You may have heard that Trump and Vought have requested to hike the military budget to 1.5 trillion next year. To do that, they’ll be cutting everything else, including the following:
For the second year in a row, US President Donald Trump has proposed significant cuts to the budgets of major US science agencies. Released Friday, the White House’s plan for federal spending next year also includes a ban on using federal funds for subscriptions and publishing fees for some academic journals.
The plan proposes cuts to federal agencies that fund or conduct research on health, space and the environment. Some of the steepest cuts would be made to the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA): the budgets of both would fall more than 50% in 2027 compared to their current levels (see ‘Budget crunch’). The budget for the US National Institutes of Health would drop 13%.
Science? Who needs it? We’re Murica and we have a military.
It’s unlikely the Congress will go along with these particular numbers. But if this GOP majority has its way it will go in this general direction.
Here’s a cheery item from The Guardian this morning. No really. Or at least it’s good news for our beleaguered friends in Ukraine. They are now not only the world’s foremost experts in the use of cheap drones on the battlefield, but robots as well. Victor Pavlov demonstrated:
The unmanned ground vehicles come in various shapes and sizes. One runs on caterpillar tracks and resembles a roofless milk float. Another has wheels and antennas. A third carries anti-tank mines. Since spring 2024 their use has grown exponentially.
“This is what modern warfare looks like. Armies everywhere will have to robotise,” said Pavlov, a lieutenant with Ukraine’s 3rd army corps.
The U.S. goes all in on expensive weaponry as if cost is no object. In the Iran theater, the U.S. is firing million-dollar missiles to stop Iranian drones that cost between $20,000 and $50,000 each. Forbes details how high-dollar U.S. gatling guns are failing to stop waves of cheap Iranian drones. They can miss a lot and run out of ammunition before the attack is over. “For that task, the sort of small interceptor drones developed by Ukraine, costing a few thousand dollars each and integrated with radar and other sensors may be a far better bet” when Shaheds “may keep coming night after night.”
Lacking our appetite or GDP, Ukraine has to get creative, innovate, and do more with less. (If only I could convince Democrats to try that.) Ukraine is developing a marketable export in the process.
Ukraine’s drone expertise is now highly sought after amid the US-Israeli war against Iran. Last week Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed 10-year defence agreements with several Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, to provide them with low-cost Ukrainian interceptors. They can shoot down long-range kamikaze Shahed drones, used by Tehran in its attacks on its neighbours, and by Moscow.
The Kremlin’s war has transformed Kyiv into a centre for the development of modern unmanned weapons. There is a unique ecosystem, where engineers design new products and frontline soldiers give instant feedback. Manufacturers then scale up supplies, building ground vehicles, anti-Shahed interceptors and pioneering sea drones.
One operator comments:
“It’s not Star Wars, where there are lots of lasers. The frontline is more like Terminator. A land robot arrives at your position and there is nothing you can do about it,” said Bambi, a drone operator with the 25th airborne brigade. He added: “You can shoot a person in the chest and they stop firing. If you shoot a ground robot it doesn’t feel pain. There is a guy looking at a screen who is going to fire back.”
So far none of these robotic systems are reported to be autonomous, AI-controlled systems of the kind U.S. tech bros and Pentagon “warfighters” want developed. So we’re not at Skynet just yet. But is that really good news?
CNN’s Harry Enten finds that Donald Trump’s net approval rating among independents is less that Richard Nixon’s ahead of his resignation. Behold:
ABSOLUTE BOMBSHELL on CNN: Donald Trump now has the worst net approval rating among independents of ANY president ever. He is literally polling 10 points worse than Richard Nixon right before he resigned. The American public has abandoned him entirely! pic.twitter.com/cAJFmv7BzS
I’m fixated on this coming November’s independent vote here in N.C. because they are now 39 percent of the state’s voter registration with Ds and Rs tied at 30 percent. Statewide, independents (registered “unaffiliated” here) voted 54 percent for Donald Trump in 2024. BUT, they voted 6 precent less than Democrats.
Reuters reported back in November on the aggregate vote share based on exit polling:
The independent share stood at 34% in the latest update of Edison’s exit poll, compared with 34% for Republicans and 32% for Democrats.
Nationally, independents accounted for more votes quantitatively, but I don’t find their national turnout percent this morning. Gallup found in January that a new high of 45 percent of Americans identify as independents. But many states do not register voters as independents, so percent turnout among self-identified independents is harder to pin down.
So while it’s significant that Enten finds Trump’s support among independents in the tank, what matters in November is how big that tank is and what percent turn out to vote.
And it’s a long seven months to Election Day. Anything could happen.
An orphaned grizzly cub and an older polar bear have just become best friends at the Detroit Zoo 🐻✨
Grizzly cub Jebbie was found wandering alone in Alaska, unable to survive on his own. He was transported to the Detroit Zoo in July, where he met Laerke, a lonely polar bear cub… pic.twitter.com/j81AjJ3Iac
— Beauty of music and nature 🌺🌺 (@Axaxia88) March 20, 2026
An orphaned grizzly cub and an older polar bear have just become best friends at the Detroit Zoo.
Grizzly cub Jebbie was found wandering alone in Alaska, unable to survive on his own. He was transported to the Detroit Zoo in July, where he met Laerke, a lonely polar bear cub who was also growing up without a mother bear. The two quickly became close companions, and the zoo says they do everything together, including ‘running, chasing each other, wrestling, rolling around, and lots of typical bear play.
What do bear cubs do to pass the time? Apparently dance and play a friendly game of Ring Around the Rosie.
A family of baby brown bears was spotted in eastern Finland holding hands and dancing around in a circle, just like schoolchildren do while singing the Ring Around the Rosie rhyme on the playground.
Valtteri Mulkahainen, a 52-year-old gym teacher, reportedly witnessed the adorable moment unfold in the animal kingdom in a forest in Suomussalmi, Finland, according to the Solent News Agency, which obtained the pictures.
Paul Krugman this morning offers some TGIF news. Batteries work and are getting cheaper. Drastically so:
The decline in battery prices has been incredible. It’s like nothing anyone has ever seen before. Big, strong men with tears in their eyes come up to me and say, “Sir, have you seen the progress in batteries?”:
Why does this matter?
First, cheap battery storage of electricity greatly mitigates the problem of intermittency — the sun doesn’t always shine, the wind doesn’t always blow. This was a major concern early in the renewable revolution. Some energy economists scolded me for my naïve optimism when I first wrote about solar technology way back in 2011. But solar + batteries provides round-the-clock power.
Here’s a graph of California’s electricity supply generated by renewables and batteries over the course of 24 hours on April 1 that illustrates my point:
During the middle of the day, California generates lots of electricity from solar. Much of it is poured into batteries, which provide electricity when the sun sets. Californians don’t even notice the switch.
In engineering school I heard one professor casually mention to another that students were not considering power density in their mechanical designs. I never heard another word about it in any class. But Krugman references it:
Second, battery performance has soared as prices have plunged. Crucially, there has been a huge increase in batteries’ volumetric energy density: the amount of electricity that can be stored in a given space. Until a few years ago the energy density of gasoline gave internal combustion a huge advantage over electric vehicles. But no longer.
For any geeks out there, follow the link in the paragraph above.
While Trump fiddles in Iran, he’s burning more fossil fuels at home while surrendering the renewables market to China. (So much winning.) But he cannot stop the renewables future, Krugman writes.
The first drop was by far the sharpest. In the couple of weeks after Trump took office and started signing a barrage of executive orders, his net approval cratered at a pace of about 15 points per month. That was the fastest decline of his whole presidency — basically, whatever political “honeymoon” Trump enjoyed after his 2024 victory collapsed almost immediately.
From early February through early April 2025, that decline slowed to around 2 points per month. Then came his “Liberation Day” tariffs announcement, a year ago as of this Thursday, April 2, and the press coverage around the Kilmar Abrego Garcia deportation. That caused Trump’s approval to drop another 5 points in just a month.
After that, things eased off a bit more. The National Guard deployment to Los Angeles in June 2025 coincided with a slower rate of decline, closer to 2 points per month. And from June through October, Trump’s numbers were almost flat, falling by less than a point a month. If there was ever a moment when things looked like they might be leveling off, that was it.
But it didn’t last. The government shutdown and the No Kings protests in October 2025 pushed the trend downward again, roughly doubling the pace of decline. The president lost support after the 2025 statewide elections across the country, then recovered a couple of points of ground.
The trend snapped back to the negative with the first round of the Epstein files release in December. And now the war with Iran has sped things up again, with Trump’s net approval falling at about 2 points per month again — the fastest sustained slide since spring 2025.
Surprisingly, one set of events the model doesn’t pick up is the murder of Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis in January. There looks to be a slight decline in Trump’s rating after these events, but the model does not pick it up as a “change point” — maybe because of the noise in the trend in early Feb. This is good point to stop and remind ourselves that analyzing aggregatge trends in observational polling data often leaves information on the table and cannot provide for causal analysis. For example, there was a big dip in Trump’s immigration issue approval after Good and Pretti were killed, suggesting it did break through to the average American when they thought about immigration in particular, even if there wasn’t an obvious hit to Trump’s overall rating.
And now there’s Iran…
Morris says that this is mostly attributed to economic anxiety and a strong majority is holding his responsible for it. But every once in a while something else breaks through that send his rating even lower. He is on a negative trajectory and nothing seems to change it. And as Morris notes, Trump doesn’t appear to give a damn about it.
As I have written, he’s playing for history and believes that he will end up being the big winner because he has always been right about everything.
Poor Trump. If only his henchmen would tell him the truth he’d be making much better decisions:
Donald Trump was in the Oval Office during the third week of the Iran war when a group of his most trusted advisers came to deliver some unwelcome news.
His longtime pollster, Tony Fabrizio, had conducted surveys that indicated the war Trump launched was growing increasingly unpopular. Gas prices had surged past $4 per gallon, stock markets had tumbled to multi-year lows, and millions of Americans were preparing to take to the streets in protest. Thirteen American service members had been confirmed killed. Some of Trump’s key public supporters were criticizing a conflict with no clear end in sight. It fell on White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and a small group of aides to tell the President that the longer the war dragged on, the more it would threaten his public support and Republicans’ prospects in November’s midterm elections.
For Trump, the stark warning was unsettling. The President has begun many recent mornings watching video clips compiled by military officials of battlefield successes, according to a senior Administration official. He has told advisers that being the commander in chief to eliminate the nuclear threat posed by Iran could be one of his signature achievements. But Wiles, according totwo White House sources, was concerned aides were giving the President a rose-colored view of how the war was being perceived domestically, telling Trump what he wanted to hear instead of what he needed to hear. She had urged colleagues, the officials say, to be “more forthright with the boss” about the political and economic risks.
The meeting reflected a reality the White House can no longer ignore: time is running out before the President, his party, and the American public pay an even steeper price. Trump had promised to revive the economy and keep the U.S. out of foreign conflicts. Now he has started a war he had not gotten a mandate to wage, and the economic pain may only be beginning. A month into the largest oil shock in modern history, global growth forecasts are being slashed, shortages are emerging across Europe and Asia, and energy traders warn the world has yet to feel the full severity of the disruption. A prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway that is the primary exit route for oil and gas from the Persian Gulf, could tip the global economy into recession.
The President was left frustrated by the predicament, at odds with some of his own officials, and fuming at the negative impressions of the war. The mounting political and economic toll has left him looking for an off-ramp, according to two advisers and two members of Congress who have spoken to him during the last week. Trump told them he wants to wind down the campaign, wary of a protracted conflict that could hobble Republicans heading into the midterms. At the same time, he wants the operation to be a decisive success. Allies say he is searching for a way to declare victory, halt the fighting, and hope that economic conditions stabilize before the political damage hardens. “There’s a narrow window,” says a senior Administration official, who like others interviewed for this account of Trump at war was granted anonymity to provide candid observations about the President’s thinking.
Magical thinking, that is. He fucked up and doesn’t have a clue about how to deal with it. And it’s all his fault. He listened to the sycophants because he wanted to hear what he wanted to hear about what a great leader he is. And he has endless faith in his ability to wriggle out of every scrape because he always has.
And get a load of this:
Key Trump officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, were surprised by the barrage of retaliatory attacks Tehran launched against U.S. and Israeli targets across the region, including in countries long assumed to be off-limits: Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar, a state that had both harbored Iran’s terrorist proxies and served as a conduit for backchannel diplomacy between the U.S. and Hamas. The response shattered the assumption that Tehran would confine itself to performative retaliation. In internal deliberations before the war’s launch, Hegseth had pointed to Iran’s muted reaction to Trump’s past attacks as evidence that calibrated force could impose costs on Tehran without triggering a broader war. Hegseth “was caught off guard. There’s no question,” says a person familiar with his thinking.
It would really be helpful if we had people in charge who know something about Iran, war, history, human psychology instead of Fox News Brain rotted weirdos. Jesus.
War is not simple politics. You can easily lie yourself into one but they aren’t easy to lie yourself out of. Trump is finding that out. And people are paying with their lives.
Mike Davis, a conservative judicial activist who is close to the White House, said in an interview Republicans “need to” take action.
“Are they just going to let the ballroom just sit there in disarray … they’re just going to let the construction zone be a fucking disaster for the next three years?” Davis added. “Like, come on.”
But most Republicans who sit on committees with direct jurisdiction of White House and public property matters have so far been silent on whether they’ll shepherd through legislation to protect one of Trump’s top priorities. Doing so could put them in the crosshairs of Democrats, who have already made clear they think the ballroom is proof the president cares more about entertaining wealthy donors than passing policies to lower the costs of everyday goods — and who, in the Senate, have the ability to block any ballroom authorization measure from ever reaching Trump’s desk.
Just leave the wrecked hulk of the East Wing right where it is. It’s the most fitting Trump memorial of all.
Trump says let the states take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare “all these individual things.”
The White House took this down but it was too late. It was already out there:
Trump: "The US can't take of daycare. That has to be up to a state. We're fighting wars. Medicaid, Medicare — they can do it on a state basis. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. But all these little scams that have taken place, you have to let states take… pic.twitter.com/G2s3WTNxpI
I will just remind people of what he said about child care during the campaign:
I know it hurts the head to listen to that gobbldygook and he’d obviously never given that issue a moment’s thought before the question was asked. But he did promise that it would be available, that he would back legislation and that the tariffs would bring in so much money that everyone would be able to get it. Now he’s telling Vought to defund it and telling the states to pick up the slack.
Trump likes to say “if you don’t control the border you don’t have a country anymore.” I think it’s clear that if you make Trump president you don’t have a country anymore. He said it: “the federal government can only take care of one thing — military protection.” I’m sure he believes that DHS thugs should be part of that too.
Basically he’s saying the U.S. government is nothing more than a protection racket. The states are all individual countries responsible for the welfare of the citizens. Good to know.
It’s interesting that they took down that video after it had been posted. I can’t imagine why they would be worried about anything he says in it. After all, he spent the day calling Springsteen a dried up old prune and posted deeply weird stuff about Jasmine Crocket being related to Davy Crocket (with a picture of Fess Parker who played the role on TV.) It’s clear that he’s lost his mind. But I would guess it was comments like this that sent terror through the GOP incumbents who knows that saying the federal government can’t pay for day care, Medicaid and Medicare is the kiss of death for them.
Little did Digby know when she asked me to join her in August 2014 that I’d be writing from one of the nation’s premier hotbeds of Republican mischief. After their 2010 REDMAP victories, the GOP had gerrymandered the hell out of North Carolina. They had passed their 2013 Voter Identification Verification Act (found in 2016 “to discriminate against African American voters” with “almost surgical precision”). But they had yet to pass their infamous 2016 “bathroom bill.” Republicans in late 2016 had yet to strip incoming Democratic Governor Roy Cooper’s “control over state and county elections boards and its powerful university system.” Republicans had yet to redraw congressional districts multiple times in response to Democrats’ court challenges, or to contest a 2024 state Supreme Court election they’d lost with six months of recounts, court battles, and an attempt to throw out tens of thousands of ballots.
But here we are. And they are at it again. As David Pepper warned, schemes cooked up in these “laboratories of autocracy” may eventually find their way to where you live.
Remember the GOP’s alleged commitment to the notion that “government closest to the people is the one that governs best”? That was then. The GOPstillmouths it. They just don’t believe it. This comes via Carolina Forward:
A major issue brewing in our state legislature today is over what to do about property taxes in North Carolina.
Pretty much since forever, property taxes have always been decided on the local, county level. Local elected officials – each county’s Board of Commissioners – sets its own property tax rate based on whatever it is their local voters want and need.
But now, that might change. The leaders of North Carolina’s state legislature are now considering whether to take away local counties’ ability to set their own property taxes based on local needs, and lock them into a formula – set and controlled, of course, by the state legislature.
For almost 150 years, voters in North Carolina have decided their own local property tax rates through local elections. Don’t like your property taxes? Go elect some different county commissioners. People do it all the time. After all, it just makes sense that the people of Polk, Cabarrus, Clay, Wake, Bladen or Gates counties choose different tax rates, since the counties are all very different themselves. Local elected officials, who are closest to their voters, are usually the best-informed about their needs.
But the leaders of North Carolina’s state legislature are no fans of local control. Many of them seem to be of the mind that they – not the local voters most affected – should decide the matter. Through some combination of levy limits and/or assessment caps, state lawmakers may soon end North Carolina’s 150-year tradition of local control over property taxation.
Here’s something for everyone to consider, though: it’s easy for our centralized state government to take power away from local counties. It’s very hard to give it back, and it doesn’t often happen.
Power flows from the pursestrings. When counties’ ability to raise revenue is limited, they’ll become more reliant on the state legislature. More and more counties will need to pay for lobbyists to prowl the halls of our legislature; county commissioners will need to spend more time in Raleigh pleading their cases.
Local elections matter. Tomorrow, they may just matter a little less.
GOP-led legislatures are implementing changes to governance and revenue streams, strategically starving cities of revenue, leaving city leaders with no choice but to raise taxes and/or cut services and piss off voters. It’s happening in North Carolina and elsewhere [dead link is corrected]:
After a couple of cycles, Republicans will be running candidates who blame North Carolina cities’ financial woes on “mismanagement and waste” by Democrats, and counting on voters to forget by then who precipitated the crisis in the first place. They’ll succeed if we don’t remind voters at every opportunity that it’s their strategy. It is deliberate.
About that N.C. Supreme Court election mentioned above. The court’s GOP majority may have picked up the delay, delay, delay gambit from the sitting president (WRAL):
The North Carolina Supreme Court on Thursday threw out the multibillion-dollar plan to improve North Carolina’s public schools in a ruling that ended the long-running lawsuit known as Leandro.
Hoke County Board of Education v. State of North Carolina was initially filed in 1994 and accuses the state of not providing an adequate education to the state’s more than 1 million students. The lawsuit has sought to shore up education in the state and improve outcomes for the state’s students.
Parties had come to an agreement on a plan in 2021 that would have drastically increased funding by more than $5 billion — funding for things such as special education, teacher pay, counselors, social workers and school nurses. It also included many policy changes, on things such as school improvement.
The court threw out that plan Thursday in a 4-3 decision. The ruling invalidates the last decade’s worth of actions in the case. But instead of remanding the lawsuit for further action on the claims of the original five school boards that sued — Cumberland, Hoke, Halifax, Vance and Robeson — the court dismissed the case entirely without giving parties the ability to re-file. Justices in the majority tossed the case in part because they contended that today’s education system has changed too much in the past 20 years and that the lack of any current students as plaintiffs means no plaintiffs have their rights at issue.
Did I mention that North Carolina is nine months into its budget year and the GOP-controlled state legislature has yet to pass a budget? Or that it has not had a new budget since 2023? Even in the wake of Hurricane Helene?
