Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning Medicare privatization, corporate taxes, and price gouging.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to get private corporations out of Medicare and close corporate tax loopholes, and tell our FTC to investigate the egg industry for price-gouging. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to get private insurance corporations out of Medicare. Tha Bush Mobb opened the door to private corporations taking taxpayer money to deliver worse service than our government – and thus “prove” the right-wing canard that TEH BIG GUBMINTZ DOESN’TZ WORKZ!!!! – and even under President Biden that door’s opened wider, even though higher costs and worse service accompany every privatization scheme. And instead of worrying that your granddad won’t get dental and hearing care, ask yourself why every Medicare recipient doesn’t get dental and hearing care. (Spoiler alert: Kyrsten Sinema wouldn’t allow it in 2021, because bipartisanship!)

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to close corporate tax loopholes. Of course, another way to describe corporate tax loopholes is corporate welfare, since corporations are getting public money for doing not a damn thing. Or for doing what they were going to do anyway! Seriously, corporations need an “incentive” to spend money developing products? What the hell else do they have to do? Yes, I know, corporations have spent the last 40 years doing nothing but whatever raises their stock prices, and some of President Biden’s policies have started to break that nefarious trend. But we still need to tell our Congressfolk that corporate welfare is evil and that they need to fight it.

Finally, Demand Progress also helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to investigate egg-producing corporations for price-gouging. Yes, anywhere you see price spikes like the one you’ve seen for eggs, your first suspicion should be fraud, and here just as elsewhere, the offending corporations are raising prices and garnering record profits. It’s a shame it’s come to that, but I think it’s pretty obvious by now that big corporations are trying to steal all the money they can before President Biden’s FTC, SEC, and DOJ start winning too many antitrust cases. So we the people are not exactly at a disadvantage here – and we need to press our advantages wherever we can.

Action: concerning health care, corruption, and law and order.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass Medicare-for-All health insurance legislation, pass the CLEAN Act, and pass legislation that would keep police away from traffic stops. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Progressive Hub helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass Medicare-for-All health insurance for all Americans. I bet we all know at least one conservative who says our government couldn’t possibly do a worse job at health insurance than the private corporations do, and when you contemplate how much more money we spend on our patchwork public/private system than virtually every other rich nation on Earth, you can see why. And Medicare-for-All would spend a lot less money on health insurance than our current system. But don’t take my word for it – take the word of the Koch brothers-funded Mercatus Institute.

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the CLEAN Act, which would make the Office of Congressional Ethics permanent and give it more power to actually investigate the ethics imbroglios our Congressfolk somehow constantly find themselves in. Making the Office permanent would shield it from the kind of political games we just saw Republicans play, where they used the will-they-or-won’t-they drama of Speaker McCarthy’s ascension to weaken the office, a move so politically fraught just six years ago that even then-President-elect Trump opposed it. One of the reasons we have laws? To protect ourselves from the lawmakers! And it works more often than the cynical would admit.

Black Lives Matter helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would keep police out of the traffic incidents. About one out of every 10 police killings start out as traffic stops, and we all saw the video of five Memphis cops beating Tyre Nichols to death, so we’ve got to do something. And, as I’ve often said, we need to stop using our police officers as the Swiss Army Knives of our culture, and that means getting them out of a lot of situations we take for granted are “police matters” and letting them concentrate on serving warrants and making arrests. I say that’d be more pro-cop than any of the I SUPPORTZ TEH POLICEZ!!!! nonsense you hear from right-wingers every time cops kill Black folks.

Around the table: the corruption, it burns!

Hard to believe, Harry, but gas drilling billionaire Kelcy Warren, suing Beto O’Rourke for defamation, has given money to judges who could hear and rule in his case. No use arguing that a billionaire can’t be expected to keep track of every single campaign donation he makes, because that’s a very good reason not to have billionaires in the first place! And what’s the “defamation” here? Mr. O’Rourke excoriated Mr. Warren for donating $1 million to his opponent, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, weeks after signing legislation that helped Mr. Warren’s corporation. That’s “c’mon, I’m not a schmuck” territory.

In a peripherally-related note, our Supreme Court failed to disclose its financial relationship with the “expert” they brought in to review that probe they supposedly conducted to find the person who leaked the ruling overturning Roe v. Wade. Said “expert,” former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, helps provide various security assessment for the Justices, but more pertinently: why does anyone look to Michael Chertoff as an “authority”? He’s a Bush Mobber, dammit, and a civilized society would ignore him unto death.

Central Bucks School District backs down from its effort to scrub Elie Wiesel quotations from school library posters. And just days before Holocaust Remembrance Day, to boot! In case you thought they were coming to their senses after a year of doing far right-wingers’ bidding, they’ve contracted with a PR firm for $15,000 a month “in an attempt to repair strained public relations and improve the school district’s image,” and I bet the good folks of Bucks County just love seeing their tax dollars thrown away like that. Want a better image? Don’t appease evil.

When I hear that first-term Rep. Andy Ogles (E-TN) has completely ignored federal laws requiring him to make his personal finances public, I wonder if House Republicans would apply the Santos standard, i.e., they’d toss him from our House if they found he’d broken the law. Ah, I kid – they’ll find a reason not to, and that reason will probably have something to do with Hunter Biden’s laptop or pronouns or M&Ms or litter boxes or whatever tantrum right-wingers are throwing that day.

Finally, Snopes.com informs us that that obnoxious twittering about gas prices and egg prices and such shooting up just because Donald Trump isn’t President anymore is utter horsedoodle. “Vince Langman” thinks he’s clever understating the actual figures for gas prices ($2.54/gallon, not $2), mortgage rates (3.7%, not 3%), and inflation (2.5%, not 1%) as of January 2020, and no doubt he’s right now composing an eight-paragraph rant about nitpicking. Maybe he could ask a bank what’s the difference between 3% and 3.7% interest over 30 years.

Action: concerning mask mandates, Israel and Palestine, and student loan debt.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the Travel Mask Mandate Repeal Act, stop funding Israel’s oppression of Palestinians, and pass the FRESH START Through Bankruptcy Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Travel Mask Mandate Repeal Act. Tired of wearing masks on public transit? Maybe you are and maybe you aren’t – me, I still like not getting sick! – but this bill represents yet another Republican attempt to go after an ant in the kitchen with a sledgehammer and not only miss the ant but destroy the refrigerator, because it would repeal all mask mandates and ensure only Congress can enact new ones. These clowns are about to crash the economy over nothing, so I sure wouldn’t trust them to do the job our CDC obviously does better even if you’re not completely happy with it.

The American Friends Service Committee helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop funding Israel’s oppression of Palestinians – if nothing else, Israel has more than enough funding and arms to keep stoking the cycle of violence there without our help – and Progress America helps you tell President Biden to fight the Netanyahu agenda, which includes enabling far right-wing racists and hamstringing courts. Most Presidents, Democrat or Republican, make noise about standing up to Israel every once in a while, and none of them ever do. And now the fascists are poised to take control of Israel! There’s a lesson in there, somewhere. And we have to make our government learn it.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the FRESH START Through Bankruptcy Act, which would let folks discharge their student loan debt via bankruptcy after 10 years. Currently student loan debt is the only kind of debt that bankruptcy can’t help fix, which should help convince you that our bankruptcy system – “reformed” by Tha Bush Mobb in 2005 – is broken. Don’t let folks tell you this bill will induce “laziness” on the part of our youth – old folks have been calling young folks lazy since time immemorial! – because students can still get in trouble for not paying their loans during that decade they can’t declare bankruptcy.

Action: concerning workers' rights and taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect workers’ right to organize, reject House efforts to defund the police at our IRS, and tax capital gains at the same rate as wages. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

If you’re bummed to hear that the percentage of union-organized workers has hit a historic low – although the raw number of unionized workers did increase by more than 250,000 last year – then you may want to call your Congressfolk and tell them to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act, which would make it a lot harder for corporations to intimidate their workers, and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, which would make governments let their workers organize. Winning union elections ain’t enough if your boss won’t negotiate and you can’t get our government to make them; both these bills will help these matters.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Senators to reject the House Republicans’ plan to defund the police at our IRS and protect the rich and corporate tax cheats they seem to consider their only real constituents. They say funding our IRS enables them to come after you, but our IRS has only been going after poor people because they don’t have the money to fight rich people and their lawyers! I’d like to think that’s a reason Republicans fell far short of expectations during the midterms. If it’s not, I’m going to be banging this saucepan for a long, long time! And so should you, particularly with your Senators.

Finally, Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk we should tax capital gains at the same rate we tax wages. It’s all income, after all! Tha Bush Mobb’s 2003 tax “reform” spewed forth this particular injustice; they actually wanted you to think investors need more “protection” from taxes than secretaries and bus drivers! They also wanted you to think unrealized assets aren’t income, either. When rich folks got all those low- or no-interest loans, they backed them with unrealized assets! They won’t get more of those loans now, thanks to the Fed’s interest rate hikes, but the injustice of working folks getting taxed harder than rich folks remains. And we should fight that until it’s gone.

Readings for January 30, 2023.

Stephan Weller and Tessa Conroy at The Conversation remind us that the inflation rate doesn’t tabulate rural price hikes – and find that inflation may be worse in rural areas. Among their findings: rural folks can’t just walk places like city folks can, meaning inflated car expenses hit them harder, and since rural folks don’t eat out as much, hikes in grocery prices also hit them harder. Housing costs in rural areas are lower, though, and rural folks more likely own their homes, insulating them from recent rental price madness. Our CPI ought to pay more attention to rural folks, obviously, and not just because that’s the kind of thing right-wingers exploit.

Good news out of Niger, as that nation has reduced the number of women who die due to post-birth bleeding by more than half. But you may notice that one of the big reasons they’re able to do that is that they use the drug misoprostol to reduce hemorrhaging. Health care professionals also use misoprostol, as you may know, in medication abortions, meaning the next time we elect a Republican to the Presidency, he’ll cut off money to any organization that uses or promotes misoprostol abroad, which means more women in Africa will bleed to death after giving birth. It wouldn’t be uncivil to shove that fact in the face of any “pro-lifer” you know. (The process for reducing post-partum hemorrhaging also involves using a condom, though not as a prophylactic; right-wingers will squeal about that, too, and we’ll have to clean up after that.)

Finally, you already knew this, but the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy informs us that the so-called FAIR Tax would “Shift Federal Taxes from the Wealthy to the Rest of Us.” As we discussed last week, you’d pay a higher tax rate under the FAIR Tax than you would even if you made $182,000 annually, but you can also see where it’d actually benefit folks making in the high six-figures, and not just because making 10 times the money doesn’t mean you have 10 times the expenses (and a national sales tax targets spending, not income). Also, “replacing all the taxes” also means no Child Tax Credit or Earned Income Tax Credit for working families. Sure, the FAIR Tax promises rebates for working families making under $30,000 annually, but they’d have to apply for those rebates, and they’ve got enough on their plate already. Again, it shouldn’t be tough for Democrats to accuse every Republican who votes for the FAIR Tax as “voting for higher taxes.”

Action: concerning law and order, debt limit drama, and abortion rights.

Long story short: tell Alabama’s Governor to commute Rocky Myers’s death sentence, tell President Biden to hold the line against Republican debt-limit drama, and tell our Justice Department to go after states that try to make abortion drugs illegal. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

First things first. Amnesty International helps you tell Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey to commute Rocky Myers’s death sentence. Mr. Myers has been on death row for the murder of his neighbor since 1994, but his conviction has, well, more than a few problems – slim-to-none evidence actually links him to the murder and the evidence that does has inconsistencies and the taint of possible cop coercion, plus he’s been diagnosed as intellectually-disabled since he was 11 and his state-appointed appeals lawyer basically abandoned him. Oh, but there’s more: the judge in his case overruled the jury in giving him a death sentence, which is now illegal in Alabama. This shouldn’t be tough! Unless you’re trying to look “tough,” I guess.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to keep holding the line against Republican debt ceiling hostage-taking. He’s been holding the line against this particular drama so far, but we’ll need to keep reminding him that we don’t want Republicans to crash the economy so they can get spending cuts they’re not even willing to spell out. The only people who want the chaos and disorder that comes with Republican hostage-taking are Our Glorious Elites, who have no memory of what real work is like, if they ever even did it in the first place. And (as evidenced, I would think, by the word “elites”) they sure ain’t a majority of Americans, so they shouldn’t get all the say about everything.

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell our Justice Department to challenge, in court, all state abortion bans that contravene federal law. Because they have a good argument – namely, that federal law invests in our Food and Drug Administration the authority to determine good Americans’ access to abortion drugs (which have proven to be safe enough to use at home) one can get through online or brick-and-mortar pharmacies, so states don’t actually have the right to ban such drugs. Remember: if you’re against abortion, don’t have one. You may have heard that a lot of pro-life women don’t even adhere to this dictum.

Around the table: and the hits just keep on coming!

New Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva accuses former President Jair Bolsonaro of genocide against the Yanomami indigenous people of the Amazon rain forest. Mr. Bolsonaro’s madness for development – legal, illegal, who cares? – may not rise to the level of genocide, though the folks who set up illegal mining operations and who knew what effect their pollution would have on the Yanomami might not be able to shield themselves so well from the law. Maybe Mr. Bolsonaro was stupid enough to incriminate himself – as so many seem to be these days! – but generally I prefer charging the folks who did the evil and shaming the folks who enabled it. Even when those enablers are irredeemable assholes, as Mr. Bolsonaro surely is.

From the “We’re Still Dealing With This BS?” file: Factcheck.org reminds us that, no, Magic Johnson didn’t get HIV from a vaccine. Sadly, the tenuous chain of events that make up this particular theory – “(t)he first commercially available hepatitis B vaccine used an antigen derived from plasma from individuals with chronic hepatitis B infection, and gay men – who were also at high risk of HIV infection – were known to have donated plasma for the effort Hep B vaccines” – appeals to the kind of fellow who loves to defend his arguments by saying “you just know.” Hep B vaccine manufacturers did a pretty thorough job deactivating any HIV found in their vaccines, but that fact doesn’t make the cynical feel as good about themselves.

The more I read about what Mother Jones calls, in a glorious understatement, George Santos’s “seemingly endless series of political mysteries,” the more I wonder how he’s going to argue that his district’s voters should give him another term. I mean, I’m sure he’ll take credit for all kinds of things he had nothing to do with, just like his idol Donald Trump did, but how will he convince people to re-elect him? By calling his opponent a Communist? By saying they got me like Jesus? That might play in other parts of the country, but not Long Island.

When I hear that Rep. Harriet Hageman (E-WY) has called land conservation “a plot to control and kill people,” I am reminded of that time an American Prospect blogger, lamenting then-Sen. Santorum’s comments about gay marriage, said that if you wanted to find a liberal who said something offensive you had to go to some obscure tenured professor, but if you wanted it from a right-winger, you only needed to find the #3 man in Republican Senate leadership. And 18 years later, the only thing that’ll end Rep. Hageman’s career is a right-winger even nutter than she.

Finally, Paul Pelosi’s accused attacker, David DePape, calls into a Bay Area newsroom to “apologize to everyone” that “I didn’t get more of them,” “them” being all those liberals he says are destroying individual liberties in America. For a brief moment it was actually refreshing that folks wouldn’t do all the pro forma apologizes our media seem to like, but now you wish some people would do any spiritual work at all. I can’t explain how “I didn’t get more of them” squares with that not-guilty plea.

Action: concerning labor and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell our FTC to slap down non-compete agreements in employment contracts, tell your Congressfolk to stop accepting donations from the National Restaurant Association (a.k.a. “the other NRA”), and tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn to our FCC already. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Public Citizen helps you share your experience with non-compete agreements with our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC). No doubt your experience with a non-compete agreement in your employment contract, one that prevents you from taking a higher-paying (or simply better) job with a competitor of your current employer, is not positive, since we know (both from scientific study and common sense) that non-compete agreements drive down wages and make workers less free. And you know big corporations will weigh in with their bogus arguments about “trade secrets” (which entirely different laws deal with!), so our FTC needs to hear from you.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop accepting campaign contributions from the “other” NRA, the National Restaurant Association. They’re yet another “small business association” that exists solely to redistribute worker income upward to executives, and lately they’ve made low-paid food workers take a $15 food safety class and then used that money to fund its own efforts to keep their wages down! And I’ll bet the whippersnapper who came up with that “food safety” scam thinks he’s the smartest person who ever lived, though he may not feel that way when he gets to the Pearly Gates. But if we expose this scam now, we'll save souls in the future -- maybe even his!

Finally, Free Press helps you tell your Senators to confirm net neutrality architect Gigi Sohn to our Federal Communications Commission. President Biden nominated her again, because she’d do good work for America, and 51 Democratic Senators can more easily ignore the excuses offered by big telecom corporations than 50 could. I know Joe Manchin voiced “doubts” about Ms. Sohn, but I bet Kyrsten Sinema – who opposes net neutrality, because nothing says “maverick” like taking the side of the corporations against virtually every American! – was the real reason Ms. Sohn couldn’t get on our FCC before. Put Ms. Sohn on our FCC and we not only get better telecom policy, we isolate Ms. Sinema further, as she deserves.

Action: concerning abortion rights and social media.

Long story short: tell our Justice Department to protect federal abortion law, tell online pharmacies to shop sharing abortion-related data with Google, and tell big social media corporations to hold Donald Trump to the same community standards as everyone else. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Daily Kos helps you tell our Department of Justice to challenge, in court, any state abortion ban that violates our federal laws. Our FDA has lately finalized a rule making medication abortions (via mifepristone and misoprostol) more available to good Americans – even though online pharmacies – but of course right-wing state governments want to make medication abortions illegal, which would (at the least) scare a lot of people into not getting the abortions they need because they’ll leave a data trail on the internet. Our Justice Department may not support federal law very vigorously here – unless we demand that they do it.

In a related note, Daily Kos helps you tell online pharmacies that sell abortion pills to stop sharing private patient info with Google. Because that data – whether it’s location data, device data, or unique browser data – could identify folks to local law enforcement personnel, and those personnel could be trying to enforce a state law that federal law pre-empts. Federal law does allow Americans to get mifepristone and misoprostol, after all, and our Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, not our FDA’s authority to regulate those drugs. Remember: if you’re against abortion, then don’t use abortion pills.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell big social media corporations like Twitter and Facebook to hold Donald Trump to the same standards they hold everyone else if they start publishing his nonsense again. Seriously, don’t brook any stridency about “free speech” – do magazine and book publishing corporations publish every manuscript they get because of “free speech”? No, they do not. And ignore Elon Musk’s pretensions – these corporations do actually have community standards, and they’ll hold you or I to them when we cross them but pretend it’s “free speech” when the rich and powerful do it. That’s evil, and we should fight it.

Action: concerning student loan debt and campaign finance.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to let student debt be discharged via bankruptcy, stop scam political action committees, and undo the harm caused by the Citizens United decision. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to let student loan debt be discharged via bankruptcy. Since the late ‘90s it’s been almost prohibitively difficult to do that, and not long after that college started to become almost prohibitively expensive; think there might be a connection there? I’d be a schmuck if I didn’t! So when you hear that young folks ought to just buckle up and pay their debts, remember that colleges have made all those debts much, much larger than they’ve ever been, and the least we can do to free people from a life of servitude (yes, college is that expensive now!) is let them get rid of their debts through bankruptcy after a decade.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Scam PACs Act. Some Political Action Committees (or PACs) exist just to steal money from seniors and veterans and redistribute that income to PAC executives, believe it or not. (OK, it’s not actually that hard to believe.) But the Stop Scam PACs Act – sponsored by Reps. Porter (D-CA) and Crenshaw (R-TX) during the last Congress – would amend the Federal Election Campaign Act so our government can go after anyone (not just folks who’ve committed actual fraud) who misrepresents themselves so they can steal money from vulnerable Americans. That’d be a big help to those folks, and we should help them.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would undo the evil effects of our Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. FEC ruling and start reigning in campaign finance again. I know – the Republicans in charge of our House now would never do that, and the minority Republicans in our Senate would filibuster any legislation that somehow made it out of our House. But our will is our will, and almost no one in America, conservative or liberal, thinks unrestrained campaign financing is a good thing. When they don’t listen, we just keep telling them, because we’re right.

Action: concerning the debt ceiling, hedge funds, and taxes.

Long story short: tell President Biden to hold the line on a clean debt ceiling increase, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act and reject Republican efforts to defund the police at our IRS. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Social Security Works helps you tell President Biden to reject Republican hostage-taking and demand a clean debt ceiling increase. Republicans want to force Social Security and Medicare cuts, and they surely have other irredeemable evils in mind, but they don’t get to do any of that just because they have a tiny majority in our House. President Biden has held the line so far, and good for him, but he needs to stay strong, which means we need to remind him to stay strong. Even Barack Obama wouldn’t negotiate with Republicans the second time they tried to take our government hostage in 2013, and Joe Biden was there for all of that, but we still must keep expressing our will.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act, which would (as its title suggests!) ban hedge funds from buying up so many American homes that actual Americans can’t buy them or live in them themselves. And when good Americans can’t buy a home, they also can’t bind themselves to our communities in a way that nourishes those communities. So don’t brook any “free” market silliness. Hedge funds shouldn’t get to do whatever they want – they should serve American communities, and when they keep houses out of good Americans’ hands so they can gamble with them (and with our economy!), they don’t serve us at all.

Finally, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Republican plan to defund the police at our IRS. Or, as one email missive put it: “why are Republicans helping criminals?” Too many Americans secretly cheer rich tax cheats, presumably because they'd like to be that rich, but tax cheats are criminals, and the richest of them cheat all of us. When rich folks don’t pay the millions (or billions!) in taxes they owe, that means less money to fix roads, less money to fund schools, and less money to keep our air and water clean. Among other things! So we need to stop this latest effort to serve mammon.

Action: concerning education and voting rights.

Long story short: tell Florida to teach the AP African-American studies course, tell North Dakota to stop targeting gay and trans books in book bans, and tell Pennsylvania to reject proposed sore loser constitutional amendments. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your state legislators' phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Organize For helps you tell the Florida state Board of Education to let high schools there teach African-American studies. The AP African-American Studies program may be new, but that doesn’t mean it “significantly lacks educational value,” as Gov. DeSantis says. And don’t take it for granted that Florida already teaches the Black experience, not just because Florida Republicans have created a lot of education drama lately, but because a lot of Floridian crybabies pretend to be “offended” when someone points out the South embraced slavery and Jim Crow with both arms. But facts are facts, and Americans face them.

North Dakota residents, take note: state legislators want to throw librarians in jail if they don’t remove “sexually-explicit” books from public school libraries. And “sexually-explicit” includes any book about gay or trans issues, though those books aren’t “sexually explicit” just because of their subject matter. Another way of putting it: sexuality isn’t “explicit,” let alone “obscene,” merely because it’s different from yours, and certainly not if you’re not actually watching it. So Openstates.org helps North Dakota residents find their state legislators. And remember we have a word for book banning efforts that target folks oppressed due to race or sexuality, and that word is fascist.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: Common Cause still helps you tell your state house Reps to reject the Republican suite of sore loser constitutional amendments that would enshrine Voter ID in our state constitution – remember when Tom Corbett’s government couldn’t make Voter ID work, even before our state Supreme Court struck it down? – and put the state’s (Republican) Auditor General in charge of elections. That latter item, especially, isn’t just sore loser thinking but short-term thinking – what if a Democrat wins the Auditor General race in 2024? Then Republicans will amend our state constitution again, I guess. You’ve heard that power without wisdom is evil? Republicans prove it every day.

Action: concerning price-gouging and taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop big oil price-gouging and reject the so-called FAIR Tax. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to penalize big oil corporations for price-gouging. It ain’t tough math: high inflation plus high profits at the same time equal big corporations taking advantage of us. I always thought gas prices shooting up at the same time as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a cover, too. It’s amazing how, even 20 years ago, even conservative economics would have caught this rather intimate relationship between high inflation and high profits, but today's right-wingers don’t care about facts, only about drama. And our “liberal” media has coddled them for too long. But that’s why we step up.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to pass the so-called FAIR Tax. The so-called FAIR Tax would replace our income, corporate, and payroll taxes with a national sales tax, one they used to call a “23% tax” although it was always a 30% tax. 30 cents on the dollar is 30%, you see, but 30 is 23% of $1.30, and 23 is less than 30, so it sounds better! But it’s not how we’ve done math for thousands of years, and when most folks realize they’re paying a lower tax rate right now – even the 24% bracket extends all the way up to $182,100 in income for single folks – they won’t go for a 30% sales tax. But we’ve got to make folks realize that, and we have to put our Congressfolk on notice.

Action: concerning pollution, forced arbitration, and renters' rights.

Long story short: tell our EPA to enact stronger soot standards, tell the New York Times to get rid of forced arbitration clauses for subscribers, and tell Connecticut state legislators to do more to keep rents down. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous soot standards possible. Our EPA last updated the standards about a decade ago, and set those standards a bit higher than scientists would have liked; the Trump Administration, of course, ignored calls to tighten the standard in 2019, but perhaps this EPA will listen a little more closely. Tighter standards ain’t a whole lot to ask, especially since soot particles are so small they can go right to your bloodstream, and wreak all kinds of havoc, including asthma, COPD, Parkinson’s, dementia. So if big polluting corporations whine, let’s remind them that America is a can-do country.

Public Citizen helps you tell the New York Times to stop forcing its subscribers into arbitration. You’re an American, so if you’ve got a problem with the Times, you should be able to address that problem in a court of law, not some “arbitration” “court” that’ll almost certainly rule against you. And you should be able to band together with your fellow Americans in a class-action suit, too. Forced arbitration is easier and cheaper for the Times, but you can’t place a high-enough price on lost rights. Don’t believe the right-wing hype that average arbitration awards are bigger than average class action awards. What’ll your “average” be after you lose? Zero.

Finally, Cap the Rent CT helps you tell the Connecticut state legislature to start protecting renters more. Rent in Connecticut has gone up 20%, on average, and in some areas has gone up 40%; have we had 20% inflation over the last two years? No, but just as corporations have hidden their record profits in our high inflation just because they can, landlords have jacked up rent prices beyond what their increased costs require, just because they can. Cap the Rent helps you ask for (among other things) a 3% cap on rent hikes and expanded Good Cause protections (so landlords can’t just throw you out without a good reason). Hard to believe anyone would oppose such things, but that’s we speak out: so they don’t.

Action: concerning debt ceiling drama, high drug prices, and defunding the police.

Long story short: tell President Biden to demand a clean debt ceiling increase, and tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to jack up prices on life-saving medicines or defund the police at our IRS . Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Social Security Works helps you tell President Biden to demand a clean debt ceiling increase from Congress, one that doesn’t cave to Republican attempts to take us all hostage. “Clean” means no Social Security cuts, no Medicare cuts, and no cuts to our CFPB, SEC, FTC, or DOJ Antitrust Division, all of which are doing great work attacking the monopolies that crush our civilization. We should win this fight, not just because Democrats control the White House and the Senate, not just because attempts at hostage-taking should always be met with maximum force, but because not even Barack Obama would negotiate with Republicans over the debt ceiling a decade ago.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any Republican attempt to roll back the drug price caps in the Inflation Reduction Act. Shame we have to tell our Congressfolk “don’t jack up prices on life-saving medicines,” but here we are – the Republican Party of George W. Bush and Donald Trump and In That Order, who do unconscionable evil, then gaslight you and call you traitor when you fight them. Whomever votes to raise prices on life-saving medicines should lose their next election. It’d help if Democrats nominate candidates who’ll actually fight for their constituents, and not be the Next Iteration of Pete Buttigieg.

Finally, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject Republican efforts to defund our police at our Internal Revenue Service. Doesn’t sound so populist when you put it like that, does it? And that’s exactly what Republicans want to do – they want to literally defund the police who catch the rich tax cheats who are their true masters. Oh, sure, they say ZOMG TEH IRSZ IZ COMINGZ AFTURZ YOUZ!!!!!, but that’s horsedoodle – our IRS hasn’t had the money to go after anyone but poor folks for years. Republican fake populism clearly didn’t work for them in the midterms, so let’s not let it work now, when everything counts.

Action: concerning sore losers, junk fees, and insurrectionist lawmakers.

Long story short: tell Pennsylvania state legislators to reject sore loser constitutional amendments, tell our FTC to fight the junk fees that seem ubiquitous in our society, and tell your Congressfolk to investigate legislators who may have committed insurrection against our government. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Common Cause helps you tell your state legislator to reject Republican sore loser constitutional amendments that would enshrine Voter ID in our constitution and take election-running authority away from the Commonwealth’s counties and give it to the just-so-happens-to-be-Republican state Auditor General. When Democrats re-took the lower house by one seat, we thought we'd be done with this, but a) one of them died and b) two others resigned to take U.S. House seats; hence we have a problem. But we deal with that problem, as usual, by communicating our will to our state lawmakers until they do our will.

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to fight the kind of death-by-a-thousand-cuts junk fees we have to put up with in our cable bills, our ticket sales, and our hotel bills, among so, so many other places. After all, disguising the real cost of your product is illegal. Of course right-wingers say the “free” market will provide a solution, but you know what happens in the sort of “free” market they ram down our throats? Big corporations gobble up other corporations until they have no competitors, meaning you have no actual choice to find another provider for your service, and they can just keep charging you junk fees out the wazoo until you die. And as civilized people, we don’t have to put up with that.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate legislators who may have aided the attempted coup of January 6, 2021 against our government. One new Rep – Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin’s 3rd, bet Ron Kind feels great about retiring now – was there on January 6, and Paul Gosar of Arizona’s 9th, a man so beloved by his own family that they've cut ads urging citizens to vote against him, was allegedly hip-deep in insurrection planning. There are others, including the North Carolina state Rep who tried to erase his own social media posts putting him at the Capitol’s door at the moment crybabies breached it, and our Constitution does prohibit insurrectionists from holding office, so let’s get to it.

Action: concerning Guantánamo Bay, ivory poaching, and public water.

Long story short: tell President Biden to close the Guantánamo Bay already, tell the British Parliament to include hippo teeth in the UK Ivory Act, and tell the California Water Board to protect good Californians’ water from private corporations. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Amnesty International helps you tell President Biden to close the Guantánamo Bay detention facility already. We’re still holding 35 Muslim men there, and we haven’t charged most of them with a crime; at the risk of beating a dead horse, if they were that dangerous, we should be able to charge them with something. Plus we’ve tortured more than a few of them, which of course means we learned nothing of consequence from them, in addition to staining our national heritage further. Generally, if George W. Bush did it, we should stop doing it. That’s a good rule for life as well as politics. And if Joe Biden wants a foreign policy victory, he could get one here, by doing our will and closing Guantánamo.

Care2 helps you tell the British Parliament to improve the UK Ivory Act – which bans the sale of elephant ivory – by also banning the sale of hippopotamus teeth. Hard to believe, but that’s where the demand has gone, now that most countries ban the sale of elephant ivory. Guess which other species has had a hard time sticking around? That’s right, hippos, who (like elephants) are losing habitat all the time and face poachers. I guess right-wingers who didn’t like the UK Ivory Act would natter on about the “unintended consequences” of the law, i.e,, that it’s spurred poaching of hippo teeth. But that’s horsedoodle. When criminals change their tactics, that doesn't mean we just throw our hands up and walk away; it means our laws have to change as well.

Finally, Sum of Us helps you tell the California Water Board to stop Blue Triton from siphoning public water out of the San Bernardino National Forest. You know the drill by now: big corporations take public water from us for pennies a gallon, and then resell it as “bottled water” for a lot more than that. A government that allows this is either evil or very, very short-sighted. And all that rain California’s gotten lately doesn’t change the fact that they’re still in a drought (since a drought ain’t over after a few days of flooding any more than climate change is over because it snowed three feet). And the money you get from selling off public water lasts a short time, but public water lasts forever – if we can keep it.

Action: concerning methane emissions, screen time, and sales taxes.

Long story short: tell our EPA to issue the strongest methane regulations possible, tell our FTC to keep big tech corporations from manipulating children into staying online forever, and tell 22 states to stop levying sales tax on menstrual products. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The National Resources Defense Council helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to issue the strongest methane regulations possible. Our EPA has lately issued a proposal that updates their 2021 proposal, and that’s good, but it doesn’t go far enough – it could limit flaring and leakage from storage tanks more vigorously, to name two issues. Methane leakage is so prevalent in gas drilling that it's birthed an entire industry (the “methane mitigation” industry) to combat it. And it packs a climate change punch that’s 80 times worse than coal emissions, which are still pretty bad. Accommodating gas drilling corporations ain’t worth it if we don’t have a planet to live on.

Fairplay helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to ban website/app design that manipulates kids into spending more time online. Asvirtually every scientist not directly in the employ of a big tech corporations would tell you, kids don’t need to be spending all that time in front of screens, and they certainly don’t need apps and programs that reward them for spending more time onscreen. Too often we imagine ourselves so helpless in the face of evil. We should react to the news that big corporations manipulate children into spending all their time onscreen not with “well, that’s just the ‘free’ market at work, what can you do?” with “so stop them.” Children are our future, after all.

Finally, Care2 helps you tell 22 states to stop charging sales taxes on menstrual products. I’m not a fan of sales taxes anyway – they hurt working people harder than rich folks – but I’m even less of a fan of sales taxes on essential items, which is why states tend not to assess sales taxes on groceries, though not “luxury” items like coffee. If you’ve ever started bleeding uncontrollably out of your vagina without any warning, then you know that a tampon is not a “luxury” item. For most men, I’m sure it’s a matter of not thinking, though in my experience that statement doesn’t make women feel any better. But if the result is sexist, the intent matters little, and if it’s sexist, we need to fix it.

Action: concerning taxes, voting rights, and monopolies.

Long story short: tell your Senators to block the House’s efforts to defund our IRS, tell Pennsylvania state legislators to reject vote-suppressing constitutional amendments, and tell our Justice Department to investigate the Ticketmaster monopoly. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Senators to reject the House-passed bill which would defund our IRS of most of the money the Inflation Reduction Act provided. Republicans have been flogging the ZOMG TEH IRS WILL COMEZ FOR TEH YOUZ!!!! lie for years; how’d that work out for them on Election Day? Well, they lost ground in our Senate, and barely won our House, so, ah, not well. And that money would help our IRS go after rich tax cheats; our IRS already goes after poor tax cheats because they’re easy pickings. So let’s not tolerate any more defund-the-police craziness from Republicans.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: the ACLU helps you tell your state legislators to reject proposed constitutional amendments that would enshrine Voter ID – which we know amounts to voter suppression against seniors and minorities – and take election oversight away from Pennsylvania’s counties and put it in the hands of the auditor general. Who, let’s check, just so happens to be a Republican right now! What a coincidence! Our legislature must pass such amendments in consecutive terms before they can go before the voters, and our Governor has no part in this process, so we Pennsylvanians had better get in our legislators’ grills right now if we want to stop them from doing this noxious crap.

Finally, More Perfect Union helps you tell our Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division to investigate the Live Nation/Ticketmaster monopoly. The Obama DOJ actually said the 2010 Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger would give us “robust competition,” which is a real head-scratcher, and not just because the resulting merger has actually given us sky-high ticket prices, junk fees, and crappy service. When one corporation controls so much of the market, where will you go when that corporation (for example) changes ticket prices once they’re in your basket or assesses fees that increase prices by 75%? Nowhere, that’s where, and that’s why we need to break up Ticketmaster.

Around the table: evil people do evil crap, part 992.

U.N. report says the hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica is healing slowly and will likely close completely in 43 years. And if this comes to pass, and I expect it will, right-wingers will immediately demand that we start making chlorofluorocarbons again because “the Earth heals itself,” though the ozone layer would have “healed itself” in large part because we stopped making the chemicals that made holes in it! And think tanks will commission studies with titles like Was Hairspray Really So Bad?

Over 7,000 New York nurses go on strike for better working conditions. I don’t know if they’re saying so, but they’re also probably mad that their bosses make millions of dollars while they handle 20 E.R. patients at once. Remember: every time health care workers have ever organized or struck, plenty of right-wingers said these workers are too important to let organize or strike. The obvious retort: if a worker’s that important, we’d better treat them right! Right-wingers think being just one of 20 E.R. patients per nurse will never happen to them, but it will, when their heroes come for their money, as evil people always do.

Rep. Scott Perry (E-PA) says he won’t recuse himself from any House probes of various January 6 investigations, even though he himself is the subject of several of them. Dig his rhetorical bait-and-switch – pressed about the fact that he’s literally the subject of some investigations, he responds “should everybody in Congress that disagrees with somebody be barred from doing the oversight and investigative powers that Congress has?” "Investigation" and "disagreement" aren't synonyms, Roget. I’m old enough to remember when politicians tried to avoid even the appearance of corruption. Scott Perry won with only 54% of the vote in his district in 2022, so perhaps he shouldn't act so untouchable.

Today, in “Short Story Ideas That Would Have Earned Me a Rap on the Knuckles From My Creating Writing Teacher”: Florida school board bans production of a play about a hundred-year old play in Yiddish that was itself banned from production because it dealt with homosexuality. The Florida government pretends to care about “exposing children to indecency,” but we know what this is about: small people with small minds and small hearts who can’t have all the say about everything anymore and want to inflict endless pain on the rest of us because of it.

Health care experts warn that the recent Ohio outbreak of measles – declared “eliminated” in America as of the year 2000 – won’t be the last. The roots of the Ohio outbreak appears to pre-date COVID anti-vaxxers, however, at least in the Midwest, where anti-vaxxers a) believe lies about the “effects” of the measles vaccine, b) think measles isn't all that bad, which, like, no, and c) still haven’t shaken the disgusting lie that “vaccines cause autism” even though the man who started that lie has been exposed many times over as a fraud. When so many Americans pride themselves on attending the University of Google, we all suffer.

Finally, at least one legal expert thinks Fulton County (GA) District Attorney Fani Willis is “gearing up to indict” Donald Trump after wrapping up the probe into that phone call he made to Georgia’s Secretary of State where he asked why he couldn’t just find him 11,780 more votes. Maybe she is and maybe she’s not, but recall the two giant hurdles to convicting Mr. Trump of anything: one, he’ll never take a plea deal, and two, chances are good that at least one Trumphole will con his way onto the jury. Not that these probabilities should ever deter us from fighting evil.

Action: concerning the minimum wage, Congressional ethics, and saving our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell New York’s Governor to raise that state’s minimum wage to $20/hour, tell your Congressfolk to expel George Santos, and tell President Biden to get with the firing of Postmaster General DeJoy already. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

More Perfect Union helps you tell New York Governor Hochul to get on board with raising the state’s minimum wage to $20/hour (and New York City’s minimum wage to $21.25/hour). I can already hear the right-wingers shout WHENZ WILLZ ITZ ENDZ!!!!!, but we first started calling for a $15/hour minimum wage a decade ago, and it still ain’t quite there in New York state. And ain’t nobody’s food and rent prices got lower during that time! I bet we’ll eventually see legal action against today’s landlords for price-fixing, now that President Biden’s made that a thing our government does again. In the meantime, workers need a way to keep their heads above water.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to expel Rep. George Santos (R-NY). New York Democrats should have beaten this guy, but they didn’t, so now it’s up to us. Mr. Santos has done so badly that I even doubt he’s gay! Normally when someone says they’re gay, I figure they know themselves better than I do, even when it’s a guy who was married to a woman as recently as 2018 – being gay still gets you beat up in much of America, after all! But now that we know that he’s almost completely fabricated the rest of his life’s story, I don’t even trust him on the one thing I’d be inclined to trust him on. I bet a lot of his constituents feel the same, and they deserve better.

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell President Biden to fire Postmaster General DeJoy and expand postal services. After all, Mr. DeJoy tried to sabotage the 2020 election, and has cut jobs and cut services – including the delivery of life-saving medicines – while raising prices. Your typical, post-Reagan CEO pretends the only way to fix budget problems is to cut services, but a bold entrepreneur might say that bringing back basic banking services (which our Postal Service provided until the late ‘60s) might bring in more dough. But the right has folks thinking bold means stupid. Thankfully, we’re not stupid.

Around the table: now *everyone* wants to be an insurrectionist!

I don’t necessarily think that the January 6, 2021 attempted coup in America inspired Bolsonaro supporters’ attempted coup in Brazil this past Sunday – most of the world has seen more coups than we have! – but I do think that when crybabies attempt a coup in the United States, then other crybabies across the planet become more emboldened. Also, while President Biden’s condemnation of the Brazil attack is far from worthless, I really needed to see more from him when Myanmar’s crybaby military staged a successful coup because they didn’t like the results of the 2020 election there.

I’m pleased that a British corporation has developed a tractor that runs on the methane found in cow dung, but I’d still like to know more about how well it works and how pricey it’ll be – I mean, if small farmers can’t buy it, then what’s the point? And that’s exactly what’ll happen if someone like Elon Musk gets his hands on it! The Bible says the love of money is the root of all evil, and I hate to see that proven so often.

Surprise, surprise, a Florida teacher trying to ban every book in sight gets described as racist and homophobic by her own students. One of this teacher’s crusades has a book about Wilma Randolph in its sights, because she thinks it’ll make white kids ashamed; now I wasn’t that spiritually-advanced as a youth, but I never made the world that much about me back then. Strange that grown-ups do – especially the ones in charge of educating kids.

When I hear that the government of Iran hanged two anti-hijab protestors – supposedly for murdering an Iranian cop, though both protestors said before their deaths that the government tortured them into confessing to that crime – I can only say this is a day ending in “y” in a fascist regime, and that when American fascists dream of the America they want, this is what they see. I do wonder if American fascists will they call their brethren in nations like Iran their “mud brothers,” as they called the 9.11 hijackers back in the day.

Finally, the South Carolina Supreme Court has struck down that state’s six-week abortion ban, saying, essentially, that the six-week ban doesn’t give women enough time to even find out she’s pregnant, let alone “take reasonable steps” to end her pregnancy. But the ruling puts a 22-week ban back in place; that ban only has exceptions for the life of the mother and the non-viability of the fetus. Why, it’s like we didn’t just spend an entire summer learning about all the reasons a woman might need an abortion.

Action: concerning insurrection, ethics, and taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to ban Donald Trump from elective office and reject any effort to weaken the Office of Congressional Ethics, and tell President Biden to keep fighting for an expanded Child Tax Credit. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Progressive Reform Network helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban Donald Trump from holding elective office again as our 14th Amendment demands. Y’all know I’ve been a stickler for the proper definition of “treason,” but “insurrection” and “rebellion” describe what Mr. Trump did pretty well, frankly. And if you’re still thinking maybe Mr. Trump was just a selfish dolt who blundered into January 6, recall that Mr. Trump knew he’d lost the election, and goaded people to storm the Capitol anyway. Also, seriously, enough with crybabies already. Yes, especially crybabies with guns!

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempts to weaken the Office of Congressional Ethics. They tried this crap in 2017, and we stopped it, so we can stop it again, even though clearly Republicans are counting on the chaos of the Speaker voting imbrogio to wear us out. We the people need to show our power to our elected “leaders” every minute of every day; our duty as Americans lasts forever, and we don’t get a vacation from it. But calling your Congressfolk ain’t hard and doesn’t take very long. And the work we do, the work of maintaining a civilization, is the most important work a human being can do.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell President Biden to keep working to get the expanded Child Tax Credit back. This may be a cynical time, with plenty of cynical people, but what a President says still matters. You know this because George W. Bush almost single-handedly made climate change denialism mainstream back in the day. You also know it because local poison control centers fielded so many calls about bleach killing COVID in the days after Donald Trump mused clumsily about it. And if President Biden keeps talking about the Child Tax Credit expansion keeping millions of kids out of poverty, that’ll make our job easier. And, after all, that’s his job!

Finally: I’ll continue to provide action alert links, but with Republicans in charge of our House now, I really think the best thing to do is to call them with our will and clog up their phone lines so they get it. Some of them will whine about it just like they did in 2017, but let’s have them whine in public, so we know who might be easiest to turn out of office in 2022.

UPDATE. Sadly, our House didn't listen to us, and basically gutted the Office of Congressional Ethics earlier today. Naturally George Santos, arguably the most ethics-challenged individual elected to Congress in recent history, said it was "fantastic," while Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has an actual ethics complaint still to be resolved, called it "disturbing." That's a Goofus and Gallant strip right there, though I guess it would pain Mr. Santos not to be Gallant here. Anyway, today we flush it, and tomorrow we get up and go again.

Readings for January 9, 2023.

Mike Lofgren at Salon reminds us that isolationists like the late Sen. Robert Taft (R-OH), once dubbed “Mr. Republican,” have always been with us. He also reminds us that we shouldn’t think their isolationism sincere, merely because they don’t indulge in anti-Semitism or love of fascism out loud. We have all succumbed to the temptation to think that Republicans Used to Be Better in The Good Old Days – I can’t tell you how many sentences I began with “at least Reagan didn’t” during Tha Bush Mobb’s reign of terror – but we would be wiser to take the 30,000-foot view here. I’ll only add that if Mr. Taft had ever condemned Father Coughlin, it wouldn’t have been useless. Even if he didn’t mean it!

From Julia Rock at The Lever we learn “How Big Pharma Actually Spends Its Massive Profits.” Long story short: “Between 2012 and 2021, the 14 largest publicly-traded pharmaceutical companies spent $747 billion on stock buybacks and dividends — substantially more than the $660 billion they spent on research and development.” So no more of this ZOMG BUT TEH INNOVASHUNZ!!!!! crap! Must I add that the money a corporation spends on research and development can’t be taxed by any government? Because it’s an expense?

Sonali Kohatkar at Raw Story reveals “The Disturbing Truth About How Much Unearned Wealth and Power Has Been Accrued by Elites.” Said disturbing truth is nepotism: “some of the most dramatic success stories began with a parent using their wealth or connections to give their child the upper hand,” she reminds us, and not just our most famous tech zillionaires like Jeff Bezos ($250,000 from his parents) or Mark Zuckerberg ($100,000 loan from his parents), but also Donald Trump – remember how he said, out loud, that his father had given him a “very small loan” of $1 million to jump-start his real estate career? And, thanks to said father’s tax evasion schemes, little Donald had been a millionaire since he was a small child! So no more of this ZOMG BUT THEYZ EARNEDZ ITZ!!!!!! crap. Better to call nepotism an affirmative action program for the well-off.

When Marick Masters at The Conversation wonders if the last year’s surge in union elections and strikes “mark a turning point for organized labor,” I’m tempted to say: only if we make it so! But Mr. Masters does us a great service by pointing out that for all the media coverage of strikes and elections lately, the numbers of these are only a little bit up from the last 40 years – as late as 1980, the year before President Reagan broke the air traffic controllers’ strike, we saw 200 major work stoppages, compared to 20 in 2022. So maybe the pandemic hasn’t driven union membership upward the way we would have liked – or the way the Depression and World War II did. A possible “ace up labor’s sleeve”? More folks like unions and/or want to be in unions than in a very long time. We should work to ensure that doesn’t just mean people tend to like what they don’t have.

Jonathan O’Calllighan at IFL Science evaluates a study suggesting that octopuses are actually aliens from outer space, and finds it wanting. Yes I also got a kick out of that viral video showing an octopus escaping through a crevice in a boat’s deck, but when a scientific paper about an animal counts 33 scientists among its authors but zero zoologists, red flags should go up. And when a study points to “gaps in the evidence” and then fills those gaps with speculation, that isn’t the same as filling them with, you know, evidence. The “we can’t explain it, so it must be aliens” argument may even remind you of “intelligent design.”

Finally, the incomparable Matt Stoller relays some good news for American workers, as our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) has proposed a new rule that would bar “non-compete” agreements in employment contracts, meaning that workers would have more freedom to work where they like, rather than being barred from working for competitors. And of course, with “non-compete” clauses already being unenforceable in at least 12 states and with many actual bosses being fairly sympathetic to the new rule, America’s “free” market votaries are applauding the rule change, right? I kid, of course – they think the “free” market only means “freedom” for overpaid executives, not actual freedom for workers to make more money, and maybe even one day become bosses themselves! (Don’t believe any hype about “employees stealing trade secrets,” either, because other laws cover that.)

Action: concerning taxes, ethics, and drama.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject any efforts to defund our IRS or weaken our Office of Congressional Ethics, and tell your Democratic House Rep not to help Republicans out of the Speaker-vote mess they’ve made. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

I hadn’t intended to post this week, but I’ve got a few particularly timely alerts, so I’ll share them. You can combine all three of these into a single phone call if you like.

First off, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to defund our IRS. You might as well say “Republicans are defunding the police,” because our IRS goes after folks who cheat on their taxes, and when someone cheats on their taxes, they’re breaking our laws. Don’t believe the hype that our IRS will use the expanded funding from the Inflation Reduction Act to “go after you.” Newsflash: our IRS has only been going after low-income earners for years, because they haven’t had the money to fight rich tax-evaders and their armies of lawyers. Beat this defund-the-police effort back, and our IRS can catch some rich tax cheats for once.

Second, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose any effort to weaken the Office of Congressional Ethics. Yeah, they tried this crap back in 2017, and we the people most certainly rose to the occasion, pounding our Congressfolks’ phone lines until even then-President-elect Trump backed us. I don’t know what it is about Republicans that they try to kill ethics watchdogs every time they seize power in our House – they couldn’t be that anxious to save George Santos’s bacon, could they? What a glorious shitshow that has been! – but whatever the reason, it’s stupid, and we need to tell them to stop.

Third, if your House Rep is a Democrat, call them and say “do not help” – as in, do not help Republicans find their way out of the Speaker-vote drama they've earned and deserve. How heartening to watch Kevin McCarthy totally debase himself so he can be Speaker, only to have his hopes crushed by folks even worse than he is! But you may have heard rumors that Democrats might somehow help Mr. McCarthy win, and starting tomorrow you’ll hear prattling from our “liberal” media that Democrats have to step in and help Republicans solve the problems they’ve caused. They’d be missing the most important thing, which is that Republicans never help you when you need it. I may seem un-Christian about this, but then sometimes kindness resembles meanness.

Light posting notice of doom and death and horror and terror and probably fury also.

This'll be the last post of 2022; we'll be back in 2023 to build on our accomplishments and confront a Republican House majority that'll be nowhere near as dysfunctional as they want us to think.

In the meantime, have a safe and happy New Year. We're going to need you.

Action: concerning campaign finance disclosure, paid sick leave, and saving our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell President Biden to force corporate campaign finance disclosure, force railway corporations to give paid sick leave to their workers, and replace Louis DeJoy as USPS Postmaster General. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to force corporations to disclose their campaign spending. A Kevin McCarthy-led House won’t pass campaign finance disclosure legislation, because a Kevin McCarthy-led House will only protect corporations no matter how many good Americans that harms. But President Biden can use power already granted to him by Congress to mandate that corporations contracting with our government need to disclose their campaign spending, and if that winds up including most corporations, well, tough toodles. Ain’t no regular Americans running through a wall for a corporation’s “right” to “free speech.”

Demand Progress helps you tell President Biden to force railway corporations to give their workers paid sick leave. Railway corporations contract with our government, after all, and thus President Biden could make them give their workers paid sick leave. Can he override a union contract that doesn’t give them paid sick leave, even though Congress forced that contract down the workers’ throats? Maybe, maybe not, but let’s at least force that argument to be had in court, rather than just let corporatists have their way, again. Maybe railway workers are so important that we should ensure they have the paid sick leave that helps them do their jobs? It’s a question worth asking!

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to get rid of Postmaster General DeJoy already. We’ve talked about Mr. DeJoy slashing jobs and services and raising prices and how all that’ll hurt the good Americans who rely on our Postal Service for life-saving medications, but we can also talk about expanding services at our Post Office, like the basic banking services that Post Offices offered until the late ‘60s. Bring in more money helping the folks the big banksters don’t want to help and you don’t have to cut services and jobs. Today’s CEOs pretend not to get that, but we do, and our will should trump theirs.

Action: concerning price-gouging, crypto, and voting rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop corporate price-gouging, start clamping down on cryptocurrency, and pass the Youth Voting Rights Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop corporate price-gouging. Specifically, you’d advocate they pass H.R. 7443/S. 3933, the Ending Corporate Greed Act, and H.R. 8777, the Competitive Prices Act; the former bill would tax excess profits, while the latter would give our state and federal governments more tools to fight coordinated price hikes. Inflation has shot up over the last two years, and corporate profits have also shot up over the last two years; you know the relationship between these two events just as well as I do, even if politicians and corporate executives pretend they don’t. So we need these bills.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to clamp down on cryptocurrency. You don’t need to have witnessed all the crypto corporations collapsing lately to know that crypto is horseshit, especially when you can get money out of an ATM anywhere on Earth now. But precisely because we live in an America where hard work doesn’t get you more money anymore, good Americans still find themselves susceptible to crypto’s promises, just as they’re susceptible to any get-rich-quick scheme. Well, our laws protect good Americans from get-rich-quick schemes, and they should protect us from crypto, too.

Finally, Rise helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 8341/S. 4500, the Youth Voting Rights Act. The Youth Voting Rights Act would help expand youth turnout by (among other things) mandating on-campus polling places and letting students use their student ID as voter ID. And remember that folks who say “voting should be hard” are just fouling the air with testosterone – and obscuring the fact that voting is the beginning, not the end, of our duty as citizens, I wonder why they’d do that? And personal to those who think young people “vote wrong”: have you tried, maybe, attracting the youth vote by not appealing to the absolute worst aspects of human nature?

Action: concerning marijuana laws, "free" trade, and big tech monopolies.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reform pot laws, help good Americans when trade agreements take their jobs away, and pass some big tech anti-monopoly bills. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to reform our marijuana laws. Specifically, you’d ask your Congressfolk to expunge criminal records of folks convicted of pot offenses; since more than two out of three Americans think pot should be legal now, it’s a bit of a head-scratcher that past pot convictions could keep good Americans from voting or getting jobs or apartments. And if anyone tries to tell you well, sometimes the consequences of your actions don’t seem fair – an argument that’s not odious in and of itself – then kindly refer them back to the part of this paragraph that says “more than two out of three Americans think pot should be legal now.”

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to reauthorize the Trade Adjustment Assistance (or TAA) program. TAA has helped good Americans survive the havoc wreaked by “free” trade deals for 40 years, but Congress let it expire earlier this year, and though we’ve largely stopped making “free” trade deals and yes Donald Trump deserves some credit for that, we’ve still got plenty of “free” trade deals on the books, and they’re still outsourcing our jobs. Not for nothing, but you’ll also be advocating that your Congressfolk do not hold TAA hostage to “free” trade “fast-tracking” authority. “Fast-tracking” trade deals, without debate or amendment, is a straight-up fascist move. Yeah, I said it.

Finally, More Perfect Union helps you tell your Senators to demand a vote on a pair of House-passed big tech monopoly bills, H.R. 3816/S. 2992, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, and H.R. 5017/S. 2710, the Open App Markets Act. Both bills – passed in an actual bipartisan manner for once! – would loosen big tech corporations’ strangleholds over product searches and app stores, but our Senate hasn’t moved on them; you’d hate to think it’s because of all the big tech money Senate Majority Leader Schumer’s gotten. And you know a Kevin McCarthy-ish House won’t do jack about this, either, so the time for action, as usual, is now.

Action: concerning violence against protestors, real tax cuts, and insurrectionists.

Long story short: tell the Iranian government not to execute Amir Nasr-Azadani over that nation’s head-covering protests, tell your Congressfolk to put kids over corporations in their year-end budget-making, and tell your Congressfolk to expel Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene for her anti-American comments about the January 6 attempted coup. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. Change.org helps you tell the Iranian government not to execute pro footballer Amir Nasr-Azadani for alleged involvement in the killing of three “morality” “police” members during the Iranian protests over the death of Mahsa Amini. They’re not saying whether he plotted or he pulled the trigger, but they have charged him with, get this, “waging war against God,” which “crime” carries a death sentence. Well, that sure would be the easiest way of killing the folks who protested the Iranian government’s insane preoccupation with forcing women to wear head-coverings, as Mr. Nasr-Azadani did! Again, only snowflake governments charge people with “waging war against God.”

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk, once again, to “put kids over corporations” in making year-end appropriations bills. That means, of course, bringing back the Child Tax Credit expansion from 2021 and not handing out all kinds of corporate welfare goodies to their big donors – the CTC expansion actually helped kids stay out of poverty, while the corporate welfare handouts just funnel taxpayer money (that is, your money!) to some politician’s cronies. And enough about research and development tax breaks. R&D is an expense, so it already doesn’t get taxed; how much hand-holding do corporations need?

Finally, Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to expel Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (E-GA). I know, she says she was joking when she told the New York Young Republican Club earlier this month that “(i)f Steve Bannon and I had organized (the January 6 attempted coup), we would have won. Not to mention, we would’ve been armed,” but I was joking get over yourself is what all assholes whine when we catch them being assholes. Not to mention nothing she said was actually funny, except to folks who’ve made their cynicism into an idol. Not to mention that telling folks you’d have overthrown the government over WAAAAAAAAH!!!!! is stupid and evil.

Action: concerning broadband, endangered species, and worker "misclassification."

Long story short: tell our FCC to force big internet telecoms to spell out what we’re paying and what we’re paying for, tell our Department of the Interior to roll back Trump-era damage to the Endangered Species Act, and tell our Department of Labor to end corporate "misclassification" of workers. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to force big telecom corporations to spell out exactly what you’re paying for when you buy their service. Consumer Reports advocates a sort of "broadband nutrition label" that would include such information as the cost of activation and early termination fees, upload and download speeds, and privacy protections, and that'd be a very good place to start. And the only people who could possibly oppose such a thing are a) big telecom CEOs looking to make even more money they haven't earned and b) right-wing government-is-always-bad types; haven’t we let them have enough of the say about everything for one lifetime?

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell our Department of the Interior to restore protections offered by the Endangered Species Act. The Trump Administration, as you know, crippled the Act, by forcing Interior to foreground corporate profits, ignore climate change, and slash protections for threatened species (so they don’t become endangered, amirite?) during legally-mandated rulemaking. And sadly, the Biden Administration has dragged its feet on the matter, recently insisting they need another two years to fix the problem. But by writing our Department of Interior, we can at least keep the issue in front of them, even if they’d prefer it goes away on its own.

Finally, Jobs With Justice helps you tell our Department of Labor to stop big corporations from simply classifying their full-time workers as “independent contractors.” They do it so they can deny full-time employees health care benefits, pension benefits, unemployment benefits, and overtime pay – among other rights employees have fought and died to earn! One 2020 study suggested that corporations have “misclassified” somewhere between 10 and 30 percent of all employees as “contractors”; one can raise an eyebrow over the wide range in the finding, but the fact is, one person denied their rights under our laws is too many.

Action: concerning environmental racism, sentencing racism, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Environmental Justice for All Act and the EQUAL Act, and tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn to our Federal Communications Commission. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2021/S. 872, the Environmental Justice for All Act, which would enable Black and Brown communities harmed by corporate pollution to sue polluting corporations in court (if those corporations received federal funding to do their harm), and would also strengthen the National Environmental Policy Act (or NEPA) so that it takes this kind of historic racism into account. The racism of building factories almost exclusively next to Black and Brown neighborhoods is so obvious it was a joke on Mystery Science Theater 3000 some 20 years ago, so justice is long overdue.

The ACLU helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1693/S. 79, the EQUAL Act, which would (among other things) eliminate the disparity between crack and powder cocaine sentencing. These days, folks convicted of crack-related crimes get nearly 18 times the jail time folks convicted of powder cocaine-related crimes get, and why? No good reason, that’s why – our culture (wrongly) assumes that crack is much more addictive than powder, and our culture (also wrongly) associates crack with Blacks and powder with whites. The bill would also reduce sentences for some folks serving time now, so let’s fight this form of racism as hard as we fight all the others.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as the fifth Commissioner of our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC). Our FCC needs a fifth Commissioner to break all the 2-2 ties on FCC votes, and, to be frank, to break those votes the way of the people’s will. The American people have communicated their will favoring net neutrality at least a half-dozen times over the last decade – and justifiably so, since net neutrality gives you the freedom to visit the websites you like without being hamstrung by some corporation’s will. But we need a freedom-friendly third vote on our FCC if we want to get it back, and our Senate has dragged its feet too long.

Action: concerning product safety, Afghan refugees, and the debt ceiling.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Hide No Harm Act and the Afghan Adjustment Act and abolish the debt ceiling. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 9361/S. 5139, the Hide No Harm Act, which would hold corporate executives accountable for knowingly hiding their products’ dangers from good Americans. Some “law and order” types would call it “nanny state” legislation, but folks who’d injure or kill people to make money need a nanny! Others might throw up their hands at the prospect of ever getting a CEO to go to jail, and while I understand their pain, we should pass laws like this – even if they don’t put every law-breaker in prison, a lot of executives will think twice before knowingly putting out unsafe products, if only because fighting criminal charges is expensive.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4787/S. 8685, the Afghan Adjustment Act, which would help the thousands of Afghan refugees achieve permanent status a lot more quickly. There’s a lot of we-broke-it-we-bought-it here – we helped break Afghanistan, which sent a lot of refugees here, so we ought to take care of them. Folks who profess to be “worried” about having “potential terrorists” in America ought to consider that refugees run from oppression, and they should also consider that most terrorists in America are natural-born white supremacist killers. Maybe it diddles one’s rage gland to worry about foreigners rather than the real threat.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to just abolish the damn debt ceiling already. Because it never reduced public spending the way its adherents claimed, and because now Republicans just use it to manufacture a hostage drama. It doesn’t matter that Joe Biden and Senate Democrats will stand in the way of their using it to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits, because I’m still scared of what Republicans might get with their little hostage drama – like defunding the police at our FTC, SEC, CFPB, and DOJ Antitrust Division, so their corporate cronies can merge into evil monopolies at will. Get rid of the debt ceiling, and we’ll never have to know.

Action: concerning paid sick leave.

Long story short: tell our government to ensure that railway workers get paid sick leave, whether through Executive action or Congressional legislation. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Lever’s December 7 report describes three ways our government could actually deliver paid sick leave to railway workers – first, with a President Biden executive order expanding paid sick leave for federal contractors to railroad workers. The Obama Administration, as you may recall, famously mandated paid sick leave for certain federal contractors, but left out railroad workers. The People United still helps you tell President Biden to issue that order; The Lever explains why a federal court might strike such an order down, but let’s at least fight that battle.

The Lever also says Treasury Secretary Buttigieg could force big railway corporations to offer paid sick leave to their workers by enforcing existing laws. Turns out when you force workers to be on-call on the time and never give them any time off, you create a lot of safety hazards! And the Railroad Safety Act of 2008 mandates that railroads come up with “fatigue management plans,” which sure would be a good place to address paid sick leave. The Biden Administration has given railroad corporations until mid-2023 to submit fatigue plans; in the meantime, communicating your will to Secretary Buttigieg would not be untoward. DOT has made this unnecessarily difficult, in my view; you could call (202) 366-4000 during business hours, or message Secretary Buttigieg on Facebook. (He’s also @SecretaryPete on Instagram and Twitter.)

Finally, The Lever instructs us that Congress could pass a paid sick leave law that would give all American workers paid time off. President Biden included four weeks of paid sick leave in the Build Back Better bill from 2021, but 50 Republican Senators plus Joe Manchin killed that plank; still, since giving workers zero time off is (surprise!) unpopular with the American people, now would be a good time to bring paid family/medical leave up again. Moms Rising still helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass paid sick leave legislation for all Americans. Seven paid sick days would have cost the railroads a piddling four days of profits, so they really have no damn excuse.

Action: concerning taxes, Medicare, and the war on Yemen.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to cut taxes for working families, stop handing out welfare to corporations, get rid of privatized Medicare programs, and end our involvement in the war on Yemen. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first: Care2 helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion, and Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any and all tax cuts for corporations in year-end legislation. This ain’t that damn deep: working families need the extra $250 or $300 per month per child to make ends meet, and corporations don’t need any more welfare handouts from the taxpayer so they can pretend to create jobs while just enabling their executives to buy back stock. Which used to be illegal! Because it concentrated corporate decision-making power in the hands of the few! It’s a shame Congress doesn’t understand these things anymore – which is why we have to make them understand.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to get rid of private insurers within Medicare. Yes, I’m speaking of the so-called “Medicare Advantage” program, which has opened the door to private corporations for two decades now. I’m sure you’ve read the reports of Medicare Advantage overbilling and fraud; right-wingers used to say the private sector can do things more efficiently and cheaply, but Medicare Advantage clearly hasn’t done that with our tax dollars. Don’t be swayed by your friends and neighbors telling you that they know someone with Medicare Advantage and it’s really helped them. Medicare would have helped them the same, only for less money and with less fraud.

Finally, the Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a War Powers Resolution ending our involvement in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. Which has been going on for over a dozen years now, which hasn’t accomplished the Saudis’ supposed “aim” of a “stable” government, which has pushed millions of good Yemeni to the brink of famine, and which has mainly targeted the same Houthi rebels who are also some of the world’s best fighters of al-Qaeda. Really, no one in their right mind would set out to do any of this! And I hate to pile on, but our Constitution gives Congress, not our President, the power to decide when and where to go to war. So Congress needs to stand up, just like we stand up.

Action: concerning car safety, labor, and methane emissions.

Long story short: tell big corporations to fix big truck and SUV blind spots, tell UPS to hire more unionized workers, and tell our EPA to protect us from methane emissions. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Consumer Reports helps you tell big car manufacturing corporations to fix the front-end blind zones on all their cars. Yes, if you’ve ever driven a pickup truck or an SUV, you may have wondered how you’ll see all those pedestrians who may well be shorter than the front end of your truck. Surely that’s an unintended consequence of big automakers’ efforts to sell big cars to insecure people! But these same big automakers could make a few changes to their trucks and SUVs, like lowering their hoods and pedestrian-detection devices, and they could do this now with the technology we already have, but alas, they don’t. Not until we brandish the Big Stick of Bad PR against them, that is!

More Perfect Union helps you tell UPS to hire more unionized workers so it doesn’t have to hand out so much overtime now. To your right-wing uncle who tells isolated anecdotes about bus drivers doubling their salary with overtime ANDZ THAT’Z NOTZ TEH FAIRZ!!!!, just remind them that the whole reason we insist on people making time-and-a-half for overtime is to force their bosses to hire the right amount of people to do the job. That’s job creation! And it’s not something bosses do – they’d replaces us with mounds of dung if they could! – but something we do, through communicating our will to our elected leaders.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous methane emissions rule possible. You know the story here, too – fossil fuel drilling tends to belch out methane into our air, and methane not only packs a much bigger climate change punch than coal emissions, it represents usable energy that sure ain’t doing anyone any good up in the air. Plus, when corporations drill on public lands, methane leaks also represent royalties the public can’t collect. A whole industry already exists to reduce methane emissions, so it’s not like we’re asking that much of big drilling corporations. No, less money for CEOs ain’t that much to ask.

Action: concerning monopolies, corruption, and taxing the rich.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to investigate the Live Nation/Ticketmaster monopoly, investigate Justice Thomas’s alleged conflicts of interest, and pass a Billionaire’s Minimum Income Tax. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate the Live Nation/Ticketmaster monopoly. Yes, Live Nation (which assimilated Ticketmaster in 2010) is a monopoly, given that they control 70% of the live event market, and last month’s Taylor Swift presale tickets scandal doesn’t begin to tell the full story of how badly they serve that market – Ticketmaster also keeps a good chunk of those notorious fees they’re not supposed to keep, plus their lax security lets scalpers buy up tickets in bulk and charge concert-goers even more money. So it turns out MTV didn’t kill the live show – ticket monopolies did. Good Americans deserve better, so our Congressfolk should do better.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s alleged conflicts of interest. You know, like his wife openly colluding to overthrow our government on January 6! Naturally he’s ruled the wrong way on January 6-related matters that have come before the court since then, and though he might be able to argue that his rulings are entirely consistent with the philosophy he’s expressed on our Court for 30 years, c’mon, we’re not schmucks. I long to live in an America where people are shamed out of their status for being corrupt! But if we want that world, we have to demand it, and work for it.

Finally, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Billionaire’s Minimum Income Tax before they go home for the holidays. It’s hard to get such things through Congress, but the more we demand it the harder we make it for Congress to ignore us. And one more time: nobody “earns” a billion dollars. Billionaires get where they are not through “talent” or “hard work” but because they leverage their privilege and their wealth to hurt other people. And if we want to be a sane, moral, and decent civilization again, we need to tax billionaires a lot harder.

Action: concerning monopolies, corporate welfare, and saving our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell our FTC to stop the proposed Kroger/Albertsons merger, tell the Argentinian government to end fossil fuel subsidies, and tell President Biden to get rid of USPS Postmaster Louis DeJoy. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to stop the proposed Kroger/Albertsons merger. You don’t have to believe that no corporation should be able to own any other corporation (as I do!) to see why the Kroger/Albertsons merger is such a bad idea – like all other mergers, it means killed jobs, higher prices, fewer choices, and more worker income redistributed upward to corporate executives. In this particular case, it also means a $4 billion payout to hedge fund banksters as they bleed Albertsons dry, and what did they do to deserve that? You already know the answer: nothing.

350.org helps you tell the Argentinian government to end all fossil fuel subsidies. What, Argentinians deserve freedom from corruption less than we do? People are people, after all. And the Argentinian government has become notorious for funneling taxpayer money to crony fossil fuel corporations, to the tune of over $3.5 billion just between 2016 and 2018, just to corporations operating in the Vaca Muerta area of western Argentina. Again, Argentinians deserve the freedom that clean water affords anyone who has access to it – mainly, freedom from illness – and they also deserve a government that spends their money on them, not on corporate welfare. So let’s help them get that.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to finish the job of getting rid of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. You know the main story by now – Mr. DeJoy, another in a long line of talentless CEOs our economy belches out like it’s just had a bowl of beans, has slashed jobs, cut services, and raised prices, which ain’t good for all the Americans who rely on our Postal Service for life-saving medications. But the side stories – his efforts to hijack voting by mail and block electric mail trucks, and his investment in the corporation that just so happened to provide the free COVID tests our Postal Service sent out – also testify to his evil.

Action: concering tax cuts for working families, maternal health care, and the *Hobby Lobby* ruling.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to bring back the expanded Child Tax Credit, pass the SHINE for Autumn Act, and investigate the alleged Alito leak over the Hobby Lobby ruling. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the expanded Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion from 2021, and make it permanent. That expansion delivered $250 and $300 checks per child into working families’ bank accounts every month during the latter half of 2021, but then 50 Republican Senators and Joe Manchin refused to extend the expansion, with Mr. Manchin notoriously alleging that people were using that money on drugs! Ah, no – they were using it to offset the high inflation Mr. Manchin used as his excuse to block almost everything else. And thanks for letting Republicans off the hook, Joe! I still prefer him to Kyrsten Sinema.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5487/S. 3972, the Stillbirth Health Improvement and Education (or SHINE) for Autumn Act, which would, as its title suggests, fund more research into stillbirths in the hope of preventing them. Over 60 babies come out stillborn every day, which means over 60 grieving families every day, and for what? The greatest nation on Earth should be able to prevent that, and not for nothing, but Black and Brown families experience the tragedy of stillbirths a lot more than the rest of us. Couldn’t be all of the polluting factories we tend to concentrate in Black and Brown neighborhoods, could it? We’ll never know, unless we spend the money to find out!

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our Senate Judiciary Committee to investigate the alleged leak from Supreme Court Justice Alito about the notorious 2014 anti-birth control Burwell v. Hobby Lobby ruling to certain right-wing activists. Though this alleged leak might not be illegal, that’d likely only be because Supreme Court Justices don’t have to adhere to the same ethics laws as every other federal judge. And a Senate Judiciary Committee investigation would sure be a good way to get some momentum for a law that would protect us from the Supreme Court corruption we all know we’re experiencing right now.

Action: concerning killer robots, paid sick leave, and campaign finance disclosure.

Long story short: tell the San Francisco government to get rid of its killer robots, and tell President Biden to issue executive orders guaranteeing paid sick leave for railway workers and campaign finance disclosure by federal contractors. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Public Citizen helps you tell the San Francisco government not to allow its police to deploy killer robots on their citizens. Incredible that I even have to write that sentence, but duty is duty, no matter where it takes us. The NYPD started using killer robots in 2020, but stopped after public backlash; if New York’s government can be cowed by good people communicating their will, so can San Francisco’s. Even if they think they know better than everyone else! Which is not a liberal character flaw, any more than San Francisco is a “liberal” city; San Francisco is a rich tech bro city, and anyone can think they know better than everyone else. This is America, after all.

The People United helps you tell President Biden to issue an Executive order granting railroad workers paid sick leave. The Obama Administration mandated that for all other federal contractors, but exempted railway workers, so it seems to me there’s ample legal precedent to do it. And even if the presence of a labor contract pre-empts such an Executive Order – I don’t know if that’s true, but it could be, even concerning a legal contract Congress just forced down railway workers’ throats – then let right-wingers sue and overturn it! It’ll just force them to spend money they didn’t earn, it’ll keep the issue in the public eye, and it might well fail. And thus we will have done a good work.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to issue an Executive Order forcing all corporations that contract with our government to disclose their campaign contributions. Right wingers will squeal BUTZ HOWZ WILLZ ANYONEZ MAKEZ ANYZ CONTRIBUSHUNZ IFZ THEYZ CAN’TZ BEZ PRIVATEZ!!!!!, but you shouldn’t be so ashamed of how you spend your money, should you? And anyway, this is taxpayer money big corporations spend trying to elect ass clowns! We deserve to know what they’re up to! And we also deserve to know if big corporations are indulging in actual corruption to feed at the taxpayer trough. Which – at the risk of sounding old-fashioned – they shouldn't.

Around the table: I have seen the future; brother, it is murder.

“Brain-computer interfaces” (or BCIs) might enable soldiers to fight remotely, and might even allow soldiers to “turn off” their fear, but here’s an idea: don’t do any of that! "What might soldiers accomplish if they just weren’t afraid?" is the wrong question to ask, particularly in this era of guerrilla warfare, where hackers will probably win the battle with BCI-enabled soldiers anyway! BCIs have more humane uses (i.e., helping the disabled), and some folks have given the ethics a great deal of thought; if only America had a way of stopping the unethical use of technology, you know, like with laws and such.

An artificial intelligence agent gets good enough at Stratego that it now outranks almost every human on Earth. Machines may not have egos like people do – study any military history and you’ll be amused and/or disgusted by how badly Our Glorious Elites have botched wars just to appease their own egos – but again, how about we don’t leave wars up to machines? I mean, yes, it’s interesting that an AI agent play a game with “imperfect information” so well, but instead of imagining how we could “fight wars better” – again, a dubious notion in the guerrilla warfare era! -- how about we imagine how we can avoid wars better?

Ho hum, right-wingers claim that vaccines kill people with blood clots, naturally by blowing one fact (that the J&J vaccine, accounting for 3% of all vaccine administrations, cause a kind of blood clotting in literally four out of every million doses) way out of proportion, pretending that postmortem blood clots aren’t common, and repeating a whole slew of other debunked claims. Also, too, just because someone dies after getting the vaccine, that doesn’t mean the vaccine killed them. If I shoot a diabetic in the head, no reasonable person would claim he died of diabetes, but right-wingers would make a movie saying exactly that if they thought they could enrage enough people.

Marion County (IN) Superior Court Judge blocks Indiana’s abortion ban – on religious freedom grounds! After all, mainstream Judaism and Islam both authorize it in certain circumstances, so banning abortion more broadly interferes with those folks’ exercise of their First Amendment-guaranteed religious freedom. Will our Supreme Court, with its stated concern for religious freedom, uphold rulings such as these? I kid, of course – nothing matters to the far right wing of our Court except imposing their will on America. Why, I bet they’ll figure out a way to rule that the Jewish/Muslim/other non-Christian women who filed the suit “don’t have standing” to challenge it!

Our Senate has passed the Respect for Marriage Act. The bill they passed wouldn’t compel churches to hold gay weddings, but as long as our government recognizes them, most folks couldn’t care less if churches do. The bill would also repeal the noxious Defense of Marriage Act, confer federal benefits to any gay couple legally married, and force states to recognize marriages legal in other states. However, the bill wouldn’t compel those 35 states that have anti-gay marriage laws on the books – laws those states will enforce if/when our Supreme Court overturns Obergefell v. Hodges – to legalize gay marriage, and that’s a thing that’ll come back to bite us. Verdict: it's progress, but it's not quite justice.

Finally, our Senate has passed a bill that’ll keep railway workers from striking – but also rejected a separate measure that would have given railway workers seven days of paid sick leave, which had (justifiably!) been a sticking point in negotiations. One has to wonder why our House put the seven sick days in a separate bill, one more easily rejected by our Senate, instead of daring right-wing Senators to oppose the whole package because they hate giving workers time off. Sadly, the only answers I can come up with are “cowardice” and “evil," which reduces to "evil" or "evil."

Action: concerning corporate spying, media fees, and big corporate mergers.

Long story short: tell ShotSpotter to stop spying on good Americans, tell DirecTV to say no to higher Fox fees, and tell our FTC to stop the proposed Kroger/Albertsons merger. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell ShotSpotter to stop spying on good Americans. ShotSpotter sells “gunshot recognition technology” that, surprise, works just as badly as facial recognition technology, since it can hardly tell the difference between a gunshot and a loud bang at a construction site. Despite that, cities use ShotSpotter to send police officers out to Black and Brown neighborhoods, which just increases the possibility of more needless deaths at the hands of cops. And ShotSpotter doesn’t just record gunshots (and “gunshots”) – it also records what people say and do nearby. Without a warrant! Hence we use the Big Stick of Bad PR.

Daily Kos helps you tell DirecTV not to cave in to Fox’s demands for massive carriage fee increases, which you know DirecTV will pass on to all of its customers, who may include you. I’m old enough to remember when Fox could dictate fees to the big telecom services for its “services,” and no, its regular TV offerings aren’t good enough to offset all the harm the notorious Fox News Channel has done and will continue to do. So now would be a good time for us to lend some steel to DirecTV’s spine and tell them to stand up to Fox’s demands for more money. Maybe they’ll have to drop Fox entirely! What a shame that would be.

Finally, More Perfect Union helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission to stop the proposed Kroger/Albertsons merger, which will create yet another mega-corporation in a world that already has too many of them slashing jobs, raising prices, and imposing their will on good people. Oh, and paying their executives way, way too much money; we can’t forget that, since that’s the real reason corporations merge. Luckily, we have laws against this sort of thing, and though it may take a while to get judges who’ll remember we have laws against this sort of thing, we can have an FTC that remembers – if we keep reminding them.

Action: concerning fair contracts for workers, tax cuts for working families, and lower insulin costs for all Americans.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to strike a fairer deal with railway workers, bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion, and cap insulin costs for all Americans. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. Both More Perfect Union and Patriotic Millionaires help you tell your Congressfolk to strike a fairer deal with railway workers, i.e., a deal that gives them more paid time off like all workers deserve. Railway workers are always on call and get one day off a month – one! – so we shouldn’t be forcing a bad contract down their throats. No use arguing that “these workers are too important” to give them more paid time off, because bosses have been using that argument against workers forever. Hospital workers are too important! Teachers are too important! Jesus Mary and Joseph if they’re that important, shouldn’t we make sure we take care of them?

Change.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit expansion from 2021 permanent. That expansion put $250 or $300 checks per child every month in working families’ bank accounts, and it sure helped them weather skyrocketing inflation in 2021, but Republicans and Joe Manchin let it expire. If Democrats had run on their vote for (and, ah, their opponents’ vote against) the Child Tax Credit expansion in 2021, I think they’d have kept their House majority and expanded their Senate majority. Still, good works are good works, and bringing back that expansion now would help keep children out of poverty now.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend the Medicare $35/month insulin cap to all Americans. Because all Americans deserve it! Don’t let your friends be like Herschel Walker, telling everyone they “gotta eat right” and imagining that’s the answer to diabetics (including the many who’ve had it since birth!) risking death by rationing their insulin! And don’t brook Republican attempts to overturn the protections we got in the Inflation Reduction Act, either! These Republicans are objectively anti-health, objectively pro-sickness, and objectively pro-inflation. And you thought being objectively pro-big donor was bad enough!

Action: concerning corporate welfare, tribal lands, and marriage equality.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop handing out corporate welfare and pass the Advancing Tribal Parity on Public Land Act and the Tribal Cultural Areas Protection Act, and tell your Senators to pass the Respect for Marriage Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop handing out corporate welfare to big corporate donors like they do every year. We just had a midterm election that was, ah, not as big a win for Republicans as they’d hoped; once they formally organize to lead our House again, they’ll propose all kinds of stupid corporate tax cuts for their big donors, so we need to communicate our will to our Congressfolk, again. Like I said, they do this every year, at the end, when we’re all preoccupied with the holidays, but there’s another reason to deny them this year: corporate profits are driving at least half of the worst-in-40-years inflation we’re suffering. Make sure to tell them that.

The Native Organizers Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 8108/S. 4421, the Advancing Tribal Parity on Public Land Act, and H.R. 8109/S. 4423, the Tribal Cultural Areas Protection Act. The former bill would prohibit sale of any public land where a native American nation has treaty or other reserved rights, while the latter would establish a federal system protecting sites of cultural significance to native Americans. That all sounds pretty common-sensical to me; the only people who’d hate it are the big corporate executives who want to turn everything into a mine or a mall. And we’ve already taken enough away from native Americans.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 8404/S. 4556, the Respect for Marriage Act, which somehow still hasn’t passed our Senate, despite getting 47 Republican yea votes in our House back in July. And sadly the other side’s arguments against it are profoundly disappointing – they won’t say they just don’t want gay and interracial couples to marriage, so they can’t land a punch! One announced that “This Depraved Law Would Allow Pedophiles to Marry Children,” as if there's literally no such thing as consent, as if our laws don’t already prohibit adult-child marriages. So let’s not let bigots have all the say about everything.

Action: concerning campaign finance disclosure, law and order, and climate change.

Long story short: tell President Biden to force big corporations to reveal campaign contributions, tell our DOJ to indict Donald Trump already, and tell our DOT to implement the climate change-reporting rule they promised (and which our laws mandate). Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to issue an executive order forcing all corporations receiving more than $1 million in taxpayer money to disclose their campaign spending. Such an order would cover a lot of corporations, since a lot of corporations contract with our government, and while we’ve got to do something about all this big corporate campaign donations helping to elect utter fools, we also have a right to know whether big corporate campaign donations also help corporations get federal contracts they don’t deserve. So President Biden could shine a light on corruption big and small – but he won’t, unless we get in his grill about it.

Woman Up helps you tell new Justice Department special prosecutor Jack Smith to indict Donald Trump already. If you get a little annoyed with right-wingers shouting in your ear that YOUZ CAN’TZ EVENZ SAYZ WHATZ TEH TRUMPZ DIDZ!!!!!, just remember that this is how he wants it – he wants chaos and disorder so you’ll forget what coherence and order feel like. Also remember that he knew he lost the 2020 election but spread lies about it for the express purpose of overturning the will of the American people and staying in office. And that’s enough of a reason to indict the man. And it's just for starters! If we let him off, if we embrace cynicism, we’ll never have real law and order in America again.

Finally, the National Campaign for Justice helps you tell our Department of Transportation (or DOT) to implement a new greenhouse gas-measuring rule already. A 2012 law mandated the rule, the Obama Administration took its time writing one, and then the Trump Administration said, as it so often does, to hell with the law and the only thing that matters is worshiping mammon; then the Biden Administration took office, announced they’d do something, and then, nothing. Because DOT Secretary Pete Buttigieg thinks the Democratic party will be the same in 2028 as it is now! Thus we get in our DOT’s grills again.

Light posting notice plus action.

Posting will be light over the next week-plus, so enjoy your holiday, and prepare yourself for the drama of a Republican House (albeit one with a rather slim majority).

For today, though, two items: the U.S. Senate may vote on H.R. 8404/S. 4556, the Respect for Marriage Act, as early as today, so you'll want to get on the horn with your Senators and tell them to vote for that bill. This bill might actually pass, and if it does, it will protect gay marriage and interracial marriage from whatever horror our Supreme Court is cooking up. I told my right-leaning Senator, who will be replaced by John Fetterman in January, not to listen to people who claim their "religious" "conscience" demands that our government prevent gay folks from marrying. If you don't want to gay-marry, I said, then just don't gay-marry. Shame that rage-filled right-wingers seem to have no idea how that works.

Also, Pennsylvania residents, take note: not long after I declared the Larry Krasner impeachment dead, the Pennsylvania state house up and impeached him, for something, I guess. Two-thirds of Pennsylvania's state Senators will have to vote to remove him from his office as Philadelphia District Attorney; Pennsylvania has 29 Republicans out of 50 state Senators, so they'd have to bully at least four Democrats into voting to remove him. Thus now's a good time to call your state Senator and tell them not to enable this right-wing sore loser drama Republicans want to inflict upon us. (Republicans rushed to impeach Mr. Krasner because, pending the results of two races in the Philly suburbs, they may have lost the Assembly.) Mr. Krasner has, frankly, enacted rather mild criminal justice reforms in his five years as DA, and any cop who says I CAN'TZ DOZ MYZ JOBZ ANYMOREZ!!!! simply because he can no longer indefinitely detain a guy for peeing against the wall of a bar at 3 AM is a whiner. And Jesus Mary and Joseph I hate whiners. I hate whiners with guns even more.

Anyway, enjoy time with family and friends this week, and thank you for all your good works.

Action: concerning drug prices, Presidential power, and social media.

Long story short: tell President Biden to expand public drug manufacturing capability to lower drug prices, tell your Congressfolk to make Presidential legal memos more transparent, and tell big corporations to stop advertising on Twitter. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell President Biden to expand public manufacturing capacity for insulin so that it doesn’t cost good Americans hundreds of dollars every month like it does now. With Republicans finally getting the 218th seat that’ll give them a majority in our House, we sure can’t expect any such action coming from them. But President Biden can use existing authority in the Bayh/Dole Act to allow our government to make more insulin at low prices – insulin that’ll compete with price-gouging big pharma corporations. Hey, the “free” market isn’t providing! And when that happens, our government must step in.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to require the Presidential Office of Legal Counsel to publicly release all of its legal opinions, past and present. Why should they keep them from us, after all? I kid, of course – they keep them from us because they know we’d see through them! After all, our government hasn’t just used OLC “secret memos” to shield Donald Trump from accountability – these memos have also justified torture in violation of the Geneva Conventions (and American law) and expanded, unconstitutional war-making power for our Presidents. Don’t buy the “national security” argument, either. They should be able to keep us safe and be accountable to us.

Finally, Inequality Media helps you tell big corporations to stop advertising on Twitter. General Motors has suspended advertising on Twitter, and if big corporations to follow suit, we might even think of them as guardians of civilization again one day! Elon Musk has turned Twitter into a cesspool of hatred and drama since buying it, and we must hold him accountable for that; absent legislation making social media liable the way publishing houses are, we can wield the Big Stick of Bad PR against any corporation that would advertise on Twitter. We should ask them not to advertise there first, though. We are civilized, after all.

Action: concerning data privacy, internet freedom, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell our FTC to keep law enforcement’s grubby mitts off our private data, tell our Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner, and tell President Biden to remove Donald “Lee” Moak from our USPS Board of Governors. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to stop private data-collecting corporations from selling all your private info to law enforcement. If law enforcement wants that information, they should get a warrant from a judge; supporting “convenience” or “efficiency” here is nothing more and nothing less than supporting fascism. Seriously! If law enforcement can just buy your personal data, and look at it whenever they like, what’s to stop them from going on fishing expeditions once they decide you’re an enemy? Hey, were you at George Floyd rallies in 2020? Well, congratulations – now you’re an enemy. It’s way too easy for cops to do that, which is why we restrict their power.

Demand Progress also helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner with a quickness. They’ve been dragging their feet about this nomination for two years, and as a result, our FCC can’t do the work Congress has given them to do – work that not only includes reinstating network neutrality as virtually everyone in America left right and center wants them to do, but also allocating a lot of infrastructure money, since Congress has passed a few of those bills over the last two years, too. Currently our FCC suffers from 2-2 votes caused by not having a fifth Commissioner, and if Gigi Sohn is extraordinarily well-qualified no matter what corporate lobbyists say. So let’s get on this.

Finally, Save the Post Office helps you tell President Biden to replace Donald “Lee” Moak on our USPS Board of Governors, preferably with a nominee who will replace the notorious Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. Mr. Moak is one of Mr. DeJoy’s biggest supporters even as he freely admits – because such admissions apparently mean nothing anymore! – that he hardly understands his work on the Board. The only thing he seems to “understand” is that raising prices, slashing jobs, and cutting services in a nation where many Americans rely on our Postal Service for life-saving medicines is somehow a good plan! And that’s why he’s got to go.

8 thoughts about the midterms.

1. Again, I wanted humiliation for Republicans – I wanted them to lose a lot of seats in our House and Senate. Still, Democrats will hold the Senate, meaning they’ll get two more years of judges, and by my reckoning they’ll finish with at least 213 House seats (adding in Alaska, Maine’s 2nd, Oregon’s 6th, Colorado’s 8th, New Mexico’s 2nd, and California’s 9th, 21st, 47th, and 49th), with 218 still possible, though unlikely (the best remaining path being through California’s 3rd, 13th, 22nd, and 41st and then Colorado’s 3rd in a recount). The last election like this? 1982, the election that cemented the Reagan Revolution! Democrats picked up over two dozen House seats that year, but with Boll Weevil Southern Democrats pretty much voting with Reagan all the time, Republicans had a working majority in the House then, if not an actual one, and Democrats netted only one Senate seat, reducing the Republicans' actual Senate majority from 54 to 53.

Heartening, in that context, but not for long – Republicans may act humbled now that they didn’t get the electoral sturm und drang they counted on, but if/when they win our House, they’ll promptly forget their humility and act like the fascists they wish they were. Incessant investigations into Hunter Biden, ugly and shameful though that’ll be, might be the best result we can expect from a Republican House. I doubt they’ll successfully defy our will to use the debt limit to force Social Security and Medicare cuts – though they’ll try, and, again, it’ll be ugly and shameful – but they might succeed in defunding our FTC and our SEC and our CFPB and our DOJ’s Antitrust Department; in fact, I bet that’s their real endgame, because the longer Biden Administration actually enforces antitrust law, the worse shape Republicans will be in every election after this one. We’ll be getting on Joe Biden about that! And you know our “liberal” media will pump out ten thousand think-pieces about how the so-called Freedom Caucus “holds Speaker McCarthy hostage.” News flash: Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, and Marjorie Taylor Greene are who the Republican Party is now. Kevin McCarthy is their beard. And he likes it that way.

On the other hand, if Democrats do manage to hold our House, we’ll have a lot less drama. And if leadership would read people like Josh Gottheimer the riot act, that sure would be nice.

2. Ballot questions, again, generally made democracy look good – put a question directly to voters and they usually make much better choices than politicians do. Three states enshrined abortion rights in their state constitutions, while a fourth (Kentucky) rejected an effort to make abortion unconstitutional there and a fifth (Montana) rejected an effort to create a massive loophole in abortion rights. Nebraska and Nevada voters raised state minimum wages to $15/hour and $12/hour, respectively; Connecticut and Nevada voters expanded voting rights, while Arizona voters rejected stricter Voter ID requirements; and California overwhelmingly rejected ballot initiatives that would legalize online sports betting and sports betting on tribal lands (and they say people don’t have morals out there!). Pot legalization was a mixed bag – Maryland and Missouri voters said yes, while Arkansas, North Dakota, and South Dakota voters said no – but that’s two more states legalizing pot (and thus lightening police officers’ burdens), and I’m old enough to remember when zero states legalized pot.

3. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez – whom the pundits said wouldn’t win Washington’s 3rd, but what do they know? – has provided the blueprint for how Democrats should win back rural and rust belt areas, much more so than Tim Ryan, it turns out. Unlike the right-wingers who hide behind “small businesses” when they try to cut their corporate paymasters’ taxes, Ms. Perez can tell you how the catalytic converter shortage exposed real supply chain problems (i.e., that big dealerships can muscle small car repair shops out of parts with impunity). She also talks about police reform in a way working folks would relate – stop buying night vision goggles and start paying cops more, she says. And no use saying well, she only beat a Trumphole, because, hey, did Tim Ryan beat his Trumphole opponent? No, he did not.

4. A lot of bad people got re-elected – though if Ron Johnson really sold his soul to the devil for another term as a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, he paid too much – but at least Paul LePage got absolutely buried in his attempt to reclaim the Governor’s mansion in Maine, where (thanks to ranked-choice voting) independent candidates can no longer take enough sane people’s votes away from Democrats. To think Mr. LePage had the cojones to say that folks on the left and the right have just got to start talking to each other again! That’s like Donald Trump saying people in America are too angry! (Actually, Mr. Trump did say Greta Thunberg, who’s a billion times the person he’ll ever be, was “too angry.”)

5. So how did incessant Republican whining about “rising crime rates” resonate with voters? Now it can be told: not very well! It worked especially poorly in Pennsylvania, where state legislators tried to make impeaching Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner (for not doing enough about crime, or something) their October Surprise; that effort fell flat at month’s end, likely because it was always noxious and offensive drama, but if “rising crime” were such a winning issue generally, then how did Pennsylvania Democrats get in position to flip the state legislature’s lower house after entering Election Day 23 seats down?

6. Looks like I’m getting a dozen emails a day from Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia for another few weeks, now that he’ll face Republican Herschel Walker in a runoff. Maybe Republican voters will stay home merely because the race won’t decide Senate control anymore, but maybe they won’t, and if Republicans take our House before then, Democratic voters will be rather more demoralized than they know now. Still, I’d be pleased to see Democrats take this race seriously and win it, not just because Mr. Warnock is a good Senator who deserves to win, but because with 51 seats the party can marginalize Kyrsten Sinema even further. Yes, as we’ve already seen with the Inflation Reduction Act, we’re much better off dealing with Joe Manchin’s old-school corruption than Ms. Sinema’s post-modern corruption. Let her go work for a hedge fund in two years, where she can sell her relationships, no, not with other Democratic Senators, but with Republican ones. You ever see her in a photo with other Democrats? No, you have not – but you’ve seen plenty of photos of her with Republicans. Such a maverick!

7. So whom are we going to war with first – Russia or Florida? Republicans clearly have an even bigger stranglehold over that state than we realized in 2020. Calling Marco Rubio an empty suit would represent a profound insult to empty suits, yet he beat Val Demings by 16 points. And Val Demings was a good candidate! Meanwhile, Ron DeSantis beat Charlie Crist by 20, which should remind us that you don’t run a nice guy against an asshole. Mr. DeSantis’s redistricting antics netted Republicans three more House districts, though even in that he was outpaced by the incompetence of New York Democrats, who netted Republicans four.

8. John Fetterman flipped the only Senate seat to change hands by beating Mehmet Oz 51-47, while Josh Shapiro trounced Doug Mastriano by 16 points in that state’s gubernatorial election; Mr. Oz wasn’t as execrable a candidate as Mr. Mastriano – we’re talking about the difference between a clown and an arsonist here – but I must conclude that Mr. Fetterman’s stroke and subsequent shaky debate performance moved the needle in Mr. Oz’s direction. If we’d gotten to see John Fetterman at his best in this campaign, he might have won by 20 points, and then the pundits, who know nothing about anything of consequence, would have mystified him by saying he’s a “unique” candidate. It’s true that Democrats don’t often run a guy who’s that funny, that smart, that social media-savvy, and that able to relate to working folks, but truth is there are people like John Fetterman all over America, and a lot of them even want to serve the public. Will Democrat consultants notice them now? I kid, of course – if you’re paid to be blind, you’ll stay blind.