for people eager to live in a place with socially liberal policies and the culture of a progressive state — but the tax code of a more conservative one.

“It’s who we are,” said John Braun, the Republican leader in the state senate.

Yet last week, in a sign that frustration with the super rich might be rising, even in the state where Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates made their fortunes, the State Senate approved what supporters and opponents alike call the “millionaires tax,” a proposed 9.9 percent annual tax on personal earnings over $1 million, enough to bring in $3.7 billion a year.

Members of the state House must now decide whether to embrace the tax — and the fundamental shift it represents in how Washington pays for schools, health care and other public services — before their 2026 legislative session ends on March 12.

Hospitals shutting down gender intervention programs for minors

Patriotwise - Major hospitals across America are shutting down controversial gender intervention programs for minors as President Trump’s executive order protecting children from irreversible medical procedures finally brings accountability to an industry that has operated with little oversight for years.

NYU Langone Health permanently ended its Transgender Youth Health Program for minors, citing regulatory pressures and federal funding threats

Multiple hospitals including Connecticut Children’s Medical Center and Rady Children’s Health have halted or wound down similar programs

Trump isn't just conservative; he's confused

Sam Smith -  A curious thing about Donald Trump is that he doesn't make much sense.  And given the drop in his polls he's not fooling the public about it. 

Unfortunately, the mainstream press favors power over performance and thus hasn't paid much attention to the fact that some of Trump's alleged solutions to the world's problems are more than a little bizarre. 

For example, according to Pew Research 20% of our workers in January 2025 were immigrants along with 15% of all US residents. As a general principle you don't run a compaign based on pissing off 15-20% of voters unless they always vote against candidates like you anyway. 

Anothe irony about Trump's war on immigrants is that it has helped create ancillary issues that aren't doing him any good, such as tariffs and ICE. And instead of recognizing that those of us who aren't Indians come from families that immigrated here at some point, Trump seems to be saying that our great great somethings shouldn't have been allowed here either. 

We don't have to determine whether Trump has a physical illness that leads to such mental oddities or whether he is just a  jerk. We simply have to keep in mind that he makes little sense on both key and trivial matters  and remind our friends and others that it doesn't help to have a jerk in the White House. 

Weather

The Hill - Millions remain under a blizzard warning from a powerful winter storm that struck the Northeast, forcing considerable disruptions. More than 250,000 households were without power as of Monday morning, according to poweroutage.us.

500 Passengers Forced to Spend Night on Grounded Planes After Heavy Snow Cancels Flights and Airport Staff Go Home

Bloomberg - Delta Air Lines said it expects to suspend operations at New York’s LaGuardia and JFK as well as Boston Logan International Airport into Tuesday.

ICE Tripled Its Reliance on Microsoft in Last Six Months, Leaked Files Reveal

+972 Magazine - U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has relied extensively on Microsoft’s cloud storage and artificial intelligence products while escalating its campaign of mass arrests and deportations in recent months, files obtained by +972 Magazine, Local Call, and The Guardian reveal.

ICE more than tripled the amount of data it holds on Microsoft servers between July 2025 and January 2026, at the same time as the agency’s crackdown on migrants broke new records and sparked mass protests across the United States. Whereas last July the agency was storing around 400 terabytes of data in Microsoft’s cloud platform, Azure, by the end of January that had risen to almost 1,400 terabytes — equivalent to approximately 490 million images.

The leaked documents do not specify the kinds of information stored by ICE on Microsoft servers, but they do indicate that the agency has used Azure to house large amounts of data, in addition to making use of AI tools that search and analyze images and videos.

ICE employs a powerful arsenal of surveillance technology, reportedly using facial recognition software, drones, phone location tracking, mobile spyware, and even tapping school cameras. The leaked documents show ICE is using Microsoft’s AI video analysis tools including Azure AI Video Indexer and Azure Vision, which enable customers to analyze images, read text, and detect certain words, faces, emotions, and objects in audio and video files.

Confession of a theoretical physicist

Vijay Balasuvramanian, Nautilus  - I remember the day when, at the age of 7, I realized that I wanted to figure out how reality worked. My mother and father had just taken us shopping at a market in Calcutta. On the way back home, we passed through a dimly lit arcade where a sidewalk bookseller was displaying his collection of slim volumes. I spotted an enigmatic cover with a man looking through a microscope; the words “Famous Scientists” were emblazoned on it, and when I asked my parents to get it for me, they agreed. As I read the chapters, I learned about discoveries by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek of the world of microscopic life, by Marie Curie about radioactivity, by Albert Einstein about relativity, and I thought, “My God, I could do this, too!” By the time I was 8, I was convinced that everything could be explained, and that I, personally, was going to do it.

Decades have passed, and I am now a theoretical physicist. My job is to work out how all of reality works, and I take that mission seriously, working on subjects ranging from the quantum theory of gravity to theoretical neuroscience. But I must confess to an increasing sense of uncertainty, even bafflement. I am no longer sure that working out what is “real” is possible, or that the reality that my 7-year-old self conceived of even exists, rather than being simply unknown. Perhaps reality is genuinely unknowable: Things exist and there is a truth about them, but we have no way of finding it out. Or perhaps the things we call “real” are called into being by their descriptions but do not independently exist.

Iran

Bloomberg - Donald Trump said he’s considering limited military strikes on the Islamic Republic to pressure it into signing a new nuclear deal. If that effort fails, he’ll consider a bigger attack aimed at driving the country’s leaders from power, the New York Times reported. The two sides are set to resume talks in Geneva on Thursday. Meanwhile, protests have resurfaced at several Iranian universities for a second day.

Global leaders dreaming of a US-free world order. Do they stand a chance?

The Guardian -  Donald Trump came to believe that every other country treated the US as a chump, free riding on its security guarantee and abusing its open market – no matter that the United States set most of the rules underpinning the postwar architecture, and broke them when it suited its interests, or that the rules enabled an era of remarkable American prosperity.

In an act of bravery not often experienced among the jet setters in the Swiss Alps, the 

Canadian prime minister challenged every other country to accept the loss of American leadership and build an alternative global architecture that might bypass the great powers intent on bending everybody else to their will.

“Great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited,” he said. “You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.”

The analysis is catching like wildfire. A couple of weeks after Carney’s speech, the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, opened the Munich Security Conference arguing that “the international order based on rights and rules is currently being destroyed”. He warned that the “leadership claim of the US is being challenged, perhaps already lost”.

The report prepared for the gathering in Munich articulated well the general feeling of America’s (erstwhile) friends. “For generations, US allies were not just able to rely on American power but on a broadly shared understanding of the principles underpinning the international order,” it noted. Washington has betrayed that understanding. “As a result, more than 80 years after construction began, the US-led post-1945 international order is now under destruction.”

How Trump's tariff chaos is affecting UK

Richard Rumbelow, Make UK, - Many UK exporters will be concerned at the further prospect of trade disruption to goods entering the US market. Stability, certainty and clarity are key cornerstones for global trade policy and for UK businesses who plan, invest and conduct trade with partners across the global economy, and particularly with customers in the United States. It’s now important UK exporters work with their US importers to maintain their trading relationships by working through customs guidance as it emerges

Given many companies will have goods at sea clarity is now urgently required on how UK exports will be treated on arrival into the United States, with the imperative being to protect the benefits of the bi-lateral trade framework that was concluded with the United States last year. It is vital government continues to seek gradual reductions in tariffs and other opportunities and seeks a strengthening of trade relations from the current position.

More than 100 lawsuits filed against Trump regime in past year

The Guardian - Donald Trump’s second term has been marked by a rollback of civil liberties.

He has terminated all federal diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility offices and positions. He has declared that the government will only refer to individuals by their biological “sex” instead of their gender identity. He has also set a sweeping anti-immigration agenda, attempting to end birthright citizenship, pausing refugee admissions and increasing immigration enforcement operations around the country.

But many Americans have been using the courts to fight back.

More than a hundred lawsuits were filed against the Trump administration over the past year by people and organizations to restore some of these rights. Among them are Fernando Viera Reyes, who says he was denied proper medical care in immigration detention; Zaya Perysian, who was denied a passport with her correct gender identity; Mohsen Mahdawi, who was detained by immigration officials over exercising his first amendment right to protest over the war in Gaza; and Jon Carlson, a pastor whose place of worship has become a target for immigration enforcement seeking to detain undocumented people.   More on these lawsuits

Reyes, Perysian, Mahdawi and Carson spoke to the Guardian about why it’s so important to fight back, not just to protect their own rights, but the rights of millions of others in the US.

Tariffs

NBC News - The European Parliament halted the ratification process of a sweeping trade deal with the United States, the latest fallout from the Supreme Court striking down most of President Donald Trump's tariffs. The deal reached between Trump and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last July would have eliminated what the White House called "trade barriers" in a variety of sectors for American exporters. The administration hailed the deal as a "generational modernization of the transatlantic alliance." NPR - President Trump announced Saturday that he plans to raise global tariffs from 10% to 15%. The move comes one day after the Supreme Court struck down the president's use of emergency powers to impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. After the ruling, the president claimed he had the authority to impose a global tariff using some sections of the Trade Act of 1974.

These sections are more cumbersome than the sweeping powers Trump previously claimed, NPR’s Mara Liasson tells Up First. Some tariffs will only last 150 days before Congress has to weigh in. Others could be permanent, but require months of investigation. The high court’s ruling meant that Republicans wouldn’t have to defend Trump’s extremely unpopular tariffs, Liasson says. But now, Congress will have to show its loyalty to the president by voting to impose new tariffs, which they aren’t interested in doing. A vote would force lawmakers to take more ownership of a policy that voters believe has driven up their costs.  China has been a major target of Trump’s tariffs. NPR’s Jennifer Pak, who is in Shanghai, reports that Chinese businesses that deal with the U.S. are cautiously optimistic about the Supreme Court’s ruling. They have dealt with uncertainty since Trump’s first term. The president has used tariffs against China as a threat to lower the trade deficit, stop intellectual property theft and more. Trump is expected to visit China in the coming weeks. Friday’s Supreme Court decision, in theory, has now weakened his hand, Pak says.

Immigration

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"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerated the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power." - Franklin D. Roosevelt

Does Trump Have the Legal Authority to Strike Iran? An Expert Explains

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Polls

InteractivePolls

NATIONAL POLL: ABC/WP/Ipsos Pres. Trump Approve: 39% (-2) Disapprove: 60% (+1) Trump's net approval on key issues Border Security: -3 Economy: -16 Immigration: -18 (new low) Tariffs: -30 Inflation: -33

2028 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION Gavin Newsom: 46.2% JD Vance: 40.3% Not sure: 13.5% — With leans Gavin Newsom: 53.2% JD Vance: 46.8% —— • Big Data https://bigdatapoll.com/blog/gavin-newsom-leads-jd-vance-for-first-time-in-tracking-poll/…

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Progressives in the presidential race

California Governor Gavin Newsom wants to ban teens under the age of 16 from social media.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom told CNN’s Dana Bash that his son opposes a presidential run, texting him, “I’m too young. You need to spend more time with us.”

9% of American adults define themselves as other than heterosexual

Newsweek - An estimated 9 percent of U.S. adults identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or something other than heterosexual, according to Gallup’s latest national polling. The figure, based on interviews conducted throughout 2025, is essentially unchanged from the previous year but remains more than double the share recorded when Gallup first began tracking LGBTQ+ identification in 2012.

Tennessee bill would allow women's death penalty for aborrtion

Tennessean  - Two Tennessee Republicans are seeking to impose the death penalty on women who have abortions, requiring the same penalties for women “involved in the homicide of her own unborn child” as defendants charged with homicide.....The bill was referred to the House Population Health Subcommittee and is not yet on the calendar to be considered

What companies support Trump?

Barack Obama Would Be the Perfect Responder to the State of the Union Address

Jim Smith, Talking Turkey -  Former President Obama has indicated that he’s willing to be more public about his criticism of President Trump, and his muted but articulate response to Trump’s State of the Union address would be perfect in so many ways. First, it would be an articulate and sophisticated response to Trump’s lies. Second, it would remind America what “presidential” sounds like.