Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: more thoughts about hubris and greed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: there are a lot of opportunities, if you know where to take them, you know.

The President enacts tariffs on steel and aluminum, and the World's Last Economist, Michael Hudson, tells us why that's such a terrible idea. While it's true that great nations got great through protectionism, not "free" trade -- and have since lied to themselves about it to get other nations to buy into "free" trade! -- generally you don't put tariffs on raw materials, but the finished products that come from them, so if imported steel gets more expensive, steel corporations not only won't invest in new plants or jobs, they'll make less money in profits. (We won't even get into the plan to lift the tariffs on Mexico if they pay for the border wall. I mean, that's just rock stupid. And the President's votaries will love it.)

Good Kansans are challenging their state's show-your-citizenship-papers voting registration law, and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who's both the defendant and the defendant's counsel here, tells the plaintiffs they just aren't trying hard enough to get registered. I couldn't blame you for asking if voting is your right, why do we have to try so hard to get registered? But you also have to remember that folks like Mr. Kobach can pretty much take the day off whenever they like without any consequences, so they don't understand what working families have to go through.

Interior Department reportedly spends almost $140,000 for a "Secretary's door." At that price, that door better open up into a better universe than this one, and, ah, when you call the contractor who did the work and they hang up on you without saying goodbye, that's a bad, bad look! And of course Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke thinks his department's budget should be cut! The pricey door shouldn't surprise you, though: Ryan Zinke, you may recall, is the man who literally rode into his first day on the job. Drama: it's all Republicans have to offer.

The Straight Dope wonders if bacteriophages, or viruses that can infect and change bacteria, will save us from the coming antibiotics crisis -- you know, the crisis that comes from using four out of five antibiotics in healthy feed animals as a way of producing more meat? Initial analysis: they could help, but they're not necessarily a magic bullet, particularly when it's hard to turn them into cash cows for big pharma (and, to be fair, when Western regulatory agencies have no history of handling them). Maybe we spend tax dollars researching phages, and then keeping the results for the public? Maybe we ban antibiotic abuse? Just saying!

Finally, we should absolutely celebrate that the West Virginia teachers' nine-day wildcat strike won them (and other state employees) a 5% pay hike, but we should also recall that the state decided to fund these increases by cutting state health care spending. A truly skilled Democratic consultant would call that an opportunityto run campaign ads against Republican state legislators who chose to cut health care instead of, say, raise taxes on rich folks. But I kid, of course -- Democrat consultants are always too busy polishing their civility trophies to try something like, you know, winning.

Around the table: describing another frontier in fearmongering, and other tales.

If Sinclair gets to gobble up Tribune Media, what sort of things can we expect on our local news programs? Why, ginned up anti-Muslim terror reports, of course! Or, as they call them, "Terrorism Alert Desk" segments, which, you won't be surprised to learn, are not exactly substantive. Sinclair ran run about 200 of them last year, and I guess if you see one more than every other calendar day, you might start to think TEH MUZLIMZ ARE TEH KILLINGZ TEH PEEPULZ!!!! everywhere. You have to remind yourself that 1.5 billion Muslims inhabit the Earth, and "Imam Reads to Blind Grandmother" isn't likely to hit the "Terrorism Alert Desk." Or even the "news desk."

Jim Naureckas at FAIR finds a Pew Research Center study anxious to point out that the youngs are liberal and the olds aren't, but strangely not anxious to point out that just about every age group has become more liberal over the last seven years. He also points out, toward the end, that social media outlets have enabled more Americans to get past the "media gatekeepers" -- and that those gatekeepers love telling us we're all in our own "bubbles," rather than the bubble they would prefer to keep us in.

Every once in a while you need to hear a former Republican remind us that Republicans only have "one idea" anymore, and that idea is tax cuts. It's good to hear someone count "the administration's dismantling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and its rules against consumer fraud" as an offense against law and order. And it's also good to hear someone remind everyone that Sen. Flake sure talks a good game about the President's various offenses against civilization, but "votes with machine-like consistency in favor of the president’s destructive agenda and unqualified nominees." Mr. Flake gave us the "resolution of disapproval" that repealed internet privacy protections, you recall.

Ho hum, the President announces stiff new tariffs against imported aluminum and steel, and then we learn that one of his advisors, the notorious Carl Icahn, just so happened to have sold over $30 million of stock in the heavily steel-dependent Manitowoc Company during a ten-day period starting on February 12. I have no opinion on whether these tariffs are actually a good idea, but here's the trouble: Mr. Icahn hadn't traded any stocks in Manitowoc for almost three years before February 12, and of course steel stocks (including Manitowoc's) went down bigly after the President's announcement. Could that be illegal insider trading? And could the "insider" who supplied Mr. Icahn with his info be the President? These are questions worth asking.

Finally, Office of Management and Budget releases report stating that "major" federal regulations enacted between 2006 and 2016 had financial benefits that far, far outweighed their costs. You would think this Administration, in particular, would have tried to cook the books, but apparently they just settled for hoping that we'd never notice, what with all the drama that surrounds our President. Also, too, OMB found that regulations tend not to be "a significant factor in employment," meaning regulations don't kill jobs. That won't stop Republicans from repeating a bunch of crap, nor will it prevent the "liberal" media from failing to question them on it. Which is why we trust ourselves.

Around the table: tabulating continuing bad behavior from the "liberal" media, corporate front groups, and, of course, our President.

Wondering how the Republican tax "reform" plan started getting positive numbers? It may have been because the "liberal" media kept parroting right-wing talking points about thousand-dollar bonuses, which were a) not given to all workers by all corporations and b) pale next to the windfall those corporations are going to get. The bad news? When you refuse to pay workers what they're worth for so long, a thousand-dollar bonus will feel like manna from heaven, rather than a small pile of money that'll be gone in two weeks. The good news? Only around 25% of Americans seem to be noticing a tax cut in their paychecks, and that number maps too easily onto my old saw that 25% of the electorate is insane. Remember when President Obama got a tax cut designed not to be noticed into your paycheck? Remember how the 2010 midterms went for him?

On the other hand, Ronald Brownstein at The Atlantic suggests that Democrats will fumble away their chance to take back Congress by "fail(ing) to effectively challenge the GOP claim that its tax-cut plan is benefiting average families." We're seeing a little evidence Democrats understand this -- ads supporting Sens. McCaskill and Donnelly mention the probability that tax-cuts-for-the-rich will lead to Medicare cuts for seniors -- but, gosh, the reality we've described above (people not seeing bigger paychecks, small bonuses spent and forgotten) should be fairly compelling, too. I'd shoot an ad with a bunch of bloodhounds looking for tax cuts. Hey, it worked for Mitch McConnell against Dee Huddleston in 1984.

Democrats formally introduce the resolution of disapproval aiming to overturn the FCC's recent net neutrality repeal, and the corporate lobbyists have already begun their whining. Dig the "Broadband for America" group's asinine assertion that "such a significant policy issue should (not) be decided by an obscure legislative device that bypasses congressional debate and important input from the public." They sure didn't complain when Republicans used that very same "obscure legislative device" to repeal FCC consumer internet privacy protections, and they didn't defend "important input from the public" when the FCC came out and said it ignored most of the public comments it got, so Broadband for America, whoever they are, can drink a big glass of STFU.

The U.S. Geological Survey plans to eliminate its Biological Survey Unit, which costs a mere $1.6 million annually (out of a $4 trillion-plus budget!) and keeps over a million plant and animal specimens. Civilizations do not do this; sick, immoral, and decadent societies do this, and the more they say they're doing it for the coal miner in West Virginia or the single mother in Detroit -- who do both benefit from research on plants and animals in America -- the sicker, more immoral, and more decadent they become. And only truly sick individuals like Newt Gingrich say some billionaire could do it if it's that important, like only billionaires can do important things. We do it, as Americans, because we do important things.

In case you were wondering, no, we shouldn't deprive gun owners of due process rights just because the President gets frustrated with having to think hard about things that require hard thinking. We have preserved due process rights over the centuries precisely to prevent governments like this one from becoming too powerful, but sadly I bet a lot of the President's votaries agreed with him, even the biggest gun-lovers among them (who, after all, always think it's those other people who deserves to have their rights violated). Being civilized is hard work. It's supposed to be hard work. And folks who don't like doing the hard work should go live in a police state. It's that simple.

Finally, notorious right-wing gasbag Erick Erickson says Parkland high school student David Hogg is a "bully." Our Glorious Elites, feeling "bullied" by high school students! And dig how they suggest that anyone who proposes a boycott is a "bully" -- where's their love for the "free" market? And dig how Mr. Erickson says "(h)igh school kids are not people we should take seriously on any subject," as if that's not profoundly elitist, and thus also anti-American! Our Glorious Elites do nothing, ever, but bully the people, and then pretend they're the victims when the people finally push back. May God have mercy on their immortal souls.

Around the table: from the problem with killing union dues to yet another Presidential fantasy.

As the Supreme Court mulls Janus v. AFSCME, David Cole and Amanda Shanor at The Nation find the anti-union argument therein to be "based on a faulty premise." An actual Supreme Court case from the '70s, Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, found that union dues don't actually constitute an abridgment of free speech rights if unions use those dues solely to perform the duties the law requires them to perform -- but not if the union uses dues for political campaigning, for example. Besides, "(t)he First Amendment protects the right to speech, but not the right to get something for nothing," which is what Mark Janus will get (all the benefits of union protection at his job with none of those pesky dues!) if he prevails at the court. I still fear the "conservatives" on the Court will ignore this precedent.

Longtime HUD official claims she was demoted because she wouldn't rubber-stamp an illegal and pricey renovation of HUD Chair Ben Carson's office. Doesn't matter that "everybody does it" or "that woman's a Democrat" or "but the FOIA requests" -- all anyone's going to remember about this is the Administration official, the one who kept hounding her to "find money" to get around the $5,000 limit on office renovations, saying that "$5,000 will not even buy a decent chair." Gosh, how do little people like us ever get along? Drain the swamp!

Michael Sainato at TruthOut profiles former Oklahoma state Senator Connie Johnson, who's running for the Democratic nomination for Governor this year. She sounds like she has a good program (tuition-free public college, legal pot), and she has a good story (her Christianity led her to forgive her brother's murderer!), and if folks think she's "too liberal" to win in Oklahoma, they ought to attend how well aping Republicans has worked out for state Democrats. Remember Brad Carson, Brad Henry, Dan Boren? Of course you don't. Nobody does. With any luck, she'll win the primary, and the national Democrats will decide she doesn't have a chance, and let her do her thing, which can't possibly be worse than nominating yet another "someone who can win."

National resistance figures have put together a "Pledge to Fight for America's Future," composed of 11 good-to-great legislative proposals, including spending actual money on infrastructure, reforming our tax code so plutocrats pay more instead of less, and committing to renewable energy. I'd shorten the title and go at some of these issues a bit harder, but Democrats would do much better running behind this plan than behind whatever bowl of soggy oatmeal the national party puts together. Do they think they won back Congress in 2006 for some other reason than supporting a minimum wage hike?

Finally, our President theorizes that he, of course, would have "run" into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School while the shooting was happening "even if I didn't have a weapon," unlike those deputies who "weren't exactly Medal of Honor winners." Well, welcome to Everything's About Me, Part 232! As my coworker said, "Mr. Bone Spurs was going to run into the school?"

Around the table: health care, deficits, Russia, fossil fuels, and liberal chances in right-wing districts.

Our President proposes expanding temporary, cut-rate health insurance plans so that they're considerably less temporary. And the result? More young, healthy people will roll the dice with these plans that don't have to cover the health care issues (including pre-existing conditions) that all other health insurance plans have to cover -- which will help make all the better health care plans more expensive. He might as well call it making health insurance suck again! Seriously, when I get action alerts, you'll get action alerts.

The incomparable Dean Baker reminds us that (all together now) Republicans obviously don't care about deficits, despite the "liberal" media's insistence that they really, really do. "This rule should be taught in Journalism 101," he writes: "Reporters should not infer views or beliefs." That's obviously true, but what's even more important is that growth-through-tax-cuts-for-the-rich has never worked -- it didn't work under Mr. Reagan, it didn't work under Bush the Lesser, and it won't work under our current President. You'd think the "liberal" media would have noted the disaster that Sam Brownback's tax-cutting "experiment" has been in Kansas just recently, but for the "liberal" media, yesterday is always another country.

Cato Institute senior fellow/Soul Coughing fan Julian Sanchez advances a novel theory: "Russia Wanted Trump to Win. And It Wanted to Get Caught." Mainly, "Project Latkha didn’t merely aim to influence the outcome of the election, but also its tone, and Americans’ attitudes toward their own democratic institutions." Also, "If we run with the hypothesis that Russia’s core goal was to sow doubt about the integrity and fairness of American elections — and, by implication, erode the credibility of any criticism aimed at Russia’s — then the ultimate exposure of their interference may well have been viewed not as frustrating that aim but as one more perverse way of advancing it." And if Congress passes laws stifling online free speech, that'll only remind you of Mr. bin Laden's long game -- not to take away America's freedoms, but to get America to do that for him.

Former U.S. House Rep. Dennis Kucinich, running in a rather crowded Democratic primary for Governor of Ohio, says he'll stop all gas and oil drilling there if he gets elected. The flesh is willing -- someone should have long ago said "(f)resh water and clean water are not negotiable issues" -- but the observer who criticizes Mr. Kucinich's plan for not emphasizing what he would do in the absence of gas and oil is spot-on. Mr. Kucinich's public works program concerns infrastructure and statewide public broadband, which is good, but doesn't seem to specify solar and wind projects, so that's a missed opportunity.

Finally, a Pennsylvania Democratic operative said this earlier this week: "Democrats have to realize that Republicans can run conservative candidates everywhere and get to 218 House seats. Democrats can’t run liberals everywhere and get to a majority." Of course, Republicans are running mostly reactionary candidates, not conservative ones, but I'd also question the meaning of the word "liberal," here: if "liberal" means "social liberals who let corporations do whatever they like," I'd completely agree with his assessment. But if "liberal" means "economic populist," then I think he's dead wrong. Liberal economic populists can win anywhere, anytime -- as long as the consultant class doesn't get to them first.

Action: infrastructure, and ethics.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a real infrastructure program that actually invests in American projects that will benefit the American people -- and fund these projects by taxing the rich and corporations a lot harder than we've been doing. (If any Congressfolk respond well then why didn't you tell me to vote against the tax plan that cut taxes on the rich and corporations ha ha ha snort, you can remind them that you did tell them, and that they ignored you.) The President's infrastructure plan would "leverage" $200 billion in spending to "attract" $1 trillion more, however that's supposed to work. Oh, wait, I know how it's supposed to work: it's supposed to give even more welfare handouts to corporations who will build a lot of toll roads to nowhere -- and, uh, do no work updating sewer systems, because that's not how you get rich! Heckuva job, Republicans!

Meanwhile, the President's cabinet, filled with the BEST and YUGEST people, also seems dogged by ethics missteps, and I don't just mean the implosions of Michael Flynn and Tom Price last year. No less than five cabinet secretaries, including the aforementioned Mr. Price, have faced investigation for ethics violations, including Messrs. Zinke, Pruitt, and Mnuchin, and now Secretary of Veterans Affairs David Shulkin, who also held the same job under President Obama, but whose alleged transgression -- paying for his wife's trip to Europe with taxpayer funds -- happened under this Administration. Did Mr. Shulkin look around and say all the other kids are doing it, why not me? Issue One helps you tell Congress to strengthen the Office of Government Ethics (or OGE) by giving it subpoena power and the power to hand out penalties for wrongdoing, so that it can properly investigate ethics allegations by government officials. What do they have to be afraid of, after all?

Around the table: the persistence of redlining, and other horrible truths.

If you're looking for some really depressing reading, Earth Justice provides this list of bills under consideration by Congress that would curb your right to get redress for grievances in our courts. The courts have been our most effective weapon against the injustice this Administration constantly perpetrates, so of course Congress wants to take that weapon from us! Now, many of the bills that got passed by the House stand a good chance of dying before a Democrat filibuster, but that's no reason to get complacent. When I get action alerts, you'll get action alerts.

Reveal's analysis of over 30 million home mortgage records finds that -- surprise, surprise! -- folks of color still get turned down for conventional mortgages at a considerably higher rate than whites, even though discrimination is, you know, against the law. Banksters say it's not what it looks like -- that they deny mortgages based, to a large degree, on credit scores. But they also refuse to release the credit scores, saying, at various times, that it'd violate privacy rights (hey, no one's demanding names!), would be too expensive (waaaaah!), and wouldn't actually tell us anything (then what are you afraid of?). Someone should tell them that three bad arguments don't add up to one good one.

Ho hum, Dear Leader says his destroy-all-regulations-and-cut-all-taxes-for-rich-people policies have brought electricity prices down, when -- hard to believe, Harry! -- electricity prices have actually gone up over the last year. They've gone up 3 percent, which outstrips inflation by a little less than a percentage point, but again, this is the guy who not only thinks he can turn around a cruise liner on a dime, but tells everyone he's done it after utterly failing to do it. And, seriously, big corporate tax cuts lowering energy prices? That is to laugh. Big corporate tax cuts gild the plumbing in a CEO's 19th vacation home, and nothing else.

Now we know why EPA Administrator Scott "Cone of Silence" Pruitt has to fly in a special first-class safe space: because one passenger told him he was "fucking up the environment." All together now: waaaaaaah! You know, when someone says something nasty to me -- and people say much nastier things to me than that! -- I don't demand a "safe space" from them at taxpayer expense; I give these morons exactly the amount of what-for I think they require, and then I move on. That's what good people do. It's not what our current Administration's officials do, which not only makes them snowflakes, it makes them bad people. Don't get your shorts in a bunch about life's many shades of gray when I say that. These people are bad. No navel-gazing is possible about this matter.

The story of the Florida shooter being vaguely associated with the Nazi wannabes at the Republic of Florida turns out to be a hoax -- perpetrated by right-wing trolls, of course. How the Republic of Florida leader who had identified Mr. Cruz as an associate got similarly "pranked" I can't tell -- either he's a bad leader or he was in on the joke to begin with, and neither of these possibilities flatter him. And anyway, the Republic of Florida got more publicity than it was going to get, and now it gets to play the victim card, by virtue of being unfairly associated with an evil school shooter (by the Anti-Defamation League, no less!). Sad that right-wing "pranksters" never seem to suffer for their sins, though.

Finally, the President tweets that the FBI missed "the many signals sent out by the Florida school shooter" because they were too obsessed with the Russia investigation -- and gets an earful from students who survived that shooting. Sadly, Reuters does not report on the students who took the President to task specifically for making their tragedy all about him, as he seems to love to do. Maybe he'll block these kids, like he blocks anyone else who gets the better of him in an argument! I must say I've just about had it up to here with this disgusting piece of filth who somehow got elected President.

Action: "free" trade, Social Security, and corporate welfare.

NAFTA renegotiations are underway, and just like with the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" we don't know how it's going, which makes total sense, since we're only the bosses of government and not some rich corporate "stakeholder." So, despite President Trump's declaration that his NAFTA renegotiation will be TEH BEST and TEH YUGESTZ!!!! trade deal ever, we have reason to doubt it. Not just because Mr. Trump has stacked his cabinet with "free" traders, one of whom, his Commerce Secretary, came out and said a renegotiated NAFTA should model itself on the hated TPP -- but also because Mr. Trump wouldn't demand an end to the "investor-state dispute settlement" mechanism in NAFTA, the one that threatens to overwrite our laws and extract tribute from the American people for the heinous crime of passing laws that protect workers, clean air, and clean water. So Sign for Good helps you tell your Congressfolk that any renegotiated NAFTA must put people before corporations.

Meanwhile, Social Security Works tells us that today, February 16, is the day when someone making $1 million annually stops paying into Social Security, because our Social Security system doesn't tax income over $127,200. Some very well-paid folks, of course, stopped paying into Social Security a few minutes after the ball dropped in Times Square, but "Millionaire's Day" (as they call it) illustrates fairly well how much better we could be funding Social Security if we merely lifted the payroll cap. Our Glorious Elites in politics and media, of course, never let such an idea pass their lips, since if they did, you might realize there are solutions to the Social Security "crisis" other than CUTZ ALL TEH BENEFITZ FOREVURZ!!!!! But they don't get all the say in America -- we get all the say in America, if we but speak. Hence Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security benefits and tax income over $127,200 to pay for it.

Finally, a slew of good-government organizations -- including People's Action, Demand Progress, and Color of Change -- helps you tell the leaders of some 20 American cities to disclose exactly what they offered Amazon in their bids to get Amazon's second headquarters located in them. Amazon has, as you know, been pitting locality against locality in their bid to get as many corporate welfare goodies as they can, even though Amazon's CEO is already the world's richest human being, and even though Amazon paid precisely zero dollars in taxes in 2017 and will get a $780 million-plus windfall from the Trump tax "reform." Localities seem to have resigned themselves to offering up more welfare handouts in an effort to "create jobs," but we deserve better than a bidding war over the corporation that's probably killed more jobs than any other over the last two decades. So let's shine some light on this process.

Around the table: the horrible truth about the "free" market, and other lessons.

On the occasion of Elon Musk launching a car into space for $90 million, Kate Aronoff makes "The Case for Nationalizing Elon Musk." Long story short: the "free" market, the one that wants you to believe that it alone comes up with all the good ideas, is in fact heavily dependent on public investment and research, both directly and indirectly, and thus the people have a stake in these "free" market outcomes (let alone their profits!). Besides, it really doesn't matter if Elon Musk does a lot of good works now -- if he gets too big, he will become corrupt.

Morgan Stanley analysis expect that only 13% of the corporate tax cuts will actually "trickle down" to employees, be that in the form of bonuses, increased wages, or better benefits. One dollar out of every eight ain't much, but Republicans keep selling it as a great deal for workers, and when closer to four out of eight dollars go to executives and shareholders, then it ain't such a great deal for workers.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt says he's been making a lot of first class flights at taxpayer expense because of the "very toxic environment politically" apparently resulting in occasional confrontations when he flies coach. All together now: waaaaaaaah! If I saw Mr. Pruitt on my plane, I'd just shake my head at him, but like the obnoxious right-winger who calls everyone he disagrees with a Communist and then castigates people for ending friendships over political differences, Mr. Pruitt acts like he doesn't deserve any of the anger directed at him.

Jonathan Chait at New York magazine describes how Republicans are planning to evade responsibility for the economic mess they're causing: by blaming the President. Of course Donald Trump is the only kind of Republican who could possibly have been elected President in 2016, just as George W. Bush was the only kind of Republican who could possibly have been elected in 2000: both ran as a "new" kind of Republican, but both of course revealed themselves to be completely predictable mainstream Republicans, even if Mr. Bush was more able to act like a civilized human being. Cutting taxes on the rich and jacking up deficits out of fear of spending cuts is, of course, a feature of Republican orthodoxy, not a bug.

Finally, as I'm sure you know, at least one member of the Trump Administration is a wife-beater, but Mr. Trump took to Twitter to whine about "due process" for such folks. Dig Ms. Sanders trying to convince us that Mr. Trump wants due process for everyone, as if that's some great gift to us. And as if it's true! When police shoot a black man dead with no charges and no trial, Mr. Trump doesn't give one rat's hind quarter about "due process" -- instead, he tries to bully you into agreeing with him. Sad!

Around the table: more stories about taxes, deficits, health care, hypocrisy, and our stupid President.

Jesus Mary and Joseph why on Earth would anyone vote for a Democrat who says we're stuck with the Trump tax "reform" for the next three decades? I thought Jon Tester might survive in 2018, but if hopelessness in the face of corruption and evil is all he's got, he's toast, even if the House Rep lately convicted of assaulting a reporter runs against him. His fellow Democrat Senators are little better, falling all over themselves not to say what needs to be said: that we have to tax the rich and corporations a lot harder than we've been doing. (I also think the Bard College economist's idea of getting rid of the corporate tax altogether and just "imputing the profits to shareholders" won't work, because it's still not really the shareholders' income. Sheesh, just tax the rich already, and stop playing 13-dimensional chess.)

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo is of course entirely correct that Republicans have never really cared about government deficits, and I understand why he hates current media reporting suggesting that Republicans have somehow "changed" on deficits, but I also know people hate admitting they're wrong, particularly when they've been so wrong for so long, and I also think there's some benefit to the "liberal" media finally framing Republicans as something other than the "fiscal hawks" they pretend to be when Democrats are in power. That's true even if it took a scolding from Rand Paul to make it obvious.

Ho hum, President Trump says Britons were out in the streets marching against their single-payer health care system, when they were actually out in the streets marching for it, and also demanding that their Tory government fund it properly. You know, I wondered if he was watching Fox and Friends, for many years the stupidest show on TV, right before he twittered out that fecal blast, and I'm sad to report that I was right. Even the Tory Health Secretary responded to Mr. Trump by saying no one wants "to live in a system where 28m people have no cover," by which he means our system, extolled by morons as TEH WURLDZ GREATESTEZ!!!!!!

Also ho hum, President Trump still isn't reading his Presidential Daily Briefs, supposedly because getting an oral summary is supposedly "his preferred style of learning." After all, they call it a "brief" because it's a thousand pages long and has all kinds of information the President doesn't need! No use saying at least Messrs. Mattis, McMaster, and Tillerson get one, because he's going to throw any or all of them under the bus if Fox and Friends tells him to.

Finally, Stephen Mattson at Sojourners instructs us that "Conservative Christianity is Now Everything That It Once Hated: Post-Modern, Morally Relative, and Post-Truth." This has, of course, been happening for a long time -- didn't Cal Thomas, of all people, discourse at length about how the Moral Majority had failed Christian values back in 2005? Why, yes, he did -- but of course it's worse now that right-wing evangelicals rush from one manufactured outrage to the next just like their more secular right-wing comrades, and have such a disgusting human being as Donald Trump as their standard-bearer. Remember: Tony Perkins gives Mr. Trump a mulligan, as long as he creates "religious conscience" exemptions allowing corporations to discriminate.

Around the table: describing at least three should-be career-ending utterances!

You may think the "liberal" media generally does a better job In These Interesting Times, but Adam Johnson at FAIR reminds us that the "liberal" media still falls all over itself trying to tell you that runaway CEO pay isn't really a big problem. Amidst the pile of hair-splitting and cherry-picked data you'll find one truly astounding nugget: the New York Times analyst who says Rep. Kennedy's statement that the best-paid CEOs make 300 times what average workers make is "true, but misleading." That really ranks down there with "alternative facts."

Hey, how's that tax cut working out for you? Here's how it's working for Kimberly-Clark workers: around 12% of them are going to be losing their jobs. And the corporation's own CFO says they're going to use those tax cuts "for capital investments and to allocate capital to shareholders," apparently unaware of how that sounds to people who work for a living. Oh, and they're also going to shut down 10 manufacturing plants, which fact will no doubt not make Mr. Trump's next State of the Union address.

Neuroscience News asks whether we'd better consider our social media interactions not as an anti-social addiction, but a hyper-social one. And given that our natural need for food can easily turn into an addiction to junk food, we ought to set boundaries on our social media use. That all sounds pretty sane to me -- why think there's something really wrong with you if you spend too much time on your phone, when a fairly simple solution would be to check your phone only at certain times?

Ho hum, Puerto Rico's Governor announces plans to use charter schools and vouchers in response to Hurricane Maria's destruction of the island's schools. Why is disaster always an opportunity for bad right-wing ideas to flourish? I guess I should look forward to the day when much better ideas will get slammed as similarly "opportunistic," as opposed to simply being ignored. (As an aside, I did not know that former Education Secretary Arne Duncan called Hurricane Katrina "the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans." Really, that should have been a career-ending utterance.)

Finally, Dave Zirin at The Nation explains "Why So Many Philadelphia Eagles Are Rejecting This White House." As if you needed another reason to love our new Super Bowl champions! The anti-racist activism of Malcolm Jenkins and Chris Long you probably knew about, but wideout/pass interference penalty-drawing machine Torrey Smith explains it best: "If I told you that I was invited to a party by an individual I believe is sexist or has no respect for women or I told you that this individual has said offensive things towards many minority groups...this individual also called my peers and my friends SOBs, you would understand why I wouldn’t want to go to that party. Why is it any different when the person has title of President of the United States?" This isn't a country founded on the idea that we should treat the President with kid gloves, after all.

Around the table: further describing our struggle with an incompetent President and a cowardly opposition.

It's about time someone put it like this: "Trump's Policies Won't Bring Back Coal Jobs -- They Will Kill More Miners." President Trump has not only vastly overestimated how many new coal mining jobs the economy has created over the last year (50,000? More like 1,000!), but if he succeeds in rolling back clean air and clean water regulations -- including regulations that specifically protect coal miners from black lung! -- then a lot more coal miners will die. The "happy ending," here, is that bosses will be richer, and bosses are the only people who matter to Mr. Trump anyway.

Ted Rall at Counterpunch reminds us that, yes, Virginia, "Democrats Could Lose Again This Fall." It's good to hear other folks saying that Democrats' complete lack of an agenda and the fact that Clintonistas still run everything (even as Sandernistas have all the energy!) may cripple them, but I doubt that Americans will vote Republican if they "vote their pocketbooks" -- hey, if the economic "recovery" of the Obama era didn't save Hillary Clinton, I don't see it saving Republicans, either -- and when more and more folks find out that the tax "cut" bill didn't cut their taxes very much, I see tax "reform"'s numbers going back down.

Joe Emersberger at FAIR catches the "liberal" media slobbering all over Ecuador's President, who ran as a liberal populist and has, of course, revealed himself to be a right-winger upon taking office. Odd how the "liberal" media calls a man who does whatever his big corporate cronies tell him to do "his own man." Also odd how they call the actual populist a "strongman" but leave that word in its sheath when the right-winger actually bullies judges. The good news? Actual liberal policies are actually so popular all over the planet that you have to at least pretend to be one to get anywhere. Why, if Mr. Trump had bashed banksters more consistently during the campaign, he might actually have won a popular vote majority.

Surprise, surprise, the Trump Administration is letting a corn syrup lobbyist help the USDA set dietary guidelines. And perhaps, like other sugar-addicted corporations like Coca-Cola, she'll use her "expertise" to downplay sugar's nefarious effects on our health! And what a surprise to learn, in addition to learning that our government gets "advice" from precisely the wrong people, that waivers to Mr. Trump's already-weakened ethics rules are so, so easy to get.

Finally, President Trump tells Ohio ralliers that Democrats who failed to applaud at his State of the Union should be considered traitors. Almost as bad, he equates their failure to applaud with a failure to love one's country, as if America is Donald Trump and Donald Trump is America, a feat of ego-stroking (among many other kinds of stroking!) the Founders would have found appalling. And I guess it's no use citing Article III, Section 3 of our Constitution to our President, though it sets the bar for treason considerably higher than he does. Memo to Trump votaries: if you support calling your enemies "traitors," particularly for the crime of not clapping at Dear Leader, then you are damaged beyond my ability or willingness to engage with you.

Around the table: concerning campaign finance, corporate welfare, tax "reform," and approaching rural Americans.

A Tampa Bay Times/WTSP-TV/TEGNA investigation finds dozens of "zombie campaigns" still spending money years after their candidates stop running for office. The culprits range from infamous Florida Republican Mark Foley still charging his campaign for $450 lunches 11 years after leaving Congress in disgrace and Democrat Robin Tallon, Jr. somehow spending large amounts of campaign money 25 years after leaving Congress all the way to folks I've long respected, like the late Rep. Steven LaTourette (R-OH), whose campaign spent over $4,500 in Ohio State football tix three years after he retired, and Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), whose dormant Presidential campaign paid his daughter over $16,000 between 2015 and 2017. And at least eight campaigns spent money after their candidates died -- which means that Mr. Trump's 2020 re-election campaign will almost certainly survive us all.

In a related note, the Center for Media and Democracy informs us that ALEC's new national chair, a North Carolina state rep named Jason Saine, has spent nearly $20,000 in campaign funds on new suits. Mr. Saine says he needs his suits specially-tailored because he's "short and fat" (his words), and, sadly, his donors probably accept that reasoning, since they're getting what they're paying for -- a "representative" whose "conservatism" consists entirely of serving big corporations (pre-empting local anti-fracking laws, now there's small-government conservatism for you!) or stoking rage in the already rage-addled (limiting free speech on campus, because what's more "small government" than telling people what they can't say?)

EPI researchers inform us that the data proving that giving Amazon tax incentives corporate welfare to build another headquarters in a particular county "just isn't there." Or, more precisely, the data proving that Amazon job creation won't be offset by local job losses caused by Amazon (which, you know, closes down Mom-and-Pop stores with a vengeance!) just isn't there. You'd think states and localities would realize they have Amazon by the short-hairs, since Amazon has to build warehouses just to keep up its super-fast order fulfillment and shipping, but then again, they serve mammon, not you and I. (In a related note, Amazon's insistence that unemployment has gone down 4.8% "on average" in counties it's built in over the last five years isn't that impressive, considering that the national unemployment rate has gone down almost 4% during that time, while the U6 unemployment rate -- which adds in folks who've given up on the job search and part-timers who want to work full-time -- has gone down over six points during that time.)

Now this is truly remarkable: Paul Ryan proudly twittered that a public school employee was getting an extra $1.50 per paycheck thanks to the Trump tax "reform," and that would take care of her Costco membership for an entire year! Most folks aren't going to notice an extra buck-fifty a week, of course, and you may recall that Sen. McConnell (R-KY) slammed President Obama's Making Work Pay tax cut for only giving folks a piddling $7 extra a week. Meanwhile, the average one-percenter, per the Tax Policy Center, will get an extra $980 weekly from the tax "reform." I guess if Mr. Ryan ever had to count the cost of anything, ever, he'd have known to keep his mouth shut. And if a buck-fifty is the boon coming to most Americans from tax "reform," Republicans might actually be in trouble this November.

Finally, Ivy Brashear at Yes! magazine explains "Why Rural America Isn't a Lost Cause for Progressive Ideas." Short answer to title question: people hate what the politicians they've got have done to them, so why not pitch real hopes and dreams to them? How to do it: meet with rural folks on their turf, talk straight to them, and talk about their problems first and then describe how liberal ideas can solve them. You know what I'd add? Don't tell them the economy's changing and they all have to learn how to write computer code to keep up -- not just because they've got plenty of mainstream Democrats in their ear telling them to do that, but because it doesn't remind them that they have the power, and the right, to bend the world in their direction a bit.

Action: infrastructure, worker safety, and gerrymandering.

President Trump put a different spin on his infrastructure plan during his State of the Union address, not just by inflating its size (he'd been talking $1 trillion, but said $1.5 trillion), but by de-emphasizing the notion of attracting private investment: "(e)very federal dollar should be leveraged by partnering with state and local governments, and, where appropriate, tapping into private sector investment." But we've known for a while that his infrastructure plan would use corporate welfare tax breaks to "attract" investment, and that it would attract a lot of private investors to "boutique" infrastructure projects, and not, for example, projects like rebuilding the water system in Flint, MI -- since most private investors think there ain't no money in it! Better to bring back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income to directly fund real infrastructure projects that will belong to the public! The Economic Policy Institute helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund real infrastructure projects.

Meanwhile, the International Labor Rights Forum helps you tell Abercrombie & Fitch to keep adhering to the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, and thus help the workers who make the clothes A&F customers wear. Apparently they haven't committed to staying with the Accord, even as some 60 other corporations have committed to doing so; you might wonder if they signed on just for the good PR it'd bring them. But we can always remind them of the bad PR they got when 29 workers died in a fire at a factory that made A&F clothing, or the fact that we still had to prod them to do better by the workers who make their clothes. What a shame that some corporate executives seem to think they can get rid of all their umbrellas as soon as it stops raining, particularly when, as conscious consumers and citizens, we can make bad PR rain whenever we like. Maybe they make more money in the short run by exposing garment workers to lethal working conditions, but any amount of money is cold comfort without a clear conscience.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Pennsylvania state legislators to pass the redistricting reforms embodied in HB 722/SB 22, then Common Cause still helps you do that. Legislators gerrymandering districts to benefit themselves (and not their bosses, i.e., us) remains intensely and justifiably unpopular among the mass of good Americans, but it's much harder to vote the bastards out once they've concentrated their power in a peculiarly-shaped district that doesn't respect county or municipality boundaries, as anyone with common sense would do, but excludes entire sides of streets and individual houses in a quest to continue in power. HB 722/SB 22 would take redistricting out of the legislators' hands and putting it in the hands of a redistricting commission, composed of two legislative leaders from each major party and a fifth member the other four have to agree upon. And thus we'd have a fighting chance.

Around the table: the last refuge of pro-Trump scoundrels, and other lessons.

Mark Karlin at TruthOut interviews America's Last Journalist, Greg Palast, about vote suppression in general, and the shutdown of the Trump Administration's Voter Integrity (sic) Commission in particular. Why does Mr. Palast think the Commission shut down, with its "mission" to be taken up by the Department of Homeland (sic) Security (sic)? You won't like the answer: "Kobach also bought lists of [Latino] voters. The purpose is clear: Match any José Garcia on voter rolls with José Garcia on deportation orders and purge an American for the crime of having a common [Latino] name." Deporting American citizens so you can win elections! It's what people do when they can't win arguments on the merits!

Ho hum, Matthew Gardner at ITEP reminds us that Disney's $125 million in employee bonuses is a little over one-tenth of its expected total haul from the Trump tax "reform." And those bonuses are a one-time thing -- I mean, only the boss's bonuses ever get repeated from year to year! -- while Disney's $1.2 billion haul from the (permanent, you remember) corporate rate tax cut will magically appear every year. I guess it'll lose its novelty after the first year, and they'll set about getting corporate welfare in other ways, but $1.2 billion every year is still $1.2 billion every year.

John Nichols at The Nation chronicles Gov. Scott Walker's continued crusade against democracy in Wisconsin -- including his refusal to call special elections for a vacant state Senate seat and a vacant state Assembly seat. All because "the legislature won't be that busy," when in fact the Governor has already called a special session for several thorny issues! This couldn't possibly be because a Democrat just won a special election in a previously Republican-held Senate seat by 11 points, could it?

EPA suspends its plan to allow mining in Alaska's Bristol Bay area, home to one of the world's largest and most profitable sockeye salmon industries. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt sure talks a good game about "the abundant natural resources" that deserve "the utmost protection" from the "unacceptable" risk of a Pebble Mine, but note that the EPA is still taking mining applications for the area, which could mean they're just fishing for the right crony investors. And if that takes a few years and we get complacent in the meantime, all the better!

Finally, with things going so well for the Trump Administration, quite a few right-wing punditoids are officially calling for people to be tried and convicted of treason. If patriotism isn't the last refuge of the scoundrel, as Dr. Johnson said it was, then calling your enemies traitors surely is. These idiots -- many of whom work for basic cable stations, which we all pay for whether we want to or not -- deserve nothing so much as a spanking. Unless, of course, they enjoy that sort of thing.

Around the table: new developments in government spying, corruption, solar power, health care, scholarship, and pimp-slapping.

This is a scary development: MIT researchers have developed a "visual microphone system" that can reconstruct sound from silent video. Of course some things are better sound reproducers than others (foil chip bags are terrific, plants rather less so), but given that it essentially allows folks to listen to sound without actually capturing the sound on tape the traditional way, this is the kind of thing that could really do a lot of damage in the wrong hands -- and by "the wrong hands," I pretty much mean "our surveillance-happy government." (I will say that the comments, averse as most of them are to discussing the spying implications, are considerably more intelligent than in most comment sections.)

Ho hum, the newly-Trumpholed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has dropped an investigation into a lender charging triple-digit annual interest rates. Because BIG GUMMINT BAD!!!!!, I suppose. It gets better: the lender in question just so happened to give a few grand to CFPB director Mick Mulvaney's various re-election campaigns in the House, which suggests that Congressfolk really, really can be bought much too cheaply. Oh, and they're going to try to overturn the CFPB's payday lending rule; when I get action alerts, you'll get action alerts.

Consumer Reports instructs us that the Trump Administration's solar panel tariff shouldn't discourage folks from going solar. Regardless of how much money the tariff would cost consumers (Consumer Reports says not much -- it's not like President Trump can put a tariff on installation and labor!), and regardless of the fact that solar subsidies won't be around after 2022 (absent further action from Congress), this much is certain: now is always the right time to do the right thing.

We learn from Diane Dewar at The Conversation that "Medicaid Work Requirements Could Cost the Government More in the Long Run." Long story short: when folks can get coverage through Medicaid, they're more likely to go to the doctor before their health problems become intractable; with Medicaid work requirements shoving over 6 million folks off the rolls, our government will ultimately spend more money, as folks now without Medicaid forego medical treatment until it becomes an ER visit.

Michelle Nickerson -- author of Mothers of Conservatism, which I highly recommend -- interviews Stacie Taranto, author of Kitchen Table Politics, a book about conservative Catholic suburban women's activism in '70s New York state. The '70s saw the first Conservative Party U.S. Senator from New York (James Buckley, brother of William F., Jr.), as you know, so clearly these women had a significant effect on the times, and it's good to be able to understand why some women rejected feminism and the liberalization of the Catholic church. (As an aside, it's a damn shame folks ever thought lowering taxes would "make it less likely that a second income (their own) would be needed," since the two-income family has pretty much been a staple of America since the first Reagan tax-cuts-for-the-rich.)

Finally, former RNC Chair Michael Steele had this to say to "evangelicals" like Tony Perkins who keep giving President Trump "mulligans" and "do-overs" for his misbehavior: "Just shut the hell up and don’t ever preach to me about anything ever again. I don’t want to hear it...After telling me how to live my life, who to love, what to believe, what not to believe, what to do and what not to do and now you sit back and the prostitutes don’t matter? The grabbing the you-know-what doesn’t matter? The outright behavior and lies don’t matter? Just shut up." I recall Mr. Steele arguing against gay marriage in 2009, among other things, but even if his newfound fierce streak is as calculated as his appeasement of extremists was back in the day, his new posture might help awaken like-minded folks, and that wouldn't be a bad thing. There is really nothing "moderate" about letting extremists kick sand in your face, after all.

Around the table: conservatism's ongoing decay, and other sad developments.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy provides us with yet more helpful data demonstrating that outsourcing the IRS's debt collection function is a terrible idea. The IRS spends about $3 on private debt collectors for every $1 they bring in, which won't surprise you if you have, well, virtually any life experience at all. Strange that today's "conservatives" push for privatization, then do nothing when the private corporations deliver bad results. Aren't conservatives all about making government more efficient and saving the taxpayer money? Or is that just what they told us?

Gov. Walker's little corporate welfare deal with Foxconn will now cost Wisconsin taxpayers $4.5 billion, instead of the $3 billion he previously said it would cost. I wouldn't put it past Mr. Walker, who's as politically astute as he is evil, to try to get some insulation from the backlash by letting President Trump announce the Foxconn deal last year, but this imbroglio remains a major opportunity for Democrats to finally find bipartisan hatred of corporate welfare sexy enough to run ads about. Of course, these are Democrats we're talking about.

Not quite two weeks after passing the massive tax "reform" bill, House Speaker Paul Ryan gets $500,000 in campaign contributions from Charles Koch (of Koch brothers infamy) and his wife. I won't say you could prove a quid pro quo in a court of law, but I'd be a schmuck to say the two events are completely unrelated. I've become convinced that the future of campaign finance is the small contribution, and that big campaign contributions like this will become massive PR headaches for donors. But I wouldn't mind the future being now, of course.

Ho hum, West Virginia's plan to drug test welfare applicants has caught exactly four people in its web over the first three months. One shouldn't compare number of welfare applicants who fail drug tests to the number of folks who use drugs in the population as a whole, but to the number of folks who fail drug tests in the population as a whole. But proponents of this sort of thing have failed to make the case that welfare drug testing is fiscally responsible, which is, again, the sort of thing we thought conservatives cared about. Of course, I'd also argue that punishing addicts is far less fiscally responsible than treating them.

Finally, former Maryland Lieutenant Governor/RNC Chair Michael Steele says the Republicans are entirely to blame for the current government shutdown. I never enjoyed watching Mr. Steele, an obvious moderate, run as far right as he could to appease the rest of the party -- you remember him popularizing the phrase "drill, baby, drill" at the 2008 Republican convention? And you remember his apology for his very mild criticisms of Rush Limbaugh the next year? -- but if he's really as fed up as he sounds these days, he might do some good for this great nation after all.

Action: net neutrality, train safety, and Social Security.

Word on the street is that the proposed resolution of disapproval that would reverse the FCC's recent decision to kill off net neutrality -- and kill off your internet freedom with it! -- now has 45 co-sponsors, including Republican Sen. Collins of Maine, and per the Congressional Review Act, the resolution would need only 30 co-sponsors to force a vote in the Senate. So Moms Rising helps you send an email to your Senators demanding that they vote to restore net neutrality and therefore internet freedom to all Americans, not just the big actors who can pay-to-play, but you may want to make this a phone call, too, so they take you more seriously. And don't flinch before the prospect of this resolution failing in the House (or getting vetoed by the President): if it passes in the Senate, it will deliver a massive PR black eye to FCC Chair Ajit Pai's efforts, and it could even help discourage big telecoms from randomly blocking and throttling your favorite websites.

Meanwhile, the Trump Administration wants to roll back an Obama-era rule requiring more advanced pneumatic brake systems for trains carrying crude oil across our great land. Always Mr. Trump tries to destroy anything with Mr. Obama's name on it; he's worse than Kylo Ren confronting Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi, amirite? And always Mr. Trump says TEH REGULASHUNZ HURTS TEH BIZNIZZIZ!!!!!, when these same regulations protect people -- I mean, is the meaning of being an American really all about having to put up with living near oil trains derailing and blowing up and polluting our air and water? After all, nearly a third of Pennsylvanians (for example) live within a half-mile of a train line which carries crude oil, so this isn't something that "happens to other people." Penn Environment helps you tell the Trump Administration to scuttle its plan to let oil trains roam the land with substandard braking systems.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to stop slashing the budget of the Social Security Administration and instead fund it so it can give seniors the help they need, then CREDO still helps you do that. What right-wingers hope you don't get about "reducing the size of government" is that government provides services to us, services we have already paid for with our taxes. If they can convince you that your government is an obstacle rather than a tool, then they win -- particularly when Democrat politicians play this me-too-but-smarter game they've been playing for almost 40 years. But I digress. The notion that there's just no money to pay for good services from the Social Security Administration is utter horsedoodle -- Congress just cut corporate taxes and rich people's taxes dramatically, so the money is there; Congress is afraid (at best!) of forcing their biggest donors to pay their fair share. So let's help them face their fear.

Around the table: the Democrats' peculiar position on government spying, and other follies.

Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept reminds us that "The Same Democrats Who Denounce Donald Trump as a Lawless, Treasonous Authoritarian Just Voted to Give Him Vast Warrantless Spying Powers." And since a significant number of Republican House Reps actually opposes warrantless government spying, Democrats could have unified and killed the bill. But they didn't. Remember that the next time someone tells you that electing more Democrats is the only way to get things done.

Remember back when President Trump "saved" all those jobs at the Carrier plant in Indiana by giving Carrier a boatload of corporate welfare tax breaks? Well, a lot of Carrier workers are getting laid off now, and have had it up to here with Mr. Trump's "promises.". The deal was never that good in the first place -- over 500 Indianapolis workers got laid off, and Carrier completely closed its Huntington plant and moved the jobs to Mexico -- but that didn't stop a lot of obnoxious right-wingers from whining that TEH LIBRULZ HATES TEH JOBZ!!!! Are any of them sorry about that now? I kid, of course -- being a Trumphole means never being sorry, or accountable.

Ho hum, the Republican mania for cutting the IRS's budget will lead to an IRS workforce that won't be able to implement the Republican tax "reform" with any skill or efficiency. Why, it's almost like that's the whole idea! Congress has slashed the IRS's employee training funding by almost 75% over the last eight years, which I'll admit is likely the envy of the corporate world vis a vis training workers, which they regard as yet another drag on profits. I wish I could say corporations that refuse to train their workers will fail -- I mean, they should, but Our Glorious Elites always seem to fail upward in this sick, immoral, and decadent society.

Julia Kassem at TruthOut finds corruption and mismanagement of public water in the Middle East to be even more damaging than in other parts of the world, leading, of course, to privatization of those resources, and thus also to more corruption and more lousy service. You see this everywhere: governments promising to "make sure" private corporations handle the public's resources properly, then being missing-in-action when those private corporations foul up. Again, it's almost like that's the whole idea.

Finally, some bad news: the number of folks without health insurance in America went up by over 3 million people in Mr. Trump's first year in office. I'm sure Mr. Trump will blame all of that on the Democrats, but nobody put a gun to his head and cut off subsidies, nobody put a gun to his head and reduce the exchange sign-up period to 45 days, and certainly nobody put a gun to his head and told him to repeal the individual mandate. I guess it's Democrats' fault because they wouldn't "work with him," by which he means capitulate to him. See? He is a real Republican!

Action: CHIP, offshore drilling, and antibiotic abuse.

As you know, Congress spent almost all of last year cutting taxes for corporations and the rich and trying to destroy our health care system, but they did not extend the Children's Health Insurance Program, which helps states insure some nine million children. CHIP's funding authorization expired on September 30, and some states are starting to run out of money! All of this really should be a devastating campaign ad all by itself, but Democrats would have to run them, and I suspect Democrat consultants are already telling all these upstarts running for Congressional seats that they should be "civil." But why should we be "civil" to people who do nothing but hurt people? Because we might have to "work with them"? When you encounter people who won't work, you work around them. Moms rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to reauthorize CHIP already. But feel free to phone your Reps and Senators instead, and add that we won't forget what they've done.

Meanwhile, the Trump Administration has announced their plan to open almost all of America's vast coastlines to offshore drilling (except in Florida, of course, where they aim to burnish Gov. Scott's rep ahead of a possible Senate bid). But, as Penn Environment says in their latest email missive, "when you drill, you spill" -- there's no sense squealing that spills happen zero point zero zero eight percent of the time or whatever when one spill can wreck an ecosystem (not to mention the economy that depends on it!) for decades. And developing solar and wind power remains anathema to President Bigballs, who no doubt finds wind and solar executives too small-time for his taste. Still, no one will one day say we lost our clean air and clean water, but at least a few CEOs got to live even higher on the hog for a while!, so Penn Environment helps you tell the Trump Administration to abandon its plans for expanded offshore drilling.

Finally, the fast food corporation McDonald's has, commendably, declared it would source its chicken only from farms that only give animals antibiotics when they're sick. But McDonald's has not committed to sourcing their beef from similarly sensible farms, and we know McDonald's for its hamburgers more than its chicken sandwiches, amirite? As we know, factory farms tend to use antibiotics on animals to fatten them up and help them endure their squalid living conditions a little better, to the point where four out of five antibiotics in America go to nominally healthy feed animals. Thus we now we risk a civilization where superbugs could render antibiotics useless and the next cut you get could kill you, just like in the 19th century. But PennPIRG helps you tell McDonald's to do the right thing and gets its beef from antibiotic-free sources. If they did it, it'd be a big deal -- a lot of people eat McDonald's hamburgers, after all.

Action: fighting budgetary hostage-taking, government spying, and failing to fund kids' health insurance.

As you may know, Congress has only funded our government through January 19, so difficult is the task of repeatedly making the good citizenry swallow garbage. But that doesn't mean they won't keep trying! So Public Citizen helps you tell your Senator to block any anti-freedom garbage from the next must-pass spending bill. You know what Mitch McConnell loves to do with must-pass spending bills? Loosen campaign finance restrictions, that's what. You know what other lunkheads in Congress would like to do, right? Repeal the Johnson Amendment, and in doing so let churches become money-laundering operations for big donors. (That church-state wall we always talk about? It protects the church, too.) But we're Americans, dammit, and we deserve better than a Congress that constantly takes us hostage so it can pass odious bills that would otherwise wither in sunlight, and we should put it to our Congressdolts like that. If that hurts their fee-fees, they can go get a real job.

Meanwhile, Congress also aims to extend Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, that section of federal law that allows our government to Hoover up your electronic communications without a warrant. Our Constitution would have our government get a warrant to do such things, but who cares about our Constitution when ZOMG TEH TERRURIZTZ!!!!!! Seriously, our Founders must be spinning in their graves watching our government act more or less like the government they revolted against, all in the name of "security." But real security comes from honoring your values, and adhering to them, even when it's difficult or inconvenient. And who suffers the most from government spying? Our government's political opponents, of course. So if you think Section 702 would be a good way to stick it to protestors and immigrants, just remember that the next Administration could always turn it on you. Both Roots Action and Free Press help you tell our government to reject the reauthorization of warrantless spying on Americans.

Finally, Congress still hasn't funded the Children's Health Insurance Program (or CHIP), though (per the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission's July assessment) most states will have run out of CHIP money by March. And dig the excuses coming from Republicans these days! Sen. Hatch (R-UT), who co-wrote the original CHIP law back in the day, says "the reason CHIP's having trouble is because we don't have money anymore." And certainly not because Congress just blew a $1.5 trillion hole in the deficit with its tax bill handouts to corporations and the wealthy! A bill Mr. Hatch shepherded through the Senate, no less! Maybe shame over this hypocrisy explains why he's not running for re-election; at least, I'd like to think so. Anyway, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reauthorize CHIP, and without poison pill amendments that would, for example, injure Medicare.

Around the table: from welfare for the wealthy to the continuing follies of our current President.

Ho hum, Bloomberg analysis finds American CEOs paid much more generously than foreign CEOs. I'm sad to learn that the income gap between CEOs and workers isn't that much better in Germany or Australia than it is here. But I'm happy to learn that the Conservative government in Great Britain has proposed CEO-worker pay-ratio disclosures -- though, to be fair, they're probably being pulled leftward by a revitalized Labour Party.

The flesh is willing, but I'm not sure the tax scam will "doom" Republicans at the ballot box in the 2018 midterms. I mean, I could be wrong, especially given that Americans are so much smarter about cutting taxes for the rich than when Tha Bush Mobb was cutting taxes for the rich, but, really, those health care "reform" votes are what should doom Republicans in November. Taxes are still a little abstract for people (though maybe not this time next year, amirite?), whereas losing your health care is quite real. Still, Democrats, bash the bill. It deserves it.

First folks got all excited that President Trump dissolved his odious Voter "Integrity" Commission, and then folks got all unnerved that the Department of Homeland (sic) Security (sic) would be taking over at least some of its work, but many observers think DHS won't "want to be the second person to jump on a live grenade," as put by a Loyola law professor. And yes, it is true that we'll attend whatever the DHS decides to do with its new mandate, but dig, if you will, Mr. Trump's statement whining about the "endless legal battles" the commission faced, as if you have some sort of right not to be sued when you do evil.

Mike Ludwig at TruthOut discusses how much damage Attorney General Sessions can do in ending the Obama-era effort to leave states with legalized marijuana alone. Long story short: "Sessions can't stop the inevitable, but he can harm a lot of people trying," and those people are most likely going to be the same people always harmed by the "war on drugs": black and brown people. The good news? Congress might simply refuse to fund any DOJ effort to meddle with the pot trade as it's legal in California, Washington, Colorado, and other states.

Department of the Interior now requires staff to ensure that anyone who gets a grant from the department "promote(s) the priorities" of the current Administration. Why, I can only guess how many laws that breaks! And, naturally, Interior has halted at least two studies (one about the health effects of coal mining, the other about fossil fuel inspections) that don't line up with the President's "priorities." But why do we talk about his priorities, and not ours?

Finally, let's not get too excited about the possibility of Oprah Winfrey running for President. She's obviously more substantial and accomplished than The Rock, let alone the White House's current occupant, but if you remember that the Roman Republic started going downhill when generals started becoming consuls, you won't really want an America vacillating between this mogul or that one as President. Yes, anyone can be President in America, but that doesn't mean everyone should be President.

Action: fighting for better tax policy, less cruelty in the Middle East, and better drug pricing for seniors.

CREDO helps you tell Congressional Democrats to commit to repealing and replacing the Trump tax bill. Find such talk "counterproductive"? Consider that Republicans whined about repealing-and-replacing the Affordable Care Act, a far less offensive bill, for nearly seven years, and their reward was the Presidency and control of both houses of Congress. Sure, they couldn't actually repeal (let alone replace!) Obamacare, but they sure have done a lot of other damage. And my guess is that a lot of working families would like their tax deductions back, and polling tells us that they know cutting corporate taxes doesn't "create jobs" any more than cutting taxes on the wealthy "creates jobs." You know what creates jobs? Taxing the rich such that they face a choice of paying most of their millionaire income to our government or actually investing that money in jobs, salaries, and production. Indeed, that's how it used to work, back in the country that teabaggers always say they wish this country could be.

Meanwhile, our government still enables Saudi oppression of Yemen, but it sure ain't popular -- even 47 U.S. Senators voted to stop giving military aid to Saudi Arabia so it can continue its war against Yemen. This war has not only resulted in epidemics and starvation, but has put America in the peculiar position of helping al-Qaeda! The Saudis are going after the Houthi rebels, after all, and the Houthi rebels fight al-Qaeda better than almost anyone else does. Can you see Mr. bin Laden smiling from beyond at our folly? Well, how would you like to wipe that damn smile off his face? Let Just Foreign Policy and Change.org help you tell your Congressfolk to keep the Executive branch from refueling the Saudi warplanes that bomb Yemen. After all, it's not like the Executive branch even has authority from Congress to get involved in this quagmire. (Remember, the 2001 AUMF doesn't give the President a blank check to do what he likes.)

Finally, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 4138/S. 2011, the Medicare Drug Price Negotiation Act. H.R. 4138/S. 2011 would do as its title says: it would let Medicare negotiate drug prices on behalf of seniors using Part D. Letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices would result in seniors getting the same benefit for less taxpayer money, which you'd think would be attractive to fiscal conservatives. The bill would also force big pharma corporations to offer low-income working families rebates on prescription drugs. Now, a similarly-titled bill -- H.R. 242/S. 41, the Medicare Prescription Drug Price Negotiation Act -- would also enable Medicare to negotiate drug prices, but that's about all it would do; I might settle for that in a sincere negotiation with Republicans, but I think the Cleveland Browns will go to the NFL playoffs before a "sincere negotiation with Republicans" will happen, so certainly let's not pre-emptively settle.

Action: protecting our earned benefits and our earned internet freedom.

Congress is back to work, such as they do, and House Speaker Ryan has been saying for weeks now that he wants to "rein in" Medicare costs, which, as we know, is right-wing code for "destroy Medicare." Other right-wingers have expressed glee at the thought of destroying Social Security and Medicaid, too. Having just blown a $1.5 trillion hole in the federal deficit with their latest corporate tax cut giveaway, they got some cojones coming to us and saying they can't give us the benefits we've earned with our hard work. And when I talk of earned benefits, I include Medicaid, too -- if you get laid off by your Ayn Rand-worshiping CEO and suddenly find yourself faced with a choice between no job and a low-paying job, you might need Medicaid. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk not to cut or privatize or otherwise hurt Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security. Because when they hurt those things after all, they hurt us. And you can't just keep hurting us and get away with it.

But Congress has another way to injure Social Security, by cutting the Social Security Administration's budget. They've been hacking away at it for years, all while President Obama nattered on about the need to compromise with political "realities," but in cutting the Social Security Administration budget, we're depriving our seniors -- and we're all going to be seniors one day, right? -- of the good services they deserve, services they've worked for and paid into all their lives. Here's a better idea: hire enough folks to ensure that our seniors don't have to wait in line all day, or wait on the phone all day, or wait years, sometimes, to get a ruling on a claim. And WHEREZ WILLZ YOU FINDZ TEH MONEYZ!!!! is a question no one who supported that hateful tax bill has any standing to ask. So Action Network helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop cutting the Social Security Administration's budget.

Finally, as you know, the FCC repealed its 2015 Open Internet order last month, thus paving the way for big telecomm corporations to start blocking and throttling your favorite websites, or exacting tribute from you to see those websites -- but we don't have to sit back and take it, as Rep. Doyle (D-PA) and Sen. Markey (D-MA) are preparing a "resolution of disapproval" that would reverse the FCC's decision to repeal its own net neutrality standards. I still don't have a bill number for either iteration of the bill, but word on the street is that 29 Senators have already signed on as co-sponsors, and per the Congressional Review Act we only need 30 to force a vote on the matter. Now, even if the bill passes both Houses, and that won't be easy, since President Trump would still have to sign it, which, given his evil proclivities, isn't likely. Still, it's our duty to do the right thing, and to pressure our government to do the right thing, so Free Press helps you tell your Senators to support a "resolution of disapproval" that would overturn the FCC's recent decision to restrict our freedom on the internet.

Around the table: concerning American poverty, tax reform, an ambassadorial Trumphole, and the "liberal" media.

U.N. poverty monitor tours the United States for two weeks and releases a scorching report on our government's apparent attempts to make America the "world champion of extreme inequality." Moreover, no excuses: "(t)he persistence of extreme poverty is a political choice made by those in power. With political will, it could readily be eliminated." We are the can-do country, after all, so I see no reason to doubt him.

Ho hum, a gaggle of CEOs interviewed by Yale say the passage of the Republican tax "reform" bill won't induce them to "immediately make large domestic capital investments,", though that was, supposedly, the point of cutting the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. But despite their many other criticisms of the bill, a majority of those CEOs surveyed said they thought it should pass! That would constitute some serious cognitive dissonance, unless we admitted the possibility that their main motivation is greed.

Speaking of which, be wary of claims that ZOMG TEH CORPORASHUNZ ARE SPENDINGZ TEH TAX CUTZ ON TEH PEEPULZ!!!!, particularly where Wells Fargo is concerned. Wells Fargo said it would raise its minimum wage to $15/hour and invest $400 million in communities next year, but raising the minimum wage would comprise a mere 2% of Wells Fargo's expected windfall from the tax bill -- and a Wells Fargo spokeshack has also come out and said these moves had nothing to do with the bill! You might well suppose the Fight for 15 movement had more to do with Wells Fargo's decisions than most "liberal" media organs report.

So, this didn't go well: Dutch reporter asks incoming U.S. Ambassador to Netherlands (and former U.S. Rep.) Peter Hoekstra about his statements accusing Muslims of creating super-violent "no-go zones" in the Netherlands, and he not only calls reporting on such statements "fake news," but once confronted with video evidence of the statements, he denies even using the term "fake news"! Wow, he and our President sure are made for each other. I wonder what Mr. Trump thought of Mr. Hoekstra's racist ad that he ran during the Super Bowl in 2012.

Finally, Adam Johnson at FAIR questions whether journalists "who served as message-carriers for Republicans’ claims that the deficit was an urgent issue" should apologize for being "taken in," now that Republicans just passed a tax "reform" that adds more than a trillion dollars to out national debt. In describing Republican "concerns" over the deficit, I might have used the term "whining" instead of "moaning," but that's about my only criticism of Mr. Johnson's article, which takes us through the bad old days of deficit hand-wringing and "liberal" media uh-huhing about it.

Around the table: now, with more good news! (For today, at least.)

Here's the House roll call vote on the tax "reform" bill; you don't need the Senate roll call, because all Republicans (except Sen. McCain, who's incapacitated at present) voted yea, and all Democrats voted nay. Your House Republicans voting nay are all from New Jersey or New York except for two Californians (Messrs. Issa and Rohrabacher) and, of course, the incorrigible Walter Jones of North Carolina. All those who voted yea should be unelectable now, just as everyone who voted to repeal Obamacare earlier this year should be unelectable now, but there's still plenty of time between now and Election Day, and seriously, you think Democrats will run ads about these evil works? Why, that would be uncivil!

Steel-manufacturing corporation agrees to pay $1.5 million for polluting the air of good Pennsylvania residents -- and will face more penalties if it doesn't reduce emissions. Those who constantly complain about TEH REGULASHUNZ!!!!! should ask themselves whether they actually approve of folks not being able to go outside because the air's so bad. Because if you constantly whine about regulations, you're objectively pro-pollution, not to mention objectively pro-bigger health care bills. I really don't think it's more nuanced than that.

Trump judicial nominee Matthew Petersen withdraws from consideration after a video of him wilting under rudimentary legal questions from Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) goes viral. Mr. Petersen can't go away without playing the pity card, of course -- "I had hoped that my nearly two decades of public service might carry more weight than my two worst minutes on television," he says, omitting the fact that his "two worst minutes" thoroughly demonstrated why he shouldn't be a federal judge. President Trump no doubt eagerly awaits the day when net neutrality is no more, so future unqualified judicial nominees won't be so easily embarrassed.

Surprise, surprise, an FCC Inspector General finds that, contra right-wing propaganda, President Obama did not, in fact, interfere with the net neutrality rule-making process in 2014 and 2015. You recall that Mr. Obama did make a video saying what he thought the FCC should do in late 2014, but that hardly constitutes "express orders," particularly when Mr. Obama made a point of saying he couldn't tell the FCC Chair what to do. Maybe right-wingers will still think Mr. Obama interfered, but I doubt a judge will, since that's where this is all going. I'm starting to think Mr. Pai isn't the accomplished servant of corporate interests he aspires to be.

President Trump commutes sentence of Iowa kosher meatpacking executive Sholom Rubashkin, who was serving 27 years for money laundering and bank fraud. So now we know whom Mr. Trump thinks deserves mercy in America: other bosses, like him -- and this boss originally got busted for using hundreds of undocumented immigrants! And while Mr. Rubashkin is no Wall Street bankster, I wouldn't be so quick to say he deserves clemency merely because he was "a devoted husband and father" and "a deeply religious man," as if these are amulets to shield you from the consequences of your actions.

Finally, jury finds first six defendants not guilty of rioting and property destruction charges for their participation in J20 Inauguration Day protests. Well, only 166 defendants to go! Seriously, I'd like to celebrate this as a victory for free speech and protest, but it is a little demoralizing seeing how low prosecutors will sink to try to win -- and frightening to think how low they'll go once President Even-Worse-Than-Trump takes office.

Action: "free" trade, children's health care, and lymphedema treatment.

Our government is renegotiating NAFTA as we speak, but when good Americans can't find out what's going on behind closed doors but over 500 corporate hacks can, you should be very scared. I know, President Trump ran on his opposition to "free" trade and the devastation it's wrought on American workers, and he did get us out of the Trans-Pacific "Partnership," but we have reason to believe that Mr. Trump would still sell us out on NAFTA: he decided not to demand an end to the "investor-state dispute settlement" mechanism that would nullify our laws and force us to pay tribute to corporations whose investors have been "harmed" bythose laws, and his own Commerce Secretary famously told a pro-business group that the TPP would be a good model for their NAFTA renegotiation. But remember that literally nothing stood between us and the TPP in 2016, and we still made it so toxic that even far-right Republicans wouldn't support it. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to do the will of their constituents, not their corporate donors, in evaluating NAFTA.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reauthorize the Children's Health Insurance Program already, and without poison pill amendments that would otherwise wither in daylight, then CREDO, Moms Rising, and the Fairness Project all still help you do that. Congress has wasted a lot of time on their notoriously unpopular and dangerous tax "reform" and health care "reform" plans this year, but (to borrow a phrase) neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers of doom from their evil rounds, and certainly the September 30 expiration of CHIP funding didn't stay them, either. Now states are starting to run out of money with which to insure the 9 million or so children who get health insurance via CHIP, and the Trump Administration has even sent emergency funding to several states so they can continue their programs. Once upon a time, CHIP was a bipartisan program, but now a narrow Republican majority in the Senate and a somewhat less narrow majority in the House can't get it done, so obsessed are they with wrecking as much else as they can. So it's up to us to speak up, again. After all, who else is gonna do it? The Democrats?

Finally, H.R. 930/S. 497, the Lymphedema Treatment Act, would mandate that Medicare cover the compression supplies that patients often need to deal with the lymphedema that often occurs as a side effect of breast cancer treatment. At least half of women who beat breast cancer will have to put up with lymphedema, so why not cover it? Not because TEH PEEPULZ ALWAYZEZ DEMANDZ THAT TEH GUMMINT DO TEH EVERYTHINGZ FOR THEMZ!!!!!, though that's probably what Sen. Hatch would say. But it's really not a burden for us to help women recuperating from breast cancer treatment to help them make sure their arms and legs don't swell up and cause them intolerable pain. Really, it's not. So Lymphedematreatmentact.org helps you tell Congressional leadership to get working on the Lymphedema Treatment Act. Their website has a novel approach: they list various Congressional committee and subcommittee leaders and give you their phone numbers. A lot of these folks won't be expecting to hear from you about this -- and that's the time to strike!

Action: tax "reform," and internet freedom.

Sen. Corker (R-TN), who once said he wouldn't vote for any tax "reform" bill that added to the deficit, now says he'll vote for this tax "reform" bill that will add between $1 trillion and $1.4 trillion to the deficit over the next decade (possibly because of this development!), and Sen. Rubio (R-FL) apparently got enough of his demands met to declare he'll vote yes on the bill -- but, dismal though things seem, you can still use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom, if you're on a cellphone) to tell your Senators and your House Reps to reject this absurd tax "reform." Don't be swayed that the bill doesn't cut renewable tax credits after all, or that it doesn't repeal the Johnson Amendment after all, because guess what else would protect these good works? Voting against the damn bill, that's what. Just remember that the bill gives massive, unearned handouts to corporations and rich folks -- who got almost three percentage points lopped off their top bracket after all, how utterly surprising! -- and takes tax breaks away from working families such that they won't feel the half-percentage point dip in some of the middle brackets at all. Don't just take my word for it, though: read the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy's report.

Meanwhile, as you know, the FCC ignored the popular will last week (as expressed in over 20 million public comments to the agency) and repealed the 2015 Open Internet order that protected the internet freedom of consumers from corporations. But it turns out that the "resolution of disapproval" process we (rightly) despise so much after it killed internet privacy and forced arbitration rules earlier this year (and damn near killed methane emissions rules) can surely be turned on those who use it the most, and Sen. Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Doyle (D-PA) will soon introduce a resolution of disapproval that would nullify the recent FCC repeal right quick. With 48-and-soon-to-be-49 Democrats in the Senate almost certainly favoring such a resolution (one that can't be filibustered, you recall) and Sen. Collins (R-ME) probably willing to join them, the resolution would need just one more Republican defection to pass the Senate. Passing the House would be rather more work, but it wouldn't be impossible. The hard part would be getting the President to sign it; you know he won't want to, but how well do you think he'll defend a veto, and how much more wrath does he want to face from the voters? Let's find out! Consumer Reports, Free Press, and CREDO all help you tell your Congressfolk to roll back the FCC's anti-internet freedom vote.

Around the table: the "liberal" media keeps obsessing about Russia, and other stories.

Mark Joseph Stern at Slate suggests that Alabama may have violated the National Voter Registration Act with its various shenanigans concerning "inactive" voters. "Voters who cast ballots in every election should not be told that they have abruptly become inactive; the right to vote should not depend upon one’s ability to recall her county of birth; citizens should not fear arrest on their way to cast lawful ballots," he writes. Thankfully, black voters came out in such numbers that they could not be ignored -- which I guess means the Republican state apparatus will redouble their efforts to suppress them.

Eoin Higgins at FAIR finds MSNBC more eager to cover Russia than other, more important issues, like the Republican tax "reform," the California wildfires, or reports that the President wants to create his own spy network. And that's why I don't watch cable news, even the nominally liberal kind! It's all drama, all the time. Also, too, MSNBC only went "liberal" (with the arrival of Keith Olbermann, who's also been too preoccupied with Russia lately) after failing to ape Fox News well enough, and not for lack of trying.

Ho hum, yet another pair of writers take to the New York Times to complain that the process for choosing Presidential candidates shouldn't be too democratic or anything. Also, apparently, Donald Trump is all Bernie Sanders's fault, and not at all Donald Trump's fault -- where have we heard that before cough bushnadergore cough? With Democrats taking "advice" like this, it's no wonder they constantly lose elections. You did notice that Doug Jones's people kept the national Democrats out of Alabama, right?

At least five multinational corporations have hired intelligence firms to spy on activist groups who oppose them, with at least one observer saying private intelligence corporations have embedded more agents within these activists groups than police have. Remember: the police work for us, and if they go awry, we can do something about it. Over private intelligence firms we have far less oversight, almost like that's the idea.

Senate Finance Committee passes Dodd-Frank "reform" bill by a wide margin, but the House gives it a "chilly reception," largely because it doesn't do enough damage to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Please, House Republicans, stand up for your beliefs! No compromise, no sell out! (Seriously, though, they say with a straight face that Dodd-Frank "hinder(ed) economic growth"? Jesus Mary and Joseph banksters hogged just about all of the growth during this recent "recovery"! How much is enough?)

Finally, federal judge throws out felony "inciting a riot" charges against the first six J20 defendants, but they'll still get tried for charges including "property damage, conspiracy to riot, and engaging in a riot." This, even though the prosecution has already admitted that none of the six defendants actually destroyed any property! Don't you, you know, kind of have to do things to be convicted of those things? Showing up at an anti-Trump rally wearing black isn't enough.

Action: tax "reform," and smart infrastructure rebuilding.

Today is yet another day that's as good as any to use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a cellphone) to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to reject the tax "reform" bill Congress is trying to finish before Christmas. It's bad enough that Republicans think they're pretty close to the finish line, but somehow they've managed to make this bill even worse! I mean, it was a badly-written bill to begin with -- and I don't mean to slight the penmanship of whomever wrote all the hand-written notes in the final version! -- but now Republicans actually plan to cut the top tax bracket down to 37%. Because some very wealthy folks complained about the tax breaks they were losing! Which reminds us, as always, that your complaints don't matter to our Congressfolk, because if you don't have a pile of money available for campaign donations, you mean shit to them. Sorry, there's really no better way to put it. It's well past time to get some new Congresspeople who might have a clue as to what "representation" actually means.

Meanwhile, S. 2165, the Puerto Rico and Virgin Islands Equitable Rebuild Act of 2017, would not only help rebuild hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, but would do so without redistributing income from working families to corporate CEOs. How would it accomplish that goal? By limiting federal relief efforts' reliance on privatizing public utilities, by promoting renewable energy in infrastructure rebuilding, by expanding Medicaid and Medicare services in these hard-hit areas, expanding investment in schools and VA hospitals, and by providing training and employment services to displaced workers, among many, many other things. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support a more sustainable future for Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands by supporting S. 2165. The Trump Administration's rebuilding efforts there so far have, ah, not exactly showed our best face to the world: a little less than half of Puerto Rico's electrical grid still isn't up after more than two months, one in 10 Puerto Ricans still don't have access to clean water, and Wall Street banksters are circling over a nation they've already screwed over numerous times. So let's show the world our best face.

Around the table: on the death of net neutrality, and other matters.

University of Maryland study finds an overwhelming and actually bipartisan majority of Americans oppose the FCC's plan to repeal 2015 net neutrality regulations. When confronted with the news that 75% of Republicans oppose the plan, I'm reminded that Newt Gingrich, in Real Change, says that if 70% of the American people want something, they ought to have it. I wonder what rhetorical feces-throwing he would employ here to deny the American people their clear will, which, I hasten to add while you can still read it, we have expressed over and over and over again.

In a related note, the FCC and FTC have announced how they'll "police" the internet after the FCC repeals net neutrality rules. FCC Chair Ajit Pai has long said the FTC really should be doing this policing, but of course the FTC won't be doing very much policing -- they won't go after corporations that block and throttle websites, but they'll go after corporations that do that without telling customers first. If you suspect that such corporate "disclosure" of blocking and throttling won't even rate fine print in a customer contract, well, I don't blame you.

Dig this Washington Post headline: "The GOP’s latest tax plan would do exactly what Rubio warned them not to. Will he vote with them anyway?" That is to laugh -- of course Mr. Rubio will ignore what one observer describes as "as close to a middle-finger from the conference committee as it gets, because the man has no courage. (His issue, in case you were wondering, is that the conference will raise the corporate tax rate a percentage point to pay for more tax cuts for the rich, when it didn't want to do so to pay for a Child Tax Credit expansion. Hey, I'd be mad, too, but I wouldn't just take it.)

Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA), currently Senate Judiciary chair, says two of President Trump's nominees to the federal bench will not get confirmed, a mere day after Mr. Grassley told the President to "reconsider" them. Both nominees are fairly notorious, but the American Bar Association rated one as "not qualified," which provoked some Republicans to whine about the American Bar Association! This nominee -- whom we will not name, lest some part of him survives oblivion -- is also married to the chief of staff of a White House counsel, and of course didn't disclose that to the Senate. I'm glad Mr. Grassley has put his foot down, enough so that I find his complaining about how hard it is to vet people in the "social networking world" only mildly annoying.

Finally, let me reiterate that Doug Jones's victory in the Alabama U.S. Senate special election represents a victory for civilized people everywhere. Whenever a man of accomplishment -- and putting two of the Birmingham bombers in jail should be the very definition of accomplishment -- defeats a right-wing blowhard with a history of trying to date girls who could not legally consent to sexual relations, well, that's a win for civilization. And let me also say that I'm glad Mr. Jones didn't take my advice and run millions of ads about the Birmingham bombers! Turns out the good black folks of Alabama, at least, didn't need any reminding about that.

UPDATE. Okay, so Sen. Rubio has now threatened to withhold his vote on the conference tax bill for the reasons described above. I'm pleased to see it, though I'd be more pleased if he wouldn't vote for the damn thing because his constituents don't want him to. And, you know, he does have a record of talking tough and doing nothing -- his criticisms of Mr. Tillerson before voting in favor of his nomination come to mind.

Action: "entitlements," Israel-Palestine relations, and factory farm waste.

You have heard, I presume, that House Speaker Paul Ryan (E-WI) has said that after Congress passes its latest tax-cuts-for-the-rich "reform" bill, it'll go after "entitlements" like Medicare and Social Security, because, in Mr. Ryan's unctuous phrasing, that's "how you tackle the debt and the deficit" and "it's the health care entitlements that are the big drivers of our debt". Uh, no: just off the top of my head, refusing to tax millionaire income at 91% like we did in the old days, refusing to tax corporations like we did in the old days, and tolerating waste and fraud in defense spending are just three of the things that "drive our debt" far more than Medicare and Social Security will ever do. But my real bone to pick, of course, is the word "entitlements." So (using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page, etc.) go ahead and call your Reps and Senators and tell them that you worked for Medicare and Social Security, you paid into them, you fought for them, and when you get older, you deserve to enjoy them. They're not "entitlements," as if our government is so generous to let us have them. They're ours.

Meanwhile, President Trump must fancy himself bold to announce that Jerusalem is the capitol of Israel (and certainly not Palestine!) and to say he'll move our embassy there from Tel Aviv, but "boldness," here, would be refusing to bow to the wishes of the farthest-right in Israel, a boldness sadly missing from all of our post-WWII Presidents, regardless of how much whining Mr. Netanyahu did about President Obama. Besides, Mr. Trump will run afoul of international law here, since the U.N. still recognizes Jerusalem as a territory separate from either Israel or Palestine, one governed by international jurisdiction. So both Jewish Voice for Peace and the Friends Committee on National Legislation help you tell your Congressfolk to stand up to Mr. Trump and prevent him from moving our Israeli embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. A few Americans will probably die because Mr. Trump loves to swing his balls in the world's face like this, but we oppose his announcement because we stand for real peace between Israel and Palestine, and that requires recognizing the harm Israel has done to Palestinians in the name of self-defense, and assessing how much security Israel has even earned in doing so. (Spoiler alert: the answers are "too much" and "very little.")

Finally, H.R. 848 is called the Farm Regulatory Certainty Act, and when you see the words "Regulatory Certainty" together, you ought to be scared. And indeed, H.R. 848 would prevent our government from regulating animal manure, waste, and fertilizer, even though these are the very things that factory farms pump out in massive quantities, and if they wind up in your drinking water, they might well make you sick. And it won't just be you getting salmonella and E. coli -- it'll be aquatic wildlife dying off, too. The bill would also prevent citizens from suing factory farm corporations at the same time our government is moving against them, and why do these corporations deserve such coddling? So, to sum: H.R. 848 isn't concerned about farms, but factory farms, and what's "regulatory certainty" for them is worry and uncertainty for you whenever you turn on the tap. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to stand for clean water and citizens' rights by opposing the so-called Farm Regulatory Certainty Act. And don't be swayed by arguments about Congress's "intent" in 1979, because factory farms weren't as big then.

Action: tax "reform," and "free" trade.

The Republicans' tax "reform" bill has taken further PR hits as more and more Americans have realized that it won't be much of a Christmas present for them, so 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 find your Reps' and Senators' phone numbers so you can tell them to reject any tax "reform" bill that comes out of the conference between House and Senate tax "reform" bills. You already know the Republican tax "reform" plan would cut corporate taxes and repeal a lot of the tax breaks (like property tax deductions and state and local tax deductions) that working families take. You may also know that their plan also would get rid of renewable energy tax credits and would repeal the Johnson Amendment, which latter item would turn many American churches into money-laundering operations for big campaign donors. But the best way to think about the damage the tax "reform" plan would do? Think of big pharmaceutical corporations that would reap hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate welfare while still price-gouging good Americans. And then ask yourself, why do these assholes deserve a tax cut?

Meanwhile, our government will be renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (a.k.a. NAFTA, a.k.a. SHAFTYA) next week. I commend President Trump for putting a stake in the heart of the Trans-Pacific "Partnership," but he'll undo that good work if he doesn't improve NAFTA for the benefit of the American people. Given that his own Commerce Secretary has said, out loud, that the aforementioned TPP would be a good model for NAFTA renegotiation, and given President Trump's own refusal to demand that a renegotiated NAFTA get rid of the "investor-state dispute settlement" mechanisms that nullify our laws and outsource our jobs, you can see where a reasonable person might be a bit skeptical that President Trump really wants to act in the best interest of the American people. But again: it doesn't matter what he wants; it matters what we want. So Public Citizen still helps you demand that your Congressfolk oppose any renegotiated NAFTA that contains an "investor-state dispute settlement" mechanism therein. They responded to us last year, but as civilized people, we understand that we must win our freedoms over and over again, because evil people keep coming to take them away from us.

Around the table: tax "reform," racism, the "liberal" media, deaths-by-taser, and real live voter fraud.

Virtually all recent polling finds that the majority of Americans oppose the Trump tax "cut" plan. And that's based on what we've been able to find out about it in the precious little time Congress has spent "debating" the bill! We Americans are demonstrably smarter about tax "cuts" than we used to be -- after all, how much "trickling down" has really gone on over the last four decades? -- but I worry that this won't become as real for Americans as the health care "reform" debate obviously did. Then again, Republicans might be greedy enough to pass this bill before Christmas, and then it'll become quite real indeed in the coming months when we all go to do our taxes.

Donna Minkowitz at The Nation finds speakers of a secret white supremacist conference doing things like denouncing corporate power and embracing single-payer health care. I've long suspected that a lot of white supremacists would find their racism a lot less compelling if we shined the light of economic populism upon them -- no use telling me wrong, because I've seen economic populism convert people! -- but we should beware of the possibility that the "liberal" media will pretend single-payer health care is a "racist" position merely because Richard Spencer contaminated it with his racist cooties, just as they've done with "free" trade. And then our work becomes much harder, but when was it ever easy, or supposed to be?

MSNBC reverses its decision to fire Sam Seder, after realizing that they'd completely misinterpreted an eight-year old tweet from Mr. Seder, a misreading helped along, naturally, by a massive right-wing campaign against Mr. Seder. Maybe I'm just a demanding bastard, but I'm not that impressed that MSNBC finally got it right, because the original screw-up is so inexcusable. Seriously, read what people write, in context, and then refute or ignore the drama that assholes create about it. Why is that so hard?

A Reuters report finds over 100 incidents of prisoners dying after corrections officers used tasers on them. Many of these prisoners were already restrained when tasered, and many of them died after being subjected to other, non-taser force. The Reuters findings cover over 17 years, but I would think they lowball the actual number of deaths-by-taser, and anyway, one is too many. And "law and order" ballswingers would see it exactly the same way if it happened to someone in their family.

Finally, former Colorado Republican Party Chair is convicted of voter fraud after a) going on and on in public about how Democrats are the only ones who ever commit voter fraud and b) filling out and mailing in his ex-wife's absentee ballot. Of course he blames it on a "diabetic episode," which you're free to translate as "the Twinkie defense." What are the chances of Fox News throwing a hissy fit over this actual documented instance of voter fraud? I kid, of course -- the chances are precisely zero, because a Republican did it.

Around the table: concerning tax "reform," religious "conscience," and sexual harassment.

If you've been tempted to think that the "liberal" media has really turned a corner in its coverage since the Trump Administration descended upon us, Ben Norton at FAIR will remind you that the "liberal" media, with its coverage of the passage of the Senate tax "reform" bill, still prefers to cover everything like it's a damn horserace. Lost in all the "victory" headlines are the simple facts: it's not a "tax cut" for anyone but corporations and the very rich, it'll create bigger deficits, and it'll prompt Congress to cut Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security to make up for all the "economic growth" that'll never come.

Eric Levitz at New York magazine reports that Senate Republicans seem to have accidentally killed many of their big corporate donors' favorite deductions, by retaining the corporate Alternative Minimum Tax, which just so happens to be 20%, which is exactly the same as the regular rate! Since Republicans would be trumpeting we closed corporate tax loopholes from the mountaintops if they'd done it on purpose, maybe it really is incompetence. But remember the lesson of The Bush Mobb years: incompetence is malice. And if the bill that comes out of conference puts all the corporate welfare back, then I suppose it'll be no-harm-no-foul for Mr. McConnell and his caucus.

Apparently the U.S. Supreme Court is trying to figure out a way to rule against a gay couple denied a wedding cake due to the wedding cake maker's "religious beliefs." I figured they'd just give the opinion to Justice Gorsuch and let him write whatever, but it seems Justice Kennedy, author of quite a few pro-gay rights opinions in his time, is ready to leap on the absurd idea that the Colorado statute that prevents this sort of discrimination evidences an "animus" toward religion. It doesn't: it has an animus toward discrimination, which it should. Justice Sotomayor's argument in paragraph 9, which describes the real free-association freedoms the First Amendment protects, is far more convincing.

Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) announces resignation after multiple allegations of sexual harassment -- though he also says he may have given folks a "false impression" that he admitted to any of them, and that a Senate ethics investigation would ultimately have cleared him. Maybe I'm too demanding, but the fact that he won't do his job and fight the accusations against him prompts me to dismiss his assertions of innocence. And while Anthony Weiner was a liberal (and an ineffectual one) only on health care, Mr. Franken has championed, and made a difference on, many issues, including forced arbitration, net neutrality, and financial regulation. Thus his fall is far more disappointing than Mr. Weiner's.

Finally, in a peripherally-related note, Trump press hack Sarah Huckabee Sanders says Mr. Trump has endorsed Roy Moore for the Alabama Senate race because having "a person who supports his agenda" is more important than the possibility that said person has sexually abused teenage girls. She also says, of course, that it's "something for the people of Alabama to decide," which raises the question of why Mr. Trump said anything at all. Why is "his agenda" important in the first place? Is that what the Founders wanted? Did they give us Senators merely so they'd rubber stamp a President's agenda?

Action: tax "reform," children's health insurance, and the Grand Canyon.

I still think you should call your Reps and Senators and demand that they reject whatever tax "reform" plan comes out of conference, but Public Citizen also helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the final tax "reform" bill or, in the words of their latest email missive, "face the wrath of (their) constituents." How much wrath they'll face remains to be seen, particularly in districts where they've been able to gerrymander individual houses into the next district (or states that use the Interstate Crosscheck database), but why not remind them that in passing this tax "reform," they stand against us? And does standing against the people seem to them to be their job? Is it their job to take away the tax breaks working families depend upon (state and local tax deductions, property tax deductions, etc.) in order to shower upon big corporations and wealthy inheritors unearned and unneeded tax breaks? Is it their job to force cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security because of the massive deficits their tax "reform" plan creates? Is it their job to refuse to face the people in townhalls over their tax "reform" plan? They may not know what their job is, but we know what our job is.

In a related note, the Fairness Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to reauthorize the Children's Health Insurance Program, or CHIP. You may want to follow up with a phone call, in which you add that you want clean CHIP reauthorization, without poison pill amendments or hostage crises. CHIP's funding authorization lapsed on September 30, since the Senate was too busy trying to take health care away from at least 20 million Americans; the House has passed a CHIP reauthorization bill since then, but one larded with poison pills. Lately, Sen. Hatch (R-UT) has opined that though he'd love to get CHIP reauthorized, he's sick and tired of all these people demanding that government do everything for them, or something. Funny that he'd indulge in that critique when discussing children's health insurance, a matter that children can literally do nothing about. Unless Mr. Hatch wants them all to work factory jobs! And for him to go on about "spending and spending" when he literally blew open a trillion-dollar hole in the national debt is just icing on the cake. Might shame finally descend upon these politicians? Or must we wait for a Doug Jones victory in Alabama that's far from a sure thing?

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell President Trump to abandon his plan of opening up the Grand Canyon area to uranium mining corporations, then Environmental Action helps you do that. If you wanted to sum up the problem here in seven words, here they are: uranium mining pollutes water that people drink. Specifically, uranium mining in the Grand Canyon area would pollute the drinking water of the Colorado River, which serves five U.S. states and two Mexican states and which, quite frankly, gets a little shallower every year, not just from corporations and people using more and more water, but also from climate change drying out the land. But you know how the unregenerate mammon-worshiper Donald Trump thinks: if some executive can make money, then screw everything and everyone else. And this is not about "creating jobs" for miners, because corporate executives won't create jobs for anyone unless one of two things happen: demand rises, or we make them. Sadly, in this age, the latter has to precede the former. Uranium mining is, for the Trump Administration, all about making mining executives richer, and nothing else.

Around the table: from the Presidential "private spy network" to the way to win and do good works in Trumpville.

Some well-off and well-connected Trump supporters appear to be creating a private spy network that circumvents the CIA and would only report to current CIA head/potential next Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Even if you don't like the "deep state," then creating a private spy network answering only to someone the President trusts is about the worst way to fight it. You think the Founders wanted a President with his own spy network? Also, too, George W. Bush fired the spies who disagreed with him, and that paved the way for this.

Even the father of Reaganomics, Paul Craig Roberts, says the Republican tax "reform" plan is an "abomination" and "an act of brutal plunder, and it proves that capitalism in the West is now "merely a looting machine." His use of the word "looters" to describe those that would benefit from the tax "reform" should shame all the Ayn Rand acolytes who support the plan, but I bet it doesn't. They all fancy themselves "makers" and they fancy working families as "takers," and many of them think looters don't even exist.

Ho hum, ProPublica still finds plenty of scams and malware in Facebook political ads that don't meet Facebook's own guidelines for its ads. Gosh, I don't know, maybe Facebook should hire people to fight this crap? A lot of people are still looking for jobs, you know, and they're a lot more trainable than executives think (or, perhaps, want you to think). And anti-kudos to Mark Zuckerberg for deflecting this into a "free speech" issue. Tricking people into paying $100 a month for erectile dysfunction "medication" isn't "free speech," it's fraud.

David C. Barker at Quartz says that Republicans probably won't pay a political price for passing that awful tax "reform" bill. I don't know that the bill's unpopularity is "somewhat overstated," but I will conceded that it sure is harder to get folks angry about a labyrinthine tax bill than about taking away their health insurance. And Mr. Barker's probably right that the bill won't destroy the economy in the short term -- it will do great long-term damage, but voters need to be prompted to see that damage before it happens. Think Democrats will do that in their ads? I kid, of course.

Finally, from the "All is Not Lost" file: a Democratic Socialist winning a city council election in a small Iowa city may not be big news -- even if that city went for Mr. Trump by five points just last year -- but I think Ross Grooters has put his finger on a winning formula, namely remembering that "everybody is facing the same economic hardships" and you have to talk about "what has to change" so voters can actually thrive, instead of constantly worrying about the next disaster draining what little savings they have. I bet it also helps that Mr. Grooters grew up in a conservative family, not that I'd know anything about that.

Penny rants for Tuesday, December 5, 2017: concerning bad arguments and evil deeds.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) says we can't fund the Children's Health Insurance Program because "we don't have money anymore" but apparently also because "I have a rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of dollars to help people who won’t help themselves." Always they bring the WE'RE BROKE!!!!!! rubbish, plus he had the cojones to say this right as he was shepherding a tax "reform" bill through the Senate that would reduce federal revenues by (in the Joint Committee on Taxation's rather charitable assessment) over $100 billion annually! So the question is this: does Mr. Hatch really regard children as "people who won't help themselves," or was he just deflecting into general rightwingmoocherspeak? It doesn't really matter, I suppose, because either way, it's bad argument. As a right-wing bumper sticker reminded me many years ago: know thy enemies, for they are your leaders. (If they would only just be our representatives, rather than the representatives of their big donors, we'd have no reason to hate them.)

Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley is little better, not just trotting out the long-discredited notion that estate tax repeal will "help family farms" but also that "not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing, as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies." We already know that folks who "spend every darn penny" usually have to, and if they don't meet their bills it's because they don't get paid enough, but a philosophy that exalts investing and disdains spending is also a philosophy that says poor people are worse people than rich people, which, given the childish way Our Glorious Elites constantly act, we also know is not true. By the way, if I suggest that this is Mr. Grassley's actual political philosophy, please understand that I'm giving him credit. After all, most mammon-worshiping right-wingers want to shelter investment from taxation merely out of greed.

Surprise, surprise, the President of Honduras, who probably would have lost his recent attempt at re-election if it were a fair one, is now using forces trained by the United States to put down folks who are protesting the election results. You know, by instituting curfews, launching tear gas into crowds, and arresting people who bang saucepans, in addition to the usual fighting and killing. Anyone whose heart went out to the million Iranians who took to the streets at great personal risk after Mr. Ahmadinejad's "re-election" in 2009 has no business tut-tutting the protestors in Honduras. (They have no business tut-tutting American masked protestors, either, if they applaud the TIGRES.) And if you think this couldn't happen here, recall that our 46% President says he lost the popular vote because three million people voted illegally. Of course, if Democrats actually nominate an economic populist for President in 2020, instead of some centrist weakling who "can win," they might just make moot anything Mr. Trump might be tempted to try.

Action: tax "reform," clean budgeting, and fracking.

Yeah, I know, the Senate passed their tax "reform" plan at about 2 am on Saturday morning, but we still don't have to take it -- House and Senate must still reconcile their almost equally noxious versions of tax "reform," while figuring out how to fund our government by the end of this week and extending the Children's Health Insurance Program they let lapse over two months ago. So you can still use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page -- or the bottom of this page, if you're looking at it on a cellphone -- to find your Reps' and Senators' phone numbers to tell them we still do not want a tax "reform" plan that hikes taxes on working families and cuts taxes for corporations and rich folks. Hey, they're bald enough to keep repeating the lie that "the tax cuts help middle-class families," so we can keep repeating the simple truth that it raises taxes for working families and cuts taxes for corporations and rich folks. The same folks who nearly destroyed our economy in 2008! And now Congress wants to give them even more tax cuts! How disgusting. But not as disgusting as if we just sat back and took it.

Meanwhile, as we noted above, Congress also has to pass a continuing resolution by Friday, or risk a government shutdown, and since a government shutdown means, among other things, national parks closing and seniors not getting their Social Security checks, government shutdowns are, well, rather like playing with fire, politically. Of course, President Trump has mused out loud (again) that a government shutdown might help him politically, and the government shutdown of 2013, the one in which President Obama finally stopped letting Republicans kick sand in his face, did little (if anything) to stem the pro-Republican tide in the following year's midterms. Still, Republicans are doing a little cock-swinging, now that the Senate passed that awful tax "reform" plan, and they'd like to stock their next continuing resolution with all kinds of poison pills that would roll back clean air and clean water protections, help corporations hide all their campaign spending, and (of course!) defunding the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a clean budget bill without any of the legislative riders that would otherwise wither in daylight .

Finally, the Delaware River Basin Commission (or DRBC) released a draft proposal in re fracking in the Delaware River Basin, and though this draft proposal goes further than previous proposals did, they don't go far enough. Certainly, they don't go as far as the fracking moratorium passed in the 2012 state budget, because the latest draft allows gas drilling corporations to withdraw nearly 10 million gallons of water per well drilled from the Delaware River, and it would also allow those corporations to store fracking wastewater near or dump wastewater into the Delaware, and that wastewater tends to have a lot of nasty carcinogens that drillers have gone some length to hide. Hence Food and Water Watch helps you tell the DRBC to enact a much stronger fracking ban, one that would prevent any fracking in or dumping near the Delaware River. Right-wingers -- you know, the folks who call themselves "conservative" without earning it -- love to say we don't have "conclusive evidence" of fracking's dangers, but we have more than enough evidence to oppose it. And anyway, wouldn't it be conservative to ensure something's safe before doing it?

Action: tax "reform," and health care.

As you know, the Republicans didn't vote on their tax "reform" plan yesterday, after it hit a couple of "snags," as the press seems to be putting it. The Senate parliamentarian ruled that the Senate could not consider a proposed "trigger" plan as part of their bill, but the big story is that the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation projected that (surprise, surprise!) the bill wouldn't actually pay for itself, but would instead add over $1 trillion in new deficits over the next decade. Frankly I think they've understated the bill's effects on our federal deficit, but this means we should keep calling our Senators and telling them to reject their tax "reform" plan. If we passed a bill bringing back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income, raising the corporate tax rate to 50%, closing corporate tax loopholes, counting capital gains and dividends as regular income, and keeping taxes low for working families, you know what we wouldn't have to discuss? The possibility of "increased deficits," since such a bill would bring in more revenue and help create more jobs.

The Trump Administration couldn't get the Affordable Care Act repealed, but they still get to run it -- and run it straight into the ground, if they like. Hence they're trying to scrutinize big premium hikes by health insurance corporations even less and loosen rules that force those corporations to spend more on health care and less on administrative costs. Doing these things would, of course, hurt people -- by allowing even higher premiums and delivering less health care, respectively -- but to a Trumphole, the only important thing is making sure our government does nothing for us, and uses our taxpayer money to give out as much corporate welfare as possible. So USPIRG helps you tell the Trump Administration to abandon these efforts to make health care more expensive and allow health insurance corporations to be less accountable to the people. Of course Mr. Trump doesn't care what you think -- he's too busy watching his own balls swing, and making everyone else watch it, too -- but the courts may care if the Trump Administration ignores the popular will.