Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: our Administration writes another Democrat attack ad for them! And other tales.

Did you know that 49 states have the ability to bill prisoners for their stay when they get out? And 46 states can put you back in jail for failing to pay your five-digit "debt" to the state. I put "debt" in quotation marks for a reason: you pay your actual debt to society by serving your sentence. And if you get saddled with a $50,000 bill for the cost of incarcerating you, you'll almost certainly never make enough to pay it back (most criminals can't find work as banksters, after all). You can't work it off in prison, either, and certainly not at 50 cents an hour. But wait, there's more! The problem is even worse in states that have privatized their prisons. What a racket!

Ho hum, our President said that tax "reform" would bring $5 trillion back into America -- from corporations that stashed it overseas and pretended it was money made in foreign countries -- but a mere $147 billion has come back. Nobody could have predicted that, given the choice between paying a low percentage on their "foreign" profits and no percentage, corporations would choose the latter! Well, except anyone who thought about it. You like how our politicians act like there's just no way to make corporations pay the taxes they owe? Even though they routinely kill bills that would do that? (And, in a peripherally-related note, Administration economic advisor Larry Kudlow tells the Economic Club of New York that it'll be time to go after Medicare and Social Security after the midterms -- you know, since tax "reform" blew another hole in the budget, not that Mr. Kudlow will say that. His statement is, of course, a Democrat ad that writes itself, and thus a Democrat ad we're not terribly likely to see.)

Michigan's reactionary state legislature passes a paid sick leave law which also makes the minimum wage the same for tipped workers as for everyone else -- but labor activists aren't celebrating. Both of these initiatives were going to go before the voters in November, but now that the legislature has passed them, they're not -- and the legislature can now change the law with a simple majority, instead of the three-quarters supermajority they'd need to overturn laws passed via ballot initiatives. You know how politicians talk about "polishing this turd" when they support bills they know aren't perfect? Well, this is kinda the opposite of that. You might even call it "turding" a bill.

Lisa Song and Al Shaw at ProPublica inform us that Hurricane Florence is very likely to destroy homes that have already collected federally-funded flood insurance payments. And naturally climate change is going to make all that much, much worse. Remember that time John Stossel all but admitted he built a house on the beach so he could collect flood insurance payments? Good times! Seriously, you can't tell people where to live, but it seems to me you can tell developers where to build.

Verizon ends its membership in the notorious American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC) because of its association with the notorious David Horowitz. You may well be asking, as I did, "Stand Your Ground didn't do it, Voter ID didn't do it, climate change denialism didn't do it, but David Horowitz did?" Mr. Horowitz has, after all, been a sort of ambulance chaser of right-wing causes for decades. But, yeah, he says profoundly ugly crap that's unworthy of a civilized people. And anyway I'll take a hit to ALEC's pocketbook however I can get it.

Finally, Fareed Zakaria takes to the Washington Post an alleged "Threat to Democracy -- From the Left." How has this threat manifested itself? Well, two colleges disinvited right-wing speakers three years apart, the New Yorker changed its mind about having Steve Bannon on a panel last month, Roy Innis never got to debate William Shockley about racism in 1974 though he really really wanted to, and John Stuart Mill and Oliver Wendell Holmes said things about freedom of speech. Really, that's the whole argument. Here's a better, shorter one: the First Amendment only protects you from your government; it does not guarantee a public audience for your views, nor does it guarantee a reputation as a public intellectual. Even if one of our papers of record routinely prints your ramblings.

Action: concerning taxes, unconstitutional war-making, and product safety.

As long expected, Congressional Republicans have introduced H.R. 6760, known as the "Protecting Family and Small Business Tax Cuts Act of 2018," but perhaps better known as "Tax Scam 2.0," the bill that would make permanent certain tax cuts Republicans passed late last year, and though Republicans spend a lot of time telling you these are really for, well, "families and small businesses," that's utter rubbish -- sure, the cut in the 25 percent bracket to 22 percent will stay, but that's not a whole lot of real money, whereas the 2.6 percentage point cut in the former 39.6 percent bracket is real money, and so is the Estate tax cut (which working folks like us never pay), and so is the pass-through business tax cut which mostly rich folks get. We might as well get the jump on this, so Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your House Rep to reject the work-hating, deficit-busting, working families-hurting "Tax Scam 2.0."

Meanwhile, several Congressfolk from both parties are still pushing for a War Powers Resolution vote on our participation in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen, and Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you demand that your Congressfolk vote on the war on Yemen, as our Constitution and the War Powers Act mandate they do. Earlier this week, our Administration "certified," in testimony to Congress, that Saudi Arabia and the UAE "are undertaking demonstrable actions to reduce the risk of harm to civilians and civilian infrastructure." Like bombing school buses? Like leaving Yemen teetering on the brink of famine? Defense Secretary Mattis has also said that American influence on Saudi Arabia and the UAE has saved civilian lives, which sure sounds like a rhetorical hostage crisis to me. You know what would save more civilian lives? If our government didn't feel like it had to go along with whatever Saudi Arabia wants, that's what. It's hard to say you have leverage over someone if you never actually use it.

Finally, hot on the heels of the news that some Playskool crayons you find in dollar stores or at online sellers like Amazon or eBay might have asbestos in them, Penn PIRG (which conducted the study) helps you tell our Consumer Product Safety Commission (or CPSC) to recall these and other products that might injure our children off our shelves. (As an aside, I sure do find the misspelling of "playschool" less funny as I get older.) Penn PIRG's findings also included markers with benzene and three-ring binders with phthalates, and while a Johns Hopkins toxicologist said the amount of asbestos found in the Playskool crayons isn't dangerous to "most" people, you have to wonder if "most" people includes children, and one of the Penn PIRG study's authors points out that if you get trace amounts of asbestos from several products (and you might!), you're still at risk for getting sick. So, yes, it seems like recalling the crayons would help save lives.

Around the table: what we must do when the next financial crisis hits the fan, and other lessons.

Thomas Hanna at In These Times reminds us that the next time the banksters collapse the economy, we'll need to have a better response than "save the banks" -- like "require a public ownership stake, with full voting rights, in any financial institution that has to be bailed out due to its own fraudulent or speculative activities." I'd just say "nationalize the banks," and anyone who responds by calling that a BIG GUMMINT TAKEOVURZ!!!! ought to take a good look around and see what all that "freedom" for banksters has done for us. And public banks now make up about a fifth of the banks in Old Europe, while the Bank of North Dakota made sure that state didn't go in the tank after the oil and gas bubble burst there (oh, and North Dakota weathered the 2008 economic armageddon pretty well, too).

Chinese government bans one of its many non-state-sanctioned Protestant churches, for, you know, refusing to allow the government to install closed-circuit cameras within. The Zion church is one of China's many "black market" churches -- or, as we'd call them in America, churches. Memo to right-wingers still gnashing teeth over transgender folks in their bathrooms: this is what government oppression of religious freedom actually looks like. Then again, the lesson may be lost on them, since this tale also has actual Communists in it, rather than the "Communists" in America whose main crime is "not being a cruel and heartless Republican."

Surprise, surprise, North Korea still seems to be going to some trouble to conceal its nuclear weapons program. Also, North Korea doesn't appear to have gotten rid of any of its nukes, and appears to have made new ones. But what happened to we don't have to worry about it anymore? We must remember that all of our President's pronouncements have an expiration date, and that expiration date is generally "just after now."

Ho hum, Dept. of Treasury Inspector General finds that the outsourcing of IRS functions to private corporations is going very badly. Not just because they've only collected one percent of the money these deadbeats owe, but also because the IRS isn't holding these corporations accountable, and because private corporations are contacting taxpayers over the phone, just like pretty much every identity thief (and precisely unlike the IRS). This is the third time we've tried to privatize IRS debt collection; when will we learn? When we stop electing politicians whose one dream is to destroy everything about government that works, that's when.

Finally, Florida Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis spoke to the David Horowitz Freedom Center in 2017, which has, over the years, hosted a flotsam of racists and other unjustifiably aggrieved speakers. Naturally Mr. DeSantis calls the Freedom Center's apparent obsession with multiculturalism and diversity straight-shooting and truth-telling. But why would anyone expect any differently from a teabagger who has so obviously (and successfully) courted our President's support? And I wish I could say associating with this crowd would hurt him in Florida, as it would in, say, New Jersey.

Around the table: we need ourselves more than we need a "blue wave," part 234.

We start with a warning about treating politics like we treat team sports: Aaron Rupar at ThinkProgress calls our President "clueless" for demanding that Apple avoid Chinese tariffs and price hikes on its products by "mak(ing) (their) products here," but he winds up defending Apple for sending parts to China for assembly because "workers there are paid much less than they would be in the United States." A lot of professional liberals won't reckon with the destruction wrought by "free" trade because our President happens to be on the right side of the issue much of the time despite being a Republican, but those of us who fight for good ideas and good policy, instead of Democratic ideas or Democratic policy, don't have this problem. And Mr. Rupar also assumes that higher costs inexorably lead to higher prices, like corporations don't routinely use the specter of "higher prices" to resist any worker wage hike or any worker safety regulation.

Another day, another study demonstrating how the Republican tax "reform" actually fattens the wallets of CEOs, not workers. This study, from our Federal Reserve, concerned the tax amnesty in the recent tax "reform," where corporations got to pay a lower tax rate on income they "repatriated" from "overseas," and it finds that, much like the 2004 tax amnesty, corporations didn't use their unearned tax break to create jobs, but to (a man does get tired of writing this) buy back stock, which delivers unearned money to shareholders and concentrates corporate decision-making power in fewer hands. Also, too, more money for stock buybacks means less money for investment in making-stuff-selling-stuff-saving-money, though doing these three things (call me old-fashioned!) actually makes economies work. (By "work," I also kinda mean "not jumping from one bubble to the next.")

The incomparable Umair Haque reminds us that it's not the "prole" who becomes a fascist but the "frustrated bourgeoisie," "(t)he one whom capitalism promised to make a capitalist -- but only did it to sell him on capitalism." My first thought, honestly, was that this point maps quite well onto the notion that it ain't the poor Middle Easterners who commit terrorism, but the middle-class Middle Easterners who watch the poor suffer. A lot of Nazi wannabes would be upset to hear how much they're like the guys who flew planes into buildings on 9.11, but not all of them. That doesn't mean the folks who aren't upset at the comparison are somehow "not racist"; it just means they admire evil.

And now from the "Blue Wave Won't Change Nothing" file: Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), in line to become Speaker again if Democrats retake the House, announces she'll reimpose the "pay-go" rule for House budgets. That would be the rule the Republicans constantly ignore when it doens't suit them. Again: Democrats never get any of benefit from playing the role of "the reasonable ones," because Republicans just act crazier, the rage-added eat it up, and the "liberal" media covers the rage-addled like they're the only people in America. And if a "pay as you go" rule seems like gospel to you, then honestly account for all the times you went into debt to get ahead. You know, like those times you bought a house or took on a car loan or a college loan.

The notorious Nestlé corporation has told the Australian government that its efforts to root various forms of slavery and sexual servitude out of corporate supply chains could raise prices for consumers. Which is what, class? A manufactured hostage crisis -- don't make my suppliers stop using child labor, or the low price of your Crunch bar gets it! Then again, perhaps they were emboldened by the Australian government's apparent refusal to impose financial penalties for modern slavery practices. Give big corporations an inch, and they'll take your past, present, and future.

Finally, Robert E Gutsche Jr at The Conversation reminds us that the latest Bob Woodward book about our Administration doesn't really tell us anything new. He's right to denounce our "liberal" media for caring about little other than salacious "scoops," but I wish his call for "journalism that joins the dots of bad language, misfires, and intentional wrongdoing to larger systems of power and to individuals who can be held accountable" was a bit more specific, criticism of salacious journalism being itself a species of salacious journalism if it doesn't offer more of a roadmap out.

Action: concerning free speech and tax "reform."

H.R. 6054, the Unmasking Antifa Act, purports to be a bill preventing protestors from wearing disguises, but actually targets (as the bill's own title says!) the Antifa protestors who just so happen to oppose obnoxious racists who support our Administration. We could easily argue that bills targeting one set of protestors discriminate against those protestors -- just as we could have easily argued that bills "unmasking" Ku Klux Klan members do the same -- but you don't even need to go there to oppose this bill. If protestors want to disguise their identities, whether out of fear of being beaten up or out of simple cowardice, then the other good Americans watching them can decide for themselves how they feel about it; passing a bill attacking protestors who wear masks sure doesn't seem like trusting people, not government. Hence Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect free speech for everyone by rejecting H.R. 6054.

Meanwhile, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to demand answers from corporations over how they've spent their enormous tax cuts. You know, like how many of their employees got pay raises due to the tax "reform" bill (spoiler alert: very few), or how much money corporations are spending on stock buybacks versus wage hikes (spoiler alert: stock buyback money exceeds wage hike money by about a 37:1 ratio), or whether corporations gave their employees a pay raise anywhere near the $4,000 our President said would happen (spoiler alert: hahahahahaha). By asking them to account for this tax "reform," of course, you may well be inviting them to prevaricate about it, as Rep. Chauncey Gardiner Hultgren did last month, but at least make them make fools of themselves in public, that's what I say. I just wish they needed more prodding to do that.

Around the table: in which our Administration starts yet another long game against the American people.

U.S. State Department starts denying passports to Americans born to certain midwives who practiced in Texas's Rio Grande Valley during the second half of the 20th century, declaring that they can't verify those Americans' citizenship after said midwives admitted forging a handful of birth certificates. Didn't know being born poor and Hispanic just inside our borders was a crime, did you? Didn't know a midwife forging one or two birth certificates made thousands more birth certificates suspect enough to provoke criminal investigation, detainment, and even deportation? It's exactly as simple as this: if you disagree with our Administration, they want you gone -- unable to criticize them, unable to shame them, and certainly unable to vote them out of office. And this is only the beginning: the mostly black, brown, poor, and old folks born outside of hospitals at any time over the last 80 years are next.

So what happens when our Federal Trade Commission installs a Bureau of Consumer Protection Chief who used to represent corporations being investigated by the FTC, and Public Citizen files a Freedom of Information Act request to discover his conflicts of interest? The FTC pumps out almost 500 pages of documents and redacts nearly all of it. Because the documents don't relate to specific lawsuits, and also because trade secrets. Should I praise them for resisting the urge to declare BECAUSEZ TEH NASHUNUL SECURITEEZ!!!! No, I should not. I doubt our laws allow this sort of chicanery, so I suppose the FTC is just following the example of our President and his Cabinet, by daring you to stop what they're doing.

Ho hum, our Administration creates a special "Marijuana Policy Coordination Committee" dedicated to persuading the public to abandon its will to legalize pot. And this Committee told other Administration departments to highlight "the most significant data demonstrating negative trends," while apparently avoiding finding anything out about how often folks consume pot or whether legalized pot reduces other drug use. Recalling that our Attorney General has a zeal for criminalizing pot should also remind you that criminalizing pot is mostly a way of putting more black people in jail. (No, John Ehrlichmann spelled that out for us years ago.)

I'm not sure that the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals actually said you have a First Amendment right to feed the homeless. Their ruling actually says that Food Not Bombs has a First Amendment right to feed the homeless during their community organizing events in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, since feeding the homeless, in this context, comprises "an act of political solidarity meant to convey the organization’s message." So it doesn't appropriately shame governments that would issue thousand-dollar permits to individuals who give food to the homeless -- although I suppose we could all go out in well-named and well-promoted groups to feed the homeless. It'd be a whole lot simpler if we'd just stop pretending that our only obligation in America is to ourselves.

Kudos to Jake Johnson at Common Dreams for noting that our President has declared a pay freeze for 2 million of our federal employees while at the same time proposing a capital gains tax cut that would benefit the super-rich and virtually no one else. It is odd, isn't it, how they always say "we can't just keep spending money we don't have" when talking about paying workers, and never about, say, building nukes we don't need or giving the rich more tax cuts or handing out more "research and development" corporate welfare? OK, maybe it's not odd, per se, once we accept the fact that we are ruled by vampires.

Finally, maybe we shouldn't rush to celebrate Rep. Beto O'Rourke's challenge to incumbent Texas Sen. Ted Cruz as an "Obama-like" campaign. Mr. O'Rourke has a gift for speaking well, but so did Barack Obama, and we all know how his Presidency went: he coddled Our Glorious Elites instead of giving them the bitter medicine they earned, he extolled bipartisanship while half of the partisans tried to burn everything down, and he helped prepare the ground for a new President who seems to hate all the good and love all the evil in our world. So if Robert Rubin and Larry Summers have already gotten to Beto O'Rourke, we could be in for another turn of the vicious Republican/weak Democrat wheel, and as I've said, we've got to break that wheel.

Around the table: why the Democrats will fumble away the Oklahoma gubernatorial race too, and other lessons.

As actual liberals win the Democratic gubernatorial primaries in Florida and Arizona, Matthew Chapman at AlterNet speculates that Democrats may pick up the Oklahoma gubernatorial mansion as well, given that Democrats nominated a fellow who's won a lot of state-wide races and Republicans just nominated a "train wreck." Remind you of anything? Democrats will fumble this one away, too -- maybe Drew Edmondson's primary opponent, former Oklahoma state Senator Connie Johnson, didn't do enough to stand out, but I remember thinking she was a pretty damn good candidate and I would have liked to see her win. Mr. Edmondson, I bet, loses 51-48. Yes, even though Mary Fallin turned out to be very unpopular once good Oklahomans saw that all her tax cuts would have consequences. But people want to vote for people, not against people.

CFPB's student loan ombudsman resigns from the agency, specifically citing the agency's direction away from protecting students from predatory lenders under Acting Director/Man Who Wears Glasses So People Don't Punch Him in the Face Mick Mulvaney. So is this what right-wingers mean when they say good people aren't motivated to stay in government? I kid, of course.

Another day, another report finding that while worker pay is stagnating or going down, executive pay is going way, way up. Which you already knew, but it's still good to have yet another set of data points about it. Also, too, CEO pay went way up in large part due to exercised stock options -- which was, of course, an entirely foreseeable effect of cutting the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, as corporations used almost all of their tax break ($37 for every dollar they spent on worker pay!) on stock buybacks, which goosed up stock prices, which made cashing in those options far more attractive. Why, it's almost like that was the whole idea.

Upon hearing that our President thinks Google searches are completely biased against him, a number of quick responses leap to mind: waaaaaaaah!, whining is losing, maybe do something good for America for once and you'll get better news coverage! But if Democrats were clever (c'mon, let's pretend!), they'd be wondering out loud if maybe our President would like a sort of "fairness doctrine" applied to our media -- you know, like the Fairness Doctrine the FCC enforced on broadcast media until the late 1980s. And I bet our President would support that idea! At least, until someone in his braintrust reminds him that such a doctrine would also apply to Sinclair, Breitbart, Newsmax, the News Corporation, et al.

Finally, several Democrats ask Federal Trade Commission to investigate Verizon's admitted throttling of Santa Clara County firefighter data in the middle of a wildfire. Since Verizon has already admitted wrongdoing, an FTC investigation would have to be conducted by blind, deaf, and dumb infants to fail to find said wrongdoing -- but then this is today's FTC, and thus likely to declare the matter settled because of all of Verizon's apologies. Law and order is for us little people, after all, not big corporations.

Around the table: some real health care activism, surrounded by venal politicians.

Ho hum, Republicans cherry-pick job growth rates in six states in order to claim that their tax "reform" law is creating jobs. Of course they're doing differential calculus (measuring the growth in the growth of job creation!) and presenting it to you as arithmetic -- in a nation that must add 140,000 jobs monthly just to keep up with population growth, hearing that Nebraska has added a mere 7,000 more jobs over the first six months of 2018 than over the first six months of 2017 isn't that impressive, which is why Republicans said ZOMG THATZ 250 PERCENTAGEZ HIGHERZ!!!!! And Democrats could just as easily twitter to the effect that the tax "reform" law is slowing job creation by citing, "for example," the negative "job growth acceleration figures" in Idaho, Montana, Kentucky, Minnesota, and Nevada.

From the "Technology Can-So Connect People" file: Fran Quigley at TruthOut describes T1International, a group of actual grassroots activists and diabetes sufferers connecting with each other to protest the absurdly high cost of the life-saving drug insulin. No one can say for sure exactly how the price of insulin has gone up 1,000 percent over the last quarter century (cough evil cough), but if folks in relatively well-off America are actually risking death by rationing their insulin (and, er, dying by rationing their insulin), you can guess how it is for folks in the developing world. But please, right-wingers, tell us again how Big Gummint fouls everything up, how the "free" market always provides a solution, and how someone who uses spreadsheets to count her carbohydrates is completely to blame for all her problems.

Surprise, surprise, our Administration's uncivilized policy of separating families who cross our border is taxing our Justice Department's ability to do almost any other meaningful work. Meaning, among other things, that now is a pretty good time to smuggle drugs or beat your wife and kids. And all so our President can diddle the rage glands of his most devoted worshipers! But here's a lawsuit I'm pretty sure will succeed no matter which knuckle-dragging federal judge hears it: that our Administration's willful interpretation of federal law has resulted in our Justice Department abrogating its duties that our laws say they must discharge.

I'll admit I'm not that emotionally-invested in our Administration revoking former CIA Chief John Brennan's security clearance after Mr. Brennan slammed them -- like John Brennan was some sort of hero before he proved the Stopped Clock Rule against an Administration that stops all clocks! -- but I notice that our Administration's PR brain trust, such as it is, hopes to roll out more security clearance revocations at "optimum times" so they can serve as "a distraction during unfavorable news cycles." Meaning they could release them pretty much any time at all, then, right? For this clown car of an Administration, everything's a nail and creating some new drama is the only hammer.

Finally, Travis Lupick at Yes! magazine writes a wide-ranging article about depression and mental health called "The Surprising Links Between Your Mental Health and Everyone Else's." You may recognize the key takeaway -- that people are "communal creatures" now living in a world that "erodes communities and isolates people" -- from Johann Hari's writings about fighting drug addiction by giving drug addicts more stuff to do and more people to connect with, and you'll hear from Mr. Hari here (he's faced down some demons of his own), as well as Dr. Gabor Maté ("(j)ust about every mental affliction is actually an adaptive response that then becomes a source of problems later on"), a Black Lives Matter activist, the founder of the Trauma Center in Boston, and a community activist who saved himself from drug addiction only after finding a community of other recovering drug addicts.

Around the table: a dying mule, still kicking hard.

"What Happens When a Pipeline Runs Afoul of Government Rules?" asks ProPublica regarding an on-again-off-again West Virginia pipeline project. "Authorities Change the Rules." In letting pipeline construction continue before legally-mandated environmental reviews have been completed, state and federal regulators have repeatedly abrogated their duties over the last two years, until finally a three-judge panel from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals halted construction. Law and order: it's only for us little people.

Speaking of which, Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh may have perjured himself by testifying to the Senate under oath 12 years ago that he was far less involved with Charles Pickering's 2002 judicial nomination than he really was. Yeah, I'd question the wisdom of going after him for this, too -- if I didn't hear so much BUT HE LIEDZ UNDER TEH OATHZ!!!!! about Mr. Clinton in the late 1990s. I guess perjury means more to right-wingers when there's a Democrat and a penis involved.

When I heard that Rep. Randy Hultgren (R-IL) defended his vote for the Republican tax "reform" by asking his constituents at a townhall whether they were better off now than they were "two or four years ago" and most of them said "no," my immediate response was "well, I guess he won't be holding townhalls anymore, either!" But then I clicked through, and, gosh, this Randy Hultgren sure sounds like he thought Chauncey Gardiner was a real person worth emulating! "We all benefit when the economy is growing" and "I see so many people who are working" and "families are seeing growth and opportunity" and "jobs are good for people" are not reasonable responses to "I'm not seeing a whole lot of tax cut in my paycheck." And he defends himself from the charge of cutting taxes for the rich just like the rest of them, by citing the "average" tax cut, when the average of a rich person's tax cut and your tax cut won't put more money in your bank account.

Randy "Iron Stache" Bryce wins Democratic nomination to contest Paul Ryan's House seat, and Republicans promptly run a radio ad accusing him of "spen(ding) his life breaking the law" because of his nine arrests from the '90s. Did you see "arrests" and immediately ask "what about convictions?" If so, good for you -- and if you noticed all those arrests occurred during his twenties, when most men do the majority of their carousing, good for you again. Seriously, though, "breaking the law"? That's grounds for a slander suit, right there. (There's some good news, though: all of those center-right Democrats who said Bernie Sanders cost Hillary Clinton the election are now castigating Mr. Bryce's primary opponent for "trying to lose the seat for the Democrats" by bringing up his arrests in the first place. I kid, of course.)

Finally, I'm going to link to this one time, and only so that you know to avoid it like the plague upon our civilization it is: Nate Silver says Democrats have almost a 75% chance of winning back the House. Seriously, has he not learned a fucking thing from the 2016 election, when he forecast a 70%-plus chance of Hillary Clinton winning the Presidency right up until Election Day? Sorry to deploy two cuss words in a single paragraph, but I need to impress upon you the importance of my point: don't look at any of this horserace shit, ever, because it induces you to treat our democracy like a spectator sport, rather than the living, breathing thing that belongs to you and to which you must tend -- and you must tend to it every day of the year, not just Election Day, because you know from experience that, absent our counsel, Democrats will interpret any mandate you give them as a mandate to suck up to Republicans. And I hate to pile on -- OK, I don't -- but your democracy belongs to you, not to the smartypantses who create "models" "predicting" "what will happen."

Action: concerning Social Security, taxes, and drilling on public lands.

You've heard of the Republican plan to fund a paid family leave plan with Social Security benefits, resulting in you getting less money when you retire if you've ever used paid family leave? Now it's a real bill! It's S. 3345, with no text or summary presently available at Congress.gov, which could be because, hey, this is a bill that robs your future Social Security benefits if you want paid family leave now. After all, where on Earth else could we possibly get the money to do that? From that $1.7 trillion tax "cut" giveaway to the rich Republicans enacted in December, maybe? Or even from the infinitesimally small payroll tax that would fund an actual paid family leave bill, S. 337, where folks making $50,000 annually would pay $8.50 a month. $8.50 a month! I've seen single servings of coffee that cost more than that! So Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Rubio rob-the-future-to-pay-now plan -- doesn't sound very conservative when put like that, does it? -- and Moms Rising still helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 337, the FAMILY Act, since that's a real paid family leave bill.

Meanwhile, speaking of that Republican tax scam, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the so-called Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and reject any further tax-cuts-for-the-rich Republicans (or our President) might contemplate. The Senate's talking about more tax cuts like there's no time for that, but don't you believe it -- if the House puts together a bill quickly enough, they'll move heaven and Earth to give more welfare handouts to their cronies. The massive corporate tax cut did not, as our President suggested, put $4,000 in every family's paycheck -- but it did result in a lot of massive stock buybacks, which concentrates power in corporate executive hands, because, yeah, they just don't have enough power already. And that 4% GDP growth from last quarter? You're not seeing any of that in your paycheck, either. You see, this is why America can't have nice things like paid family leave -- because our government cares more about its cronies than its owners, i.e., the American people. We'll just have to learn 'em.

Finally, our Administration plans to auction off two million acres of public land in six Western states so that gas and oil drillers can pollute it create jobs wean America off foreign oil redistribute yet more of our wealth as Americans upward, to themselves. Hence WildEarth Guardians helps you tell our Administration to scuttle these plans. We could go on (and we have!) about how gas and oil drilling spoil clean air and clean water, etc., and spoil wildlife habitat, etc., and these are very important things, but gas and oil drilling also put public lands off-limits to those members of the public who love the great outdoors. Surely it was love of the great outdoors (I doubt he conceived of pollution the way we do now) that moved the first President Roosevelt to start establishing national parks and monuments in the first place. How far we've fallen from him to our current President, the Whiner-in-Chief, for whom now is all and the future is for losers.

Around the table: with another reminder that you can't eat GDP.

Actual economist Dean Baker explains why last quarter's GDP growth was not "amazing." Long story short: two quarters of 2015 surpassed it, and even President Carter had a quarter with four times the GDP growth of this past one. Long story somewhat longer: we're not seeing wage growth along with GDP growth, we're not even seeing investment growth in significant amounts, and the rich are getting most of the benefits from the Republican tax scam. Remember, kids: you can't eat GDP.

Dan Alexander at Forbes suggests that our Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, has demonstrated a "Pattern of Grifting" at his businesses. Out of the over $120 million Mr. Ross might have stolen, if all the multitudinous complaints against him are true, he's paid at least $12 million in settlements and fines, plus his corporation returned $12 million to investors as part of an SEC settlement in 2016. Given how well his corporation was doing in 2016 (i.e., not), perhaps Mr. Ross looked at our President as an escape hatch. And maybe our President looked at Mr. Ross and saw a kindred spirit!

Sen. Dean Heller (R-NV) says Republicans made a "big mistake" in trying to "reform" health care first. He's absolutely right that health care was tactically the wrong thing to try to do first, and maybe even that health care "reform" (recall that Mr. Heller's name was also on the notorious Graham-Kennedy bill that comprised the Senate's second failed health care "reform" bill) could have passed if they'd done taxes first. I suppose if you're conspiracy-minded, you'd find it odd that Republicans tried to do that first, since surely they knew the "resistance" had already made defending the Affordable Care Act its top priority.

Add Jonathan Last to the list of right-wingers who think Democrats can win in 2020 by going considerably further left. I disagree strongly, of course, that Howard Dean is all that liberal (he was, after all, the only state governor who chose to balance his state's budget during the '90s!) or that Barack Obama is all that liberal (n.b. virtually everything I've ever said about him), but Mr. Last's thesis that the more "mainstream" candidate tends to lose does map fairly well onto my thesis that the candidate who seems less like a politician tends to win, even if I would quarrel with how he describes many of these candidates (Mr. Mondale was the more liberal alternative in 1984 even if he was also the more "mainstream" one, and Mr. Bush the Lesser posed as a moderate in 2000 before governing as a far right-winger).

Finally, in advance of an Inspector General report on the matter, FCC Chair Ajit Pai admits that last year's alleged hack of the FCC's commenting system during its net neutrality repeal process never actually happened. And of course Mr. Pai blames underlings and the Obama Administration, just like his boss. He's gotta hope that he's slung so much fecal matter against the wall that a court hearing challenges to his net neutrality repeal won't be able to keep up -- also, just like his boss.

Action: concerning Medicare, dangerous chemicals, and campaign finance disclosure.

Yesterday was Medicare's 53rd birthday. In just 12 more years, it'll be old enough to get Medicare! But our Congressfolk seem determined to destroy Medicare before it reaches that milestone, what with Speaker Ryan's repeated voucherization votes and our House's budget proposing even more benefit cuts than our President has proposed. As Paul Craig Roberts said many years ago: our elites have stolen everything else, so our so-called "entitlement" programs (how generous of them, to let us feel "entitled" to the things we've fought for!) are all that's left. But, as I've said before: we worked for it, paid into it, and fought for it, and we deserve to have it when we need it; hence the Economic Policy Institute helps you tell your Congressfolk to strengthen, not cut, Medicare, Medicaid, and other services -- and pay for it by repealing last year's tax-cuts-for-the-rich.

Meanwhile, the EPA found in 2014 that the chemical trichloroethylene (or TCE) presents excessive risks to workers and consumers, and in 2016 proposed to ban its use in various industrial processes (including spot cleaning at dry cleaners). But then a little catastrophe called the 2016 Presidential election happened, and guess what? Our Administration is doing its damnedest to stall implementation of proposed TCE bans, this even though TCE is carcinogenic and toxic to our brain, kidneys, and immune system, and seems to turn up an awful lot at Superfund sites. Chances are that a federal court will tell the EPA to stop delaying already (and our Supreme Court won't weigh in on the matter even if asked), but why rely on that, when we can rely on people power? So the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect their bosses -- i.e., us, the American people -- from the known health effects of TCE.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6239/S. 3150, the DISCLOSE Act, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. Fact is our elected representatives don't listen to us and don't ever seem to pay much of a price for their failure -- folks want better health insurance, politicians say no; folks want corporations and rich folk to pay their share of taxes, politicians say no; folks want government to protect them from financial predators, politicians say no, and politicians rarely lose elections for their dereliction of their duty. And campaign finance is probably the biggest reason politicians don't do their jobs -- it's easier to do the will of big donors who guarantee funding for ad campaigns. The Supreme Court calls this state of affairs "free speech," but we can still shine a light on big campaign donors. Even if they claim to feel "bullied" by it.

Around the table: the real "cost" of single-payer, revealed! And other tales.

Did you know that a Koch brothers-funded "think tank" just said that Sen. Sanders's Medicare-for-All plan would reduce health care costs and boost worker wages? Well, they did! Of course, they didn't, ah, foreground that information -- they foregrounded the ZOMG TEH COSTZ OF TEH $32 TRILLYUNZ!!!!!! scare number, a number that covers ten years of spending and doesn't account for the fact that projections of current health care spending already have us spending a lot more than that. A pair of single-payer advocates also argue that the Koch-backed study underestimates the savings from a Medicare-for-All plan. Still, now you get to tell your right-wing uncle that even the Koch brothers think letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices will save almost $85 billion annually. Hey, they said it.

Ho hum, our Treasury Secretary thinks he may be able to deliver yet another tax-cut-to-the-rich without those pesky people's representatives in Congress having anything to do with it. Every time someone proposes some kind of capital gains tax cut, they say it'll goose up revenues big-time because a lot of people will sell their houses and such, but people sell their houses for a lot of reasons -- many of them even having to do with their family's needs! -- and the "windfall" (if it materializes!) never lasts long. For all that, I wouldn't mind indexing initial house purchase prices to inflation for the purpose of giving working families a capital gains tax cut when they sell their house. But I'd cap it at one property annually and $250,000 in an inflation-adjusted initial house investment, since we don't want to make our economy's addiction to property churning (which basically only benefits banksters) any worse than it already is now.

Jana Winters at the Boston Globe describes the Transportation Safety Authority's "Quiet Skies" surveillance program, in which federal air marshals spy on air travelers who haven't been accused of or charged with a crime. Ever use a laptop on an airplane, or have a "cold penetrating stare"? Then you might have been spied upon by a federal marshal! Don't politicians understand that Philip K. Dick novels are dystopian works, and not operations manuals? The good news: more than a few federal air marshals also think this is all bullshit.

Simon Davis-Cohen writes, in an admirably restrained manner I think, about the FirstNet network, a sort of "internet superhighway" "built specifically for police and public safety." Given the troubles Rekognition is having in, well, rekognizing people, you won't be impressed to learn that a police officer could, one day, take a photo of someone on his cellphone and find out if that someone is in a gang database, and not just because gang databases tend to be full of people who haven't actually committed any crimes. And, seriously, just because it's The Future doesn't mean Americans suddenly don't have habeus corpus rights anymore.

Finally, our distinguished President, proving he's no better than any other politician, claims that our media are "very unpatriotic" for "reveal(ing) internal deliberations of our government." He knows he works for us, right? And that he is not literally America, right? Oh, but he goes on to say "(f)reedom of the press comes with a responsibility to report the news accurately," quickly following with "90% of media coverage of my Administration is negative," as if you won't notice his casual equation of "accuracy" with a lack of "negative" coverage. Maybe Dr. Johnson was right, and patriotism really is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Around the table: what "tough on crime" actually means to our Administration, and other sorrows.

U.S. District Court judge allows D.C. and Maryland attorneys general to proceed with a lawsuit against our President for violating the emoluments clause of our Constitution. Dig our President's argument that "the Founding Fathers had written this clause to stop officials from taking bribes — but not to stop them from doing business." Those of us who think public service is more important than making craploads of money won't be impressed with that. (If Mr. Kavanaugh ascends to the Supreme Court, though, I bet this story will have a happy ending for our President.)

As our President does a Jeff George Victory Lap about a 4.1% second-quarter GDP growth, Jake Johnson at Common Dreams reminds us that most of that largesse is going where it's been going for years -- to the rich. As you may recall, wages have actually gone down over the last year, so if you're looking for that $4,000 raise you were supposed to get from corporate tax cuts, I think it's safe to say you can stop looking. (As an aside, "you can't eat GDP" should be, like, the greatest Twitter hashtag, ever. I'll get on it.)

Mike Ludwig at TruthOut reminds us that our Administration's "tough-on-crime" approach most certainly does not extend to corporate lawbreakers. This won't surprise you if you remember how many health-and-safety citations our President's Mar-a-Lago resort has received over the years, or even if you've noticed, ah, how many folks Mr. Mueller has indicted and/or convicted already. But it sure does seem like this Administration thinks rule are for "the little people," i.e., us, and not for the "important people," i.e., them. You might call that elitist. You might also call it un-American.

If you weren't already ROFLing over Joe Freaking Lieberman trying to advise Democrats not to embrace socialists, Branko Marcetic at Jacobin reminds us exactly how noxious Mr. Lieberman's four-term career in the Senate was. He ran to Lowell Weicker's right because he always was to Lowell Weicker's right, and he never met a "war on terror" he didn't like, but I think he was at his worst on health care, constantly moving the goal posts so he could scuttle the Clintonian reform plan and water down the Obama reform plan. You may recall that he also proposed an internet "kill-switch" -- you know, like the one the Egyptian government used before it fell! Could it be that folks like socialism more because of politicians like Joe Lieberman?

Finally, Chuck Collins at Yes! magazine says we can start fixing the crisis in affordable housing by taxing rich absentee real estate owners. Wealthy folks all over the planet are sinking their money into real estate they don't intend to occupy. But high-end real estate taxes -- like the one Vancouver levied upon unoccupied properties, or the one British Columbia levied on absentee owners, or the one San Francisco levied upon real estate transfers over $5 million -- can either use the revenue to fund affordable housing programs or, at least, discourage wealthy folks from driving up housing prices wherever they decide to use municipalities as "piggy banks." The haters will say it can't be done, but the haters ain't the boss of us.

Action: concerning the Supreme Court, police brutality, and paid family leave.

If you haven't told your Senators to oppose the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, you can still use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a cellphone) to find your Senators' phone numbers and call them. We know Judge Kavanaugh would reflexively put corporations above people, would support discrimination-because-Jesus, and would fight clean air and clean water regulations, but I suggest you put one reason front and center in your phone call to your Senators: that Judge Kavanaugh thinks a President should be immune from criminal prosecution while in office, because he's so busy. (Watching Fox News all day, apparently.) But we now have a President who might actually merit criminal prosecution, and we also have a President who expresses open admiraton for brutal dictator-wannabes like Messrs. Erdogan and Putin. Corruption and totalitarianism is already a bad mix, so why would we add "immunity from prosecution" to it?

Meanwhile, a group of good government organizations helps you tell Our Justice Department to investigate police killings of black folks as well as rates of police brutality against folks of color. We know our Justice Department doesn't feel the way we do, but duty is duty, in a world where white mass shooters seem easy to apprehend, but "carrying a cellphone while black" seems too often a capital crime. Our Justice Department has made noises about "supporting" local police departments, and being their "partner," but what kind of partner lets you do whatever you like no matter who gets hurt without consequences? And in what universe does "support" equal "jackboot lockstep agreement"? Only in universes that don't really value freedom, which is, sadly, the universe our current Administration seems to inhabit. Still, that's why we're here -- to bring them back to reality, where we live.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support S. 337, the FAMILY Act, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. We live in a time when mainstream Beltway opinion holds that we should cut Social Security benefits to pay for family leave benefits, but mainstream Beltway opinion is moronic as usual. That tax-cut-for-the-rich that we just passed? Repealing that could easily pay for the FAMILY Act, which would otherwise get its funding from a payroll tax of 0.4% -- which is to say, workers would pay 0.2% of their income and their employers would also pay 0.2% of those workers' income. That's two-tenths of one percent, not "two percent" or "20 percent," "liberal" media! We might as well do the math all the way: a worker making $50,000 would pay $100 annually for paid family medical leave insurance. $100! In an entire calendar year! When you confront numbers like that, I could forgive you for thinking our leaders are stupid. Or cowardly. Or greedy.

Around the table: "Where's My Tax Cut?" And other mysteries.

Remember when our Administration claimed that the corporate tax cut alone would give families $4,000 more annually? Get your surprised face ready: wages actually went down from 2018's first quarter to its second quarter, and when you account for inflation, the drop becomes steeper. Wages had been inching up slowly over the Obama years, keeping close to inflation only because inflation was so low, but now wages are dropping back, and stock buybacks are shooting through the roof. You may be old enough to remember when the SEC banned corporate executives from buying back stocks! Anyway: something's trickling down, but it sure ain't wealth.

After the spectacularly unsuccessful effort to prosecute over 200 J20 protestors on felony rioting charges, some of those defendants are preparing to file formal complaints against the Assistant U.S. Attorney who led the prosecution. Well, if you use the legal system to oppress people, as Ms. Kerkhoff did by (among other things!) withholding evidence that hurt her case, you'd better win a lot more than that, since the people you fail to prosecute can use that very same legal system to come after you. But proving prosecutorial misconduct is a high bar -- the judge who sanctioned Ms. Kerkhoff for withholding evidence called her actions "intentional," but wouldn't call them "malevolent." You could argue she was greedy for a successful prosecution, but then you'd have to explain why she overcharged the defendants.

A Yahoo Finance report says that Wall Street "management" of public pensions has cost those pensions at least $600 billion over the last 10 years. That is to say that investing public pensions in index funds -- which merely follow the market -- would have netted $60 billion more annually than banksters investing in hedge funds and the like. And by the way, $60 billion annually is the low end of their estimate! But this story will have a happy ending: in the next round of right-wing hysteria over ZOMG TEH PUBLIC PENSIONZ WILLZ BANKRUPTZ USZ ALLZ!!!!!!!, the role of banksters in losing some $60 billion annually will go unmentioned. (As an aside, I kinda never want to hear banksters talk about the "secret sauce" in their investments again.)

Mike Lux asserts that "left-wing politics can win anywhere in the country," which is true, but blunts that assessment somewhat by suggesting that Democrats should hew close to the wishes of "grassroots leaders," as Republicans do. I mean, yes, Democratic "leadership" is incompetent if not malicious, and the party would benefit from adhering to grassroots leadership in the short term, but it'll become a trap in the long-term if grassroots leaders (versus, you know, grassroots Americans) get all the say about everything. I mean, that's what's happened to Republicans, particularly as their grassroots leaders have become mainstream politicos. (As an aside, I think Mr. Lux really brings home the weight of the Democratic failures of 2009 and 2010 in paragraph 4.)

Finally, Lornet Turnbull at Yes! describes how Buffalo residents are trying to fight gentrification in historically-black neighborhoods: by creating a community land trust, the first of its kind in the city. Land trusts rebuild neighborhoods and keep them affordable for future generations, i.e., keep land out of the hands of developers who only care about money, and who raise rents such that folks who've lived there for generations have to leave. Right-wingers would no doubt call this "socialism" (though there's actually very little government involvement), but I suspect a real conservative would applaud the land trust mechanism because it keeps rapid developmental change from uprooting traditional neighborhoods. In any case, I wish these good Buffalo residents luck.

Around the table: chronicling an unusually high amount of low-level corruption.

Our President pardons the two Oregon ranchers, currently serving five years for arson on public lands, who "inspired" the Bundy brothers' 2016 seizure of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Public lands belong to whom, again? To the people. That's kinda why they call them "public." The Hammonds and Bundys of the world, of course, act like they're the "public" and no one else is, but ain't nothing they can do our President can't make worse. Law and order!

Actual rich liberal populist wins Mexico's Presidential election, and the "liberal" media here in America hope for "business-friendly" change. I guess that's an improvement from saying Mr. López Obrador is "just like" our President (just like him, except in, you know, nearly all of his policy proposals!), but "business-friendly" shouldn't be everyone's first concern, when corporations go around ruining everything in the world just so they can squeeze it for money. Remember, kids: money doesn't last, but civilization does.

Ryan Cooper at The Week asks an obvious question: "If democratic socialism is so bad, why is Norway so great?" Important lessons: don't confuse democratic socialism with things like Communism (particularly as practiced by the Soviets) and don't put yourself in the position of arguing that elite individuals should control the economy but the people shouldn't. And wasn't our President complaining about not getting enough immigrants from non-"shithole countries" like Norway? (As an aside, the relatively high U.S. per capita income is undoubtedly goosed up by our world-leading supply of super-rich, which, as I've often said, doesn't mean you see a bump in your bank account.)

Uh oh: Rep. Tom Reed (R-NY) has been putting GPS tracking devices in campaign signs so he can locate the people who steal them! Which has led him, no, not to an Antifa or Black Lives Matter protestor, but to a retired pastor. I wouldn't steal campaign signs myself, but maybe Mr. Reed should have considered that getting all Captain Queeq about a campaign sign makes him look like a small man. And really, if you were to serve the good people of New York's 23rd district, instead of serving mammon, you wouldn't have to worry about who's stealing your campaign signs.

Double uh oh: shortly after voting for that massive tax "reform" last fall, Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL), who personally stood to gain $2.1 million from that tax "reform," bought himself a million-dollar yacht. Naturally his spokeshack whines about negative campaigning and "partisan smears," and the fact that Mr. Buchanan disclosed the purchase is irrelevant, like following the law is some gift he gives to us or something. This little yacht purchase is exactly the stuff of classic (and relevant) campaign ads. I wouldn't lay money on his Democratic opponent having the guts to run it, though.

Finally, Democrats seem to be meeting the Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination with "mixed messages," which is, admittedly, always a danger when a nominee is so completely awful on everything. But I can help with that problem! Here's the message: Judge Kavanaugh thinks Presidents should be even more powerful, which would make the American people less powerful. You're welcome, Democrats. (Full disclosure: Democrats never take my advice.)

Action: concerning gerrymandering, family leave, and nuclear waste.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: we've told Gov. Wolf to call a special legislative session to pass redistricting reform, but that won't mean anything if the legislature screws up the reform process again, so Fair Districts PA helps you tell your Pennsylvania state legislative leaders to do the right thing during a special session on redistricting reform. One of those "leaders" -- House State Government Committee Chair Daryl Metcalfe -- gutted not one but two redistricting bills in his own committee, and when House leaders successfully kept future redistricting bills out of his committee, legislators from both parties swamped those bills with hundreds of amendments. So, yes, we're demanding they come back during their time off to do their job because they've done an abominable job so far. They could redeem themselves by doing a good job this month, however.

Meanwhile, as several right-wing Senators work on a plan to divert Social Security funding into a paid family leave plan -- anything not to raise taxes on their corporate paymasters! -- Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 337, the FAMILY Act. The FAMILY Act would finally bring paid family leave to America by establishing the Federal Family and Medical Leave Insurance Trust Fund within the Social Security Administration. Monthly benefits would range between $580 and $4000, depending on your income, and an 0.2 percent payroll tax (that's two-tenths of one percent, not "two percent," "liberal" media!) would fund it. So when your right-wing uncle says IZ TEH GUBMINT GOINGZ TO DO EVERYTHINGZ!!!!, remind him that our taxes pay for our benefits, which any of us could use. Just remember: you won't convince him you're right -- but you might convince anyone else who might be listening that you're right.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject the proposed placement of a nuclear waste storage site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, then Food and Water Action still helps you do that. If you're tempted to respond well, you gotta put the waste somewhere, then you should ask yourself which is worse: storing nuclear waste in hardened containers near nuclear power plants, or transporting that waste across 44 American states and thus risking contamination from the inevitable trucking accident. And there's yet another reason we should reject nuclear power as a nation -- you know, along with the fact that you can get low carbon emissions from solar and wind, and the fact that power plants that present such a high risk of contamination from accidents and/or terrorist attacks tend to be so unpopular that they need massive government handouts to build them and keep them running. So, yeah, let's stop doing that.

Around the table: in which bad people who do bad things get ostracized by their neighbors.

Hours after a federal court told Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin that he could not impose work requirements and deductibles (among other obstacles!) upon Medicaid, Gov. Bevin guts dental and vision benefits for Medicaid recipients. Another court will probably strike down Mr. Bevin's actions, but he'll cause a lot of damage in the meantime, to people who suddenly can't get health care because he's a drama-loving asshole. We'll see if he can get a clean cup of coffee anywhere in the state after this.

Amanda Marcotte at Salon reveals why voters believe all our President's lies about MS-13: because of decades of "lurid but false urban legends about how a cousin's friend's friend's sister heard about random gang violence aimed at strangers." When I hear that MS-13 has a mere 10,000 members in America (what army has ever conquered a country this size with a force that small, an army also scattered and aimed almost entirely at other immigrants!) I am reminded, as I often have been over the years, of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode in which an Admiral nearly turns the Federation over to fascism based on fear of the Dominion threat, and a Dominion operative reveals to Capt. Sisko that there are exactly four Dominion operatives on Earth at that moment. DS9 spent the '90s warning us about this kind of thing, and we've spent the subsequent two decades ignoring those warnings.

Jesus Mary and Joseph Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) might feel emboldened enough by Joe Crowley's loss in the NY-14 Democratic House primary to make another run at Nancy Pelosi's caucus leadership position. Ms. Pelosi is as corporatist a Democrat as they come, but recall that Rep. Ryan voiced his support for corporate tax cuts last fall, even saying that Democrats "can't just be the party of redistribution of wealth," never mind that Republicans are the party of redistribution of wealth upward. Then again, we learned all we needed to learn about Mr. Ryan when he abruptly became pro-choice on the day he announced his last challenge to Ms. Pelosi. I'm pro-choice myself, but gosh, your values aren't worth anything if they don't inconvenience you every once in a while.

Uh oh: Media Matters finds even more racist dung nuggets in Republican NJ-2 House nominee Seth Grossman's past. I have to say I didn't even know American Renaissance was operating anymore! But the really stunning revelation here is that Mr. Grossman's act is a bit behind the times -- his no-I-really-do-care-about-minorities and we-can't-say-what-we-think-out-loud-anymore-because-we're-not-free act comes from a time when you had to mask your racism a little better, but a certain President has proven you don't have to do that anymore. Mr. Grossman's act would do better in a state other than New Jersey, of course.

Finally, the Washington Post reports on the public shaming certain Administration figures face. Much of it without cuss words -- I mean, "(y)ou ought to be ashamed of yourself! Go look in the mirror!" is a perfectly civilized thing to say in public! Still, to hear Sean Spicer say that "(w)hen we went out, the goal was not to make a spectacle" is to laugh -- people in this Administration do nothing but make a spectacle out of themselves every minute of every day. And Mr. Scaramucci sounds like the kind of fellow who'd complain about your "meanness" if you yelled at him for smearing his feces all over your walls. Isn't there a point at which, if you're that worried that someone urinated in your $80 sushi plate, you need to at least wonder if maybe the problem's you?

Around the table: the President of France is not a good President either! And other lessons.

Good news, everyone: prosecutors have dropped all remaining charges against the J20 protestors. As you know, prosecutors tried to ring up over 200 Inauguration Day protestors on felony rioting charges, but they failed abjectly to do so. Of course, their own lipstick-on-a-pig statement that "21 people have pled guilty to charges for their conduct that day" hides the fact that they brought so little evidence to trial that they would have had to count on guilty pleas to get any guilty verdicts. I wonder how they got those guilty pleas.

Our Army has started discharging immigrant soldiers who joined the Army so they could establish a firm path to citizenship. Our Army told a few of them they were "security risks" because they had relatives abroad (why, nobody could have predicted that immigrants would have relatives in other nations!) or because the DoD hadn't completed background checks, which are, of course, more extensive for immigrants. Is there any promise this Administration won't break just to diddle the rage glands of its votaries?

Shira Tarlo at Salon reminds us that Andrew Wheeler, the coal lobbyist replacing Scott Pruitt as EPA Administrator, won't be any better than Mr. Pruitt. He may not have Mr. Pruitt's peculiar taste for low-level perks, but a former colleague assures us he "does things by the book," which may mean he'll move more slowly than Mr. Pruitt, which is good -- or it may mean he knows all the loopholes he can use to make our air and water dirtier again, which is bad. Apparently he doesn't really want the job, either, though he might be doing it for a while.

Surprise, surprise! Juliette Legendre at Inequality.org finds the Presidency of France's Emmanuel Macron to be "an old-fashioned, right-leaning neoliberal determined to overhaul France’s hard-won social model under the guise of modernism and emancipation." Cutting taxes for the rich and for corporations, gutting labor laws, partially privatizing the national rail system, and declaring his opponents to be "slackers," "cynics," and "do-nothings" -- how preferable, really, is all of that to the shitshow we're enduring here in America?

Police union President talks of "an influx of tremendous outrage" from the community over the inclusion of two books on an eight-book summer reading list for incoming students at a South Carolina high school. Dig how he calls two books "almost an indoctrination toward distrust of authority figures" -- gosh, I wonder how many of our Founders complained that our Constitution was "almost an indoctrination toward distrust of authority figures." My favorite part is when we learn that one of the books this fellow fears actually has a good police role model in it. All together now: waaaaaaaaah!

Finally, Ronald Brownstein at The Atlantic says Democrats will have to choose in 2020 between mobilizing whiter, Republican-leaning voters disgusted with Trump or mobilizing younger, less white, more liberal voters. I can make that decision for them! Mobilize the voters who are sick of an economy that serves only the richest Americans, because disgust with that economy pretty much resonates across age and race groups. Hell, it might even remind some Republicans that they're really Democrats.

Around the table: meet the new boss, same as the old boss, part 785.

From the "Nobody Could Have Predicted!" file: ISIS fighters have moved back into Raqqa, Syria, not even a year after coalition forces allowed 250 of their fighters to leave Raqqa with their families and all the weapons they could fit into a three-mile long convoy. It sure is a good thing our new national security braintrust isn't overly preoccupied with truly ridiculous projects like regime change in Iran! Oops, sorry; I forgot which evil alternate universe I was in for a moment.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt resigns/is fired, citing "unrelenting attacks on me personally" because waaaaaaaaaah! And our President's votaries now see Mr. Pruitt as One of Them, because he gets attacked by Those Librul Elites just like they do! Never mind that they'd never tolerate a Cone of Silence from a Democrat. (Also, a former coal lobbyist now runs the EPA, on an "interim" basis that I expect to last at least until the end of 2020.)

In the face of yet more "liberal" media hand-wringing over Just What Those Red State Voters Are Really Like, Amanda Marcotte at Salon reminds us that the glue that really binds them (and their messy lives) to our President (and his messy life which is now our messy life) is sexism. "The anti-abortion campaign is all about punishing women for sex, not men," right-wingers don't "put a 'higher value' on marriage" so much as they "stigmatize not being married," by which they mean women not being married -- all true, and as long as men are trying to get sex from women (and imagining themselves somehow disenfranchised if they don't), this'll all remain a problem.

Ho hum, privatizing IRS tax collection functions has caused our government to lose money, which Nobody Could Have Predicted! Worse, private tax collectors more typically go after low-income working families than big fish, which Nobody Could Have Predicted, Either! We talk about this kind of stuff all the time, but our elected representatives never seem to listen. That's why we need to keep talking about it. Can't some enterprising Democrat somewhere run campaign ads about this? Or would that be uncivil?

Max Boot becomes another major right-wing figure (a la George Will) to openly root for Democrats to win back the House and Senate this fall. Of course, Hillary Clinton was able to find plenty of Republicans willing to endorse her and even shoot ads for her; how did that work out? And how much pull do folks like Max Boot and George Will really have with regular Americans? Hell, how much pull do they have with other elite right-wingers, most of whom, I imagine, are saying we're getting rid of regulations and getting two Supreme Court Justices out of all of this as we speak?

Finally, leave it to Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall to point out that simultaneously telling Democrats "we have to fight or we can't win" and "if we do fight, it will backfire and we also can't win" is utterly absurd. He also approves of the "Abolish ICE" slogan because at least it's got "clarity and power," like, you know, all right-wing slogans do no matter how stupid they are, plus "(i)f your political language tip toes around what you think or shows you’re not quite sure what you think or shows that you know what you think but may not be willing to act on what you think, that has bad consequences. It signals weakness and irresolution. It shows you may not have the resoluteness to act." Which explains how Scott Walker/Sam Brownback/Paul LePage/Rick Snyder/Rick Scott somehow won all those elections -- they're wrong about everything, but they're resolutely wrong.

Action: concerning taxes and animal bans.

On the occasion of the 6-month anniversary of the Republican tax scam, and the Republicans' stated intent to pursue another tax-cut-for-the-rich before the midterms, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Republican tax scam, oppose another tax-cut-for-the-rich, and enact tax policy that actually helps working families. A couple dozen dollars every week ain't nothing, but giving a couple dozen dollars to working families while giving billions to corporations and hundreds of thousands to millionaires just ain't moral -- ultimately, it's a way to bribe working families so that rich folks can get even more powerful. If Congress wants to help working families, they can tax the rich harder, so that they're less able to buy Congressfolk who'll write laws that help them run roughshod over the rest of us. Sounds a lot like common sense -- to anyone but a Congressdolt dependent on campaign funds to survive, that is.

Meanwhile, airline corporations have met with some much-deserved bad PR over avoidable pet deaths, the most famous (from almost a year ago) being the bulldog puppy who suffocated after a United Airlines attendant insisted the dog be put in the overhead compartment. So Delta Airlines (which had a dog die during a layover on one of its flights last month) has compounded the problem by banning pit bulls from their flights, even if they're service or emotional support dogs. I can't be the only one who's had nothing but positive experiences with pit bulls. And this ban happens to violate the Americans with Disabilities Act, since no one who has a seeing-eye pit is going to go through the trouble of training (and trusting) a dog of a different breed just to fly Delta. Hence Sara Enos has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell Delta Airlines to get rid of their pit bull ban.

Around the table: concerning automation, corruption, wage theft, tax cuts for the rich, more tax cuts for the rich, and rogue ICE agents.

With all the anti-worker hysteria of ZOMG TEH AUTOMATIONZ WILL KILLZ ALL TEH JOBZ!!!!!, Neil Irwin at the New York Times highlights a number of very reasonable solutions we could implement to prevent such a job-ocalypse. These do not include a universal basic income, which right-wingers will use to destroy Medicare and Social Security -- they include work-sharing programs, codifying "maximum employment" policies in law, and shortening monopoly protections for trademarks and patents. But they should also include bringing back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income, which really is the thing that will prevent executives from throwing living-breathing workers under the bus for their not-very-well-working machines.

Ho hum, Florida Gov. Rick Scott's decision to issue "emergency contracts" for hurricane cleanup will cost Florida taxpayers at least $28 million more than if he'd relied on existing contracts for hurricane cleanup. I am, of course, reminded of Florida Republican U.S. House Rep. Carlos Curbelo instructing us last August that doing hurricane cleanup the right way saves more money than doing it the quick way, but Gov. Scott spent valuable time and money doing the whole rebidding process over again. Why, that's something you'd do if you were trying to help out your cronies, not protect taxpayers from "special interests"! The POGO general counsel's statement that Mr. Scott's decision did not reflect "good business sense" should be a Democrat campaign ad, but then again, these are Democrats we're talking about.

Sam Pizzigati wonders why big corporations, which can afford not to commit wage theft, still do so. Decline in unions yes, attacks on regulation certainly, but also the simple fact that "(t)he outrageously generous rewards that have become so commonplace in Corporate America give the executives who run our top corporations an ongoing — and almost irresistible — incentive to behave outrageously." Best way to fight the problem at its source? "(E)nd" "eye-popping CEO pay packages." At the risk of beating a dead horse, bringing back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income would be the best way to do that -- certainly better than the so-convoluted-they-must-be-designed-to-fail ways center-right Democrats have come up with over the years.

Remember when tax "reform" supporters in the White House claimed that their tax-cuts-for-the-rich-and-for-corporations would put an extra $4,000 in every family's bank account? Well, it's fair to ask where that "$4,000 Raise" went, as Leo Gerard does. Wages actually went down 0.1% for non-supervisory workers from May of last year to May of this year once you factor in inflation -- and I think you would only "forget" to factor in inflation when you're trying to lie about economic policy! -- while less than five percent of American workers got raises or bonuses. Most of that tax-cut largesse, as you probably recall, goes toward executive stock buybacks and higher dividends for shareholders. I may have mentioned this before, but you could run a lot of good ads along the "Where's My Tax Cut?" meme -- you could even send out bloodhounds to find it, like Mitch McConnell did in those ads for his first Senate campaign back in the day. But again, Democrats would have to run these ads, and they wouldn't be civil.

Greg LeRoy at CityLab informs us that workers at Amazon's second headquarters, wherever they build it, will very likely be paying their state taxes directly to their employer, since whichever states "wins" the bid to host HQ2 will be giving massive corporate welfare handouts to Amazon. Where is the state that will stand its ground and say no, you clowns already get to deduct your expenses, so further "deductions" would be immoral, since it would cheat present and future generations of the services they pay for with their taxes? I don't know, since 18 of 50 states are in the running, and maybe the other 32 would like to be, but can't be, for various reasons, possibly including that Amazon would consider a lot of those states "flyover country."

Finally, ICE agents detain 62-year-old man who has permanent resident status and has been in America for literally almost half a century -- over an 18-year-old domestic violence complaint for which the man had already completed probation and anger management. Even if you want to spend valuable time and money combing through all these records for the "bad" immigrants -- hell, even if you want to assert that domestic violence should carry a worse sentence than that! -- you have to respect our nation's traditions and laws enough to leave people alone who have already paid their debt to society as mandated by the court that convicted them. Then again, for a lot of Americans, generally the ones who complain about "law and order" the most, there really is no law and order; there is only whatever satisfies their prejudice and their rage.

Around the table: news about nukes, monopolies, and right-wing snowflakes.

I've been quite patient, but since our President is doing the dance-with-no-pants about it, I'll say it: this nuclear "deal" between our President and North Korea is a nothingburger on a dung bun. I'd ask how any sane person pulls out of an Iran deal that actually keeps Iran from making nukes and then signsa "deal" with North Korea that only gets "assurances" that North Korea will denuclearize, but I know that question answers itself. Could this be the moment when we finally -- finally! -- see significant numbers of mainstream Republicans breaking off from our President? I mean, they're all proud of what defense hawks they are, and while the President's votaries love him, he can't get re-elected without the support of those other Republicans. If they keep mum through this, I shudder to think what will shake them out of their stupor.

John C. O'Day at FAIR notices that the "liberal" media seems happy to report on our President's authoritarian tendencies, but then goes blind about them when they have to confront the fact that we wage war all over the planet and have enough nukes to destroy the world 200 times over. (Dig especially the narrative twist at the end of the third paragraph.) Now, maybe the "liberal" media think that's "balance." You know what I think -- that symmetry isn't balance, and balance isn't fairness. Fairness doesn't obsess over whether all the negative columns are the same size; fairness gives everyone their due, as they've earned it. Yes, I am a little impatient about these matters.

The incomparable David Dayen explains why "The AT&T-Time Warner Merger Ruling Is Bad for the Country." Long story short: modern thinking about antitrusts (first developed during the Reagan era, of course) posits that judges should only evaluate big corporate mergers on the literal dollar-and-cents cost to consumers, "when common sense clearly demonstrates the dangers of concentration." You know, the more power concentrated in the fewer hands, the worse off we all are? You knew it before I said it, but contemporary judges, who study for years to get where they are, pretend they don't know it. It's a damn shame. (Dear trolls: don't spout off about "precedent," since there's plenty of actual precedent -- not to mention the plain text of antitrust law! -- to do antitrust protections the right way, too.)

Virginia Republicans send 2017 almost-gubernatorial nominee/Confederate flag-hugger Corey Stewart up against Democratic incumbent Tim Kaine in this year's U.S. Senate race. Mr. Stewart has promised a "vicious" campaign against Mr. Kaine; maybe he'll outdo Ed Gillespie in that regard. But do you suppose Mr. Stewart will have the smarts to challenge Sen. Kaine on his support for giving the President even more war-making power? After all, wrapping yourself in the Confederate flag will only take you so far, even in Virginia. (Mr. Kaine, for his part, would do better to put "taking health care away from folks" first in any list tabulating Mr. Stewart's bad ideas.)

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) -- the man who gives empty suits a bad name -- not only calls criticism of Twitter's CEO for ordering from Chick-Fil-A during Pride Month "bullying" but is even fundraising off it. Ugh, one more time: criticism is not bullying. Gosh, does Mr. Rubio ever hear criticism from any of his friends? Or are they all tired of how he acts when he does? If he really thinks folks are being "bullied" every time someone disagrees with their regressive views on homosexuality, then he's a damn snowflake. Snowflakes deserve representation, of course, but (like the rest of us) they deserve much better than to be represented by other snowflakes in Congress.

Finally, Democrats score yet another special election victory in Wisconsin -- in the Senate 1st District election that Wisconsin's snowflake Governor, Scott Walker, tried his damnedest not to hold! Republicans have held this Senate seat for 40 years, by the way -- and it's up again in five months, and a lot can happen in five months, so who knows, they might take it back. But probably not if now-Sen. Frostman foregrounds health care, tax cuts for the rich, and clean water as his main issues, as he does on his campaign website.

Action: black lung disease, wastewater, and EPA funding.

First things first. The Black Lung Disability Trust Fund -- which, as you can tell by the name, helps coal miners with their extensive health issues -- has never been funded properly, such that the GAO now informs us that it's billions of dollars in debt. Even better, the tax on coal corporations which funds the trust will go down by more than half later on this year! Right-wingers will demand that we fund the trust some other way than making that those "poor" coal CEOs pony up more money, but that's a real Pandora's box right there -- after all, why not fund the trust by, oh, I don't know, repealing corporate tax cuts and tax cuts for the rich? Because SOCIALISM COMMUNISM NAZISM, that's why. So get a head start on solving this problem for-real for-real by allowing Change.org help you to tell your Congressfolk to support coal miners over coal executives by properly funding the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund.

Meanwhile, did you know that the state of Pennsylvania has been spraying gas and oil drilling wastewater on our roads to, get this, keep the dust down? Where carcinogenic and radioactive elements can easily drift into the air or work their way to our water tables? I will smack the next pimp who responds that well, dust is a problem on Pennsylvania roads, as if the mere existence of a problem automatically validates any conceivable solution. A more crafty pimp would say that this "solution" allows gas and oil corporations to "dispose" of their waste without resorting to, say, open-air pits, but, again, the mere existence of a bad solution doesn't automatically validate any other conceivable bad solution. I don't like radioactive and cancer-causing crap when it's on my California strawberries; why would I like it on my roads? Penn Environment helps you tell the state DEP to stop spraying down our roads with wastewater.

Finally, Congress is still trying to gut EPA clean air and clean water programs. How many times must I tell these pimps! Clean air and clean water programs are not BIG GUMMINT GONE AMOK!!!!, nor do they "hurt small businesses" (which certainly don't pollute at the rate fossil fuel corporations pollute!) -- these programs protect the American people, because without clean air and clean water, you can't have healthy Americans. And when you have healthy Americans (will right-wingers follow this line of reasoning?), you have lower health care costs. See? Clean air and clean water programs actually save money -- they just don't deposit those savings directly into fossil fuel CEO bank accounts, so Congress doesn't care about them. So we make them care. The Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to put Americans before big donors by fully funding clean air and clean water programs.

Around our table: how print media dies, and other lessons.

Sarah Posner at The Nation discusses why the Supreme Court's recent Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling "Is Not as Harmless as You Think." Long story short: while the Court affirmed that the decision doesn't confer a right to discrimination on the basis of "religious" "conscience," the Court sure did turn over every rock in Colorado trying to find some evidence of "animus" against religion, and everyone who's ever heard a public official say religious bigots are knuckle-draggers now has a reason to try again. (Justice Kennedy's obsession with "animus" hasn't come out of the blue, though -- his finding of an "animus" against gays in Colorado's notorious Amendment 2 led him to strike it down.)

Why is the Denver Post laying off journalists left and right, you may be wondering? Well, in a CounterSpin interview, we learn that the banksters who bought the Post demand double-digit profits and think the best way to accomplish that is to hemorrhage jobs. And make the writers fill a three-byline quota daily (as if stories don't depend on work or something!), which results in even more rewritten PR releases. It's hard for those of us who work for a living to comprehend, but the biggest money-makers in America don't have better ideas or even better processes anymore; they just know how to suck the marrow out of an almost-dead body. And then they call themselves "job creators" and look down on you and I for "not working as hard as they do"! It's fucking un-American, frankly.

Ho hum, a lot of people who wrote that steaming piece of a tax "reform" bill are now going to work as lobbyists for the big corporations who benefit the most from that legislation. If you respond that this is as-it-should-be-because-it's-always-been-this-way, you'll want to consider more closely whether these folks might have written legislation the way they did because they knew they could cash in on their "expertise" more easily. You might also think of some other things that used to be always-this-way (you know, like segregation) and maybe demand a little more of your values than you're doing now.

After our President disinvited the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles from a White House visit in yet another manic fit of whining self-pity, the Fox News (sic) Channel, in reporting on the matter, showed photographs of several Eagles players, including tight end Zach Ertz, supposedly kneeling during the anthem, when these players were actually praying before the game. After Mr. Ertz dressed them down publicly on Twitter, Fox News admitted the error and apologized for it, but defensive end Chris Long wasn't impressed, and he shouldn't be: FNC knows full well that their million-plus votaries have already seen the report and diddled their rage glands over it, so Mission Accomplished! (As an aside, our President sure seems to have summoned a thundercloud in Reggie Bush.)

Finally, some good news: a Maine Superior Court justice has ruled that Maine Gov. Paul LePage (E) must implement the Medicaid expansion voters approved last year. You know, it's easy to take pot-shots at Paul LePage for his apparently bottomless cruelty, so let's just recall that he grew up a very poor Franco-American, suffered at the hand of an abusive, alcoholic father, was literally homeless for about a year as a pre-teen, and even though he worked hard in high school still couldn't get into college until a Maine state legislator named Pete Snowe (yep, the late husband of the former U.S. Senator) convinced said college to give him his entrance exam in French and vouched for his ability to catch up with his English. Let all that sink in, and then be sad at how thoroughly he's forgotten where he came from.

Around the table: from ballot initiatives to social media dramas.

From Michael Corcoran at TruthOut we learn why Republicans fear ballot initiatives. The good news? You can scare up more righteous anger at, say, a state "right-to-work" law than you can scare up righteous anger in support of it. The bad news? The rage people feel at liberal policy initiatives sure does seem to get more attention. We need to amend our Constitution so we can have national ballot initiatives, by the way. I'd tell the states to do it, too, since less than half of them do it now.

The New York Times publishes a lengthy report on how economic austerity policies in Great Britain are decimating that nation's once-formidable safety net. I'd say it's interesting that the Times writes about austerity like it's a bad thing, but then again, they're probably more comfortable writing about the austerity that's happening far away than the austerity that's happening here.

Surprise, surprise, corporate CEOs are actually starting to come out and say they're not using any of their tax "reform" windfalls to raise worker pay. OK, I suppose it is a little surprising that they'll say it out loud, just as in a few months they'll be saying, out loud, that yeah we're going to cut all these jobs now because we have big balls. Think some of these CEOs can be the stars of Democrat attack ads? I kid, of course -- these are the Democrats we're talking about.

Of course we should investigate whether there's any relationship between the President's daughter getting five trademarks in China mere days before the President decided to bail out the Chinese corporation ZTE, but fact of the matter is our President seems to do something every minute of every day that points to some corrupt act or other. And the lesson? Don't elect people with so many conflicts of interest!

Perhaps the most bizarre moment during Roseanne Barr's sudden crash-and-burn earlier this week was the spectacle of right-wingers taking to social media to insist that Bill Maher should be fired for the same thing! (Which was "comparing someone to an ape," though if you compare a black person to an ape, as Ms. Barr did -- and as Mr. Maher did not -- you're taking part in a long tradition of American racism.) What a surprise it must have been that liberals largely responded by saying, essentially, whatevs, yo. And the lesson? Fight for ideas and policies, not people. By the evidence, liberals seem to be taking this lesson to heart more than right-wingers are.

Finally, Louisiana-based televangelist starts soliciting donations for a brand new $54 million private jet, saying that, if Jesus were here on Earth today, "he wouldn't be riding a donkey" but would be "in an airplane flying all over the world." But would Jesus insist on his fourth private jet in 40 years because there are too many "demons" to pray away in coach? That sure doesn't sound like the Jesus I've known since I was a little kid.

Action: fighting banksters, cruel housing policies, and cruelty to animals.

Our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) wants to shield its database of over 1.4 million consumer complaints from public view. Because we're not trying to be a Yelp for the financial sector, says CFPB acting director Mick Mulvaney, but, ah, three things: one, the CFPB has used customer complaints to pursue major actions against wrongdoers, like Wells Fargo; two, academics use this database for research about the financial sector, and three, banksters who can't face public accountability over their misdeeds really don't deserve any customers anyway. Regarding Mr. Mulvaney's assertion that complaints go public before they're "fully-vetted": corporations get to respond to the complaint before it goes public. Regarding bankster whining that some complaints are too "general" to be useful: people know how to read. Hence Consumer Reports helps you tell the CFPB to keep its customer complaint database both active and public.

Meanwhile, HUD Secretary Ben Carson has proposed tripling minimum rents for the poorest folks who get federal housing, and though the numbers might not seem oppressive -- from $50 to $150 monthly -- I assure you they are oppressive for folks who have families and make minimum wage and have other bills to pay. And if you're ready to respond that these people already get plenty of other federal assistance, keep in mind that our current Administration is trying to cut all of that, too. You don't pick on the poorest working families in America, particularly after giving the richest Americans another massive welfare handout in the form of tax "reform." Would it be piling on to remind you that Mr. Carson spent over $30,000 on new office furniture for HUD in violation of federal law and then blamed his wife for it? Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the HUD minimum rent hikes Mr. Carson has proposed.

Finally, our Department of the Interior would like to overturn its ban on cruel wildlife killing methods in Alaskan National Park preserves. If that sounds a little esoteric to you, consider some of the things you can't do in these preserves that our new Interior Department would allow you to do: kill wolf pups and bear cubs in their own dens, using donuts and bacon to lure bears out to be shot, and shining super-bright spotlights on bears and cubs hibernating in their dens in order to shoot them. Our Interior Department Secretary loves talking about the importance of hunting in our culture, but I'd be hard-pressed to imagine actual hunters finding any of the things I've described above to be sporting. Killing animals and their children while they're sleeping seems, in fact, rather the kind of thing wannabe genocidal maniacs contemplate. So MoveOn helps you tell our Interior Department to stop its pro-animal cruelty rule-making process.

Around the table: starring hubris, shame, corruption, greed, and gerrymandering.

Dave Lindorff explains, at some length, exactly why our current Administration is headed for disaster with North Korea and Iran. You should read the whole thing, because it covers just about everything, but long story short: our Administration will fail because they think they can bully their way to get whatever they want from these two nations. Long story somewhat longer: they've also subscribed, rather uncritically, to an American tradition of "negotiation" that demands that the other side give them everything they want before "negotiations" even begin. Of course, if you've ever heard, from anyone, that actual negotiations have to be win-win, this way of "negotiating" will seem strange to you.

It took me a minute to sort out exactly why I can't stand the "liberal" media's absurd habit of blaming right-wing excesses, particularly those coming from our President and his votaries, on "liberal smugness," but here goes: blaming the President on his opponents's "smugness" is a way of trying to silence criticism of the President, calling the President's opponents "smug" is a way of trying to keep us from shaming the President and his votaries when they deserve it, and why do we blame liberals for what right-wingers do in the first place? And why do we never right-wingers called "smug" when they shame people? I suppose pointing to the "smugness" of liberal critics is also a way of saying you can't win the argument on the merits.

National Democratic politicians suddenly release a plan to deal with governmental corruption, the "Better Deal for Our Democracy" -- and it's not at all bad. I mean, it has plenty of good proposals, but they also divide neatly into three categories (voting rights, ethics, campaign finance) that have broad support across the ideological spectrum. Question is: will they run on it? I mean, these are Democrats we're talking about, obsessed with polishing their civility trophies and appearing "bipartisan." They could fumble away this opportunity like they've fumbled away so many others. So we gotta stay on them.

Ho hum, Harley-Davidson makes big bucks from the Republican tax "reform" bill, then closes a heavily-unionized plant in Kansas City, displacing 800 workers, and announces a close-to-$700 million stock buyback. It gets worse: their York, PA plant will add 450 workers, many of whom will be temps and other contract workers, for a net loss of 350 well-paid, highly-skilled, permanent workers. It gets even worse! Harley will also open up a plant in Bangkok, Thailand, later this year -- not to outsource jobs, they assure us, but to avoid paying taxes in the United States. No, they said it out loud! Maybe whomever runs against noted Harley-rider Scott Walker in Wisconsin can tie all of this nastiness to him?

Finally, a Pennsylvania state Senate committee unanimously passes the famous anti-gerrymandering bill, SB 22, with the full Senate about to take it up presently. But the Senate State Government Committee did amend the bill, and not for the better: if the Commission can't approve a new redistricting map, for example, the legislature, not the state Supreme Court, gets next crack at it (though the hurdle for approving that map is still high at both points -- 7 of 11 Commissioners, then two-thirds of the legislature). But it's still worth your support -- at least until Daryl Metcalfe gets a hold of it and makes a grotesque mockery of it, like he did with those other two redistricting bills earlier this year.

Around the table: with important reminders about "far-left" policies, privatizing prisons, and political bad actors.

And here's the best headline I read all week: "The Surprising Popularity of 'Far-Left' Policies." The only way it could have been better is if they'd put ironic quotation marks around "surprising," because only Our Glorious Elites and their "liberal" media enablers would consider "protecting more public lands," "limit(ing) corporate tax loopholes," and "raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy" to be "far-left" positions, when in fact these policy proposals generally get majority support (and therefore bipartisan support) from Americans! But, as I've been saying for a long time, they love calling popular, good proposals "extreme," when their own solutions to everything -- make war on other countries so you can swing your balls around, cut spending that actually helps people, cut benefits for programs you've paid into all your life! -- are actually quite extreme.

The city of Tucson, AZ adopts resolution banning the privatization of its prison system. The even better news? Tucson isn't even the first locality to outlaw private corporations running their detention centers and jails, and a lot of the other localities that have done so are, like Tucson, in very red areas of the country. Of course, if you thought about it for a minute, you'd see that private prisons have no "market" incentive to improve prisoners' lives, because the more miserable they are, the less they'll be able to make it on the outside, and thus the more likely they'll become "repeat customers."

"Nearly Half of You Reading This Have Bullshit Jobs," announces the headline of this Daily Beast interview with the author of (you guessed it) the book Bullshit Jobs. The term "bullshit jobs" describes jobs that are a) quite well-paid and b) quite useless, the kind of job that exists to make other people look good, or at least not incompetent. They can range from the receptionist who takes one phone call daily but has to exist to make the boss look important to the "people who provide unnecessary supervision" to corporate-lawyer "goons." And they don't exist in spite of our "free" market ideology, but because of it, and its mania for quantifying everything. (Read the whole article; it contains, among so many other things, the best argument for a universal basic income I've yet heard.)

California Republican U.S. House candidate actually films herself harassing a transgender woman trying to use the bathroom at a Denny's. I won't name name this U.S. House candidate, since we shouldn't give jerks too much sunlight. But I will highlight her stupid argument, that a transgender woman was "invading my privacy" (italics in original) merely by a) being born male and b) wanting to use the women's room. Setting aside that following someone into a bathroom and then harassing them is an actual invasion of privacy, I could more easily argue that this House candidate is invading my privacy merely by being such an asshole that I noticed it. The good news? She'll be lucky to lose by only 50 points in this district, and thus she's the proverbial walnut in the batter of eternity.

Finally, upon hearing the so-far-unsubstantiated rumor that the Administration might fire Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, my first thought was: who on Earth do they think they're going to find to do that job better than she does it? By "that job," of course, I don't mean "informing the American people about what the Administration's doing," but the job of putting entire cartons of lipstick on the pigs this Administration keeps trotting out. Seriously, even Tha Bush Mobb's notorious last Press Secretary, Dana Perino, couldn't match the sheer will-to-lie of Sarah Sanders. Then again, I'd hate to report, in a few months, that I'd spoken too soon.

Action: freedom of the press, payday lenders, and safe schools.

Amnesty International helps you demand that the Burmese government release journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo. The government has charged them with violating Burma's Official Secrets law, after they met two police officers in a restaurant who handed them rolled-up papers. Sound like a set-up to you? And certainly such a set-up would have absolutely nothing to do with their ongoing investigation of the murder of ten Rohingya Muslims in western Burma! The government detained the two reporters for over three months before their first court hearing, and oh, the police said they presented a warrant to Wa Lone's family in order to search his house the day after the arrest, but the family says they didn't. Whom to believe? The family who has every reason to fall in line behind the government's official story, or the government that has every reason to lie? Their Rohingya massacre sure hasn't gotten them the best PR, after all.

Meanwhile, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, under former Director Richard Corddray, put together some regulations that do more to prevent payday lenders from trapping people in a downward spiral of debt. So naturally Congress is grateful that the CFPB actually did something to protect consumers, something Congress itself hasn't seen fit to do over the years. I kid, of course -- whether they find intolerable the mere existence of a single regulation that might actually help people or whether they're as mad as their President to undo anything that might have the name Obama on it, Congress has introduced H.J.Res. 122/S.J.Res. 56, another "resolution of disapproval" that would nullify the CFPB's payday loan rules. Why on Earth would you want to be pro-financial predator? Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to support consumer protections by rejecting H.J.Res. 122/S.J.Res. 56.

Finally, on the heels of several local reports detailing the various health care risks Philadelphia children still face in their schools -- like asthma and lead poisoning -- Penn Environment helps you tell Philadelphia's Mayor and City Council to get rid of health care hazards in schools. You can still find lead in paint in Philadelphia public schools, and in some rooms lead dust levels were 150 times higher than federal standards allow. You can also find lead in outdated water fountains, asbestos in ceiling tiles, and mold and rat poop in classrooms, and these are not things we should tolerate in the Birthplace of Freedom, because they help cripple our future. Ultimately, as I've long said, Philadelphia property taxes are going to have to go up if we want to make our schools safe again. In the meantime, cleaning up the toxins and hiring more custodial workers sure won't hurt.

Around the table: with next moves on net neutrality and the real "bad news" from a New Hampshire poll.

Mike Ludwig at TruthOut explains "How Net Neutrality Can Survive the Trump Administration." Senate Democrats will force a vote this week on their "resolution of disapproval" that would begin the process of reversing the FCC's repeal, plus the OMB is still reviewing parts of the repeal, and several lawsuits are coming, all of which may give us a bit of breathing room until the midterms, when we might get a more net neutrality-positive Congress. If we stay on them, that is.

Ho hum, Utah prosecutor charges six animal rights activists with felony theft stemming from their exposure of rampant animal abuse at a Utah factory farm. Specifically, the activists took three turkeys who were so abused they were going to die anyway, as about a quarter or turkeys "raised" at factory farms do. Faced with the loss of their ag-gag law, "theft" of dying birds is what they come up with! I hope this prosecutorial effort dies the same death the ag-gag law did in federal court.

Also ho hum, the Tax Policy Center informs us that the Republican tax "reform" has not, in fact, "supercharged" our economy. We see no dramatic increases in GDP growth and job creation since the end of December, for example. And if the economy does wind up cratering, Republican apologists will just say it would have been a lot worse without the tax "reform" bill. Or perhaps they'll bust out that "nobody could have predicted" line, although TPC does suggest that the increase in Treasury bond yields could be a harbinger of increased inflation.

Even more ho hum, our Administration is suddenly unable to produce any evidence it considered any of the public input it solicited over reorganizing federal agencies -- or, indeed, any evidence that it received public input, though OMB claimed to have received 100,000 submissions. They keep moving the deadline back for releasing their plan to reorganize federal agencies, too. Well, that's our "law and order" Administration for us.

Our President apparently hired an Israeli intelligence firm to dig up dirt on the Obama Administration officials who negotiated the Iran nuclear deal. And why are they looking for information that doesn't actually have anything to do with Iranian behavior under the nuclear deal? Because they already know they're not going to find that kind of info (just as Mr. Netanyahu's drama from the other night didn't find that info), and when you can't win the argument on the merits, you resort to personal attacks.

Finally, a poll of New Hampshire Democrats puts Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in third place out of eight possible 2020 Presidential contenders, but that news isn't nearly as "bad" "for Bernie" as the headline says. Elizabeth Warren, who's less likely to run in 2020 than Mr. Sanders, is in first with 26%; if the poll hadn't asked about her, where do you think those votes would have gone? I'll tell you where most of them wouldn't have gone: to second-place finisher and two-term Vice President Joe Biden, also less likely to run in 2020. If anything, this poll is bad news for Deval Patrick (who just served two terms as Governor right next door in Massachusetts) and Terry McAuliffe (whose extensive ties within the Democratic establishment haven't resulted in a groundswell of voter support what a shock).

Action: wind power, prisoner rights, and Arctic drilling.

The Pennsylvania Game Commission lets gas drilling corporations conduct hydrofracturing (a.k.a. "fracking") on public lands, but thinks wind power is too dangerous to wildlife to allow onto public lands! Because of all the wind turbines that go rampaging through the forest, no doubt! Seriously, the Game Commission should really have said all that out loud before doing it. Fracking involves, among other things, leaking methane into the air, poisoning our air and water with carcinogens, and building pipelines that carve up land and run the too-high risk of spilling more poisons; what about that isn't dangerous to wildlife? Wind turbines, on the other hand, carve up rather little of the ground if you do it right, and fossil fuel corporations kill far more birds than wind power does. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell the Pennsylvania Game Commission to end its double standard for wind power development on public lands.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support S. 2520, the Inmate Calling Technical Corrections Act. What would S. 2520 do? It would stop phone service corporations from extorting absurdly-high phone rates from the families of prisoners. And why should we care? Because prisoners who can stay in contact with their families go back to jail less often, because judges don't sentence prisoners to absurdly-high phone call rates, because families shouldn't be punished with those high rates either, and also, you know, because we're not cruel bastards. Speaking of which, our current FCC Chair apparently thinks the problem can be solved by stuffing burner phones into dead cats and throwing them over prison walls -- even though the very same corporations that "provide" phone "service" in prisons also provide prisons with cell-phone jamming devices! So let's speak out, not merely to treat prisoners and their families more humanely, but to better ensure this Administration's just humiliation.

Finally, as you may know, the Republican tax "reform" bill opens up the Arctic Refuge to drilling, even though we've been saying for years that the small amount of oil we'd get out of the Arctic Refuge doesn't outweigh the damage we'd do to clean air and water. Luckily, the Interior Department has to go through many public comment periods before anyone can drill in the Arctic, and though this Administration will try to go through those public comment periods as quickly as they can, so that fewer good Americans comment on the matter, they still have to go adhere to the process, because law and order. Hence the Alaska Wilderness League helps you tell Interior Secretary Zinke to reject new drilling leases in the Arctic Refuge. He doesn't care what you think -- unless you've got some free trips or a $150,000 door you can give him, amirite? -- but, as always, it doesn't matter what they want; it matters what we want.

Around the table: power, corruption, and lies, part 864.

Against the advice of EPA career staffers, most of whom he's going to throw under the bus before too long anyway, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt approves waiver exempting large swath of southeastern Wisconsin from smog rules -- and Gov. Scott Walker's favorite corporate crony, Foxconn, just so happens to sit there. But, ah, is Mr. Walker absolutely sure he wants to run on all that corporate welfare he handed out to Foxconn?

David Mislin at The Conversation explains how "Anti-war Protests 50 Years Ago Helped Mold the Modern Christian Right." Mainly, a lot of Protestants left the anti-war churches -- most of which had never protested a previous American war -- and joined the more fundamentalist ones. You do have to wonder, of course, what role racism also played, given all the tension over (among other things!) open housing laws in the mid-'60s.

Ho hum, ThinkProgress finds that Rep. Martha McSally (R-AZ), now running for Jeff Flake's Senate seat, has totally broken her pledge to vote against her party 20% of the time. I never would have made such a pledge in the first place ("that was four pro-party votes; I sure hope the next one's something uncontroversial!"), but she did attack her opponent's bipartisan bona fides back in 2014, so she made her bed. For the record, she's voted the President's way 97% of the time since January 2017. That's a campaign ad waiting to happen -- but Kyrsten Sinema would likely be the one running it, so forget about seeing it.

With the West Virginia Republican U.S. Senate primary less than a week away, an Evan Jenkins campaign ad doctors a photograph of Patrick Morrisey so that it looks (vaguely!) like he's shaking hands with Hillary Clinton, when in the actual photo he was shaking hands with the President. I expect this to backfire on Mr. Jenkins bigly, though not necessarily to Mr. Morrisey's benefit (Don Blankenship is also running, and oh boy would he get buried by the right campaign ad). In any case, the Jenkins flack who said the campaign was just "tak(ing) creative license while arranging images in order to help make a substantive point" is an evil bastard whose career in politics should be over, though of course it won't be.

Get a load of House Speaker Paul Ryan claiming that the end result of Democrats winning back Congress would be "subpoenas and gridlock." In reverse order: this clown couldn't repeal Obamacare even though Senate Democrats couldn't filibuster it, and even the Republicans' list of evil achievements is actually pretty small, basically comprising tax-cuts-for-the-rich and a few overturned Obama Administration rules. And as for subpoenas, that is to laugh: a Democrat politician's default setting is don't rock the boat. There won't be subpoenas until and unless the President's guilt is obvious to a deaf, dumb, and blind infant. Who was it who called Paul Ryan the stupid person's idea of a smart person?

Finally, while it's grotesquely easy to tabulate the multitudinous ways in which "400 years of slavery" isn't a "choice," as Kanye West suggested to TMZ a few nights ago, let's not let pass the putative genius saying he admires the President because he did "the impossible." So, by implication, Mr. West thinks it's less impossible for black folks to overcome redlining, police brutality, and environmental racism than it is for a white billionaire to become President. Success really does make people forget where they came from.

Action: Medicare, fuel efficiency, and Social Security.

S. 2708, the Choose Medicare Act, would (as its title suggests) let good Americans to buy into Medicare via the Affordable Care Act exchanges, which would make Medicare, essentially, a public option for folks under 65. Medicare works astoundingly well for a health insurance program that only includes people who are very likely to get sick; how much better would it work if younger, healthier people also bought in? The Choose Medicare Act would also let employers choose Medicare for their employees, which a lot of them will do, if they're actually sincere about cutting costs. And the Choose Medicare Act would (finally!) let Medicare negotiate drug pricing, which would certainly do a lot more to keep drug prices down than the corporate welfare handouts of the recent tax "reform" law. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand access to good health care for Americans by supporting the Choose Medicare Act.

Meanwhile, both Sum of Us and Public Citizen help you tell automobile manufacturing corporation Ford Motors to stop trying to gut the fuel efficiency standards set by the Obama Administration. Yes, despite their kind words about the standards in 2012, and despite their little PR campaigns in which they say they deplore climate change, they're trying to gut those fuel standards now that a Republican occupies the Oval Office, even though these standards actually save money for regular folks like you and I and save in long-term health care costs for regular folks like you and I. Sadly, corporate executives are not regular folks like you and I, and they "suffer" from being made to make their cars get more miles to the gallon by making less money. This, even though their choice in life is either to be rich or to be rich! Our choice in life, of course, is more stark: we'll either be free or we won't. Strike a blow for freedom by telling Ford to stop running us down.

Finally, Republicans have tried to privatize Social Security, and failed; they've tried to cut Social Security benefits, and failed; they've even tried to cut Social Security customer service funding, and failed. And they failed at each of these because we've stood in their way. But I guess they've got to get a win somewhere, so they're planning to let Social Security field office leases lapse without renewing them. You know, the way corporations like to let people leave without replacing them? Trouble with that, of course, is that people still need Social Security offices to serve their needs, and people who need Social Security offices did work for it and pay for it all their lives, did they not? Social Security Works helps you tell our government to stop closing Social Security offices that help good Americans enjoy the dignified retirement they deserve.

Around the table: how Democrats will lose in 2018, and other lessons.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims to have evidence that Iran "lied" about the nuclear deal -- but only proves that Iran wanted to build a nuclear weapon before the deal, a fact no one has actually disputed. Iran's intentions aren't particularly relevant, after all -- Iran's actions are, and 55,000 documents from an apparently unlocked warehouse later, we can't say they're building nukes now. Which makes Mr. Netanyahu's address what, class? Drama, that's what. No wonder our President loved it.

Pennsylvania state Rep. Daryl Metcalfe (E-PA) guts yet another anti-gerrymandering bill in his committee, one that also had the support of more than half the members of the lower house. I was going to say he's left quite the trail of slime over the years, but then I realized how insulting that'd be to slime. Is it too much to ask that the man who talks like he's never going to lose an election again lose his next election? I don't care if Zombie Charles Manson beats him.

Branko Marcetic at Jacobin looks at the Democrats' "Red to Blue" list of approved Congressional candidates, finds it wanting. The woman who lost bigly to John McCain in 2016, the dude Steny Hoyer likes so much he told one of his primary rivals to get out of the race, the guy who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory against Sam Brownback in 2014, the woman who worked in Tha Bush Mobb's foreign policy apparatus, and so on -- it's bad when the guy running in Utah's 4th is one of the more courageous candidates. If Democrats can't win back the House despite all the wind at their back, this is why.

Former HHS Secretary Tom Price said that repealing the individual mandate penalty in the Republican tax "reform" will result in higher prices for those who use the Affordable Care Act exchanges. Because healthy people will drop out, you see -- gosh, where have we heard this before? Oh, right: from almost every single American who thought about the matter for 20 seconds. What a stalwart defender of the forgotten man he was, back when he had the power to do something!

Now Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) says "there's no evidence whatsoever" that the recent Republican tax "reform" bill -- for which he voted, because of course he did -- has helped American workers. He's not quite in Sen. Corker territory, I suppose, but The Economist really needs to attend Mr. Rubio's "ideas" more closely, so they could tell us that he would like to "increase()" the "child tax credit" so that very rich people could get it too, and that his "provision for paid family leave" would steal from Social Security to pay for it. Marco Rubio: he gives empty suits a bad name.

Around the table: untangling webs of corruption and weakness.

The Intercept gets an audio recording of current House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD) telling a candidate for Colorado's 6th U.S. House district to get out of the way of the party's more corporate choice for that seat. If you're still tempted to say "get people who can win" (and, ah, haven't considered how that worked out in 2016), remember that the party gives a leg up in endorsements and fundraising to their preferred hacks, and then uses this "success" in endorsements and fundraising to justify more help! But if these hand-picked candidates are so great, why not let the primary voters choose them? Because no one snatches defeat from the jaws of victory like a Democrat, that's why.

What's worse? That Mick Mulvaney came out and said if you gave to his House campaigns, he'd talk to you, and if you didn't, he wouldn't? Or that he came out and told banksters that if they want to hamstring the agency he now (nominally) leads, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, they should give more money to Congressfolk? I kid, of course -- there is actually no point in trying to decide which is the pile of dung the flies have found and which is the pile they haven't found yet. Here's a lesson for Democrats, though: Republicans didn't prevent people like Mick Mulvaney from running for Congressional seats in 2010, and they won back the House that year, and look how he's made so little go such a long way!

Ho hum, the six biggest banksters saved nearly $3.6 billion in taxes just last quarter, thanks to the massive Republican tax "reform." Also, "(b)ank executives have said the majority of the savings from the lower tax rates will be returned to shareholders in the form of higher dividends and stock buybacks," i.e., not job creation. Some enterprising Democrat should run ads like that famous Mitch McConnell ad from 1984 where hound dogs looked for his opponent, except these hound dogs would look for that supposed $4,000 boon everyone was supposed to get from corporate tax cuts. Then again, you know, Democrats.

Been hearing about the "massive fundraising advantage" Democrats allegedly have in the upcoming midterm elections? Well, don't believe the hype: NBC informs us that "(m)ajor national Republican and Democratic party groups" have spent over $48 million just on the seven Congressional special elections since January 2017, and Republican groups are outspending Democratic ones by a 3 to 1 margin. Getting a lot of bang for their buck, too, I see! Seriously, remember that when you hear that a candidate has raised x amount money, you have no idea what PAC or SuperPAC is going to inject y+z money into that race. Also, too, getting excited over who's raised what is horserace politics, and thus beneath your dignity as a citizen.

Finally, speaking of special elections, Republican Debbie Lesko won Tuesday night's special election in Arizona's 8th, but by a mere six points, in a district Republican Trent Franks had typically won by over 28 points in his races. I won't say, as one local Democrat consultant does, that a swing of 15 points here (the President won this district by 21) means a swing of 15 points everywhere, but I will say that Hiral Tipirneni's excellent showing means that Democrats can make a winning argument everywhere. Unless they bully all the liberals out of their Congressional primaries, that is.

Action: ranked-choice voting, food stamps, torture of autistic students, and the Sinclair/Tribune merger.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Roots Action helps you tell your state legislators to create a ranked-choice (or instant runoff) voting system in Pennsylvania. A ranked-choice system allows you to designate first, second, third, and so on choices for elected offices, rather than simply designating one choice (very likely while holding your nose). The top two vote-getters then advance to a runoff election (hence the term "instant runoff"), and if your first choice didn't make it to the runoff, your second choice would get your vote (or your third, if your first and second choices don't make it, and so on). That means you'd never have to worry about "throwing away your vote" on a "spoiler" candidate again. Ranked-choice voting could help us break the wheel of voting for political parties that too often seem to conspire against us. And that's worth fighting for.

Meanwhile, Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the upcoming Farm Bill if it winds up cutting benefits for low-income working families. Yeah, Congress is working on a Farm Bill again, and by "Congress," in this case, I mean Republicans. And you know what that means: more regulations that make it harder for good Americans to get the help they need -- because Republicans only like the regulations that actually constitute a burden! -- and more rules kicking more Americans off the food stamp program. They got some nerve, passing trillions of dollars in tax cuts mainly for the rich and then saying that big corporate tax cuts will trickle down to the poor! I rather suspect the poor are used to something else trickling down upon them from the rich. Food stamps: you pay for them, so you should be able to get them when you need them. This is not a very difficult principle to understand, or at least it shouldn't be.

In other news, you may recall that horrid 2002 video of the Judge Rotenberg Center in Massachusetts administering electric shock "therapy" to an autistic student 31 times in seven hours for refusing to take off his jacket. The Rotenberg Center is literally the only American program for disabled children using remote electric shocks as punishment, which is nothing to yell WE'RE NUMBER ONE! about. Between 2014 and 2016, our FDA debated and then wrote regulations banning these shocks. Then what happened? A man who fervently hates all regulations that actually help good Americans got elected President, and since then, the FDA has done nothing about the matter. Typical. So the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell the FDA to implement regulations banning electric shocks, and thus help end the torture of special-needs students in America.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the FCC and the DOJ to reject the proposed Sinclair/Tribune merger, then CREDO still helps you do that. There's no need to theorize about what could happen when one corporation owns over 200 TV stations nationwide and can reach into every corner of the country, because we've already seen from Sinclair what that means: trading favorable coverage of the President for more access, mandating that their anchors support the "war on terror" after 9.11, and forcing all their newsreaders to recite from the same script about "fake news." It ain't far from there to imagine the Administration itself writing their "news" copy, and then what would separate us from your average developing-world dictatorship? You know, aside from the fact that we have a lot more weapons? Our Glorious Elites' lust for mammon will bring the rest of us hardship and misery -- unless we speak out in numbers our government can't ignore.

Action: war-making powers, torture-supporting nominees, the quality of mercy, and the "balanced budget amendment."

Another day, another "bipartisan" attempt to find that elusive "balance" between following our Constitution's war-making procedure and letting the President bomb whomever he likes. S.J.Res. 59 would authorize our President to use military force against "the Taliban, al Qaeda, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and designated associated forces," but not just them, not really -- also against anyone else the President designates as "associated forces." Congress would get to reject such designations, but they'd have to do so within 60 days -- can you say "run out the clock," boys and girls? -- and they'd functionally have to reject new inclusions by two-thirds, so they can override the expected Presidential veto. No, terrorists are not "existential threats" -- they don't hurt us anywhere near as much as we hurt ourselves fearing them. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject this attempt to give the President more unconstitutional war-making powers.

Meanwhile, you didn't think I'd forgotten about the nominations of Mike Pompeo to be Secretary of State and Gina Haspel to be CIA Director, did you? Word on the street (as of this writing) is that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will not report Mr. Pompeo out favorably -- the Committee has an 11 Republicans and 10 Democrats, with all Democrats and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) reportedly opposed -- but the full Senate might well vote on, and confirm, him anyway. And if Mr. Pompeo ascends to State, Ms. Haspel will be up for CIA Director; both individuals, as has been well-reported, support torture and generally frown upon privacy and human rights issues, and like other recent Administration hires including Zombie John Bolton, Mr. Pompeo seems anxious to start a war somewhere -- in Iran, he hopes, where he's in line with Administration dogma against the Iran nuclear deal, even though it's working. Hence Demand Progress helps you tell your Senators to reject the Pompeo and Haspel nominations.

In other news, the family of one David Diaz has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell California Gov. Jerry Brown to free Mr. Diaz, given the increasing uncertainty surrounding his conviction in a 1997 shooting. The victim of that shooting says Mr. Diaz didn't do it, and no less than three witnesses now say police pressured them into identifying Mr. Diaz as the shooter. Sounds like reasonable doubt to me! If you still think Mr. Diaz should serve out his sentence because "he was 19 and Hispanic so he must've been guilty of something," please do two things: 1) slap yourself and 2) slap yourself again. Maybe a third time, if that's what it takes. Our Founders quite correctly oriented our laws so that the burden of proof rests with the accuser, not the accused, and folks who squeal about law and order all the time when confronted with this fact may want to stop bragging about how much they love our Constitution.

Finally, the House passed its nefarious "balanced budget amendment" last week -- though not by a two-thirds margin, which is what you need to amend our Constitution. So why is the Senate taking it up this week? To be jerks, of course, because if our Senators can do one thing well, it's be jerks. No, our government does not need to "balance its budget like we do," because a) we don't and b) the rest of the world actually has a lot of faith in the credit of the most powerful country on the planet. And a "balanced budget amendment" will result in what, class? Cuts to Medicare and Social Security, that's what. And do we deserve that, after having worked for them and fought for them and paid into them all our lives? No, we do not. Maybe Congress could balance the federal budget better if they stopped giving welfare handouts to the rich and to corporations! Anyway, CREDO helps you tell your Senators to reject the "balanced budget amendment."

Around the table: why Russiagate still comforts liberals, and other lessons.

Glenn Greenwald discusses with Daniel Denvir the "comforting answers" Russiagate "offers to despondent liberals." Long story short: "the Trump victory was a traumatizing and disorienting event for most people," leading folks to "crave an explanation that makes sense and that lets you feel like the world is safe and understandable again." Key reminder: the Russian troll effort was "primitive and pales in comparison to the amount of money spent on messaging by political campaigns, let alone US corporations and lobbyists." And regardless of who goes to jail over Russiagate, I still think the Democrat play-not-to-lose mentality and Republican vote suppression had more to do with the result than Russia could ever hope to have done.

Say, did you hear about that time the National Restaurant Association hired Frank Luntz's group to poll Americans about raising the minimum wage, which of course the "other NRA" opposes -- and found over 70% of Americans perfectly happy to pay restaurant workers more even if it meant higher prices? No? That's likely because the big restaurant lobby, as you might expect, isn't happy with the findings, even though it hired The Father of The Death Tax to get those findings. I am a little appalled that 29% of Americans opposed a minimum wage hike "even if the average food service employee can't make ends meet," until I remember that 25% of the electorate is batshit insane.

Jim Naureckas at FAIRNew York Times hack advising Democrats to be more like "liberals" and less like "progressives." Apparently "liberals" know better than to "eradicate" economic problems like the income gap -- apparently they'd be content with handing out welfare checks, rather than, you know, minimum wage hikes and job-creating taxes on the rich -- and "progressivism" is somehow "intrinsically opposed to conservation," which is as ridiculous as saying conservatism is intrinsically opposed to progress. Anyway, I've never called myself a "progressive," because it's long been the Democrat way of running away from the word "liberal," but articles like the Times's give liberals like me a bad name.

Another week, another Congressional special election in a deep-red district that's somehow a tossup in at least one poll, and we learn that the Republican nominee for Arizona's 8th, current state Senator Debbie Lesko, has "routinely" introduced bills that are little more than ALEC model bills with a few words changed. It'd be nice if her dependence on/work for ALEC scuttled her election bid, but certainly the news has arrived too late (the election's tomorrow), and besides, not everyone knows what the American Legislative Exchange Council is, or how nefarious their works have been over the decades.

From the "Nobody Could Have Predicted" file: Mitt Romney doesn't even get a majority of votes at the Utah Republican Convention to pick a U.S. Senate nominee (among others) for 2018, and will face a primary against a state Rep who got more votes. Mr. Romney thinks Utahns didn't care for him running at the convention and trying to get enough signatures to appear on the primary ballot anyway, and maybe he's right -- or maybe good Utahns, like everyone else, hate those whom they perceive as "Establishment" politicians.

Finally, in the wake of our newest Supreme Court Justice casting the deciding vote against a part of immigration law allowing detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants who have committed "violent" crimes, our President now wonders aloud if Justice Gorsuch is conservative enough. All together now: one counterexample does not destroy a trend. Also, too, why should a President expect Justices to toe his line? And why should we enable that sort of thinking? That's not what our Founders wanted, was it?

Around the table: more thoughts about hubris and greed.

'Tis the season for the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy's "10 Things You Should Know on Tax Day." Roll call! American taxes are actually fairly low, and everyone pays them! The Republican tax "reform" gives most of its cuts to the wealthy! Tax cuts for the rich and corporations don't create jobs! The number of folks who pay the Estate Tax is now absurdly low! Plus charts.

Pursuant to the point that tax cuts for the rich and for corporations don't actually create jobs, Sam Pizzigati relates the story of Toys "R" Us's success during the New Deal era and its recent bankruptcy at the height of the let's-not-tax-corporations era. Once the highest tax bracket dropped to around 28 percent, "(b)ehaving entrepreneurially in the classic sense -- identifying an unmet consumer need, meeting that need with style and panache -- would now not be enough for many of America’s wealthiest. Patiently building up a business could eat up too much time. Behaving ruthlessly could pile up the millions quite a bit quicker." And so it went for Toys "R" Us, which squeezed advertisers, manufacturers, and workers, made its CEO very, very rich, and fell prey to private equity vultures.

Dean Baker reminds us that the relatively poor performance of Harvard's endowment over the last 10 years proves that "Hedge Fund Managers Get Rich Even When They Mess Up." Add that to the relatively poor performance of certain state pension funds who have apparently been bamboozled into thinking hedge fund managers know what they're doing! If they're not handing work to hedge fund managers out of sheer corruption, of course. Tha Bush Mobb taught us, I hope, to consider the possibility that what looks like incompetence might just be malice.

Alleged "moderate" Rep. Charlie Dent (R-PA) says he'll resign his seat in the coming weeks, rather than at the end of his term. And you know what that means: another special election in Pennsylvania! And the last one went so well for Republicans! Voters will fill the 15th district seat (much of which will go into the new 7th district, once the new district maps take effect with the general election later this year) as early as July -- or as late as November, though that latter option sure sounds like a recipe for mass confusion. Usually I'd say Republicans are better at exploiting chaos, but I don't know anymore. They've had a lot more practice lately, and seem to be worse at it.

Finally, CNBC catches Goldman Sachs analysts asking if "curing patients" using gene therapy is "a sustainable business model." They cite the example of Gilead Sciences's massive sales drop after developing a very good Hepatitis C treatment, one with a cure rate over 90%. More cures means less patients, you see! And there you have the very reason we are a sick, immoral, and decadent society: Our Glorious Elites don't say curing Hep C is something we ought to be doing because it's an unqualified good, like we do -- they wonder if it can make money. Thus gene therapy research might well give us eugenic manipulation, which only the rich would be able to afford, but not cures for diseases regular folks get, because only the former "makes money"! Are we actually in an episode of Black Mirror?

Around the table: from an apparent "free" trade reversal to the "retirement" of the House Speaker.

Remember when we could say "at least he got us out of that awful Trans-Pacific 'Partnership'"? Well, now our President is contemplating re-entering talks on the hated "free" trade deal. And by the looks of this article our "liberal" media is all set to enable him -- we don't even hear a substantive word about "free" trade opponents (a group which includes, like, everybody) until paragraph 18. The good news? A President Hillary Clinton would have already rejoined TPP by now, and thus sent her party on the road to massive losses in the House and Senate in November.

Chauncey DeVega at Salon reminds us how Republicans manage to keep their votaries and hurt them at the same time: by redirecting their rage at "individuals and groups they view as the Other." That's why the fever ain't breaking, Mr. Obama! The sad part about all of this is that we could just have easily said "Republicans leave the vast majority of their voters' bellies empty" but "fill their voters' hearts and minds with rage, hate and resentment" when Mr. Bush was President.

In a truly revolting development, Pennsylvania state Rep. Daryl Metcalfe (R) guts HB 722 -- which would have created an independent commission to handle redistricting -- with an amendment that puts power back in the hands of politicians. This he did, apparently, without showing his amendment to anyone first -- which is what folks always do when they've got the superior argument! -- and naturally his rewrite also cuts the state Supreme Court out of the process entirely, because waaaaaaaah! Could the good citizens of Butler County please turn this monster out this year? A shrub could do a better job.

Ho hum, Republicans who helped write the recent tax "reform" bill just so happen to be getting, on average, over $300,000 from "pass-through" business tax cuts. If I were Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), I'd use that information to absolutely savage probable Republican opponent Rep. Jim Renacci, who's one of the 15. If I were Rep. Jacky Rosen, the probable Democratic nominee in this year's U.S. Senate race in Nevada, I'd use that information to savage incumbent Sen. Dean Heller. And they both might be game for that! I just hope the consultants don't get in their ear first.

Our President apparently plans to pardon former Bush Mobb crony Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the only person convicted of anything over the Valerie Plame scandal back in the day. But how much good is this really going to do for Republicans in the short term? Scooter Libby isn't some martyr whose framed visage hangs on every rage-filled voter's wall, and even if the President's votaries care about nothing except "pissing off the liberals" (which is quite possible!), I still don't see them doing victory laps around the voting booths on Election Day because of it.

Finally, on the occasion of U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan's announcement that he'll retire from the House at the end of this term, Sam Fullwood III at ThinkProgress examines Mr. Ryan's legacy of "Cruelty Toward the Poor." But I doubt we're seeing the "curtain come() down" on his career of evil, because now he can earn millions of dollars spewing the same filth by becoming a lobbyist, a think tank fellow, or (God forbid!) a cable news commentator. In other words, Mr. Ryan's reward for quitting will be a promotion and a significant pay hike. Nice work if you can get it!

Around the table: the President is not America for the 443rd time, and other musings.

Louisiana and Minnesota legislators introduce anti-protest bills in the wake of protests over pipeline expansions in those states. And the Louisiana bill actually goes further than model ALEC "critical infrastructure" legislation in that you don't actually have to set foot on a pipeline site to go to jail. Again: if you have to pass laws to stifle protests, you've lost the argument. Adults admit when they lose arguments. I guess that means these legislators aren't adults. You know, just like our President.

Jessica Rich at Wired reminds us that -- in the wake of the news that 87 million Americans, not 50 million, may have had their personal info on Facebook compromised by Cambridge Analytica -- that we need basic internet privacy laws in America. Recall that Congress repealed FCC broadband privacy regulations in 2017 and a campaign ad may present itself: the Facebook scandal proves we need stronger privacy laws -- but your Republican Congressperson voted to gut federal privacy laws! Think Democrats will run that? Nah; running ads like that might make people think you'll actually work for them.

Alvin Chang at Vox draws a straight line from tax-cuts-for-the-rich in Oklahoma to the Oklahoma teachers' strike, now almost two weeks old. Over the last 14 years, the state legislature has cut the top bracket from 6.65% to 5%, which wound up depriving Oklahoma of some $350 million in annual education spending, such that Oklahoma kids now only go to school four days a week. You recall, no doubt, that tax-cuts-for-the-rich has put Kansas's public schools in peril, too, though at least Kansas didn't respond to hard economic times by sponsoring an "Oilfield Prayer Day," as Oklahoma did.

Ed Henry at Fox News may have won numerous plaudits for his unexpectedly scorching interview with EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, but the network's other programs either a) ignored the interview or b) gave it as much pro-Administration spin as possible. And this is exactly how one would do evil propaganda -- put up the occasional negative report to say "see, we're not so bad," and then bury that negative report as deeply as possible on programming that gets the most eyeballs. It's rather similar to how they've been using Shepard Smith for years. Hell, it's how they've been using their internet reporting for years.

Finally, hot on the heels of two FBI raids of the office of our President's personal lawyer, our President calls the FBI raid "an attack on our country in the truest sense." If he has a serious point to make about, say, the way the FBI got its warrants for the raid, you'll never hear it underneath all his TEH UNFAIRNEZZ!!!! and TEH WITCH HUNTZ!!!! And one more time: the President is not America. I locate the greatness of America in our people and our traditions, not our President. Perhaps Dr. Johnson should have said that conflating yourself with your country is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

Action: war in the Middle East, and the "balanced budget amendment."

In re whatever we're planning to do to Syria in the next day or two: Robert Naiman at Just Foreign Policy has started a petition on Change.org which helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure that our President gets Congressional authorization before beginning any military action against Syria. Our Glorious Elites will scream TIME IZ OV TEH ESSENCEZ!!!!! in our ears, in an attempt to get us to back yet another military action in the Middle East that will backfire against us in time, but we should remember two things: one, that our Constitution mandates that Congress, not the President, authorizes war, and two, that we don't know if Syria's government attacked its citizens with chemical weapons. After all, we couldn't prove they did last time Mr. Trump threw a bunch of missiles at them. That's why you don't leave foreign policy-making up to the President.

Meanwhile, earlier this week I argued against the "balanced budget amendment" the House will start considering soon on purely philosophical grounds -- and both Social Security Works and Americans for Tax Fairness still help you tell your Congressfolk to reject it -- but these organizations remind me that I didn't do enough to describe exactly what kind of havoc a balanced budget amendment could wreak. The amendment, if it passes, would force automatic cuts to programs like Medicare and Social Security, programs, I feel compelled to say once again, we earned by paying into all our lives. The amendment would also require a three-fifths vote, rather than a majority vote, to overspend its budget or raise taxes on rich folks and/or corporations. Thus Republicans could cut our earned benefits without actually having to vote on it! It's a win-win! For everyone but the American people, that is.

Around the table: including a *completely unsurprising finding* about tax "reform"!

Ho hum, Tax Policy Center analysis finds that folks making more than $732,000 are getting over $32,000 from the Republican tax "reform," while folks making less than $25,000 are getting a mere $40. If your first inclination is to say BUT TEH RICHEZ MAKES MORE OF TEH MONEYZ HA HA HA HA!!!!!, you might try grabbing a calculator and figuring out that folks making less than $25,000 are getting a mere one-sixth of one percent of their income back from the "tax cut," while wealthy folks are getting a far more robust 4.3 percent of their income back. And if your response then is to say THEY DESERVEZ ITZ MOREZ BECAUZ THEY CREATEZ THE JOBZ!!!!!, maybe you ought to just slap yourself. I can only repeat "CEOs would never hire anyone if they didn't have to" and "people who buy stuff create jobs" so many times, after all.

Campaigns in seven states and the District of Columbia have begun to close the "carried interest loophole" enjoyed by hedge fund managers at the state level. And all of conservatism rose up at once to marvel at the wondrous works "states' rights" can do! I kid, of course -- the "conservatives" you always see on TV care about nothing other than rich people having more money. Still, they might do well to attend what actual conservatives might be thinking -- that restraining the rich, particularly those rich who don't really do anything of value but move money around in a giant shell game, might help the little guy pull himself up by his proverbial bootstraps a bit better.

So you've heard about that $50-a-day-only-the-days-he-stayed-there condo EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt rented from an energy lobbyist's wife? Well, turns out the EPA approved a Canadian corporation's application for a pipeline extension, and that lobbyist worked for that very same corporation! "Any attempt to draw that link is patently false," an EPA spokeshack said, "because, gosh, if it pollutes and makes some CEO richer, we're going to approve it, regardless of whatever perks the Administrator might be getting!" OK, I made up that last part -- or, at least, I made up the part where the spokeshack said it out loud. Anyone else think maybe "knowing the industry you're regulating" is a farcical explanation for corruption?

In case you were wondering how "Fair and Balanced" Fox News was covering the shooting of Stephon Clark in Sacramento by police officers, Dina Radtke at MediaMatters informs us that Fox News has rather de-empasized the shooting and rather overemphasized the protests. Interesting, isn't it, that the on-air personalities say "violence" and then describe protestors standing on tables and being demanding and blocking other folks from going places and breaking one window? Gosh, I'm old enough to remember when violence was violent! But if you're getting all your news from Fox, chances are you're not doing this kind of tabulation anyway -- you're just waiting, breathlessly, to have your rage gland diddled.

Kentucky state legislature actually passes law preventing radiologists from diagnosing black lung disease from X-rays, and would leave the matter solely to pulmonologists. Turns out Kentucky has only six federally-certified pulmonologists, and four of them work for coal corporations, which might well have an interest in reducing the number of black lung diagnoses! Also, radiologists are doctors, too, plus they're better at reading X-rays, as you might guess from the word "radiologist," and of course they tend to find more black lung sufferers than the aforementioned pulmonologists do! But I'm sure our President, that champion of the forgotten, will sweep in and fix everything! I kid, of course.

Finally, Mike Elgan at Computer World says email is "the best social network." With email you can connect with "a lot of users," "filter spam and harassment," "interact with people on all the social networks," avoid advertising, and enjoy better search capabilities, among other things. Meanwhile, social media "are designed...to turn you into an addict," "so that you spend hours every day descending into a rabbit hole of unproductive distraction." But you can do a lot better getting your news by subscribing to email lists (ahem!) than by compulsively checking your social media feeds. Hell, email's a better way to get your news than cable news channels, too.

Around the table: more thoughts about law and order, health care, and media folly.

Self-described former "Second Amendment absolutist" says it's now time for "common-sense gun control." I wholly sympathize, having only lately accepted Thom Hartmann's prescriptions for a) regulating semi-automatics as strictly as we regulate automatics and b) regulating guns generally the same way we regulate cars. Averse as I am to making people pay over and over again for their past crimes, I would caution expanding background checks too broadly -- I would only want to check someone's criminal background if they were buying an automatic or semi-automatic, and only because these guns are basically killing machines, and thus machines whose sole purpose is to deprive other people of their rights (like, you know, life).

The unsuccessful prosecution of the Pulse shooter's widow constitutes, for Maha Ahmed at The Intercept, "The Criminalization of Domestic Abuse Survivors." Shooter Omar Mateen being dead, prosecutors rang up his abused wife, Noor Salman, on charges for which she has since been acquitted but which took up two years of her life fighting. Prosecutors often go after "somebody to punish," in one observer's words, and "(a)buse victims often end up being that 'somebody'" -- and a prosecutor has a lot of ways to bend these victims to their will, like charging them with failure to protect their children from abusers. With the vast majority of women in prison having suffered domestic abuse at some point in their lives, you'd think we could intervene more effectively than we do. But I sometimes think we'll even get past racism before we get past sexism.

Texas woman gets five years in prison for voting illegally -- because she was a convicted felon who did not understand that she had to finish the supervised release part of her sentence before she could get her right to vote back. Maybe she should have known beforehand, and maybe we should be treating folks who commit tax fraud more harshly than we do, but none of that matters in this instance, because she should never have lost her right to vote in the first place! Laws depriving folks of their right to vote because of felony convictions are a stain on our nation, and not merely because a vote isn't anything like a Tommy gun.

Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times notes that the current Administration's "sabotage" of the Affordable Care Act will result in our government spending $33 billion more to insure 6.4 million fewer people. I like saying "heck of a job" to things like that as much as the next guy, but as a journalist (and a damn good one, by the way!) I suppose Mr. Hiltzik can't just come out and say the obvious: why, it's almost like spending more federal money and covering fewer Americans is the whole idea! Luckily, I'm not a journalist, so I get to say it.

Finally, the notoriously right-wing Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns nearly 200 TV stations and will own over 40 more if its proposed merger with Tribune Media goes through, has apparently forced its media personalities to read the same script about the "the troubling trend of irresponsible, one-sided news stories plaguing our country." And then an enterprising Twitter user put together an 11-second video (embedded at the above link) depicting at least nine of these media personalities saying the exact same thing. A bunch of "local" news stations all owned by the same corporation all denouncing "fake news" and "media bias" in exactly the same way? Didn't I see that on Black Mirror?

Around the table: comprising mostly warnings about the next war, plus Rick Santorum says The Worst Thing Ever, Again.

Alex Ward at Vox puts the problem with killing the Iran nuclear deal: per a former State Department official, "(i)f I were the North Koreans, and Trump pulled out of the deal with Iran, why should I make an agreement?" Logic is not this Administration's strong point, and of course its votaries think logic is Communist or something, so I suspect the Administration will make the bad deal described in paragraph 26 -- one that would let North Korea keep the nukes it's got, versus the actual deal the Administration has such a hard-on to scuttle, in which Iran can't have any nukes. After that I presume they'll Blame Obama.

Andrew Sullivan sees the appointment of the Mustache of Evil as National Security Advisor as "the next step toward tyranny." It's a good analysis worth reading in full, but I would caution against thinking the next war will come after the midterms -- President Kennedy's Cuban missile crisis just so happened to take place weeks before the 1962 midterms, and I suspect having the country rally around him saved a lot of Democrat ass that year.

Of course unidentified sources say income National Security Advisor John Bolton will "rein in" his "hawkish views" once he joins the Administration, because what else would they say? That's he's going to make damn sure we go to war with Iran, regardless of whether America wants that or not or whether it's a good idea or not? Besides, going around announcing you're going to break everything would lead people to suspect you're going to break everything, and people who want to break everything can't have that.

CNBC poll finds a little less than one third of Americans reporting having more take-home pay as a result of the recent Republican tax "reform." That doesn't mean more folks aren't getting more money in their paychecks, but they sure ain't getting what rich folks and big corporations are getting, and people are going to vote how they feel. It is a bit miraculous that we're seeing this kind of reporting -- you know, instead of all the parroting of right-wing talking points we normally see when the "liberal" media tries to talk about taxes.

Finally, there is so, so much wrong with Senator Rick Santorum's suggestion that high school students should learn CPR instead of protesting gun violence, and the fact that CPR doesn't help you if you're bleeding to death isn't the half of it. He wants you to think "t(aking) action to ask someone to pass a law" equals "looking to someone else to solve (your) problem," when it actually equals getting your representatives, who are called "representatives" for a reason, to do their jobs. And he says kids should be asking "(h)ow do I as an individual deal with this problem," because if kids ask "how do we come together to deal with problems," then people like Rick Santorum don't win elections anymore. But worst of all: he thinks kids should accept the reality that they could be shot to death at school for no damn reason, and prepare for that eventually not by demanding more from their leaders but by learning CPR. I mean, c'mon, America is a can-do nation.

Around the table: the real lesson of the PA-18 special election, and other stories.

Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times reminds us how little the Republican tax "reform" is doing for workers. Mr. Hiltzik reminds us that if corporations were serious about using their tax cut largess to make workers' lives better, they'd have given permanent raises, not bonuses that disappear almost as fast as they appear. And he also reminds us that Pfizer could reap immense rewards (not just of money, but of prestige) if they actually found a good treatment for Alzheimer's and Parkinsons, difficult as that's proven to be. And that's perhaps more emblematic of our times -- Our Best and Brightest corporations, which our laws supposedly need to "set free" from "regulatory burdens," constantly choose the easy way out when given the chance. And the easy way out now tends to be more lucrative, which is not how it should be in a civilized society.

Ho hum, the Treasury Department projects that our budget deficit will go up to nearly $1 trillion this year! And none of the President's votaries, who wouldn't stop whining about the Obama deficits, will complain about this one, because TEH TAX CUTZ!!!!! Which, as demonstrated in the above paragraph, are doing such great work for America.

Also ho hum, we learn that none other than OMB/CFPB director Mick Mulvaney was the one who approved the Labor Department's disastrous decision to bury the study that said their now-abandoned "tip-stealing" rule would actually result in bosses stealing their workers' tips! I presume one day Mr. Mulvaney will realize he's gone all-in on the wrong side, and suffer appropriately for it. I kid, of course -- Mr. Mulvaney will get wingnut welfare from Fox News forever after all the harm he's done our country. (If only we could buy our cable channels a la carte! Then there might not be any media wingnut welfare to give!)

Here's something genuinely surprising: the Senate Intelligence Committee, currently dominated by Republicans, says (among other things) that we should conduct elections with paper ballots. You and I have been saying this for close to 20 years, but I'm not going to be annoyed about that, or about the fact that their concern isn't machines disappearing votes but Russian meddling -- it's the right prescription, and I didn't think they had it in them to even say so. Now let's see if they actually help fund paper ballots at the state level.

Speaking of things you and I have known for 20 years, Paul Krugman at the New York Times instructs us that the entire Republican program is a "bait and switch" -- they promise all kinds of things to voters, but what they deliver is nothing more than "upward redistribution of income" from workers to bosses. But his analysis is valuable, because it confines itself to the PA-18 election, in which the Republicans tried "three different bait-and-switch strategies" -- roll call! Tax cuts are great! Tariffs will bring back the steel jobs! Democrats hate God and America! -- that failed to deliver victory for Mr. Saccone in a district the President won by nearly 20 points. But, you know, it isn't that the voters are "wising up" (the voters are actually plenty wise already!) so much as that Democrats like Conor Lamb -- who ran against the tax cuts and Obamacare repeal, and who ran for expanding Social Security -- are giving voters someone to vote for, and that's a thing that might even overcome whatever war the President plans to start the last week in October.

Finally, a Dane County Circuit Judge tells Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker that he must hold special elections to fill two vacant state legislature seats, even if he's really, really afraid Republicans will lose both, as they lost a Republican-held (and rather grotesquely-gerrymandered) seat less than two months ago. And who was the gay-humping, baby-killing, flag-burning, socialist-loving Governor who appointed this judge? I won't tell you his name, but his initials are "Scott Walker."

Action: Social Security, consumer data protection, and social media.

So Paul Ryan wants to create a commission to "fix" Social Security? What's "broken" about Social Security, which keeps millions of seniors out of poverty and helps them have the dignified retirement they deserve? Well, according to Mr. Ryan, "reforming" Social Security is one way to "tackle the debt and the deficit." You know another way of "tackling the debt and the deficit"? Not passing tax cuts for the rich and for corporations, that's what! But of course Mr. Ryan supported that, and of course he revels in doomsday predictions about Social Security becoming insolvent. Why, I'm old enough to remember when they said Social Security would run out of money in 2016! So Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any Social Security "Commission" designed to cut our hard-earned benefits, but feel free to go further and tell your Congressfolk that lifting the cap on payroll taxes so that income over $128,400 can be taxed into the system is a better idea.

Meanwhile, Congress is also doing its damnedest to let Equifax avoid telling customers when they're responsible for data breaches! It really is like we have a Bizarro World Congress, one that observes all the negative media coverage over Equifax exposing the personal data of nearly 150 million good Americans to hackers and identity thieves and responds by saying well, let's protect Equifax from all the bad publicity, even though they earned it! Problem solved! And the legislation in question would also overrule stronger state-level laws demanding more disclosure from corporations that lose your data, because, after all, being a conservative is all about letting states do what they like, until they don't do what you like! Hey, I'm just going by the evidence! So Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject proposed legislation that would give even more corporate welfare handouts to big credit monitoring corporations.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Facebook to stop marketing its Messenger app to children under 14, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. Frankly, kids have a tough enough time navigating social media without Facebook dangling more shiny objects in front of them, and saying oh, lighten up, liberal, kids can handle more than you thinkis a) inaccurate, given that studies have found that 8th graders are generally unhappier the more they use social media, and b) disrespectful of parents' rights to make those decisions for their children. No, b) is not an exaggeration: kids today have so, so many more avenues to get led down an emotional rabbit hole than we did when we were young, and parents absolutely have the right to tell their kids no to any of it. Otherwise, how can parents even raise children? How can they teach them what's valuable and lasting in our civilization? I sure wouldn't leave it up to social media corporations to teach them that.

Around the table: with horrible truths about the Pennsylvania 18th district special election.

The President's nominee for CIA director, current CIA deputy director Gina Haspel, allegedly ran a CIA "black site" in Thailand where prisoners got waterboarded, and may even have ordered the destruction of video evidence of that torture. Right-wingers, of course, are squealing that ProPublica got the identity of one tortured suspect wrong, which of course automatically means she never ever tortured anyone ever ha ha ha suck it liberals! Seriously, though, this is what we get for looking forward, not backward. Right, Mr. Obama?

Study finds that of the 150 counties that get the most food stamps, 136 are rural. A majority of counties isn't the same as a majority of recipients, but surely this finding means our "liberal" media and our politicians underplay the prevalence of food stamp usage in rural counties. That's because of racism, of course -- keep telling rural food stamp recipients that any cuts in the program are really for TEH BLACKZ!!!! and they'll keep voting Republican. Unless, of course, Democrats start running campaign ads about Republican cutting your food stamps. I kid, of course -- these are Democrats we're talking about.

Turns out at least two stories about Executive branch corruption are worse than we thought: EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt's little "cone of silence" wound up costing $43,000, not $25,000, and the Carsons did-too pick out their $31,000 dining set on the taxpayer dime. I wouldn't blame you for thinking this doesn't look a whole lot like "draining the swamp," but you must remember that when they say "drain the swamp," they really mean "stick it to liberals."

Senate votes by a nearly 2-1 margin to pass the nefarious S. 2155, which would loosen financial regulations on big banksters. Any good news? The House thinks the Senate bill isn't evil enough, and wants even more easing of regulatory "burdens," so when House and Senate go to conference out differing versions of the same bill, Democrats can filibuster the resulting conference bill. Yes, even the ones who voted for it the first time who feel "betrayed" by the changed conference bill. I mean, Jon Tester's not a fool -- if the President's going to remain this unpopular, why throw him a lifeline?

Now that Democrat Conor Lamb has upset Republican Rick Saccone in the Pennsylvania 18th special election -- in a district the President won by almost 20 points in 2016 -- some Republicans, including the President himself, are scrambling to claim Mr. Lamb as a conservative. Because he's personally pro-life but believes abortion should be legal, an opinion that has impressed exactly zero pro-lifers since Geraldine Ferraro? Because he "doesn't like" Nancy Pelosi, another opinion that will have zero consequences in the real world? They're even resorting to lies like saying he "love(s) the tax cuts," which is the precise opposite of the truth, without breathing a word about Mr. Lamb's many attacks on repealing Obamacare and slashing Medicare and Social Security. Well, when you've got nothing but you still feel the need to flap your yap, what can you do but lie?

Finally, and perhaps even worse, Republicans were calling Mr. Lamb's opponent, Rick Saccone, an "F candidate" even before the election. Mr. Saccone is an ignorant, blustering fool, certainly, but you don't even have to look at our President to see that he's not exactly an anomaly -- that in fact he represents the natural progression of the mainstream Republican candidate. When Republicans spend decades defending indefensible Presidents and policies and provoking their most rage-addled adherents with bad arguments and lies, then Rick Saccone is precisely the kind of person winds up carrying their banner. Seriously, they're all "F candidates" now.