Thieves in the Temple.

Action: tax "reform," and home-grown terror.

American investor Nick Hanauer has started a petition on Change.org which helps you tell your Congressfolk to give rich folk and corporations "not one penny in tax cuts." I find it fascinating that this document finally exists -- in a nation where more than half of Americans have thought the rich should pay more for many years now, it really should have come into being a lot sooner! -- but it is still a defensive maneuver. If you want to play offense, call your Reps and Senators and demand a 91% tax bracket on millionaire income (which will not raise taxes on any income under $1 million, no matter what some right-winger tells you) and an end to corporate welfare tax breaks without reducing the corporate tax rate, so that small businesses and ordinary Americans like us don't have to shoulder a bigger share of our taxes than we can pay or deserve. You don't just move the line by holding the line; you move the line by seeing where the line could be -- and, in this case, where the line has been, since the 91% tax bracket was a feature of our tax code through the middle of the last century.

Meanwhile, a Change.org petition also helps you demand that our Department of Justice bring terrorism charges against James Alex Fields, who drove a car into a group of counter-protestors in Charlottesville, VA on Saturday. In apparently deciding to use his automobile as a weapon, Mr. Fields killed one person (Heather Heyer, of Charlottesville) and injured 19 others, and though I have no interest in reading any manifesto he may have written or may yet write, I find it hard to imagine that he did not intend to terrorize other folks into being silent. And I'd feel the same even if we didn't already know that driving cars into large groups of people has become one of ISIS's favorite ways of spreading terror. (If we pointed that out to him, we would not be surprised, I'd hope, if he reacted with some admiration toward terrorists he might otherwise call "mud people.") Perhaps a terrorist charge for Mr. Fields is, ah, a big ask of this particular Administration, one that loves swinging its balls when discussing a foreign threat but gets all limp when the perp is a home-grown Nazi wannabe. But duty is duty.

Action: tax "reform," law and order, and clean air.

Heard those radio ads lamenting our "highest in the world" corporate tax rate? And did you immediately respond, so why do so many corporations pay no taxes? Strange that right-wingers would think cutting the corporate tax rate might be the most popular part of the Trump tax "reform" plan -- apparently no one's buying tax-cuts-for-the-rich as "middle-class tax cuts" anymore. But you know why Congress always waits until budgeting has to get done to pass their corporate welfare "tax extenders" -- because corporate tax cuts are unpopular. So use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of the page, if you're on a cellphone) to tell your Congressfolk you want them to keep the corporate tax rate right where it is and close corporate tax loopholes so that the corporate tax raises more money and so good citizens and small businesses don't have to shoulder even more of the tax burden. And no, corporate tax cuts won't "liberate" CEOs to "create jobs" -- CEOs only create jobs when we make them, and when we close corporate tax loopholes, and bring back the return of the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income, we'll make them.

Meanwhile, H.R. 1865, the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, and S. 1693, the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, don't actually do much about sex trafficking, despite their titles -- instead, they allow internet service providers to be held liable for the activities of those folks who use their platforms. They won't go after phone corporations for letting sex traffickers use their phone lines, of course, but I digress. These bills would do nothing but cow a lot of internet service providers into shutting down services that sex traffickers might use, but which law-abiding Americans do use, like message boards, mailing lists, and dating apps. And right-wingers who constantly complain that liberals "blame the wrong people" should note that these bills actually do blame the wrong people -- only those ISPs that actually participate in sex trafficking should ever be held liable. I mean, that's basic law-and order, and when politicians use the horror of sex trafficking to curtail the freedoms of law-abiding citizens, they also do evil. So the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to vote down H.R. 1865 and S. 1693.

Finally, S. 263 might be called the Ozone Standards Implementation Act, but mostly what it does is prevent our government from implementing ozone standards! S. 263 would, ho hum, give states more time to comply with the ozone standards the Obama Administration EPA put out in 2015, would allow the EPA to review those standards every 10 years instead of every five, and would force the EPA to jump through even more bureaucratic hurdles before it can issue new ozone-related regulations. A lot of right-wingers seem to think (or, more precisely, want you to think) that the EPA doesn't consider economic costs at all when issuing regulations, but it always does, perhaps too much so, and "economic costs," here, shouldn't just mean a CEO's ability to gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home, but health care costs, which would go down at least $2.9 billion annually if the standards stay the way they are. Note well, also, that this bill's main sponsor is West Virginia Senator Shelly Moore Capito, who made a lot of noise about opposing the Trumpcare bill only to vote for the "repeal only" bill in the end. CREDO helps you tell your Senator to help keep our air clean by rejecting S. 263.

Action: rational budgeting, climate change, and abusing federal workers

The Trump Administration "Hard Power" budget -- no, I'm not calling it the "skinny budget," not just because "skinny" seems unthreatening, but because we should always call Trump Administration initiatives by their supervillain names, especially when the Trump Administration is dumb enough to hand them to us! -- would cut a lot of government spending that actually helps the good Americans who fund our government in the first place, and one of them is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (or CDC). How much does the CDC get annually? In FY 2016, the CDC's budget was a little over $11.5 billion, which ain't chump change (not even to Donald Trump!), but which also represented less than one-third of one percent of all federal spending that year. You'd think with all the CDC actually does for America as far as fighting infectious diseases, antibiotic resistance, and obesity, we'd actually increase their budget, not cut it. So PennPIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to cut the CDC budget.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell Gap, Disney, and Pepsi to end their association with the reactionary climate change deniers at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Sadly, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has mutated from your grandparents' pro-business organization to a behemoth that lurches as far right as it can on every conceivable topic. Want banksters to stop stealing your money? Then the U.S. Chamber of Commerce will fight you. Want our politicians to stop giving welfare handouts to oil and gas corporations and start helping develop a renewable energy grid that would be the envy of the world if we but had the will to build it? The U.S. Chamber of Commerce will fight you there, too. Getting corporations to quit the Chamber because of its reactionary economic views isn't so effective, of course -- why, big corporations generally have the same views! But big corporations (Gap, Disney, and Pepsi among them) also like getting on the public's good side in re climate change, and so you hit them there.

Finally, the Department of the Interior has reassigned over four dozen high-level employees to new jobs -- including Joel Clement, formerly the head of Interior's Office of Policy Analysis, who spoke out publicly about climate change's impact upon Alaska's Native communities -- so the Sierra Club helps you tell Interior Secretary Zinke to stop moving Senior Executive Service employees around after they say things that make the Trump Administration uncomfortable. Once Mr. Zinke gets down from that horse he always seems to be riding whenever the cameras are around, he'll tell you that he can move employees as he sees fit -- which is true generally, but not if he's doing it in retaliation for whistleblowing, or to force workers to quit. But behold! Mr. Zinke has already said, out loud, that he would use "reassignments" as one tool to reduce the Department's workforce. Logically speaking, how would that work? By sending people to places that would provoke them into quitting, that's how! And why should we allow him to do that?

Action: tax "reform," and pro-rape laws.

Since many Republicans seem anxious to move on to tax "reform," use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to call your Congressfolk and tell them to oppose the Republican tax "reform" "plan." As always, they'd give the biggest share of their tax cuts to the very rich -- and that's true of both their income and corporate tax cuts, since if corporations get to keep more of their profits, who do you think they're going to give it to? Their rich executives, of course. And if Congress repeals the Estate Tax, which doesn't affect estates under $5 million, who benefits from that? The very rich, again. No use telling me TEH RICHEZ CREATEZ TEH JOBZ!!!!!, not only because corporate executives never create a job if they can get away with it, but because higher taxes on the rich and on corporations create jobs -- when corporations have no incentive to hoard money or pay their executives outlandish sums, they'll hire more workers to make more stuff and call that an expense. I mean, that's how it worked in the country I grew up in -- you know, that place teabaggers keep wishing we could go back to?

Meanwhile, Jordan's Parliament may consider, as soon as today, repealing a law forcing rape victims to marry their rapists in order to "protect family honor." One wonders why the rapist doesn't bring dishonor on his own family through his action, or, you know, upon himself. (I presume we don't need to gender-equivocate about this matter as it occurs in Jordan or the seven other nations that still have such laws on their books.) But this is not a matter that should be left up to "cultural relativism" -- if a woman gets raped and then gets forced to marry the man who raped her, that's abominable simple and plain, not least because it takes away her freedom to be who she wants to be. And if the victim is a minor, who could not legally consent to sexual relations at all in America? That's even worse. So don't feel like a scold or a snob for telling people how to be civilized if they need to hear it. And of course some Jordanian lawmakers want to keep the law, because, I guess, change is hard and we can't just ignore tradition. But, ah, yeah, we can, in fact, ignore "tradition" that places a family's "honor" ahead of a woman's freedom and a civilization's justice. So Avaaz helps you tell the Jordanian Parliament to get rid of their pro-rape law.

Action: the 17th Amendment, and health care.

OK, let's cut this beast's head off while it's still small: Mike Huckabee, who used to be charming but has been intolerable since President Obama's election, called for the repeal of the 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution -- which provided for the popular election of U.S. Senators for the first time -- in the wake of not-enough Senators voting for any of the notoriously cruel and unpopular Republican health care "reform" bills. So call your Reps and Senators and state legislators today (using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page, or on the bottom of this page, if you're on a smartphone) and tell them you absolutely will not stand for repeal of the 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and you will regard anyone who supports such repeal as being objectively anti-democracy, since if you support repealing the 17th Amendment, you essentially oppose people voting. The fact that two-thirds of state legislatures just so happen to be held by Republicans right now must be a coincidence, right? The 17th Amendment improves on the Constitution, just as the Bill of Rights did, just as the 13th and 14th Amendments did, and amending the Constitution doesn't somehow dishonor our Founders, or their achievement. Rather, it does the opposite -- it says they taught us well.

Speaking of repealing things, Republicans would like you to believe that their health care "reform" effort is dead -- but OMB Director Mick Mulvaney not only told us that President Trump wants health care "reform" done before anything else, but he actually said that this was "the national attitude toward it." Good Americans would like our health care system to work better, but assuming that they must therefore support Republican efforts to make it worse is, to put it kindly, quite the logical leap. So, while you have your Reps and Senators on the phone about the 17th Amendment, go ahead and tell them what you want: that you want tens of millions of good Americans to be able to keep their health insurance, that you want Congress to expand federal Medicaid spending, not cut it; that you want them to preserve the pre-existing conditions ban, rather than give states and corporations ways to work around it; that you want them to keep the funding mechanisms for the Affordable Care act, rather than give yet more welfare handouts to rich people in the form of tax cuts. You know what else? Tell them you want them to force President Trump to fund the Affordable Care Act's subsidies, that you want Medicare to be able to negotiate its own drug prices, and that you want them to support H.R. 676, which would establish a national Medicare-for-All, single-payer health care system.

Around the table: in which the Democrats put forth a "strong, bold" economic agenda I'm sorry I couldn't get through that without laughing.

Miles Kampf-Lassin at Nation of Change evaluates what Sen. Schumer calls the Democrats' "strong, bold economic agenda," and finds it wanting. The plan's got antitrust enforcement, a $15/hour minimum wage, and paid sick and family leave, but no Medicare-for-All, no universal public college, no renewable energy grid refitting, and no 91% tax bracket on millionaire income, plus they're still plugging that damn retraining tax credit like that's ever been anything but corporate welfare. Also, too, "10 million more jobs over five years" will only run a little ahead of the population entering the workforce during that time, so it's not much of a promise. Remember, folks: don't invest yourself in the damn Democrats; invest yourself in the things you want your Congressfolk to do.

Speaking of corporate welfare, there's President Trump joining Rep. Ryan and Gov. Walker at a big to-do in Wisconsin announcing a new LCD screen-manufacturing plant supposedly to be built in Kenosha, which would create 3,000 jobs averaging $54,000 annually -- but would be financed by corporate welfare to the tune of at least $270,000 per job! Of course, if our state and federal governments were to spend, say, $54,000 on each $54,000/year job they created, Messrs. Trump, Ryan and Walker (who is, as you know, the King of Corporate Welfare) would call it SOCIALISM COMMUNISM NAZISM KENYAN ANTI-COLONIALISM!!!!! (Also, too, when you read the article, you'll find out that just about none of the promises made add up -- and that Foxconn, previously notorious for worker suicides at its Chinese plants, has walked out of deals like this before.)

The incomparable David Dayen tells us where a state-wide single-payer health insurance system could actually begin -- in Maryland, where many factors that would help establish a single-payer system (key among them being a) the relative absence of restrictive budgeting rules and b) the ability to level off hospital reimbursement rates) already exist. The Democratic front-runner for the 2018 gubernatorial race is a single-payer advocate, too, though we saw how that played out in Vermont. But then again, we can make things happen -- which is the only thing we should count on, since we're counting on ourselves.

Ho hum, major "liberal" media organs haven't critically investigated Amazon or its owner, newest-richest-man-ever Jeff Bezos, in nearly two years. This is despite (because of?) the fact that Mr. Bezos now owns the Washington Post (which has, I grant, surprised me at times since he took over). It's also despite the fact that close to one out of every two dollars spent online goes through Amazon, and that Amazon seeks to leverage its monopoly power in online commerce to get monopoly power in every other market eventually. I mean, no one thinks (in the absence of strong antitrust regulations) that Mr. Bezos will simply decide one day that he has enough money.

Finally, after the failure of the Republicans' latest (but surely not last!) health care "reform" effort, Fox and Friends's Brian Kilmeade bemoaned the fact that "the healthy people are paying for the sick people." Ugh, one more time: that's how insurance works -- and it's illogical to divide people into "healthy" and "sick," since anyone can be either healthy or sick at any time. And boy the Fox and Friends prettyheads sure complained a lot about Democrats celebrating the Republicans' failure. I wonder how they felt about the Republicans celebrating the passage of the House bill.

Around the table: in which we contemplate Trumpcare's apparent end, and other matters.

Michael Corcoran at TruthOut discusses "How Civil Disobedience Helped Kill Trumpcare -- At Least For Now." To the degree that we've won -- and we have to fight to preserve every victory, because nothing endures quite so long in Washington as a bad idea! -- it's because we looked around the morning after Election Day and we realized it was down to us. Now let's keep thinking that way in the coming fights over tax "reform" and the Trump infrastructure "plan," rather than worrying about getting more Democrats into the House and Senate.

Dig this understated headline from ITEP's Just Taxes blog: "GOP Leaders in Congress and the White House Set Out Goals for Tax Reform that Their Plans Fail to Meet." Remember: when they say they want to "fix our broken tax code for families, small business, and American job creators," they really only mean "American job creators," and by "job creators," they don't mean "anyone who buys something," though that's what "job creators" actually means -- they mean corporate CEOs, who would never create a job if they could help it.

Reed Richardson at FAIR reports on the "liberal" media's shameful rediscovery of the inaccurate body count in covering the "war on terror." It's bad enough that we hear so often these days about how many thousands of people we've supposedly killed, but the numbers all too frequently don't add up -- the "liberal" media regurgitate official kill figures such that "the official estimated size of ISIS in 2015 and 2016 averaged 25,000 fighters, which means the US coalition had supposedly wiped out the equivalent of its entire force over both years without making a dent in its overall size." You'd think that would pin their BS detectors to the red.

Nicholas Thompson at Wired talks to Tristan Harris about "how technology is hijacking people." Ever find yourself watching Paul Davis videos on YouTube when you only meant to check email? Well, that's the technology -- created and curated by engineers at very, very large corporations -- hijacking you. And if you don't like it (maybe you like Paul Davis better than I do, but at the point you're watching "Superstar" I think you've gone too far), you'll want to contemplate the difference between "ethical and unethical persuasion," or whether a "let's meet" button would be better than a "comment" button.

Finally, President Trump says we should get rid of the Senate filibuster in order to prevent failures like the Senate health care bill -- though that bill, thanks to arcane Senate rules, wasn't even subject to the filibuster! Of course, he has also complained that Democrats are stalling his nominees, though thanks to Harry Reid's 2013 "reforms," Democrats can't filibuster a single Presidential nominee anymore! Mr. Trump sure will say anything to divert your attention from the concrete cold fact that only the people stand between him and his cruel and stupid agenda.

Penny Rants for Friday, July 27, 2017: well, *someone* had a really good week.

Don't believe the hype that President Trump wants a middle-class tax cut and he wants rich folks to pay more. Not just because he's already proposed massive tax cuts for rich folks: don't believe it because we know that Mr. Trump will say anything to foment drama and chaos, and that fomenting drama and chaos is the only way he can get anything done. Of course, he's not really talking to us, at any rate -- he's talking to his votaries, who will dutifully cling to the belief that TRUMP CUTZ MY TAXEZ!!!! even as they're figuring out for the 20th straight month whether to keep the gas or the lights on. I really had my fill of government-by-drama-and-chaos during Tha Bush Mobb years; obviously God decided that, as a nation, we really didn't learn our lesson. Too often -- like, when I contemplate sensationalistic "liberal" media coverage in 2016, or how thoroughly Democrats have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory over the years -- I find it hard to argue with that conclusion.

Democratic New York Governor Andrew Cuomo explains why he doesn't "lay into" President Trump like many of his fellow Democrats do: "As a general rule, I haven’t found nasty ad hominem attacks on a person whose cooperation is needed to help your state especially helpful." Anti-kudos to Mr. Cuomo for using the word "help" twice in five words -- and that's not counting the synonym for "help" he used four words before that. "He decided early on he wasn’t going to stick a finger in Trump’s eye" would have considerably more gravity, of course, if Donald Trump didn't spend all his time sticking his finger in everyone else's eye. And Mr. Cuomo's statement also translates pretty well into "I'm happy being a hostage to circumstance, as is our unique heritage as Americans." If Mr. Cuomo is the Democratic nominee in 2020, Mr. Trump will beat him to a pulp -- why, Mr. Trump may even win the popular vote if Mr. Cuomo runs! He may even get a majority of the popular vote!

Hot on the heels of Mr. Trump's announcement of a ban on transgendered soldiers, ostensibly because their health care "costs so much," Josh Hafner at USA Today informs us that the added cost of transgendered soldiers' health care needs is equivalent to about four trips the President takes to his resort in Mar-a-Lago. It's also equivalent to 14 hundredths of one percent of our government's spending on our soldiers' health care, but the Mar-a-Lago figure is the most telling. I said yesterday that the up-to-$8.4 million added cost of transgendered soldier health care would be "chump change" in any other context to Donald Trump, but I forgot that his corruption always goes deeper than that: he also high-fives himself for sticking the cost of a month of weekend travel to Mar-a-Lago on the taxpayer, while crying crocodile tears about the "disruption" and "burden" of covering transgendered soldiers' health care for an entire year. What a fucking asshole.

Around the table: in which we confront financialization, again, and traumatic brain injury in NFL players, more fully.

Another economist reminds us that "financialization" of the world economy has turned it into a "house of cards." Read the whole thing, and then recall that Republicans, the "conservative" party, have become the apostles of handing over our economy to banksters (even more so than Democrats!), and ask yourself if chasing short-term profits and strangling corporations and households with debt exemplifies "conservative" values. I always figured being in it for the long term was more "conservative."

Greg LeRoy argues that politicians shouldn't hand out tax breaks to Amazon in an attempt to get them to bring their warehouses to their state or locality, but rather should impose new taxes and fees upon them. After all, Amazon has largely destroyed local retailing almost everywhere, more, even, than giant chain stores ever did, and while Amazon has been collecting sales taxes for some time now, they've been seeking out corporate welfare handouts to offset that "loss." So why won't politicians impose new fees and taxes? Answers could range from "abject cowardice" to "the hope that Amazon will kick back some campaign donation cash."

Boston University study finds evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (or CTE) in a staggering 110 of 111 brains of deceased former NFL players. There's tremendous "selection bias" in the brains, warns a lead researcher -- BU examined only 111 of some 1,300 brains of players who died after 2008, and many of these brains came from a player's family, some in accordance with the player's wishes -- but even if none of the others showed evidence of CTE, the resulting percentage would still dramatically exceed what you find in the general population. Note well, also, that a lot of these players had long retired before the era of the 300-pound-plus offensive lineman, meaning we can no longer blame the size of the players. We have to blame the game.

Finally, in a development sure to unnerve close readers of the Book of Revelation, a Wisconsin corporation actually plans to offer implantable chips to employees -- so those employees can "open doors, buy snacks, log in to computers, and use office equipment like copy machines." Which we know is absolutely necessary, since it's not like there's any other way to do any of these things. The implants are optional, of course -- until a series of "equipment upgrades" makes them "necessary," no doubt! As Leonard Cohen might say: I have seen the future; it is murder.

Finally, President Trump speaks to the Boy Scouts Jamboree in West Virginia and does what he does best: act like he's the center of the universe and nobody else, even his audience, matters.. I'm not particularly bothered that he "brought politics" to the Jamboree, or even that he yammered on about "fake news" or joked about firing his HHS Secretary or called our Capitol a "cesspool," but it's profoundly uncivilized behavior to take an event that belongs to other people and talk about nothing but yourself and your obsessions, and taking adult topics to a meeting of youngsters, frankly, just heaps injury upon insult. And seriously, segueing from "a scout is trustworthy, loyal" to "We could use some more loyalty"? You could try earning some loyalty, Mr. President.

Action: health care, the "war on terror," and the Grand Canyon.

Despite reports last week that Senate Republicans don't have the votes either for their planned repeal-and-replace-badly bill or their just-repeal-and-don't-bother-replacing bill, word on the street is that they're going to try and vote on one or the other of these monstrosities anyway. The Congressional Budget Office (or CBO) hasn't helped Republican efforts, of course, by calculating that the just-repeal bill will kick 32 million more Americans off their health insurance, with more than half of those losses (17 million) coming in just the first year. But of course, when some Republican Senators talked about both bills' inadequate funding of Medicaid and/or fighting opioid addiction, you should have known what would come next: an offer of tens of billions just for funding Medicaid and fighting opioid addiction in the states those Senators just so happen to represent, which is exactly the kind of naked who-cares-what-it-looks-like opportunism that has made Mitch McConnell so beloved the world over. Still, you can call your Senators and remind them that the whole point of being a Senator is not to strike deals with other Senators, but to represent their constituents. And you can ask them if handing out massive tax cuts to the wealthy while throwing tens of millions of people off their health insurance (which both bills will do) represents their constituents.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) that has enabled so much unconstitutional war-making over the last 16 years. Yeah, we're coming up on some anniversaries -- not just the anniversary of 9.11, of course, but the anniversary of every bad idea Tha Bush Mobb forced down the throats of the American people afterward, including the USA PATRIOT Act and the AUMF, which latter item President Obama used to justify military operations (in Libya and Syria, to name two) he didn't get approval from Congress to undertake. But when the House Appropriations Committee approved an amendment from Rep. Lee (D-CA) that would repeal the AUMF, a spokeshack for House Speaker Ryan (E-WI) quickly declared that the amendment "endangers our national security," though of course Mr. Ryan supported the Iraq war, which we can pretty much say created ISIS, and thus "endangered our national security." And now the Lee amendment has somehow been quietly disappeared from the defense authorization bill; Ms. Lee blames Mr. Ryan, which, if true, gosh, whatever happened to not stepping on your Committee Chairs' toes? That has, after all, been Mr. Ryan's go-to excuse whenever someone actually calls upon him to, you know, lead. They have an excuse for every occasion, don't they? Would it be too much to ask for Mr. Ryan's not-that-red district to send him packing in 2018?

Finally, President Trump wants to drill everywhere, even (or maybe especially!) on public lands, and guess what that means for the Grand Canyon? It means that former Interior Secretary Ken Salazar's one great achievement -- banning uranium mining in the area around the Grand Canyon for 20 years -- is in danger of going down. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell current Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to keep uranium mining corporations out of the Grand Canyon. He doesn't care what you think any more than his boss does, but let's tell him anyway, because it's our duty. The Colorado River, as you know, winds through the Grand Canyon, and it provides drinking water to over 40 million people in seven states plus the northwest region of Mexico -- and, well, it provides noticeably less drinking water to those good folks now, thanks to increased demand and climate change. Now imagine leeching uranium into that water. Does that sound like a good idea? Especially given that some uranium already leeches into the water naturally? Why, it's enough to make you think maybe tourism is the best economical use for the Grand Canyon, which is one of our national treasures, even if our government hasn't formally designated it as such. (Yes, Mr. Obama forgot to do that, too, during his last year in office.)

UPDATE. "Coming up on some anniversaries" is how that phrase in the second paragraph should have read! Error corrected.

Around the table: why the President's cronies shouldn't hold their breath waiting to be pardoned, and other lessons.

Come on, folks, President Trump will not issue mass pardons in order to thwart Mr. Mueller's investigation of his Russian ties. I'm sure Republicans have already told him exactly how that would look to the nation, but why would Mr. Trump want this whole Russia drama to go away in the first place? I mean, the man loves drama, and he also loves the way drama keeps people from looking where they ought to be looking, at things like his crappy health care "reform" bill and his crappy tax "reform" plan and his crappy "voter fraud" commission. Which is why we pay attention to these things, and not the big drama.

And never mind Mr. Trump's young-people-paying-$12-monthly-in-premiums figure, which sounded like hyperbole from the get-go -- his statement that letting health insurance corporations sell policies across state lines would reduce premiums by "60 and 70 percent" is the real whopper. Of course no one in the Trump Administration can cite evidence for this assertion, because it's utter rubbish. And it's not just rubbish: it's also a plot to wipe out what little power state regulators have to keep health insurers from screwing you. Note well, also, that healthy-people-should-pay-less-than-sick-people is an article of faith on the right, never mind that folks can be both sick and healthy at different times in their lives.

Neal Gabler explains the right-wing's Russia-love by telling us that "conservatives have a deep affinity for authoritarianism and an even deeper distrust of modern Western culture." I'm sure that's true of some folks who call themselves "conservative," and I don't doubt that Mr. Putin's "embrace" of "moral values" tricks some conservatives as well, but of course I'd argue that a love of authoritarianism is fundamentally not conservative -- and that a true conservative would fight concentrated power everywhere, even when that concentrated power benefits him in some way. So that should tell you that the biggest lovers of Vladimir Putin shirtless on horseback are not conservative, but reactionary, like too many who call themselves "conservative."

Some liberals sure are wringing their hands over the hosts of the Chapo Trap House podcast telling center-right Democrats that if they want to work together to beat Trumpism, they have to "bend the knee" to more hardcore liberals. Speaking as someone who finds Chapo Trap House sympathetic, I do find it more than a little absurd that this article spends more time wondering if "bend the knee" might be sexist or whether "dominance politics" is incompatible with egalitarianism than examining whether DNC let's-all-get-along types have thoroughly bollocksed everything up and maybe the real liberals should drive the car for a while. (And calling "bend the knee" sexist is a reach, though it's not a big reach.)

Ho hum, a Republican punditoid, who used to go on cable news all the time to defend President Trump, has taken money from Mr. Trump's 2020 re-election campaign. At least the Fox Business Channel has started to identify Mr. Serrano as a Trump campaign "senior advisor," but dig the Trump campaign saying they paid him for "communications consulting" and not for his TV appearances! It's like they think we're the stupidest people on the face of the Earth. Let's keep reminding them that we're not.

Finally, now that the Congressional Budget Office has said the Trumpian repeal-and-then-maybe-replace-later bill would kick more than 30 million folks off their health insurance, Republicans are stepping up their attacks on the CBO itself. But surely they know their arguments ("they were wrong about a relatively small matter a while ago, so of course they must be hysterically wrong about this much larger matter!") will be even less persuasive now that the CBO has been telling them the opposite of what they want to hear for months now. And if they keep the CBO from looking at the Trump tax "reform" plan, they must know how that will make them look, too -- i.e., like diaper-loaded infants, without the promise that they'll be charming again once you change their diaper.

Action: Social Security, and corporate transparency.

Social Security Works helps you tell Congress to protect and expand Social Security, not cut and privatize it. Since everyone who tries to destroy Social Security says they're trying to save it, you have to be specific: if someone's out to cut Social Security benefits, or give it up to the vagaries of the stock market so banksters can collect unearned commissions, then they're not trying to save Social Security. Even if they say so! Good intentions don't go a long way with me ordinarily, but lying about one's good intentions goes nowhere with me at all. You know what else goes nowhere with me? Scare stories about TEH SOSHUL SECURITIEZ IZ RUNNINGZ OUTZ OFZ TEH MONEYZ!!!!!! I'm old enough to remember when very serious projections from very serious people said the trust fund would run out by last year. And even if it were in trouble, very simple solutions present themselves -- chief among them, lifting the payroll tax so that income above $121,000 gets taxed into the system -- if our politicians had but the will to, you know, do the people's will.

Meanwhile, H.R. 3089, the Corporate Transparency Act, would force folks who start corporations to disclose that corporation's "beneficial owners," i.e., anyone who has (or shares) voting power or investment power in a corporation. Disclosing such information would essentially end the practice of forming a "shell corporation," which generally exists to launder money, and no, right-wingers, the Corporate Transparency Act would not infringe someone's "freedom of speech"! Money is not speech, and using corporations to conceal one's Medicare fraud or tax evasion or drug trafficking or terrorism certainly doesn't qualify as "speech," either. You may be pleased to learn that, in this drama-soaked, hyper-partisan time, three of H.R. 3089's seven House sponsors are Republicans -- two from New York and one from California, and you might describe any of them as moderates in the right light. You might even describe one of the Democratic sponsors as a moderate in the right light! So Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight corruption by supporting the Corporate Transparency Act.

Action: health care, forced arbitration, and monopolies.

After two more Senators came out against the revised Senate health care "reform" bill Monday night, Mr. McConnell announced a new health care bill that would (much like the bill Congress passed early last year) simply repeal the Affordable Care Act and give the Senate another two years to come up with something. But then Sens. Capito (R-WV), Collins (R-ME), and Murkowski (R-AK) announced they'd oppose the new bill, too. So is the Republican effort to destroy Obamacare finally over? Don't bet on it -- the new bill is actually a dream bill for Republicans, one that repeals all the taxes that fund Obamacare and makes severe cuts to Medicaid while leaving the pre-existing conditions ban intact, plus it would kick even more people off their health insurance! You can go ahead and call your Senators and tell them you oppose the new-new bill, too, because it still hands out welfare to rich folks, because it still cripples Medicaid, because it still kicks tens of millions of Americans off their health insurance.

Meanwhile, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) has just finalized a rule preventing banks from forcing customers to redress grievances through arbitration -- which allows customers to band together in class action lawsuits against banks for the first time. (The CFPB's authority to issue this rule, by the way, comes from Congress via the Dodd-Frank law, so brook no silliness about "regulatory overreach.") If someone says "class action lawsuit" and you automatically think "frivolous lawsuit," you won't be impressed with the CFPB's rule, but you might be more impressed if you were one of those folks who had Wells Fargo open up fraudulent accounts (and collect fraudulent fees) in your name. Forced arbitration, as you know, tends to benefit the banks more than it benefits you -- sure, it's "quicker," but if that means a bank can pick the "right" arbitrator more easily and thus win a case that you should have won, why would speed matter? So Congress is trying to roll back the CFPB's rule, because of course they are, so People's Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect your right to a day in court and reject any effort to roll back the CFPB forced arbitration rule.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell the House and Senate Judiciary Committees to hold hearings on Amazon's proposal to buy Whole Foods. Politicians of both parties have shown little taste for pursing antitrust matters, and they've also shown a distressing ignorance about the disruptive power of technology corporations. Hence they'll likely reason that since the proposed sale of Whole Foods to Amazon doesn't give Amazon anything close to a monopoly of grocery stores, it's not an antitrust matter. If, like me, you think a corporation should never own another corporation, you'll be less impressed. You'll also be less impressed if you foresee a time when Amazon will take over all markets -- a takeover greatly facilitated, of course, by Democrat and Republican fiddling while Amazon usurped internet commerce to the point that one out of every two dollars spend online goes through Amazon. In short, Amazon would leverage their monopoly power in one fairly large market to gain monopoly power in all markets, and that's definitely a matter that requires further Congressional investigation.

Action: tax "reform," and endangered species.

President Trump seems awfully anxious to get past health care "reform" and on to tax "reform," and you can see why. The Affordable Care Act went to such labyrinthine lengths to preserve corporate health insurance that no one who might have fought for it could say, simply and directly, what they were fighting for, but now Republican "reforms" have been, if anything, more labyrinthine -- plus millions of good Americans have now benefitted from Obamacare and thus have something tangible to defend. Getting the rich more undeserved tax cuts should be easier, since most folks hate paying taxes, and since folks often find the things taxes pay for to be intangible. But I think folks are getting wiser about all that, and the Tax Policy Center makes the whole matter pretty simple, by showing how big Mr. Trump's tax cuts would be for the very rich ($900,000!) and how tiny they'd be for poorer working families ($40), a message so simple you could turn it into a 30-second ad. So that should help you call your Senators and tell them to reject more tax-cuts-for-the-rich.

Meanwhile, I still have two action alerts relating to Congressional efforts to gut the Endangered Species Act: the first, from Penn Environment, helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject H.R. 717, the so-called Listing Reform Act, which would force our government to jump through all kinds of flaming hoops before listing a species as endangered, and the second, from Environmental Action, helps you writing a letter-to-the-editor opposing H.R. 2134/S. 935, the so-called Endangered Species Management Self-Determination Act, which would give our government a mere five years to rehabilitate an endangered species enough to delist them. Both bills follow the right-wing playbook of messing with anything our government does well -- and rehabilitating 98 percent of all the species ever listed as endangered is pretty darn good! They also follow the right-wing playbook of invoking "reform" and "self-determination" when they really mean "letting oil and gas drillers do whatever they like."

Action: health care, Medicare drug prices, and clean water.

Sen. McConnell (E-KY) has postponed voting on the latest iteration of the Senate health care "reform" bill, ostensibly because Sen. McCain (R-AZ) just had surgery, but call your Senators anyway and tell them to reject this bill, too. Why? Certainly because it injures Medicaid just as much as it did before, but also because it would do a brand new injury to Obamacare exchange users by allowing health insurance corporations sell a crappy, high-deductible plan as long as they sell Obamacare-compliant plans as well. Not only does that allow insurers to evade the pre-existing conditions ban in their crappy, high-deductible plans, it siphons off most of the healthy people from the good plans, which means sicker people will use the good plans, which will make the good plans more expensive. The new Senate bill excises three (but not all) of the tax major-cuts-for-the-rich, but don't celebrate: if the Senate passes this bill, the House's bill will still have all those tax cuts in it, and guess what'll happen next? The reconciliation bill will have all those tax-cuts-for-the-rich in it. I mean, I'm no oracle, and I know they'll do that. So let's stop them.

Meanwhile, Sen. Sanders (I-VT) says he'll wait until after this whole Senate health care "reform" bill is over and done with before he introduces a single-payer health care bill, but no power in the universe constrains us from expressing our will about health care issues, so Sign for Good helps you tell your Congressfolk to allow Medicare to negotiate its own drug prices. Medicare has only had a prescription drug program since 2003, and one of the prices of creating it was that Medicare could not negotiate for better drug prices with big pharmaceutical corporations, you know, because that was "big government" or something. You won't be persuaded by that argument, of course, if you think of "big government" as our government, nor will you be persuaded if you think lower drug prices for seniors is a better goal than inflated salaries for big pharma CEOs, which is basically the choice here. Oh, and don't count on President Trump's "leadership" on this matter; he thinks Medicare is the biggest price-fixer on the market, despite its complete inability to negotiate drug prices! That's why you never count on "Presidential leadership" -- and you only count on your leadership.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell the Delaware River Basin Commission (or DRBC) to keep banning fracking in the Delaware River area. The Delaware River still provides drinking water to 15 million Americans, so fouling it up with carcinogenic fracking chemicals would be a bad idea. Don't let right-wingers browbeat you with their ZOMG WE NEEDZ TO GET OFF TEH FOREIGN OILZ!!!!!, because if we get ourselves off foreign oil but can't drink our own damn water, then we've played the game wrong. Also, there are other ways to get yourself off foreign oil -- solar and wind power, for example. And certainly don't let right-wingers drone on about the cost to small businesses and the higher energy bills, because, again, our descendents won't be sitting around a fire telling each other that even though no one can drink the water now, it sure was a good thing that electricity bills were a little cheaper! If that's even true, of course -- I mean, really, between "lower electricity bills for regular folks" and "more unearned money for executives so they're better able to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home," the latter is the more likely outcome.

Action: pollution, tax "reform," and drug monopolies.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: the state legislature has passed SB 624, which would allow longwall mining corporations to dump their waste in Pennsylvania's streams as long as they come up with a "plan" to clean it up later. I've said it before and I'll say it again: if you told your kid to clean his room, would you let him dump his clothes all over the floor and just let him come up with a "plan" for cleaning his room later? No, you would not. And your kid isn't planning to poison the drinking water in public streams! It gets worse: SB 624 would also apply retroactively, meaning the Consol corporation would get off the hook for the pollution it's already caused, and if that isn't the very definition of corporate welfare, I don't know what is. But Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf still has to sign the bill in order for it to become law, so you can call him at 1.844.906.0777 and tell him to veto SB 624. He wouldn't just be protecting good Pennsylvanians' drinking water, he'd be protecting the rule of law. I mean, if corporations can just get crony legislators to get them off the hook for their wrongdoing, do we even have a rule of law?

Meanwhile, the Trump Administration now says it wants to lay out a tax "reform" plan in September and get it passed by year's end -- and Treasury Secretary Steve "the Foreclosure King" Mnuchin said it absolutely won't raise taxes on the rich, despite reports that Steve Bannon wanted to see a "4" in front of the top tax rate (though I guess we can't discount the possibility that he really meant he wanted the top tax rate to be 4 percent!). But we know this drill: Republicans would merely give massive handouts to the rich and to corporations, and while we've done good work with our resistance to the health care "reform" bill, we're going to have to do a lot more heavy lifting to stop Republican attempts at tax "reform," in part because, well, a lot of folks don't remember that taxes pay for things. So go ahead and call your Reps and Senators, using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) and tell them real tax reform would bring back the 91% tax rate on millionaire income, raise the Estate Tax rate, close corporate tax loopholes, and favor lower-income families more than the wealthy.

Finally, H.R. 1223, the Orphan Products Extension Now Accelerating Cures and Treatments Act, is known as the OPEN Act, though its title actually produces the acronym OPEN ACT Act. Which is awkward! And as with so many bills with allegedly clever titles, this bill will do us harm by giving big pharmaceutical corporations an additional six months of exclusive rights to a drug the FDA approves for an additional, rare health condition. How does that help folks who have such conditions? Why, by forcing them to pay through the nose for the use of that drug for six months, that's how! In other words, H.R. 1223 is nothing more than a corporate welfare handout disguised as a way of "encouraging" big pharma corporations to treat rare conditions. If you're about to argue that their rarity precludes a big pharma corporation seeing it as a money-making opportunity, then slap yourself! Seriously! Stop accepting the lie that helping people must make someone rich -- because that's a good way of ensuring that people keep getting rich without actually helping anyone. Social Security Works helps you tell your Reps and Senators to oppose corporate welfare and drug monopolies by opposing the OPEN Act.

Around the table: in which we are reminded to define terms like "treason" and "free markets" precisely.

Well, this timing sure is suspicious: not long before the ongoing five-nation terror campaign against Qatar began, the Trump family tried to get a Qatari billionaire to put half a billion dollars into their failing 666 Fifth Avenue property. So just remember that the next time President Trump says Qatar "has been a funder of terrorism at a very high level" -- if the vaguely-put "at a very high level" doesn't already strike you as coming from a man who's lying. And maybe the next time your Republican Senator rushes from his car to a meeting of rich people, you could ask him whether President Trump's real estate failures are going to dictate our entire foreign policy from now on.

Speaking of Trump and failures, Charles Pierce at Esquire looks at Trump the Younger's apparent attempts to get "dirt" on Hillary Clinton before the election and concludes that when the Trumps deal with Russian mob figures, they're "punching out of (their) weight class" and are little more than "compliant minnows in a shark tank." As a bonus, we may have learned why the Trump Administration really fired former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara. Study, though, the works left behind by Sergei Magnitsky, because he was obviously an extraordinarily courageous man, facing as he did certain death by exposing Russian corruption on an almost unimaginable scale.

But Jesus Mary and Joseph can Sen. Kaine (D-VA) stop with the "treason" talk already? It sure looks like Trump the Younger broke the law by soliciting "dirt" on Mrs. Clinton, but is that treason? Article III, Section 3 of our Constitution instructs us that "(t)reason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort." Has Congress declared war against Russia? No, it has not -- and I refuse to distend the definition of "enemy" further than that. Anyone who's ever been called a traitor for no damn good reason -- and their numbers include not just you and I, but this nation's Founders -- appreciates the importance of defining terms precisely.

Sam Pizzigati at the OurFuture blog reminds us that the ongoing downfall of Sears more or less reflects our ongoing downfall as a civilization. Wasn't that many decades ago that Sears executives didn't make silly money and its employees got good treatment -- though the 91% tax bracket kept executive salaries down and Sears treated its employees well to keep them from joining a union. Today, of course, the top tax bracket is over 50 points lower and unions have a third of the membership they used to have, so of course a vain bankster runs Sears into the ground and you might find more rats than employees in a store on a given day.

Charles Ornstein at ProPublica describes yet another way right-wingers injure Medicaid users: by demanding that the folks who get it verify their eligibility twice annually instead of once. And here you thought being conservative was about streamlining government services and reducing paperwork! Sadly, today's "conservatives," who we'd better describe as reactionaries, would only reduce the "burden" of "bureaucracy" for corporations, not people. Plus they think any program that works for everyday Americans is evil. Am I beating a dead horse? In these times, beating a dead horse is an act of courage.

Finally, Dean Baker reminds us that "Paul Ryan Hates the Idea of a Free Market in Health Care" and "He Wants to Give Money to Rich People." "There are no government-granted patent monopolies in a free market," Mr. Baker reminds us. "It is possible to argue for the merits of government granted monopolies...but it is not possible to deny that these monopolies are a government policy, not the free market." More to the point, this policy doesn't make people free, not if we pay $360 billion more every year for prescription drugs. Of course, the intellectually-bankrupt Mr. Ryan doesn't oppose any of that, nor does he oppose big pharmaceutical corporations taking taxpayer money to make drugs in the first place (which entitles us to rather more oversight than we've got!).

Action: health care, and student loan debt.

Congress comes back to work this week (such as they "work"), and the Senate will be all hot to pass that monstrosity of a "health care" "reform" bill, so you can call your Senators and tell them to oppose it, whether you've done that already or not. And I would recommend making a list of all the things about the health care bill you don't like. For example, I would tell your Senators you do not want them to cut the Affordable Care Act's taxes, most of which are on the very wealthy and some of which help fund Medicare. I would tell your Senators they should expand federal Medicaid spending, not cut it. I would tell your Senators you do not want to give states any wiggle room to allow insurers to deny people with pre-existing conditions. I would tell your Senators you do not want them to allow insurers to charge seniors even more than they charge younger folks. And I would tell your Senators you do not want them to make Obamacare's tax subsidies worse than they are now. I think you need to make very specific demands, in order to make your will clear to your Senators.

Meanwhile, you may know that Education Secretary DeVos has "frozen" Obama-era protections against predatory student lenders -- protections that would prevent for-profit colleges from using forced arbitration clauses, among other things -- but her move has apparently prompted 18 state Attorneys General to sue the Department of Education. Anyway, the Department of Education also plans to gut the Gainful Employment and Borrower Defense rules, which would force for-profit colleges to live up to their claims that the education they're offering can actually get you a job and protect students from predatory for-profit colleges, respectively.  The Dept. of Ed is taking public comments on their plans to gut these rules, but only until this Wednesday, of course (that'll probably be another lawsuit eventually); here's where to leave your comment. You might want to mention that for-profit colleges generally get taxpayer money, which means we get stuck with the bill when for-profit colleges like Corinthian saddle their students with useless degrees and mountains of debt.

Action: health care, Amtrak funding, and anti-pollution funding.

As you know, Senate Republicans have postponed voting on their even-worse-than-the-House-bill health care "reform" bill, and maybe it looks bad for a bill that typically gets around a 17% approval rating (higher than Congress's approvals generally, but rather lower than Obamacare's approvals at similar points in 2009 and 2010). Still, let's not get complacent; the Senate plans to be done with revisions on the bill today, which means it would go to the CBO next week and get a vote in mid-July, and these Republicans are evil. They don't care that you rely on the Obamacare Medicaid expansion right now or might one day, they don't care that the ban against pre-existing conditions protects you from getting screwed by your insurer, and they certainly don't care that you already see through their lies about "tax cuts for the middle class" (they're for the rich, just like always!) and "lower premiums" (your premiums might go up more slowly, but who cares if you're paying more out of pocket for lousier health care?). So call your Senators again, just to let them know we're watching them.

Meanwhile, among the multitudinous other nefarious things the Trump "hard power" budget would do is zero out funding for Amtrak long-distance service for passengers. Historically, Presidential budgets that have tried to cut Amtrak funding have met with fairly steadfast resistance even from Republican Senators -- remember Mr. Specter's blithe dismissal of a Bush Mobb budget cut proposal in 2005? -- but these are, as they say, interesting times. And ending federal funding for Amtrak's long-distance train rides would essentially destroy long-distance train travel in America, denying that service to nearly half of all Americans, particularly those in areas that don't have much in the way or airports or interstate highways. The truly stunning thing, of course, is that Mr. Trump's budget actually comes out and says it'd be better for Congress to concentrate on improving Amtrak's "corridor" services, meaning, essentially, densely-populated areas. And they say Democrats hate flyover country! MoveOn helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to end funding for Amtrak's long-distance passenger service.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: your state legislators are all hot to cut funding even further for the state Department of Environmental Protection, as well as the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. Why? Because these things don't make money for some politician's crony -- they only protect our clean air and clean water and public lands. But cutting funding for these two departments has real-world consequences, ranging from the closure of beaches and trails to the backlog of clean water complaints the DEP can't address because it doesn't have the staff. I shouldn't even say "staff" -- I should say jobs. Maybe then the legislature will fund the DEP and the DCNR -- because they create jobs for people who actually do the hard work of (for example) inspecting mines and monitoring fracking waste. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your Pennsylvania state legislator to protect the commonwealth by properly funding the Departments of Environmental Protection and Conservation and Natural Resources.

Around the table: in which Republicans blink, for now.

Senate puts off health care "reform" bill vote until after the July 4 holiday. But don't get complacent: keep calling your Senators and communicating your will. And what's with President Trump's spokeshack saying that Mr. Trump hopes "Republicans would live up to their promise" of passing an Obamacare repeal? Like Mr. Trump never made that promise himself? Way to throw your party under the bus, Dear Leader!

So how was Mitch McConnell putting lipstick on that pig of a bill until yesterday? Why, by completely ignoring that part of the CBO report that says 22 million good Americans will lose their health insurance under the Senate bill, of course! He also pretended tax cuts going mainly to the rich were "middle-class" tax cuts, and he also "confused" rising premium prices and the rising growth rate of premium prices, so he could "accidentally" say the bill will do something about the former when it actually does something about the latter. Punchline? Obamacare has already reduced the growth rate in premiums -- and that's nothing to write home about.

Just to remind you that states aren't the only organs keeping massive amounts of data on good citizens, Cora Currier at The Intercept describes World-Check, a database owned by Thomson Reuters and used by world banks, which lists some two million folks whose alleged ties to crime or terrorism may be quite exaggerated. You might be able to get World-Check to change its data on you, eventually -- if you even know you're on it. And of course Thomson Reuters says it's a "risk assessment" tool, which is just doublespeak for blacklist.

Jeff Bryant at the OurFuture blog explains why "Charter Schools Do Bad Stuff." Long story short: "Because They Can." Long story somewhat longer: private agencies, not public ones, generally "monitor" charter school activities and "hold them accountable." It's bad enough we throw away the taxpayer money on private schools that we should be spending on public schools, but then our local governments don't even hold them accountable, instead outsourcing the job to a private entity. But really, what do charter schools have to fear from the people?

Finally, in a heroic effort, Tasneem Nashrulla at Buzzfeed tabulates recent softball questions Fox News has asked President Trump, Vice President Pence, and Ivanka Trump in the last 24 days. The list is either disheartening or hilarious depending on your level of spiritual advancement, but I'm only going to highlight one example: one talking head asks Mr. Trump if "Republican Senators are doing enough to have your back" on the health care bill, rather than the more pertinent question of whether they, or their President, have got the people's back. You see, for Fox News and for Donald Trump, democracy ain't about you, it's about them. May God have mercy on their immortal souls.

Around the table: why the FDA is a hostage to medical device corporations, and other lessons.

AP finds nearly 20 secret prisons in southern Yemen, where UAE forces torture alleged terrorists and American forces question them. The difference between the two isn't so vast, since international law looks upon the questioning of tortured detainees as complicity in that torture, and also since one Yemeni soldier has testified that at times American forces were mere "yards away" from that torture. Oh, if you're smelling that faint Trump odor, it sure looks like this has all been going on since the Obama years.

FDA strikes "deal" with medical device manufacturers which just so happens to require that the FDA exercise considerably less oversight over these same manufacturers. The FDA has to renegotiate this particular point every five years in order to continue getting funding from the medical device industry to finance a big chunk of its operations. Why not just fund it entirely with tax money, particularly since every time a medical device goes bad it hits the news big-time? At least then the FDA would be more accountable to us, instead of being industry's hostage.

Franklin Foer writes a long and generally incisive piece on how Democrats can get white working class voters back (without, you know, becoming racists again). Key points we learn from the famous Macomb County, MI focus groups: Trump votaries generally hate blacks a lot less than they used to but seem to have displaced that anger onto immigrants, and they don't care that Mr. Trump seems unhinged -- but they also don't know he's sold out to Wall Street banksters, and are very angry to learn that he has. Courageous Democrats might do something with the second item, but I think I just told you why that won't happen.

Ron Fein at TruthOut reminds us that President Trump has said bupkus about Turkish Presidential bodyguards attacking American protestors on the street last month. We can think of a few reasons, of course -- that Mr. Trump has encouraged his own supporters to act pretty much the same way, or that assholes tend to hang around with other assholes -- but you may not know that the Turkish President threatened to take Mr. Trump's name off a pair of Trump Towers in Istanbul last year. Oh, well, just another Trumpian conflict of interest that limits our freedoms.

Finally, the Carrier plant in Indiana where President Trump supposedly saved all those jobs in late 2016 will still outsource some 600 manufacturing jobs by the end of this year. Turns out most of the jobs Mr. Trump "saved" were not union-organized manufacturing jobs, but were technical and engineering positions that were never in danger of being lost in the first place! Also, the cash Carrier got as an incentive to keep the jobs? They're putting that into automation instead of actual job creation. Who "doesn't care about jobs" now, Trump votaries?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: net neutrality, and the Estate Tax.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: the continuing adventures of President Manchild.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: corporate tax evasion, and live town halls.

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

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