Polls

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

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.

Word

Action Links

Congress should reject the SAVE Act and all attempts to make it harder to vote.

Impeach and convict Donald Trump... 30,000 activists have already signed on this week 3/11

Save Stephen Colbert's show

Who should be the Democratic nominee for President in 2028? 3/26

Mark Kelly is suing Pete Hegseth for violating the Constitution, after Hegseth abused his power and tried to punish Senator Kelly for speaking the truth. To support Kelly

Tell Congress: Protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

Money

NY Times -   Economic growth was slower at the end of 2025 than data first showed and inflationary pressures persisted at the start of this year, a troubling snapshot of an economy on unsteady footing before war with Iran upended oil and financial markets.

Consumer prices increased moderately in January, the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge showed on Friday. Economists worry prices will march even higher in the coming weeks. And gross domestic product, the benchmark measure of economic growth, which is adjusted for inflation, was revised down to a 0.7 percent annual pace for the last three months of the year.

The Personal Consumption Expenditures price index, the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, notched a 0.3 percent monthly increase in the first month of 2026. Compared with the same time last year, prices were up 2.8 percent. The “core” inflation reading, which strips out more volatile food and energy prices, came in at 0.4 percent on a monthly basis, and 3.1 percent on an annual basis. That is a full percentage point above the Fed’s 2 percent target.

“It basically shows that inflation firmed up to start the year,” Omair Sharif, founder of the research firm Inflation Insights, said of the data. “All the key measures are moving in the wrong direction.”

Trump's and the law

Alternet -   In an op-ed/essay published by the New York Times on Friday, March 13, Deborah Pearlstein — a law professor at Princeton University in New Jersey — describes the fear of ethics violations that federal DOJ prosecutors are facing during the second Trump Administration.

"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," Pearlstein explains. "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 the president was telling the American people. That was then. Now, under pressure to ignore a range of ethics rules, a large number of Department of Justice attorneys have quit, opting to lose their jobs but save their careers."

Dirt Diggers Digest -   When it comes to alleged terrorists, drug cartels, so-called illegal aliens, and purported fraudulent voters, Trump’s Justice Department is quick to adopt an aggressive prosecutorial posture. The DOJ is eager to throw the book at defendants.

Yet when it comes to cases involving corporate misconduct, DOJ changes from a lion to a lamb. The focus shifts to leniency and the desire to avoid putting an undue burden on companies. Restraint seems to be the primary objective.

The latest expression of the latter approach can be seen in the DOJ’s announcement of the first Department-wide policy on how corporations should be criminally prosecuted. Actually, it is a policy on how they shouldn’t be prosecuted, since the emphasis is on rewarding companies that cooperate with investigations by declining to bring charges against them

Misnamed SAVE Act passes House

Forward Blue - The SAVE Act just passed the House — and it's heading to the Senate. If it becomes law, it could strip millions of Americans of their ability to vote.  An estimated 69 million married women who changed their last names could be blocked from registering to vote, a right protected by our Constitution. Trans Americans, disabled voters, rural communities, and the elderly face even steeper barriers, with new requirements to appear in person with documents like passports that many simply don't have.

It doesn't stop there. The SAVE Act would eliminate online voter registration entirely and ban voter registration drives, gutting the very infrastructure that helps underserved communities participate in democracy.

A petition telling the U.S. Senate to reject the SAVE Act 

New Republic -  Republican Senator John Cornyn got a firsthand lesson in why the SAVE Act, backed by President Donald Trump, would suppress votes if passed.

At a Senate Judiciary hearing Thursday, Cornyn said, “I don’t understand how [the SAVE Act] could disenfranchise millions of Americans. Maybe you could explain.” His Democratic colleague, Dick Durbin, was happy to oblige. After thanking Cornyn for his question, Durbin explained that the voter ID requirements of the bill are not satisfied by a driver’s license, but only a passport.

“Fifty percent of Americans do not have a passport. Those who want to obtain it so they can vote will pay $186 and wait three or four weeks for that to happen,” Durbin said. “Secondly, you can use a birth certificate, but any person who has changed their name as a result of a marriage … has to find not only their birth certificate but some correction of it to prove that they are eligible to register to vote.

“It’s estimated that 9 percent of the voters in America do not have the identification required by this bill. It means that, ultimately, those people will not be voting. And I think that is the ultimate goal of this administration,” Durbin continued. 

Housing

NPR  - The Senate yesterday passed the largest housing bill in decades with an 89 to 10 vote. The bipartisan legislation aims to improve housing affordability and availability by deregulating, expanding existing programs and banning large corporations from buying single-family homes, with few exceptions. The bill, which has over 40 provisions, aims to drive down housing costs by encouraging more homebuilding, NPR’s Stephan Bisaha says. The nation is millions of homes short of meeting the demand, but Bisaha explains that the federal government doesn't have a "big lever" it can pull to mandate more construction. So the legislation is an amalgam of different programs and incentives that co-sponsor Sen. Elizabeth Warren describes as a "giant meatball." It includes a popular provision banning institutional investors from buying single-family homes. While people blame these investors for driving up prices by outbidding families, research on this is mixed. Bisaha notes that large investors own few homes across the U.S. and, in some cases, they help lower costs.

Middle East

NPR - Israel launched attacks on central Beirut last night, intensifying its offensive in Lebanon after the Iranian-backed militant group Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel. The exchange marks some of the fiercest fighting between the two sides since the beginning of the war in Iran. Today, U.S. Central Command confirmed that at least four crew members were killed when a refueling aircraft went down in western Iraq. Yesterday, Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, issued his first message, vowing to keep the Strait of Hormuz closed.

Congress

Roll Call -    The House and Senate Armed Services panels have yet to be briefed on the costs of the Iran war, members and aides said Thursday. This week, Pentagon officials gave the Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee an estimate of $11.3 billion for the war’s first week, a figure first reported Wednesday by The New York Times.

The Senate Armed Services Committee held a classified briefing on the overall war effort on Tuesday with Pentagon officials and top officers....

But neither the House nor Senate Armed Services panels, which authorize nearly $1 trillion in annual defense spending and set national security policies in law, have yet received a briefing focused on the details of the war’s costs. The war entered its 13th day on Thursday and how long it will continue remains unclear.

Why Netanyahu wins regardless

Mairav Zonszein, NY Times  -   Benjamin Netanyahu has spent much of his political life trying to make war with Iran seem not only inevitable but overdue. Thus, for the Israeli prime minister, the latest conflict was a victory the moment it began. Not because every consequence is good for Israel, but because he can sell almost every conceivable result as proof that he was right all along: that Iran had to be confronted, that force was unavoidable and that delay would only have made the threat more treacherous.

Mr. Netanyahu does not need a clean victory — he just needs a durable narrative. This is not just about distracting Israeli voters when they head to the polls this year. This is also about cementing an Israeli national security doctrine that always trumps diplomacy. He needs Israelis talking about Tehran rather than Oct. 7, about existential enemies rather than political accountability or the unresolved disaster in Gaza — where, after nearly two and a half years of indiscriminate destruction, Hamas still remains — or the crisis in Lebanon, where the renewed conflict with Hezbollah shows no signs of waning.

A war with Iran does not erase those failures, but it does slide them into the background. It also moves the political conversation back onto emotional and political terrain where Mr. Netanyahu has always felt strongest: using fear with the claim that only he truly grasps the scale of the threat to Israel from Iran, and the (empty) promise that he can remove it through force.

Word

So damaged is the department’s reputation for truth-telling at this point, one judge noted despairingly, that ‘the court is left with little confidence’ that government lawyers ‘can be trusted to tell the truth about anything.’ - Deborah Pearlstein, director of the Princeton Program in Law and Public Policy

Airport security issues

The Hill -  Growing security lines at airports around the country are putting pressure on both White House and Senate Democratic negotiators to reach a deal to reopen the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which saw its funding lapse nearly a month ago.

Senate sources familiar with the negotiation say there’s been some progress behind the scenes, though not as much as both sides would have hoped as lawmakers in both parties hear complaints from constituents about chaos at airports.

A person familiar with negotiations said that leaders in both parties would like to get a deal by the Easter recess, which is scheduled to begin March 28.

“There wasn’t any sign of movement a week or so ago. There are a few roots this week and I’m hopeful we can get some movement next week,” said the source, who cited long waits at airport security lines as a major concern among lawmakers.

Donald Trump in 1998

CALL TO ACTIVISM 

One-third of Americans skip meals or other needs to afford health car

Washington Post -   Americans are driving less, skipping meals and putting off big life moves, like buying homes or having children, to keep up with health care costs, according to two Gallup polls released Thursday.

Roughly one-third of Americans are cutting back on daily spending to cover medical costs, and about half of middle-income households said they have delayed a major life event because of the same expenses, the polls found, as premiums rise and the federal government cuts Medicaid spending.

Eleven percent of respondents said they had skipped a meal in the past year to meet health care costs, according to the first poll on Americans’ daily spending. Fifteen percent said they had borrowed money or prolonged a current drug prescription. The trend was most pronounced among Americans who don’t have health insurance, 62 percent of whom said they made at least one financial trade-off to pay for health care.

Housing costs to be affected by Iran war

Newsweek -   Several materials used in homebuilding—including steel, copper, aluminum and cement—could see price surges as a result of the war in Iran, according to a new report from Linesight, a global construction consultancy.

It all starts with the impact that the conflict is having on the Strait of Hormuz, where one fifth of the world’s oil normally transits. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), a prolonged disruption of transport in the Strait of Hormuz could push the global oil market into deficit, with consequences spilling over the energy market alone—especially if the chokehold on the strait continues for months.

"Energy cost rises then pass through to quarrying, calcination, smelting and transport, making energy the primary channel from geopolitics to construction budgets," Linesight wrote in its report.

Among the materials most vulnerable to these dynamics is steel, which is both energy intensive and sensitive to logistics disruptions. Steel prices reached their peak in 2022 in response to a surge in crude oil prices, Linesight wrote, surging by 75 percent from May 2021 to May 2022 as oil prices increased by approximately 66 percent.

Teens can't go an hour without checking their phones

Study Finds -  Researchers found phone activity during every hour of the school day across the sample, and not one student went the entire school day without using their device. The average teen logged more than two hours of screen time during school, with social media and entertainment accounting for nearly 70 percent of that time in younger students. High schoolers picked up their phones an average of 64 times per school day, and those who checked most frequently scored worse on a standard test of focus and impulse control.

Immigrants

Indpendent, UK -   The White House appears unbothered by a recent United Nations committee report that expressed deep concern over President Donald Trump’s “racist hate speech” toward immigrants, which they say contributed to a violation of human rights in the United States.

“This United Nations assessment is just as useless as their broken escalator, and their extreme bias continues to prove why no one takes them seriously,” White House Spokesperson Olivia Wales said in a statement.

The report, published Wednesday by the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, found that Trump and other political leaders may have incited racial discrimination and hate crimes against migrants by using dehumanizing language and harmful stereotypes as well as portraying immigrants as criminals or burdens.

“No one cares what the biased United Nations’ so-called ‘experts’ think, because Americans are living in a safer, stronger country than ever before,” Wales said.

HeadlineUSA -   According to an Axios report, White House Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair privately advised House Republicans on Tuesday to drop the phrase “mass deportations” from their talking points and instead center their rhetoric on the removal of violent criminals, sources with knowledge of the closed door meeting said.

The instruction represents a notable pivot for an administration that built its 2024 campaign around promises of sweeping immigration enforcement. A Politico poll released in January showed that nearly half of Americans view Donald Trump’s deportation efforts as too aggressive, with one in five of the president’s own 2024 supporters sharing that assessment.

NPR -  The Trump administration is seeking to tighten rules for immigrants with temporary legal status seeking a commercial driver’s license, citing several high-profile crashes involving foreign-born drivers. Critics argue that these changes won’t improve road safety. According to the Department of Transportation’s estimate, the proposed regulations could force around 200,000 immigrants, including asylum-seekers and DACA recipients, out of the trucking industry. 

Trump lies

Democratic Association of Secretaries of State - Donald Trump just shared a fake 2020 electoral map online — one that falsely shows him winning states he clearly lost — and used it to call for arrests over the last presidential election. Six years later, Trump is still pushing debunked conspiracy theories about 2020, and now he’s pairing them with threats of criminal prosecution.

The Intercept -   President Donald Trump claimed that Iran, not the U.S., struck an elementary school in the southern Iranian town of Minab, the attack with the highest civilian death toll in Trump’s second Iran war.

Three current and former defense officials, however, pushed back on his claims. Even Trump’s own Pentagon chief, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, refused to back him up. U.S. Central Command appeared to suggest that Trump’s comments were “inappropriate.”

“This is another instance of Trump lying and just talking out of his ass,” said a U.S. government official who reviewed satellite images of the Shajarah Tayyebeh school. “This clearly was not a failed rocket from the IRGC base.”

The U.S. official was referring to an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps navy base that was adjacent to the school. The claim that the IRGC struck the school spread as part of a misinformation campaign about the attack peddled by social media accounts that support restoring Iran’s monarchy.

The U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak freely, said it was clear that Iran did not strike the school. Trump, however, endorsed the dubious claim when taking questions from the press aboard Air Force One on Saturday.

Pam Bondi

New Republic -   Attorney General Pam Bondi has left her apartment in Washington, D.C., and moved to a military base in the area after reportedly facing threats from drug cartels and critics of her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case.

The New York Times, citing unnamed sources, reports that the move took place within the last month and that federal law enforcement saw an uptick in criticism and threats against Bondi. These threats increased after Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was abducted in January. Bondi joins other Trump administration officials who have moved to military housing, including Stephen Miller, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, Pete Hegseth, Army Secretary Daniel P. Driscoll, and Navy Secretary John Phelan.

Polls

Prime Chronicle -   Record 38% of registered voters see shifting to socialism as a good idea, up from 32% in 2022 and 18% in 2010. 

• 61% overall oppose socialism, with Republicans at 78% and conservatives at 75% firmly rejecting it.
• Support surges among young Democrats (66% under 45), very liberals (66%), and under-30s (53%), driven by economic frustrations.
• Nation splits nearly even on capitalism (51% say it works well, 49% disagree), signaling vulnerability in key demographics.

NBC News Poll: A historic number of voters say economic and political systems are stacked against them.