Donald Trump

Futurism -   President Donald Trump’s Truth Social bid, Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), has burned through an alarming amount of cash. The company, which owns the president’s struggling far-right social media platform, issued an alarming financial report earlier this month, revealing that it had lost a staggering $712.1 million last year — while earning a pitiful $3.7 million.

The disastrous figures once again highlighted how the company, 52 percent of which is owned by Trump and which trades with a ticker of his initials DJT, has firmly cemented itself as a gauge of the president’s popularity rather than as a viable business.

As Trump’s war on Iran rages on, polls have shown that his approval rating continues to dip. A similar story is playing out at his social media company, with shares reaching an all-time low on Friday of $9.73. That’s an enormous fall from the company’s record high of just shy of $80 shortly after the company merged with a blank check acquisition company in March 2024, a move that allowed it to be publicly traded.

Economic Development, Climate Justice, and Prosperous Communities in the 21st Century

We usually treat our big problems as global or national, but here's a new book that looks at these issues from the perspective of one state...and it's well worth doiing. The whole book is readable here   

Yes, Trump is impeachable

Ralph Nader - It is long overdue for the Democrats in Congress to lay the groundwork for impeaching Trump and removing him from office. Trump provides them with the impeachable evidence openly and brazenly every day. No president in history has ever declared that “Then I have Article II, where I have the right to do anything I want as president.” No President has ever dared to say, as did Trump in an interview with Reuters on January 15, 2026, that “…when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election” and meant it.

Based on their detailed declaration against King George III in the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the Congressional safeguards in the Constitution drafted in 1787, our Founders, were they members of Congress today, would unanimously vote articles of impeachment against Trump for rampant constitutional lawlessness.

Here are seventeen articles of Impeachment against dictator Trump that many constitutional law scholars would endorse, drafted by constitutional law specialist and practitioner, Bruce Fein. (For the full text of the articles of Impeachment, here.)

ARTICLE 1—WAR POWER-MURDER-PIRACY

ARTICLE 2—MILITARIZATION OF DOMESTIC LAW ENFORCEMENT

ARTICLE 3—SERIAL UNCONSTITUTIONAL DETENTIONS AND DEPORTATIONS

ARTICLE 4—BRIBERY

ARTICLE 5—RETALIATION AGAINST CONSTITUTIONALLY PROTECTED SPEECH OR ASSOCIATION

ARTICLE 6—ABUSE OF THE PARDON POWER—SABOTAGING THE RULE OF LAW

ARTICLE 7—ILLEGALLY CRIPPLING OR DEFUNDING PROGRAMS TO PROTECT CONSUMERS, THE NEEDY, WORKERS, AND THE ENVIRONMENT

ARTICLE 8—USURPATION OF THE CONGRESSIONAL POWER OF THE PURSE

ARTICLE 9—CONTEMPT OF CONGRESS—SECRET GOVERNMENT

ARTICLE 10—PERVERTING LAW ENFORCEMENT TO PERSECUTE POLITICAL OPPONENTS AND BENEFIT FRIENDS

ARTICLE 11—SUSPENDING OR DISPENSING WITH LAWS

ARTICLE 12—FLOUTING SECTION 1 OF THE FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT

ARTICLE 13—SPECIOUS NATIONAL EMERGENCY—FOREIGN TERRORIST ORGANIZATION DECLARATIONS

ARTICLE 14—DOMESTIC AND FOREIGN EMOLUMENTS CLAUSES

ARTICLE 15—CHRONIC DECEIT AIMING AT DICTATORSHIP

ARTICLE 16—TREASON

ARTICLE 17—MEGALOMANIA-HUBRIS

Already, a growing majority of the American people want Trump Impeached. They are feeling the impact where they live, work, and raise their families of Trump’s dictatorial, corporatist regime, which is endangering, weakening, and wrecking America! 

Trump regime

NY Times - Investors in a deal to create a U.S.-controlled TikTok are set to pay $10 billion to the U.S. Treasury, the latest example of the Trump administration’s inserting the federal government into corporate deal making in unusual ways.

The fee, which the U.S. government is considering a transaction fee for its role in helping bring about the deal, will be paid by new investors in the U.S. TikTok, according to two people briefed on the matter who were not authorized to speak publicly about the transaction.

The new investors paid the Treasury roughly $2.5 billion of the fee when the deal closed in January. They plan to pay the rest of the fee in an additional set of payments, one of the people said. The investors include the software giant Oracle; MGX, an Emirati investment firm; and Silver Lake, another investment firm, which each own about 15 percent of the company.

TikTok struck a deal with the investors in January to address years of legal uncertainty about the video app, owned by the Chinese internet company ByteDance, after bipartisan concern that its ownership could pose a national security threat.

Trump and the law

Alternet - President Donald Trump’s lawsuits are so unsuccessful, lawyers are afraid of destroying their careers by working for him. In response, Trump is trying to make it harder to hold dishonest lawyers accountable — and a legal expert is calling out the president for this.

“Like all other lawyers licensed to practice in the United States, if they violate legal ethics rules, they can face sanctions in court or professional discipline, up to and including the permanent loss of their license to practice,” Deborah Pearlstein, the director of the Princeton program in law and public policy and a visiting professor of law at the Princeton University School of Public and International Affairs, wrote for The New York Times. “Efforts to overturn the 2020 election foundered in court more than 60 times, before judges of both parties, in part because lawyers arguing President Trump’s case often feared telling a court the same extravagant lies that he was telling the American people.”

The Hill -   A federal judge ruled Friday that the Trump administration unlawfully took the position last year that it couldn’t request more funding for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).  U.S. District Judge Edward Davila ordered the agency’s acting director, Russ Vought, to continue requesting the necessary funds from the Federal Reserve to carry out the CFPB’s obligations.

Inside Climate News  -  One year ago today, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced he was terminating the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, one of the biggest climate initiatives of the Biden administration, after weeks of alleging the $20 billion in grants had been awarded in a “criminal” scheme.

But the Trump administration never was able to show the federal courts evidence of wrongdoing with regards to the fund, which Congress created in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act to spur private investment in clean energy and climate solutions.

Now, the chaos and accusations of those early months of President Donald Trump’s second term are at center stage in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. After an unusual hearing before 10 of the 11 judges last month (Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson is not participating in the case), the court is weighing what next steps are available for the grantees that have been frozen out of their accounts for the past year.

The D.C. Circuit, widely viewed as second only to the Supreme Court in judicial branch importance because of its role in hearing federal agency cases, questioned the Trump administration’s lawyer harshly. Dominated by Democratic appointees, the court seemed inclined to rule in favor of the grantees. But it is not clear that a favorable ruling will be enough to revive the nation’s first national “green bank.” The Trump administration is poised to continue to press a multi-pronged strategy to defend its right to terminate the slew of contractual agreements that established the program.

Climate change

An early-season heat wave is descending across the Western United States, likely to bring record-shattering temperatures to much of the region

Officials in Corpus Christi expect a “water emergency” within months and to fully run out of water next year. That would halt jet fuel supplies to Texas airports, trigger a surge in gasoline prices and result in an “economic disaster” without precedent, former officials said..

Regions that are often pummeled by severe storms—like the Midwestern United States under last weekend’s powerful thunderstorms and deadly tornadoes—could also face the threat of more extreme hail.  New research published in Atmospheric Science Letters for the first time linked human-caused warming with the size of hailstones in a single thunderstorm. The study examined a May 3 storm that pelted Paris and other parts of France with hail ranging in size from marbles to golfballs, destroying or damaging more than $350 million worth of property.. The researchers compared real-time data from May 3 with dozens of similar weather patterns from past decades to isolate how a warmer atmosphere changed the storm’s ingredients. 

Polls

Jobs

In These Times -   A third of American workers now have access to some form of government-issued paid leave — the biggest share ever.  The United States is one of only a handful of countries that doesn’t have a federal paid leave policy offering workers paid time off after the birth of a child or to seek medical care, for example, and access to unpaid leave is only about 30 years old. In that dearth of federal action, states and jurisdictions have moved ahead to pass 14 paid leave laws since 2002, which now cover a third of the population. Ten of those were passed in the past decade, as support for paid leave has risen; three go into effect this year...

This year, Colorado expanded its paid leave program to include an additional 12 weeks for parents of babies in the neonatal intensive care unit. In Oregon, survivors of domestic violence also qualify for paid leave. Connecticut offers paid leave if you’re serving as an organ or bone marrow donor.

According to research from the National Partnership for Women & Families, a nonprofit advocacy group, the 14 laws now cover 32 percent of private-sector workers, an estimated 46 million people. Of those covered, a third are women and a third are men, while overall a third are parents. Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders have especially benefited — 55 percent have paid leave through their state programs, as do 41 percent of Latinx workers due to a concentration of these communities in states that have enacted programs.

Pew Research - The federal workforce had a net loss of nearly 238,000 employees in 2025. The number of people who quit, retired, were laid off or otherwise left federal employment was up 80.8% from 2024. Meanwhile, the number of people who started federal employment was down 55.6%.

Iran War

NBC News -  As the U.S. and Israel bombard Iran with strikes, the Islamic Republic is retaliating by utilizing its arsenal of missiles and cheap exploding drones. Footage from over 30 open-source videos and satellite images verified by NBC News show Iranian drone strikes and interceptions by the U.S. and allies across seven countries. Apparent targets include military bases, transportation hubs, energy infrastructure and diplomatic centers. The videos reveal a pattern of inadequate protection for strategic locations targeted by the drones from the outset of the war. 

The drones' versatility may allow Iran to prolong the war by straining enemy resources, experts say. The technique, popular among cash-strapped states, challenges the economics of warfare by forcing targeted countries to use expensive munitions for interceptions.

MS NOW -   The bean-counters at the Department of Defense — admittedly not the best bean-counters in the federal government — have tallied up the cost of President Donald Trump’s unilateral military incursion into Iran.

The first week of the conflict, they estimate, ran up a bill for U.S. taxpayers of somewhere around $11 billion, though they admit this is more of a ballpark number than a hard-and-fast calculation. It is probably safe to assume that any error in their calculations is leading them to underestimate the cost rather than to overstate it.

Much of that cost was incurred in the form of munitions. The missiles and bombs that have been pounding Iran since the first attacks on Feb. 28 each carry substantial price tags. Add in the time of the pilots and operators carrying out the strikes — and then the costs of their support teams and vehicles — and it’s clear how quickly costs can add up.

The Iran war's looming economic threat: Higher food prices.

Iran threatens to strike oil facilities after the U.S. hits military targets on Kharg Island, a critical fuel hub.

Jack Detsch and Paul McLeary of Politico reported today that last year Hegseth slashed the oversight offices designed to limit civilian casualties in war and to investigate responsibility for them. Over the warnings of top military officials, he cut the number of employees working in that field from 200 to fewer than 40. Hegseth has vowed not to be hampered by “stupid rules of engagement,” but as Wes Bryant, the Pentagon’s former chief of civilian harm assessments, told the journalists, ““As it turns out, when you kill less civilians, you tend to be putting your resources toward killing the enemy.

Middle East

NBC News -  Approximately 5,000 additional Marines and sailors are deploying to the Middle East to support the war in Iran, according to three U.S. officials.   One official said the additional forces were requested because "part of the plan for this war was to have Marines available to provide options for use." The Marines are trained for crisis response, such as evacuations and protecting embassies, and ground operations.

Via DulceBiatch

Polls

Political Polls

@PpollingNumbers

Harris 39% (+17) Newsom 22% AOC 11% Buttigieg 8%

Another one: Newsom 44%

Vance 38% Harris 44% Vance 39%

AOC 43% Vance 40%

Focaldata poll | 3/6-3/10

President Trump approval Disapprove 51% Approve 39% —— Trump's approval on the issues Immigration: -7 Iran: -16 Economy: -18 Healthcare: -23 Inflation: -29 (new low)

NBC News -  Nearly 6 in 10 voters say the economic and political systems are stacked against people like them, tying a record high over roughly 40 years of national NBC News polling.

The latest survey also found that an overwhelming share of voters (84%) say they agree with the statement that "the very rich and powerful are above the law when they do something wrong, they look out for each other, using their power and connections to get special treatment," while 14% disagree and 2% agree.

Axios -   When asked who is most responsible for current gas prices, 48% said the president and his administration.  That was followed by 16% who pointed at oil and gas companies, 13% who blamed global market forces and 11% who cited former President Biden.

Seven in 10 Americans say Donald Trump’s tariffs have led to them paying higher prices, according to an exclusive new poll for the Guardian. The Harris Poll survey presents Republicans with a major problem in the battle for the upcoming midterm elections. The majority of all voters (72%) believe Trump’s tariffs have had a negative rather than a positive impact and 67% said tariffs aren’t the right solution for improving the economy

Trump and the law

How the SAVE bill will disenfranchise many Americans

NY Times -    A federal judge in Washington threw a major roadblock into a criminal investigation of Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, quashing grand jury subpoenas issued to the central bank by federal prosecutors over renovations underway at its headquarters in Washington.

In a blistering 27-page decision unsealed on Friday, the judge, James E. Boasberg, derided the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, led by the Trump loyalist Jeanine Pirro, for pursuing a case against Mr. Powell when it appeared that its only reason to do so was President Trump’s desire to seek vengeance against him. Mr. Powell has long resisted calls from the White House to significantly lower borrowing costs, prompting a litany of attacks that has extended to the president’s effort to fire another top official, Lisa D. Cook.

“There is abundant evidence that the subpoenas’ dominant (if not sole) purpose is to harass and pressure Powell either to yield to the president or to resign and make way for a Fed chair who will,” Judge Boasberg wrote.

He continued, “On the other side of the scale, the government has offered no evidence whatsoever that Powell committed any crime other than displeasing the president.”

Trump lawyers argue that journalists are not fully protected by the First Amendment

Daily Kos - The Trump administration argued in court that one of the most basic acts of journalism—soliciting news tips and information from the public—is an act of “solicitation” and therefore is not protected by the First Amendment. The bogus stance came about because The New York Times is suing the Pentagon in response to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s policy that bars news outlets from reporting on classified material with government approval.   As part of ongoing court proceedings between the Times and the Pentagon, the administration argued that the Washington Post’s web-based request for news tips goes over the line by asking readers to “help us report on the Pentagon” and requesting information related to “changes within the Pentagon and throughout the U.S. military.”

The Trump administration has imposed a host of extremist policies throughout the armed services, including banning transgender troops, erasing history, and even ordering Scouting America to embrace bigotry. It’s a basic tenet of journalism to solicit information, which can then be investigated and possibly turned into a news report.

White House Abandoning Mass Deportation Policy

Iran's new leader

Headline USA -   Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, who replaced his slain father as the new supreme leader of Iran, issued his first statement on Thursday, where he said the Strait of Hormuz would remain closed and vowed Iranian attacks on US bases in the region would continue.

“Certainly, the leverage of blocking the Strait of Hormuz must also continue to be used,” Khamenei said in his message, which was issued as a written statement and read on Iranian TV. He suggested that Iran could open “other fronts” in the war and vowed there would be revenge for Iranians who have been killed, including more than 100 girls and boys who were killed by a US strike on an elementary school in the opening hours of the war.

“The retaliation we have in mind is not only related to the martyrdom of the great leader of the Revolution; rather, every member of the nation who is killed by the enemy becomes a separate case in the file of retaliation,” Khamenei said.

...The Iranian leader addressed regional countries, saying that Iran wants good relations with its neighbors but would continue targeting US bases as long as they remain. “From now on, we will again be compelled to continue doing this if necessary, although we still believe in the importance of maintaining friendly relations with those neighboring countries,” he said.

Meanwhile. . .

Bonita Gibson, who was believed to be the oldest person in Michigan, has died. She was 114. "Bonita was the oldest living person in the State of Michigan, she was the second oldest in the United States, and the seventh oldest in the world," the funeral home's obituary for Gibson said.

Newsom and oil prices

Politico -   Republicans have spent years hammering Gavin Newsom for California’s high gas prices. Now, the Democratic governor is seizing a sudden opening to shift the blame to Donald Trump as the war in Iran sends oil costs skyward. “Look at your cost at the pump the last few days: That was an act of the Trump administration,” Newsom told reporters two days after the first U.S. strikes in Iran.

Then on Monday, after California gasoline prices surged 12 percent in a week to $5.20 a gallon — 57 cents higher than Washington state, the nation’s second-priciest state — Newsom doubled down on social media. He called Trump a “con man with no plan” after the president said that oil prices would drop rapidly once the “Iran nuclear threat is over.”

“California’s fuel prices were stable for years until Trump launched this war without a plan,” Newsom spokesperson Anthony Martinez said in an email. “Where is Donald Trump’s plan to lower prices?”

New development in synagogue attacker story

Headline USA -  A man with a rifle who crashed into a large Michigan synagogue in what federal officials are saying was an attack had lost four family members in an Israeli airstrike in his native Lebanon last week, an official said Friday.  Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, 41, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Lebanon, was killed by security after ramming into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township near Detroit and driving down a hallway in a vehicle that then caught fire, according to authorities.

McDonald's wants to bring back lower income clients

Charter - McDonald’s wants to win back budget-conscious diners with yet another value push, as the fast-food business loses more ground to sit-down restaurants.  According to the Wall Street Journal, the burger chain will roll out menu items priced at $3 or less nationwide, along with new $4 breakfast meal deals, starting in April. The move follows a series of promotions in recent years, including the $5 meal deal the company launched in 2024 and a relaunch of its discount menu category last September.ChMcDonald’s wants to win back budget-conscious diners with yet another value push, as the fast-food business loses more ground to sit-down restaurants.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the burger chain will roll out menu items priced at $3 or less nationwide, along with new $4 breakfast meal deals, starting in April. 

Artificial intelligence

She uses AI for everything. Her husband thinks AI is a menace

The Guardian -   The standoff between Anthropic and the Pentagon has forced the tech industry to once again grapple with the question of how its products are used for war – and what lines it will not cross. Amid Silicon Valley’s rightward shift under Donald Trump and the signing of lucrative defense contracts, big tech’s answer is looking very different than it did even less than a decade ago.

Anthropic’s feud with the Trump administration escalated three days ago as the AI firm sued the Department of Defense, claiming that the government’s decision to blacklist it from government work violated its first amendment rights. The company and the Pentagon have been locked in a months-long standoff, with Anthropic attempting to prohibit its AI model from being used for domestic mass surveillance or fully autonomous lethal weapons.

Jobs

Newsweek -   A new report from artificial intelligence giant Anthropic has taken a closer look at which jobs were most at risk due to the rise of AI and large-language models (LLMs).  The report, which was released on March 5, found that AI at present is, "far from reaching its theoretical capacity," and that it is currently achieving only a "fraction" of the coverage made possible by the technology....

According to Anthropic, the most exposed workers demographically tended to be female, older, higher educated and higher paid.

The research showed that currently, AI is being utilized most in jobs involving programming and math—many coders are using AI to produce their work. Computer programmers were 74 percent exposed and data entry workers were 67 percent exposed. Customer service representatives were also more than 70 percent exposed.

Meanwhile, categories for "legal" and "arts and media" were both relatively high in "observed AI usage" in comparison to their "theoretical AI usage."

Both office and administration positions and sales positions have seen high levels of observed AI usage as well.

However, the company suggested that artificial intelligence is currently being underutilized most in areas like architecture and engineering. Their graph also suggested that life and social science jobs are far from their theoretical AI coverage.

The least exposed workers, unsurprisingly, were jobs that require a physical presence like installation and repair, grounds maintenance and transportation. Additionally, food and service workers appear relatively inoculated from AI.

The non-political origins of things like Trump

Sam Smith - As a one time anthropology major, I like to think occasionally about non-political influences on our poltics. Something that keeps coming back is the thought that Donald Trump is not just a political disaster, he's the product of some major changes in our culture.  

One of these was television. We seldom talk about the influence that TV has on our life but this from Wikipedia gives a hint:

In 2011, 96.7% of households owned television sets.... Most households have more than one set... In 1948, 1 percent of U.S. households owned at least one television; in 1955, 75 percent did. 

As a whole, the television networks that broadcast in the United States are the largest and most distributed in the world, and programs produced specifically for American networks are the most widely syndicated internationally.

My thinking is that the growth of television is one of the changes in America culture that affected our politics as well as other thngs. We spent much more of our time watching TV and absorbing the values it projected. Less important became our community, our  neighbors and the values we had learned in school or at church. The winners in all this were less like friends and co-workers and more like the stars we saw on the screen, projecting themsleves as purported winners and not merely the folks down the street. One of those who entered our lives like this was Donald Trump, who actually had done hardly anything for us yet could easily  pretend otherwise on the screen. 

The Internet created new links between ourselves and those who wanted to enter and run our lives without having to ring our doorbell. Donald Trump is not just a political problem; he's a fearful example of a cultural issue.