Why do Americans hate each other while Canadians love each other?

Could it have something to do with our politics? With the sociopath in the Oval?

Robert Reich

A survey released on March 5 by the Pew Research Center finds that 53 percent of American adults describe the morality and ethics of our fellow citizens as “bad” (ranging from “somewhat bad” to “very bad”).

This puts Americans way out front of other nations on the we-hate-our-compatriots scale. In the 24 other countries polled by Pew, most people called their fellow citizens somewhat good or very good.

At the opposite end of the spectrum from the United States is Canada, where 92 percent say their fellow Canadians are good, while just 7 percent say they’re bad.

Why are we so down on our fellow citizens? It may have something to do with our politics.

Some 30 years ago, my dear friend the late Republican Senator Alan Simpson told me Democrats viewed Republicans as stupid and Republicans viewed Democrats as evil. “I’d rather be in the stupid party,” he chuckled.

I asked him why Republicans saw Democrats as evil.

He took a deep breath. “Religion.”

I said I didn’t understand.

“It’s the Christian right,” he said, as if talking to a five-year-old. “Since Reagan, my party has been a magnet for religious conservatives and Christian fundamentalists, where it’s all about good and evil. Too bad, pal. You’re on the evil side.”

That was 30 years ago. Since then, the divide has only sharpened.

In 2012, Mitt Romney told supporters that “47 percent” of Americans would vote for Obama no matter what because they’re “dependent upon government ... believe that they are victims ... believe the government has a responsibility to care for them ... [and] pay no income tax.”

Insulting 47 percent of Americans was no way to win an election. It was also no way to unite the country.

Then in 2016, Hillary Clinton described half of Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables.” Also no way to win or to foster mutual trust.

Once Trump took office, dislike of our fellow citizens soared.

Before he entered the White House, 47 percent of Republicans and 35 percent of Democrats said people in the opposing party were “immoral.”

By 2022, after years of Trump’s venom: 72 percent of Republicans and 63 percent of Democrats called people in the opposing party “immoral.”

Since he’s been back in the Oval, it’s gotten even worse. 

The Cold Heart of Power: Trump's War on Life Itself

A Man Who Hates Dogs: What Trump's Sterile World Reveals About His Soul

by Lobachevsky in Daily Kos

There's something deeply unsettling about a man who systematically removes every trace of life from his surroundings. Donald Trump's latest assault on the White House Rose Garden—paving over JFK's historic lawn with concrete—isn't just vandalism. It's a window into a soul that finds comfort only in sterile, lifeless environments.

From Gardens to Graveyards

The Rose Garden transformation tells the whole story. What was once a living symbol of American history, designed by Bunny Mellon for JFK and Jackie Kennedy, is now a concrete patio. Trump's justification? "Women, with the high heels, it just didn't work."

Because apparently, accommodating footwear is more important than preserving a century of presidential history.

Critics have called the result "devoid of life" and resembling "a parking lot." One observer noted it looks like "the tombstone he has put on the US economy."

The Golden Mausoleum

This isn't new behavior. Trump's Trump Tower penthouse reads like a pharaoh's tomb—all gold leaf, marble, and mirrors. Architectural Digest described it as resembling "a hotel lobby in the sky." Every surface shimmers with 24-karat gold, from the banquette covered in gold-painted fabric to the gold-leaf ceilings.

No plants. No flowers. No warmth. Just cold, hard surfaces that reflect his image back at him endlessly.

His Mar-a-Lago estate follows the same template—opulent but sterile, impressive but lifeless. It's the aesthetic of someone who mistakes expense for beauty, glitter for gold.

And he’s transforming the White House to match. Gold knick-knacks in the Oval Office. Gold decals on its ceiling.  Removing the grand lawn outside the White House to put in a concrete patio. Ruining an historic landmark that belongs to the people of America—not to him.

The Dog Whisperer (of Hate)

Then there's his relationship with living creatures. Trump is the first president in over a century not to have a pet. But it's worse than simple absence—he actively despises dogs.

His "like a dog" insults are legendary:

• Marco Rubio "sweating like a dog"
• Mitt Romney "choked like a dog"
• Omarosa "compared to a dog"
• Countless others "fired like a dog"

As Vanity Fair noted, Trump never uses dog comparisons positively. It's never "loyal like a dog"—always about failure, betrayal, or humiliation.

His ex-wife Ivana wrote that Trump hated her poodle Chappy, and the feeling was mutual. The dog would "bark at him territorially"—apparently recognizing something the rest of us missed.

The Psychology of Sterility

What does this pattern reveal? A man who's fundamentally uncomfortable with anything he can't control. Living things are unpredictable. They grow, change, die. They require care, patience, empathy—qualities Trump seems to lack entirely.

Gardens need tending. Pets need love. Both represent vulnerability, the acknowledgment that some things matter more than power or profit.

Trump's world is transactional to its core. Everything must serve a purpose, preferably his. A dog's unconditional love? Useless—it can't be leveraged. A garden's beauty? Irrelevant—it doesn't generate revenue.

Policy Through the Lens of Coldness

This coldness isn't just aesthetic—it's political. A man who paves over rose gardens and despises dogs approaches human suffering with the same sterile calculation.

• Environmental protections? Obstacles to profit.
• Healthcare for the vulnerable? Wasteful spending.
• Refugee children? Statistical problems to be solved with cages.

The same impulse that turns living gardens into concrete patios turns complex human needs into simple cost-benefit analyses.

The Emptiness at the Center

There's something profoundly sad about a 79-year-old man who's never experienced the simple joy of a dog's greeting or the quiet satisfaction of tending a garden. His world is all surfaces—gold-plated, mirror-polished, but ultimately hollow.

As one critic observed, looking at Trump's concrete Rose Garden: "I'm beginning to figure out how [Trump] bankrupted several casinos."

When you can't distinguish between what's valuable and what's merely expensive, when you mistake sterility for sophistication, failure becomes inevitable.

The man who promised to make America great again can't even keep a garden alive.

Why does MAGA spread hate and violence?

The MAGA mind virus

Stephen Robinson

The disastrous choice American voters made in last year’s presidential election was put on grim display earlier this month in response to the politically motivated shooting of Minnesota state lawmakers and their spouses by a right-wing extremist named Vance Boelter.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz responded to the violence like a decent human being and condemned the shooting as an attack on all Americans and our very civic order.

“We are not a country that settles our differences at gunpoint,” a somber Walz said during a press conference. “We have demonstrated again and again in our state that it is possible to peacefully disagree, that our state is strengthened by civil public debate. We must stand united against all forms of violence — and I call on everyone to join me in that commitment.”

The president, meanwhile, responded to the shootings like — well, like a maniac.

Trump rejected Walz’s call for unity and as always refused to even pretend he’s supposed to be the president of the entire United States.

“I think the governor of Minnesota is so whacked out. I’m not calling him. Why would I call him?” Trump told reporters on Air Force One. “The guy doesn’t have a clue. He’s a mess. So I could be nice and call him, but why waste time?”

Trump’s predecessors responded more humanely to gun violence. After the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007, Republican president George W. Bush immediately reached out to Democratic Gov. Tim Kaine and offered his support and sympathy. 

Four years later, when 19 people, including Rep. Gabby Giffords, were shot in Tucson, Arizona, President Barack Obama offered Republican Gov. Jan Brewer — a vocal political opponent — the full resources of the federal government.

Unfortunately, 77 million Americans surrendered these moments of shared humanity when they put Trump back in the White House. The tragedies that once united us now only result in more division. And no one, including his supporters, should have expected anything else.

Donald Trump's actual "Help Wanted" posting. Not making this up.

JD Vance’s selection as Trump’s running mate marks the end of Republican conservatism

Fascism and Christian Nationalism now define the GOP

Karyn Amira, College of Charleston

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and
vice presidential candidate JD Vance at a campaign rally in
Michigan on July 20, 2024. AP Photo/Evan Vucci

Since Donald Trump chose Ohio Sen. JD Vance as his running mate, it’s been widely noted that Vance once described Trump as “reprehensible” and “cultural heroin.” However, the day after Vance won his own Senate race in 2022, he reportedly made it known that he would support Trump for president in 2024.

Given this dramatic change, what does Vance’s selection mean for the Republican Party and conservatism, the political philosophy that the GOP once claimed to embrace?

I am a political scientist whose research and political analysis focuses on the relationship between Trump, the Republican Party and conservatism. Everyday citizens define conservatism in different ways, but at its root it is a philosophy that supports smaller and less-centralized government because consolidated power could be used to silence political competition and deny citizens their liberties.

Since 2015, Trump has tightened his grip on the Republican Party, moving it further away from its professed conservative ideology. The choice of Vance as Trump’s running mate – and the competition that preceded it – are the latest steps in this process.

Political columnist George Will describes how Trumpism has steered the Republican Party away from traditional conservative views.

Vance came from a small pool of contenders that included other noteworthy politicians who likewise once vehemently opposed Trump. By examining their trajectories, we can see how the Republican Party has abandoned conservative values to serve a single man.

Why we can’t quit election polls

Often in error but still seductive

W. Joseph Campbell, American University School of Communication

Polls showed Joe Biden, right, holding double-digit leads
over Donald Trump, left, in the run-up to the 2020 election,
but he won election by only 4.5 percentage points. 
AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File

Their record is uneven. They misfired in one way or another in the past three presidential elections. And yet the prevalence of election polls is undiminished. Thirteen months before the 2024 election, polls are many – and inescapable.

Why is that? What explains polling’s abiding appeal despite its performance record?

The reasons go beyond facile analogies that election polls are akin to weather forecasts in offering a fluid, if sometimes contradictory, sense of what lies ahead.

Polls and poll-based forecasts are not always in error, as I noted in my 2020 book, “Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections.” Their enduring appeal rests in part in offering a sense of data-based certainty that can be irresistible, especially to journalists who tend to value precision in a field awash with ambiguity.

It is hardly surprising, then, that news organizations also are polling operations. Ties to election polling live deep in the media’s DNA.

It Is Now Democracy vs. Authoritarianism

There Can Be No Compromise

ROBERT REICH in Robertreich.Substack.Com

The so-called "town hall" debacle marked the unofficial start of Donald Trump’s campaign to be reelected president of the United States.

He spent over an hour of prime-time television before an adoring crowd — courtesy of CNN — suggesting America should default on its debts (the crowd applauded) and that we should not defend Ukraine from Russia (cheers).

He defended his infamous “grab ’em by the pussy” comments, called E. Jean Carroll, against whom a Manhattan jury had just found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation, a “whack job,” and said her trial was “a rigged deal” (cheers and applause).

All of this was bad enough.

But what really got my attention was his attempt to rewrite the history of his attempted coup: He asserted that January 6, 2021, was “a beautiful day” (more cheers), that the Capitol rioters had “love in their heart,” and that if elected, he’d pardon those who have been convicted (big applause). He denied moderator Kaitlan Collins’s factual assertion that he took three hours to tell the January 6 rioters to go home (more cheers).

He claimed that he never asked Georgia election officials to “find” him the exact number of votes needed to defeat Biden in Georgia. (He did, and it’s on tape.) 

He claimed that ex-Vice President Mike Pence had the power to overturn the election. (He didn’t.) 

He called Michael Byrd — the Black Capitol Police lieutenant who fatally shot Ashli Babbitt while protecting lawmakers during the storming of the Capitol — a “thug.” (He isn’t.)

And he reiterated that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and — menacingly — refused to commit to the results of the 2024 presidential election (more applause).

What’s been the reaction to this prime-time squalor?

No Republican lawmaker has condemned it — except for Utah’s Mitt Romney (remember him? He was the Republican Party’s presidential nominee in 2012, as amazing as that now seems).

From the rest of the Republican Party — Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, other Republican leaders in Congress, Republican governors? Nothing.

Crucial Choices Ahead for Beloved, Besieged Social Security

Time to lift the income cap? 

By Gerald Scorse, Guest Columnist 

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” That famous phrase from Charles Dickens sums up the double-edged sword hanging over the roughly 63 million Americans now getting monthly retirement payouts from Social Security. 

Their 2022 COLA (cost-of-living adjustment) rose by 5.9%, the biggest jump in nearly 40 years. The 2023 increase, just announced, came in at an even-higher 8.7%. That’s the best of times. The worst of times, getting ever closer, is the date when the Social Security trust fund runs out of money—and those higher benefits this year and next will likely wipe out the fund earlier than the current estimate of 2034. 

Adding to the problem, the nation’s demographics have created their own double-edged sword. For years, a combination of higher life expectancies and lower birth rates has been lowering the ratio of workers who pay in to beneficiaries who take out. 

Putting everything together, Congress will be forced to act to keep benefits from shrinking to only 78% of the currently scheduled amounts. There’s little doubt that lawmakers won’t let that happen, but plenty of doubt over the direction their fixes will take. 

Even though Social Security is hugely popular, only the most optimistic expect a bipartisan solution. Everything will likely hinge on which party is in charge, and the ideas backed by the two parties differ sharply. Democrats want more generous benefits; the GOP, under the guise of saving Social Security, would effectively cut them. 

Let’s review the major ideas. Then let’s consider two further reforms—both aimed at high-income Americans—to help prevent any shortfall and put the system on a sound fiscal basis. 

There was a time when at least some Republicans cared about the environment

Putting the “conserve” back in “conservative”

Peter Dykstra, Environmental Health News

Last Sunday, an influential British conservative sent up a red flag in the Times of London. Sensing a sharp turn in the policy direction of new Prime Minister Liz Truss, William Hague wrote “conservatives must always be environmentalists.”

In other words, the British Right is in deep trouble if it follows the path of America’s Right.

But — from Teddy Roosevelt to Richard Milhous Nixon to Ronald Reagan — it wasn’t always that way here.

So, in this sharply divided country, how do we get back to a time when millions of us don’t equate clean air with bad taste? Maybe a tour of more than a century of Republican history could guide us.

Republican's nightmare vision for America

New GOP plan to raise taxes on working people & end Social Security & Medicare

By Thom Hartmann for the Independent Media Institute

They’re at it again: Republicans want to raise taxes on poor and working-class Americans, end Social Security and Medicare, jack up pollution and corporate profits, all while continuing to pamper their billionaire donor base.

This time it’s the guy in charge of getting Republican senators elected and re-elected, Florida’s Senator Rick Scott. 

You may remember him as the guy who ran the company convicted of the largest Medicare fraud in the history of America, who then took his money and ran for Governor of Florida, where he prevented the state from expanding Medicaid for low-income Floridians for all the years he ran the state. 

Now he’s the second-richest guy in the senate and, IMHO, the leading candidate for the GOP nomination for president in 2024. And, true to form, he’s echoing the sentiments of the richest guy in the Senate, Mitt Romney, the last guy before Trump to have that nomination.

“There are 47 percent who are with him,” Romney said of Obama voters back in 2012, “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. These are people who pay no income tax.”

Low income working people in America generally pay a higher percentage of their income as taxes than do most of our billionaires and multi-multi-millionaires.  They pay Social Security taxes, Medicare taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, taxes in the form of fees for everything from a driver’s license to road tolls to annual car inspections.

Putin my heart on the line

For more cartoons by Ruben Bolling, CLICK HERE.

 

No joy for Chuck

For more cartoons by Ted Rall, CLICK HERE.

 

Make No Mistake, Fascism Is on the Ballot in 2022

The biggest battle for the survival of American democracy is before us now.

THOM HARTMANN

When fascism reared its ugly head in Europe and Japan in the 1920s, it signaled a coming war. As a newer and slicker form of that despotism rises here in America, it may well bring the same type of crisis.

We stand on the threshold of momentous change in this nation. While it’s rarely discussed in this frame, the next two elections will almost certainly determine what form of government we’ll have for at least a generation.

Will America become more free and democratic, or will we devolve into a 21st century form of Trumpy fascism?

The Democratic Party is institutionally committed to America finally realizing a republican form of democracy, rejecting gerrymanders and voter suppression while embracing the kind of “maximum participation” ease of voting seen in every other advanced democracy in the world.  

Three significant pieces of legislation to reverse the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act and protect the integrity of the vote have passed the House and if Democratic Leadership (looking at you, Biden and Schumer) can get them through the Senate there is a vastly improved chance for the survival of our form of government.

Additionally, most federally elected Democrats support strengthening our democracy by ending the filibuster in the Senate and adding at least Washington, DC as a new state (with high support for Puerto Rico as well).

But do Democrats have the will and power to fight a battle against financially well-armed rightwing billionaires and their predatory and polluting industries?

Not to mention taking on today’s GOP version of Mussolini’s Blackshirts, the volunteer civilian “tough guy” militias that initially roamed around Italy beating up Jews and lefties?

The Republican Party, having openly given up on democracy, is trying through gerrymandering, voter suppression and election rigging to seize and hold control of our nation against the will of the majority of America’s voters. 

Calling it a “slow motion insurrection,” the Associated Press reports how the GOP is taking over election systems across America with the explicit goal of refusing to certify elections that they lose in 2022 and 2024.

“Never in the country’s modern history,” the AP notes, “has a a major party sought to turn the administration of elections into an explicitly partisan act.”

In the process, the Republican Party has put fascism on the ballot in 2022 and 2024.

Bipartisan if Dems do it THEIR way

 

Trump mob follows long American tradition of racist violence

US Capitol protesters, egged on by Trump, are part of a long history of white supremacists hearing politicians' words as encouragement

Shannon M. Smith, College of Saint Benedict & Saint John's University

The Proud Boys outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.,
on Wednesday, January 6, 2021. 
(Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/For The Washington Post via Getty Images

“President Trump and his Republican enablers in Congress incited a violent attack Wednesday against the government they lead,” The New York Times’ editorial board wrote on Jan. 6, summing up much of the response to the incursion into the Capitol by rioting Trump supporters that day.

At a rally that morning, Donald Trump had urged those supporters to march on the Capitol, saying he would “never concede” and that they should show “the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.”

The Times was joined in laying the blame at Trump’s feet by many others, including Republican Sen. Mitt Romney, who said what happened at the Capitol was “an insurrection incited by the president of the United States.”

Among the protesters at the Capitol were members of white supremacy groups, including the Proud Boys. Their participation in the Jan. 6 events, egged on by Trump, reflects a long history in the U.S. of local, state and national political leaders encouraging white supremacist groups to challenge or overthrow democratic governments.

During Reconstruction, the post-Civil War period of forming interracial governments and reintegrating former Confederate states into the Union, white city and state leaders in the South tacitly encouraged violence against black voters by state militias and groups like the Ku Klux Klan. They did it in a way that allowed those leaders to look innocent of any crimes.

Those groups used that chaos to end federal power in their states and reestablish white-dominated Southern state governments.

Today, white supremacists hope the political chaos they contribute to will lead to race war and the creation of their own white nation.

Trump is unraveling in plain view

Mental Health Experts: Why the Next Four Months Could Be Really Dangerous

By Alan D. Blotcky and John M. Talmadge

Donald Trump on Friday commuted the sentence of his crony, Roger Stone. 

As Mitt Romney tweeted, “Unprecedented historic corruption: an American president commutes the sentence of a person  convicted by a jury of lying to shield that very president.”

So the president of the United States takes action to help his buddy, a convicted felon, but he cannot take decisive steps to combat the coronavirus pandemic and save lives. 

This is an act of corruption of the highest order. And this is an example of Trump’s mental disorder and a stark preview of his unraveling over the next four months leading up to the November election.

Heading to the November election, Trump’s mental disorder will continue to unravel in the face of mounting pressures and stress.

Now, Trump has found a new foil and is attacking Anthony Fauci, a highly respected public health expert. 

Dr. Fauci has served in five presidential administrations. He relies on data and science. Trump trying to discredit Dr. Fauci is a desperate attempt to blame him for Trump’s own catastrophic handling of the deadly pandemic.

And it is another reflection of the gravity of his mental disorder.

Trump’s death wish

Why Is Trump So Enthusiastic About Americans Dying?

By Thom Hartmann for Common Dreams

Two weeks after America diagnosed its first case of COVID-19, Republicans in the United States Senate (with the single exception of Mitt Romney) refuse to vote to impeach Donald Trump.

They decided he couldn’t do much more damage than he already has, and, as Senator Susan Collins suggested, he would back down from his most outrageous behavior because his hands had been slapped by the House of Representatives.

Now, newly empowered and feeling invincible, he seems hellbent on a crusade to kill hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Nobody knows why Trump is so enthusiastic about encouraging people to get sick and die from COVID-19, although there are a couple possibly viable theories.

Trump’s and Republicans’ rhetoric all shifted a day or two after April 7, the day that the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN and other national media reported that Black and Hispanic people were dying of COVID at about twice the rate of white people. 

Is it possible Trump and the racists in his Party think this is a good way to reduce the Black and Hispanics population, or at least that it’s not an issue for white people?

Another possibility has to do with Freedomworks, the group that was largely raised to prominence by rightwing billionaires and helped fund the so-called Tea Party movement. 

Billionaires want their people back at work, be they in refineries or meat processing plants or retail stores, and they know that if some of those workers get sick and die there’s a never-ending supply of poor, unemployed people willing to replace them.

Support Trump or die

This is how ancient Rome's republic died

Classicist sees troubling parallels at Trump's impeachment trial
Timothy Joseph, College of the Holy Cross

The U.S. Senate has made its judgment in the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, acquitting the president. 

Fifty two of 53 senators in the Republican majority voted to acquit the president on the abuse of power charge and all 53 Republican senators voted to acquit on the obstruction of Congress charge.

All 47 Democratic senators voted to convict the president on both charges. Senator Mitt Romney of Utah was the only Republican voting to convict for abuse of power.

The Republican senators’ speedy exoneration of Trump marks perhaps the most dramatic step in their capitulation to the president over the past three years.

That process, as I wrote in The Conversation last fall, recalls the ancient Roman senate’s compliance with the autocratic rule of the emperors and its transformation into a body largely reliant on the emperors’ whims.

Along with the senatorial fealty that was again on display, there was another development that links the era of the Roman Republic’s transformation into an autocratic state with the ongoing political developments in the United States. It’s a development that may point to where the country is headed.

Get Ready For Trump’s Next Act— ’Vindication And Attack’

And you thought be was bad BEFORE impeachment

By Terry H. Schwadron, DCReport Opinion Editor

To watch Donald Trump disrepect the National Anthem just before his acquittal, CLICK HERE.

Even as the Republican Senate majority was acquitting Donald Trump of impeachment charges, one could sense the country bracing for the impending retaliating boomerang.

Trump is never gracious. Even in would-be victory, he is sure to be boastful about beating the so-called witch hunt.

The next step, naturally, will be vindication and attack.

The vote was almost without drama since almost all senators had declared their intentions. The exception, of course, was the emotional decision by Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) to convict. He was the sole senator to break with the GOP. After closing speeches filled with self-serving hyperbole, the Senate finally got to the predicted vote. Democrats held together in a minority.

Susan Collins (R-Maine) insisted Trump has learned from the flawed scheme in shaking down Ukrainian officials for personal political gain that gave rise to the removal vote. She trusted Trump would refrain from other such actions again. Trump apparently dismissed Collins’ suggestion and told news anchors he had done nothing wrong.