The Best of the Rest of the News. — Trump has illegally, unconstitutionally attacked Iran in collaboration with his fellow felon Netanyahu. — Will this finally get Epstein off the front page and give Trump his excuse to declare an emergency to rig the elections? — Speaking of panicked Republicans, after they stripped Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) subsidies from millions of Americans, causing insurance bills to double and triple, they're facing a wave of outrage. — Does the arrest of a Columbia University Student show that we've lost our civil society? — Is CNN the new CBS? — Trump's inflation heats up from tariffs. — Bowing to chemical industry donations, Trump officials are killing off the system that protects families and communities from chemical disasters like explosions, spills, and fires at chemical facilities. — Crazy Alert! Trump viewed Noem's shooting her puppy in the face as an asset.

Trump's attack on elected officials of color isn't just ugly rhetoric, it's a calculated attempt to redefine who gets to belong in this democracy… Donald Trump didn't merely criticize his political opponents this week, both at the SOTU and from his office yesterday morning. He went on a racist rant that would have embarrassed a talk radio shock jock (if it didn't get them fired), much less a head of state. After Representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib shouted "shame" and "liar" during his State of the Union and walked out in protest, Trump took to social media to sneer that they had "the bulging, bloodshot eyes of crazy people" and were "LUNATICS, mentally deranged and sick" who "look like they should be institutionalized." He labeled them "Low IQ" — his favorite slur for women, Black, and Hispanic people — and suggested they be sent back "from where they came." He lumped in Robert De Niro as "Trump Deranged," "demented," and possibly "criminal" for criticizing him. This is the president of the United States talking.

The national debt isn't the cause of our problems: it's the receipt. It's the paper trail of the largest upward transfer of wealth in 250 years of American history… Tonight is the State of the Union speech. If it follows the routine of previous GOP presidencies, Trump will use our national debt as an excuse to call for more tax breaks for billionaires along with drastic cuts to social spending, just like Reagan, Bush, and Bush did. "The national debt is the United States' next great war," Jodey Arrington, the top Republican on the House Budget Committee, thundered this month about our $38 trillion national debt and $1 trillion annual interest payments on that debt. If we're going to use his war analogy to describe this very real crisis, the first shots were fired in 1981, when Republicans' so-called supply-side tax cuts began a forty-five-year upward transfer of over $50 trillion in wealth that made billionaires fabulously rich while it hollowed out our nation's Treasury. They stole $38 trillion from our government, and another $12 trillion (at least) from working class families via wage freezes and the destruction of unions.

"The social compact would dissolve, and justice be extirpated from the earth, or have only a casual existence, were we callous to the touches of affection." —Thomas Paine In January, as another brutal Maine winter gripped the Northeast, Dwayne LaBrecque faced an impossible choice. The diabetic father of five, who’d lost several toes and part of his foot to infection, stared at his most recent heating bill with a growing dread. After losing his job as a shipping manager, Dwayne’s income had collapsed. For years, he’d relied on LIHEAP—the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program created by Congress in 1981—to keep his family warm through Maine’s harsh winters. But soon after his inauguration, Trump and congressional Republicans had put LIHEAP on the chopping block.