February 21, 2026
Polls
Newsweek - A new InsiderAdvantage survey, conducted February 17–18 among 800 likely voters using a mix-mode text and panel methodology, found Trump with 50 percent approval and 46 percent disapproval. The poll carries a margin of error of plus or minus 3.46 percentage points, placing the president narrowly above water.
InsiderAdvantage pollster Matt Towery said the result reflects a rebound after a period of weaker approval, arguing Trump has returned to roughly the 50 percent level, close to or exceeding his margin of victory against Kamala Harris in the 2024 election.
He pointed to what he described as more orderly and strategic ICE raids, along with signs the economy is turning positive, as factors behind the shift.
Towery also said that while the previous government shutdown appeared to hurt Trump’s ratings, the most recent one has coincided with stronger numbers.
However, polling analysts say the result stands apart from most other recent surveys and should be interpreted carefully.
Andrew to be removed from line of succession
Express, UK - Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor faces being removed from the royal line of succession as the Government considers a major intervention. Just a day after Andrew was arrested on February 19 on suspicion of misconduct in public office, it has been reported that the government is considering introducing legislation which would remove Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor from the line of royal succession.
The former prince, who had his titles stripped from him last year following scandals surrounding his past friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, is currently eighth-in-line to the throne. Andrew has always denied wrongdoing and accusations against him.
Trump DoJ bids to join lawsuit alleging LA schools discriminate against a ‘new minority: white students’
The Guardian - For decades, the Los Angeles Unified School District has classified its schools based on the proportion of enrolled students who aren’t white.
In a city where more than two-thirds of residents identify as Hispanic, Black or Asian, that meant a vast majority were found to have extraordinarily diverse student bodies. And in an effort to combat segregation, the school district has afforded those diverse schools with smaller class sizes and other benefits.
But last month, a conservative group sued the school district, saying the decades-old program has become a mechanism of “overt discrimination against a new minority: white students”.
That group, called the 1776 Project Foundation, hopes to end the program and “vindicate the American ideal of racial equality”.
“These policies are not just unfair – they’re unconstitutional,” Aiden Buzzetti, the president of the 1776 Project Foundation, said in a statement in January. “What began as a temporary measure to address segregation has become a rigid system of racial favoritism that excludes thousands of students from equal opportunity.”
And on Wednesday, the case was bolstered by the Trump administration. The Department of Justice, under attorney general Pam Bondi, said this week it agreed. The agency’s civil rights division filed to intervene in the case, saying students in LA “should never be classified or treated differently because of their race”.
Trump raises tariffs to 15% on imports from all countri
The Guardian - Donald Trump announced on Saturday that he would raise a temporary tariff rate on US imports from all countries from 10% to 15%, less than 24 hours after the US supreme court ruled against the legality of his flagship trade policy.
Infuriated by the high court’s ruling on Friday that he had exceeded his authority and should have gotten congressional approval for the tariffs, the US president railed against the justices who blocked his use of tariffs, calling them a “disgrace to the nation”, and ordered an immediate 10% tariff on all imports, in addition to any existing levies.
....The law according to section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 allows the president to impose a levy of up to 15% for 150 days, although it could face legal challenges. During that period, his administration will work on issuing new and “legally permissible” tariffs, Trump said.
ICE
Megan, Rural Organizing - Rural people across the country are organizing to stop the expansion of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities and coming together to protect their neighbors. In fact, taking action to support our immigrant neighbors has been one of the most galvanizing topics for our rural members that we’ve seen in our decade of organizing on a wide range of economic and civil rights issues. In just a week we’ve convened, trained, and facilitated information sharing with hundreds of rural leaders across the country in strategically important and underserved locations. It shouldn’t be surprising — immigrants ARE rural America. Immigrants are our friends, neighbors, and co-workers — in fact international immigration accounted for 87% of nationwide population growth over the past year.
You may not see it on the news, but brave rural Americans in the very strongholds MAGA Republicans take for granted are standing up and taking action against Stephen Miller and the Trump administration’s deportation machine. These massive facilities designed to warehouse people are extremely controversial and invoke many negative connotations. In fact, experts in the subject, like author Andrea Pitzer, refer to them as “concentration camps.”
Artificial Intelligence
Time - One icy morning in February, nearly 200 people gathered in a church in downtown Richmond, Va. Most had awakened before dawn and driven in from across the state. There were Republicans and Democrats from rural farms and D.C. exurbs. They shared one goal: to fight back against AI development in a region with the largest concentration of data centers in the world. “Aren’t you tired of being ignored by both parties, and having your quality of life and your environment absolutely destroyed by corporate greed?” state senator Danica Roem said, to a standing ovation.
The activists—wearing homemade shirts with slogans like Boondoggle: Data Center in Botetourt County—marched to the state capitol and spent the day testifying to lawmakers about their fears over data centers’ impacts on electricity, water, noise pollution, and more. Some lawmakers pledged to help: “You’re getting a sh-t deal,” state delegate John McAuliff told activists.
The phrase captured many people’s feelings toward the AI industry as a whole. Not much unites Americans these days. But a growing cross section of the public—from MAGA loyalists to Democratic socialists, pastors to policymakers, nurses to filmmakers—agree on at least one thing: AI is moving too fast. While most Americans use the tools, the U.S. is one of the most AI-pessimistic countries in the world. A 2025 Pew poll found five times as many Americans are concerned as are excited about the increased use of AI in daily life. The public thinks AI will worsen our ability to think creatively, form meaningful relationships, and make difficult decisions, Pew found. Other surveys show Americans believe AI will spread misinformation, erode our sense of purpose and meaning, and harm our social and emotional intelligence.
The news media chose not to tell you the truth about tariffs
Dan Froomkin, Press Watch - How obviously illegal were Donald Trump’s tariffs?
So obviously illegal that even this radically right-wing, Trump-enabling Supreme Court couldn’t find a way to rule in his favor.
And here’s the thing: It was obvious that they were illegal from the minute Trump imposed them. The Constitution very clearly assigns that sort of power exclusively to Congress. The tariffs were an arbitrary exercise of power well outside the rule of law.
But the mainstream news reporters covering Trump just couldn’t bring themselves to say so.
Similarly, the tariffs were crazy. They were a non-solution to a problem that didn’t exist. They were destabilizing. They were capricious. And, for good measure, Trump didn’t actually seem to understand how tariffs worked.
But reporters just couldn’t bring themselves to say that, either. (Well, one of them did, briefly.)
Instead, the elite Washington press corps did what it always does with Trump. It treated his actions as if they were within the realm of the normal. That’s called normalizing. It selectively quoted and paraphrased him to make him sound like he was saying something in the realm of the rational. That’s called sanewashing.
Our elite journalists were effectively covering up for Trump, and spreading his lies rather than telling the public the truth.
McConnell Stalls Trump’s Election Overhaul Bill as Republicans Fume
New Republic - Senator Mitch McConnell appears to be stalling the voting bill backed by President Trump, and fellow Republicans are not happy.
McConnell, who leads the Senate Rules Committee, is refusing to schedule a vote on the legislation, thus preventing it from moving forward. The bill would create barriers for voting, requiring specific forms of ID in order for Americans to exercise their constitutional right.
In blocking it, the retiring senator and former majority leader has drawn the ire of his colleagues. Representative Tim Burchett posted a video on X Friday saying McConnell’s actions are partially coming from a place of “meanness” because he doesn’t like Trump, and called his mental acuity into question.
Asian students at Harvard jump
Headline USA - Asian enrollment at Harvard University is skyrocketing as white student participation continues to plummet, according to the latest statistics.
Twitter user AF Post recently pointed out the startling statistics, stating: “Despite the Trump administration’s efforts to enforce the Supreme Court ruling against race-based school admissions, Harvard is now discriminating against White applicants instead of Asian ones. The share of White students admitted in the Classes of 2028 and 2029 fell from 47% in 2025 to 31% in 2028 and 2029, while the share of Asian students rose from 26% to 41% in 2028 and 2029. Black and Latino admissions stayed the same.” [Issues about these numbers]
The Supreme Court ruled in June 2023 in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard that race conscious admissions programs violate constitutional protections, effectively ending decades of affirmative action at colleges. The original lawsuit alleged Harvard discriminated against Asian American applicants by capping their admission numbers and assigning them lower personal ratings compared to other racial groups.
The Supreme Court decision extends beyond tariffs
Robert Reich - A 6-3 majority of the Supreme Court decided yesterday that Trump cannot take core powers that the Constitution gives Congress. Instead, Congress must delegate that power clearly and unambiguously.
This is a big decision. It goes far beyond merely interpreting the 1997 International Emergency Economic Powers Act not to give Trump the power over tariffs that he claims to have. It reaffirms a basic constitutional principle about the division and separation of powers between Congress and the president.
On its face, this decision clarifies that Trump cannot decide on his own not to spend money Congress has authorized and appropriated — such as the funds for U.S.A.I.D. he refused to spend. And he cannot on his own decide to go to war.
“The Court has long expressed ‘reluctan[ce] to read into ambiguous statutory test’ extraordinary delegations of Congress’s powers,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for himself and five other justices in the opinion released yesterday in Learning Resources vs. Trump.
He continued: “In several cases involving ‘major questions,’ the Court has reasoned that ‘both separation of powers principles and a practical understanding of legislative intent’ suggest Congress would not have delegated ‘highly consequential power’ through ambiguous language.”
Exactly. Trump has no authority on his own to impose tariffs because the Constitution gives that authority to Congress.
But by the same Supreme Court logic, Trump has no authority to impound money Congress has appropriated because the Constitution has given Congress the “core congressional power of the purse,” as the Court stated yesterday.
Hence, the $410 to $425 billion billion in funding that Trump has blocked or delayed violates the Impoundment Control Act, which requires Congressional approval for spending pauses. This includes funding withheld for foreign aid, FEMA, Head Start, Harvard and Columbia universities, and public health.
Nor, by this same Supreme Court logic, does Trump have authority to go to war because Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the Constitution grants Congress the power to "declare War … and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water" — and Congress would not have delegated this highly consequential power to a president through ambiguous language.
Presumably this is why Congress enacted the War Powers Act of 1973, which requires a president to notify Congress within 48 hours of deploying troops and requires their withdrawal within 60 to 90 days unless Congress declares war or authorizes an extension. Iran, anyone?
The press has reported on yesterday’s Supreme Court decision as if it were only about tariffs. Wrong. It’s far bigger and even more important.
Labor
In These Tmes - Union membership ticked up last year, with an overall gain of more than 400,000 workers, and a slight increase in the percentage of workers who have a union, to ten percent. The percentage of unionized working people in the private sector held steady at 5.9%, according to the new Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) survey. That remains a 100-year low.
The bump in the numbers is welcome news, but union membership statistics tell us only so much about what’s really happening with the U.S. labor movement. There are promising developments rumbling through unions and other worker justice organizations that the BLS union survey doesn’t capture. Here are five that stand out.
Northwest Labor Press - For decades, strikes were unheard of at Kaiser Permanente, the heavily unionized health maintenance organization that invested in a highly touted partnership with its unions. Now, increasingly, strikes are back, and so are dark warnings from union leaders about the decisions coming out of the executive suite.
A case in point: The U.S. Department of Justice announced Jan. 14 that Kaiser Permanente will pay $556 million to settle claims that it defrauded Medicare in California and Colorado to the tune of about $1 billion over a period of 10 years.
How much snow will actually fall near you?
NY Times - There’s a reason the snowfall prediction on your weather map often misses: It represents just a fraction of the possible outcomes contained within official forecasts.
Most weather maps show you only the center of the distribution of snowfall estimates. Search below to see the full range of possibilities for your community over the next few days.
Truckers and bus drivers wiill have to take tests in English only
Headline USA - All truckers and pass drivers will have to take their commercial driver’s license tests in English as the Trump administration expands its aggressive campaign to improve safety in the industry and get unqualified drivers off the road.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced the latest effort Friday to ensure that drivers understand English well enough to read road signs and communicate with law enforcement officers. Florida already started administering its tests in English.
Currently, many states allow drivers to take their license tests in other languages even though they are required to demonstrate English proficiency. California offered tests in 20 other languages. And Duffy said that a number of states have hired other companies to administer commercial driver’s licenses tests, and those companies aren’t enforcing the standards that drivers are supposed to meet.
“And the third party tester is participating in the scam because they are not adequately testing the people who went through a sham school,” Duffy said.
Dumb stuff
The Guardian - The US’s ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, has contended to the podcaster Tucker Carlson that Israel has a biblical right to take over the entire Middle East – or at least the lion’s share of it.
“It would be fine if they took it all,” Huckabee said to Carlson during an interview posted on Friday. The Trump administration appointee and former Arkansas governor discussed with Carlson interpretations of Old Testament scripture within the US Christian nationalist movement.
Carlson – who recently made disputed claims that he was detained at Tel Aviv airport in Israel – asked Huckabee about a biblical verse in which God promises Abraham that his descendants will receive land “from the wadi of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates – the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites”.
Carlson pointed out that this area in modern geography would include “like, basically the entire Middle East”.
“The Levant … Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon – it’d also be big parts of Saudi Arabia and Iraq,” Carlson said.
Huckabee said: “I’m not sure it would go that far, but it would be a big piece of land.”
He continued: “Israel is a land that God gave, through Abraham, to a people that he chose. It was a people, a place and a purpose.”
Gavin Newsom
Newsom's new book
This is not an endorsement but a piece abut one of the candidates progresives are considering. There will be others.
Maybe the Time Is Right for an AOC Presidential Bid
This is not an endorsement but a piece abut one of the candidates progresives are considering. There will be others. Read here
February 20, 2026
How did America get to where it would elect someone like Trump?
Sam Smith- We're wisely blaming Donald Trump for a lot of our problems, but he didn't come from nowhere. As the son of a Franklin Roosevelt staffer and a participant in 1960s movements such as civil rights, I have long been aware that America had gone in a troubled direction. In my mind it was the 1980s and the Reagan era that started really changing things.
One example: In 1971 some 26,000
students got masters degrees in business. By 2022 that number had risen to over
205,000.
The messages of the New Deal and
the 1960s have been fading. And it wasn't just the growth of corporate values
that did it. For example, most American
households had TVs by the 1980s compared to hardly any in the early 1940s. And the early 1990s the worldwide web was
underway.
Among the cultural changes that occurred
was not only a decline in reading a newspaper - which started in the 1970s and
80s and is now down to 1940s levels, but that classic sources of education and
information - such as schools, community groups, churches and books - were
losing their status and we became increasingly depending on TV and the Internet
for information and guidance.
I'm quite aware of this because
from my first job as a DC radio reporter to my internet work today, I have
maintained an interest in both national and
local matters. In fact, one of my first publications covered the
neighborhood right next to the US Capitol and life in these two places couldn't
haven't been more different. As the paper expanded to citywide I came across numerous
strong neighborhoods and was even elected advisory neighborhood commissioner in
one.
There is something our TV and
Internet still forgets to tell us about Washington: for many years blacks and
whites got along better thanks in part to a number of common interests such as
the need for home rule and the plans to run freeway through black and white communities.
So what does this have to do with
Trump? I would suggest that you don't
elect someone like him if you still believe in working, talking and even
arguing with real people and living in a real community.
Politics is actually about getting along with people, a lot of whom quite different from you. I learned this being one of six kids. My job wasn’t to lecture or fight them but to find things things you could talk about or do together.
Community is a larger, but still
human, version of this. As I wrote afew
years ago:
Community builds trust, mutual reliance, understanding and sympathy
of others, as well collective power. We don’t have to agree on everything, just
discover what it is we have in common.
When I think of those who have helped create my passions and
values, I find myself quickly leaving my own identity and reflecting on those
with whom I worked and enjoyed things including black urban activists and white
Maine farmers with all sorts of different stories and
neighbors who were also close friends.
Good politics is like that as well. Keep and celebrate your own
identity for sure. But share it with others for common goals, such as a new national identity we desperately need.
This is
the way to offer a working alternative to Trump
Immigration fraud
Fact Post News - Non-citizen voting fraud is so minimal that the Heritage Foundation, over a more than a decade of studying this, found 24 cases nationwide in which naturalized citizens or immigrants had improperly voted.
Farms
Mike Levin - More than 15,000 American farms shut down in 2025. The American Farm Bureau has warned that rising costs, falling margins, and policy decisions in Washington are pushing family farms to the brink.
Can Trump start a war with Iran without the approval of Congress?
Find Law - Can the President of the United States (POTUS) begin a military conflict without Congressional approval? As commander-in-chief of the U.S. military, how much control do they have? As you might expect, the answers aren't simple.
A President Is Not a King. The Founding Fathers wanted to avoid giving one person the authority to plunge the new nation into a war. While the office of the president was crafted with George Washington in mind, the creators of the Constitution realized that those who followed might lack his virtues and humility.
As such, it was left to Congress to declare war. This was considered well-established constitutional law until around 1950.
It is still unequivocally true that only Congress has the power to declare war. They've done so 11 times, the last time being during World War II.
It's understandable if you're scratching your head, remembering Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and other conflicts that sure seemed like wars. While Congress has only declared war 11 times, it's also approved 108 "military operations" through resolutions.
This is where it gets complicated. A couple examples may help illustrate.
In 1950, President Harry Truman sidestepped Congress by going directly to the United Nations — then five years old — to authorize military action in North Korea. The U.N. did authorize military action, and Truman used U.S. troops to carry out the "police action."
In 1990, President George H.W. Bush believed a military response was required after Iraq invaded Kuwait. While ultimately Congress declared a joint resolution authorizing the deployment of troops, Bush maintained that he had the right to deploy troops regardless and would have done so even if it led to his impeachment. Bush felt it was vital to U.S. economic and security interests to protect Kuwait.
Ultimately, a Congressional resolution rendered the issue moot. However, it left a gray area regarding when a president can oversee the deployment of troops even without a declaration of war.
No president has ever made a formal declaration of war on their own.
As commander-in-chief of the U.S. military, the president makes all final military decisions during wartime...
Congress has also expanded and retracted the president's wartime powers. In 1941, the First War Powers Act gave President Franklin D. Roosevelt temporary control of many Congressional powers to enhance the efficiency of the war effort. These were repealed after the end of World War II.
The War Powers Resolution of 1973 (referred to as the War Powers Act) went in the other direction. It limits what the president can do with military forces if lacking Congressional approval. U.S. forces sent into combat are limited to 90 days without a Congressional resolution, 30 of which must be spent on their withdrawal.
While the War Powers Act limits prolonged engagements, it also grants the president the authority to "respond to attacks and other emergencies." This was the right that President Trump claimed in 2017 after ordering missile strikes against a military base in Syria without explicit Congressional approval....
Iran
On June 21, 2025, the U.S. military attacked three nuclear sites in Iran. Congress did not approve the action and has not declared war. Iran hadn't attacked any U.S. targets, but the Trump administration claimed that Iran's nuclear program meant that attacks were imminent.
The administration could try to frame any retaliatory strikes by Iran as justification to proceed without Congressional approval under the War Powers Act, at least for a limited time.
Congress could pass legislation limiting the president's war powers, but would need to gather enough support to override an almost certain veto from Trump. Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie submitted such a resolution in the House on June 17.
Will you get any tariff rebates?
Washington Post - Probably not. For the most part, tariffs are paid by importing companies during a Customs and Border Protection process. Individual consumers eventually see some of those fees in the form of cost increases but do not pay tariffs directly.
It’s unlikely that individual businesses will refund customers for price increases.
Trump said several times last year that he planned to use the tariff revenue, which was about $200 billion as of mid-December, to give stimulus checks to Americans. But there are many challenges inherent in that plan, including that tariff funds go to the Treasury and must be allocated by Congress before they are used.
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