Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning the war on Yemen, whistleblowers, and campaign finance disclosure.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to end our involvement in the war on Yemen, pass strong protections for financial sector whistleblowers, and pass the DISCLOSE 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.

Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Yemen War Powers Resolution, which would enable our Congress to claw back some of the war-declaring power they’ve historically delegated (unconstitutionally!) to our President, at least as far as Yemen is concerned. President Biden talked a good game about winding down our involvement there, but hasn’t done very much of consequence, since we’re still providing weapons and logistical support to the war, and lately our President’s tried to “reset” our relations with Saudi Arabia, the nation leading the coalition against Yemen. All that means is, once again, it’s up to us to make our Congressfolk do their job.

The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the most vigorous reforms possible for good Americans who blow the whistle on money laundering schemes. Such reforms would include a mandatory minimum award for these whistleblowers – who have basically risked their livelihoods to do the right thing! – and an established fund to pay out such awards. And not for nothing, but money laundering drives wars all over the world, including the one Russia’s waging on Ukraine, so strong protections for whistleblowers who expose financial sector wrongdoing would result in (dare I say) a peace dividend. A real one, though!

Finally, the Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 443, the DISCLOSE Act, which would (among other necessary reforms) force disclosure of all big campaign finance donors who give more than $10,000 to campaigns or committees. As for those who worry about big campaign finance donors getting death threats once they’re exposed: that kind of lawlessness is a separate problem. Death threats are always wrong and illegal and our laws exact punishment for them, but it’s our job to protect our democracy from big money, which is why we demand that big players at least show themselves.

Action: concerning stock buybacks, social media, and conservation.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to extend the airline industry’s stock buyback ban, tell Facebook to stop enabling hatemongers on its platform, and tell President Biden to enact the strongest old-growth tree conservation rules possible. 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 Congress to extend the airline industry’s stock buyback ban they enacted in 2020. Seems Congress was afraid that airline corporations would take corporate welfare and just give it to their executives to buy stock back with, instead of helping their workers keep their jobs; now, with airlines flush with cash again but inflicting delays on customers, they’re hoping to outlast the ban and start spending all their money on stock buybacks. Hence our call to keep that ban going. Don’t believe the hype that it’s “unfair” to airline corporations! Frankly, all corporations should have stock buyback bans.

Color of Change helps you tell Facebook to stop enabling hate on its platform. Among other very important things, you’ll ask for Facebook to end page “auto-generation” that automatically generates white supremacist “pages” that help white supremacists find each other. Free association is free association, but no law says big corporations should make it easier for racist pricks to find each other, and there’s no substitute for people when it comes to content moderation. Facebook uses algorithms for that not because they do it better than people, but because you have to pay people and give them off when they get sick or have problems, and Facebook doesn’t want to do that. So let’s stop enabling them.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell President Biden to protect old growth forests as vigorously as possible. When a tree is centuries old, as some of America’s trees are, it stores a lot of carbon emissions, so it seems to me you’d not only like to keep old trees around but help more trees get old! And once you cut a tree down, it doesn’t store carbon emissions anymore, nor does it help keep our air and water clean or preserve wildlife habitats. And as impermanent as is the desk they make from old-growth trees, the money an executive makes from cutting them down is even more impermanent. No one remembers folks who convert life into money.

Around the table: featuring another winning Democrat ad proposal!

I wish it were more of a surprise that labor union assets have nearly doubled over the last decade as the number of organized workers (as a percentage of the workforce) has declined, but we’ve known at least since Last Exit to Brooklyn that corruption both petty and spiritual can creep in anywhere, including the movement that gave us the eight-hour workday and the weekend. The worst union executives probably think that folks will tolerate anything to hang on to an ever-slimmer reed of labor power, but that ship sailed well before the pandemic hit. The good news: relatively small investments into organizing and strike funds can turn this thing around. I don’t have to tell you the bad news.

I wish it were more of a surprise that Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D?-AZ), who single-handedly killed recent Democratic efforts to get lightly-taxed hedge fund managers to pay more of their fair share, has received almost $1 million in contributions from banksters just in the past year. Nice to hear a Democratic consultant say “there is no universe in which it is politically smart to fight for favorable tax treatment of the wealthiest people in the country,” and if Senator Galaxy Brain is bold enough to ignore virtually all the evidence of the last 15 years, I expect she’ll pay in the 2024 primary, if she doesn’t get a hedge fund lobbying job first.

I wish it were more of a surprise that Rick Scott’s Max Headroom impression from last week was even worse than I had supposed – he actually called $280 billion in Medicare savings a “cut,” which I know isn't your attitude toward getting something good for less money. The surprise there is that Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan pushed back on that twice. But I wish she’d pushed back a little differently on the notion that Medicare paying less for drugs means “(t)here will be lifesaving drugs that seniors will not get” (i.e., it's a tired argument, as we’ll see below). I also wish she’d pushed back on his claim that “companies don't end up paying the taxes. Shareholders pay the taxes. Lower income for the employees paid the taxes. Less investment pays the taxes.” Setting aside that civilized people should never tolerate corporations taking out their higher taxes on everyone else, high corporate tax rates helped create the greatest middle class in history between 1932 and 1980.

Speaking of bad arguments about drug pricing reform, Arthur Allen at Kaiser Health News gives us a little of the history behind the “kills innovation” argument big pharma corporations deploy whenever you try to rein in their evil. Turns out the argument is at least as old as 1906, when our government first forced big drug corporations to list their drugs’ ingredients. Fast-forward 115 years, and drug prices have gone up a staggering 8500 percent over the last dozen years, and big pharma corporations still whine about being made to doing anything that might prevent their executives from gilding the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes.

Finally, what do Republicans plan to do if they win back either House of Congress this year? According to Rep. Chip Roy (E-TX), they’re going to shut down our government on their first day of power and force Democrats to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act! And how does he think that will work, given that Joe Biden will still be President? Make a campaign ad about this, Democrats – if Republicans take back control of the House, they will shut down your government out of pique, which means no air travel, no Social Security checks, no federal small business loans, and no national parks or museums. Show crying babies in that ad.

Action: the Inflation Reduction Act.

Our House votes on the Inflation Reduction Act today, so you may want to call your House Rep and tell them to vote for the bill; if you don’t know your House Reps’ phone numbers, use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to find them. It sure ain’t the bill we tried to get, but it would be the biggest climate change-fighting bill ever, plus it would help our IRS catch rich tax cheats and make corporations pay more taxes, and all that’s a lot better than the bill Republicans would have us pass, which is “no bill.” Seriously, if you’re still bummed, just remember that Republicans threw a massive hissy fit and tried to kill a veterans’ health care bill and a semiconductor bill once they knew the Inflation Reduction Act was coming. All Republicans are good for is tantrums, and it's our duty to keep professional tantrum-throwers from getting their way.

In a peripherally-related note, I understand that right-wingers incensed by our FBI’s raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort are openly calling for “civil war.” I’ll admit that since I moved from the city to the suburbs, I have become more acutely aware how many assholes walk among us. But here are three other things I know: folks don’t hit their targets most of the time, having a gun doesn't guarantee you a hero-making shot in the first place, and spending every Saturday at the shooting range ain’t “preparation for civil war.” So I think the Hummer Brigade would go down more easily than the Confederacy did, even though they’ll whine and yell a lot more.

Action: concerning education, the war on Yemen, and Social Security.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the College for All Act and the Yemen War Powers Resolution and expand Social Security benefits. 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.

Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2730/S. 1288, the College for All Act, which would (as its title suggests!) help all Americans get a college education without taking on a mountain of debt. How would it do that? Mainly by eliminating tuition and fees for all students at community colleges, as well as for children of working families at public colleges and universities, but also by making the Pell Grant program permanent and expanding its benefits so that students from working families can cover more of their living expenses. Remember: putting our children into a debt pit they’ll never get out of ain’t investing in our future.

Peace Action helps you tell your Senators to pass the Yemen War Powers Resolution, which would end our involvement in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen, a war that has left millions of good Yemeni on the edge of famine and killed a lot of the world’s best fighters against al-Qaeda. How is it that Our Glorious Elites abandon the Kurds and the Houthi when they’re some of the best fighters against al-Qaeda on Earth? Perhaps that question answers itself! But if we don’t want to wage war in Yemen, why are we still doing it? And why are our Congressfolk abandoning their Constitutional duty to declare war? If they won’t do their job, we just have to get in their grills until they do.

Finally, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to increase Social Security benefits. Close to half of our seniors can’t live on Social Security alone, and if your right-wing uncle tells you they should have gotten a job with a good pension, remind him, kindly or otherwise, that not that many jobs come offer pensions anymore – and the ones that do leave too much of their pension management to banksters! It’s almost like banksters are trying to cripple our pensions while walking away with massive unearned fees for their “performance.” And that’s why we don't rely on them, and instead fight to strengthen those programs we worked for, paid into, fought for, and deserve to enjoy in our later years.

Action: concerning monkeypox, "free" trade, and our Supreme Court.

Long story short: tell President Biden to use all his legal power to make monkeypox vaccines more accessible, and tell your Congressfolk to conduct Indo-Pacific trade talks transparently and pass the Judiciary 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.

Public Citizen helps you tell President Biden to use all his legal power to make monkeypox vaccines more accessible, and not just to Americans – if the world can’t get the vaccine, monkeypox is going to continue to bite us in the ass. I just can’t remember where we might have already learned this lesson recently! You would also ask President Biden to use the Defense Production Act to produce more vaccines and get them out more quickly. I guess right-wingers will say “hey, that’s not what that law’s for!” But Jesus Mary and Joseph if it’s not for defending our nation against epidemics and pandemics, then what is it for? Making defense contractors rich?

Global Trade Watch helps you insist on transparency during negotiations on the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework. The Biden Administration says this’ll be different from the other “free” trade deals, because it’ll be “worker-centered,” but we’ll believe it when we see it, and if they won’t let us see it, we won’t believe it. Did they not learn their lesson from the Trans-Pacific “Partnership”? People hate “free” trade deals that nullify our laws and outsource our jobs, and they hate “free” trade deal negotiations that “must” be “secret” even more. They “must” be “secret” because they’re lying to us! They could fix that – but they won’t, unless we get in their grills about it.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2584/S. 1141, the Judiciary Act, which would enable President Biden to add four new Supreme Court Justices, for a total of 13. 13 just so happens to be the number of federal appeals courts we have, and I’ve long advocated each Supreme Court Justice handling one appeals court, but let’s be frank: this current Court is out of control. They want to take everything from us, using whatever BS argument they can. The good news? More Americans agree with us now that Roe v. Wade, and thus the legal right to an abortion, is gone. So we’ve got to make our will clear.

Around the table: Rick Scott *is* Max Headroom! And other stories.

Sonali Kolhatkar explains how Alex Jones, in purporting to fight government, actually helped make our government significantly worse. And not by spewing bad ideas to enrage the inattentive, but by turning over his primed-to-believe-whatever audience to Donald Trump, who helped put our government even more in big corporations’ pockets while ranting about the “deep state” (which is a thing, as you know, but not necessarily the thing the Trump/Jones axis yells about). So, to sum: not only is Alex Jones a jerk, he’s a jerk who serves Our Glorious Elites while pretending to oppose them. St. Peter’s really going to dig that at the Pearly Gates.

Naomi Oreskes at Scientific American laments that today’s scientists too often peddle solutions that “depend() on technologies that do not yet exist.” It gets worse: depending on unproven (and likely unviable) technologies like carbon capture is just another way of avoiding scaling up the renewable technologies that do work. And we all know why that’s happening! (I was also displeased to learn that the “bipartisan” infrastructure bill passed last year allocated 20 times as much money to carbon capture as it did to renewables. Getting to yes!)

ProPublica tells us all about “A Uranium Ghost Town in the Making” in New Mexico. Since 1958, a uranium processing corporation has polluted air and water, and federal and state regulators didn’t tell good New Mexicans for over a decade; this all started during the nuclear arms race, so I guess sacrifices had to be made. The mill closed in 1990, but folks still suffer from ill effects, so the corporation’s bright idea now is to buy out all the local homeowners (as cheaply as possible, of course) and force them to absolve the corporation of any liability as a condition of sale! In what’s still a seller’s market, no less!

When I hear that Republican Senate Campaign Committee Chair Sen. Rick Scott (E-FL) “br(oke) down like a glitching Furby” when an NBC reporter asked him about the Republicans running for Senate in 2022, I’m tempted to say, “well, in fairness, he is a robot,” but I’ve rarely seen someone have such trouble enunciating. How does one get so unnerved by the question so why do all your candidates suck? And saying the word “Biden” like it’s a cuss word ain’t gonna work no matter how low his approvals go. It doesn’t bode well for any of the Republicans running this year, not just Blake Masters, who really does have a face even a mother could punch.

Mere days after Democrats dared Republicans to remove a $35/month insulin cap from their massive reconciliation bill, both North Carolina Republican Senators face a “vehement backlash” from their own constituents for voting against both the cap and the bill. And that’s how it should be, even when both Senators think they’re immune from accountability – Sen. Burr is retiring, of course, and Sen. Tillis just got re-elected, even though the next time he gets even 49% in a Senate election will be the first. Democratic Senate nominee Cheri Beasley promptly jumped on them for it; maybe she can win her race, if the Democrat consultant class doesn’t make her forget what matters to voters.

Finally, our FBI searched Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Monday, ostensibly for classified documents wrongfully and/or illegally removed from the White House, but right-wingers still leap to his defense. Here’s the money quotation: “if law-enforcement officials want to murder an unarmed Black man in the street, brutalize protesters against police misconduct, or investigate a Democratic presidential candidate, conservatives will insist that such officers are infallible and that any criticism of their conduct is outrageous. But when the law is used to investigate or restrict the conduct of people deemed by conservatives to be above its prohibitions, that is axiomatically an abuse of power.” Rush Limbaugh being a conservative was harder than being a liberal, but not when being a conservative means you just make up the rules as they fit you. Holding values that don’t always tell you what you want to hear? Now that’s hard.

Action: concerning marriage, lead poisoning, and campaign spending.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Respect for Marriage Act, tell our Interior Department to keep lead out of bullets and tackle used to hunt and fish on public lands, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the DISCLOSE 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 Senators to pass H.R. 8404/S. 4556, the Respect for Marriage Act. Our House passed it a few weeks ago, but our Senators won’t, unless we get in their grills about it. The Respect for Marriage Act would protect gay and interracial marriage protections from our Supreme Court’s recent thirst for overturning the precedents that protected them in the first place. No, really, Justice Thomas specifically called for our Court to use the Dobbs decision (which overturned Roe v. Wade) to overturn rulings protecting gay and interracial marriage! So when the mustache-twirling villains actually tell us what they’ll do, we have to stop them.

Mobilize 4 Change helps you tell our Fish and Wildlife Service to ban lead from bullets and fishing tackle that Americans use on public lands. Really, is this so much to ask? Not a hunting ban, or a bullet ban, but a lead bullet ban. Any right-winger who complains about this is a whiner, simple and plain. I mean, I think they’re whiners anyway, but I bet everyone thinks the lead-bullets-or-bust crowd are a bunch of whiners. But when we hunt animals with lead bullets or go fishing with lead bait on public land, that lead gets into animals that don’t get hunted, like, apparently, half of all bald eagles. And that lead also gets into the water that we drink and that fish swim in. Seriously, this is a bank shot.

Finally, the Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 443, the DISCLOSE Act, which would force large organizations to disclose their biggest donors, particularly when they run ads about judicial nominations. The bill would also expand prohibitions against foreign financing of campaigns to digital media, in case you were worried the Russians would spend heavily on Facebook ads favoring Republicans this year. I can’t say that’s a dumb worry! Anyway, huge majorities of Americans favor more campaign finance disclosure, so we should get more of what we want for all our trouble, maybe?

Action: concerning climate change, health care, taxes, immigration, and campaign finance.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Inflation Reduction Act and prevent ICE officers from pretending they’re police officers, and tell President Biden to require that federal contractors disclose their campaign spending. 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.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Inflation Reduction Act. Our Senate passed it yesterday – the final tally was, of course, 51-50, with all Republicans voting against – so now our House has to pass it. The bill has no $35/month insulin cap for non-Medicare patients (thanks, Republicans!) and no narrowing of the hedge fund loophole (thanks again, Kyrsten Sinema!), but it still taxes corporations harder, lets Medicare negotiate some drug prices, extends expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies, and helps us kick some climate change ass, plus it now contains a 1% tax on stock buybacks! That tax should be higher, but the Inflation Reduction Act would make our lives better, and so deserves our support.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation prohibiting Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) enforcers from identifying themselves as “police.” It’s a shame we have to do this! But when a branch of law enforcement abuses their power, we as civilized people must step in and make our government work on our behalf. And when right-wingers whine that doing so would “tie the hands” of ICE enforcers, they’re basically admitting they’re against civilization. Also, ICE enforcers who misrepresent themselves prevent our actual police from questioning immigrants about other crimes. But then, right-wingers only care about stoking rage.

Finally, the Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell President Biden to make all corporations that get federal contracts disclose their campaign spending. We have an interest, I would think, in knowing which corporations receive taxpayer money and then spend money goading our representatives in Congress into voting against our interests. Right-wingers will call that “stifling free speech," which not only pretends spending money equals “speech,” but also pretends not to know that if you take taxpayer money you have to follow taxpayer rules. Right-wingers like that notion, until it doesn’t suit them, but civilized people know better.

Around the table: evil works have a long half-life -- and so do good works.

William Rivers Pitt at TruthOut informs us that “The Secret Service Text Cover-Up Keeps Getting Bigger and Bigger,” as the mass text-deletion scandal now encompasses our Department of Defense and our Department of Homeland Security as well as our Secret Service. One observer wonders if folks have a “moral right to presume the worst about Trump entities that deliberately destroyed federal evidence regarding January 6,” but “moral right” is a bad way of putting it – we as Americans have a duty to ensure the survival of our own civilization. “Trump entities” would enjoy the presumption of innocence if they stand trial in a court of law, but Americans need not give them that presumption either at the ballot box or the water cooler. Hey, that’s the marketplace of ideas.

Texas jury finds right-wing blowhard Alex Jones guilty of defamation over his repeated assertions that the Sandy Hook school mass murder was somehow not real, and orders him to pay nearly $50 million in damages. Stupid Texas law will limit that outlay, but it’s still a big deal anytime someone pays a price for their evil works. And if you’re thinking Alex Jones only paid that price because he’s a relatively small player in the system, so is almost everyone else who deserves his fate. Why keep Alex Jones or Steve Bannon around when a hundred other jerks can rise up to take their place? Hell, they only keep Donald Trump around because he won’t go away.

When I hear that New York state’s Health Commissioner says the single case of polio they’ve found so far could well mean hundreds of other folks might have it, all I can say is: heckuva job, Andrew Wakefield! Mr. Wakefield, you may recall, is the ex-scientist who manufactured “data” finding a “link” between the MMR vaccine and autism; anti-vaxxers ran amok with this “research” and convinced numerous Americans that all vaccines were dangerous. Fast forward to the summer of 2021, when numerous crybabies refused to take the COVID vaccine and thus helped keep us all in danger to this day, and we can see clearly the damage anti-vaxxers have done. What’s next, smallpox?

West Virginia man gets a little over three years in jail for sending threatening emails to Dr. Anthony Fauci and ex-NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins while they were both federal officials. Let the record show that this man was no expert dancer on the free-speech-or-terroristic-threat high wire. And while it’s great that we got justice here, how about we go after everyone who threatened a schoolteacher or school board official over masks or vaccines or “critical race theory”? Because good teachers won’t come back until we prove we’ve got their back.

Ho hum, FactCheck.org finds too many folks using misrepresented vaccine safety data in order to claim that the COVID vaccines have “serious side effects” they don’t actually have – but this time the database is German, not American. And naturally Tucker Carlson, who jumped all over misrepresented data coming from our VAERS database last year, jumped all over this one, too, proving that those who would exploit the rage-added never rest, nor do they feel shame when we expose their lies. It’s enough to make you think that Jon Stewart’s method – good old-fashioned ridicule! – is the better way.

Finally, in an act of political aikido I can’t believe came from Democrats, the Senate parliamentarian ruled that the Inflation Reduction Act couldn’t contain a $35/ month insulin price cap for non-Medicare patients and still comply with the Byrd Rule concerning budget reconciliation – but Democrats left the cap in the bill anyway, daring Republicans to force them to take it out, and Republicans dutifully took the bait. 60 votes would have overcome the point-of-order raised by Sen. Graham (E-SC), but only seven Republicans voted with Democrats to overcome it – meaning that headlines like “Republicans strip insulin price cap from bill” are now completely valid both in newspapers and campaign ads! Of the seven Republicans who voted to keep the insulin cap, only two – John Kennedy of Louisiana and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska – are up for re-election in 2022, so you have to wonder what goes through the minds of people like Ron Johnson, Marco Rubio, Chuck Grassley, and Rand Paul, each of whom have formidable Democratic challengers this year. (The insulin price cap is particularly in Kentucky Democrat Charles Booker’s wheelhouse, for reasons you might easily imagine.)

Around the table: the most pro-corporate Supreme Court ever! And other total non-surprises.

I’m sure you already knew that the John Roberts-led Supreme Court is easily the most pro-corporate Supreme Court in recent memory, but it’s still good to have some data behind it, even if we’d also like to know how the Roberts Court compares on this matter to, say, the Courts led by Salmon Chase or Morrison Waite. How incoming Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson writes on corporate issues will help tell us whether President Biden actually wants to change our politics so that ordinary Americans count again, or whether he just wants to look like he's doing that.

I wouldn’t blame you for being skeptical that “the teacher shortage in America has hit crisis levels,” because our “liberal” media cry “crisis” at a lot of things (cough crime cough) that aren’t actual crises, and the fourth paragraph of this article admits it can’t teacher levels well, at least not beyond data and anecdotes from (by my count) nine “state and district-level reports.” To the degree that it’s happening, though, I point the finger at right-wingers yelling and screaming at (and threatening!) teachers over wearing masks and getting vaccines and teaching about racism. Yes, the pandemic was rough on teachers, but I’d lay money that all the right-wing whining afterward tipped more teachers over the edge.

Not long before Kyrsten Sinema finally signed off on the Inflation Reduction Act after forcing through at least one significant change-for-the-worse, someone in the “liberal” media actually wondered why Democrats “left (her) out” of negotiations on the bill. Gosh, I don’t know – maybe because they hate her even more than they hate Joe Manchin? Joe Manchin is garden-variety corrupt, after all, but Kyrsten Sinema thinks she’s so much smarter than us, and the next person I meet who actually likes people who think they're so much smarter than everyone else will be the first. And anyway, “mavericks” don’t go to bat for banksters, not when even Donald Trump says nasty things about them.

Surprise, surprise, study links “Earning Persistently Low Wages” “With Faster Memory Decline In Old Age,” which results include dementia. I’ve long said that people aren’t “bad at math” or “bad at budgeting” so much as they don’t make enough money to make a budget work, and I’ve also suspected that failure at that task alone (never mind the consequences of that failure, like foreclosure and eviction and getting your water and your heat and your electric turned off) makes you less sharp as the years go by. I’ve even suspected that not having savings to fall back on (as low-wage earners rarely have) also makes you less sharp. Now we have data that supports these notions.

The money shot from this article about how John Fetterman’s parents supported him and his family well into his 40s shows pretend-Pennsylvanian Mehmet Oz calling Mr. Fetterman a “pretend populist,” but I don't care that Mr. Fetterman grew up in a (his word!) “cushy” suburb or needed a substantial cash infusion from his parents as late as 2015. No child picks where they’re born or where they grow up, and if you're lucky enough to have privilege, your life's work is leveraging that privilege for all the folks who don’t have it, so in that light, giving up an insurance underwriting career to mentor young orphans and high-school dropouts seems heroic. And how did Mr. Oz leverage his privilege at pandemic's outset? By telling Sean Hannity that some kids would have to die to keep the economy going. Gallant, meet Goofus.

Now Sen. Ron Johnson (E-WI), the man who gives the “Citizen Legislator” a bad name, wants Congress to have to renew Social Security and Medicare every single year. As a way of “controlling government spending,” something the Ron Johnsons of the world never do when it comes to all the welfare handouts they give to corporations. But Americans like their Social Security and Medicare, and the only way this ends well for Mr. Johnson is if Mandela Barnes – the presumptive Democratic nominee now that his top three Democratic opponents have bowed out – simply doesn’t mention it in campaign ads. Sadly, this is not difficult to imagine. Too many Democrats preoccupy themselves with being “different” and “special” and "thinking outside the box" when what they really need to do is go for the throat.

Finally, let us take a moment to celebrate good Kansans turning back an anti-abortion constitutional amendment by an impressive 59-41 margin. The people of Kansas accomplished this despite a) voting on the matter during a primary election which always has lower turnout, b) a poorly-worded-probably-on-purpose ballot question, and c) a mysterious effort to mislead pro-choice voters into pulling the wrong lever that’s almost certainly going to send someone to jail. The news wasn’t all good from primary Tuesday, though: Lucas Kunce, as impressive a candidate as Democrats have ever lucked into in Missouri, lost his bid for the Senate nomination to (sigh) the beer heiress who goes-along-gets-along with Republicans like that has ever energized turnout. Even that cloud’s got a silver lining, though: Mr. Kunce’s strong showing (he lost 43-38; a lot of folks ran) puts him in a good position for a 2024 Senate race against Josh “Running Man” Hawley.

Action: concerning agriculture, law and order, and gay rights.

Long story short: tell our USDA to make contracts between big ag corporations and small farmers more transparent, tell our Justice Department to prosecute Donald Trump for his naked attempt to subvert the will of the people during the 2020 election, and tell 15 states to let gay and trans folks adopt children . 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 Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell our U.S. Department of Agriculture (or USDA) to force big ag corporations to be far more transparent in their contracts with small farmers. Yeah, I’d break up the big ag monopolies myself, but USDA Secretary Vilsack – yeah, he’s back, after such a great run the first time! – has shown little appetite for that, and you can go ahead and mention that in your comment if you like. But forcing big ag corporations like Tyson to spell out what’s in the contracts they sign with poultry farmers ain’t nothing. And we really should be prioritizing the farmers that grow the food over the corporations that sell it. I hope that doesn’t sound too old-fashioned.

Common Cause helps you tell our Justice Department to prosecute Donald Trump. If we’ve learned anything from the January 6 Commission over the last few weeks, it’s that Donald Trump knew he lost the election but tried his damnedest to nullify the will of 81 million voters anyway. I love how they always talk about the “75 million voters” who felt “disenfranchised” by the result. Of course, it was 74 million voters; one million voters isn’t a rounding error. But we should never allow this man near our sacred public offices again, and we need to hold him accountable for abusing the trust we solemnly placed in him in 2016, even though he lost the popular vote then by three million votes.

Finally, Care2 helps you demand that gay and trans folks can adopt children everywhere. If they want to outlaw abortion and say “just put the kid up for adoption,” then anyone who otherwise meets state requirements for being a good parent should get a chance to adopt the kid! It’s stupid to bring more unwanted children into the world and then say “not you” to folks who want them! And yet 15 states still prohibit gay and trans folks from adopting, and they include only two states (Virginia and Pennsylvania) that gave their electoral votes to Mr. Biden in 2020. That makes the job daunting, doesn’t it? But duty is duty, and right is right, and our duty to communicate what’s right doesn’t change because it’s a heavier lift.

Action: concerning corporate taxes, paid family leave, and government spying.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ending Corporate Greed Act, pass paid family leave legislation and legislation protecting abortion rights, and pass the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale 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.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7443/S. 3933, the Ending Corporate Greed Act. Sounds ambitious, right? But this bill would tax excess corporate profits at a rate of 95%, “excess profits” being the difference between profits made in a particular year and the average inflation-adjusted profits of the previous five years. That would catch out corporations jacking up prices on good Americans as CEOs gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. If folks call that “punishing success,” remind them, again, that using high inflation as a cover for jacking up prices is not “success.” You might also want to ask them: is evil success?

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to restore abortion rights and pass paid family leave legislation. Because you can’t exercise your right to an abortion if you can’t get paid time off from work! Just like you couldn’t deal with a COVID infection if you couldn’t get paid time off from work, a truism even Congressional Republicans recognized in 2020. Of course, the Republican plan for abortion is to make it illegal and make it damn near impossible to get if they can’t, and all I can say to that is: you’re against abortion? Then don’t get one. And if you do want one – or, more likely, need one – you should be able to get one without wondering if you’ll still have a job when you get back.

Finally, the ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. Our Fourth Amendment, as you know, protects “(t)he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,” yet big data-collecting corporations buy your info from the big telecom corporations that provide internet service, and then the big data corporations sell it to law enforcement, which now doesn’t need the Fourth Amendment-prescribed warrant to get your info. At that point, you are no longer “secure,” certainly not in your “papers” or “effects,” so Congress has to plug this loophole with a quickness.

Around the table: well, at least we knew Bill Russell.

NBA legend/civil rights warrior Bill Russell died on Sunday at the age of 88, but he leaves behind a life of good works. Mr. Russell helped the Celtics win eight straight NBA titles – it would have been 11, but for that one year Wilt Chamberlain’s 76ers went wild – and he did this at a time when Jim Crow still throttled Black folks in half of the cities in which he played, and his own city treated him like dirt, his money and fame apparently not good enough to get him into more exclusive communities, nor enough to keep feces-smearing assholes from trashing his house. So what does one do about all of this? Do what Bill Russell did – organize against evil, and excel at what God put you here to do. We can all do better, thanks to his example, and that’s all you can ask of anyone.

Ho hum, our “liberal” media seem to be against Chile’s draft constitution, though they can’t seem to decide whether that’s because it’s “undemocratic” or too democratic. They call it “woke,” a word that only right-wingers ever seem to use these days, or a “left-wing wish list,” and boy do Our Glorious Elites brutalize our language! Who thinks “wish list” are bad words, until some Thought Leader tells them to? My personal favorite moment, though, is when the right-wing hack says the proposed constitution “could destroy Chile’s economy, democracy and integrity as a nation.” I love how these clowns put “economy” before “democracy” and think no one can tell they’re sociopaths.

I’m sure the right-wing media had a field day with an unnamed Friend of Biden comparing this Administration’s first two years to Ronald Reagan’s first two years, and it’s true that the American Rescue Plan Act isn’t as consequential as the Kemp-Roth tax cut, nor has Mr. Biden had a defining moment comparable to Mr. Reagan’s firing of striking air traffic controllers. But I’d also say it’s no worse than 50-50 that the Biden Administration might actually turn America around – thanks to Lina Khan, Jonathan Kanter, and Rohit Chopra, mergers are going down, and I think our Federal Reserve’s interest-rate hikes will ultimately break the banksters’ hold on our economy, because why buy up real estate (or bitcoin!) just to show assets for cheap loans if you can’t get cheap loans anymore? Hell, why financialize the economy if you can't get cheap loans? To put it more poignantly: I wasn’t as optimistic about America in August of 2010, and I was more innocent then.

Jesus Mary and Joseph why on Earth does anyone care if Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D?-AZ) “was caught completely off guard” by the announcement of the Inflation Reduction Act? We’re not supposed to care about politicians’ feelings! They’re supposed to do their job, which is to listen to their constituents and do their constituents’ will. On that latter part, I understand that Sen. Sinema’s office has hemorrhaged staffers over the last two years, at least in part because they tire of taking angry calls from good Arizonans wondering why she’s not voting the right way. I’m not sure how many more ways can I say I hate drama.

Finally, I was going to say you can judge this article by its headline – "Democrats Are Dangerously Close To Changing Laws So Our President Is Elected By Popular Vote" – except that it’s actually much worse. Why? Not because the author assumes that anything the Founders wanted should stay; not, even, because he cries about tyranny like Donald Trump’s only obstacle to tyranny was his own bad character, but because he assumes that the Presidential election is the only election that matters and the “interests of the minority would naturally be set aside” if the popular vote won a Presidential election, as if there is literally no other way a “minority” could win legislative battles. We can set aside all the legislative battles rich minorities have been winning the last couple of decades, and just mention that Wyoming, for example, has two percent of all U.S. Senators despite having less than two one-thousandths of one percent of America’s population. You may be able to see why I have little patience with right-wingers whining about unheard “minorities.”

Action: concerning inflation, taxes, and campaign finance disclosure.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to tax big oil windfall profits and billionaire income, and pass campaign finance disclosure 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.

More Perfect Union helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a windfall profits tax on big oil corporations. There’s a news hook, of course: both Exxon Mobil and Chevron announced record profits for the 2nd quarter of 2022, which just so happens to coincide with that period over the last few months where we've all had to pay for gas in gold doubloons. It's because of the war in Ukraine, they said, but horsedoodle – they raised prices because they could, and what were we going to do about it? Stop driving to work and to the grocery store? No, we were not. But if we pass a windfall profits tax on big oil corporations, they’ll never be able to hold us hostage this way again. And that alone would be worth it.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 8558, the Billionaire Minimum Income Tax Act,which would (as its title suggests) ensure that every household worth more than $100 million pays 20% of all their income every year, be it salary or unrealized investments. That’s 20,000 households, so don’t brook any stupidity about how this tax would “affect small businesses” or “affect working families,” because it won’t. Some folks don’t want to tax the wealthy as hard as we should because they think they’re going to be in the club someday! But remember that naked self-interest is a stupid reason to do almost anything.

Finally, the Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 443, the DISCLOSE Act, which would crack down on foreign contributions to American political campaigns, and would also require organizations (including corporations, labor unions, and political action committees) to disclose the names and addresses of folks who donate over $10,000 to that organization. If “the inclusion of the information would subject the person to serious threats, harassment, or reprisals,” the organization could keep that info secret. But I would presume “serious” reprisals would not include a finger-wagging lecture from a neighbor or a mean post on a public social media page.

Action: concerning climate change, health care, taxes, the war on Yemen, and corruption.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, end U.S. involvement in the war on Yemen, and ban Congressfolk from trading stocks. 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 pass the Inflation Reduction Act – which would cut prescription drug prices, extend expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies for three years, enact a minimum corporate tax, fund renewable energy projects, close the hedge fund bankster tax loophole, and fund our IRS so it can catch rich tax cheats. Also, Drug Prices Are Too High and Social Security Works help you tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate drug prices, since more than 80% of Americans want that and our Congressfolk sure to have a nasty habit of forgetting what their constituents really want, particularly when it concerns something big pharma corporations don’t. Is this bill everything we want? No! Is it better than what we’ve got now? Of course it is! So let’s get it done.

Win Without War helps you tell your Senators to get us the hell out of the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen posthaste. This war kills more of the best fighters against al-Qaeda in the world (i.e., the Houthis) than even Turkish President Erdogan dreams of doing, and President Biden made hopeful noises about getting out of this mess early in his term, but no one hears those noises anymore, not when he’s trying to get back in Saudi Arabia’s good graces now that gas prices are still rather higher than they were six months ago. Note to Saudi Arabia’s government: if you want people to like you, maybe don’t kill journalists with bone saws! Also, don’t wage war on Yemen for no apparent reason except to cause famine and kill children.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass legislation banning members of Congress from trading in stocks at all. Plenty of bills that would accomplish this aim have passed our filters this year, and our Congressfolk have made a lot of hopeful noises about getting it done, but, as you may have noticed, they’ve done nothing. Congressfolk wield a lot of power, and frankly the last half-century of American politics has proven that we can’t “trust” them not to wield that power to enrich themselves. Corporatists love to argue that we can trust the powerful to police themselves. I sure hope there aren’t too many Americans left who still fall for that line of shit.

Around the table: the stupid, it burns! Part 539.

Our Justice Department sues to prevent Meta’s acquisition of a virtual reality app corporation, thus saying not-so-fast to Meta’s mad dash to create the “metaverse” which is totally not Decentraland or Sandbox or Second Life. Naturally Meta’s entire retort to the suit is regulation chills innovation, an offensively absurd argument which persuades very few Americans. Of course, they don’t throw it out there to persuade so much as to give people pause. Don’t pause, good peoples. The famous cliché instructs us that necessity, not “freedom from regulation,” is the mother of invention.

Hoo boy Donald Trump sure has big cojones throwing around phrases like “law and order” like he personally isn’t the most lawless individual most people know, but I’ll grant that calling for the death penalty for drug dealers is probably fairly popular, and it would absolutely be the wedge he uses to do all his other unpopular fascist crap, like sending the National Guard into cities and parking police cars on every corner and “removing” prosecutors who don’t do exactly what he wants. Seriously, cop cars on every block? It’s like they never want a teenager to vote Republican again!

Pema Levy at Mother Jones runs down all the state laws that essentially enable every citizen to be a “snitch” for money, like the odious Texas anti-abortion law. People like thinking of themselves as vigilantes, but that doesn’t mean they like other people to be vigilantes, particularly when they gum up their lives! Our Supreme Court should throw out all these laws, given that they’ve previously ruled that you must be able to prove harm was done to you to have standing to sue about anything. Think this Court will respect that precedent? I’d sooner lay money that the Detroit Lions will win Super Bowl LVII.

Thinking Republican Doug Mastriano has a real uphill battle to win the Pennsylvania Governor’s race? Think again: corporations still love plowing money into the Republican Governors Association, and the RGA’s working hard to elect Mr. Mastriano, even as they’re pretending they’re not. Hilariously, the corporations that have given to the RGA either don’t respond to questions or respond with stupidity. “We give to both sides” is a stupid thing to say when one side literally imitates Nazis in saying a “Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy” runs the world.

What does it mean that figures such as Christie Todd Whitman and Andrew Wang have come together to form a third party optimistically called the Forward Party? It means someone’s created yet another gravity well to suck in money from the rich and/or inattentive, that’s what! A plurality of Americans call themselves independent, but BFD – I’m an independent, too, and I won’t vote for Republicans even under threat of catheterization with barbed wire. People don’t hate parties so much as they hate politicians who constantly give them the backs of their hands.

Finally, let the record show that Republicans reacted to the possibility that Democrats might actually pass an even more slimmed-down Build Back Better bill by killing popular veterans’ health care legislation, and threatening to derail legislation protecting gay marriage as well. When I say the only way to talk to a Republican is to tell him to stop whining, this is why, because all of this is literal immaturity on Republicans’ part. If Democrats want to win the midterms – and we have ample reason to believe that they don’t! – they should run ads depicting their Republican opponents as tantrum-throwing babies from now through November.

Action: concerning birth control, gay marriage, taxing the rich, and electric mail trucks.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect contraception and same-sex marriage rights and pass the billionaire mininum income tax, and tell our Postal Service to make more of their mail trucks electric. 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.

Hip Hop Caucus helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass laws protecting birth control and same-sex marriage. Don’t listen to right-wingers telling you “it’s not necessary,” not when Justice Thomas explicitly said that our Supreme Court should use the Dobbs decision (the one overturning Roe v. Wade) against exactly these things! And certainly don’t listen to them saying “Democrats are just trying to distract from their failures fixing the economy,” when those very same Republicans have blocked everything Democrats tried to do! A lot of which – higher taxes on the rich, paid family/medical leave, Medicare drug price negotiation – would have made America a lot better! Yes, even for Republican voters.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a billionaire minimum income tax. The bill (which Reps. Cohen and Beyer will introduce soon) would make sure every household worth over $100 million pays at least 20% of their worth every year – and worth includes all the unsold assets that allow the super-rich to avoid paying taxes in the first place! Folks who think that’s unconstitutional should remember that we have an Estate Tax. And folks who feel sorry for those who’d pay this tax? They should remember that 20% of $100 million still leaves $80 million. They may also want to assess their chances of ever becoming that rich a bit more realistically.

Finally, the Climate Reality Project helps you tell our U.S. Postal Service to make more of their mail trucks run on electricity. Mail trucks go basically everywhere in America, so making them electric would level a serious blow against both pollution and climate change. Now, I couldn’t blame you for noticing that our USPS has decided to go 40% electric after getting a lot of flak from the American people about it. Hey, they compromised with us! Which is, after all, their job. But you know what our job is? To keep pressing our advantage until they comply with our will completely. Sound harsh? Hey, it’s what Republicans try to do literally all the time, and they don’t represent anyone but a bunch of assholes!

Action: concerning campaign finance, overdraft fees, and PFAS pollution.

Long story short: tell President Biden to force federal contractors to disclose their campaign donations, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Overdraft Protection Act and the PFAS Definition Improvement 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 Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell President Biden to make federal contractors disclose their campaign donations, which, since a lot of corporations take taxpayer money, will do a great deal for campaign finance reform. You’ll recall that our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) debated this very matter last decade, and received over a million public comments favoring disclosure which was about a million more than they typically get – and then did nothing. You’ll also remember that President Obama mooted issuing an Executive Order about the matter, and then did nothing. Thus we must pressure President Biden to do the right thing.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4277, the House Overdraft Protection Act. People get slammed with unexpected overdraft fees these days, and not because they're “bad at managing money” – I’m going to kill that idea dead before I’m gone! – but because they don’t make enough money. The House Overdraft Protection Act would help fix one part of that problem by (among other actions) limiting overdraft fees, banning overdraft fees resulting solely from debit holds, and forcing corporations to disclose overdraft fees as part of overdraft coverage plans. You mean banks don’t do that already? you may well ask. No, they do not! And that’s why our government has to make them.

Finally, Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5987, the PFAS Definition Improvement Act, which would, as its title suggests, improve our EPA’s definition of PFAS chemicals so that it can address all PFAS chemicals. Yes, at some point our EPA was either too corrupt or too cowardly to define PFAS chemicals – also known as “forever chemicals,” largely because of the amount of time they stay in your system after you ingest them! – broadly enough. And though that’s already caused a lot of health care problems for a lot of good Americans, at the very least we can start attacking the health care problems these ubiquitous chemicals will cause in the future.

Around the table: when robots talk, and other horrors.

While even “liberal” media outlets like CNN and the New York Times apparently don’t want to shill for Brazilian President/irredeemable asshole Jair Bolsonaro – despite all the “good” he’s done American corporations with his “reforms” – Fox News has proven it’s up to the task. Hilariously they’re using booga-booga about China as a reason to support Mr. Bolsonaro, when Brazil spend four times as much on Chinese goods as Americans do – and that number’s actually gone way, way up since Mr. Bolsonaro took office. Sadly, Glenn Greenwald has slipped further down the rabbit hole at almost as rapid a pace. I know, the guy who literally broke the Sergio Moro corruption story! But obsession with censorship über alles has ruined many a good thinker.

A University of Chicago Institute of Politics Poll informs us that one out of every four Americans feels so “alienated” from our government they think it “may soon be necessary to take up arms against it,” but let me be the one to tell you that this information is not that startling if you’ve long thought, as I have, that about 25% of the electorate is bat-guano insane in the first place. It’s just that back in the day they wanted to put Iraq war opponents in jail for treason, and today they think they need to take up arms against their government. It’s not even much of a devolution, frankly, and if you’d asked folks this question in, say, 2004, I think the only reason that number would have been lower was because you had a Republican government then. Strange, isn't it, how liberals talk about changing government while right-wingers talk about burning it all down?

It’s easy to dunk on Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-PA) for voting against protecting gay marriage at around the same time he was toasting his own son at his son’s gay wedding. And Mr. Thompson seems like a good guy – his resume includes decades spent as a physical therapist, a firefighter, and an EMT – so we’re better off saying that he’s the sort of Republican who should be forcing his party to do better. But I don’t have the power, I guess he’d say, and setting aside the fact that he’s in line to be Agricultural Committee Chair if Republicans take the House, the first power you have, as a civilized person, is the power of shame. It’s a great power, if we would but use it.

What do you call it when a long-time advisor to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán breaks with him over his latest speech decrying all the European “people of mixed race”? Same thing you call it whenever right-wingers fight: drama! I mean, I really do like to think the best of people, but right-wingers have spent decades making positive noises about courage without delivering any actual courage, and the evidence does pile high after a while. (Don't object with "but Liz Cheney," for reasons including, but not limited to, the fact that for every Liz Cheney there are a hundred Jeff Flakes who talk a good game but do nothing.) In any case, I’d lay money that Zsuzsa Hegedüs will soon go back to work for the Master Race in some other capacity.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the sheer volume of overtly anti-democratic BS that has crept into mainstream political discussion lately, let me sum up “mysterious” and “complex” concepts like “neoreaction” in three words: you don’t count. Seriously, if you’ve grown up your whole life believing that anyone can make it in America (or that anyone should be able to make it in America), you shouldn’t take up with statements like “all organizations – irrespective of size – are best managed by a single executive” even after Joe Manchin scuttles the 135th attempt at Build Back Better. Here’s another five words about wishing for strongmen: boys do that, not men.

Finally, Ohio Senate candidate/pretend redneck J.D. Vance has caught a lot of well-deserved flak for saying that folks shouldn’t leave violent marriages for the sake of the children will no one think of the children! And I guess some folks easily fooled by robot talk will find his “defense” of marriage convincing. But Mr. Vance presents a false dichotomy: he posits only two possible worlds, one in which you “stay with your abusive spouse no matter what,” and the other in which “people change spouses like they change underwear,” and a great nation needs not submit to these false choices. Besides which, neither choice describe America as it actually is – the divorce rate, for example, is considerably lower now than it has been in decades, maybe because real Americans navigate all these issues better than Mr. Vance wants you to think.

Action: concerning internet privacy and health care.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, tell our FDA to finally outlaw menthol cigarettes, and tell your Congressfolk to extend health insurance subsidies past the end of the year. 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 Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, which would prevent private data collection corporations from selling your personal data to law enforcement without a warrant. I know, getting a warrant, following the Fourth Amendment, how quaint! But there’s a reason we make law enforcement follow laws about investigating individuals – “individuals” includes you and I! – and that reason is you don’t want police officers to have too much power. And no use saying just don’t use the apps that sell your data, because all apps do that, so it’s a lot like saying just don’t breathe in the polluted air if you’re so mad about pollution.

The Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to prohibit menthol cigarettes once and for all. You’ve heard people say pot is a gateway drug? It’s not, but menthol cigarettes are a gateway for kids to a life-long bad habit that’ll likely wind up killing them before their time. Menthol cigarettes taste a lot better than the other kind, I’m told, but if they wind up killing you, BFD! Also too, the big tobacco corporations have spent a lot of money trying to addict Black folks to menthol cigarettes, and sadly, it’s worked. Just don’t smoke then, say the right-wingers who do nothing about their rage addiction. When corporations won’t do the right thing, our government has to step in and make them.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend the expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies so that good Americans don’t get slammed with massive premium hikes at the end of the year. Joe Manchin says he thinks maybe he can support this, but more likely he’s just playing Lucy with the football to our Charlie Brown again, and anyway how many ways can I say this? Joe Manchin does not fucking matter! He is a pine nut in the batter of eternity! Only the American people matter, and if we rise up and speak with one voice to all of our Reps and Senators about this matter, we will deliver Joe Manchin to the oblivion he so richly deserves, 50th vote in the Senate or not.

Action: concerning taxes, drug prices, and fossil fuels.

Long story short: tell your Senators to pass legislation raising taxes on the rich and lowering prescription drug prices, tell your PA state legislators to stop investing in gas infrastructure, and tell your Congressfolk to pass a big oil corporation windfall profits 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.

Public Citizen helps you tell our Senators to pass a bill that will raise taxes on the rich and lower prescription drug prices for all of us. No, it literally does not matter that Joe Manchin torpedoed just such a thing this past week! Nobody made Joe Manchin our One Great and True and Real American President, and if this was your will last week, and it’s still the right thing to do, then why wouldn’t it be your will this week? Because of one spiritually and morally corrupt Senator? Our Glorious Elites have created a Second Gilded Age in America, where corporations gouge us so lazy executives so they can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes, so we ain’t got time for Manchinean drama.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Penn PIRG helps you tell your state legislator to end all new gas infrastructure investment. They’ll say what Tom Corbett used to say – “I want the jobs” – as if there’s just no other way to create jobs! You know what’s actually a pretty good way to create jobs? Invest in renewable energy infrastructure like there’s no tomorrow, and not just because there’ll actually be no tomorrow if we don’t. A lot of out-of-work coal miners would take to building out solar and wind and geothermal infrastructure pretty well – a lot better than they’d take to “just learning to code,” which seems to be Our Glorious Elites’ answer to everyone they’ve ever displaced through their laziness and apathy.

Finally, More Perfect Union helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a windfall tax on big oil corporations. Rule one is “when prices and profits go up at the same time, corporations are stealing food out of your mouth.” And rule two is “if you’re tempted to think they’re raising prices because of Russia’s war on Ukraine, see rule one.” Seriously, we live in such a sick, immoral, and decadent time that CEOs just come out and say they’re passing costs on to the consumer, and investors just come out and say you should invest in a corporation which has a lot of control over pricing. There’s another name for such a corporation, though, and that name is evil. And we need to start punishing evil in America again.

Action: concerning climate change, kids' privacy, and taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to act on climate change, pass legislation protecting children’s privacy online, and fully fund our IRS so it can go after rich tax cheats . 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 “step up” and fight climate change. Doesn’t matter that Joe Manchin derailed yet another stab at Build Back Better because of his “concerns” over inflation, because duty is duty. Surely our Congress could pass legislation specifically allowing our EPA to regulate climate change emissions, now that our Supreme Court has reversed itself (that part hasn’t been said enough!) and said our laws don’t specifically authorize that. I’d say, in the manner of Chuck Hagel, that if they can’t do that, they should go sell shoes, but they’d probably suck at that, too.

Fairplay helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 3663, the Kids Online Safety Act, and S. 1628, the Children and Teens’ Online Protection and Privacy Protection Act. You know how miserable social media algorithms make adults? Now imagine how miserable they make kids, who literally can’t make adult-level decisions. Both these bills would protect childrens’ privacy better than our laws currently do – Congress passed the original Children Online Privacy and Protection Act in 1998, think anything’s changed since then? – and the Kids Online Safety Act would establish that online websites have a duty of care with regard to children, which sounds like it would take a club to all their hateful algorithms.

Finally, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the rich pay what they already owe in taxes, by properly funding our IRS once and for all. Brook no BS about how our IRS already has too much power – a fear right-wingers only voice when rich folks’ tax returns get leaked – because, frankly, our IRS doesn’t have too much power, not when they go after poor people before they go after rich people because poor people can’t afford lawyers. And what’s Joe Manchin going to do? Keep whining about inflation? They already owe the money. So we need to collect it.

Around the table: now with at least half good news!

Wonders never cease! Economist Larry Summers says we need to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations “right now” to tamp down inflation, all but calling Joe Manchin’s incessant “concerns” about doing anything that benefits good Americans while inflation’s this high “basically ludicrous.” Of course, he also says we should just raise taxes on the rich and on corporations and then not spend that money on any new programs, and he doesn’t like student loan debt forgiveness either, but hey, baby steps. After all, the man thinks he created the economic boom of the ‘90s, so it may take him a little while longer to come back down to Earth.

Nine folks file class-action lawsuit against the Prince George County, MD prison system, alleging that they were detained for weeks or months even after judges ordered their release. The plaintiffs allege specific injuries – lost employment, being unable to care for family, and, of course, getting COVID – from their unlawful detention. But we do this to far too many good Americans, and we waste taxpayer money to do that, too, all so politicians can pretend to be “tough on crime.” I wish the plaintiffs the best in their efforts to get justice, and not just for themselves.

Dr. Jacob Lentz at Emergency Medicine News says “It’s Time to Ask (depression and anxiety) Patients to Quit Social Media.” You know one of the reasons for that already: social media algorithms prize “engagement” above all else even though we all know assholes get the most engagement. But Dr. Lentz also points out that folks suffering from depression and anxiety can’t watch all their friends put on a show about how great their lives are, no matter how troubled their lives actually are. You’ve heard that you watch everyone else’s performances but only you've witnessed your own failed rehearsals? Now imagine how already depressed folks even get to that understanding with social media addling them.

With a victory in a Cleveland, OH store late last week, Starbucks workers have now won union elections in 200 stores, which, as More Perfect Union noted, is 200 more than workers had eight months ago. Now they have to win actual contracts, a matter upon which Starbucks management has already dragged their feet, but the law doesn’t let them drag their feet forever. I wish them the best in their efforts to secure a better future for themselves. After all, we really missed them in 2020, didn’t we?

Jury finds Steve Bannon guilty of two counts of contempt of Congress, meaning he will serve up to two years in prison, and could it have happened to a nicer guy? Well, I guess now he can have his hands on his weapons full-time! Even in a country-club prison, I suspect he’ll need to.

Finally, thanks in part to your activism, Verizon will drop the notorious One America News (or OAN) network from its FIOS offerings as of July 31. Folks can still stream OAN from several platforms (including Pluto TV, which, quite frankly, has more right-wing news options than a civilized nation should tolerate), but even with evil social media algorithms killing jobs and fomenting rage, it’s a lot easier to find bad TV on your TV than to find it on the internet. Now all we have to worry about is Newsmax, Fox News, Sinclair, The Blaze, The First, and America’s Voice, which last network is almost as overconfidently-titled as One America News.

Action: concerning taxes, animal abuse, and endless war-making.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to tax big oil corporation windfall profits, pass the Prohibit Wildlife Killing Contests Act, and repeal the 2002 Iraq AUMF. 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 your Congressfolk to tax big oil corporation windfall profits. Yeah, gas prices have been coming down for about a month – too late for June’s inflation figures, you may notice, but maybe not too late for July’s, which come out on August 10 – but big oil corporations are still making far too much money “dealing with circumstances” that they might better deal with by eating some profit and being good to Americans. Of course, the powerful don’t do that, unless we make them. And then they whine about how “onerous” our laws are! But when we make them do the right thing, we make good things happen. History always shows that.

The Endangered Species Coalition helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7398, the Prohibit Wildlife Killing Contests Act, which would, as its title suggests, make it illegal to conduct a wildlife killing contest on public lands. The bill specifically excludes invasive species, in case your right-wing neighbor was going to launch that objection without reading the bill, as they often do, but a wildlife killing contest strikes me as merely an excuse for testosterone-addled men to be cruel, and we really shouldn’t be giving them more opportunities to do that. Especially on public lands, where protected species don’t all walk around with signs around their necks.

Finally, the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Iraq War Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF). Why bother after all these years? Because Presidents still use it to launch illegal and unconstitutional war efforts, like former President Trump’s assassination of Iranian General Soleimani, and you give a President a weapon like that, they’re going to use it sooner or later. And bad people will use and abuse bad laws, and the 2002 Iraq AUMF is a profoundly bad law that did profound evil. That Mr. Bush ever asked for it, and Congress ever passed it, still deeply offends me, and it’s not the kind of thing you just “let go” of, not if you want to stop it from happening again.

Around the table: some Democrats rise to the challenge, others don't.

The AFL-CIO puts out a report finding that CEO pay went up much, much faster than inflation in 2021, and while normally I’d ask how much CEO wages went up in previous years, when CEO salaries go up more than twice as fast as inflation and nearly three times faster than worker wages, that’s really all you need to know right there. They said income redistribution would wreck this great nation – and they were right! So stop listening to the pundits telling you worker wages drive up inflation.

A Democratic politico comes up with a way to beat Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis: feed right-wing news sources with stories about how Mr. DeSantis has been insufficiently right-wing. But, off the top of my head, I can’t think how he’s done that, and though the right-wing capacity for rage seems endless, I can’t imagine right-wing media outlets wanting to conspire with Democrats to oust Mr. DeSantis, since he trafficks in the rage that keeps the cycle of doom going. All of this, of course, supposes Democrats really want to depose him. Too many of them are asking why not keep raising money off him? as we speak, a strategy that has never led to disaster before! I’ve got a better idea: run a candidate who’ll do things with their power.

It “May Surprise You” “What the Bible Actually Says About Abortion” – i.e., nothing directly, and both pro- and anti-choice forces can find Biblical quotations that support their cherished position, plus Jesus’s own feminism continues to impress! – but facts about the Bible won’t impress any right-wing Christians; they don’t read the Bible so much as imagine the Bible already agrees with them. I’d prefer a Bible that didn’t agree with me on everything, just like I prefer to hold and practice values that inconvenience me.

Science puts out a study that instructs us, among other things, that about 20% of Americans think violence in defense of one’s political aims is A-OK, nearly half of Americans think a Civil War is coming, and, dig this, 40% prefer “having a strong leader” to “preserving democracy.” That last one, especially, is a stupid choice – there is no law of physics that says “democracy” and “strong leadership” are incompatible, though you need strong leaders who will let the popular will lead them. So, not Kyrsten Sinema, then.

And not Pete Buttigieg, either: Matt Stoller creates a giant Goofus and Gallant strip about certain Biden Administration officials and their attitudes toward monopolies, and he finds our Treasury Secretary wanting, as he is. Dig how Mr. Buttigieg says his office has concluded “ten separate investigations” on airline refunds! The whole country is talking about how bad airlines are treating them, and he unfurls a typical right-wing trick, hoping you’ll think “concluding an investigation” and “doing something” are the same thing! Anyway, how about we start promoting Jonathan Kanter and Rohit Chopra as Presidential timber? Because those two know what they’re doing. Or is “knowing what you’re doing” not sexy enough?

Finally, ho hum, Trudy Busch Valentine’s family farm has hosted at least two fundraisers for Missouri U.S. Senate Republican candidates, although Ms. Busch Valentine is running for Senate herself, as a Democrat! And her family’s ties to Republicans go considerably deeper than that! In a sane and moral world, this news would finish Ms. Valentine’s campaign – particularly since her main opponent, Lucas Kunce, would be a much better candidate! – but we live in a sick, immoral, and decadent society where we can never underestimate Democratic politicos’ ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Action: concerning campaign finance, labor, and pollution.

Long story short: tell big corporations to stop donating to the Republican politicians who tried to overturn the election, tell Dollar General to treat its workers much better, and tell our Interior Department to protect the Boundary Waters. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

In advance of what may be yet another explosive day of testimony from our January 6 Committee, Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell big corporations to stop donating to Republican insurrectionists in Congress, That would be the 147 Reps and Senators who refused to certify the election Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden by seven million votes. Remember when they said Mr. Trump earned a “mandate” from the people after he lost the popular vote to Hilllary Clinton by three million votes? Standards! And big corporations made all the right noises about campaign donations after January 6, but their actions give the lie to their words. They need to know we’re watching, and they need to know we’re done.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell Dollar General to stop oppressing workers with low pay and unsafe workplace conditions. You won’t be surprised to learn that more than nine-tenths of Dollar General workers make less than $15/hour while its CEO makes $1.7 million, but its numerous fire code violations, moldy conditions, and deliberate understaffing – which had led at least one OSHA administrator to slam their “blatant and continued disregard for the safety of their employees” – may surprise you. And not for nothing, but AC/heating issues make pandemics like the one we’re in now much worse. So Dollar General needs to get right.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell our Interior Department to protect the Rainy Rivers Watershed of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness from mining. Because mining equals pollution, even if some four billion tons of nickel and copper sit in and near the Wilderness. One would have to balance that against the probability that mining would pollute the Boundary Waters, but one would also have to balance that against the 150,000 visitors the Wilderness gets every year, people who go there for canoeing, fishing, hiking, and dog-sledding, among other activities. Life ain’t just about churning up the land and making executives rich.

Action: concerning taxes, health care, and Social Security.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to tax billionaire wealth, extend expanded health care assistance, and expand Social Security benefits. 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.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to start taxing billionaire wealth already. Billionaires spent over a billion dollars on election campaigns in 2020, which is nearly 40 times as much as they spent in 2010, right after the notorious Citizens United v. FEC decision essentially repealed McCain-Feingold; soon we’ll have five trillionaire oligarchs buying enough Congressfolk to run the entire country according to their own whims, and the rest of us won’t be able to afford housing, health care, or education. You’d like to be able to afford these things, and to make a better life for yourself and your descendants, right?

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend the expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies and close the Medicaid coverage gap now. In reverse order: the Medicaid coverage gap is the gap between Medicaid eligibility and ACA subsidy eligibility, and the expanded ACA subsidies have helped 13 million Americans better afford their health care; the only reason not to keep these things going is cruelty. No, not “inflation,” because these things keep inflation down, as anyone who thinks about it for a second knows. Seriously, how does helping people spend less money “cause inflation”? I can hardly call economics a science anymore.

Finally, Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security benefits by $200/month, and pay for it by taxing income over $400,000 into the system for the first time. Right-wingers will guffaw: you want to increase benefits? Social Security is going broke ha ha snort! But if I had a dollar for all the deadlines for being “broke” Social Security has blown through in my lifetime, I’d have more than a few dollars, and again, taxing rich people will put more money into the system. Right-wingers will again guffaw at the “folly” of taxing rich folks more, but taxing rich folks more built the greatest middle class in world history. And some of these right-wingers come from that middle class!

Around the table: how to deal with horror, part 332.

Now this is how you do it: Oakland, CA parents occupy Parker Elementary School after the district announces its closure for next year. They’ve stayed there 50 days, even opening a “Parker community school” offering free summer programs to kids and adults. The district wanted to close, shrink, or merge 11 schools, mostly serving Black and Brown kids almost like that was the whole idea, but folks ain’t putting up with it, with occupations and hunger strikes and legal complaints. The right-wing parents get all the ink these days, but you’ll more likely remember these parents, even if they don’t win every battle this time around.

But alas, right-wing “education” organizations like Moms for Liberty don’t just get all the ink – they get all the corporate money, too, so says at least one observer who says the organization has grown “at a pace that only a corporation's monetary resources could manage.” These are some bat-guano insane folks at Moms for Liberty, and I don’t say that because they gave Ron DeSantis a wooden sword at their convention – I count two instances of defamation and one instance of a terrorist threat just in paragraph 7, and I think the victim of all three needs to file charges post-haste. Having feelings about stuff doesn’t make threats and defamation legal, let alone OK. Why do I feel like the conservative in every conversation about right-wing behavior?

In a peripherally-related note, Caitlin Bernard, the Indiana doctor who performed an abortion on a 10-year-old Ohio girl a month back, is planning to sue Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, in part for suggesting she failed to report the abortion to state authorities when, ah, she did. I hope this ends Mr. Rokita’s career, since he seems like the kind of guy who’ll say anything to induce rage in the easily-enraged – many of whom have dutifully followed up with terroristic threats against Dr. Bernard. I’d like all of them in jail, too, partly because I believe in law and order, and partly because, again, assholes need to start paying a price for their behavior in America.

Nicole Martins and Erica Scharrer at The Conversation discuss how to help young kids cope with violence on news programs. They give lots of good advice – chiefly, to limit their exposure to it! – but I have to say I was struck to read that “(v)ery young children will not understand that what they see are replays of the same event and not another tragedy happening again,” because I suspect that adults aren’t much better at this – adults will better understand that they’re seeing the same footage again, sure, but they’ll also readily turn three video clips into a crime wave. I still think we’re all much better off reading the news than watching it.

Finally, Laura Bassett at Jezebel instructs us that ”Just Three Weeks Post-Roe, the Stories Emerging Are Worse Than Anyone Imagined” – in the sense that stories didn’t “trickle out over the next six months to maybe a year” but instead “sprayed out like a firehose.” I guess I worry that folks will tune out the sheer volume of the horror, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t tell these stories, since that could be anyone’s wife, mother, or daughter who has to travel hundreds of miles to another state to deal with an ectopic pregnancy because their home state Republicans say no exceptions ever.

Action: concerning corruption, police brutality, and abortion.

Long story short: tell our Department of Justice to prosecute the Trump campaign for wire fraud, demand justice for Jayland Walker, and tell President Biden to open abortion clinics on federal land. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell our Justice Department to prosecute the Trump campaign for wire fraud. So how do they merit this particular charge? They told supporters they were raising money for an “Official Election Defense Fund,” ostensibly to fund all the frivolous lawsuits they filed over Mr. Trump’s seven-million-vote defeat in 2020, and then spent around 95% of the $250 million they raised on wholly unrelated matters, like raising more money and funding more rallies. The man gives off the stench of corruption with every breath he takes, so our laws have to land a punch somewhere. But only if our DOJ swings!

MoveOn helps you tell the city of Akron, OH and our Department of Justice to get justice for Jayland Walker, a Black man shot 90 times by police officers over a, get this, “traffic and equipment violation,” which sure sounds like a made-up category. “They won’t be convinced by ‘traffic,’ so let’s add ‘equipment.’ More words is better!” When I hear that police shot a man once, I get suspicious; what am I supposed to think when they shoot a man 90 times? The petition makes a lot of other demands of Akron, like an end to police violence against protestors and “investment in real, community-led public safety solutions.” The city should give in to all of them, because it's the right thing to do.

Finally, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell President Biden to open abortion clinics on federal land. If “abortion clinics on federal land” sounds a little absurd to you, put it next to our Supreme Court outlawed abortion because it’s not a “deeply-rooted” right even though it’s been legal everywhere for nearly half a century and was also legal for over half a century at our country’s founding and even Ben Franklin had an abortion cocktail! Not so absurd now, is it? And ain’t nothing states can do about what happens on federal land, try though they might. President Biden doesn’t seem like the kind of fellow who’d do this. But that’s why we stay on him.

Action: concerning health care, child care, and the war on Yemen.

Long story short: tell your Senators to lower prescription drug prices, lower child care costs, 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.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Senators to lower prescription drug prices now. It doesn’t matter that 50 Senate Republicans block everything that might help good Americans! It doesn’t matter what Joe Manchin wants to do or what Kyrsten Sinema’s "thinking" is! People hate paying an arm and a leg for the medicines that keep them healthy – or alive. And 80% of Americans want Medicare to be able to negotiate lower drug prices; if 80% of Americans want something, and it’s a good thing, than your Senators have to do it. Otherwise, they’re just evil. And I mean evil! Sometimes nuance is a wedge between you and wisdom, and this seems to happen a lot in American politics.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Senators to lower child care costs for good Americans. People also hate paying more for child care than they might pay at a public university! And why do they have to do it? Because child care is so much more intricate than it was 50 years ago? No: they have to do it because most families are two-job families now and if they don’t, either the kids stay home unsupervised or the family can’t pay the bills on one income. In other words, the child care corporations charge absurd amounts because they can. That ain’t the “free” market at work; that’s an evil market at work. Hey, all they have to do is not be evil.

Finally, the Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Senators to end American involvement in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. The realpolitik types will tell us we have to be nice to the Saudis and keep their war on Yemen going (and thus keep Yemeni children starving and keep killing some of the best fighters against al-Qaeda on Earth) because if we don’t, Russia and China will get the upper hand in world affairs, but that’s a load of horsedoodle. Anyone can justify anything by mouthing booga-booga about Russia and China; but folks of courage and wisdom can step back and say no to chaos and disorder, and we need to create more of these folks.

Around the table: concerning pollution, abortion, labor, and Joe Manchin.

Now that our Supreme Court seems determined to gut pretty much any part of our government that actually helps good Americans, Branko Marcetic at In These Times reminds us how well our Environmental Protection Agency has worked over the years. “From dramatically improving air quality and banning cancer-causing substances, to cleaning up toxic sites and making long-poisoned natural attractions habitable again, the EPA has been the worst nightmare for right-wing, anti-government forces: an example of government power working for the benefit of the average person,” he writes. But he doesn’t forget to note that activists have often had to prod our EPA into working for us. And that’s as it should be: a tool is only any good if folks use it, after all.

The so-called National Right to Life Committee has proposed model legislation that would not only make abortion illegal everywhere in America, but would put anyone who helps someone get an abortion in jail. And naturally the bill is just vague enough to ensure that journalists reporting on reproductive issues would get swept up in its nefarious dragnet, meaning it’s also an anti-free speech bill. As more than one observer has noted, we need to understand the right-wing agenda as, ultimately, an anti-free speech agenda – they’ll make everything illegal and if you talk about it, they’ll make you an accomplice.

So how did right-wingers react to the 10-year-old girl who had to travel from Ohio to Indiana to get an abortion because she was six weeks and three days pregnant? By calling it fake news, of course, though they strained not to use that exact term, and naturally Washington Post “fact-checker” Glenn Kessler didn’t do his due diligence, either, which was exactly the cover they all needed. I would not oppose defamation lawsuits against all the right-wing fools who claimed the story wasn’t true only to be proven wrong (and who then labored mightily to cover their tracks without correcting their statements).

Starbucks says it’s closing 16 stores (including a few unionized stores) under the guise of “store safety,” and Starbucks Workers United (the union organizing their workers) files a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board. Starbucks execs think they’re clever for closing some non-union stores along with the union stores, but they’ll never escape the bitter irony that store safety issues provoked a lot of the union organizing to begin with! Perhaps these executives imagine someone will write a Mahabharata about their exploits one day, but they’re wrong – no one will remember their names or their evil works in a hundred years, and that’s as it should be. In the moment, of course, we must overcome their evil.

You’ve heard that Joe Manchin has killed the latest iteration of the Democrats’ climate change bill – and that President Biden has rather vocally moved on, though we’ll see if that actually produces any results – but I guess I should note that Mr. Manchin himself has denied killing the bill, saying he just wanted to see what inflation was going to be like and see what the Fed planned to do about it before going further, which sure sounds like every other damn excuse for inaction he’s offered the last 18 months. I normally have no sympathy for Chuck Schumer, but it sure looks like he just decided to cut to the chase already.

Finally, in a related note, Paul Kane at the Washington Post warns that we should “Always listen to Joe Manchin’s public comments, not what others hear in private,” and adds that Democrats “seem to have all made the same mistake: hearing the nice tones that the West Virginia Democrat said in their private meetings, while dismissing his pessimistic comments in public as standard negotiating ploys. Instead, Manchin is the odd politician whose public pronouncements, whether in brief Capitol hallway interviews or in detailed prepared statements, carry more weight than whatever he tells his colleagues in private.” I must say that is an awfully long way of saying he negotiates in bad faith, and I’m not sure letting Rep. Jayapal say essentially the same thing makes up for that.

Action: concerning abortion and journalism.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act and the Ensuring Access to Abortion Act, and tell your Congressfolk to reject the Journalism Competition and Preservation 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.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass both H.R. 3755, the Women’s Health Protection Act, and H.R. 8297, the Ensuring Access to Abortion Act. The former bill would, as you know, prevent states from outlawing or limiting access to abortion, and would also outlaw state-level “heartbeat” and forced ultrasound laws as well. The Ensuring Access to Abortion Act would prevent states from outlawing traveling to another state to get an abortion; such a ban would violate the Commerce Clause, I would think, but lawlessness is no longer an impediment to getting our Supreme Court’s blessing. Word is our House will vote on these bills today, so we gotta get to it.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject H.R. 1735/S. 673, the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, since it would only enable big journalism corporations to figure out how to bill anyone who deploys a link to their articles in a blog post or a newsfeed! That would be rather like billing scholarly works for the endnotes they use, which we do not do, because what civilized society would charge people for proving their point or buttressing their arguments? Newspapers ain’t dying because of technology; they’re dying because they only care about the bottom line and don’t do good work anymore. They should start doing good work again, maybe?

Around the table: "woke heat maps," "suck on that," and other absurdities.

Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph now Democratic “moderates” in the House want to pass a reconciliation bill without even the mild tax reforms the Senate appears to have agreed upon. Someone needs to remind Rep. Gottheimer that the only reason, and I do mean *only* reason, he's a House Rep is that many conservatives in his district found former Rep. Scott Garrett too homophobic. He could lose in 2022, and he’ll blame the liberals for it – even though those same liberals, at least in our House, are not making themselves a nuisance by advancing an alternative tax plan that would tax the rich harder. And they should!

Matt Stoller reminds us that even though President Biden’s put antitrust opponents at our FTC and DOJ, he’s put a lot of corporate-friendly folks on the courts. Since these judges will rule on antitrust cases pumped out by our FTC and DOJ, I couldn’t blame you for thinking putting solid people at our FTC and DOJ was part of a plan to mislead us into thinking things were really going to change. And when you realize that some of his other appointments (i.e., Secretaries Buttigieg and Vilsack) haven’t shown the same hunger to confront monopolies, you might feel that more acutely. Mr. Stoller won’t go that far, of course; I hope he’s right to pull his punches.

When I hear that a right-wing group in Missouri has created a “woke heat map” to target “groomers” and folks who actually believe racism is a real thing, all I can say is: assholes ruin everything. That’s before I get to the part about how right-wingers took a map of trans-friendly clinics and turned it into a tool for harassing those clinics. Remember, also, that when they talk about “grooming toddlers with sexually explicit books,” that the only thing “sexually explicit” about those books is that they include gay or trans folks at all. First time I saw that particular stratagem, a certain loofah-loving Fox News “independent” was flogging it.

Ho hum, Steve Bannon gets caught on tape characterizing Mr. Trump’s plans on Election night thusly: “at 10 or 11 o’clock Trump’s gonna walk in the Oval, tweet out, ‘I’m the winner. Game over. Suck on that,'” actual election results be damned. Well, he’s been telling good Americans to “suck on that” for decades now; why should Election Night 2020 have been any different? Given Mr. Bannon’s habits, he won’t bother saying he was taken out of context, but will merely add Mother Jones (which unearthed the tapes) to his ever-lengthening list of enemies he’ll “crush” or “destroy” or whatever.

Surprise, surprise, Amazon has handed over data from its ubiquitous/notorious Ring doorbell camera 11 times to law enforcement this year, without requiring a warrant or getting consent from Ring owners. Amazon of course says it only does so in “emergencies,” without defining what exact emergencies prompted these 11 incidents, but we all know that, as Josephine Gattuso Hendin once said, “once you cross a line, you keep crossing.” You can enable end-to-end encryption on your Ring device, though really end-to-end encryption should be the default setting, not something you have to turn on. It’s almost like they know you’re too busy to consider this issue carefully or something.

Finally, John “The Mustache of Evil” Bolton went on CNN and, as part of an attempt to prove that Mr. Trump’s January 6 actions were not part of “a carefully-planned coup d’état,” actually claimed that he personally “has helped plan coups d’état, not here, but, you know, other places.” We all knew that, of course, but still, nice to have a confession. I’m actually a little more annoyed that Mr. Bolton apparently thinks incompetence at planning a coup means you didn’t really do it (he did insist on saying “carefully-planned,” after all), and I’m tired of right-wingers pretending that stupidity mitigates or excuses evil.

Action: concerning birth control, student loan debt, and endless war-making.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation protecting birth control, tell President Biden to abandon means-testing for student loan debt forgiveness, and tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Iraq war AUMF. 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.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a law protecting birth control from our Supreme Court. You know, like they failed to do with abortion. Nonetheless, Civic Shout’s petition shows cunning! A lot of politicians will happily voice their opposition to abortion – but how many will happily voice their opposition to birth control? I mean, sure, the far-right ones will and there are far too many of them in Congress, but they’re not a majority, at least not yet. And birth control is considerably more popular, after all. Why, a lot of men favor it! At least for their women, they do. And recall, Justice Thomas has already put it down in writing that he’d overturn Griswold!

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell President Biden not to erect stupid barriers to student debt relief. Like means testing! Look, our IRS already knows how much money you made last year, so making folks jump through bureaucratic hoops so they can get the relief they deserve is just a way of ensuring that folks don’t get that relief. Also, don’t get evicted or get in an abusive relationship, or else the application likely won’t find you! And don’t count on our Department of Education getting funded well enough to handle all the paperwork it’ll have to process. Recall that Republican Presidential candidates typically promise to disband the department entirely.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) in Iraq. That mistake is now almost old enough to order a beer legally! And Presidents still use it for reasons wholly unrelated to the Iraq War – former President Trump, for example, used it to justify our assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, which almost brought us to war with Iran. So it was a bad idea in the first place, and we misuse it and bring ourselves to the brink of war – anything else? Oh yeah: our Constitution invests the power to declare war solely in our Congress, so letting Presidents go to war whenever they want contravenes our laws in addition to our morals.

Action: concerning banksters, privacy, corruption, and pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Wall Street Looting Act and the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, tell the Biden Administration to remove the DHS Inspector General, and tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation restricting the use of PFAS chemicals. 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.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5648/S. 3022, the Stop Wall Street Looting Act. This bill would treat several forms of bankster income as ordinary income, i.e., so that it gets taxed at normal-person rates, rather than the lower rates our government has foolishly set for too much speculative income. The bill would also force bankruptcy proceedings to give higher priority to taking care of a corporation’s employees, so that executives can’t steal all the money from a corporation’s dead husk. Folks who object to the word “looting” don’t understand what looters are. I think even Ayn Rand would call today’s banksters looters.

Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. You’ve heard that if you’re using a period-tracking app that you should totally stop doing that, now that abortion could soon be illegal in your state (if it’s not already)? Well, that’s just one reason we need the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, because currently third-party data collectors can sell all your data to law enforcement whether you want them to or not, and this bill would put a dead stop to that. The bill would also force our government to follow the 1978 FISA Act in conducting surveillance. And call me old-fashioned, but law enforcement shouldn’t get any data without a damn warrant.

The Project on Government Oversight helps you tell President Biden to remove our Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General and replace him with someone who’ll do the job right. Because the accusations against him are mounting – ignoring sexual harassment complaints, wrongfully firing his deputy, and retaliating against whistleblowers, which amounts to a very bad look, especially, you know, for an office that’s supposed to be rooting out corruption in our government! Mr. Cuffari is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, but I’m old enough to remember when the appearance of corruption prompted folks to step aside. We’ve got to get back to that in America.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation restricting PFAS chemicals and holding the corporations that make them accountable. They call PFAS chemicals “forever chemicals” because they’re everywhere and your body can’t break them down, and even worse, at least one corporation that manufactures PFAS chemicals (3M) knew decades ago how bad those chemicals are! If they knew something would hurt us, and they not only kept doing it but lied to us about it, we’ve got to fix that. We can’t just wait for them to get to the Pearly Gates, not when PFAS chemicals make us sick now.

Around the table: good people need to overcome bad people, part 933.

I almost hesitate to summarize Matt Stoller’s July 7 article about how certain big media personalities are taking money from monopolists and thus soft-pedaling their criticism thereof, because, as usual, it’s worth your time for so many other reasons. Chief among them: he reminds us that “most people chalk up shortages to Covid,” but “brittle supply chains causing a lack of critical goods preceded the pandemic,” to the point where our FDA lists hundreds of drugs we’ve been short on for almost 20 years. Empty shelves at the supermarket get all the ink, but it is admittedly much harder to see the future we don’t have (like one where doctors have been able to prescribe what their patients really need!) because monopolists control everything.

Oh boy: our IRS actually approved the notorious Family Research Council’s application to become a freaking church back in 2020, and if you’re thinking well, look who was President, well, I couldn’t blame you – except that the notorious Focus on the Family made itself into a “church” in 2016. And they’re not the only ones! We might lay this imbroglio, also, at the feet of the Republicans who have aggressively defunded our IRS for the last decade-plus on spurious pretexts, and, of course, the Democratic President who enabled all of that. Still, if this ain’t against the law, it should be. I joke about creating a religion that excludes Republicans for a reason.

Because we don’t get enough good news in the world, note well that a little over a month ago, Kazakhstan voters approved constitutional reforms that effectively end Nursultan Nazarbayev’s notorious 30-plus-year stranglehold on power there. By a 77-17 margin, too, with almost 70% turnout! The good citizens of Kazakhstan fought hard to get here, suffering greatly at the hands of Mr. Nazarbayev's successor/puppet government this past January, and they deserve our admiration. Mr. Nazarbayev seems to be taking all of that relatively well – including the possibility that some of his relatives will go to jail on corruption-related charges – which I guess means Donald Trump will call him a loser shortly, if he even knows what Kazakhstan is.

In yet another development that makes me wish we could simply saw Florida off this great nation, the state of Florida now has a law requiring students and professors at public universities to submit to questioning about their political beliefs, with the threat of losing funding if folks don’t answer or answer incorrectly. Didn’t any of these idiots grow up watching The Twilight Zone? Or did they think it was all an instruction manual? And I never, ever get tired of hearing right-wingers whine about “socialism” and “oppression” they can’t describe. Florida liberals, this is your moment – get candidates for Governor, Senator, and state legislature with some fight in them, or else you're doomed to live in Trumpville forever.

Hoo boy, Sen. Lindsey Graham (E-SC) says he'll fight a subpoena that would force him to testify before a grand jury investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to undermine the voters’ will in Georgia in 2020. He also has the nerve to say that “(i)f we open up county prosecutors being able to call every member of the Senate based on some investigation they think is good for the country we’ll ruin the place.” Of course they didn’t subpoena “every member,” just the one who called Georgia’s Secretary of State to try to get him to change the vote totals.

Finally, former Trump Administration official Peter Navarro says that Mike Pence “is guilty of treason, to at least President Trump and perhaps to this country” over his refusal to go along with Mr. Trump’s plan to steal the 2020 election. Jesus Mary and Joseph there is no such thing as “treason to the President,” as anyone with a glancing acquaintance with Article III, Section 3 of our Constitution would tell you, and anyone who voices such a ridiculous notion should move to a place he’ll find his views much more well-received, like Turkey or Russia or Saudi Arabia. But not Kazakhstan, not anymore.

Action: concerning whistleblowers, renewables, monopolies, and worker safety.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reform the Espionage Act and pass the Energy Security and Independence Act of 2022, and tell our federal government to rein in big ag monopolies and protect American workers from heatstroke. 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 Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to reform the Espionage Act so that our government doesn’t use it to bludgeon journalists. Specifically, you’d ask your Congressfolk to pass Amendment 617 to the defense authorization bill, authored by Rep. Tlaib (D-MI), and I’m glad someone did the extra reading for Sausage Making 101 by attaching necessary legislation to must-pass bills! Currently our government has too easy a time prosecuting and silencing heroic whistleblowers like Daniel Ellsberg, John Kiriakou, and Daniel Hale; we should make it harder for them to do that. I mean, that could be any of us witnessing evil and having a conscience!

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7439/S. 4013, the Energy Security and Independence Act of 2022. This bill would amend the Defense Production Act so that it specifically authorizes our President to invoke it to build renewable energy infrastructure; I don’t think Russia’s war on Ukraine is the biggest reason gas prices went up (that would be “corporate greed”), but it’s really not a far walk from foreign policy disasters to energy supply chains, and instead of staying vulnerable to world events so that big oil executives can keep getting richer, why don’t we ensure we can make more of our own energy here instead?

Food and Water Action helps you tell our U.S. Department of Agriculture (or USDA) to stop big ag corporations from running roughshod over small farmers and ranchers. The Packers and Stockyards Act nominally protects small farmers and ranchers from the ill effects of consolidation and monopolization, but our government hasn’t enforced it for at least the last 40 years, which means small farmers and ranchers now exist at the mercy of meat-packing middlemen. The Reagan Revolution didn’t “set our economy free,” not even from bureaucracy, but it gave middlemen and speculators all the control over our economy; it sure would be nice if our USDA would help a brother out here.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell our Occupational Safety and Health Administration (or OSHA) to pass emergency heat standards for American workers. After all, it’s only going to get hotter from here on in, and we’re already almost halfway into July. I am a little surprised to learn that heat kills more folks than tornadoes, hurricanes, and floods, but should I be? Those weather events get all the ink, but most folks who die of heatstroke hardly know it’s happening to them while it’s happening, and too many of our workplaces think only of the bottom line, and not of their workers’ safety. That’s why we have our government: so it can step in on our behalf when big corporations won’t do the right thing.

Action: concerning "sore loser" bills, taxing the rich, paid family leave, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell your PA state legislators to oppose yet another “sore loser” bill, tell your Congressfolk to enact a Millionaire’s Surtax and pass paid family/medical leave, and tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner. 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 SB 106, which would propose state constitutional amendments outlawing abortion, imposing Voter ID, and creating a body that would conduct endless election “audits” whenever Republicans don’t like the result. They’re proposing these amendments because they’ve lost all these battles already and they don’t want a Democratic governor vetoing any bills they’d enact on these topics, so we’d best call SB 106 a sore loser bill. Just so happens you can say so in the petition’s comment section. I did, and I sure feel a lot better. They're a bunch of damn snowflake crybabies.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Senators they’d damn well better pass a Millionaire’s Surtax as part of whatever agreement they’re hammering out concerning climate change and prescription drug prices. News reports have said Democrats are leaving the Millionaire’s Surtax out, likely because of the opposition of 50 Senate Republicans and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D?-AZ), whose excuses for opposing higher taxes on the rich are straight out of Paul Ryan’s playbook from 10 years ago. Arizona residents may want to call Sen. Sinema especially; she won’t listen, since you don’t own a yacht, but let’s demonstrate that she ignores her constituents’ will.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a federal paid family leave program. Moms Rising reminds us that paid family /medical leave is even more important now that abortion won't be legal in more than half of America's states! It is pretty simple, really: if folks are going to have to drive 12 hours to get an abortion, and many folks who need an abortion will have to do that, then they need a federal paid family/sick leave program so that they still have a job when they get back. You'll recall that 50 Republicans and Joe Manchin (D?-WV) killed the paid family leave program late last year; they still call it a handout, though if our taxes pay for a program and then we use the program -- which all of us almost certainly will! -- it's hardly a handout, is it?

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner already. Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but 50 Republican Senators oppose her, but a few Democratic Senators are also still “contemplating” her nomination, although, again, I don’t see what there is to “contemplate” here. Gigi Sohn helped put together the Open Internet Order of 2016, which codified into law net neutrality, the principle that corporations should treat all network traffic equally, meaning that you, not them, get to control your internet experience! Naturally the Trump FCC repealed it, because hate corruption cruelty, so our Senators have to make this right, by putting Ms. Sohn on our FCC.

Around the table: containing *actual good news* about health care developments!

When I hear that the city of Houston has done an excellent job moving homeless folks out of encampments and into homes, I feel compelled to note that studies have told us, for years, that putting homeless folks in homes actually costs taxpayers less than giving them emergent services. I also feel compelled to note, to the hard hats who say why do they get goodies, that anyone could become homeless at any time – yes, even a hard hat! And of course I also feel compelled to note that we didn’t have nearly as many homeless folks back in the days when we, you know, taxed rich folks and corporations hard, and spent a good chunk of that money ensuring folks had somewhere to live.

IRS Commissioner asks agency Inspector General to look into how James Comey and Andrew McCabe got audited over the last few years. Could it be a complete coincidence that our IRS audited two famous politicians who just so happened to be on the receiving end of abuse from former President Trump? Sure. But I’d be a schmuck to believe that! Absent evidence of actual wrongdoing, of course – and, given how few resources our IRS has to go after tax cheats anymore, I’d also have to know such wrongdoing merited special attention.

We could have Omicron-tailored boosters available by this fall, as Moderna, at least, thinks it could have one together fairly shortly, given relatively successful Phase 2/3 trials at our FDA. Now, we could have all new variants by then, but that doesn’t mean a booster aimed more at BA.4 and BA.5 would be useless, nor does it mean that boosters that don’t target those variants would be useless, as folks who’ve gotten their shots have had far less severe symptoms than those who haven’t. Worse than that, though, there’ll be even more COVID fatigue by then; those of us still masking up in supermarkets too often report we’re the only ones.

In a related note, a Lancet study finds that the COVID vaccines have saved close to 20 million lives in their first year of use. That’s the good news. The bad news? About two-thirds of those lives got saved in high- or middle-income nations, which not only isn’t particularly fair to poor nations that can’t weather pandemics as well, it also ensures that COVID will keep coming back to bite us in the ass. Of course, policymakers aren’t the only ones to blame – I still think the Delta wave wouldn’t have been nearly as bad if we didn’t have all these crybabies in America refusing to get vaccinated.

Surprise, surprise, Kansas will hold a vote on a constitutional amendment essentially outlawing abortion during the state’s primary election on August 2. Holding votes like these on primary day, rather than during a general election, seems an obvious act of disenfranchisement – unaffiliated voters can’t even vote on the amendment! -- but I’m sure if our Supreme Court would just throw up their hands and say well, why don’t the unaffiliated voters just join a party? Problem solved! Still, if I were running the pro-choice movement, I’d be descending on Kansas in force and with a quickness. Folks hate having something taken away from them, as I’ve said, but there’s still plenty of time for them to get so demoralized about it that they give up.

Finally, Northwestern University researchers may have found a way to handle severe pain without opioids, via a dissolvable implant that cools peripheral nerves that transmit pain elsewhere in your body. I don’t suspect these implants will cure opioid addiction – their developers say they’d go in along with surgery – but I suspect they’ll reduce the number of folks who need opioids to deal with pain after surgery, which would still be a good work. I wish these researchers the best in their future endeavors.

Action: concerning abortion rights, health care subsidies, and bad airline corporations.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to codify Roe v. Wade in law, extend ACA subsidies, and expand Medicaid, and tell our Transportation Secretary to start punishing airlines that abuse their customers. 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.

Left Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to codify Roe v. Wade into law, now that our Supreme Court has struck it down. Think of all the girls and women who won’t be able to get the health care they need now – women who survive rape and domestic abuse, women whose fetuses have no organs, women who created half a dozen fetuses through in vitro fertilization, women who won’t survive their pregnancy because of a placental abruption or an egg lodging in their Fallopian tubes, but also women with cancer who get pregnant and whose doctors can’t treat the cancer because their fetus won’t survive the cancer treatment. All the right’s holier-than-thou blustering can’t stack up to that.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies and expand Medicaid, so that 15 million Americans will still be able to afford health insurance. The American Rescue Plan Act expanded subsidies, but they’ll expire September 30 unless Congress acts, and given Republican/Manchinean/Sineman intransigence, it looks like Congress won’t act, though they could very easily extend the subsidies and fund them without raising taxes on anyone but millionaires. Who gets ACA subsidies and Medicaid? Why, the poorest among us, of course! And yet politicians still cut these programs and then retreat to their yachts. Unless we act, of course.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell Transportation Secretary Buttigieg to use his lawfully-granted power (until our Supreme Court takes it away, I suppose!) to punish big airline corporations that abuse their passengers. Of course airline corporations got a lot of COVID relief money to keep folks working, and of course they used that money to cut workers, which has helped cause all the delays that have been in the news. Secretary Buttigieg can put aside burnishing his “bipartisan” bona fides in advance of his 2028 (2024?) Presidential run and fine airlines that delay flights more than three hours and schedule flights without enough workers. But he’ll only do that if he hears from enough of us.

Around the table: concerning abortion and conspiracy theories.

Surprise, surprise, Republicans getting everything they want out of the end of Roe v. Wade “complicate(s)” their efforts to take back Congress in the midterms. As I’ve said, people hate it when politicians take away the things they rely on, and legal abortion is one of those, more so, I think, than the Affordable Care Act was in 2017 and 2018, and when Republicans threatened that they lost the House. And if Republicans are worried now, just wait until inflation comes down! There’s a lot in this article worth commenting on, but I’ll just cite abortion clinics all closing in Wisconsin after Ron Johnson said things wouldn’t change that much. That’s a winning campaign ad if there ever was one – and, you know, if Democrats just have the guts to run it.

Uh oh: a right-wing evangelical gets caught on tape claiming that she prays with sitting Supreme Court Justices – who just so happened to have cited her organization’s amicus brief in their ruling overturning Roe v. Wade. I’m going to guess that this isn’t against the law per se, but only because we don’t hold Supreme Court Justices to the same ethical standards we hold all other federal judges. In any case, it sure looks like an obvious conflict of interest, and if your currency is objectivity, you would reasonably avoid even the appearance of such a conflict. Unless, of course, you don’t care because you’re just going to take everyone’s freedoms away ha ha.

Speaking of which, Maurizio Valsania at The Conversation reminds us that Justice Alito’s ruling in Dobbs “cherry-picks” American history in claiming that abortion rights aren’t “deeply-rooted” in American culture. I’m old enough to recall a time when “Blackstone condoned abortion” (let alone Ben Franklin’s abortion recipe!) would end all arguments on the matter, but fact is women had more autonomy over their bodies in the 18th century than they did in the 19th, and last I checked, America did exist during the 18th century. So add “originalism” and “textualism” to the pile of words so tortured by their utterers that they tell them exactly what they want to hear.

Martha Crawford writes about the uncertainty wrought by our Supreme Court’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade – and her own experiences navigating sexuality even with the support of Roe. “Roe meant my body could never be ultimately controlled by such men” as the funny uncle who looked up her skirt at the shoe store, yet her Ms.-reading mother still called her a slut after finding out she was on the pill, and her Christian teen group-running father told her she was “a spirited filly that needs to be broken,” preferably by “a man with a good set of spurs.” And if our Supreme Court gets the last word, women won’t even have the modicum of bodily control Dr. Crawford did.

Finally, Donovan Schaefer at The Conversation explains why folks like conspiracy theories. Long story short: “confronting conspiracy theories requires understanding the feelings that make them so appealing,” namely that conspiracy theories “let() you feel like you’re smarter than everyone” and allows you to see yourself as a “critical thinker.” There’s no small joy to knowing an “obscure” source, I’ll admit, and knowing something “no one else knows,” though you should also, you know, become an adult and put away childish things. And Q-holes’ ability to make any datum fit their conclusion should raise red flags for actual critical thinkers.

Action: concerning Social Security, our Supreme Court, and campaign finance.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security and our Supreme Court, and tell big corporations to stop donating to anti-abortion politicians. 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 your Congressfolk to expand Social Security benefits by $200/month – an expansion that would help poorer seniors the most! – and fund it by taxing income over $250,000 into the system for the first time. As you know, Social Security currently only taxes income under $147,000, so you can see where taxing high income will help Social Security’s trust fund become even more solvent. Don’t believe the Henny Penny BS from right-wingers that TEH SOSHUL SECURITIEZ WILL RUNZ OUTZ OFZ TEH MONEYZ BYZ 2033!!!! or whatever date they’re saying now. Best to think that punditoids who say that on TV are just trying to steal Social Security from us.

CPD Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to get to expanding our Supreme Court already. It’s not enough to say Democrats just need to win more elections, and it’s certainly not enough to say just vote harder, as Democratic politicians tend to do, to their everlasting shame. It’s not even enough to surmise that we have 13 federal appeals courts and having one Supreme Court Justice per appeals court would obviously improve the appeals process. No, our Supreme Court has obviously gone rogue with all their recent rulings – they clearly don’t respect “precedent” anymore, unless that “precedent” is some half-truth about history from centuries ago. So, yeah, we gotta get angry now, and act on that anger.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell big American corporations to stop funding “forced birther” politicians. Big corporations are trying to get good PR by proclaiming they’ll pay for their employees’ abortions, but I’ve listed my doubts about that several times already – and I haven’t even mentioned that, for example, certain cancer treatments may result in an abortion so the mother can live, and I’m pretty sure corporate bureaucrats aren’t subtle enough to get that! And anyway, corporations that promise to pay for abortions but also funnel big campaign cash to the same politicians who have gotten us into this mess have pretty much told us how they really feel.

Around the table: now with bonus Jorge Luis Borges references!

When I hear that a bunch of “Proud Boys” stampeded into a gay-friendly kids’ reading event at an Indiana public library, I shudder to think that people call this activism! Yes I’ve read Deutches Requiem and been haunted by it, but I suspect even the independent voter who says “I’m fine with gays as long as I don’t have to see them kissing” would be disgusted by a bunch of bearded assholes ruining a children’s book event. I even suspect that the ones who think such events are “indoctrination” won't be swayed by the “Proud Boys.” (Yeah, I noticed “prance” in the headline, too, and I’m OK with it – I approve of using right-wingers' own hate words against them, and I get why folks would criticize me for that, but I think they're picking the wrong hill to die on. In a related note, I did not pick the word “bearded” by accident, either.)

Los Angeles voters will vote this November on a proposal that would tax the sale of mansions over $5 million, and direct that money toward fighting homeless, and though I’m sure more than a few hard hats will say why do those people get the goodies (psst: because great nations take care of their poor, and also so they won't be in your way, and anyway you could be one of those people one day), but not too many will cry over rich folks having to pay a tax on selling their big houses. I’m sure right-wingers (and Kyrsten Sinema) will claim this tax will somehow affect the little guy, but the little guy ain’t selling his house for $5 million. No, not even in Los Angeles.

Another day, another “liberal” media plaint about TEH RISINGZ OFZ TEH CRIMEZ!!!!! – this one entitled “Justice Department Braces for Summer of Violent Crime.” But the one actual crime statistic in the article (in paragraph seven) suggests that summer holiday crime has actually gone down! We also learn that “the onset of warm weather typically signals an onslaught of violence in many parts of the country,” which leads us to wonder why write 24 paragraphs about it, then? Oh, but by all means, “liberal” media, let’s continue to foment drama and hysteria about crime so that otherwise reasonable vote for more fascists.

From the “Sometimes You Don’t Need to Read Past the Headline!” file: John Teufel at TruthOut writes that “Democratic Leadership Can Protect Abortion Rights” but “They Would Rather Fundraise.” If you do read the article, you’ll hear about the Reproductive Choice Act, which ain’t as good as the Women’s Health Protection Act but which I would certainly advocate passing if we had no other alternative, which, given the Manchinema axis’s refusal to even change the filibuster so that it’d be more useful, sure seems the case right now. (Mr. Teufel thinks we can pass it through reconciliation, but recent precedent defies that optimism, and most of today’s Congressfolk probably don’t even remember Congress passing the 1996 welfare "reform” bill that way. Hell, I didn’t, or I’d have made a stink about it during the minimum wage debate last year.)

Holy moly several unnamed Supreme Court Justices might actually have had heated arguments about how exactly to overturn the 2020 election results and keep Donald Trump in power. That’s according to emails obtained by the January 6 Committee, and sadly those emails post-date our Court’s refusal to hear two appeals concerning the election, meaning that whatever relatively united front our Court presented on December 8 and 11 may have dissipated by Christmas Eve. If this is true (and Mark Sumner does a good job illuminating the questions we’d need answered before declaring it true), our Supreme Court may not be able to recover from the bad PR. Hell, we might even see a few resignations.

Finally, from the “Even When He’s Right, He’s Wrong” file: buried in the next-to-last-paragraph of this Mitt Romney essay about how “(t)oo many Americans are blithely dismissing threats that could prove cataclysmic” is this unfortunate plaint: “(o)ur elected officials put a finger in the wind more frequently than they show backbone against it.” Decent turn of phrase, I’ll grant, but, ah, no – the problem, obviously, is they don’t listen to us enough! Polling tells us that more than 80% of us want Medicare to negotiate drug prices, but almost 50% of our House Reps and at least 53% of our Senators just say no. Medicare-for-All, paid family leave, and higher taxes on the rich all routinely get over 60% in polls, but our politicians can’t get any of that done, either. And when our representatives don’t follow our lead, fascists fill the opening – and I can’t even rule out the possibility that those are the people who “show backbone against” the “wind” in Mitt Romney’s mind.

Action: concerning taxes, climate change, endless war, and Medicare premiums.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich for-real for-real, pass real climate change legislation, repeal the 2002 Iraq war authorization, and reduce absurdly high Medicare premiums. 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.

Word on the street is Senate Democrats are straining to water down tax hikes on the rich in the House-passed Build Back Better Act, so call your Senators and tell them to stop that shit. I mean, we all pay our damn taxes; when will the folks who make millions of dollars an hour start paying their share? And yes, by every conceivable measure, their fair share is a lot larger than ours! That’s how it’s supposed to be! That’s how we built the greatest middle class in history! And that’s not “punishing success” – rich CEOs succeed only on the backs of millions of good Americans who work for them! Seriously, if Elon Musk had to grow his own food, he’d be knocking on every door in your neighborhood with his hands out.

With our Supreme Court dealing yet another body blow to our government’s ability to keep big corporations from hurting good Americans in West Virginia v. EPA, the Climate Reality Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to act on climate change – as in, explicitly give our EPA the authority to curtail it. You may have thought our EPA already had that authority – even the late Justice Scalia said so! – but our literal-when-we-want-to Supreme Court disagrees, and they’re out to destroy everything we’ve fought for, until our government is powerless to do anything but spy on us. Yes, that’s the endgame! And we Americans have shed too much blood and spent too much treasure to let that happen. Our Congressfolk need to know that.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 AUMF that authorized war with Iraq, but which other Presidents have used to authorize all sorts of unconstitutional warmaking thereafter, including but not limited to former President Trump’s assassination of General Soleimani in 2019. Call the 2002 AUMF yet another humiliation visited upon good Americans in the wake of the “war on terror,” a “war” which may one day prove to be even more injurious to our great nation than the “war on drugs” has been. Yes, even though the “war on drugs” now exists almost entirely to put Black and Brown folks in prison! The 2002 AUMF is old enough to vote for stupid people now, so it’s well past time to send it to a much-deserved oblivion.

Finally, Social Security Works helps you tell the Biden Administration to lower outrageously-high Medicare premiums, preferably by rebating the overcharges to seniors before the midterms. Yeah, there’s some political calculation in there – yes, I said “some” because it’s also the right thing to do – but you know the other side only calculates; it’s why they’re irredeemably decadent and morally bankrupt. And Medicare really screwed up by deciding to cover the expensive-and-not-terribly-effective Alzheimer’s drug Aduhelm – and then did the right thing by only covering it for seniors in clinical trials. But Medicare still needs to do another right thing by reversing the premium hikes that covering Aduhelm caused in the first place.

Around the table: featuring weak executives, hypocritical corporations, and other losers.

Ever the optimist and I say that as a compliment, Matt Stoller sees a chance at undoing the T-Mobile/Sprint merger through suits by private plaintiffs, including all those independent franchises T-Mobile promptly shut down after it went through. Still, we live in a transitional moment (at best!) in re mergers and monopolies, which is why even folks like Mr. Stoller still write sentences like “(a)fter AT&T was blocked from buying T-Mobile, and prices dropped, executives across the industry became increasingly agitated about competition in the market.” Aren't executives always saying they like competition? Sadly, they do not really like competition. That's because they’re weak.

You knew this was coming: most of the corporations making the biggest deal about paying for their employees’ abortions just so happen to have made big donations to the Republican Attorneys General Association (or RAGA), which “by its own admission, played a central role” in getting Roe v. Wade overturned. And besides, only around 5% of all corporations have even pledged to pay for employee abortions, plus they’re leaving out contractors and students, and besides, what if you don’t have a job? But yeah, all that great PR JP Morgan Chase hoped to get from its pledge should dissipate now that we know they gave $25,000 to RAGA just this past March. The putatively pro-abortion corporation that's lately cut off welfare payments to RAGA? Yelp, if you can believe it. GoPuff has been a major offender, and I bet you can more easily believe that.

Yahoo! News/YouGov poll finds an eye-popping 68% of Fox News viewers actually think the perps of the January 6 attempted coup were liberals trying to make Donald Trump look bad – which, like, Tucker Carlson was saying that that damn night, using a source that even the Washington Examiner soon repudiated – but the poll contains even more interesting results. A third of CNN viewers and a quarter of MSNBC viewers agreed, and more than a third of non-cable viewers (that’d be my category!) also agree, and that’s too damn many. Also, only 11% of Americans blamed the Trump votaries at the Capitol first and foremost. And that would have been my choice! Donald Trump incited a riot, but good Americans are supposed to take good enough care of themselves that they don’t get incited. Seriously! You're supposed to understand that being full of rage all the time is bad for you in at least two ways.

Michigan Republicans want to pass a bill that would allow parents to file frivolous lawsuits against public schools for exposing children to drag queen shows, though no one can cite a single example of this ever happening. I mean, how many of today’s teachers have even seen The Kids in the Hall? It’s not enough to say “well, the lawsuit will fail without evidence,” because the state government will have to pay to defend the suit, and, well, they’ll be using taxpayer money to do that. Bunch of damn drama hounds, right-wingers are, alleging horrors where they don’t exist and thinking it means nothing they can’t defend their position. Can Michigan Democrats run against this stupid crap, maybe? Because I think they'd win, even in the more gerrymandered areas of the state.

Mitch McConnell actually threatens that Republicans will tank a bipartisan semiconductor bill if Democrats take up any version of Build Back Better in the next month or so. And here’s how the fuck you’d deal with that: take the semiconductor bill, add it to the Build Back Better-ish bill, and pass it through budget reconciliation – which means Republicans would get no credit for reviving the American semiconductor industry. Oh, wait, is that uncivil? We’ll never get civility back in American politics until we stop playing pattycake with assholes. Too often Democrats act like they've never heard of boundaries. And seriously, what's Mitch McConnell's problem with lower drug prices? We need to ask that every time he makes a threat like this.

Finally, Bush Mobb Attorney General Alberto Gonzales says our Justice Department could well prosecute Donald Trump for his role in the January 6 coup but before we begin a bunch of sentences with “Even Alberto Gonzales,” remember that Alberto Gonzales comes from an entirely successful fascist regime, and what most likely bugs him about the Trump regime is how stupidly they went about it. I do wonder if “there’s a lot there” is a sly wink to the major complaint about George W. Bush before he became President, which, as you may recall, was “there’s no there there.” Of course, “there’s no there there” is exactly what competent fascists try to make you think.

Action: concerning Medicare, insurrection, and abortion.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to strengthen Medicare instead of funding Medicare “Advantage” and investigate Sen. Ron Johnson’s role in efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and tell our FDA to make the abortion drug mifepristone widely available. 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 your Congressfolk to end the Medicare “Advantage” program once and for all. Medicare “Advantage” siphons off Medicare funding to private health insurers, which are more costly and tend to deny care at the most inopportune times, so what’s the “advantage”? It offers vision, dental, and hearing care, which Medicare doesn’t. Well, here’s a better idea: have our Medicare offer vision, dental, and hearing – at a lower cost than some private health insurance corporation trying to insure its executives all have gas in their yachts. Your big campaign donation-sucking Congressfolk won’t like your logic, but keep bringing it to them.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate Sen. Ron Johnson’s role in trying to overturn the 2020 election results. He’s gotten himself in the soup lately with the news that his staffers tried to hand a slate of “alternate” (i.e., fake) electors to Vice President Pence. He denied knowing anything about that at first, but then he said, now that he’d had time to think about it, he did know about it and got the list of fake electors from Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA) – who, of course, promptly said he hadn’t spoken to Sen. Johnson in at least a decade. Which doesn’t preclude the possibility that Mr. Kelly's office provided Sen. Johnson with the lists! But let’s find out, and then punish the wrongdoers.

Finally, Change.org helps you tell our FDA to lift restrictions on the abortion drug mifepristone, which our FDA declared safe during the first trimester of a pregnancy over 20 years ago, but still lists in its most restricted category – along with fentanyl, among others! – and that’s a move that must have been an effort to pander to the pro-life industry. But mifepristone is much safer than that – in fact, medical studies have long found it to be even safer than Tylenol, a drug nobody thinks twice about taking. Widely-available mifepristone may be the only way for women in red states to get abortions now, so we should help them get it, lest Republicans succeed in turning all of them into mere breeders.

Action: concerning the Espionage Act, marriage equality, and drug prices.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reform the Espionage Act, protect marriage equality, and lower prescription drug prices. 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.

Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to reform the Espionage Act so that our government can’t use it to silence journalists and whistleblowers. You know, like they’re trying to do to Julian Assange for the crime of exposing American wrongdoing during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. That embarrassed a lot of American elites, but embarrassing American elites ain’t no reason to use anti-spying legislation to silence journalists. And silencing whistleblowers? Who expose corruption at great personal cost? Anyone who says they love America should be ashamed of doing such a thing. Allow me to believe that shaming still works in America.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to codify marriage equality in our laws before our Supreme Court uses its dastardly “deeply-rooted rights” notion to reverse Obergefell v. Hodges. Because you know they’re just itching to do it – why, Justice Thomas said they should do it in his concurring opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization which overturned Roe v. Wade. Hence we need our Congressfolk to act. It’ll take a while for a case to reach our Court that could outlaw gay marriage, but don’t let that make you complacent. Whenever our Court takes our rights away, it always seems like it’s too soon.

Finally, Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower drug prices already. Feel free to tell them exactly how in the space for comments – like, by letting Medicare negotiate drug prices, or capping insulin prices, or fining big pharma corporations when they raise prices faster than inflation. People like all of these ideas, and would it kill our Congressfolk to do some things that people actually like, and actually want them to do? As Drug Prices Are Too High suggests, it might even help them in the midterms this November.

Action: concerning financial predators, sexual discrimination, and Medicare overcharges.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Veterans and Consumers Fair Credit Act, and tell the Biden Administration to enact the most vigorous Title IX protections possible and rebate Medicare premium overcharges directly to seniors. 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.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5974/S. 2508, the Veterans and Consumers Fair Credit Act. Our laws currently cap loan interest rates at 36% for veterans, meaning veterans don’t have to put up with 300% death-spiral payday loans, and we were able to get that for veterans because, hey, nobody wants to be seen voting against veterans! Now we should extend that cap to everyone, because, really, we all deserve protection from financial predators. And again, I’d make that cap lower! And you can tell your Congressfolk that if you want, without worrying about those poor, poor banks. But I’d pass this bill, too.

The National Women’s Law Center helps you tell the Biden Administration to enact the strongest Title IX revisions possible. Title IX, as you know, governs discrimination on the basis of sex in public schools, and the Trump Administration, as you may recall, gutted certain Title IX protections concerning sexual assault, because, you know, “(i)t’s a very scary and difficult time for young men today.” Even more difficult for the young women they rape, he somehow forgot to add. The Biden proposals would fix those, and they would also extend Title IX protections to transgender students, which, I mean, the word “sex” has a pretty plain meaning that even Justice Gorsuch gets.

Finally, Social Security Works helps you tell the Biden Administration to fix inflated Medicare premiums already. How did those premiums get inflated again? By Medicare’s decision to insure an expensive (and not very good) Alzheimer’s drug; the American people spoke out against that, and Medicare changed course, covering the drug only for patients in clinical trials. But the inflated premiums still remain! Our Administration ought to be rebating our seniors the money they should never have had to pay. They’ll talk about the importance of making sure taxpayer money doesn’t get stolen, but our government already knows whom they’ve overcharged, so that’s bunkum. Never tolerate bunkum from your government.

Penny Rants for June 29, 2022: good news for Democrats! Which is bad news *to* Democratic politicians.

For some reason, Kerry Eleveld’s report about the fall of Roe “disrupting” the Republicans-will-crush-it-in-November narrative starts off with reports about Democratic and Republican enthusiasm in the wake of Roe’s fall, when the big story, it seems to me, is that the generic ballot polls have been trending hard in the Democrats’ direction. NPR’s generic ballot poll, which was 47-44 for Republicans in April, is now 48-41 for Democrats; that’s a 10-point swing, basically, in two months. (A Politico/Morning Consult poll found a three-point swing toward Democrats in one week, albeit the week our Supreme Court overturned Roe.) Republicans had better hope gas stays at $5/gallon! Seriously, as I’ve said, people really hate politicians who take away things they count on, just like they did in 2017-18 when Republicans tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Nobody stopped them but the people. That’s how it’ll have to happen again.

Virginia Republican House candidate Yesli Vega – like most of today's Republicans, desperately trying to appear more anti-abortion than anyone who's ever lived – suggests that it’s a lot harder to get pregnant from rape than from consensual sex, “maybe because there's so much going on in the body” and/or “(b)ecause it's not something that's happening organically,” or because “the male” is doing it more “quickly.” Even worse than all that, though? She suggests that it must not happen all that often merely because she only saw it happen once in her decade-plus as a police officer, like she’s the center of all human experience or something. Admittedly, she may be a little harder to trap into a humiliating loss than Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin was, precisely because she’s clearly more prone to word salad, but it’s a long campaign, so I suspect she’ll give us other opportunities. Bonus: if Abigail Spanberger actually loses to her, she’ll have to confront the fact that the problem was never “defund the police” or “socialism” but her.

Finally, when I hear that Sen. Joe Manchin (D?-WV) not only won’t say he’ll support President Biden in 2024, which, like, who cares, but won't say whether he'd run for President as a third-party candidate, I feel compelled to first take a deep breath and then ask: what sane person thinks Joe Manchin is the answer to anyone’s problems? Our chattering class always whines that there are just no moderates anymore whenever a moderate is President, but Joe Manchin and the 50 Senate Republicans stopped us from raising taxes on the rich. Joe Manchin and the 50 Senate Republicans took monthly $250 and $300 checks away from working families. Joe Manchin and the 50 Senate Republicans prevented American workers from getting four weeks of paid sick leave. And Joe Manchin and the 50 Senate Republicans kept child-care prices astronomically high for American families while pissing and moaning about inflation. And were he so dense as to run for President, that’s the ad I’d run over and over and over again until he slinks away into the oblivion he has most certainly earned.