Thieves in the Temple.

Action: health care, paid family leave, and wage slavery.

So the Senate dropped its health care bill yesterday, and early reports indicate it's just as bad as we thought it would be: it makes some subsidies to poorer working families a little better than the House bill would, but it would cut Medicaid even more than the House bill would, and it would still substantially weaken the Obamacare ban on denying coverage for pre-existing conditions and still let insurers charge seniors a lot more than they can now -- and, of course, it would still repeal most of the taxes-on-the-rich that fund Obamacare programs. Remember that they're trying to cut taxes for the rich now so they can cut taxes for the rich even more later on and still comply with Senate rules. So today, also, would be a good day to use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) and call your Senators to tell them to reject the Senate's health care "reform" bill. You might tell them to support H.R. 676 -- which would establish a Medicare-for-All, single-payer health care system in America -- while you have them on the phone.

Meanwhile, some folks try to tell you the one saving grace of the Trump budget (and after all, why would you ever need more than one?) is its boutique paid family leave plan, but don't believe that hype, either -- the Trump plan would only let new parents take the leave, and since it doesn't actually commit new funds to the plan, it would essentially force states to pay for it, likely by cutting unemployment benefits for other folks. Conservatives would call that an unfunded mandate; if you don't hear any of today's "conservatives" calling it that, well, you can assume they're not actually conservative. Around one in seven American workers gets paid family leave, and we are, as you know, the only industrialized nation on Earth that doesn't mandate it by law to new parents; that's not a good reason to start chanting WE'RE NUMBER ONE! So Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Trump budget and its "smokescreen" of a family leave plan -- and pass a real budget, that reflects America's real priorities, and a real paid family leave plan that doesn't leave working families behind.

Finally, the Follow the Thread Campaign has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell five big retail corporations to disclose information about where they source their clothing. Most of the clothing you buy at big-box retailers, as you know, gets manufactured overseas, quite often in factories that treat their workers badly -- certainly you recall the Rana Plaza disaster in 2013, in which the collapse of a garment factory killed over a thousand Bangladeshi workers and injured 2,000 more, and you may also recall two factory fires in Pakistan and Bangladesh in 2012 that killed 350 garment workers. All of these disasters came about because of lax safety standards, and all of them prompted many of the corporations that source from these factories to pledge to improve those standards. Still, some fools will tell you that improved safety for foreign workers means higher prices for you. Can they find this alleged truism in Newton's laws? Of course not -- it's just another way to avoid talking about runaway executive pay, the real reason your prices would go up.

Action: health care, drug policy, and Pebble Mine.

First up this week, of course, is the Senate's health care "reform" bill. The Senate's deliberation process, such as it is, has been so secret that even Sen. Murkowski (R-AK) has said she can't answer her constituents' questions about it because she literally hasn't seen any language from it -- and, of course, so secret that there'll be no committee hearings on it, and perhaps not even a copy of the bill for the public to read. Of course, from what we have heard about it, it'd merely hand out hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts to the rich and cut more hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid -- supposedly the only "disagreement" among "moderate" Republican Senators is in how fast they'd make those cuts. Oh, and their other ideas are pretty crappy, too -- just try and explain the difference between the Obamacare mandate and "auto-enrollment." Go ahead and call your Senators and tell them to reject their secret health care bill, and if you've got a Democratic Senator, then Indivisible helps you remind them that they've got tools to fight this thing.

Meanwhile, Attorney General Jeff Sessions may be hot to stamp out the spread of marijuana, everywhere (remember how he said back in the day that he thought the Klan were OK until he learned they were pot-smokers?), but H.R. 2920/S. 1374, the CARERS Act, would end federal prohibition of marijuana (which, frankly, has never belonged on Schedule I with really dangerous drugs like heroin) and thus protect the 30 states that have legalized medical marijuana. Yep, Mr. Sessions wants to go after that, even, having already asked Congress to fund efforts to prosecute medical marijuana providers and patients. The CARERS Act would also loosen some of the restrictions around marijuana research, which would, at least, cut down on the number of people who reflexively shout YOUZ CANTZ PROVEZ TEH POTZ HAZ ANYZ BENEFITZ!!!! You can't shut down all the haters, of course, but you can contain them. So Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to support sane drug policy by supporting the CARERS Act.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell the EPA to reject the proposed Pebble Mine project in southwestern Alaska. Wait -- you thought that was over and done with? Well, the change in Administrations has brought a change in the EPA's heart, if it can be said to have one anymore, as the EPA has "settled" a lawsuit with Pebble Mine's owners. If you've come to regard "settlement" as a dirty word thanks to Obama-era settlements with banksters, well, this one's even worse -- all the EPA got out of it was an end of lawsuits that might well have failed anyway, and now Pebble Mine's owners get to reapply for permits to mine for gold and copper in an area with a thriving salmon industry, one that provides about half the world's sockeye. Guess what happens to them if Pebble Mine ever becomes operational? They're all going to choke to death in polluted water, and the jobs they support will disappear along with them. Still, new permits require new public comments, which the Trump Administration doesn't care about, but is still legally required to solicit -- until such time as he declares martial law, I suppose.

Around the table: time for another exciting round of "who's the snowflake now?"

Rep. Lou Barletta (R-PA) says Congressfolk "absolutely" ought to cut down on public appearances (including town halls, which he absolutely talked about at length!) in light of the recent mass shooting that critically injured Rep. Scalise. That's rather insulting to the voters, when the vast majority of us are civilized people, and civilized people don't go around shooting people. Why do you suppose they'd want to conflate tough questions at townhalls with shootings? And Rep. Barletta is one of the fellows who actually charged people real cash money to go to his townhalls in 2011, so he's, like, a snowflake emeritus. Can't campaign ads address this sort of cowardice?

Researcher finds Georgia's voting system security to be almost absurdly vulnerable to hackers -- not long before the special House election in Georgia's 6th district that has the entire Beltway world aflutter. But if Jon Ossoff weren't just another let's-all-get-along-with-Republicans Democrat, he wouldn't have to worry about election hacking. America's not Iran -- you can't hack an election here unless it's already close, and here you can actually inspire large numbers of people to vote for you, versus repeatedly dragging out the spectre of The Republican Ogre Who Must Be Stopped This Time.

Kate Cox reminds us that "The Internet Can Help Treat Sick People in Rural America, But Most Lack Adequate Access." Not because net neutrality "stifles" such access, either (I know that argument's coming!), but because corporations simply don't build broadband out there because "there's no money in it." You know, the same reason we don't have an ebola virus after all these years. You know what would help rural broadband internet access? Good old public broadband funded by good old tax hikes on the rich -- and certainly not more haranguing from Democrats about how you've got to get on board with the future before the future's even arrived in your neck of the woods.

Here's something to think about: maybe mass killings of coyotes doesn't actually make livestock safer. Not that I really fault people for thinking that mass killing of predatory animals is Teh Only Way, but scientists have found that a) even the most experienced ranchers can't always tell exactly which animal killed their animals, b) killing predators tends to wreck the social structures of their packs such that their numbers actually get bigger, which makes them more dangerous, c) non-lethal means of discouraging predators (including guard animals and chemical repellants) actually protect livestock pretty well, and d) predators fulfill other important functions in ecosystems, functions you don't always see right away. Lesson: if a pen does the job, don't use a sledgehammer.

Finally, the government of China grants preliminary approval for nine previously rejected Trump trademarks. I'm sure this development is completely unrelated to the fact that Mr. Trump has stopped haranguing China for alleged currency manipulation. And no, right-wing snowflakes, that matter is precisely at the heart of the Constitution's emoluments clause. At least right-wingers can take comfort in the likelihood that Democrats will blow their chance to remove him from office by continuing to obsess about Russia.

Action: corporate welfare, clean water, and freedom of speech.

Did you know this was "infrastructure week," according to President Trump? Sure, other things crowded it out of the news, but Mr. Trump did propose privatizing our nation's air traffic control apparatus -- by letting a "non-profit" run it, though non-profits can pay their executives outrageous salaries and then jack up prices and fees to balance the books as easily as any for-profit. The rest of his infrastructure program is pretty much what you already expected -- some $200 billion in corporate welfare handouts that will purportedly attract $800 billion in investment, so private corporations can own our roads, our bridges, our schools, and our water systems, putting their profits above our services -- not by streamlining operations in order to deliver better service at the same price, but by simply dictating prices and services to good Americans held hostage by private ownership. Hence Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject Mr. Trump's boutique infrastructure plan.

Meanwhile, the authors of H.R. 953/S. 340 have called the bill the Reducing Regulatory Burdens Act and the Sensible Environmental Protection Act, respectively, and you know what that means: that "regulatory burdens" mean only those "suffered" by big campaign donors, and "sensible" means "whatever pleases big polluters." Read the bills at congress.gov and you may not be that appalled by them, as they would allow a corporation to discharge "a pesticide authorized for sale, distribution, or use under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act" into our public waters without getting a permit. But you might also see problems with that: saying something is safe to kill bugs is not precisely the same as saying it's safe to discharge in large quantities into our rivers, lakes, and streams, and getting rid of permitting requirements for polluters would reduce our ability to know what pollutants are in the water we drink, clean with, and bathe with. Is filthy water a good price to pay for a little less bureaucracy? H.R. 953 has already passed the House, hence CREDO helps you tell your Senators to protect our clean water by opposing H.R. 953/S. 340.

Finally, President Trump still has a jones to dismantle the Johnson Amendment, that slice of our tax code that prevents all 501(c)(3) non-profits, including churches, from endorsing (or opposing) candidates for office. Mr. Trump and his kind say that the Johnson Amendment violates a church's First Amendment rights, but it doesn't -- it merely strips politicking preachers of their non-profit status, which is hardly the same as being put in jail for your speech. And since churches don't have the same reporting requirements as other non-profits, you would not have difficulty imagining big campaign donors using churches as massive money-laundering operations allowing them to evade campaign finance disclosure laws. And frankly, churches need as much protection from the Johnson Amendment as we do! The church-state wall works both ways -- it keeps the church from imposing its will on good Americans, but it also protects churches from corruption by politicians, and thus keeps them free to serve communities. People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to repeal the Johnson Amendment.

Around the table: a potential public option in Nevada, responsible government in Kansas, and other items.

Don't look now, but Nevada's state legislature just passed a bill that could make Medicaid a public option there. The bill allows folks who qualify for Obamacare subsidies to use them to buy into Medicaid instead, an option that might be attractive to both Nevada and Nevadans simply because Medicaid generally pays doctors less than Medicare does. But if Gov. Sandoval doesn't veto the bill (and he may not), I suppose those "conservative," "states'rights" people in the Trump Administration could always come in to try to squash it. You can't judge by "positive" interactions with Tom Price's CMMS, after all.

Is Kansas finally ready to bounce back? The state legislature finally rolls back a big chunk of Gov. Brownback's "signature" tax-cuts-for-the-rich by overriding his veto of a sizable legislature-passed tax hike. To the Republican Rep who voted against the override by saying it was "(t)oo much, too fast," I might remind him of William Lloyd Garrison's axiom that you don't pull a baby out of a fire gradually. I might also be interested in his opinion of those actually too-much-too-fast tax cuts in the first place.

Michael Shermer at Scientific American reminds us of the key reason "Why Climate Skeptics Are Wrong": they don't point to a better theory that explains the data better. Also, they often "point to the occasional anomaly in a particular data set, as if one incongruity gainsays all the other lines of evidence." Of course, when you worship at the altar of mammon, you don't have to do science very well.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is following up on earlier ProPublica reports that Wells Fargo has been charging mortgage fees to customers inappropriately, often blaming bank-caused paperwork delays on the customer. And given that these were, you know, mortgages, the fees could be $1,000 or more. Nice work if you can get it! The CFPB is, of course, the agency Congress and President Trump are so hot to cripple, because worshiping at the altar of mammon also means you don't have to do morality very well.

The Town Hall project provides a list of the 193 members of Congress (out of 535 Reps and Senators) who have not held townhalls since the inauguration. Some "liberal" media flak no doubt stands ready to call the problem "bipartisan," but only 34 of the 193 are Democrats, meaning this is a problem is over 82 percent Republican. You'll see New Jersey House Rep. Frelinghuysen on that list -- the one who told activists to pipe down and let him do his work, the one who outed another activist to her employer, the one who should lose re-election to a shrub in 2018.

Finally, the Columbia Law School's Knight First Amendment Institute thinks President Trump is violating the First Amendment by blocking critics from his Twitter feed. But I think that depends entirely on whether Mr. Trump's Twitter account really is a "designated public forum," and not just the absurd rantings of a guy who happens to be President; under the latter, I think he would have First Amendment free association rights like anyone else, whatever we may think of him blocking his critics. But making the President use an official account that is a "designated public forum" would be well within Congress's rights.

Action: campaign finance, health care, and the "liberal" media.

H.J.Res. 31/S.J.Res. 8 would amend our Constitution to empower state and local governments to restrict campaign spending, like we used to do before the Supreme Court's Citizens United v. FEC ruling. Two-thirds of Republican voters think the Court ruled wrongly in Citizens United, and virtually no one thinks unlimited corporate campaign spending is an unqualified good, so you know what that means: it means arguments against overturning Citizens United are desperately absurd. Mostly they rely on conflating money and speech, when money and speech are not the same thing -- the First Amendment protects the latter, but the former is property, and courts have long held that governments have a right to regulate property. But they also use scare tactics, like the threat of government shutting down newspapers or incumbents passing laws silencing opponents, i.e., things that never happened during the heyday of McCain-Feingold. So People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to support real campaign finance reform in America by overturning the Citizens United decision.

Meanwhile, you may have heard that the California state Senate passed a single-payer health insurance bill. The state Assembly still has to pass it, and then the mercurial Gov. Brown would have to sign it, but it's still a good step, and one we ought to try and repeat at the federal level, too. I know, I know, the Republicans who run Congress only seem to care about inflicting injury and hardship on working families, hence their zeal to take away protections for pre-existing conditions, give away taxpayer money more directly to health insurance corporations, and (hilariously!) "automatically enroll" people who don't have health insurance into health insurance, which is so different from the Obamacare mandate they profess to hate. So, yes, it's well past time to change the subject and demand that our Congressfolk enact a Medicare-for-All, single-payer health insurance system that we pay for with our taxes. Hey, we pay for all kinds of corporate welfare with our taxes, so why can't we pay for the general welfare, too? The Peace Team helps you demand a Medicare-for-All health insurance system from our politicians.

Finally, you may know that the Washington Post wrote essentially a hit piece against Social Security Disability Insurance by profiling, at length, a single family that's been getting disability payments for generations. Oh, BFD: one example of abuse (even one that's been going on for decades) doesn't constitute a trend, let alone an argument, and one of the challenges of civilization -- of maturity, even! -- is to resist the temptation to throw away good works because a very small number of people abuse them. Better to stop people from abusing them, so honest people can benefit from them! And you should remember that regardless of the sizable amount of good reporting the Post has done on President Trump, once e's gone they'll go back to foregrounding the "need" to "reform" "entitlements" (i.e., by giving away Social Security and Medicaid to private corporations) far more than they're doing now. We can help put a stop to such efforts, by telling the Washington Post to stop running distorted stories that support the President's anti-Social Security agenda, as Social Security Works helps you do.

Around the table: the ongoing chronicle of malicious Republicans, weak Democrats, and enabling media.

The estimable McClatchy D.C. bureau informs us that "GOP Media Plot Anti-Media Strategy for 2018 Midterms." And it could work! The "liberal" media deserves criticism, after all, for embracing sensationalism at the expense of truth, for turning our civic life into a glorified sporting match, and for letting their corporate paymasters dictate what gets covered and what gets buried. But I doubt Republicans level these criticisms at the media, and all Democrats have to do in response is tell everyone that only losers whine about the media. I kid, of course -- these are Democrats we're talking about.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt says coal corporations have created over 50,000 jobs since President Trump took office, but he overestimates that number by almost 49,500 jobs. Well, after all, simply taking jobs hostage whenever folks want you to stop polluting their air and water -- don't make my plant pollute less, or these jobs get it! -- only goes so far, and it doesn't go as far as it used to, frankly. So the forces of evil are reduced to telling balder and balder lies, and it sure doesn't look like the Sunday morning news shows were all that prepared for that.

Democrats actually contemplate attaching some conditions of their own to the next debt limit fight, which should occur in July. But of course they won't demand, say, a minimum wage hike before they vote to raise the debt limit (hey, it worked on The West Wing!), but they're merely going to demand that Republicans make their tax reform plans "revenue-neutral." And that's bad leadership: you only lead well when you remind voters of what they're fighting for, not merely what they're fighting against. Of course, if you do the former, you risk alienating your big donors, so, yeah, they'll totally bollocks this up, too.

Ho hum, Saudi Arabia pays the Trump International Hotel over a quarter of a million bucks over the past few months. No, this gets worse: they were putting up American war vets in $500/night rooms so they could go to D.C. and lobby against the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, which would allow 9.11 families to sue Saudi Arabia for its involvement in 9.11. After lying to them that such lawsuits could be turned on them by foreign governments, no less! And that's how far you have to go to get good people to do bad things.

Donald Trump whines that Democrats are keeping him from staffing our government, and is, of course, wrong. How is he wrong? He hasn't even nominated a lot of folks to staff our government, and those positions that require Senate confirmation can no longer be filibustered by a Senate minority. Always he blames someone else, even when it's obviously his fault. Remember that when the next big terrorist attack hits.

Finally, first-term U.S. House Rep from Louisiana writes a clumsy rant on Facebook saying, among other things, that America should hunt down and kill "radicalized Muslim suspects." Hey, asshole: you don't kill a suspect in America, "radicalized" or not. And if you think you should get to kill a suspect, maybe you need to go live in a police state.

Around the table: climate change, the "war on terror," health care, immigration, and the "liberal" media.

Before President Trump's withdrawal from the Paris climate change accord, Naomi Klein at The Intercept warned us that the Paris climate change accord was never all-that to begin with, having been consistently negotiated downward in order to appease American corporate interests. Which, of course, means Mr. Trump's withdrawal is little more than drama. While voluntary agreements (i.e, those without penalties for noncompliance) aren't worthless, I much prefer our citizens making our government curb pollution of our air and water -- and, of course, other nations' citizens doing the same.

The truly stunning thing about Mr. Trump's incessant twittering after the London attacks on Saturday? That he let approximately zero time lapse before bringing up his precious Muslim ban and how we need to "stop being politically correct," by which I guess he means we should scrap that whole innocent-until-proven-guilty thing. In comparison, Tha Bush Mobb was positively measured in its immediate response to 9.11; heaven knows (and does not need to tell us!) how far off the deep end Mr. Trump will go if we have another one of those here. (As an aside, ah, terrorist attacks five days before the British snap election? Hey, I'd be a fool not to have noticed the closeness of the two events.)

Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) thinks it's "unlikely" Congress will reach a deal to "reform" America's health care system this year, and even says the House bill is "dead on arrival" and is "not a good plan." But don't get complacent! Mr. Burr most definitely does not say that Republicans won't pass something health-care related -- what will stop Republicans from, for example, simply repealing all those taxes-on-the-rich that fund Obamacare? All these Republicans want are tax cuts for their big donors, after all, and if those tax cuts can cripple Obamacare, that's just gravy.

I would bet that even the most hardened nativist would pause before applauding ICE's arrest and deportation of a man who was on his way to picking up his newborn son from the hospital after life-saving surgery. Or am I giving them too much credit? I can also imagine them arguing about law and order, a phrase I never hear them utter when polluters put cancer in our air and water, and I can also imagine them arguing you have to have the courage to make hard decisions, which courage is always much easier to muster when someone else will bear the consequences.

Finally, Michelle Goldberg at Slate reminds us that the "liberal" media wrings its hands over "the rage of Trump voters" while never wondering if Hillary voters might also have feelings worth considering, let alone fearing. I'm all for redressing the legitimate (i.e., not racist) grievances of Trump votaries, but I also find odd the media's "lopsided concern for the tender feelings of people who march around in 'Fuck Your Feelings' T-shirts." And what an utter surprise to see the Washington Post's Robert Samuelson, that banal apologist for Our Glorious Elites, arguing that we shouldn't impeach Mr. Trump because it might offend his votaries. Can you say hostage crisis, class?

Action: food stamps, drug prices, and Presidential tax returns.

Trumpians say "it's time for good people to stop paying for bad people" in our federal budget. But they're not talking about taxpayers paying for welfare handouts for banksters and big pharma and nuclear power plants; they're talking about things like food stamps, as if only "bad people" (and not, say, children or seniors) use them. Trouble, of course, is that we now live in a society where (as Neal Gabler instructed us a year ago) nearly half of us would have big trouble scaring up $400 if we had an emergency, so the next time you cross the street against the light, you could be utterly broken financially as well as physically, and then you might need food stamps to make ends meet. Would that automatically make you a "bad person"? Of course it wouldn't -- and if we funded food stamps like civilized human beings, we could be there for each other, and not incidentally, for ourselves, since trouble doesn't discriminate. So Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject Mr. Trump's proposed food stamp cut.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 1776/S. 771, the Improving Access to Affordable Prescription Drugs Act, then Sum of Us still helps you do that. Want yet another measure of the sickness, immorality, and decadence of our society? Then consider how easily the notorious "Pharma Bro" could hike the price of the life-saving medicine Daraprim by over 5000 percent and then act all surprised anyone thought that was uncouth. Consider also how Mylan could hike the price of an EpiPen -- something you might need to deploy within 10 seconds to save someone's life! -- by over 400 percent. Consider how often cable news punditoids talk about us having to live with high drug prices as the price of research and development, without noting that research and development are expenses and thus don't get taxed as corporate profits! So if you're as sick and tired as I am of all the rhetorical hostage-taking, then the Improving Access to Affordable Prescription Drugs Act is for you.

Finally, supporters of H.R. 305/S. 26, the Presidential Tax Transparency Act, are now circulating a "discharge petition," which would require the bill to get a full vote before the House if more than half its members (218 of 435) sign it. Then House Speaker Paul Ryan wouldn't be able to deploy his usual excuse for refusing to consider a bill (that doing so would step on the tootsies of his precious little Committee Chairpersons!). The bill would, as its title suggests, force Presidential candidates to release their tax returns, as Mr. Trump famously refused to do during the campaign (and now he says he won so it doesn't matter nyah-nyah-nyah). It used to be tradition for Presidential candidates to do this, but Mr. Trump killed the tradition, so now it's gotta be law. And though the bill couldn't force a sitting President to release his tax returns, guess who's already declared his candidacy for re-election in 2020? Sign for Good helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Presidential Tax Transparency Act.

Action: "free" trade, paid family leave, and health care.

The Trump Administration notified Congress a while back that it intends to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, also knowns as NAFTA (or, perhaps, SHIFTY) -- but Mr. Trump has also decided not to get rid of the most odious thing about NAFTA, the "investor-state tribunal" that allows corporations to nullify our laws and exact tribute from the taxpayer for having those laws in the first place. Thus we have every reason to fear that Mr. Trump would scrap NAFTA only to give us something that would be an even larger corporate welfare giveaway than NAFTA already is -- you know, just like he's planning to do with his health care "reform" plan, his tax "reform" plan, and his HARD POWER! budget. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell your Congressfolk the kind of trade deal you'd like to see in NAFTA's place -- like eliminating the "investor-state tribunal," including strong environmental and labor standards, and rules that would keep medicine costs down. Alternately, you could use the tools in the upper-right hand corner of this page (or the bottom, if you're on a cellphone) and tell your Reps and Senators what you want over the phone.

Meanwhile, former WalMart worker Jasmine Dixon has begun a petition at CREDO Mobilize which helps you tell WalMart to institute a good paid family leave policy for all its hourly-paid employees. We haven't managed to get paid family leave laws passed at the federal level (mainly because Republicans are all like this guy), and though we have managed to get some state and local initiatives passed, certainly no law prevents us from petitioning one of the nation's largest employers (particularly one of the nation's largest employers of low-paid workers) and prodding them to do the right thing -- not least because WalMart has responded to the Big Stick of Bad PR before. No use retorting that you should have to earn paid family leave; everyone needs paid family leave sooner or later, and saying you have to "earn" it is a little like saying you have to "earn" clean air and clean water. Of course, Our Glorious Elites secretly believe that as well, but given that Our Glorious Elites also believe banksters are the Greatest People Evah, they're not the folks who should be telling us what "earning things" is all about.

Finally, as you know, the CBO has scored the House's health care bill, and found it would ultimately deprive 23 million folks of insurance over the next decade, versus the 24 million figure it found for the bill's previous iteration. But you may be surprised to learn which "liberal" media outlet decided to use that 1 million uninsured difference to mislead. USA Today tweeted that "#BREAKING: CBO says House Obamacare repeal bill covers 1 million more people than prior draft." I'd have expected that kind of spin from Fox News! USA Today received a crapload of critical comments afterward, and have since issued a series of tweets that I suppose aim to "correct" their rubbish headline. But their more accurate tweets didn't get nearly as much social media play as their more Trump-friendly one, and I can't help but think that was a deliberate calculation on their part, since it gets them attention coming and going. But USA Today isn't generally a bad paper, so if you contact them using information at the above link, you can tell them they should avoid the appearance of using sensational, misleading headlines to generate drama.

Around the table: time for another exciting round of "When's That Terrorist Attack Coming?"

Uh oh: Jonathan Chait figures out that the Trump budget assumes that $2 trillion in miraculous economic growth over the next decade will pay for both $2 trillion in tax cuts and enough growth in government revenues that the budget will balance -- but they can't both be true. The Administration's responses are even worse than I imagined they'd be, but let's not congratulate ourselves on the Administration's "$2 trillion math error," because that's exactly the kind of "mistake" evil people make when they're pretty sure circumstances (when's that terrorist attack coming again?) will cover them.

Administration Budget Director Mick Mulvaney insists that his President's multitudinous attacks on federal programs that actually help people actually show compassion for the taxpayer. Now here's why that's a pile of dung: anyone who pays taxes may, theoretically, need to avail themselves of the programs for which those taxes pay -- not just programs ensuring clean air, clean water, and working roads, but also programs like food stamps and Medicaid. In America, we should invest in each other, not redistribute income upward to the undeserving wealthy, as is Mr. Mulvaney's fervent wish.

Jesus Mary and Joseph why is anyone reporting that "Paul Ryan and the White House are barreling toward a tax reform show-down"? There will be no showdown -- only the drama they pretend to have so they can distract the people from the real evil they're about to do. We learn, at least, that the Republicans want to sell their "border tax" by saying it "ends the 'Made in America' tax," which is a pretzel of a notion to try and sell, and where were they when the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act came up for a vote? Filibustering it, of course.

Comcast sends cease-and-desist order to a pro-net neutrality website called Comcastroturf.com, saying the website's name is "confusingly similar to the (Comcast trademark) because it sounds the same, looks the same, and is spelled similarly to Comcast." The good news? If Comcast actually filed a copyright infringement suit against Comcastroturf.com, a judge would laugh it out of court in about 30 seconds. The bad news? Comcastroturf.com still couldn't sue under a federal SLAPP law, because it doesn't yet exist. Still, ain't nothing so pitiful as a big corporation that can't take a joke. Waaaaaaaah!

Finally, the Department of Labor decides it'll implement the 2016 "fiduciary rule" after all -- but activists wonder if the Trump Administration will actually enforce it. Like them, I suspect not -- but failing to protect pensioners from fund managers' selfishness (as the rule would do) would likely invite legal challenges, and trying to junk it as part of Mr. Trump's effort to randomly kill regulations would almost certainly invite more. Plus, sooner or later we'll get a President who'll enforce it, even if he's another center-right Democrat.

Around the table: in which we wonder, again, *when's that terrorist attack coming?*

Turkish President's security detail attacks protestors at the Turkish embassy in Washington, D.C. yesterday -- the same day he visited President Trump at the White House. I bet a lot of winking went on between the two Presidents. And I wouldn't put it past our President to wonder out loud, very soon, why he shouldn't be allowed to get away with doing such a thing.

Reed Richardson at FAIR chronicles the "13 Resets in 13 Months" phenomenon, where President Trump seems to get endless chances from the "liberal" media to "start over." It doesn't matter that you have to constantly start over when you constantly screw up -- the "liberal" media has no business speculating on what he "could" do to start "winning" again, and the sooner they get back to the not-titillating-but-still-vital work of giving the American people the information they actually need, rather than the horserace coverage that's only as satisfying as junk food, the sooner we can become a sane and moral society again.

Miss USA says health care is a "privilege" you get because you get a job, then backtracks after the backlash. But I won't pile on her, in either direction; I'm pretty sure she said it was a privilege merely because she thought she was describing the landscape -- in America, we assume that health insurance comes with a job, when in fact our health-insurance-through-your-employer system is actually fairly unique on the planet. What's wrong with saying you pay taxes, you get health insurance?

Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID) thinks he's found "the real criminal" behind Mr. Trump's disclosure of classified information to the Russians: the person who leaked that story to the press. Mr. Risch should consider that Mr. Trump may have sent an Israeli intelligence agent to an early grave regardless of whether anyone outside the room heard it or not, and he might also want to consider the difference between a "weasel" and a whistleblower. But then, he sleepwalks his way to re-election every six years, so I doubt he'll ever consider anything very carefully again.

Finally, speaking of the Great Man, Mr. Trump instructs us that "(n)o politician in history has been treated more unfairly" by the media than he. Set aside that the "liberal" media, even if they seem a little chastened about it now, was his biggest enabler on the path to victory: what Mr. Trump is doing here is whining. And here you thought being a conservative was all about, you know, not whining. I'd say that actual conservatives have got to be tired of his whining by now, but, sadly, there aren't very many actual conservatives left in America -- they've been mostly reactionaries for some time now. So when's that terrorist attack coming?

Around the table: another "moderate" proving his utter uselessness, and other tales.

Because you need to steel yourself for the worst, Musa al-Gharbi at Counterpunch explains "Why Trump Could Win in 2020." You might summarize it as "incumbency has its advantages," or that folks tend not to abandon bad situations quickly, but read it anyway; it's very informative. Also, too, "what matters most is not how the public feels about the incumbent, but how they feel about the most likely alternative." If Democrats serve up another cautious technocrat who worships at the altar of "innovation" and "entrepreneurship," they'll lose to Mr. Trump. (Yes, that means they've got a much better shot if they nominate Bernie Sanders next time.)

On the other hand, Rob Kall at OpEd News thinks we have a path to get rid of both the President and Vice-President and replace them with a Democrat, without impeachment. Convincing Messrs. Trump and Pence to step down because they're on the precipice of going to jail might be the sounder half of the plan -- for a Democrat to take over from them, Democrats would have to retake the House, and no one snatches defeat from the jaws of victory like a Democrat.

Robert Parry at Consortium News wonders if a "soft coup," i.e., a deep-state coup, could take down Mr. Trump over persistent concerns over his ties with Russia. His verdict: maybe, but what would we have won? The undemocratic "deep state" would win, not us, the real owners of democracy. Frankly, I wonder if the "deep state" is all that upset about Mr. Trump, since the deep state doesn't care if more than 20 million people lose their health insurance, and probably rejoices at the prospect of lower taxes on the rich, less regulation of banksters, and more corporate welfare via Mr. Trump's boutique infrastructure plan.

U.S. Supreme Court won't hear an appeal of the 4th Circuit Appeals Court's decision to strike down North Carolina's draconian Voter ID law. But that's because North Carolina's Governor and Attorney General, both now Democrats, don't want to continue the appeal, and so the Republican-held state legislature is trying to do it. If the legislature can establish standing to appeal, I'm sure the Court will hear it -- though I'm also sure swapping out the late Justice Scalia with Justice Gorsuch will have no effect on the decision, since being 30 years younger doesn't give you two more votes on individual cases.

Far-right Senate Republicans (I won't call them "conservatives," as the Wall Street Journal does, far too charitably) want to gut Medicaid even more than the House bill already does. And I'm sure that absent a lot more creativity from the American people (who barely have town halls to ventilate their anger anymore, I wonder why), they'll do it! I mean, with 52 Senators in the caucus, which Senators can you lose: the two "moderates" who only buck leadership when leadership allows it, or the three far-right nihilists demanding more cuts? (I wish it meant more that Medicaid is actually pretty popular with Trump votaries, but Trump votaries are also the kind of people who'll say if we can't get it, no one should, a sentiment for which I do not entirely blame them.)

Finally, in a truly chilling development that also further demonstrates the complete uselessness of Republican "moderates," Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NJ) alerts one of his big donors to the presence of a "resistance" leader in his own bank's management! And she then resigned, citing the resulting harassment from her bosses as one of the reasons! If I'm Mr. Frelinghuysen's next opponent, I'm running an ad about this -- what he did likely isn't illegal, but it is the mark of a coward who can't win arguments on the merits. How do we prevent this from happening to us? Make sure our bosses know that every time they fuck with our free speech they will summon a thundercloud.

Action: better budgeting, real pension reform, and "regulatory accountability."

Of course we should let Social Security Works help us tell President Trump to keep his promise not to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid -- regardless of what his budget proposals might say, he did promise, and we should remind him of that even though he doesn't care what we think. But why only play defense? The Congressional Progressive Caucus has released the People's Budget, one that would (among other things) actually create jobs, rebuild infrastructure, and promote sustainable energy. The right-winger in your head is already no doubt yelling how're you gonna pay for it? Well, among other things, by raising tax rates on high incomes, taxing investment income at the same rate as wages, and closing corporate tax loopholes, including the one that gives corporations goodies even when they outsource jobs. Why would any of that offend anyone but corporate executives and the folks who defend them? And why do we treat them like they're the majority? Tools for calling your Congressfolk are in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom, if you're on a cellphone).

Meanwhile, you may recall Congress passing the Multiemployer Pension Reform Act in during the 2014 lame duck session of Congress, and like many bills with the word "reform" in their title, this bill was more of a "deform" bill -- it allows pension plan trustees to fill funding shortfalls by reducing pension benefits. Would it be so much to ask for someone in a position of power in America to keep a promise they make? Could a pension plan trustee fill a shortfall by, oh, I don't know, investing more wisely, or investing without the very expensive "assistance" of hedge fund managers? Every time our "betters" screw up, they make us pay, but if you've got a pension, that means you worked for it, you paid into it, you fought for it -- and, most importantly, you deserve it. Hence the Keep Our Pension Promises Act, which would give the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation more leeway to help pensions with funding shortfalls. The Pension Rights Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to roll back legislation that hurts retirees and instead give pension funds the tools they need to get back on track without benefit cuts.

Finally, the Senate might soon take up H.R. 5/S. 951, the notorious Regulatory Accountability Act, which passed the House in January. Congressfolk seem to want endless "accountability" for everyone but themselves and their big donors, and here the word "accountability" means nothing so much as "obstruction," because the bill would force federal regulatory agencies to put any proposed rule through bogus "studies" before even proposing it, and then big corporations extra opportunities to file lawsuits against the rule once proposed. Because corporations just don't get enough say in our democracy already! So, one more time: the legislative branch mandates the executive branch to formulate and issue regulations to achieve legislative aims, and the public gets a chance to comment on these regulations. And giving corporations more opportunities to put hurdles in front of regulations is, again, like the giving a losing baseball team six more innings just because they're behind. So Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Senator to reject the Regulatory Accountability Act.

Action: basic human rights, education, and clean water.

S. 1055, the Philippines Human Rights Accountability & Counternarcotics Act of 2017, would (among other things) stop sales of certain arms to the Philippines as long as that country can't protect basic human rights. You'll likely know why this is happening -- because Philippine President Duterte has openly encouraged the murder of Philippine citizens suspected of dealing or using drugs (due process, how quaint!), to the tune of over 7,000 deaths. So I guess that's why President Trump has such a hard-on for having Mr. Duterte over -- after all, they're both big talkers who don't really care about law and order and who prefer that other, more disposable people do their dirty work for them. But the fact that we Americans are, by nature, a people impatient with bullshit does not mean we are uncivilized, or that we tolerate uncivilized behavior anywhere. Killing people you "just know" to be drug-dealers or drug-abusers is plenty uncivilized, and demands a response from civilized people. Hence the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to support S. 1055, and thus support the basic human rights of Philippine citizens.

Meanwhile, H.R. 1880/S. 806, the College for All Act -- a production of Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), respectively -- would end tuition and fees at community colleges for all students, and end tuition and fees at four-year public universities for those making less than $125,000 annually. It irks me that folks (including Sen. Sanders himself!) call this "free college," because it's not really free if your taxes pay for it. People very often take for granted what their tax dollars get them (what do you call a liberal? A conservative who just bottomed out over a pothole), and that's at least partly because too many weakling Democrats pretend taxes don't really exist at all, and don't fulfill a function in our society. But we need to ask whether funneling more and more of our tax money into CEO bank accounts as corporate welfare is really a better way to go than setting aside money so anyone who wants to go to college can go. The latter, certainly, seems like more of an investment in our future than the former. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the College for All Act.

Finally, as you know, the Trump Administration may have approved the Keystone XL Pipeline, but they don't get all the say about that: Keystone XL would run through the great state of Nebraska, and over the Ogalalla Aquifer that supplies clean drinking water to millions of heartland Americans, so the Nebraska Public Service Commission still has to issue the necessary permits. And, as it happens, Nebraska farmers and ranchers also aren't all that keen on a pipeline going through the land that provides for their livelihoods. You need not be worried about climate change (though you should be!) to oppose Keystone XL -- you need only be aware of TransCanada's not-exactly-sparkling pipeline safety record, and of the decades it might take to fix the damage a pipeline burst can do. And what would people who want to drink clean water do in the meantime? What would farmers and ranchers do? Food and Water Watch helps you tell the Nebraska Public Service Commission to deny permits to TransCanada for building Keystone XL. If it can't go through Nebraska, after all, it can't really go anywhere.

Action: health care, and clean water on public lands.

Today would be a good day to use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) and call your Senators to tell them you oppose Republican efforts to "reform" or "repeal" Obamacare. Now, your Republican Senators might tell you what mine did last week: that any bill coming out of the Senate will be different from the House bill. Of course, they say that to trick you into thinking the Senate bill will be a good bill. So fire a pre-emptive strike, as it were, by listing exactly the things you don't want them to do: you don't want them to repeal taxes on the rich that would steal money from Medicare, you don't want them to let states start jacking up premiums for people with pre-existing conditions (and, as you can see from this list, just about everyone in America has one!), you don't want them to end or roll back the Medicaid expansion, you don't want them to change Obamacare subsidies so more working families can't afford health insurance, and (of course!) you don't want them to take health insurance from more than 20 million good Americans. When we make our demands plain, we paint our enemies into a corner. And we need to keep doing that, because you can never count a bastard out.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents take note: SB 624 would amend clean water laws in Pennsylvania such that corporations could pollute local streams with as long as they submit a plan to clean up the water later on. What are we supposed to do with the dirty water in the meantime, you wonder? Stop drinking, bathing, swimming, and fishing? Tough luck, good citizens of the Commonwealth -- your will to do what you want to do on your public lands and waters must take a back seat to some corporation's desire to make unearned money! And worse, actually -- the bill would apply retroactively, such that any corporation indulging in such pollution could simply whip up a "plan" to get rid of it and get off the hook. Just so happens the Consol corporation has been longwall mining in the southwestern part of Pennsylvania, and polluting public waters there, for years. Gosh, what could be the connection between the two? The Sierra Club helps you tell your Pennsylvania state legislator to oppose efforts to legalize pollution on public lands.

Around the table: an Oklahoma anti-free speech law and a French Presidential election, with chewy health care in the middle.

Oklahoma enacts a blatantly anti-free speech law which jacks up trespassing fines, as well as fines for any organization found to be "conspiring" with the trespasser. You may find judges who'll see this for what it is -- a way of stifling protests against gas and oil pipelines -- but you probably won't find such judges on the Supreme Court, at least for the foreseeable future. And of course this law takes effect immediately under an "emergency" provision, because, after all, conservatism is all about shrieking about fake emergencies. (Full disclosure: conservatism is, of course, not about that -- but the reactionaries who call themselves conservative sure seem to think so.)

Among the many other good Americans who'll get shafted if the House's Obamacare repeal bill (or something like it) becomes law: some seven million military veterans who will no longer qualify for tax credits. I foresee a million Democrat campaign ads about this matter, echoing Mr. Hayne's statement that Republicans "feign() patriotism in the form of flag pins"! I kid, of course -- these are Democrats we're talking about, who pretend all fighting is uncivil. It's not good news that Trump spokeshack Sean Spicer was ready for a question about this matter, but kudos to the Newsmax reporter (now, there's a phrase I don't say every day!) for not taking any of Mr. Spicer's guff.

Don't look now, but I think I've found the phrase Republicans will deploy to protect themselves against the political consequences of their own health care bill: "we repealed Obamacare." "Midterms are base elections, and this could energize GOP voters," one analyst says, and I suppose that's true, but we repealed Obamacare ain't nothing compared to the simple statement their Democratic opponents could deploy: they took away your health care. But, again, these are Democrats we're talking about. Republicans have had, like, 50 Obamacare repeal votes over the years; think maybe we should have seen those attack ads already?

With so many folks on both sides doing victory laps over the bill House Republicans just passed, it sure is a good thing Thom Hartmann is around to point out how the Obamacare repeal vote is "Just Part of a Sinister Long Game." Republicans are, after all, lying out their wazoos about what this bill does, and sheer repetition of lies sure does resemble truth after a while; soon they'll blame the Democrats for their Super-Awesome bill getting watered down. The solution: simply say Trumpcare is "a Big Lie, it’s really about cutting taxes on billionaires!" Which, of course, it is, since tax hikes on the rich fund Obamacare in the first place.

Then again, House Speaker Paul Ryan isn't exactly helping his cause by saying "the most recent CBO score showed that we’re perfectly in compliance with the Senate budget rules, which is what matters here." "Which is what matters here"? Most good Americans would be scratching their heads wondering how that could possibly "matter" more than you took away my healthcare. Maybe the Democrats should try to recruit Mr. Ryan for their So-Smart-We're-Dumb Caucus.

Finally, France elects center-right candidate Emmanuel Macron to the Presidency by a 65-35 margin over far-right candidate Marine Le Pen. But the incoming President faces the very real possibility of actual labor unrest -- caused, of course, by government efforts to curtail workers' rights, efforts which the former banker Mr. Macron has embraced, and it's good to be reminded that labor unrest did help unseat Charles de Gaulle, who was only the face of the French resistance to the Nazis. I wish the French people luck in making their government work for them, since the very purpose of someone like Emmanuel Macron (or, for that matter, Bill Clinton, or Barack Obama, or Hillary Clinton) is to make the citizen lose focus.

Action: health care, fossil fuel handouts, and the Bears Ears National Monument.

Congress could vote on Obamacare repeal bill as early as today, but even if they don't, use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to call your House Reps and tell them to reject it. This bill is actually worse than the previous one, because it allows states to charge citizens more for their pre-existing conditions, which basically renders Obamacare's ban on pre-existing conditions meaningless. And the bill would still do all the horrible things it would have done if it had passed last month -- it would throw upwards of 20 million people off their health insurance, it would change Obamacare subsidies so more working families couldn't afford insurance, it would steal hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicare by repealing tax hikes on higher incomes, and it would get rid of the Medicaid expansion. You know, in a sane and moral society, "moderate" Rep. Tom MacArthur, the co-author of the pre-existing conditions amendment, would lose his next election in his purple New Jersey district by 20 points. But in our sick, immoral, and decadent society, he'll probably beat whatever milquetoast the Democrats put up.

Meanwhile, in the wake of a Trump tax "plan" that would give away trillions of dollars in taxpayer money -- i.e., our money -- to himself and his rich pals, Friends of the Earth helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal billions of dollars in tax subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. I mean, if you're serious about tax reform, you'd get rid of the $4 billion or so annually in fossil fuel subsidies. That's not a whole lot of money in the context of a $4 trillion annual budget, but if you believe our government should use taxpayer money to subsidize emerging industries, then why would you support subsidizing oil, natural gas, and coal? Oh, wait, let me guess -- because they're domestic sources of energy, as if wind and solar somehow aren't. And the wind and solar industries have to pull teeth to get help from our government, whereas these ancient, far dirtier industries get handouts. And no, fossil fuel subsidies don't "protect workers," either -- these subsidies only protect the ability of CEOs to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home, and these are the same CEOs who'd fire all of their workers if they could.

Finally, WildEarth Guardians helps you tell Interior Secretary Zinke to preserve the recently-designated Bears Ears National Monument in Utah. President Trump has lately ordered Interior to re-evaluate all the national monuments designated over the last 21 years, and he singled out Bears Ears in his public statements; why does he have this hard-on to get rid of this monument? I mean, sure, fossil fuel corporations want to drill there, but they want to drill everywhere. I'd hate to think it was because President Obama designated it last year, and that if-it's-Obama-it-must-die. But it could also be because our government currently allows the five Native American nations for whom Bears Ears is sacred take a significant role in managing that monument. In any case, you can remind Secretary Zinke that it actually takes a couple of years to designate a national monument, and that new Secretaries don't just get to come in and do whatever they like for whatever reason they like. If they do, they tend to get sued in court, and because the process of designating national monuments is governed by laws, not men, they tend to lose.

Action: net neutrality, and the Estate Tax.

As you know by now, the FCC has officially filed a "notice of proposed rulemaking" that they've got the cojones to entitle "Restoring Internet Freedom" -- by which of course they mean "restoring internet service providers' freedom to restrict your freedom" -- and during this time the FCC nominally listens to citizen feedback about their proposal. Free Press helps you express your opposition to the Trump FCC's attempts to gut-not-restore internet freedom, but I think this issue also merits a phone call to your Reps and Senators, so that they, too, might amplify our voices against the FCC's naked corporatist power grab. The FCC's current net neutrality rules require internet service providers to treat all pieces of network traffic neutrally; if ISPs had the "freedom" they want, they could make Miley Cyrus twerking videos load faster than whatever webpage you want to see, or even make you watch Miley Cyrus twerking videos before (or instead of) visiting whatever webpage you want to see. All of that means less freedom for you, so you ought to fight it.

Meanwhile, the Trump Administration released its tax "reform" plan last week, and certainly you ought to call your Reps and Senators (using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page, or on the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a cellphone) and tell them to oppose it, because it's pretty nefarious, but you can also sign Defend the Estate Tax's petition, because the Estate Tax deserves some special consideration. Estate Tax opponents have long called it the "death tax," and have long told sob stories about family farms going broke because of it, but both of these are utter propaganda -- it's not a "death tax" unless everyone has to pay it, and literally almost 99.9% of Americans don't have a large enough estate to pay it. Also, as David Corn told us in The Lies of George W. Bush, the American Farm Bureau, a notorious estate tax opponent, couldn't find a single family farm crushed by the tax. Estate tax repeal, like the rest of Mr. Trump's tax plan, would mainly benefit Mr. Trump and people like him. Who ain't people like us, amirite?

Around the table: Turkey's President is *even worse* than ours, and other lessons.

Turkey blocks access to Wikipedia, citing it as a "security threat." What a big baby this President Erdogan is. Waaaaaah! Wikipedia article on me has picture of cockroach instead of a picture of me! Waaaaaaaah! I sure hope Mr. Trump doesn't get any ideas -- though if he does, I expect a holy righteous fury to rise up spontaneously from the American people, at which point we'll know if this whole democratic experiment of ours works.

Reed Richardson at FAIR describes "100 Days of Media Hoping for a New, Improved Trump." Remember when the "liberal" media said he "became" President the night he addressed Congress without shouting at them, or the day he fired nearly five dozen missiles at a Syrian airbase the Syrians had already mostly cleared out? Good times! Of course, the media's job, like the citizen's job, isn't to "hope" for a better President, but to make Donald Trump be a better President.

Ho hum, Chinese workers making Ivanka Trump's very expensive clothes get paid around $1 an hour. No use complaining that Chinese workers don't make very much money generally, because Ms. Trump is sure making a big profit using cheaper workers, instead of American workers she'd have to pay at least seven times as much. In short, we're much better off making hay of this than we are of Melania Trump's immigration status, because this really tells us who the Trumps are.

Even the New York Times tells us that "Trump Tax Plan Would Shift Trillions From U.S. Coffers to the Richest." Doesn't matter that he didn't release details, because we all know who always benefits from slashing corporate taxes and estate taxes and Obamacare taxes and capital gains taxes and alternative minimum taxes, and we all remember that Tha Bush Mobb's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts didn't exactly goose up job creation or economic growth.

Finally, speaking of economic growth, guess what else Mr. Trump can take credit for? A 2017 first-quarter GDP growth rate of a mere 0.7%. Not that Mr. Obama's GDP growth rates were the cat's pajamas, but Mr. Obama didn't walk around like he had the biggest balls on Earth, either. I presume Mr. Trump will do what any ball-swinger does, and blame his predecessor (as his Commerce Secretary has already done), even though Mr. Obama was only in office for the first 20 days of the quarter.

Action: health care, clean air and water, and consumer protection.

So we might have another vote on the Republican's health care "reform" bill in the House today, and then in the Senate shortly thereafter. This bill apparently differs from the old bill (which Republicans pulled last month after realizing they didn't have the votes to pass it) in that it lets states get waivers from the Obamacare provision that protects folks with pre-existing conditions -- thus not actually protecting good Americans from the whims of health insurance corporations! And the bill still gets rid of the Medicaid expansion, still deforms Obamacare subsidies so that sick folks will have to do without health care, still steals hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicare in the form of repealing tax increases on higher incomes, still increases Health Savings Accounts merely so the wealthy can have yet another tax shelter, and still threatens to take away the health insurance of over 20 million Americans. So you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or on the bottom of this page, if you're using a cellphone) to tell your Reps and Senators to reject this unpolished turd of a health care "reform" bill.

Meanwhile, the Trump Administration has asked to postpone oral arguments in a case against the EPA's Mercury and Air Toxics standards -- standards implemented under Barack Obama's EPA, and thus standards Donald Trump would have no interest in defending. And that comes on the heels of the confirmation of notorious pro-polluter Scott Pruitt to head up the EPA, and several Executive Orders aimed at opening up public lands to more oil and gas drilling. Hence the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell the EPA to put the American people's right to clean air and clean water first in their decision-making. Shame we have to come out and say it, but these are, as they say, Interesting Times. A March Gallup poll found that a mere one out of 10 -- one out of 10! -- Americans think the EPA does "too much" to fight pollution, while nearly six out of 10 think the EPA does "too little." And yet the Trump Administration appears poised to fight for the will of 10 percent of Americans. Is that how democracy is supposed to work -- 10 percent of the people getting all the say about everything? Is that the legacy the Founders bequeathed to us?

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject any legislative efforts to weaken or destroy the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. Our Congressfolk (not to mention our President!) live in a bubble where they only seem to talk to other people who think all regulations are an evil burden and all banksters can police themselves, but if that were true, why did Wells Fargo get in such trouble last year for opening up accounts for their customers (and charging the fees that went along with those accounts) without telling those customers? Why did banksters pay a $25 billion-plus settlement in 2012 for routinely breaking state and federal law in the "robosigning" scandal? Hell, why did banksters nearly destroy our economy back in 2008? Right-wingers' arguments against regulation haven't evolved at all since that Armageddon. That really irks the hell out of me -- until I consider that maybe the reason they haven't come up with better arguments is that they can't, and, gosh, that's got to be obvious to everyone sooner or later, doesn't it?

Around the table: the continuing adventures of President Manchild.

The Trump Administration releases its tax "reform" plan, one notable mainly for the lack of details. And the rollout is notable mainly for how testy Messrs. Mnuchin and Cohn got when reporters pressed them for said details. Look at the handy one-page bulleted list, though, and you'll see the same-old same-old: Estate Tax repeal, a big cut for the top income bracket, and an even bigger cut in the corporate tax rate. And they also use "small businesses" as a human shield to justify repealing the Obamacare tax that only hits six-figure investment income! Will the "liberal" media notice when Mr. Trump first says the corporate tax rate is too high and then tries to assuage the fears of deficit hawks by saying "well, nobody actually pays that rate, so it won't be that big a cut"? I wish I could be sure.

I've been warning that Mr. Trump's multitudinous failures as our President foretell another stupid war, and Matt Novak at Gizmodo sees the same thing. The "liberal" media stoking fears of a North Korean bomb hitting New York, Fox News saying air invasion of North Korea would yield fairly immediate victory, the media's amnesia about how hard it actually is to occupy another country -- remind you of anything? Apparently Mr. Trump has decided that the only way to get the "liberal" media off his back is to start a war, and shamefully, he might be right. But I'd like for future historians to be able to tell the story of how he failed because he couldn't get the people off his back.

Jim Lobe tabulates all the times the Washington Post has called French Presidential candidate Marine Le Pen "far right" while calling Trump Administration advisor Steve Bannon "conservative." You might come away from this outstanding article thinking there are no more conservatives in America -- just reactionaries calling themselves "conservative" and redefining the term ever rightward. And as bad as it is to use the word "conservative" to describe a man who likes Vichyites and openly boasts of wanting to "bring everything crashing down," it's probably even worse to use the word "populist" to describe the former Goldman Sachs bankster, which our "liberal" media also does. And you never have seen Steve Bannon and Marine Le Pen in the same room.

21 state Attorneys General write Education Secretary DeVos expressing "profound concern" that she has directed the Federal Student Aid office to withdraw a guidance aimed at helping students avoid loan troubles. After all, what says "innovation" more than "letting banksters gouge students more easily"? And right-wingers who say why do we need to tell students how to avoid being fools? should learn to focus their righteous anger more on the banksters who go very far out of their way to fool the students. I'm tired of folks who blame the wrong people all the time.

Ho hum, Rep. Chris Collins (R-NY) bought over $2 million of a big pharmaceutical stock looking to get an MS drug approved in the U.S., then wrote legislation speeding up FDA approval of drugs, then bought $1 million more of that corporation's stock mere months before his legislation became law. He may have evaded actual law-breaking, but that speaks to the weakness of our laws rather than his upstanding nature. Of course his office has responded by describing how awful MS is, as if letting Rep. Collins do exactly as he wanted was the only possible way to get relief for MS patients.

Finally, President Trump takes to Twitter to excoriate the 9th Circuit for ruling against him on "sanctuary cities," even saying "(s)ee you in the Supreme Court!" Of course it wasn't the 9th Circuit that ruled against him but a federal District Judge, but why have facts when you can wallow in rage? He may also be a bit optimistic that the U.S. Supreme Court will even take up the case, since their default setting since the Rehnquist days has been "defer to lower courts wherever possible." Still, what a big baby he is! And imagine how much whining you'd hear from right-wingers if Mr. Obama had said something like this. (They are generally silent now, but they may only be pretending to be ashamed.)

Around the table: the popular will, domestic terror, curious royalty payments, Administration drama, and the French elections.

Buried in this rundown of a recent NBC/WSJ poll results is this nugget, from an NBC/WSJ poll: Americans think their government "should do more to solve problems and meet the needs of Americans" by a nearly six to four margin. 57 to 39 is a big spread, but really, given the question's wording -- i.e., "solve problems" -- that spread should be even bigger, since government can, in theory, solve problems by doing something or by doing nothing. For example, it can solve problems both by preventing pollution and by not spying on good Americans without a warrant.

DHS Secretary John Kelly admits on CBS's Face the Nation that he doesn't know how to stop "homegrown terrorists." But that's our Trump Administration -- always boasting about how good they are at the unnecessary or the harmful, while utterly helpless to do their actual jobs. But of course there's also more to domestic terrorism than home-grown ISIS fanatics -- the Planned Parenthood bomber wasn't an ISIS fanatic.

The Buffalo News headline asks a provocative question: "How Did (NY Gov. Andrew) Cuomo Make $783,000 on Memoir That Sold 3,200 Copies?" And Jim Naureckas at FAIR notes that a) the corporation that published his memoirs is Harper-Collins, owned by, you guessed it, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, which has made a habit of funneling large royalty payments to politically-connected authors, and b) News Corporation just so happened to be supporting certain tax cut proposals before the legislature at that time. Could this suspicious appearance of "legalized bribery" scuttle a Cuomo Presidential race in 2020, or a third Cuomo term as Governor in 2018? We can only hope!

Donald Trump says he won't fire Press Secretary/Utter Hack Sean Spicer because, get this, he "gets great ratings" and "(e)veryone tunes in" to watch him. I don't think hate-watching is a widespread phenomenon, particularly among mature people, and I also doubt Nielsen actually tracks Mr. Spicer's conferences, but Mr. Trump's statement is more proof that all he cares about is that you're talking about what he's doing, not whether he's doing anything particularly well, or even whether the people approve of what he's doing. In short, it's all about the drama.

Finally, over in France, Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen survive the first round of voting in the Presidential election; they'll proceed to a runoff in a little less than two weeks. So, to sum: the actual left-wing populist and the nominal conservative didn't make it to the runoff, so a poll-favored establishment centrist will face off against a far-right anti-immigrant candidate who pretends to be an economic populist. Gosh, doesn't that all sound familiar?

Penny Rants for Sunday, April 23, 2017: politics as sport and drama, and other considerations.

"CNN Treats Politics Like a Sport," says Carlos Maza at Vox, and "That’s Bad for All of Us." You know it's bad when CNN's own president says "(t)he idea that politics is sport is undeniable, and we understood that and approached it that way," as if no one overhearing that could possibly call it evidence of a sick, immoral, and decadent society. Of course, calling politics "sport" is a way of turning good Americans into spectators, though our Constitution demands that we be participants in our democracy. And the accompanying video reminds us that CNN also thinks of politics as "drama" ("drama" being, like a sporting event, something you watch rather than participate in). We then witness (among so many other things!) a CNN punditoid say something ridiculous and then CNN coverage of the fallout over the ridiculous thing he said as if it'd ever be a story in a sane and moral society. This video, which runs a total of 6 minutes, 2 seconds, is a more trenchant slab of media criticism than Outfoxed is, and Outfoxed ran 78 minutes.

OK, I'll admit, Jon Ossoff outperformed my expectations in last Tuesday's special election in Georgia's 6th House District -- his 48% outdid his late polling, so maybe voters (and not just Democrat voters) might actually prefer an obvious milquetoast moderate to a Republican right now. 48% doesn't avoid a runoff, though, and he'll have a tougher time with one opponent than he did with 17. On the other hand, that opponent is former Susan G. Komen Foundation executive (and former Georgia Secretary of State) Karen Handel, who should really be parlaying that résumé into a Senate seat, except she's already tried and failed. Democrats will pound Ms. Handel's involvement in the Komen Foundation's messy divorce from Planned Parenthood, but that won't get Mr. Ossoff over 50. Here's what would: Ms. Handel told supporters to keep Democrats from "steal(ing) a seat"; if Mr. Ossoff has the presence of mind to retort that seat belongs to the good voters of the Georgia 6th, not the Republican Party!, then he might actually pull this off.

So Bernie Sanders lent his star power to Omaha Democratic Mayoral candidate Heath Mello at a rally on Thursday night -- and then we learned that Mr. Mello not only opposes abortion but has advanced anti-abortion legislation while serving in the state legislature. I've long said that the pro-lifer who wants to bring back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income is more my ally than the pro-choicer who wants "free" trade agreements to outsource our jobs and nullify our laws, but I don't see much evidence that Mr. Mello actually is an economic populist -- even his infrastructure plan reheats the same "public-private partnerships" that Americans rightfully dismiss as corporate welfare. Democrats no doubt see an opportunity in a city Mrs. Clinton won by eight points, but Mr. Sanders is likely the cagier operator here, knowing that most folks will only remember that he went to bat for someone who didn't hew precisely to party orthodoxy. Still, I'd prefer he'd go to bat for an actual anti-abortion economic populist; I know they're out there.

Given all the weirdness involving an aircraft carrier going somewhere other than where the Trump Administration said it was going last week, some observers are floating the notion that maybe Donald Trump is crazy-like-a-fox. Authors Raymond Tanter and Ed Stafford negotiate the "madman approach" with some care; long story short, the "madman approach" might work OK against more rational states, but not against other states that, ah, may be "practicing" their own version of the "madman approach." But you should remember that some of Mr. Bush's supporters said the same thing about his apparent insanity in going into Iraq -- that he was attempting to scare our enemies with his craziness -- and, well, how did that work out? We got ourselves an al-Qaeda presence in Iraq, where it wasn't before, and then out of American internment camps in Iraq we got an ISIS presence all over the Levant, and ISIS is doing its damndest to make al-Qaeda look quaint. So remember: so many folks fancy themselves as tricksters; so few folks are any good at it.

Around the table: more of the persistent "ironies" of President Trump.

Politico reminds us that President Trump promised a cybersecurity plan within 90 days of taking office, and that deadline just blew by with no action, or even a plan for action. He also promised that "the generals" (the same ones he's "smarter than," you may recall) would give him a plan to defeat ISIS within 30 days, and, well, that was a while ago. So add these two items to the long list of President Trump's failures (skips Presidential intelligence briefings, guts the State Department, retreats to Florida to play golf every weekend, generally acts like an arrogant prick) when the inevitable terrorist attack comes.

Given Arkansas's recent attempt at an "execution blitz," Adam Rogers at Wired describes "The Shocking Lack of Science Behind Lethal Injections." Lethal injections seem more humane than firing squads, but very little scientific research exists to prove they're more humane. You might expect that to some degree -- most scientists want nothing to do with such research, and we treat prisoners as research subjects a lot better than we used to. Still, it sure looks like someone made a thing and then thought about justifying it later, if at all.

Charles Ornstein at ProPublica reveals that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have proposed to compel private hospital accreditors to make the findings of their inspections public. Which is a step forward, I suppose, but you have to wonder why CMS shouldn't just do the job itself, and dig all the problems we already have with getting private accreditation agencies to do the work -- they constantly refer to the hospitals they're inspecting as partners! And they complain on their "partners"' behalf about the rate of change, when this is actually a very small change, and no one should be afraid of sunlight. Our best and brightest, ladies and gentlemen!

Hoo boy, is this not the change we need: former Kansas state House minority leader/failed 2014 gubernatorial candidate Paul Davis is eyeing a U.S. House seat. Mr. Davis couldn't beat one of the worst and least popular Governors in America and he thinks he can win Kansas's 2nd? And remember why he couldn't beat him: his prescription for Kansas's tax-cuts-for-the-rich-caused troubles was to phase in more tax-cuts-for-the-rich a little more slowly. Democrats should have learned by now that serving up cold oatmeal against unpopular Republicans never works.

Finally, President Trump's lawyers have argued that protestors at his rallies don't have First Amendment rights. Because their protests infringe on his First Amendment rights. Our President, ladies and gentlemen: a man who thinks he's the hottest shit that ever was, but who also whines that criticism oppresses him, and that his rights need to be bigger than everyone else's. I hope a judge laughs this argument out of court, but Republicans have to get tired of this incessant self-pity act sooner or later. Don't they?

Around the table: the defense community vs. methane emissions, and other tales.

Democrats declare they won't work with President Trump on tax reform until he releases his own tax returns, presumably so we can see how his tax reform plans would benefit him. But we already know how his tax "reform" plans would benefit him (i.e., bigly), and we really shouldn't make everything about Mr. Trump, since he feeds on drama like a dung beetle feeds on dung. Instead, Democrats should be advancing ideas that would actually reform our tax code, like bringing back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income and closing corporate tax loopholes, but of course they won't do that, because they fear losing their big corporate donors, when they should fear losing American voters.

Have you been wondering why the Senate hasn't yet acted on the House's "resolution of disapproval" aiming to overturn the Bureau of Land Management's rules limiting methane emissions on our public lands? Well, apparently a significant slice of the defense community, including thousands of veterans and four Generals, support the methane emissions rule, arguing that (among other things!) venting methane as wastefully as we do hurts our efforts to produce our own energy, and thus also our efforts to stay out of wars over energy. Could we run ads saying those who want to get rid of the methane emissions rule are objectively anti-security? Hey, they'd just be getting some of their own.

Adrianne Jeffries at The Outline reminds us that stories about people who walk 12 miles to work every day are not "heartwarming" -- that they're "really indictments of a country that has the world’s largest economy but can’t promise a living wage," or at least not enough of a living wage to buy a car. Also, too, why can't we have nice things like public transportation, particularly in rural areas? Because we won't tax the rich hard enough to get them, that's why.

Alana Semuels at The Atlantic describes how four years of complete Republican rule have allowed coal ash pollution to hurt residential clean water in North Carolina. It's a big story, and note well that in Amy Brown -- the Belmont, NC resident and former Republican who now lines her walls with bottled water for cooking, drinking, and tooth-brushing and who agitates against coal ash pollution -- North Carolina has summoned a thundercloud, for hell hath no fury like a Republican utterly abandoned by her party.

Finally, Trump Administration spokeshack Sean Spicer suggests that public disclosure about such issues as Mr. Trump's tax returns and the identity of White House visitors is (as the Times puts it) "unnecessary, intrusive, or even harmful." People who talk about the importance of "privacy" not as it relates to your internet information but as it relates to "the President's ability to get the best advice" don't seem to understand that they work for America, and they also don't understand that Americans give the President all the advice he needs. It's a shame Mr. Spicer's position isn't an elected one, or we could pelt him with "public disclosure is harmful" ads until he has to get a real job.

Action: cellphone privacy, harmful chemicals, and Social Security.

H.R. 1899/S. 823, the Protecting Data at the Border Act, would make law enforcement officials get a warrant when they want to search your cellphone at the border. The bill would also prevent our government from denying entry to you just because you won't let them search your cellphone without a warrant. You'd think all this would be common sense, but, sadly, it's not, not when your government is so anxious to take away your freedoms in the name of fear -- fear of something that's less likely to kill you than a bathtub accident, I feel compelled to mention. The bill has some bipartisan support -- its sponsors include Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-TX), of all people -- and though that doesn't necessarily bode well for its chances of passage, the way folks value their cellphones in contemporary America does. Even Chief Justice Roberts, no great friend of citizen privacy, wrote the majority opinion in Riley v. Califonia ruling that law enforcement has to get a warrant before looking at a cellphone, and he seemed quite in awe of the power of a cellphone, appropriately so, I think. So use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone as we speak, on the bottom of this page) to call your Reps and Senators and urge them to support the Protecting Data at the Border Act.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you submit a public comment to the FDA as to whether it should allow cosmetic corporations to use lead acetate in their hair dyes. I'm guessing the word "lead" might have led you in a particular direction on that question, and it should have: lead acetate (a color additive in hair dyes) is a "possible carcinogen," per the Centers for Disease Control, and the CDC also strongly recommends that one keep children away from any hair dye that contains lead acetate. Scientists have also linked lead acetate to kidney troubles, reproductive toxicity, and nervous disorders, which last item makes sense, since lead acetate is also a neurotoxin. Also, both the European Union and Canada have banned lead acetate in hair dyes, and (this is important) corporations still sell hair dyes in these areas of the world, which you should remember when their PR hacks complain that YOU CANTZ MAKE TEH HAIR DYEZ WITHOUTZ TEH LEADZ!!!!!! The FDA actually seems inclined to agree with cosmetic corporations on this matter, but c'mon, America is the can-do country -- surely we can figure out a way to dye our hair and look nice without causing ourselves all kinds of health problems.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Reps and Senators to reject the Trump proposal to get rid of the payroll taxes that fund Social Security, then CREDO still helps you do that. (Alternately, you can urge them to do so while you have them on the phone about warrants for cellphone searches.) Mr. Trump has apparently floated getting rid of FICA taxes as a "middle-class tax cut," since FICA taxes only apply to the first $127,200 of one's income, but those taxes fund Social Security, which means they fund the retirement you worked for, paid into, fought for, and deserve -- and, not incidentally, they're currently funding the retirements of good Americans who've already worked for it, paid into it, fought for it, and deserve it. You know what would be a far better idea? Lifting the ceiling on payroll taxes entirely, so that all income gets taxed into the system. The various bills floating around Congress now don't actually do that -- they tax high-end income, to be sure, but they leave a "donut hole" of untaxed income in the low six figures. I'd prefer getting rid of that ceiling entirely, and if you feel the same, you may want to mention that to your Reps and Senators.

Around the table: various follies concerning protests and town halls, plus that thing your Tea Party uncle told you that wasn't-true-either.

Natasha Lennard at Esquire reminds us that over 200 Inauguration Day protestors are still facing "felony riot" charges, the penalty for which could be a $25,000 fine, ten years in the clink, or both. Also, too, when a right-winger beats up a left-winger at a protest, he tends not to get charged with anything. How will the police prove probable cause (i.e., that each and every person they arrested actually actively incited other people to commit vandalism and the like)? Sadly, a lot of defendants might plead out before then.

Uh oh: Rep. Todd Rokita (R-IN) faces hostile questioning about health care and President Trump at a breakfast with local chambers of commerce. And even admonishes the crowd to "be civil" at one point! Republicans get a little breathing room when they claim that "paid protestors" swarm their town halls, but chambers of commerce are supposed to be their people! Hmm, maybe things really are coming apart for Republicans this time.

Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) tells a crowd of constituents angry that he voted to repeal FCC internet privacy rules that "nobody's got to use the internet." He goes on to say that "I don't think it's my job to tell you that you cannot get advertising for your information being sold," when, actually, the FCC rules allowed you to opt out of privacy protections if you chose. That first quotation should be an easy campaign ad, though.

Mr. Sensenbrenner's fellow Wisconsin House Rep, Speaker Paul Ryan, didn't hold any town halls at all during the February recess -- but he did raise over $650,000 at upwards of six non-Wisconsin locations. Meeting with his real constituents, I suppose! And you may recall that in 2011 he was charging his constituents money to go to his town halls, like the people work for him and not the other way around. These two items are also campaign ads just waiting to write themselves.

Is your Tea Party uncle telling you that President Trump "increased your Social Security"? That's abject rubbish -- our government announced the latest Social Security cost-of-living adjustment (or COLA) back in December; Mr. Trump had nothing to do with it. You know, just like Mr. Obama had nothing to do with the "quadrupling of the deficit" in early 2009, since he didn't write that budget or demand the bankster bailout that inflated it.

Finally, while discussing the latest Trump flatugasm against protestors yesterday, I neglected to mention that he ended one of his twitterings with "The election is over!" By which he means, of course, that democracy is over, at least until the next election (though I'm sure he's working on that!), and that elections are the only days Americans are to be permitted to express their will. Well, them's fighting words.

Action: corporate tax evasion, and live town halls.

S. 863, the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act, and H.R. 1932, the Corporate EXIT Fairness Act, would go a long way toward preventing corporations from pretending they're "foreign" corporations so they can avoid paying taxes here in America. Taxes pay for things, as you know, so when corporations pretend they're "foreign," they cheat good Americans out of bridges, libraries, police, schools, and firefighters, among the many good services we expect from our tax dollars. Of course you know what your Republican Reps and Senators will say in response? They sure won't say "let the corporations avoid paying taxes," because that would be awfully silly. Instead, they'll tell us that it's no wonder corporations offshore their profits, because they're taxed so much here (which, of course, isn't true, given that a little over half of Fortune 500 corporations received almost half a trillion dollars in tax breaks over the last eight years), or they'll say they're waiting to see what comes out of Mr. Trump's tax reform efforts, which could be, like, forever from now. I suggest you call your Reps and Senators, using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or on the bottom of this page, if you're using a cellphone), and tell them to support S. 863 and H.R. 1932, and stop corporations from offshoring their profits just to avoid paying taxes.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania's junior U.S. Senator, Patrick J. Toomey, has gotten quite the reputation in Pennsylvania for not holding public town hall meetings, a habit that's received much more scrutiny as of late, as Republicans across America try to avoid the wrath of their constituents as often as they can. But Mr. Toomey can claim to be something of a pioneer in this field, since he hasn't held a live town hall since 2013; one does wonder why his Democratic opponent, Katie McGinty, didn't make much of this four short months ago, and one suspects, unfortunately, that she didn't really want to hold them, either, being cut from the same corporate centrist cloth as the Democratic Presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton. But there is only one reason you avoid your constituents the way Mr. Toomey has: you're selling them out and you don't want to face them after you sell them out. And perhaps not coincidentally, Mr. Toomey's record has thus far been one of siding with his big donors and ignoring the needs of regular Pennsylvanians. Hence this Change.org petition, which helps you tell Mr. Toomey to start holding live town halls with live people in them. (No, his "tele-town halls" don't count -- he can screen questions and, more importantly, not actually face anyone.)

Action: Social Security, blood farms, and retirement advice.

Word on the street is that Mr. Trump has abandoned the tax cut plan he pushed during the election -- a tax plan that would have delivered yet another windfall to his rich friends, cut the poorest Americans' taxes a little, and actually hiked taxes for some middle-class folk unlucky enough to find themselves in a different bracket. But now he's pushing another tax cut plan, one that would eliminate FICA payroll taxes, and he'd like to sell that as a "middle-class tax cut," since FICA taxes only affect the first $127,200 of income. And if that number sounds familiar to you, you probably already know the catch: FICA taxes fund Social Security. Gosh, it's like he watched the third season of House of Cards and didn't realize it was a cautionary tale. If you repeal the taxes that fund Social Security, guess what happens? You don't get to collect Social Security when you retire. Because the money is gone. Taxes pay for things, after all, and FICA taxes pay for the retirement you worked for, fought for, earned, and deserve. Tools are in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or on the bottom, if you're using a cellphone) so you can call your Reps and Senators and tell them to reject any "tax cut plan" that would cripple our Social Security.

Meanwhile, a few months back we learned that "harvesting pregnant horse blood" was an actual thing that pharmaceutical corporations (mostly in Europe) do, in order to get a magical hormone that regulates a pig's reproductive cycle, and therefore regulates meat production (and thus, I presume, profits) at factory farms. Apparently our activism against this disgusting practice has helped cause at least one pharmaceutical corporation (Merck, Sharpe, and Dohme, which is what Merck & Co. calls itself outside the United States) to announce that it would refrain from using the worst blood farms, but only for its European products, oddly, so Sum of Us helps you tell MSD to do better at getting itself out of the horse blood trade. And Sum of Us also helps you tell the German pharmaceutical corporation IDT Biologika to cut ties with horse blood farms. It's not just the prospect of draining animals of their blood that should give you the willies -- it's also the fact that blood farms tend to drain them until they die, and also induce abortions in the course of their work, since I guess it takes too long for a horse to grow up to the point where they can drain its blood, too.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to submit a public comment telling the Department of Labor to keep the Obama-era rule requiring retirement advisors to put their customers' interests before their own, then the Economic Policy Institute still helps you do that. President Trump is all about getting rid of regulations, you know -- because getting rid of regulations that some banksters find annoying is much more important than keeping regulations that help everyone! -- but Mr. Trump still must follow the rules, and if he's that desperate to get rid of a rule that should be common sense for financial advisors but isn't because financial advisors have proven themselves to be too greedy to police themselves, he still has to take public comments on getting rid of it. And I bet your comment will be better than any of our opponents' comments! I mean, our opponents are actually going on record saying the rule would make too many financial advisors suffer, and even put a few out of business. Hmm, selfish financial advisors being unable to make as much money as they'd like -- isn't that how it's supposed to work?

Around the table: what "free markets" really mean, and other important lessons.

Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals rules that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects gays from discrimination at the workplace. The word "gay" doesn't appear in the Civil Rights Act, but the Court ruled, essentially, that discriminating against gay workers isn't appreciably different from discriminating against workers because of their sex, which latter item is in the Civil Rights Act. An 11th Circuit panel reached the opposite conclusion last month, but don't bet that even a Neil Gorsuch-infused Supreme Court would strike down such a ruling, at least as long as Anthony Kennedy is still around.

One great economist, Paul Craig Roberts, briefly describes the work of another great economist, Michael Hudson. You'll learn how classical economists use the term "rent" (i.e., "an income stream that has no counterpart in cost incurred by the receipient of the income stream," not necessarily what you pay your landlord). Also, "(c)lassical economists, such as Adam Smith, understood a free market to be one in which taxation freed the economy from untaxed economic rents. In neoliberal economics, Hudson explains, 'free market' means freedom for rent extraction free of government taxation and regulation. This is a huge difference." And if you were to suddenly see rents everywhere in this economy, you wouldn't be alone.

Third-party private tax collectors will begin operating soon, and given all the The Consumerist tells you what you need to know. Long story short: the IRS won't outsource just any old tax collection effort, you'll still get written notices from the IRS and the private collector before you get any phone calls, the private collector still can't call you just any old time, you can opt out of working with the private collector, and private collectors will by law direct you to pay the IRS, not them. I'd still prefer the IRS just did all the work they're mandated to do, though of course they can't mainly because Republicans have been starving their budget for years.

From the "Racism is Not Dead" department: a ProPublica analysis of four states finds car insurance corporations charging higher premiums to folks in minority neighborhoods, though these folks don't actually cost car insurers more! This "may amount to a subtler form of redlining," they say, which is quite an understated way of putting it. You'll also find that the article includes many criticisms of its methods -- and refutes just about all of them. (That doesn't stop the trolls in the comment section, because what reason ever stopped a troll?)

Harold Meyerson at The American Prospect thinks "Republicans have made a key miscalculation in their decades-long strategy of attacking social programs," since their white working-class supporters need these programs more and more now. I'm sure the poll figures cited are quite accurate, but I remember saying a long time ago that folks would be more sanguine toward food stamps as they knew more people using them (or had to use them themselves) and I'm just not seeing it. All that seems to happen is that the 25% of this country that's bat-guano crazy (a sector which, sadly, overlaps pretty well with "downwardly-mobile whites") just gets crazier.

Finally, Republicans get rid of filibuster for Supreme Court nominees, clearing the way for the confirmation of Judge Gorsuch to the high court. And Sen. McConnell (E-KY) had this to say: "There cannot be two sets of standards: one for the nominees of the Democratic president and another for the nominee of a Republican president." Of course, the Republican standard for "nominees of the Democratic President" is to completely fail to even hold hearings, which they did in 2016, and were planning to do if Mrs. Clinton won the Presidency, and surely would have done in 2009, too, if they'd had a Senate majority then. Good citizens of Kentucky, could you please turn out this clown in 2020? And Democrats: how about running candidates who might inspire people to vote for them?

Action: Social Security, the death penalty, and mandatory minimums.

H.R. 1114/S. 427, the Social Security Expansion Act, would, as its title suggests, expand Social Security benefits for all seniors, and pay for these benefit expansions by instituting a payroll tax on income over $250,000. That would, of course, create a sort of "donut hole" in the current payroll tax scheme, since income over $117,000 doesn't get taxed into Social Security at all -- and indeed, the Harkin/Begich bills from 2014 would have simply eliminated that $117,000 income cap -- but certainly this tax-hike-on-the-rich would result in Social Security doing better by our seniors. The bill would also tie all cost-of-living increases to the CPI-E, or the Consumer Price Index for Elderly Consumers, and for good reason -- seniors have fixed incomes and high health care costs, which other indeces don't capture. The Social Security Expansion Act warrants a phone call to your Reps and Senators; you can find their phone numbers, of course, using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on your cellphone, the bottom of this page).

Meanwhile, the state of Arkansas, after not executing a prisoner for a decade, now plans to execute two inmates a day on four separate days over a 10-day period, something no state has ever done before -- and all because its supply of the dangerous execution drug, midazolam, expires at the end of the month. Even if you support the death penalty, you would raise an eyebrow, I think, at the notion that using up stock of an expiring drug would dictate when to carry out executions -- and, not for nothing, but both Florida and Arizona have banned this drug, because it can cause prisoners to convulse for a quarter-hour after injection. If, of course, you're all about causing prisoners pain, then you're not a civilized person who treats people humanely even when you think they don't deserve it -- you know, like Jesus would do! -- and you really should stop reading this blog and go read Breitbart or something. Just remember to wipe off your computer screen afterwards! The ACLU helps you tell Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson to drop his "execution blitz" plan.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents take note: the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down the state's mandatory minimum sentencing regime in 2015, on the grounds that suspects didn't find out they were a target of a mandatory minimum until after sentencing, but HB 741 would re-establish mandatory minimum sentences (while requiring prosecutors to argue for a mandatory minimum sentence during trial, which would likely satisfy the Court's objections). But who could be against mandatory minimums for people who sell drugs and molest children? Someone who thinks judges should judge, and someone who has faith that we can keep people safe and punish people honestly for heinous crimes, that's who. Mandatory minimums also increase taxpayer costs (as you'd figure it would, since mandatory minimums also jack up the prison population) and prosecutors who claim they need the mandatory minimums to get to drug kingpins need to ask themselves how well that's all worked out. So the ACLU helps you tell your Pennsylvania state legislators to reject mandatory minimum sentencing.

Action: tuition-free public college yea, whistleblower protections yea, "right to work" nay.

S. 806 -- authored by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and known colloquially as the "College for All Act" -- would make four-year public universities and colleges tuition-free. (I don't have a House bill number yet, but Rep. Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington, sponsors that bill.) If your right-wing friends get all ZOMG HOW WILL YOU PAYZ FOR TEH COLLEGEZ!!!!, tell them that the College for All Act would fund its aims with a financial transaction tax (or "Robin Hood tax," or "Wall Street sales tax"), one that would levy a 0.5 percent tax (not "five percent," and not "50 percent"!) on stock trades, a 0.1 percent tax on bond sales, and a 0.005 percent tax on derivative transactions. I think the bill should tax derivatives a lot harder than that, and I'm not a big fan of dedicated revenue streams either, but I approve of making public college-level education tuition-free for all Americans. So you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to support the College for All Act.

Meanwhile, S. 762, the IRS Whistleblower Improvements Act of 2017 -- an actually bipartisan bill introduced by Sens. Grassley (R-IA) and Wyden (D-OR) -- would better protect whistleblowers who drop a dime on tax fraud at their workplaces. The IRS whistleblower program has recovered $3 billion in tax fraud since 2006, which doesn't sound like a lot in the context of trillions of dollars in revenues annually, but which also represents a dramatic improvement in recovered taxes since then, and really, we ought to protect the good folks who risk their lives and careers (and I'm not exaggerating when I say that!) to expose the people who are cheating us out of all the services our taxes buy. With all the hysteria from the right about the IRS over the years, it's awfully nice to see at least one Republican tune it out occasionally, and that's true even if you knew the one Republican who'd tune it out would be Charles Grassley. The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Reps and Senators to support courageous whistleblowers by supporting S. 762.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject "right-to-work" legislation -- such as H.R. 785/S. 545, the National Right to Work Act -- then Sign for Good still helps you do that. Listen to folks who support such legislation and you'll be whisked off to an alternate universe where the National Labor Relations Act somehow deprives workers of their right to negotiate terms of employment (rather than enhance their ability to exercise that right!), and where a union bargaining on your behalf is somehow a "monopoly." Seriously, if you're already very, very wealthy and successful, you can negotiate terms of employment more or less to your liking, but absent unions and strong legislation, employers could dictate terms to the rest of us, or else we wouldn't have a job. And, ah, the union as a "monopoly within the workplace"? What a profound insult to all the people hurt by real monopolies -- including the monopolies that treat their workers the worst precisely because no one can compete with them. Sometimes right-wingers are clever with words. But not so much this time.

Penny Rants for Sunday, April 2, 2017: false flags, "free" trade, and internet privacy.

Emphatic non-truther Paul Street says "the time has never been riper for a false flag terror attack." Approvals in the 30s not even three months in, his first attempt at repealing Obamacare falling flat on its face, his first two anti-Muslim executive orders dying in court, his utter inability to put the Russian hacking story to rest -- yeah, the new President has sure made an entrance, and don't forget that 54% of the electorate voted for someone else. And don't forget, also, that George W. Bush didn't win the popular vote either, and sure looked headed for a one-term Presidency before 9.11 became his "opportunity" (Condi Rice's word, not mine). At least Mr. Bush actually put together a government; Mr. Trump hasn't even done that much, meaning there'll be fewer people in the conspiracy if there is one (and of course the bigger the supposed conspiracy, the more likely it doesn't exist). Remember that, incidentally, when the attack comes -- along with his refusal to attend intelligence briefings, his purge of the State Department, his golfing weekends in Florida, and his general strutting around like he's got the biggest cock in the universe. But, really, Mr. Trump may not need a conspiracy -- as one of my co-workers says, Mr. Trump's election is ISIS's endgame.

Mr. Trump says he won't scrap NAFTA, formerly "the worst trade deal," but will keep many planks in place when he goes to renegotiate it. And I bet you just can't guess one of them. That's right, the investor-state tribunal -- which the Times doesn't even mention until paragraph 20, though I'd say the mere existence of such tribunals, which threaten to destroy law and order in America and any other country in which they exist, was the main reason folks across the political spectrum hated the Trans-Pacific "Partnership." Were you wondering how Trump was going to fail us on "free" trade? This sure looks like how. But Paul Ryan's smoke-blowing aside, Mr. Trump hasn't exactly convinced everyone he's a "closer," and it looks like our neighbor to the north -- you remember that Canada was also a party to SHAFTYA, right? -- might have more urgent concerns about Mr. Trump's aims than Mexico does. Let's not allow the existence of Mexico's national sales tax lure us into accepting Mr. Trump's proposed American national sales tax "border tax," either. I'd be happy to accept our withdrawal from NAFTA. I'd even be happy to give Mr. Trump credit for it, as I do for our withdrawal from the TPP. (Not too much credit, though. We really deserve most of that.)

Wondering how to navigate the post-internet privacy world, as delivered by Congress this past week? Quincy Larson at Quartz advises us to set up a Virtual Private Network (or VPN) and certainly to enable HTTPS on our browsers, while Emily Dreyfuss at WIRED advises us to check out the Internet Noise website, which opens five tabs on your browser to websites chosen at random, and then visits five more websites every 10 seconds until you tell it to stop. I will admit to being quite attracted to the latter item -- as we learned in the Star Trek episode "Charlie X," one good way to deal with someone who's got too much power is to give them too much to handle -- but I also imagine that the better ISPs (and the better data-buyers) will ultimately figure out which traffic is trash. You should also worry (especially since Internet Noise's creator hasn't even evaluated all the search terms he uses) that an unscrupulous actor will concoct a terrorist plot from these searches -- Cardinal Richelieu once said "give me six lines written by the most honest man in the world, and I will find enough in them to hang him." There's more than one way to give evil too much to handle, though -- one of my random searches led me here, and that sure brought back some happy memories.

Action: Presidential tax transparency, and "right to work."

H.R. 305/S. 26, the Presidential Tax Transparency Act, would force Presidential candidates to disclose their tax returns, like virtually everyone else who goes to work in our government. Right-wingers who read the bill may tell you that the "Special Rule for Sitting Presidents" described in Sec. 2(a)(1) -- which would compel the person who's actually President right now (his initials are "Donald Trump") to submit his tax returns within 30 days of the bill's enactment -- is an unconstitutional bill of attainder. And you know what? They'd be right about that: the Constitution does specifically proscribe arresting and convicting folks for crimes (here, the refusal to disclose tax returns while a Presidential candidate) that weren't crimes when they committed them. But you know what else? Mr. Trump has already declared his candidacy for 2020, which makes him a Presidential candidate, which would put him under the scope of the bill, if it becomes law. You can see where a clever negotiator might have put that "Special Rule" in there only because giving it away would be worthless to the other side. Anyway, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Presidential Tax Transparency Act.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk and your President to reject "right-to-work" legislation, then Sign for Good still helps you do that. "Right to work" is a clever phrase, I'll give right-wingers that -- they're very good at coming up with clever phrases while their counterparts in the Democratic party are tripping over their five-syllable words and using words like "innovation" and "entrepreneurship" as if they were amulets. But so-called "right to work" laws don't actually confer upon you the right to work, or even the right to work the way you'd like -- they merely deprive unions of the ability to automatically collect dues from their members, who presumably had a say in whether or not they wanted a union and who certainly enjoy the benefits of being in one, which is why liberals often call it "right to work for less." Still we hear right-wingers say "why should anyone be compelled to pay for something they don't want," as if, you know, civilized people don't routinely pay for things they don't want, as the price of living in a civilized society. I mean, I opposed the war in Iraq, but I'm not asking for a refund of all that tax money I contributed toward it.

Around the table: Trumpcare raids Medicare, and other truths.

I'd resisted repeating the Trumpcare-raids-Medicare meme, because folks who deployed it tended not to explain it, but I was being thick: as Allegra Kirkland at Talking Points Memo reminded us a while back, the Trumpcare bill repeals most of the taxes that fund the Affordable Care Act -- and one of them is the payroll tax on high incomes that helps fund Medicare. As Atrios has reminded us, Republicans really won the House in 2010 because they ran ads claiming that the ACA "stole" $500 billion from Medicare, and now here comes a bill that will steal money from Medicare. Think Democrats will apply the good-for-the-goose lesson in 2018? I kid, of course.

Peter Maass at The Intercept reminds us that "For Donald Trump, A Terror Attack Will Be An Opportunity, Not a Curse." There's hope, of course, not least in the fact that we saw all this before with Tha Bush Mobb and that resistance to the fact of the Trump Presidency has already begun. We'd also do well to remember, of course, that he retreats to Florida to play golf every weekend, that he hardly attends Presidential intelligence briefings, that he's gutted the State Department and his budget would gut it further, and that he's generally acted like an arrogant prick, and so if a massive 9.11-sized attack comes, he will have failed America.

Dean Baker reminds us that "(o)ver the past two decades, the economics profession has compiled an impressive track record of getting almost all the big calls wrong." Paragraphs 17 through 21 explain scare numbers pretty well -- the ZOMG TEH WELFAREZ IZ $17 BILLYUNZ!!!! crowd never explain their numbers in any kind of context (in the context of a $4 trillion federal budget, for example), and of course they'd never suggest taxing the rich more, because when did that ever happen? Except back when most of the Tea Party were growing up, that is. Have I mentioned that I think psychology is a more rigorous science than economics?

The incomparable David Dayen reminds us that "Donald Trump Isn't Even Pretending to Oppose Goldman-Sachs Anymore," now that his brain trust, such as it is, includes no less than five Goldman-Sachs veterans. As Mr. Dayen suggests, there's no use protesting the Democrats hire Goldman-Sachs vets to run finance, too, since Mr. Trump said he'd be different and went out of his way to criticize banksters when he knew it would get him votes. The good news? Maybe some of his votaries will see this and be angry. The bad news? I thought a lot of those votaries were in it just for the Jew-hate anyway.

Finally, John Light at the Moyers and Company website shares "11 Ways the EPA Has Helped Americans." You don't hear much about the hole in the ozone layer anymore, nor the Cuyahoga River catching fire, nor acid rain nor DDT, and that's mainly because of the EPA's authority, derived from law, to regulate these matters. Nice also to know that right-wingers whined about blackouts and higher electricity prices when the EPA moved against acid rain. Seems like they're always whining about that, and they're never right. It'd be nice if the "liberal" media would give their whining the appropriate amount of oxygen, i.e., none.

Around the table: Donald Trump wants you to spend more on gas, and other truths.

Buried in this account of President Trump's intention to roll back fuel-efficiency standards is, of course, a scare number advanced by the auto industry: ZOMG TEH BETTUR CARZ WILLZ COSTZ TEH $200 BILLYUNZ!!!! But of course you have to divide that $200 billion over the eight years automakers have to reach the standards, and you also have to divide that by the 17 automakers that made the claim, and now you're down to a little less than $1.5 billion annually, per automaker. Toyota alone made over $19 billion in net income during the fiscal year ending in 2016.

Federal judges in Maryland and Hawaii block Mr. Trump's Muslim Ban 2.0 a day before it was to take effect. It's not like you have to dig real hard to find the religious animus when Mr. Trump exposes that animus all the time and when his supporters go on TV and say Mr. Trump asked them to help him create a Muslim ban "legally." Mr. Trump responded to the news by saying, "(t)his ruling makes us look weak, which by the way we no longer are," which should remind you that anyone who has to say he's not weak is weak.

OMB head Mick Mulvaney defends the Trump Cruelty Budget by saying he can't ask "a coal miner in West Virginia or a single mom in Detroit" to keep funding public TV with their taxes. We can set aside, for a moment, that one of the features of living in a civilization is that your taxes occasionally go to things that don't appear to have immediate value to you. But dig how he insults these hypothetical Trump supporters! Does he think coal miners didn't grow up watching Sesame Street?

Yes it's damn annoying that the "liberal" media seems to care only about right-wing objections to the Obamacare repeal bill, though substantially more than half of Americans in poll after poll support Medicare-for-All, single-payer insurance, the most liberal plan out there -- but it ain't just corporate bias at work here, but an addiction to irony, and you know that I, too, used to comb through the ranks of the right to find folks who hated Tha Bush Mobb. Irony's like a hammer, though -- quite useful, but not the right tool for every task.

Matthew Yglesias at Vox notes that the recent CBO report also says that Obamacare is not, in fact, "imploding" as Messrs. Trump and Ryan love to say it is. And lo and behold, the reason Obamacare isn't likely to implode is that it ties its subsidies to income level, which makes it very likely that the working poor will stay in the system. But, ah, "(t)he merits of paying for a tax cut for millionaires by cutting millions of poor families off from Medicaid coverage" is not "something reasonable people can disagree about."

Finally, the Arizona Supreme Court unanimously dismisses a challenge to that state's popularly-enacted minimum wage hike. The challengers, including the Arizona Chamber of Commerce, have now had so little success fighting these things tooth-and-nail that they're going to go after the law that allows good Arizonans to vote on matters concerning them in the first place, which puts their utter intellectual bankruptcy on full display. Keep worshiping mammon, gentlemen, and you'll find your reward in hell.

Penny Rants for Sunday, March 12, 2017: health care, the "liberal" media, and taxes.

Rep. Chaffetz (R-UT) has taken a lot of well-deserved hits for saying folks who worry about the cost of health care should just avoid buying that new iPhone, and not just because health care costs are absurdly high (getting your appendix out, without any of the follow-up care you'd need, could run you about 20 iPhones), or even because Mr. Chaffetz implies you should just "grow up" if you want more from your government than the back of its hand. Mr. Chaffetz advances the notion that you should "invest" in health care, but you don't literally invest in health care -- if you could save $200 monthly in an index fund paying 7% annually and reinvest your dividends annually, it'd still take you close to six years to pay off that appendix removal, and hopefully nothing else happens to you in the meantime! Also, you need health care when you need it, not when you can draw off your investments, and that's why insurance works: a large number of people pool their resources together so that a few of them can endure a catastrophe at a particular time. Why would Mr. Chaffetz want you to think you're in this on your own, I wonder?

We discussed Josmar Trujillo's article about the New York Daily News's latest defense of "broken windows" policing last week, but I wanted to discuss one more aspect of his piece, since it slices the Gourdian knot of how we should approach the media during the Trump years. Mr. Trujillo opens with this statement: "When President Donald Trump rails against the mainstream media, it might not make much sense to come to their defense...the problems with media powerhouses like CNN and the New York Times are well-documented, and preceded any of Trump’s Twitter storms." I've been uneasy about the quickness to which so many liberals have jumped to the media's defense lately, and that's even though the media have been doing a better job. But the problems with the "liberal" media -- too corporate, too sensationalist, too hostile to non-whites -- still remain, and won't go away overnight. So you approach the media under a President who calls them "the opposition party" like you approach anything else -- honestly, without worrying whether we should consider the media to be on "our side" because our jerk of a President is on the other side. Your side is the truth, not "whatever side isn't Trump."

Finally, Michael Hudson also had so many good things to say about Trumponomics in his Counterpunch interview earlier this month that I just didn't have space to get into Mr. Trump's opposition to deducting certain kinds of loan interest from your taxes. Long story short: Mr. Trump says he supports ending the practice, and doing so would put the brakes on the corporate raiders and unscrupulous landlords (ahem!) who seem to benefit the most from it -- but Congress would never do it, since their biggest donors are these same corporate raiders and unscrupulous landlords. And of course Mr. Trump knows that his opposition will come to nothing -- nothing, that is, except a PR weapon to use against Democrats on Election Day. Yet I find I don't want to get rid of all of those deductions -- I'd let folks continue to exempt student loan debt interest, I'd limit the mortgage interest deduction to mortgages of less than $300,000, and I wouldn't let folks take the deduction on more than one house plus one home equity loan. All of that would make being a landlord unattractive, but what a shame that would be.

Around the table: from corporate tax avoidance to Scott Pruitt's forked tongue.

In a completely shocking development, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy finds that, from 2008 to 2015, over half of Fortune 500 corporations paid, on average, a mere 21.2% in corporate taxes, despite the corporate tax rate being 35%. 18 of these corporations paid zero dollars in taxes during these years, with 100 more having at least one zero year and 24 having at least four, and no it can't possibly be because they hemorrhaged money over that time, since they're still around and still doing well (General Electric, Priceline, PG&E, ad nauseam). So that's what you say to your Trump-loving uncle when he complains about the corporate tax rate not being "competitive" enough.

President Trump reassures Republicans that if Obamacare repeal doesn't work out, he'll just keep blaming Democrats for Obamacare's failures, real and perceived. And this could work! Republicans take over government and deliberately run it badly precisely so people will think think government is naturally incompetent, and most folks don't fully understand that. Sure, one could reason that Trump votaries could stay home in 2018 because he didn't get rid of Obamacare, but reason can't compete with their bottomless, unquenchable, easily-stoked rage, and do you think Democrat smartypants weaklings will fight back?

Elizabeth Dexheimer at Bloomberg suggests that Congressional finance committees have been focusing on almost anything but gutting the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. Though the President may have more success doing that by himself, I hope she's right. But I can't help but imagine how easy it would be to thwart such pro-bankster efforts if we turned out for them the way we're turning out for the Affordable Care Act! And people aren't anywhere near as ambivalent about banksters as they are about the ACA.

Chris Morran at The Consumerist describes how Republicans have actually defended their efforts to repeal a 10% tax on tanning salons as part of their effort to destroy Obamacare. Rep. Jason Smith (R-MO) actually suggested it'd make as much sense to tax the sun. It should be grotesquely easy to run ads against Republicans when they say things like that -- (insert name of House Rep) caters to tanning salons instead of listening to your concerns, etc. -- but then you remember Democrats would have to run such ads, and that'll never happen, since it's hard to drop the words "innovative" and "entrepreneur" into them. (Please, don't anyone take that as a challenge.)

Marshall Allen at ProPublica finds one reason for skyrocketing health care expenses: "all the perfectly good stuff hospitals throw away." These include disposable instruments discarded unused because they entered a surgeon's sterile field; supplies dedicated to particular patients that get thrown out once patients leave; supplies that get thrown out when a hospital upgrades models or changes vendors; supplies that have outlasted their expiration dates but remain unopened and usable. It's not a large percentage of health care waste, but it's still pretty annoying -- and, sadly, it ain't just third-world hospitals that would be happy to have the stuff, but American rural hospitals, too.

Finally, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt says he doesn't think carbon dioxide is an "important" contributor to climate change. But the fact that he's dead wrong about that isn't as important as the fact that he said exactly the opposite to the Senate during his confirmation hearings -- meaning that he knew what Senators wanted to hear, said it, and then went back to saying whatever he wanted afterward. Folks who are capable of that should be nowhere near the levers of power in America.

Action: free speech, health care, and the Muslim Ban 2.0.

It begins again: North Carolina state Reps. John Torbett and John Faircloth have introduced HB 249, which would, dig this, create a brand new class of "violent terrorists" called "economic terrorists." And what is an "economic terrorist," according to HB 249? Someone who "willfully and maliciously or with reckless disregard commits a criminal offense that impedes or disrupts the regular course of business, the disruption results in damages of more than one thousand dollars." They want you to think that just means violent protestors who break windows, but really it could describe anyone who stands in the street in front of a business with a sign! Think an unscrupulous person couldn't concoct $1,000 in damages from that? Republicans control the Presidency, both houses of Congress, and almost two out of every three state legislatures, and they're still so afraid of the people that they're constantly trying to criminalize our protests! They'd have fewer protestors if they didn't do so much evil. Really, that's all it would take. Mr. Torbett's phone number is 919.733.5868, and Mr. Fairlcloth's number is 919.733.5877.

Meanwhile, the House has released its Obamacare repeal bill, and now we know why they put it together in secret. As I suspected, the bill gets rid of the individual mandate and all the taxes levied against the well-off while keeping the pre-existing ban around, while also fooling around with Obamacare subsidies so poor people have less access to insurance, repealing the Medicaid expansion and then capping total federal spending on Medicaid, and in place of the mandate's tax, we'll have 30% premium hikes for folks who have a gap in health insurance coverage, which essentially means you'll be paying the mandate to the insurance industry rather than our government. Ultimately, the bill represents a whole bunch of tax cuts for the rich -- and just guess which funding mechanism from Obamacare the Republican plan keeps? That's right, the "Cadillac" tax, the only one that might actually hurt working people! The bill would delay its implementation five more years, but where is their zeal to protect working families from TEH TAXEZ!!! Republicans will (surprise!) rush these votes through House Committees, so use the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page to find phone numbers for your Reps and Senators.

Finally, the Trump Administration has issued a new immigration-related executive order, i.e., "Muslim Ban 2.0," and while you'll find some cosmetic changes from the ill-fated first order struck down by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, you'll still sniff that faint animus against Muslims that seems to animate every foreign policy decision Mr. Trump makes, as the 120-day ban on refugee resettlement is back, even if the "indefinite" ban on Syrian refugees is not. And now, instead of seven majority-Muslim nations on his little Enemies List, he's got six, having excised Iraq. Maybe Mr. Trump's exemption of current visa holders and his excision of parts prioritizing "refugee claims made by individuals on the basis of religious-based persecution" will get him past the courts this time, but the court of public opinion, well-shaped by the President's own multitudinous pronouncements against races and religions he does not like, may not be so easily-swayed. In any case, the ACLU helps you tell your Senators to condemn this latest Muslim ban.

Around the table: more "liberal" media conflict-of-interest non-disclosure, plus at least two bad ideas from our Senate.

Ho hum, Comcast-owned media outlet runs positive article about app literally hours after Comcast sinks half a billion dollars into said app, without disclosing this fact. That's yet another good argument against corporations owning other corporations! Also, too, why are we covering corporate valuations like they're sporting events? Even if you're not actually invested in Snapchat (and your pension fund might be!), you might still be affected by its stock crashing, and more so than by your football team losing.

Sen. Shelby (R-AL) suggests Republicans might be able to get big chunks of Dodd-Frank reform repealed through budget reconciliation. And all the right-wingers who squealed like pigs when Democrats used reconciliation to pass Obamacare rose at once and shouted Sen. Shelby down! I kid, of course. And, ah, there might be a reason Congress hasn't foregrounded these pro-bankster efforts, while ensuring Obamacare repeal takes up all the oxygen in the room. (That reason would be "because the people would hate them.")

Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) suggests Democrats might be willing to shut down our government if Republicans won't help them get to the bottom of President Trump's Russian ties. Jesus Mary and Joseph that is one of the stupidest things Democrats could possibly do. I can think of far, far better reasons to allow a government shutdown, and certainly I'd never allow it over something that would never have happened if Democrats were really the party of the people -- not to mention something that damages Mr. Trump more by the minute.

Here's something that almost escaped my notice: Sanderson Farms has begun to run ads suggesting that those corporations who are cutting out antibiotics from their chickens are merely indulging in a "marketing gimmick" that is "just a trick to get you to pay more money." And if antibiotic abuse really does bring about a world where the next cut you get can kill you again, there may not be many of us left to tell Sanderson Farms "I told you so." But I bet they'll still be around, feeling no shame over their enabling of civilization's destruction.

Finally, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) wants to pass a law mandating that all Presidential candidates for 2020 release their tax returns. He says that would include Mr. Trump "if" he runs for re-election, but surely Mr. Graham knows that Mr. Trump has already filed re-election papers with the FEC, which I guess raises the possibility that his team would regard such a law as a sort of "bill of attainder" for Mr. Trump, which of course the Constitution prohibits. I'm sure Mr. Graham knows that, too, which makes all of this yet more bad theatre from the Republicans.

Penny Rants for Sunday, March 5, 2017: losing Democrat strategies, and losing tax cut plans.

You may have heard that Democrats think they have a shot at picking up Tom Price's old House seat in an April special election, because voters there only went for Mr. Trump by a 48-47 margin. But apparently Republicans are running ads compiling social media videos the 30-year-old Democratic candidate has made, thinking they'll embarrass him. This may work, and then again it may not -- it's 30 seconds too long, it makes an obscure and probably inaccurate point, and why would Georgia 6th District's voters find Mr. Ossoff making fun of spoiled rich girls in our nation's capitol a bad thing? But this strategy's effectiveness will be short lived in any case, since even Republicans will run out of old-people candidates one day. I think the two more damaging pieces of news are a) that Mr. Ossoff has raised $2 million already (because money is everything, and ideas are nothing!) and b) that two Hollywood actresses (neither a superstar, but neither a has-been) have endorsed him (presumably Mr. Ossoff's opponent will run that ad closer to Election Day). So this still looks like the Democrat formula of raising boatloads of money and creating celebrity "buzz" for uninspiring candidates, the same formula that just brought us our present disaster.

Economist Michael Hudson explains how the Trump tax cut plan is based on myth. "The more you compress the tax rates" (that is, make them flatter so everyone pays more or less the same rate) "the more you un-tax where the income is really made," i.e., by the rich, whose share of income growth under the Obama Administration was approximately all of it. Also, income doesn't "trickle down" from the rich, precisely because they don't spend their extra money but lend it, which creates more debt for the rest of us -- and which makes complete sense once you consider that someone who makes 100 times what you make doesn't need 100 times the calories or 100 times the living space, nor do they spend 100 times what you spend on a cheeseburger. And it doesn't get said enough, but whatever working families get from tax cuts they'll lose in the social services that get cut or privatized -- and that doesn't necessarily mean food stamps or welfare, but education and health care. Plus, at the risk of piling on, most rich folks don't make their money working, but off of capital gains -- and this tax, of course, is the one all politicians, regardless of party, have the biggest hard-on for cutting. End result: "a vast sucking of income and wealth upward."

Around the table: the newest email scandal! And other tales.

Uh oh: while Governor of Indiana, Mike Pence used his AOL account. to conduct state business, and that account got hacked at least once (to run that old we're-stranded-send-money scam, no less!). And right-wingers are coming down just as hard on him as they did on Mrs. Clinton! I kid, of course -- we're more likely to see squealing that Indiana laws are different, or that previous Indiana governors did the same thing, though neither is a standard you'd use to select a President or Vice President.

The incomparable David Dayen informs us that Trump crony "regulatory advisor" Carl Icahn gets President Trump to draft an executive order that would force gasoline wholesalers, not oil refiners, assure that gasoline meets the 15% renewable energy standard. Why is this important? Because Mr. Icahn just so happens to own an oil refinery that can't blend ethanol, meaning his refinery has to buy renewable fuel credits to the tune of over $200 million last year. In the words of one industry analyst, "this is no deal for anyone but Carl Icahn." Greed and selfishness: they're what the Trump Administration is all about.

Surprise, surprise, the Keystone XL pipeline will not have to build with American steel like other pipelines will per a Trump executive order, because the Keystone XL pipeline isn't a "new" project, having been first proposed over eight years ago. If Mr. Obama put out that excuse, right-wingers would call him an egghead, but Mr. Trump did it, so they'll laud his cleverness in "sticking it to the man." Right-wingers never realize that they're "the man" their heroes stick it to.

Lily Hay Newman at Wired explains how "Medical Devices are the Next Security Nightmare." More and more implantable medical devices can be tweaked over wi-fi, which is a big improvement over needing another surgery, unless a hacker gets ahold of it. The only slightly less awful news is that the outdated computer software hospitals use (a few hospitals still use Windows XP, for which Microsoft no longer even makes security patches) is the more likely target.

Samsung is sending out Dish network techs to fix washing machines. The corporation says it notifies customers they'll get a Dish tech, and assures us that their Dish techs know what they're doing, but, ah, they don't always, plus they occasionally try to sell you a Dish network subscription. What on Earth would be the harm in, you know, hiring washing machine technicians in an economy with a U6 unemployment rate still above 9%? Oh, I forgot -- doing that doesn't get the CEO his 19th vacation home.

Finally, the good people of Kansas achieve a victory, of sorts, when their state legislature votes to rescind all of Sam Brownback's tax-cuts-for-the-rich since 2010. Sadly, Mr. Brownback, who's somehow still Governor, vetoed the bill and only the legislature's lower house overrode the veto. Still, I hope they try again. But I also hope that when Mr. Brownback leaves office his name is synonymous with "failure" -- and that the whole concept of "trickle-down economics" soils the name of anyone who supports it.

Around the table: everything old is new again, again.

So you've seen all those headlines about the "Confederate flag-waving couple" who got 33 years in prison? Adam Johnson at FAIR reminds us -- as "liberal" media headlines somehow don't! -- that they were also waving a shotgun at black folks. Which might explain the longer sentence a little better! Personal to the folks who say ONLY READINGZ TEH HEADLINEZ IZ TEH STUPIDZ!!!!: you're telling me you read every single story for which you see a headline?

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) pushes natural gas as a climate change solution at townhall meetings. Methane emissions, as you know, are a fairly persistent side effect of fracking, and pack a climate change punch much larger than even coal emissions, and I just can't imagine how Mr. Cassidy will vote on H.J.Res. 36, the "resolution of disapproval" that would nullify BLM rules limiting methane emissions from gas drilling on public lands.

Ho hum, the IRS is hemorrhaging experienced criminal investigators, though tax cheats still work around the clock. One could reasonably ask whether the IRS investigates too many cases that aren't directly related to tax fraud, but the main culprit here, of course, is Republican budget-cutting and Republican-engineered dramas about IRS investigation of right-wing groups. If you want to get all "law and order," you should maybe start with the tax cheats that steal from all of us.

President Trump's new National Security Advisor, H.R. McMaster, apparently rather dislikes using the term "radical Islamic terrorism," unlike his boss and millions of whining right-wingers. Because, he says, being a terrorist is "un-Islamic," rather like it's also un-Christian and un-any other religion you can name. And how many times must I tell these pimps! Demanding that everyone use the term "radical Islamic terrorism" is the very soul of political correctness!

Finally, about the President's address to Congress Tuesday night: let's not give the man so much credit for deciding that pretending you care is a better stratagem than constantly acting like a prick -- and let's also consider whether this "Presidential" persona will merely enable his votaries to label his prick-nature "fake news." And, really, Donald Trump telling someone else to cut it out with the "trivial fights"? That's Bush Mobb-level chutzpah, right there.

Around the table: border taxes, private prisons, "states' rights," immigration, playing defense, and hearts and minds.

Citizens for Tax Justice also thinks the "border tax" is a bad idea. Claims that ZOMG TEH BORDER TAX WOULD RAISE TEH 1.2 TRILLYUNZ DOLLARZ!!!! (over 10 years) tend to ignore the fact that the Republican proposal would actually lose $4 trillion over 10 years (largely because it repeals the corporate tax). Of course we should never tolerate when corporations pass on their taxes to consumers, but we shouldn't be dumb enough to think that wouldn't happen, either, particularly given the Republicans' utter lack of a law-and-order bent when it comes to corporate behavior.

Ho hum, Attorney General Jeff Sessions continues his hot streak by withdrawing an Obama Administration memo aiming to reduce private prison involvement in detaining undocumented immigrants. Because how can our government do the job all by itself? Private prisons do a worse job just like private everything does a worse job of fulfilling government functions, and we shouldn't leave it to Bernie Sanders to remind us that private prisons gave a lot of money to the Trump campaign, though I'm still glad he did.

Zaid Jafani at The Intercept notes the irony, as it were, that the Trump Administration wants to leave transgendered-folks-in-bathrooms policy "up to the states" but won't leave marijuana enforcement up to the states that have legalized the drug. "States' rights" is one of the most intellectually-bankrupt concepts in American history, having long been little more than a synonym for a state's "right" to own black slaves. Everyone wants the smallest possible governmental unit to have the most direct power over people's welfare, but people have rights, and "states' rights" can't be an excuse to run roughshod over those rights. Plus, pot ain't an opioid, so using opioid problems to justify cracking down on pot doesn't make sense.

Issie Lapowsky at WIRED says President Trump's immigrant deportation plan isn't just cruel, but suffers from "bad math." Long story short: your plan has a smaller chance of success the bigger its ambitions -- and deciding that deporting every undocumented immigrant is a bad way to use finite resources. Plus that Skittles analogy is really, really stupid -- "three in a handful" itself vastly overstates how many refugees commit violent crimes.

Another day, another quite correct diagnosis that playing defense isn't enough and Democrats need to start taking a few more chances if they're ever going to come back. "We must fight to either disengage the Democratic Party from its corporate masters, or to develop a viable third party," Leonard C. Goodman writes -- though the latter might be the only way to achieve the former.

Finally, Colin Beavan tells us "What It Takes to Change Hearts and Minds." Basically, we shouldn't pound numbers and facts so much, but we should "align() communication about (our) cause with the most deeply-held values and aspirations of (our) friends, relatives, neighbors, and fellow citizens." I'll admit it takes a lot of practice to discern between doing that effectively and just telling other folks what you think they want to hear. Keep in mind, though, that 25% of the electorate is bat-guano crazy and can only be contained in their damage, and that's just as true now as it was under Tha Bush Mobb. So we work on the 75% who aren't crazy. And that's why I'm an optimist.

Action: church and state, transgendered students, and internet privacy.

You may have heard that President Trump told attendees at the National Prayer Breakfast that he wanted to "get rid of and totally destroy the Johnson Amendment." No truth to the rumor that he also said he wanted to annihilate it, rip it to shreds, and go back in time and kill Lyndon Johnson's grandfather so that it'd never even be born. The Johnson Amendment, as you know, prevents churches and similarly tax-exempt organizations from advocating on behalf of candidates, or to donate money to those candidates' campaigns. So Mr. Trump would prefer that churches be tax-exempt without doing the duty that tax-exempt organizations must do, but that may not be the worst part -- the worst part would be the prospect of large corporations using churches as money-laundering schemes, because they can never have too many ways of obscuring the source of their money. I mean, we don't just separate church and state for the state's benefit -- we also do it for the church's benefit. So Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk not to gut the Johnson Amendment.

Also, as you know, the Trump Justice Department (and I put those words together at considerable risk of opening up a hole in space-time!) has revoked the Obama Administration's Title IX guidance which mandated that schools ensure that transgender students can use the bathroom that corresponds with their gender identity, rather than the birth certificate listed on their gender. So the ACLU helps you tell Attorney General Sessions to reinstate the guidance, and thus protect transgendered students from bullying and discrimination. The DOJ no doubt thinks adding a statement saying it really, really hates bullying and discrimination does the job, but it doesn't -- all the caring words in the world don't do as much as one caring act. Hopefully no trolls are coming along to say that transgendered folk are all child molestors, because they're transgendered. I mean, usually they're a little cleverer than that, but that's how their argument boils down. Since men still commit the vast majority of pederasty (and mostly against girls), we might do better to ban men from public restrooms. Of course, that would be a terrible idea, but that only tells you how terrible the other idea is.

Meanwhile, the FCC, now headed by Ajit Pai, plans to do whatever it can to gut your net neutrality laws, but might also move against new privacy protections put into place by the previous FCC. The FCC would, like most good Americans, prefer that internet service corporations get permission from you before they go selling and mining your personal data, but big corporations, of course, don't want to do that -- they'd rather propagate the myths that privacy protection on the internet is just too hard, or you're a greedy fool for wanting privacy on the internet, or but you'll lose our on all our great deals! The truth is that they'll lose out on that golden opportunity to make money by doing even less work that the internet provides. And I guess I should point out that I don't begrudge them the ability to make money by directing their ads at the right eyeballs more easily -- I begrudge them the "right" to demand that we participate in that, whether we want to or not. So Consumers Union helps you tell the FCC to protect internet customers' privacy.

Around the table: banksters wilt under reporting requirements boo-hoo, and other tales.

Trump Administration rescinds Obama Administration's guidance on transgender folks using the bathroom of the gender they identify with. The Times reports that Education Secretary DeVos initially resisted, and while I'd love to believe that's true, I don't -- I believe, of course, that the report of her initial opposition exists to lull us into a false sense of security about how well the Trump Machine is running, when it's running exactly the way Our Glorious Elites want it to run.

The incomparable David Dayen informs us that banksters want to reduce federal reporting requirements on suspected money-laundering -- you know, the kind of thing that helps catch drug kingpins, tax evaders, and terrorists. Banksters' apparent inability to comply with federal law on this matter might suggest that the reporting requirements are onerous, but they're not, and with banksters, of course, you have to ask how their notorious incompetence in following the law might be intentional. Read the whole thing, though, because the banksters' bad arguments just get worse and worse. And if Mr. Trump wants to be a law and order President, he should be paying attention.

Sue Sturgis at Facing South explores another way to dilute minority voting power in a region: make all the representatives "at-large." She's talking specifically about the Board of Commissioners of Jones County in North Carolina, and I guess defenders of the "at-large" nature of the five Commissioners will happily explain how Commissioners aren't "representatives" per se. But I'm equally happy to call such an explanation pedantry, since federal courts have ruled against County Commissioners on Voting Rights Act grounds before.

Issie Lapowsky at Wired writes that "The Internet Gave Us Milo" Yiannopoulos, and "The Internet Can Take Him Away." But as Ms. Lapowsky acknowledges, he wouldn't have gotten anywhere without mainstream media coverage of his internet shenanigans, and he may find he made a major mistake taking his book to a major publisher, when, you know, he could have self-published the thing and made a lot of sales. Think maybe he didn't go full-indy because he wanted to be legit? And think maybe he's regretting that now?

Wellesley College's Davis Museum removes works created by immigrants -- in effort to highlight contributions made by immigrants to American culture. I can already hear right-wingers squealing that they can't imagine any immigrant Muslims making such contributions, oblivious to the fact that folks once said that about Germans, Irish, and Italians. And a lot of the right-wingers who squeal about such matters have German, Irish, and Italian blood, too.

Finally, the U.S. Supreme Court allows convicted murderer Duane Buck to ask for a new sentence, given that one of the reasons prosecutors gave in arguing for his death sentence in 1997 was that he'd be more likely to commit crimes in the future because he was black. This one was easy enough that Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority opinion; one day I may regard his compulsive literalism as an idiosyncrasy rather than a flaw, but he's firmly anti-racist when the evidence is obvious enough or the forces of evil sloppy enough, and I guess that's not nothing.

Around the table: tax havens, climate change, moving left, right-wing whining, and an internet bully finally gets his comeuppance.

Ecuador voters appear to pass referendum forbidding its civil servants and politicians from investing in tax havens. They'd have a year to bring their money back to Ecuador, and if they didn't, they'd have to quit their jobs serving the public. If you're about to argue that politicians should have the same rights to put their money where they like as everyone else, please do two things: 1) slap yourself, and 2) meditate on the last three words of the previous sentence. The mantle of public service requires you to make decisions in the public interest, not in your own personal portfolio's interest.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt wonders whether the EPA "has the tools" to address climate change under the Clean Air Act. Of course, the Supreme Court ruled, almost 10 years ago, in an opinion authored by the late Justice Scalia, that the EPA does, in fact, have those tools. 10 years ago! Two Presidents ago! But if you feel compelled to hide your toolbox from yourself, of course you'll "wonder" where all the tools are.

At long last, someone takes to one of the big newspapers and urges Democrats to move left. The math certainly doesn't appear to support the notion that Democrats should try to win back the white voters who defected from Mr. Obama to Mr. Trump, since many, many more of them defected to Libertarian and Green candidates in the three battleground states that Mr. Trump unexpectedly flipped on Election Day. I'd still like to have had some inkling of what the author means by "moving left," though -- social issues are far from unimportant, but Democrats won't really win voters back, and for the long haul, until they move left on economic issues.

Trump Administration Press Secretary Sean Spicer laments (and "laments" is the word) that the President doesn't get more credit for all his leadership in fighting anti-Semitism. You and I will remember that Mr. Trump went well out of his way to excise the word "Jewish" from his first Presidential Holocaust statement, but forget that for now. I want to know when right-wingers will finally hear statements like "no matter how many times he talks about this that it's never good enough" as whining.

Finally, right-wing hack Milo Yiannopoulos loses his book deal with Simon and Schuster (and, later, his Breitbart job) after previous utterances resurface in which he favored pederasty in certain circumstances. So, to sum: self-hating gay man who makes career out of bullying others finally gets comeuppance after saying maybe we ought to bend our society's rules on consent -- which state that no child can consent to have sex with an adult -- because a lot of gay kids are lonely. Is it too much to ask that we never hear from, or about, this clown again?

Around the table: from health care lies to dystopian imaginings.

Julie Chinitz at the OurFuture blog offers "Five GOP Health Care Buzz Phrases You Need to Inoculate Yourself Against." These are: "block grant for Medicaid" (better described as "destroying Medicaid"), "health savings accounts" (better described as "tax shelters for the rich") "high-risk pools" (a.k.a. "high-premium pools,") "per-capita caps for Medicaid" (i.e., "putting limits on your health care"), and "premium support" ("destroying Medicare" or "making seniors' health care cost more"). Seems Democrats could run about a thousand ads against this crap; guess how many they'll actually run.

In a related note, Margot Sanger-Katz at the New York Times comes up with at least two other ways to describe Republican health care proposals: they'd "redirect money from poor to rich," and they'd "chang(e) the winners and losers." I prefer "redistribute" to "redirect," but I'm glad to hear some version of it from our Paper of Record. And it wasn't that long ago that Republicans complained about government "picking winners and losers." What really upsets them is the prospect that government might prevent them from picking their cronies to be the winners.

Janine Jackson at FAIR finds some dirt on Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch: he not only ruled against a cancer survivor's request to work from home while her workplace was besieged by a flu epidemic, but he also said that laws and rules protecting the disabled shouldn't "turn employers into safety net providers for those who cannot work." That's pedantry at best and cruelty at worst, and it's not too much to ask that our next Supreme Court justice come to us without these faults.

Thea Riafrancos and Daniel Denvir write about "moving past" identity politics. To me, the sword that slices the Gourdian knot of identity politics is the fight for economic justice -- anyone can identify with it, no one needs to feel left out by it, and attaining it also makes fighting racism, sexism, and homophobia a lot easier. Of course I find the whole notion of "throwing blacks overboard so we can attract white voters again" to be quite stupid -- it's as if evil people want us to think that's the only choice. But we Americans can make our own choices. That's why we rock.

Cade Metz criticizes Mark Zuckerberg for offering "A World Divided By Facebook" "More Facebook." Always they blame the wrong people! Facebook hasn't divided our world -- Our Glorious Elites have divided our world, and they've divided it a lot harder as their moral and intellectual bankruptcy has become more and more obvious. If you think Facebook is unprecedented in its ability to spread lies, then you've never heard of a whisper campaign, and if you blame Facebook for "help(ing) Americans construct parallel factual universes," then you've never heard of Fox News.

Finally, David Frum describes how Donald Trump could "Build an Autocracy" in America. I don't see the "familiar expansive magic" of "big tax cuts, big spending, and big deficits" as a sure thing -- surely he remembers the, ah, mixed economic record of his old boss, George W. Bush -- but Mr. Frum does a great job imagining the banality of an American autocratic state (and most dystopian thinkers shrink before that task!) as well as describing how incrementally this autocratic state could creep up on us. These are Interesting Times, so I guess I'll have to say it: David Frum's article is essential reading.

Penny Rants for Sunday, February 19, 2017: just say no to the border tax! And other stories.

Republicans purport to wring their hands over "who would pay" for a 20% "border tax" on imports. That question's easy to answer: who always pays, i.e., everyone except corporate CEOs. That explains why they like the idea so much! Well, that and the fact that the "border tax" would (along with a 20% "corporate income tax") replace the 35% corporate tax, finally delivering that big corporate tax cut that corporations don't need because they already get so many handouts tax-wise. Of course all that's heinous, but what folks may not realize is that the "border tax" is essentially a back-door national sales tax -- you think Congress will lift a finger preventing big corporations from passing that tax on to consumers? -- and, as you may know, I hate sales taxes, because they hit working people far harder than they hit the well-off. When are we going to get back to taxing high incomes in this country? Don't tell me those high-income folks have earned it unless you can explain to me exactly how these hifalutin financial instruments are exactly like the real, hard work our parents and grandparents did when they built a middle class in America.

The Philadelphia Daily News's John Baer frustrates me at times, like when he describes the apparent difficulty good Pennsylvanians have been having getting hold of their junior Senator, Republican Pat Toomey. (I haven't been able to reach him on the phone for days myself.) He quotes Mr. Toomey's spokeshack extensively to the effect that Mr. Toomey only has four staff per office, all of whom who have other duties, which begs the question why not hire more staff? That would be job creation, after all. And while Mr. Baer reassures us that reaching out to your elected officials is "fundamental to creating or maintaining a society that actually cares about how and by whom it is governed," he's still a bit too eager to point out that "some, if not most or all" folks who complain about not being able to reach Mr. Toomey "are tied to a national online effort called 'Indivisible' urging grassroots opposition to Trump’s agenda." "Are tied to" should beg the question by whom?, if not the question why would a journalist use passive verbs?, if not the question why does that matter? And, having taken the Parable of the Prodigal Son to heart over the years, I've stopped cutting people down by saying where were you before the election?

David Brooks at the New York Times wonders "What a Failed Trump Administration Looks Like." The spirit is willing to believe Mr. Brooks's assertion that Mr. Trump can be "played" by anyone who flatters him enough, but I still think we're better off believing that Mr. Trump and Our Glorious Elites are playing us, and that this "war" between himself and the "establishment" is a phony war. And sure I laughed out loud at the final "saving thought" that "(t)he human imagination is vast, but it is not nearly vast enough to encompass the infinitely multitudinous ways Donald Trump can find to get himself disgraced" -- but he disgraced himself in fairly unprecedented ways before Election Day, and still won. My real problem here, though, is that Mr. Brooks seems to think everything was fine until Mr. Trump got elected, that "moral arbiters in Congress like Howard Baker and Sam Ervin" ever did very much moral arbitrating, that "a single media establishment that shapes how the country sees the president" is a good thing. And I bet quite a few black folks could tell him that we already weren't "experienc(ing) the same reality."

From the "So Smart, They're Dumb" file: Democratic Party poobahs have apparently asked for Bernie Sanders's help in ensuring that all of this populist anger gets directed at Republicans and not them. Why they think they deserve a shield against populist anger is beyond me -- sure, they're "unified" against Obamacare repeal, but that's yet another place where unity won't actually help them fight repeal! Worse, they seem to think they deserve a shield not just against populist anger but against the popular will -- they have no business suggesting that, say, Pat Toomey should get pointed questions at townhalls but Robert Casey shouldn't, because Mr. Casey should be just as accountable to the people as Mr. Toomey. The Post doesn't report what Mr. Sanders said in reply, which should concern you if (like me) you worry that he now has the Democratic leadership's ear not because he's earned it (though he has!), but because they want to neuter him and co-opt his supporters. If he needs to, he can always ask Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tspiras how well ingratiating oneself with elites has worked for him.

Finally, embedded in this interesting assessment, by U.S. News and World Reportcontributing editor John Stoehr, of Donald Trump's weakness in the face of reversal, is his claim that white working class folks are predisposed to "authoritarianism" rather than "socialism," and that they "eat and sleep being told what to do." I'm not entirely sure what that last part means, unless he's telling us the workplace isn't a democracy and a great deal about familial relationships isn't particularly optional, but I know plenty of white working class folks myself, and they regard themselves as fairly independent thinkers, and you can only create a real authoritarian state if you convince the majority they're doing it on their own. Also, I'd say the white working class isn't predisposed to "authoritarianism" so much as they're predisposed to impatience. And you can't really blame them, not just because politicians fail them so often, but also because, well, being impatient is really part of our heritage as Americans -- we get crap done because we refuse to be thwarted, and impatience doesn't need to end in authoritarianism any more than conservatism needs end in reactionary extremism.