Worrying -- and the stress that partners with worry -- are very human. We all worry, to some degree or another. We all feel stress because of that worry, to some degree or another.
Why do people worry so much?
Part of it is because there is a lot to worry about. I remember an old bumper sticker that said “If you aren’t outraged, you aren’t paying attention.” This was during the W Bush days and it wasn’t wrong — there was plenty of awful stuff he and his minions were doing and not worrying about it seemed naive.
And, frankly, given the current cast and crew in the Republican party, it seems even more logical to worry.
So we worry about things because things are worrying.
But here is the thing: we worry about things MORE than is really good for us. A lot more. Why? Well part of it is because humans evolved at a time when worrying had a really clear advantage. People who worried about having enough food lived. People who didn’t died. People who worried about getting attacked by animals lived. People who didn’t died. People who worried about keeping warm throughout the winter lived. People who didn’t died. The people who survived (our ancestors) were the worriers. Those who didn’t died off. We evolved to worry. Worry was useful for keeping us alive.
But here is the thing: worry is no longer as useful. Sure, it is important to be aware and to be active in changing the world. But a lot of worry these days does nothing but stress us out. The world is giant and we are aware of much more of it than we used to be. Every single item can be a reason to feel anxious. And our inability to fix much of those problems can make us feel very stressed out. That is bad.
The propensity to worry can lead some people to bury their heads in the sand to avoid the worry. If they don’t know about the awful things then they don’t worry and they can be happy. That is bad too.
Avoiding worry by sticking your head in the sand might not lead us to die as quickly as our ancestors, but it might lead us to end up with trump as president again, and frankly, I am not sure what is worse.
So how to we train our ancient systems to be effective in these modern times? Luckily, science has some answers for that.
Here is what tends to work for people: First, pay attention to important things (trump is running for president again!) but limit your time gathering info on things that are very stressful (trump is running for president again!) No one needs to be online all day reading every article available. Second, do OTHER things that separate you from the endless streams of things you can stress about. For example, leave your phone at home and go for a walk or a hike or a swim. Touch the grass. Laugh with friends. Walk a dog. Hold a baby. Finally, take action. DOING something is the best way to get the panic center of your brain to calm down and let you enjoy life. That is what it is waiting for: action.
What are some things you can do?
Keeping the senate would be a game changer for us! In order to help, we here at the GNR have set up a “one stop” donation spot that will send our money to the 9 most competitive Senate races. To donate, click on:
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Your donations will come bundled with others from our Good News community and will show the Democrats and the Biden team that there are many of us who support him and combine hard work with optimism in our battles for a better America!
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Now onto the good news!
Democrats are doing great things
Biden Administration Reducing Penalties In Supplemental Security Income Program
he federal government will soon stop docking disability benefits for people whose friends, family or roommates help them out with food.
The Social Security Administration finalized the rule change this week as part of a broader mini-makeover for the Supplemental Security Income program, which provides monthly benefits for more than 7 million Americans with disabilities.
The maximum SSI benefit is $943 per month, but the government can reduce the amount by a third if someone else in the household provides “in-kind support” in the form of food or shelter. Come September, the government will take food out of the equation.
As Republicans wrestle with IVF, the Biden administration expands benefits
While Republican lawmakers try to walk a fine line on in vitro fertilization — expressing support for the popular procedure, even as some of their supporters argue life begins at conception — the federal government expanded fertility benefits for millions of workers this year, including up to $25,000 a year for IVF.
The federal government — the largest employer in the country — now offers enhanced IVF coverage in about two dozen of its health plans, according to the Office of Personnel Management, which administers them.
Eighty-six percent of Americans say IVF should be legal, according to a recent CBS News-YouGov poll.
Employers added 303,000 jobs in March, reflecting strong labor market
The U.S. labor market added 303,000 jobs in March, soaring past expectations, reflecting a booming labor market that continues to prop up the broader economy.
The unemployment rate fell to 3.8 percent last month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday.
The jobs market is charging ahead in 2024, churning out more jobs per month on average than before the pandemic, after gradual cooling for much of past year in response to higher interest rates.
Restaurateurs say it is finally becoming easier to find employees, after years of worker shortages, relieving the pressure to raise wages. A major pickup in immigration has also helped fill many long-standing openings, with 3.3 million immigrants arriving in 2023, according to the Congressional Budget Office
Reasons to be Optimistic about November
Here is something a lot of us spent a lot of time worrying about that ended up being a nothingburger:
No Labels Finally Drops Its Quixotic Plan to Field a 2024 Candidate
The centrist political party No Labels announced Thursday it was calling off its plan to launch a third-party ‘unity’ ticket for November’s presidential election after it failed to find a candidate with a “credible path to winning the White House.”
Rahna Epting, the executive director of liberal activist group MoveOn, cheered the party’s announcement—and encouraged independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to also bow out of the race.
“Millions of Americans are relieved that No Labels finally decided to do the right thing to keep Donald Trump out of the White House,” she posted to X. “Now, it’s time for Robert Kennedy Jr. to see the writing on the wall that no third party has a path forward to winning the presidency. We must come together to defeat the biggest threat to our democracy and country: Donald Trump.
'They’ll never vote for Trump again': Voters in GOP strongholds souring on ex-president
Former President Donald Trump appears to be bleeding out critical support in typically redder suburban areas well outside of major cities, according to a new analysis.
Politico analyzed 2024 GOP presidential primary results across more than 1,000 counties across the US and determined that the former president may lose votes in traditionally Republican territory he carried in both 2016 and 2020. This could prove costly in November — particularly in must-win battleground states.
"You hear a lot of moderate Republicans now who say that they’ll never vote for Trump again," Emmet County, Michigan GOP chair Parker Fairbairn told Politico. Fairbairn added that voters there are longing for "commonsense conservatism," as opposed to Trump's blustery retribution-focused rhetoric and his proposed radical restructuring of the federal government.
Politico reported that unlike suburbs on the outskirts of large, Democratic-leaning cities like Detroit where Republicans have already been losing significant ground to Democrats, jurisdictions like Emmet County — which is on the far northern tip of Michigan's lower peninsula and hours from any major city — have usually been reliable Republican strongholds. Trump won the county with 55% of the vote in 2020.
Republicans down, abortion up. What did overturning Roe achieve?
The Florida Supreme Court’s go-ahead on Monday for a November abortion referendum sets in motion the most significant electoral contest on the issue since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Floridians will decide whether to override the legislature’s six-week abortion ban, which the court upheld, with a constitutional amendment allowing unfettered abortion access until about 24 weeks of pregnancy.
One poll late last year put support in the state for the pro-choice measure at 62 percent. The Biden campaign is gleeful about the chance to play up abortion rights in a state Donald Trump won by less than four points in 2020
As that contest gets underway, it’s worth taking stock of just how badly the Republican Party and the pro-life cause have been routed since the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. First, Dobbs contributed to Democrats’ historically strong performance in the 2022 midterms. In 2020, according to a careful academic study, abortion pushed independent voters toward the GOP by 4.5 percent. In 2022, the issue pushed them toward Democrats by 13 percent.
Republicans Shrug Off the ‘Massive Problem’ Awaiting Trump
Donald Trump is about to confront some of the toughest months of his campaign to date, staring down a huge money gap and a calendar full of four days per week in court—and GOP operatives have no real plan to address the situation.
The legal problems on their own might be manageable if Trump were competing on the fundraising front, one Trump-aligned GOP strategist said, “but the fact that Trump is in dire need of money is a massive, massive disadvantage.”
The scope of Trump’s money problem is its own challenge. If Trump were behind just a few million dollars, after having to spend in the GOP primary, that would be one thing. But this strategist continued that getting outraised by “orders of magnitude,” after a relatively quiet primary, is a real concern.
Then there’s the lingering concern that, without a steady dose of rallies, Trump might act out more than usual in his limited availability on the campaign trail. The crowded court schedule and tight budget have drastically constricted the number of MAGA rallies already this cycle. Trump will only have Wednesdays and weekends for counterprogramming to his court news once the Manhattan trial starts on April 15, and the Trump campaign appears reluctant to hold many rallies—both out of concern that Trump might say the wrong thing and because, as the same strategist said, the rallies are “extremely expensive to put on.”
Meanwhile, as Trump’s team insists everything is going great, the Biden campaign appears eager to take advantage of a distracted Trump and continue building advantages on the financial front and out in the field.
Obamacare once cost Democrats elections. Now Biden’s hoping to win on it.
President Biden and top Democrats have spent weeks mounting a full-scale blitz to tout the Affordable Care Act, including ads, social media posts, speeches — and a video that blasts rival Donald Trump for “running to ‘terminate’ the ACA.”
That evolution reflects a political reality: while voters often resist sweeping government changes in theory, they tend to become attached to individual programs and concrete benefits. The ACA’s current popularity seems to bear out former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s oft-mocked 2010 insistence that once Americans found out what was in the law, they’d want to keep it.
16 Polls Have Biden Up
t’s been a very good week of polling for Joe Biden and the Dems. With Data for Progress coming in this morning at 47-46 for Biden, and Marquette University 52-48, there are now 16 polls taken since late February showing Biden ahead: (via 538):
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52-48 Marquette (this week)
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47-46 Data For Progress (this week)
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50-48 NPR/Marist (this week)
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42-40 Big Village (this week)
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44-42 Morning Consult (this week)
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48-45 Quinnipiac
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44-43 Noble Predictive
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44-43 Economist/YouGov (March 19)
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47-45 FAU/Mainstreet
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44-43 Morning Consult (March 11)
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46-45 Public Policy Research
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50-48 Ipsos/Reuters
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45-44 Civiqs
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47-44 Kaiser Family Foundation
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51-49 Emerson
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43-42 TIPP
Additionally, another measure we look at, the Congressional Generic, which asks the simple question of who you will be supporting for Congress this year, has turned much more blue in recent days
Many Democrats Are Worried Trump Will Beat Biden. This One Isn’t.
Simon Rosenberg was right about the congressional elections of 2022. All the conventional wisdom — the polls, the punditry, the fretting by fellow Democrats — revolved around the expectation of a big red wave and a Democratic wipeout.
He disagreed. Democrats would surprise everyone, he said again and again: There would be no red wave. He was correct, of course, as he is quick to remind anyone listening.
These days, Mr. Rosenberg, 60, a Democratic strategist and consultant who dates his first involvement in presidential campaigns to Michael Dukakis, the Democratic presidential candidate in 1988, is again pushing back against the polls and punditry and the Democratic doom and gloom. This time, he is predicting that President Biden will defeat Donald J. Trump in November.
In a world of Democratic bed-wetters, to reprise the phrase used by David Plouffe, a senior political adviser to Barack Obama, to describe Democratic fretters, Mr. Rosenberg is the voice of — well, whatever the opposite of bed-wetter is these days. He even has a Substack newsletter offering insights and daily reassurance to his worried readers — “Hopium Chronicles,” the name taken from what the pollster Nate Silver suggested he was ingesting back in 2022.
Dems Have a New Strategy to Juice Grassroots Fundraising—and It’s Already Working
The group responsible for electing Democrats to statehouses saw its best first quarter for grassroots donations in history, thanks in part to a new focus on recurring donations, according to information first shared with The Daily Beast.
Launched in January, Down Ballot Defenders has already helped the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee raise $2.3 million in grassroots donations this year. The DLCC elicited that record-breaking sum—a 45 percent increase over its last highest first-quarter haul back in 2021—through calls, texts, in-person engagements, and online, largely among small-dollar donors.
In the view of DLCC President Heather Williams, the growing enthusiasm comes as voters have developed a deeper understanding of the importance of state governments after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade two years ago. Before that, even many voters who cared about their own state-level representation didn’t prioritize pitching in on statehouse campaigns elsewhere; they were more focused on winning the White House and Congress.
Florida Supreme Court allows one of nation’s strictest abortion bans to take effect (note: this is not good news, but the effect it WILL have in November is good news)
Florida’s conservative Supreme Court ruled Monday that the state’s constitution does not protect abortion rights, allowing one of the country’s strictest and most far-reaching abortion bans to take effect May 1.
But in a separate decision, the high court also ruled that an amendment to enshrine abortion rights in the state’s constitution can go on the November ballot, for a vote that could undo the ban in a matter of months.
Together, the two rulings will ensure that abortion is a major issue in Florida during the presidential election — with Floridians experiencing the realities of a six-week abortion ban for six months before they have the opportunity to cast a vote on the issue.
“Today’s rulings prove exactly what is at stake at the ballot box,” said Nikki Fried, the chair of the Florida Democratic Party. “Florida voters understand that voting yes on Amendment 4 in November is our last line of defense.”
Bad News for Bad Guys
How Republicans texted and emailed their way into a money problem
In the years after Donald Trump lost the presidency to Joe Biden, Trump sent so many emails and text messages asking for money that Republican consultants warned his mailing lists could become useless. The former president’s friends told him that they were being asked for too much, too often, and Trump himself ordered aides at one point to slow the solicitations. Some of his fans, pockets emptied, mailed handwritten letters apologizing for not being able to give more.
Now, as Trump and Biden prepare for a rematch, Trump’s vaunted small-dollar fundraising operation is not bringing in as much money as it once did.
In 2020, Trump and his fundraising committees raised a record $626.6 million from small-dollar donors, 35 percent more than Biden took in from that group.
But last year, Trump raised just $51 million from small donors, way down from the $119 million he registered in 2019 and only 18 percent more than Biden’s total. His small-dollar haul — which includes donations of $200 or less — was not nearly enough to offset Biden’s lead among major donors.
The recommendation of Eastman’s disbarment is a big deal — for Trump
stripping John Eastman, Donald Trump’s former attorney, of his California law license. Eastman, mastermind of the former president’s scheme to overturn the 2020 election results by recruiting phony electors, is not the first ex-Trump lawyer to face discipline over election-related matters.
Eastman can appeal, but Judge Yvette Roland’s meticulous 128-page ruling rests on devastating factual findings and airtight legal analysis.
Roland’s decision does not bode well for Eastman in his criminal case in Georgia. And insofar as Trump is likely to face much of the same evidence and to offer the same defenses, he has plenty to worry about in D.C. and Georgia. No one, it seems is buying their excuses.
Other Good News
Wait, does America suddenly have a record number of bees?
Where in the unholy heck did all these bees come from?!
Israel Opening Aid Routes to Gaza After Biden’s Threat to Netanyahu
Israel says it will open aid routes into Gaza as part of efforts to boost the amount of humanitarian support entering the enclave.
The announcement early Friday came just hours after a tense phone call between President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Biden condemned the recent killing of aid workers and general humanitarian crisis in Gaza, according to the White House, and gave Netanyahu an ultimatum: implement “specific, concrete” steps to alleviate the crisis and protect civilians, or run the risk of the U.S. changing its policy towards Gaza.
After the dramatic call, Netanyahu’s office said Israel’s security cabinet had approved taking immediate steps to address the humanitarian situation in Gaza. They include temporarily allowing Israel’s port in Ashdod to be used for processing aid shipments and the reopening of the Erez crossing in the north of the strip. The heavily fortified land crossing was destroyed in Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks.
Israel will also allow aid shipments from Jordan to flow through another land crossing.
On the lighter Side
I am so lucky and so proud to be in this with all of you 💓💚💛🧡✊🏻✊🏽✊🏾✊🏿✊❤️🧡💛💚