Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning federal budgeting, internet freedom, and paycheck fairness.

Earlier this month, our President released his latest "hard power" budget or whatever; it would, of course, slash virtually every federal program that actually helps good Americans -- federal programs should help good Americans, of course, since good Americans fund them with their taxes -- while jacking up defense spending and of course hiking spending for his vanity border wall. In a Goofus and Gallant world, this would definitely be a Goofus budget. Our President's budget has virtually no chance of passing as-is, since Presidential budgets rarely do, but then that could be what our Administration wants us to think! They do tend to be more dangerous when you underestimate them, after all. Besides, our duty is to offer our counsel to our Representatives, so let's do that -- the more they hear about how much we hate this budget, the more likely they are to pass something closer to our will. So Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject our Administration's FY 2020 budget.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to restore real internet freedom by passing H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. The Save the Internet Act would restore the 2015 Open Internet Order -- you know, the one the FCC repealed in 2017 -- that codified net neutrality principles into law, so you, and not some corporation, can be in charge of your internet experience. Of course forces have aligned against us -- Michael "the Lesser" Powell calls the bill "a partisan death sentence for internet innovation," though of course he lost me at "innovation." But it ain't just corporatist dead-enders like him -- it's also a few recalcitrant Democrats in the House, who take campaign donations from big telecom corporations. But who on Earth thinks the voters put them in the House so they could suck up to Comcast? We put them in the House, and we put them there to do the right thing, so we need to remind them of that.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, then People for the American Way still helps you do that. The Paycheck Fairness Act would, as you know, help women fight for more equal pay by (among other things) toughening penalties for employers and keeping employers from using a worker's history of being underpaid against them when making hiring decisions; of course the forces of evil yammer on about how different workers have different skill sets without noting that H.R. 7 already takes that into account (in Sec. 3). But the last time Republicans filibustered the bill, they claimed that the Paycheck Fairness Act would scare employers into not hiring women! Thus do they reveal their low opinion of everyone who's not themselves! Look, Republicans, either these are our best and brightest and boldest entrepreneurs, or they're scaredy-cats who can't read a law. They can't be both.

Action: concerning discrimination and pollution.

The Tennessee state legislature's House Judiciary Committee plans a vote today on HB 836, the so-called Child-Placing Agency Religious Freedom Bill, which we can run through our Bill Title-to-English translator and find, give me a minute, ah, here: "let private adoption agencies refuse to place kids with gay parents because of the gay cooties." Some folks love making a big drama of crying in public over their "religious" "beliefs" being "violated" though literally no one forces them into a gay marriage and literally no one forces them to worship Liberal Gay-and-Muslim-Loving Jesus -- and no one even forces them to stop hating gays, women, and foreigners, though this hatred does seem to comprise the entirety of their "religious" "beliefs." But actual religious folks understand that the tension between religious belief and worldly pursuit is not only intractable but promotes religious growth, and that insisting on codifying "God's kingdom here on Earth" through law is an arrogance God would find intolerable. The Tennessee Equality Project helps you tell Tennessee legislators to reject more pro-discrimination legislation by rejecting HB 836.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is taking public comments on mining development in Alaska's Bristol Bay area. If you thought we'd already chased away mining development there, well, yes, the Pebble Mine project in Alaska has had trouble attracting investors, and yes, even Scott Pruitt's EPA frowned upon mining development in Bristol Bay, but as long as one corporation wants to keep Pebble Mine alive (now it's Northern Dynasty Minerals, after Rio Tinto pulled out), then the Bay's clean water is in danger, and the world's largest sockeye salmon industry is in danger, and the Native American communities who also rely on the salmon are in danger. Hence Sum of Us helps you leave a public comment with the Corps of Engineers opposing mining development in Bristol Bay. You may well be feeling more than a little disgusted that we managed to chase away so many investors and yet we're still trying to save Bristol Bay. Who could blame you? But if we've learned one thing over the years, it's that the forces of evil never stop fighting -- and so neither can we, even after we think we've won. And, as they say, knowing is half the battle.

Around the table: the worst word in the English language, and other revelations.

John Mauldin at Forbes announces that "The Average American Can't Save Enough to Retire" -- and that's mainly because the average American doesn't make enough money. Take that, rich boss who looks down on everyone who's not like him! I can't really fault Mr. Mauldin for talking about retirement in terms of "cruises and golf tournaments," or bills only in terms of paying off your house or car, since I imagine that's how his intended audience at Forbes thinks about these things. And perhaps some of them will get the message, however muted, that they're not paying their employees enough to have a decent-sized IRA.

Fran Quigley at TruthOut warns us that big pharma corporations are trying to deflect from their role in pricing life-saving drugs too high by nattering on about middlemen like "pharmacy benefit managers." Because what else can they do when you have them dead to rights on jacking up the price of insulin so much that some diabetics skip doses which diabetics cannot ever do? Just remember that big pharma corporations pay their executives tens of millions of dollars and report profits as high as 40%, and that the price of insulin has increased tenfold over the last 20 years, which is, to say the least, a lot faster than inflation. (Also, note that pharmacy benefit managers don't set a drug's list price.)

Buried in this account of how our President hates the idea of self-driving cars, not that he's doing anything about it, is the statement that Administration Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao faces a "challenge" to "manage safety concerns while promoting U.S. innovation." If a car isn't safe, how is it "innovative"? Are we "innovating" on the definition of safety now? To include, you know, stuff that's not safe? "Innovation" is really the worst word in the English language. You can safely decide that anyone who deploys it as an unambiguous positive is a fool.

Janine Jackson at FAIR reminds us, in the wake of the news that the Venezuelan government didn't blow up those aid convoys at all, that "Exposure of Another Pro-War Lie Doesn’t Make Media More Skeptical of Pro-War Claims." You have to wonder why our "liberal" media keep going to the same people who are always wrong about everything -- a phenomenon we've observed repeatedly, such as when folks who swore up and down that the Iraq war would be easy-peasy kept getting cited as "experts" in news reports -- but of course we already know why: because war makes big corporations money, and media outlets don't challenge money.

If you're wondering why this session's Medicare-for-All bill has fewer House Democratic supporters than last session's Medicare-for-All bill did, despite there being, you know, more Democrats in the House this session, you can take comfort in the fact that quite a few of last session's Democrats supported it because it had no chance of passing, and its chances of passing grow with the passage of time. You can take less comfort in recalling that Democrats sure do have a habit of sabotaging good ideas when they have the power to do so -- but you can take more comfort in knowing that our job isn't to elect more Democrats, but to make the politicians in power do our will.

Finally, in a related note, David Dayen reminds us that California Senator/Presidential hopeful Kamala Harris loves to celebrate her role in getting that $25 billion settlement from banksters over foreclosures, but that the settlement itself is nothing to celebrate. That goes beyond the fact that banksters were able to write that $25 billion off their taxes, and none of them went to jail, even though they obviously broke the law -- a lot of that settlement money didn't actually help anyone keep their home, though that was, ostensibly, its whole purpose. Think of that the next time someone tells you that you have to support Kamala Harris because she's "electable" or "sensible" or whatever -- in these times, these words mean "part of the problem."

Action: concerning media, consumer protection, and monopolies.

In the wake of, well, decades of generating fake outrage against civilized people so Our Glorious Elites could consolidate their own unearned power, but more recently in the wake of bad PR about Tucker Carlson's racist and sexist behavior, Free Press helps you tell corporations to stop advertising on the Fox News Channel. Again, Mr. Carlson's jokes/"jokes" about sex with underage girls is exactly the kind of thing we expect boys to stop doing once they become grown men, but Fox has deserved shame and shunning since the beginning, and in the absence of a law forcing cable providing corporations to offer cable channels to us a la carte, prompting their advertisers to drop Fox is the next best thing. Fox's natterers will claim they're being "oppressed," which the powerful always do whenever a hint of criticism crosses their filters, but we only have a First Amendment right not to be put in jail for our speech; we do not have a First Amendment "right" to get a cush job doing "journalism," nor does our First Amendment protect us from advertisers, activists, or customers. Professional self-pitiers won't hear any of that, but they don't get all the say around here.

Meanwhile, H.R. 1500, the Consumer First Act, would reverse the changes made to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) by former Acting Director/current Acting Chief of Staff/man who wears glasses so people don't punch him in the face Mick Mulvaney. H.R. 1500 would (among other things) bring back supervisory and enforcement powers for the CFPB's Office of Fair Lending and Equal Opportunity, would re-establish the student loan office that helped protect college students from being defrauded, and would ensure that the CFPB is properly-staffed, always a challenge when you're talking an Administration that believes not hiring enough people equals "small government." These are all common-sense restorative changes -- I mean, who thinks students shouldn't be protected from colleges that would prey upon them? Who thinks stripping a fair lending office of its power is a good idea? Only someone who thinks bosses are more important than anyone, and that's our President, right there. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect good Americans from financial predators by passing the Consumer First Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Federal Trade Commission to break up Facebook, then Freedom from Big Tech still helps you do that. Why would we break up Facebook? Because it has a virtual monopoly of social media in America -- nope, using Messenger and Instagram and WhatsApp "instead" won't break that monopoly, because Facebook owns all three, and moving to another social media network won't work for you if your friends don't move there, too. Facebook has been known to be quite careless with your private information, and earlier this month, when Sen. Warren (D-MA) proposed breaking up Facebook in ads on Facebook, Facebook then blocked its users from seeing those ads -- and then reversed ground when Politico reported on it! The FTC is supposedly considering fining Facebook $1 billion over its privacy lapses, but that won't do any good, not when $1 billion is a few days' income for Facebook, and not when corporations still get to deduct fines from their taxes. If only our government remembered that breaking up big corporations for the public good is a fine, old tradition in America! Well, at least we're here to remind them.

Action: concerning war in Venezuela, food stamps, and taxes.

Fresh off Congress's attempt to nullify our President's vanity border wall emergency, S.J.Res. 11 would prevent our President from starting a military campaign against the democratically-elected government of Venezuela without Congressional authorization -- which, for once, might not be coming! I mean, normally, Congress just nods its head and goes along with whatever Presidents want to do foreign policy-wise, which is a precise inversion of our Founders' will as expressed in our Constitution. I won't get too mad at Congress for only figuring out their Constitutionally-mandated role because it's this President; if I understand the Parable of the Prodigal Son correctly, it matters less when, how, or why you come to wisdom than that you come to wisdom. So Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep us out of an unconstitutional war with Venezuela by passing S.J.Res. 11. And you don't even have to reckon with all the one-sided reports on Venezuela coming from our "liberal" media to support this bill. After all, if it were your country, you wouldn't want to be invaded, would you?

Meanwhile, our USDA would very much like to prevent states from giving food stamps to folks who can't get a full-time job, even though food stamps is, you know, the kind of program that exists to help people through tough times. Gosh, it's like this Administration doesn't understand how anything works, though of course I know they would prefer to give you the impression they're stupid rather than the impression they're evil. No need for anyone to cite the 3.7% unemployment rate as proof that our Administration should do this, because the U6 unemployment rate -- the one that actually counts folks who've given up looking for work or who can only get part-time work when they're trying to get full-time work -- is still almost twice that, at 7.3%. Hence the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell our USDA to reject its plan to cut food stamps for large numbers of Americans. If you're wary of this, you may want to remember that we all pay into this program with out taxes, and any of us could suffer misfortune and suddenly be in need of food stamps. I'm starting to think that having trouble imagining that happening to you is a character flaw.

Finally, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to "repeal the Tax Scam," i.e., the 2017 Republican tax "reform," known as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. (I've said it before and I'll say it again: you can't magically transform any pile of dung into meatloaf merely by sticking the word "job" in its title.) You know, if I were a less spiritually-advanced person, I'd find it hilarious that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act will go down in history as the "tax cut" bill everyone thought of as a tax hike bill! It's not just the many folks who rely on that four-figure check from the IRS every April who are now going to owe money because the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act changed the withholding tables -- it's also the folks who can't deduct as much in state and local taxes anymore or the folks who can't deduct medical expenses anymore. Meanwhile corporations got a massive welfare handout from the bill, which supposedly helps them "create jobs," which is to laugh, since anyone knows if you give someone a big pile of money they're going to hoard it, but if you raise taxes on big piles of money, then the holders of that money will put it into the economy so they don't have to pay taxes. So it's time to repeal this pile of dung.

Around the table: "what looks large from a distance/close up ain't never that big."

The Senate passed the "resolution of disapproval" aiming to nullify our President's "national emergency" declaration by a 59-41 margin, which ain't enough to overcome a Presidential veto, but as a few of those 41 "nay" votes get more scrutiny, well, we've got a shot. Thom Tillis's sudden "nay" vote after declaring very loudly that he'd vote "yea" has been all the rage on Twitter, but dig Martha McSally's "nay" vote after our Administration assured her it wouldn't draw money for its vanity border wall from four defense projects in her home state. She'll say protecting these projects is just her job, but it sure looks like the kind of political deal-making most Americans despise. Ben Nelson went from being one of the most popular Senators in America to one of the most despised for less.

The Senate also passed the War Powers resolution aiming to stop military aid to the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen, but by a less-convincing 54-46 margin. Mr. Friedersdorf's 2020 analysis is a bit incomplete here -- sure, our President should be made to "own" this war, but it's not a certainty he'll run against a Democrat who's less hawkish than he, nor is it a certainty that Republican voters (let alone our President's most strident votaries!) will remember, or care, how this vote broke down. At least Todd Young's putting his money where his mouth is, and Steve Daines, who's up in 2020, might be slicker than I previously thought. (I suspect Susan Collins's embrace of actual independence here -- she's also up in 2020 -- comes far, far too late.)

Paul Street at Counterpunch watches MSNBC so you don't have to, finds the station full of "Red Scare Dems" who worry that the Democrats, in embracing popular/beneficial policy initiatives, will move "too far left." And one of them says that he would have to vote for the President he hates if Democrats nominate someone like (fill in any name, since they'll all be "too far left" for our "liberal" media anyway). So to sum: MSNBC employs putative liberals who constantly cry about "socialism," and it also employs Republicans who hate our President -- see, they're completely fair and balanced! (Don't be the one who complains that all this fake bipartisanship has given bipartisanship a bad name, because that's like turning off your living room light and then complaining that all of a sudden it's dark.)

Mehdi Hasan shows the world how to interrogate Administration cronies on his al-Jazeera program and what's the most telling thing about that? That the interview took place on a network virtually no Americans can watch? That Mr. Hasan showed up to a gunfight with a gun and Erik Prince didn't even bring a pointed stick? That American journalists are more likely to brag about which member of Our Glorious Elites they're in good with than about which poisonous elite they helped to bring down? That Our Glorious Elites are so far from our-best-and-brightest they'd need two buses and a train to get in the same neighborhood as our best and brightest? Really, it's a hard question to answer, and it's almost like that's the idea.

Survey finds that more than half of all victims of rapes, robberies, and burglaries simply won't report these crimes to the police. You'll be pleased to learn that some of these folks handle these matters themselves without resorting to additional violence, but folks who constantly yell at everyone for "not respecting our police enough" might want to wonder if police could do more to earn that respect. Also, too, that Reagan-era "finding" that our justice system is "biased" in favor of "criminals" would likely merit an it's-a-feature-not-a-bug statement from our Founders, as well as the you-don't-know-what-it's-really-like statement it merits from folks of color. Yeah, law and order is hard work, but we do it because civilization is worth it.

Finally, in the wake of our Justice Department charging 50 rich folks with paying millions to illegally get their kids into schools like Stanford and Yale, may I request that I never hear any more whining about the "unfairness" of affirmative action again? I used to remind everyone that folks of color need affirmative action just to get past all the legacy admissions of lifelong C students, but I clearly underestimated the scope of the problem. (And, please, if you've been whining about affirmative action all these years, don't up and say you're now just as concerned with what rich folks do to get their kids in college. I don't hear any affirmative action-complainers voluntarily talk about rich folks gaming the system. What you choose to fixate upon matters, you know.)

Action: concerning government spying, discrimination, and immigration.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Department of Homeland (sic) Security (sic) to stop spying on journalists, activists, and legal advocates. Did DHS get warrants to spy on these individuals? Ha, ha, that is to laugh -- if they'd tried to get warrants, a judge would likely have laughed them out of court, because then DHS would have tried to tie all these good folks to specific acts of violence at the border, and then, perhaps, try to convince a judge that trying to help folks navigate the asylum process and reporting on same is somehow "violent." Also, too, spying on individuals isn't part of DHS's mandate, even if it's handing the data over to ICE and Border Patrol; how utterly surprising that the Administration that struts around about how "law and order" it is constantly flouts the rule of law when good Americans use their Constitutional rights in opposition to this Administration's will. But we have to fight them here, or we're going to be fighting them everywhere.

Meanwhile, H.R. 5/S. 788, the Equality Act, would amend existing civil rights laws (including the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act) so that gay and transgender folks can enjoy protections from discrimination under the law. The fight for LGBTQ civil rights has won many victories over the years, but it has not yet won many basic protections under the law, for you can still be fired just for being gay, denied housing just for being gay, or rejected from school just for being gay, and let's not even get started about how tough it is for transgender folks to take a piss in a public restroom. Which reminds me: the Equality Act will not abridge "religious freedom." You will still be able to worship whichever God you feel compelled to worship. You just won't be able to impose your beliefs on other people, or use the "religious conscience" excuse to discriminate against people you don't like. Freedom for All Americans helps you tell your Congressfolk to support freedom and equality for all Americans by passing the Equality Act.

Finally, H.R. 6, the Dream and Promise Act, would accomplish most of the goals the DREAM and American Promise Acts would have achieved if they'd been enacted -- it would help more immigrants brought here as children stay in the country they love (and likely the only country they've ever known), and it would also help more immigrants keep their Temporary Protected Status if they countries from which they've come still aren't safe enough for them to return. What a shame we would call this bill "progress," since what it mainly does is fix what our President broke, but, sadly, that's where we are. I suppose Republicans and their "liberal" media enablers will whine that the bill isn't "bipartisan" enough, even though most of us are old enough to remember when Republicans supported its aims. Of course, good Americans don't care about "bipartisan" government; they only care about good government. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support common-sense immigration policy by passing the Dream and Promise Act -- and without right-wing poison pills.

Action: concerning war on Yemen, tech monopolies, clean air, and the Grand Canyon.

Our Senate may vote soon on ending military aid to the Saudi/UAE coalition waging war on Yemen. I wish I could say that Congress's habit of delegating its Constitutional war-making duties to the President is a post-World War II thing -- it surely got worse after WWII, but we invaded central American nations many, many times (a tradition our President seems to want to continue in Venezuela) before that without getting formal declarations of war from Congress. The cynical would say that the previous sentence proves it's no use holding this Administration to any kind of standard, but cynicism is evil, and the time for doing the right thing is always now. Hence Stop the War helps you tell your Senators to pass the War Powers resolution that would choke off our military aid to the Saudi/UAE coalition. And certainly don't believe the hype that such a resolution would hurt the "war on terror." Our interference in Middle Eastern affairs, and our greed for their resources, has done more to spread terror than any effort to hold our elected officials to our Constitution ever could.

Meanwhile, Sen. Warren (D-MA) has proposed breaking up giant tech monopolies including Facebook, and has even advertised her proposal on Facebook -- at which point Facebook took the ads down, only to reinstate them after Politico reported on it. You'd think a confident social media corporation would allow folks to criticize it on their site! But it's almost like Facebook knows that gobbling up Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger isn't popular -- or that folks still use Facebook because they're basically the only game in town. (Oh, sure, you can "just join another network," but your friends would have to join it with you!) Even the Conservative British government has criticized Facebook's market dominance, but our Federal Trade Commission, like our President, hates any regulations that might do people good but cost some boss some money. The only thing that might change minds at our FTC is our raised voices. So Freedom from Big Tech helps you tell our FTC to protect consumers and foster competition by breaking up Facebook.

In other news, our Administration also wants to roll back the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, because, again, these standards might actually protect good Americans from the cancer and brain damage these pollutants cause, but some CEO somewhere needs to gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home, so no nice things for America. Of course, with noted perk hound Scott Pruitt in charge of our EPA, our Administration's attempts at rolling back clean air and clean water regulations generally died a merciless death in court; now, with former Jim Inhofe lackey/fossil fuel lobbyist Andrew Wheeler firmly in charge of our EPA, they might actually do it -- unless we speak out, in numbers they can't ignore. Hence the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell our EPA to protect good Americans from pollution by rejecting its own proposed Mercury and Air Toxics rollback. Forget the Democrats -- all that's stood between our Administration and its evil goals, so far, is us. And we'll keep standing.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep uranium mining corporations out of our Grand Canyon forever by passing H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Protection Act. The Grand Canyon Centennial Protection Act would simply mark over one million acres of the Grand Canyon area in Arizona as off-limits to mining interests, and would extend similar protections to any adjacent land our government acquires as public lands thereafter. The Obama Administration, as you know, imposed a 20-year moratorium on uranium mining in the Grand Canyon area, and for good reason -- uranium mining might make mining corporation CEOs rich, but it also pollutes the Colorado River, upon which good Americans in five states depend for clean water. That water will be polluted long after the last mining CEO spends his last unearned dollar, but of course our current Administration only cares about the short-term interests of the well-off few, the long-term interests of the many be damned. And that's why we need Congress to act.

Action: concerning "free" trade, ANWR drilling, and financial predators.

I've said that our Administration's USMCA trade agreement is a vast improvement over previous "free" trade deals, because it gets rid of the "investor-state dispute settlement" (or ISDS) system with Canada and curtails it with Mexico, and the ISDS system threatens to nullify our laws and outsource our jobs. However, the USMCA also locks in absurdly high prices for big pharma drugs, including many life-saving drugs, by extending big pharma corporations' monopoly rights for such drugs to 10 years, meaning they can block cheaper generics for that long, and folks shouldn't die before the altar of "intellectual property," particularly when big pharma all too often can't develop drugs without massive taxpayer investment. Don't think you have to accept big pharma monopolies to get the destruction of the ISDS system, because you are the boss of your government and you don't have to take any guff -- if you make your voice heard. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell our government to cut the big pharma monopolies out of the USMCA agreement.

Meanwhile, you may recall that the 2017 tax "reform" bill opened up the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR) to oil drilling. But H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, would simply repeal that section of the tax "reform" that permits drilling in ANWR. You might be able to recite all the good reasons we shouldn't drill in ANWR: that we're likely never going to get very much oil from ANWR anyway, that the porcupine caribou and the Gwich'in people who rely upon them merit the protection of the law, and that oil drilling in that region always carries with it the threat of air and water pollution, particularly in a region of the world that's rather difficult to clean up. And what are the arguments on the other side? "We needed Lisa Murkowski's vote on the tax bill" and "CEOs should have every opportunity to make more unearned money and everyone else be damned." Not that impressive, is it? So the Alaska Wilderness League helps you tell your House Reps to protect the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge by passing H.R. 1146.

Finally, the Fifth Circuit overturned the Department of Labor's fiduciary responsibility rule back in June. You remember the fiduciary responsibility rule, right? The one that would have required that retirement fund advisors put their clients' interest before their own? Naturally the new Administration fought that tooth and nail, since they believe all regulations that actually protect people from financial predators are bad. So now this Administration's Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) is making up new fiduciary responsibility rule -- and naturally the banksters love it! The SEC's proposal doesn't require retirement advisors to put their clients' interests first, nor does it crack down on the kinds of sales incentives that tend to prompt advisors to put their own interests first; common sense tells us a strong proposal would do these things. Hence Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our SEC to protect good Americans' retirement funds by creating a fiduciary responsibility rule with teeth.

Around the table: starring the usual cast of right-wing whiners and Democrat weaklings.

You should read Bess Levin every day, though you don't need her to tell you that our Administration's 2020 budget is a "next-level horror show" -- though, then again, maybe you do need her to help you confront the extreme BS coming from yet another "acting" member of this Administration, acting OMB Director Russ Vought, who thinks it's some kind of achievement for a President to "attempt to tackle the debt within eight years." "Attempt"? Really? I guess our President wants a participation trophy.

Uh oh: Administration claims that forces allied with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro set an aid convoy on fire, but video evidence shows that an anti-government protestor did it, although apparently by accident. I was going to say "and there's yet another reason this Administration isn't as bad as Tha Bush Mobb," but then I remembered that Tha Bush Mobb couldn't get Mr. Maduro's predecessor, Hugo Chavez, out of office even after literally staging a coup. Other Administration claims about Mr. Maduro burning food and medical aid have also changed subtly upon being confronted with contrary evidence. I bet we didn't see any of that on the TV news, though.

Did you know there was a "debate" over whether payday lenders gouge people? According to NPR, there is, and it's a debate that appears to have our CFPB, a handful of payday lending corporation spokeshacks, and literally one person who used payday loans on one side, and the rest of us on the other. If NPR is too "liberal," as inattentive folks often say, then it must be a Robert Frost kind of liberal -- you know, the liberal who's "too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel."

White Pennsylvanian man puts up a billboard that says "whites have rights too" and calls possibly every politician of color he knows a "racist," then says he really only meant to "start a dialogue." "I just wanted to start a dialogue" is, as you know, the whine that emanates from everyone who talks without thinking, and did you notice he talked about how much he cares about "how you stand for my flag" and then corrected himself to say "our flag"? I sure did. All together now: waaaaaaaaah.

Finally, Rahm Emanuel gives his fellow-Democrats and us uppity liberals "advice" about how to beat our President in 2020 I won't tabulate my objections to Mr. Emanuel's piece, since they number approximately one per point made, but I will say this: nearly 100 million Americans didn't vote in 2016; what if even one-tenth of them are waiting for a Presidential nominee who might actually, you know, do stuff that helps people? The candidate who captures them will be unbeatable, "socialist" or not.

Action: concerning government spying, internet freedom, paycheck fairness, and the minimum wage.

We learned last week that (per the House Minority Leader's own national security advisor) our National Security Agency (or NSA) hasn't used the PATRIOT Act's Section 215 bulk phone data-collection program in six months. And the result of this serious inaction was a cascade of nesting 9.11-size terrorist attacks, right? Well, not exactly -- particularly since the Section 215 program has actually never thwarted a terrorist attack, which you wouldn't find surprising if you thought about the whole needle-in-a-million-haystacks nature of combing through all those phone records. Rep. McCarthy's spokeshack quickly said that his co-worker doesn't speak for Congress or the President, but that wasn't exactly a denial, and the program has, frankly, always been an invasion of privacy as well as an offense to law and order. Hence Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to promote freedom by letting the Section 215 bulk data-collection program expire.

Meanwhile, you've been hearing about all those fake net neutrality bills various Congressfolk have been flogging, the ones that would pretend to restore net neutrality while still letting big telecom corporations censor and throttle your data, but the Save the Internet Act (for which Congress.gov has no bill number at this writing) would repeal the FCC's net neutrality repeal of 2017, prevent them from just issuing another one just like it, and restore the 2015 Open Internet order that codified strong network neutrality principles into law. Don't believe the haters who say well, the internet ain't that much different than it was before, is it? Nobody expected the big telecoms to start censoring your favorite websites the day after the net neutrality repeal became law; freedom dies in degrees, because otherwise folks would notice its absence. Hence both Free Press and the Electronic Frontier Foundation help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Save the Internet Act.

In other news, the House may vote on H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, early this week; the Paycheck Fairness Act would toughen penalties for employers that pay their female workers less than their male workers without having a bona fide good reason (like differing skill levels, education, or experience). I thought for a moment I should just type that whole sentence again, in case someone wants to leap in with EVERYONEZ IZ TEH DIFFERENTZ!!!!!, but really, there's no need -- trolls are gonna troll no matter what you do. The Paycheck Fairness Act would also add some more teeth to the Fair Labor Standards Act by preventing employers from using wage history as a criterion for considering employment, and I trust you can see why: because employers can keep women underpaid by refusing to hire them based on their long history of being underpaid! So Moms Rising helps you tell your House Reps to help close the wage gap between women and men by passing the Paycheck Fairness Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Reps to help working families by passing H.R. 582/S. 150, the Raise the Wage Act, then Social Security Works still helps you do that. The Raise the Wage Act would, as its title suggests, raise the minimum wage to $15/hour from its current $7.25/hour over the next five years, and would raise the minimum wage for tipped and disabled workers to the same level as all other workers after six years. After all, you wouldn't want employers to suddenly convert all their workers to "tipped" workers (or even figure out how to call them "disabled"!) merely to avoid the minimum wage. Hey, if I thought of it, I'm sure they have. Don't consider that a reason not to pass the Raise the Wage Act, because then you would hold yourself hostage to whatever imagined emergency opponents could come up with next. And anyone who thinks these wages would be "onerous" for small businesses clearly can't imagine workers spending their extra wages at small businesses.

Action: concerning H.R. 1, discrimination, war-making, and "national emergencies."

As you know, the House passed H.R. 1, the For the People Act, late last week; H.R. 1 would enact broad and far-reaching reforms in voting rights, gerrymandering, ethics, and campaign finance -- or it would, if Senate Majority Leader McConnell would hold a vote on it. But he won't, because, and I quote, "I get to decide what we vote on." He's wrong as usual -- if we get in his grill enough, and we get in his fellow Senators' grills enough, they'll hold a vote on it whether they like it or not. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to vote on and pass the For the People Act. Our Glorious Elites don't seem to understand that most Americans don't consider (for example) automatic voter registration "radical," or campaign finance disclosure "socialist," but folks like Mitch McConnell really believe that the richest people in America are the best people in America and should thus have all the say about everything. I guess it's just our terrific luck that we get a seminar every single day from our President about how little wealth has to do with character or talent.

Meanwhile, the Tennessee state legislature will take up HB 836 -- the so-called Child-Placing Agency Religious Freedom Bill, and with a title that clunky, you know it can't be good -- as early as tomorrow. HB 836 would let private adoption agencies refuse to place children with gay couples if it violates their "religious" "conscience" -- well, actually, the bill words it "written religious or moral convictions or policies," but that might be even worse! You can easily imagine adoption agencies refusing to place children with Unitarians, Jews, Catholics, agnostics, or atheists, when they should just concentrate on finding good parents. I guess the bill's supporters will argue that forcing agencies to put their bigotry in writing is some sort of major advance for civilization, but I'm such a churl I prefer that civilization advance by refusing to let some folks use their bigotry to deny other people their rights. Hence the Tennessee Equality Project helps you tell Tennessee state legislators to protect the rights of all their constituents by rejecting HB 836.

In other news, H.R. 1274 would repeal the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) that each of the last three Presidents have abused in launching military campaigns without getting the necessary declaration of war that our Constitution mandates. You may recall that last year Congress tried to repeal the 2001 AUMF but replace it with a far worse AUMF that would have let a President start military operations without getting Congress's permission at all, unless Congress acted to end those military operations within 30 days of their start. But H.R. 1274, which is a very, very short read at Congress.gov, simply repeals the 2001 AUMF. Far too many politicians will protest that repealing the AUMF "puts our troops in harm's way," but that's a most disgusting form of rhetorical hostage-taking, and anyway I'll tell you what puts our troops in harm's way: sending them off to fight wars without doing the due diligence our Founders commanded and our Constitution requires. CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to help restore law and order by repealing the 2001 AUMF.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass the "resolution of disapproval" that would reverse our President's "emergency declaration" which enables him to fund his vanity border wall, then Moms Rising, Public Citizen, and People for the American Way all still help you do that. Our President's vanity border wall is surely a totem of stupidity and hatred, but you don't need to feel some kind of way about immigration or refugees to oppose his "national emergency" declaration -- all you need to know is that our President said, out loud, in the presence of reporters, not even one calendar day after issuing his declaration, that "I didn't need to do this" but "I would rather do it much faster." Few, if any, words in the English language carry the connotation of "need" that "emergency" does, but I guess our President is bold enough to ignore the common meaning of common words. But we sure don't have to take his guff, and we also don't need to take the guff of Senators too cowardly to oppose a man who's so wrong so much of the time.

Around the table: concerning government spying, taxes, private prisons, "right to work," and "socialism."

Apparently now our government is tracking journalists and refugee advocates with a secret database run by the Department of Homeland (sic) Security (sic), which of course doesn't have the legal authority to do such things. A Customs and Border Protection spokeshack says they're targeting these folks because of alleged violence at the border in November, and how do you know that's bullshit? Because that wasn't what they told NBC7 a mere five days earlier. Tha Bush Mobb would have given us the bullshit explanation right away, which is yet another reason they're worse than this clown car of an Administration.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy offers "Fairness Matters," a chart book showing who pays state and local taxes these days. Long story short: lower-income working families pay a bigger share of their income in state and local taxes than the rich do, and states that call themselves "low-tax" because they don't have an income tax tend to fill revenue shortfalls with the kind of regressive taxes and fees that hit working families a lot harder. Some rich folks think that's the way it should be, because they think they're better than you. But they don't get all the say in America.

Here's some good news: big banking corporation JP Morgan Chase has announced it will no longer underwrite bonds and loans for private prison corporations. If you have agitated for this very thing, go reward yourself a Buffalo chicken cheese steak, or what you will. (Also, too, you think this might have had something to do with Rep. Ocasio-Cortez's call for oversight hearings on the relationship between banksters and private prison corporations? Of course it did, and there's another lesson in the importance of pushing to get people in office who'll do good, rather than merely settle for people who won't literally burn down your house.)

Kenawha County (WV) judge rules that West Virginia's "right to work" law actually violates workers' First Amendment rights to free association. It's similar to the Dane County (WI) judge's decision against Wisconsin's "right to work" law in 2016, which the Republican-dominated state Supreme Court reversed because of course they did -- and, lo and behold, the Republican-dominated West Virginia state legislature is at this moment trying to impeach every member of the Democratic-leaning state Supreme Court. It's like they can't win unless they set everything on fire. Why do we, as civilized people, tolerate such insanity?

Finally, when you hear Sen. McConnell (D-KY) suggest that the now-passed-in-the-House For the People Act is a "radical" and "socialist" bill, you are reminded that all they can do now is call what they don't like "radical" and "socialist." And when Mob Boss Mitch has to call it that -- rather than farm out the remarks to some hungry youngster like, say, Tom Cotton -- that means the forces of evil are even more desperate. I'd call that good news, except that we all know what desperate people are like -- they're the kind of people who throw nukes at Venezuela and Iran to keep power.

Action: concerning antibiotic abuse, corporate taxes, family separation, and H.R. 1.

Penn PIRG helps you to tell Burger King's CEO to eliminate antibiotic-dependent animals from his beef supply. Burger King is, as you know, the second-largest fast food chain after McDonald's, so if it gets the antibiotic abuse out of its meat, that'll have a tremendous effect on the market. But don't get swayed when the factory farms say things like we wouldn't want to stop antibiotic use in sick animals, because literally no one on Earth has called for that -- we have, rather, called for factory farms to stop using antibiotics to fatten up healthy animals, since that's where about four out of every five antibiotics we use in America go, and that makes antibiotics less effective and infections more resistant. Certainly don't get swayed by arguments asserting that your meat will be too expensive if you cut the antibiotic abuse out of the supply chain. Our descendents will not be sitting around a campfire musing well, the next cut you get on your hand will kill you now, but boy was the meat cheap for a while!

Meanwhile, Demand Progress's latest email missive begins: "You probably have more money in your wallet right now than what Amazon will pay in corporate income taxes this year." Amazon, as you may have heard, will pay zero dollars this year, out of over $11 billion in profits, and given that they just pulled out of building a second headquarters in New York City despite getting $3 billion in corporate welfare from the state of New York, that's not good PR for them. Hence Demand Progress helps you tell Congress that corporations like Amazon must pay their fair share of taxes. Note well that the recent Republican tax "reform," though it slashed the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, ain't the whole problem here, since Congress has been handing out welfare to corporations for decades. Remember, also, that when corporations say they can't do research and development without these handouts, that research and development are expenses and thus already tax-deductible. What a shame I have to say that out loud.

In other news, H.R. 883/S. 271, the Families Belong Together Act, would essentially grant lawful permanent resident status to those families whom our Administration separated at the border. Feeling a little wary about that? Well, our Administration says it's just too hard to put children back with the parents from which they've separated them, so granting those children and those parents permanent resident status in America is just about the only way to have a fighting chance at fixing what our Administration broke. And note well that if someone you know is still banging the BUT TEH CHILDZ TRAFFICKURZ!!!! drum, note well that Sec. 2(1)(B) would actually exclude those children or adults from the possibility of getting permanent resident status if the Department of Homeland Security proved in court that "the parent or legal guardian was unfit or presented a danger to the child." So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to restore some basic human decency to the immigration process by passing the Families Belong Together Act.

Finally, the full House will vote on H.R. 1, the For the People Act, today; as we've discussed, H.R. 1 would enact a series of necessary reforms in voting rights, gerrymandering, campaign finance reform, and ethics. So you'll want to call your Reps and tell them to vote "yea" on H.R. 1; tools for finding your Reps' phone numbers are, as always, in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone). Good luck and God bless.

Action: concerning a Wall Street tax, Medicare drug price negotiation, and consumer protection.

S. 647, the Wall Street Tax Act, would impose a miniscule tax on Wall Street trading -- a 0.1 percent tax, to be precise, which amounts to 10 cents for every $100 of trading. To review: that's a 0.1 percent tax, or one-tenth of one percent, not "1 percent" or "10 percent," "liberal" media! Personally I'd go for the 1 percent, because that's the hardest one to lie about, but even a 0.1% tax on Wall Street trades would net us almost $80 billion annually, more than enough to pay for, say, state and community college education for all citizens, or a water infrastructure rebuilding program. These would be investments in the American people, not "investments" in gilding the plumbing in some CEO's 19th vacation home. Hence Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to invest in our future by passing the Wall Street Tax Act.

Meanwhile, H.R. 1046/S. 377, the Medicare Negotiation and Competitive Licensing Act, would a) let Medicare negotiate drug prices on behalf of our seniors, and b) let Medicare manufacture a particular drug if it's not able to negotiate a fair price on said drug. Even if a big pharma corporation has exclusive rights to that drug! Maybe we ought to manufacture our own drugs and just cut out the big pharma middleman entirely, but in the meantime, this bill, if it becomes law, ought to reduce drug prices dramatically -- by some $85 billion annually, according to a study done by a Koch brothers-affiliated institute. Yes, I said "Koch brothers"! And yet our President blunders on, insisting that Medicare is the "real price-fixer" just because a bunch of big pharma CEOs told him to, when Medicare is literally prohibited by law from negotiating drug prices! CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support lower prices by passing the Medicare Negotiation and Competitive Licensing Act.

Finally, Rep. Waters (D-CA) has introduced the Comprehensive Consumer Credit Reporting Reform Act (Congress.gov has no bill number as of this writing), which would (among other things) ensure that any paid/settled medical debt doesn't show up on your credit report, give you a year to resolve complex medical bills before they show up on your credit report, and prevent credit reporting corporations from mixing up your credit info with someone else's. In a world where one out of every five credit reports contain errors of some kind, Ms. Waters's bill would go a long way toward preventing credit errors from ruining your life. What is the right's answer to that? That corporations should be protected from "frivolous" lawsuits exposing their mistakes and the damage they cause to real people? Don't laugh, because that was the Republican answer to the Experian identity theft scandal in 2017. Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect consumers from credit report errors by passing the Comprehensive Consumer Credit Reporting Reform Act.

Action: concerning clean water, pollution, and internet freedom.

S. 611, the WATER Act, would finally provide funding for the upgrades our water infrastructure needs, and not just for the people in dry Southwestern states, or factory farm-polluted rural areas, or places where drinking water just got outright contaminated like Flint, MI. Fact is, our government hasn't properly invested in upgrading our water and sewer infrastructure for decades -- you know, because right-wingers say government should only funnel taxpayer money to corporate cronies, and never do anything that actually helps people! -- and the WATER Act would be a step in the right direction, by allocating $35 billion annually to water/sewer investment. Where's the money going to come from, you ask? Well, I can think of more than a few defense-related boondoggles that could provide the money, and more than a few tax hikes on the rich that could provide the money, but the WATER Act would close corporate tax loopholes to fund the upgrades. Hence Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to support clean, safe water by passing the WATER Act.

Meanwhile, our government is short an Interior Secretary, as you know, after former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke rode out (maybe not literally this time!) on a wave of investigations into possible corruption on his part; our President dutifully installed his number two man, former fossil fuel lobbyist (heard this tale before?) David Bernhardt, as his acting Interior Secretary, and now he's nominated Mr. Bernhardt as the permanent (as permanent as they get with this guy, anyway) Interior Secretary. (Gosh, that was an awful lot of parentheticals. Some folks just demand snark.) Anyway, you probably know the drill by now: just as former fossil fuel lobbyist/Jim Inhofe lackey Andrew Wheeler was a bad choice for EPA Administrator (the Senate confirmed him anyway, boo Senate!), Mr. Bernhardt is a bad choice to administer our public lands, since we know he'll administer them on behalf of fossil fuel corporations and not on behalf of, you know, the public. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Senators to reject the nomination of David Bernhardt as Secretary of the Interior.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject a trio of so-called "pro-net neutrality" bills (H.R. 1006, H.R. 1096, and H.R. 1104), then Free Press still helps you do that. For many years now, net neutrality has been popular across the ideological spectrum, and why not? Conservatives hate being told where they can go on the internet just as much as liberals do, after all. And net neutrality is so popular that not only did the FCC resort to calling their anti-net neutrality regulation "Restoring Internet Freedom," but right-wingers in Congress have for years routinely introduced supposedly "pro-net neutrality" bills that, just like these three new ones, let corporations censor content and block and throttle websites and forbid the FCC from ever regulating the internet as a public utility again. Which makes them, right, not "pro-net neutrality." But your Congressfolk may need reminding of the difference.

Action: concerning H.R. 1, the Mueller investigation, and being behind on your rent as a "felony."

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Reps to vote for H.R. 1, the For the People Act, which would enact reforms in the areas of voting rights, redistricting, and campaign finance, then NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby, provides a toll-free number, 1.888.496.3502, with which you may call your Reps. (Alternately, you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page, or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a cellphone.) H.R. 1 would essentially codify a lot of good bills we've supported in the past into law. These bills include the Voting Rights Advancement Act (which would plug the hole our Supreme Court blew into the Voting Rights Act), the DISCLOSE Act (which would mandate disclosure of the identities of big donors), the Fair Elections Now Act (which would create a public campaign finance system), and the Redistricting Reform Act (which would make states redraw Congressional districts via more independent redistricting commissions). All these reforms are worthwhile, so let's get to calling our Reps.

Finally, People for the American Way helps you tell our Justice Department to publicly release the findings of Robert Mueller's Special Investigation into possible collaboration between our President's 2016 campaign and certain foreign individuals. I've never been very focused on Russia, partly because the ideas we support here transcend partisan politics and particular politicians, but mainly because once we tell law enforcement to do its job, it's up to law enforcement to do its job. But certain members of our Administration seem reluctant to account for their works to their bosses, the American people, and we must discourage such reluctance at every opportunity -- particularly when even GOP House Rep/notorious Administration stooge Devin Nunes (R-CA) says that disclosure of the results of investigations into alleged Clinton Administration wrongdoing set a precent for disclosure of this investigation. And it's really, really not a good idea to fight against accountability to the people.

Meanwhile, did you know that, in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, you can get hit with a felony charge of "criminal theft" if you fall even one month behind on a rental payment? Because of big corporate reluctance to hire folks and/or pay them enough to live on, anyone who pays bills these days knows how hard it is to make ends meet, and you don't need a felony charge hanging over your head when you're trying to figure out how much of the rent you can pay while still making some progress on that electric bill. Those of you who think everyone should just pay all their bills all the time should honestly account for how often you've been able to do that yourself -- and then you ought to fight for bills like the Raise the Wage Act that would give more people the ability to meet their bills. Hence the ACLU helps you tell your Pennsylvania district attorneys to stop putting people in jail for the "crime" of being poor. Regardless of what pop culture might tell you, nobody "chooses" to be poor.

Action: concerning Medicare-for-All, pro-discrimination bills, and the minimum wage.

H.R. 1384, the new Medicare-for-All health insurance bill, currently has over 100 co-sponsors in the House; you always have to wonder how many of them have signed on in order to sabotage it, but that doesn't change our duty to tell our Congressfolk that we want a single-payer, Medicare-for-All health insurance program in America, as Public Citizen (as well as many other good government groups) helps you do. Certainly don't believe the like that three-quarters of Americans like their health insurance just the way it is, because you can be pretty sure that those folks haven't had to use their health insurance recently (or perhaps aren't, at present, among the approximately one-in-three Americans who've had cost-related problems getting health care in the last year). And certainly don't believe a Medicare-for-All program would cost TEH 32 TRILLYUNZ!!!!, because everyone who beats that drum forgets to tell you that America will spend $49 trillion on health care in the same period. After all, haters gonna hate, and haters don't get all the say around here.

Meanwhile, the Tennessee state legislature plans to consider HB 1152, a bill that would let private adoption agencies discriminate against potential parents based on that agency's "religious" views, which should irk you if you think kids deserve good parents first and foremost, and should irk you some more if you're wondering exactly how a thing (like an adoption agency) can have "views" about anything. What about the religious views of gay folks who want to adopt a child who doesn't have a family? Not nearly as important as the "religious views" of a corporation that would facilitate such an adoption, according to HB 1152. This is about folks hating gays, certainly, but don't forget that it's also about some folks thinking that rights are only for the "right" people, not for "little people" like us. Hence the Tennessee Equality Project -- which has been beating back anti-gay legislation in that state for years -- helps you tell Tennessee state legislators to abandon their efforts to encode discrimination into state law.

Finally, Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 582/S. 150, the Raise the Wage Act. You know the deal: folks who made $2/hour in the late '60s actually had a stronger minimum wage than we do now at $7.25/hour, because of a little thing called inflation -- what cost $2 in 1969 now costs well over $13 now, so clearly $7.25/hour hasn't been keeping up. And you also know what John Boehner always pretended not to know: that people aren't going to just cut minimum wage jobs if they have to pay their minimum wage workers more, because they're generally the kinds of jobs you can't just "cut," and when minimum wage workers have more money in their pockets, they don't just make ends meet and get ahead a lot better, they also put more money back into the economy. Why, you might even say that a higher minimum wage makes all of us richer. That argument won't impress people who spend all their time trying to make CEOs richer. But they don't get all the say about everything in America, either.

Around the table: describing a couple of false alarms about Medicare-for-All as well as some instances of Our Glorious Elites acting badly.

We shouldn't be surprised that Medicare-for-All has lost some support as those politicians who've only recently come out to support it don't know how to answer basic questions about it, but check out the Wall Street Journal's statement that "net support" for Medicare-for-All has fallen among registered voters in polling from 30% to 12%. What is "net support"? "Net support" is a figure you get by subtracting opposition from support in poll numbers, meaning that 12% more voters support Medicare-for-All than support it -- and it's also a figure you trot out if you want to associate Medicare-for-All with a much smaller number than, say, the number of voters who actually support it, since that number's just about always above 50%. You might even call it a "scare number," since people use it so they can scare you into giving up the fight.

And here's a news item that helps explain the previous one: the day Rep. Jayapal introduced the new Medicare-for-All bill, stocks in health insurance corporations dropped by almost five percent. You need to be ready for right-wingers telling you that "yet another reason" we can't have Medicare-for-All is that it'll cause "too much havoc on the markets." Worse, you'll need to prepare for a Democratic President we settle for (who is not to be confused with the ones we might fight for) saying the exact same damn thing, and thus insuring nothing but continued Democratic electoral losses at the federal, state, and local levels.

Former Maine Gov. Paul LePage says getting of the Electoral College would effectively keep white folks from becoming President anymore, which is fitting, coming from the fellow who always strutted around like everybody voted for him but who only won two terms (with 37% and 48% of the vote, respectively) because a third-party candidate drew a lot of support. It's also fitting that he struts around openly defending "white people" when he undoubtedly experienced hate from other Maine residents due to his Franco-American heritage. Remember, good peoples: don't forget where you came from, because you don't want to be like Paul LePage.

Ho hum, our President says he was "misinterpreted" after saying that he accepted Kim Jong-Un's assurances that the latter simply "didn't know" about the late Otto Warmbier's treatment while detained in North Korea, despite his original comments (the ones that provoked the Warmbier family into speaking out) existing on tape. I guess it really would kill him to admit he's wrong about something, but of course that isn't a demonstration of strength, as his votaries seem to think; it's a demonstration of weakness. Strong people can admit they're wrong, make amends, and move on. Our President can't. What a role model.

Finally, dig Sen. McConnell (E-KY) trying to blame the imbroglio in North Carolina's 9th Congressional district (where the election fraud perpetrated by a Republican operative was so pervasive that they have to do the election over) on Democratic refusal to support Republican vote-suppressions schemes. Of course Mr. McConnell (I watched his little speech so you wouldn't have to!) mischaracterizes complaints about Republicans' vote-suppression efforts as a "lack of concern" about vote suppression, and of course we all knew sooner or later Republicans would step up and claim that only they could stop the voter fraud they seem to be the ones getting caught doing. But am I being too optimistic to note that, once again, it's Mob Boss Mitch delivering a message better delivered by a junior Senator looking to make his bones?

Action: concerning "national emergencies," the death penalty, and national monuments.

As you know, the House has passed a "resolution of disapproval" which would nullify the "national emergency" declaration that our President is using to build his vanity border wall; now the resolution goes to the Senate, which by law must vote on it within 18 days, hence Moms Rising, Public Citizen, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass the resolution. You may want to remind your Senators that our President said, out loud, in the presence of reporters, that he "didn't need" to declare a "national emergency" but did so because he wanted to build his vanity wall "faster." You may also want to remind your Senators that tantrum-throwers shouldn't get their way, just like their mamas taught them. A few Republican Senators have already said they'd support the resolution, but not Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, who has said our President was wrong to declare a national emergency over the Southwest border but says a "resolution of disapproval" is too "partisan" for him to support. All together now: waaaaaaaah! If Beto O'Rourke is contemplating another Senate run, he might consider this an opening.

Meanwhile, the state of Alabama plans to put an intellectually-disabled man, Rocky Myers, to death for murder, so the ACLU helps you tell Gov. Kay Ivey to grant clemency to Mr. Myers. The problems with Mr. Myers's impending execution don't end with the cruelty of putting a man to death who doesn't understand what's about to happen to him, of course -- in fact, if you've followed death penalty cases at all over the years, the additional problems will be all too familiar to you: a suspect with zero history of violence before his capital murder charge, the complete absence of forensic evidence establishing his guilt, conflicting testimonies given at his trial, a judge who overrode the jury's finding that life in prison would be a better sentence, a juror who referred to Mr. Myers with a racial epithet. Even death penalty advocates will tell you that putting someone to death is something you really ought to get absolutely right the first time, since there are really no takebacks. So let's all encourage Gov. Ivey to do the right thing here.

Finally, you recall that our President has lopped off big parts of the Bears Ears National Monument, apparently because a) Barack Obama created the monument and our President must urinate all over anything Barack Obama ever did as President and b) because a few fossil fuel corporate cronies would benefit from being able to drill on these lands. Well, along comes H.R. 871, the Bears Ears Expansion and Respect for Sovereignty Act, which would re-expand the Bears Ears monument to its former size, and CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support public lands by passing the Bears Ears Expansion and Respect for Sovereignty Act. The "Respect for Sovereignty" part comes from the fact that five Native American nations share in the management of Bears Ears, which makes five Native American nations whose rights our President completely ignored when he slashed the size of Bears Ears. There's some controversy, of course, over whether our President can even legally slash the size of a national monument. But why not settle the matter with H.R. 871?

Action: concerning our Estate Tax, the quality of mercy, and robocalls.

S. 309, the For the 99.8% Act, would lower the threshold at which estates would face the Estate Tax from $11 million to $3.5 million -- which is still high enough that it won't ensnare any family farms or small businesses -- and would create several new brackets so that larger estates face a higher tax rate. In other words, Republicans would repeal the Estate Tax entirely, while Sen. Sanders would raise it on the wealthiest estates -- gosh, it's like a Goofus and Gallant strip. And the Estate Tax is most emphatically not a "death" tax, or everyone would pay it; currently only 1,900 folks pay the Estate Tax annually, comprising less than one-tenth of one percent of all the folks who die in a given year -- meaning that the next time you're in a room with a thousand zombies in it, you might not be able to see the one zombie who paid the Estate Tax. Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to support fair taxation by passing the For the 99.8% Act.

Meanwhile, you know about "banning the box," in which employers stop asking (via that ubiquitous box on job applications) if potential employees have a criminal record, so that folks who've already paid their debt to society can more easily get jobs and make a contribution to society. But you may not know that some District Attorneys have pledged to expunge the criminal records of folks who've served time for things those DAs won't prosecute anymore, like marijuana possession charges. In the event your right-wing uncle protests that these DAs are essentially imposing unconstitutional ex post facto laws upon us, you can remind him that American jurisprudence only forbids ex post facto laws that make punishments for crimes worse than before. Certainly you'd be hard-pressed to imagine our Founders actually intending to outlaw mercy. Color of Change helps you tell America's DAs to automatically expunge criminal records for those good folks who deserve it.

Finally, the technology already exists to stop scammers from "spoofing" phone numbers so you think the call's actually coming from your bank, power company, or loved one, and our FCC has already said they actually think corporations should use this technology, but naturally our FCC has a certain attitude toward government's role in a "free" market, to the point where they want phone corporations to be "free" to voluntarily install this technology before the end of the year, which leaves criminals "free" to continue to try to steal your money in the meantime. How many times must I tell these pimps! Corporations don't do the right thing until you make them! They say "doing the right thing" just costs too much money, but that's not even true -- doing the right thing might cost the boss some money, but the boss probably already makes too much money. Hence Consumer Reports helps you tell our FCC to help protect consumers by forcing corporations to stop "spoofed" robocalls.

Around the table: unexpectedly with more political analysis than usual.

House passes "resolution of disapproval" aiming to nullify the "national emergency" declaration our President has used to fund his vanity border wall, but with only 13 Republicans joining virtually the entire Democratic caucus, which means the House doesn't have enough to override a veto. The resolution might pass the Senate, too, with at least three Republicans saying they'll vote for it at this writing, but squeaking to a 51-49 victory won't override a veto, either -- which means it'll probably die in court, at approximately the moment a judge contemplates an emergency that the President himself said he "didn't need" to declare, but declared anyway so he could build his vanity wall more quickly.

Let's not get too anxious about Gallup's finding that "Conservatives Greatly Outnumber Liberals in 19 U.S. States," not just because the most "conservative" states tend to be the least populous (New York state, for example, has a higher population than Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and South Carolina combined) but mainly you're asking people whether they think of themselves as "conservative" or "liberal." For instance, how many of these self-described conservatives support Medicare-for-All health insurance, which our "liberal" media constantly tells us is a "far-left" position? Given the majority-to-supermajority that Medicare-for-All gets in most polls these days, quite a few.

Poll finds more Democratic and Democratic-leaning partisans wanting their party to move in a "moderate" direction than a "liberal" direction, which you'll find as meaningless as I do if you're invested less in the direction of some political party and more in the direction of our country. You'll find it even more meaningless when you find that close to six in 10 Republicans and Republican-leaners want their party to move in a more conservative direction, like they all enjoy all the swordfighting their standard-bearers have been doing over "who's more conservative."

Some pundits think that Texas Sen. John Cornyn (R) would have an easier time beating Beto O'Rourke (who hasn't yet declared his intentions for any 2020 race) than Ted Cruz did, because the "spread" between Mr. Cornyn's favorable and unfavorable ratings is larger than Mr. Cruz's in a Quinnipiac poll. I say they're wrong. First Read doesn't spell out that Quinnipiac has Mr. Cruz's favorable rating at 51%, much higher than Mr. Cornyn's 43%, which tells me that Mr. Cruz is the more formidable opponent despite his unfavorables (40% to Mr. Cornyn's 26%), because people would always prefer to vote for someone. Mr. Cornyn will skate to victory anyway if Democrats don't nominate someone people want to vote for; perhaps Mr. O'Rourke would have the best chance at simulating such a person.

Finally, the estimable Nathan J. Robinson at Current Affairs advises us to "Ignore All Arguments About What Is 'Politically Feasible.'" If you were as sick as I was of hearing Democrats refuse to do anything bold because of the "landscape" -- they were talking about the "landscape" when they had a Democratic President, a Democratic House, and a filibuster-proof Senate majority, you recall! -- you'll find this article quite sympathetic, even though its truths ("predictions tend to assume that the range of possible outcomes today is going to be the same tomorrow," "(e)ven from a purely pragmatic and compromising perspective, aiming low is irrational") transcend particulars. But you'll also find it sympathetic if you've been watching Republicans consistently ignore what's "politically feasible" and win.

Action: concerning war in Venezuela, food stamps, and pollution.

H.R. 1004 is, like a lot of recent anti-war bills, quite simple: it would prevent our President from spending any money on military force in Venezuela unless specifically authorized by Congress, as mandated by our Constitution and the War Powers Act. Too often, over the years, Congress has just rubber-stamped anything our President wanted to do overseas; perhaps the ascension of a clearly unqualified individual to the Presidency has galvanized Congressional somewhat. But if something bad were to happen in the world, you know this newfound resolve would dissipate -- unless we demand otherwise. Hence Just Foreign Policy, Roots Action, and Win Without War all help you tell your Congressfolk to restrain our President from wanton war-making in Venezuela by passing H.R. 1004. Even if you support yet more American interference in Venezuela -- which sure didn't work out in our government's favor in 2002, amirite? -- you can still urge your Congressfolk to do it the right way. We have laws for good reason, after all.

Meanwhile, our Department of Agriculture has proposed some nefarious changes to our food stamp program; they would restrict the number of Americans who would qualify for food stamps, and hamstring states' ability to grant waivers for those restrictions. Citing the low U1 unemployment rate and the growth in GDP kinda misses the whole point of food stamps -- it's supposed to be there for the folks who need it. Hence when Agriculture Secretary Purdue says it "belies common sense" that three quarters of Americans on food stamps weren't working in 2016, well, actually, the opposite is true. It's a shame that we have to spell this out to anyone. It's also a shame that we don't fully understand, as Americans, that we all pay into the system with our taxes and that any of us might need it at any time, if bad fortune befalls us; thus it's not a "handout" but insurance. So Moms Rising helps you tell our USDA to abandon its efforts to make food stamps less accessible to those who need it.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our EPA to abandon its efforts to roll back regulations protecting us from mercury emissions from power plants, then Environment America still helps you do that. Mercury is a powerful neurotoxin, and as such can do serious developmental damage to children; it used to be enough of a problem that just about every state in our great union warned against eating the fish you fished out of your local lake or stream, such was the problem with mercury contamination from coal plants. Of course, our incoming EPA Administrator is a former coal lobbyist, and our President often seems to think coal CEOs are his one true constituency. Would that he were even as good a boss as a coal CEO! I could fault coal CEOs for their greed and their inability to change with the times -- I can't believe coal CEOs simply never had the money to broaden their portfolio to include renewables -- but our President certainly takes greed and shortsightedness to a whole new level. That doesn't mean we have to, though.

Action: concerning taxes, domestic violence, and patent trolls.

Both Moms Rising and Americans for Tax Reform help you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2017 "tax scam." The Moms Rising tool also helps you tell your Congressfolk to strengthen the Earned Income Tax Credit (or EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (or CTC), since these are tax credits that actually help working families make ends meet, or even get ahead. Unlike all those corporate tax loopholes Congress loves waiting until the end of the year to extend because they know they're too unpopular to extend at any other time! But the 2017 tax "reform" -- which more and more Americans, however accurately, now regard as a "tax scam" because they're not getting as much back at tax time as they did in previous years -- not only gave us near-trillion-dollar deficits, but handed out welfare to corporations and rich folks. They say the wealth will trickle down to us "little folks"; I say something's trickling down, but it sure ain't wealth.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act already. Yup, they let it expire again, just like they did in 2012, but at least then they got hung up over stupid crap; this time, they let it expire because, you know, why bother governing when you could be posturing? The Violence Against Women Act has done America a great deal of good -- before Congress passed it in 1994, domestic violence survivors generally thought they were at fault for what happened to them, and most Americans agreed; now, at least, most folks will keep their victim-blaming to themselves, and blame the attackers for taking out their insecurities on their partners. This is no small thing, helped by the many programs (including the National Domestic Violence Hotline) VAWA has created. But we've got more work to do, and the Violence Against Women Act helps us do that work, so let's get to it.

Finally, you've heard of "patent trolls," who patent relatively common pieces of software and then sue anyone who uses that relatively common piece of software as part of a considerably more innovative product, thus cowing such actual innovators into giving them money for not actually doing any work. Naturally, the U.S. Patent Office -- in the Administration of the President who has, more than any other American, excelled at conning folks into giving him money for not doing any work -- wants to make it even easier for patent trolls to operate. Such is our Administration's blind hatred for regulations, particularly regulations that actually help good Americans. So the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell our Patent Office to apply, not narrow, our Supreme Court's decision in Alice v. CLS Bank, which held that you can't just patent any old thing because you can now do it on a computer.

Action: concerning H.R. 1, the war on Yemen, and discrimination.

As you probably know, Sen. McConnell (E-KY) won't hold a vote on H.R. 1, the For the People Act, whenever it passes the House (with more than half of House members as co-sponsors, you'd have to imagine they'll pass), so Common Cause helps you demand that the Senate hold a vote on the For the People Act after it passes the House. You might also do well to call Mr. McConnell and demand that he allow a vote; his D.C. phone number is (202) 224-2541; you can find phone numbers for his Kentucky offices if you scroll to the "Office Locations" section of his Senate website. It's not enough to win the argument with a bill that would improve voting rights and campaign finance reform in America -- we have to be in their grills every day, because that's the only thing that gets their attention. We got in their grills over health care and they utterly failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act despite having all the advantages. We get in their grills the same way over H.R. 1, and they'll have no choice but to pass it. We can do that; we need but act.

Meanwhile, H.J.Res. 37, the War Powers Resolution that would end American involvement in the war on Yemen, passed the House by a 248-177 vote; the "yea" vote included at least a dozen "Freedom Caucus" members, meaning it only took about eight years for the Tea Party to earn a very small part of its reputation for foreign policy iconoclasm. H.J.Res. 37 now goes to Senate, where the companion resolution -- S.J.Res. 7 -- has one Republican co-sponsor, Mike Lee of Utah; the Senate approved a similar resolution last year by a 56-41 vote, but they took that vote when they knew it would do no good; they'll only approve it now if we demand it, and if our President vetoes it, then we'll just have to get after them again for the override. So use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a cellphone) to call your Senators and tell them to vote to end our logistical and weapons support for the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen.

Finally, the Tennessee state legislature plans to take up HB 563 this week; HB 563 would prevent Tennessee state and local governments from enacting policies against corporations that discriminate against certain populations (i.e., gays) for "religious" reasons. Its supporters call it the business anti-discrimination bill, which is to laugh, since it essentially prevents governments from doing anything about businesses that discriminate! Folks who think governments should be able to refuse to provide taxpayer funding to organizations that participate in the BDS movement in re Israel and Palestine really have no business supporting HB 563, since HB 563 would prevent governments from doing the same thing to businesses that discriminate against gays. Of course, rageheads don't care about consistency, but if you do, you can let the Tennessee Equality Project help you tell Tennessee state legislators to reject HB 563, the "Business License to Discriminate" bill.

Around the table: another reminder that you, good citizen, are *not* "far left."

Amihal Glazer at The Conversation reminds us that New York City ought to be glad Amazon pulled out, given the failed promises of job creation other corporations have made to other states and localities. Let's see: there's GE vs. Boston, GM vs. White Marsh, and Foxconn vs. Wisconsin, plus a few dozen studies demonstrating that corporate welfare does not, in fact, reliably lead to either higher job creation or increased tax revenues, and now you know another reason that poll finding that most New Yorkers approved of the deal isn't particularly instructive -- the poll essentially asked whether $3 billion for 25,000 jobs was a good trade, but what if you don't even get the 25,000 jobs? Foxconn promised Wisconsin 13,000 jobs and now is looking for an out after creating a total of 178 jobs.

Ho hum, CNN anchors call Medicare-for-All and the Warren wealth tax "very far left" and "far left of center," despite these proposals getting majority and even supermajority support in polls. I've been saying this for over a decade now: what Our Glorious Elites call "extreme," you and I call popular. Funny how that works. Remember that when they tell you Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or Sherrod Brown can't win because they're "too far left."

When we confront the fact that our "liberal" media can't seem to identify austerity policies as the cause of misery in Europe even when the evidence stares them in the face, we are reminded that Greg Palast taught us that the whole point of a one-continent currency is to prevent any one country from stimulating its economy by printing more money, which (again) suggests that Greece would do better to leave the EU than Britain would (the U.K., you recall, has been using the pound the whole time it's been in the EU!).

Now here's an interesting headline: "FBI Scientist's Statements Linked Defendants to Crimes, Even When His Lab Results Didn't." And then we read about "image analysis," and how it's not as scientifically sound as it's cracked up to be on, say, The X-Files. Would it be too harsh to call Richard Vorder Bruegge, who has "single-handedly built a body of case law that has kept the FBI unit's testimony admissible in the courts," the Andrew Wakefield of image analysis? Why, it's even possible that Mr. Vorder Bruegge has done more harm, and given all the otherwise intelligent people Mr. Wakefield has helped convince to stop immunizing their kids, that's saying something!

We learn that our Administration's Labor Secretary once cut a deal to get a billionaire sex-trafficker off light without telling any of the sex-trafficker's victims. For the QAnon crowd, of course, this news is just more proof that our President is that much closer to smashing the worldwide child sex abuse ring that is his putative reason to exist -- I'm sure there's a lot of he put Acosta close to him so he could draw out his evil! on the message boards as we speak, though I'm not going to make sure. Again, this is why we leave our President's votaries to God.

Finally, Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo wonders "What's the Point" of our President's new climate change panel -- you know, given that our President just ignores everything he doesn't want to hear anyway. It's a valid question, but I don't think it's just "a sort of global owning the libs" -- maybe our President really wants government-approved legitimacy for what he already wants to do, so he can claim he really "drained the swamp." Sooner or later he's gonna have to give an example, after all, and all the clean air and clean water regulations he's actually failed to change won't be enough.

Around the table: our Supreme Court does a good thing, plus a lot of other people do bad things.

Our Supreme Court unanimously rules that states and localities must adhere to our Constitution before they can indulge in asset forfeiture shenanigans. To be sure, their ruling won't end asset forfeiture, but it will give defendants a way to argue that seizing their property without being able to convincingly tie them to an actual drug funding network violates our 8th Amendment protections against excessive fines. Maybe one day we'll be able to get our Supreme Court to recognize that seizing property without convicting someone of a crime is itself an excessive fine, but the arc of history surely bends toward justice even when it looks less like an arc and more like a plank.

I'm not sure saying that our "liberal" media have been busy lately "erasing" the positive effects of the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela gives us the whole picture, because it sure seems to me that our "liberal" media have never acknowledged these gains! The Chavismos have definitely reduced poverty, illiteracy, malnutrition, and even racism; does that make it OK for the late Mr. Chavez to have demanded (and received) "rule-by-decree" power in 2000 and 2007, for example? No, of course not. But painting the works of the Bolivarian revolution the way our "liberal" media do sure doesn't tell us the whole story, and not least because they all forget to mention U.S. sanctions on Venezuela as the main contributor to Venezuela's economic woes.

Another day, another report showing big corporations getting hundreds of millions of dollars in tax rebates despite making hundreds of millions (or billions) in profits. And another day, another "expert" asserting that corporations should never pay more taxes than they owe because they're supposed to please their shareholders, when the issue is actually that we don't make them owe enough in the first place! Seriously, that statement has almost everything I hate about right-wing argument in it -- the gaslighting, the changing of the goalposts, the tacit admission that they can't win on the merits.

Surprise, surprise, our President talks tough about stopping migrant smugglers while undermining actual efforts to do that. Typical. To be sure, this state of affairs results (at least in this Administration) from overzealousness in one area (deportation) resulting in neglecting another (attacking smuggling rings), but when a man spends so much time talking about how super-awesome he is, you do tend to be less forgiving of his faults, and who could blame you? Besides a ragehead, that is.

When you encounter a poll indicating that Sen. Mitch McConnell's poll numbers are seriously underwater just 20 months before he goes before the voters again, you may remember we were at this point in 2013, also, and he went on to paste his opponent -- you remember his opponent, Alison Lundergran Grimes, the one who refused to say whether she voted for Barack Obama for President? Lesson: if Democrats won't put up someone people will want to vote for, then Mob Boss Mitch will cruise to another term, no matter how little Kentuckians seem to like him.

Finally, with his Administration's own climate change assessment and intelligence community having the temerity to tell him things he doesn't want to hear, our President is putting together another climate change panel, to be headed up by an unregenerate climate change denier who has said -- sit down for this one! -- that the "demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler." Just like! Remember how we kicked carbon dioxide out of our schools, segregated it into its own ghettoes, boycotted and vandalized its shops, made it wear yellow Stars of David, and then froze its property and assets when it tried to leave for other lands? When they say a little learning makes a man dangerous, this must be what they mean.

Action: concerning "free" trade, recycling, and net neutrality.

As you may know, our Administration's new trade pact with Mexico and Canada, the USMCA, would dramatically curtail the use of the hated "investor-state dispute settlement" (or ISDS) system that allows foreign investors to nullify our clean air, clean water, and labor laws. But the USMCA also extends monopoly rights for new medicines, which essentially gives big pharma corporations a massive welfare handout. It also keeps drug prices high, which causes people to stay sick and die -- if you don't believe me, contemplate the diabetics who respond to the high cost of insulin by rationing it, and sometimes die as a result. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to demand that the USMCA eliminates these handouts to big pharma corporations. Don't let big pharma's but-how-can-we-find-new-treatments-if-we-can't-make-obscene-money excuse sway you -- not just because research is already a tax-deductible expense, but because they're really protecting their executives' "right" to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home.

Meanwhile, Philadelphia residents, take note: you've been dutifully separating your recyclables from your trash for years now, right? Well, thanks largely to incompetence, your city has lately sent about half of your recycling as trash to incinerators for a few years now. (Don't get distracted by reports of "contamination rates" -- or the rate of dirty items or trash items in recycling bins -- being a little over 19% in 2017, not just because 19% ain't close to 50%, but because waste management corporations process those items out as part of their contracts.) Most of the city's excuses don't wash -- they complain they can't get long-term waste management contracts in an industry that actually desires long-term waste management contracts, for example -- but they've made a promise to us, one that we've paid taxes to maintain, no less, and whining about how difficult it is to deliver on your promises is not the American can-do spirit. So Penn Environment helps you tell Philadelphia's Mayor and City Council to fix the city's recycling program.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject three so-called "pro-net neutrality" bills circulating through Congress, then Free Press still helps you do that. Net neutrality, as you know, is the principle that you should get to determine where you want to go on the internet, without some big corporation having the ability to herd you into some junk news ghetto, and thus internet service providing corporations should deliver all internet traffic with the same urgency, rather than prioritizing some traffic over others. And you know how reasonable that all sounds, unfortunately, by the number of bills pretending to uphold its principles while actually destroying them! The bills in question -- H.R. 1006, H.R. 1096, and H.R. 1101 -- would let corporations slow down traffic and censor other traffic, and of course they'd also prevent our FCC from ever regulating net neutrality again; if that doesn't sound like net neutrality to you (and it shouldn't!), then get with your Congressfolk right quick.

Action: concerning nuclear weapons, pollution, and paid family leave.

Our Administration plans to withdraw from the INF Treaty, which has kept intermediate-range nuclear missiles from proliferating for over 30 years, and at least one result of that, the latest email missive from Just Foreign Policy reminds me, is "yet another corporate welfare gravy train entitlement for the Pentagon-industrial complex," and I count at least three instances of turning right-wing tropes against the right wing in that phrase alone. But a "corporate welfare gravy train entitlement" will result if and only if Congress funds said gravy train, hence H.R. 1249, which would prohibit spending on any weapons that would violate the treaty, and which its main sponsor, Rep. Gabbard (D-HI), says she'll force a vote upon if it gets enough support. Hence Just Foreign Policy and Change.org help you tell your House Reps to stop our President's efforts to nullify a treaty that's done us, and the world, a considerable amount of good by passing H.R. 1249.

Meanwhile, our EPA will be taking comments until March 25 on its nefarious plans to roll back mercury pollution standards from power plants. It's like they've never heard the phrase "mad as a hatter," or know that it derives from the use of mercury in hatmaking, or know that mercury causes serious developmental disabilities in children, or know that mercury used to be so prevalent in our fish that just about every state told its citizens not to eat local fish! It often seems, in fact, like our Administration doesn't know anything about anything except how to cripple our government's ability to work on the people's behalf. That being said, our EPA is at least aware that they have to take public comments on its regulatory proposals (or, should I say, anti-regulatory proposals), and Penn Environment helps you tell our EPA to protect our health, rather than executive bank accounts, and leave mercury standards the way they are.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to create a real paid family leave program in America by passing S. 463, the FAMILY Act, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. The FAMILY Act would fund 12 weeks of paid family leave for all workers (including part-time and self-employed workers) from an 0.4% payroll tax, half borne by the employer and the other half borne by the employee. Thus a worker making $50,000 annually would pay $100 annually, or less than $2 per week, for the peace of mind of knowing that they'll still be able to pay the bills if they have to take a few days off to care for sick kids or sick parents. That's certainly better than Sen. Rubio's profoundly offensive plan to pay for family leave by using future Social Security benefits! Seriously, if you love freedom, and believe that a lifetime of hard work ought to earn you a dignified retirement, you have no business supporting such a noxious idea. The FAMILY Act is far, far better.

Around the table: more tales of corruption, lies, and cowardice from our political class.

You already know our current Administration is, shall we say, ethics-challenged, but the Campaign Legal Center's complaint describing several Department of Interior appointees giving inside info to their former employers may still shock you -- particularly when you recall that this Administration's own ethics pledge requires appointees to refrain from communicating about specific policies with former employers for two years. And then there's the part where an Interior official actually meets with a Koch-affiliated group about two lawsuits the group had filed against Interior -- one of which got settled in a manner said group found very satisfying. Our President would probably call that "deal-making," but the rest of us would call it corrupt.

This article alleging that liberals may have committed a "gaffe" by "scaring" Amazon out of New York City should strike you as a skimpy article given that five of the article's seven-only-seven paragraphs have nothing to do with the Amazon deal. And if the poll finding that a majority of New Yorkers (including a supermajority of black and Latinx respondents) approved of the deal gives you pause, click through to the poll's crosstabs and find that the Amazon question only discussed tax breaks and job creation, when objections to the Amazon deal also included Amazon's general propensity to destroy small businesses wherever it goes and its pointed refusal to let its New York workers unionize.

FiveThirtyEight provides a useful public service by telling us exactly where every Republican Senator stands on our President's "national emergency" declaration. At this writing, eight Republican Senators oppose it, 15 more have "doubts," and we've got some, ah, surprises in the undecided column, including Arkansas's Tom Cotton, who's never seen a wave of anti-immigrant hysteria he didn't like, and Arizona's Martha McSally, whom you'd think would have a more settled opinion about the matter just due to her home state. Naturally, these folks saying they oppose it or have "doubts" about it is a long way from doing something about it. I bet Kentucky's Rand Paul, for example, votes to block it at approximately the moment he figures out it'll make no difference either way.

Our Administration's nominee for U.N. Ambassador, former Fox News talking head/State Department spokeshack Heather Nauert, withdraws from consideration for the job "in the best interest of my family" after Bloomberg reports that Ms. Nauert once hired a nanny who didn't have proper authorization to work (though she was in the country legally). And then Secretary of State Pompeo pushed her right out the door; gosh, he sure learns quick! Sadly, other Administration possibilities for the post seem to have even bigger problems than Ms. Nauert had, and the one person who would likely sail through Senate confirmation (who is, that's right, currently the "acting" U.N. Ambassador) seems not to be a favorite of the Administration. Maybe Lindsey Graham can recommend someone.

Oh, but our Administration isn't the only organization hiring TEH BESTEZT PEEPULZ!!!!!: CNN has hired a Republican spokeshack with approximately zero journalistic experience to "coordinate" their 2020 campaign coverage. Which provides us with yet another useful reminder that just because Our Glorious Elites look like they're fighting doesn't mean they're actually fighting! And don't make any hay out of the fact that our President supposedly "hates" her, for the same reason.

Finally, buried deep in this Philadelphia Metro piece describing a study finding that getting rid of cash bail for more than three-fifths of criminal charges has not actually resulted in mass rapes by zombies is the notion (voiced by a reporter, apparently) that getting rid of cash bail might cause the murder rate to spike. Yes, the murder rate in Philadelphia has gone up lately, but seriously, does anyone think to themselves well, I wasn't going to murder anyone today, but now I might, because folks who get arrested for pissing in public don't have to post bail anymore? But that's the right-wing mind, where literally anything they don't like can be said to cause literally anything else they don't like, and to hell with reason, or even persuasion.

Action: concerning the war on Yemen, toxic pesticides, and family separation.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to end our involvement in the Saudi/UAE war/humanitarian crisis in Yemen, then Amnesty International still helps you do that. Close to 11 million good Yemenis stand on the verge of famine, and plenty of other countries have cut off their arms sales to Saudi Arabia because of that, but our President yells that "(t)he world is a dangerous place!" (exclamation point in original) and thus justifies any and all evils in which we might be complicit. I'm sure I'll hear from a few cynics that other countries don't have the "responsibilities" we have, and can thus more easily do the right thing with regard to Yemen. To that I could only say how often such cynics seem to regard the most powerful country on Earth as completely powerless. If we can't use our power to demand more civliized behavior from our allies, then why have power at all? Really, power without good works is useless.

Meanwhile, the EPA recommended a ban on the pesticide chlorpyrifos back in 2015, but then a certain very damaged individual unexpectedly ascended to the Presidency, and he decided that all regulations that protect our health are evil because they prevent some CEO, somewhere, from gilding the plumbing in his 19th vacation home. Hence H.R. 230, the Ban Toxic Pesticides Act, would force the EPA to ban the sale and use of chlorpyrifos, including chlorpyrifos residue on food. Scientists have linked chlorpyrifos with brain damage in children and various autoimmune disorders, among other ills; indeed, the EPA banned chlorpyrifos for home use back in 2001, and that was Tha Bush Mobb's EPA, for frack's sake. Why not for agricultural use, then? I'm sure they'd say "less exposure per capita," but that's unconvincing if "less exposure" still makes us sick. Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ban Toxic Pesticides Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase to "break up" with private prison corporations, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. Investing in prison privatization is bad enough -- I'm old enough to remember when governments actually took care of government functions! -- but investing in prison privatization that aids in our Administration's efforts to separate immigrant parents and children is far worse, and you would think that big banksters like Wells Fargo and Chase would want to avoid all the bad PR that comes from investing in that. And we should absolutely "break up" with banksters that invest in evil crap, and encourage others to do the same -- at least until our Supreme Court finally rules that telling others to abandon big corporations isn't free speech but "terrorism" of big corporations. Don't laugh -- if I thought of it, you know they have.

Action: concerning unlawful detainment, the school-to-prison pipeline, and Social Security.

The government of South Sudan arrested Peter Biar Ajak in July after he criticized that nation's government, which I'm sure are two completely unrelated events, though South Sudan hasn't exactly been helpful in clearing that up by detaining and utterly failing to charge him with something for six months. Didn't they do the extra reading for Totalitarianism 101? You're supposed to manufacture a bunch of BS charges when you arrest political enemies -- "insulting the leader," "undermining security," like that. Mr. Ajak's life should be a movie -- he came to America as a refugee, one of the "Lost Boys" of South Sudan in 2001; he settled in Philadelphia, attended LaSalle and then Harvard, and was about to finish his Ph.D. in philosophy at Cambridge, but now he's in South Sudan's notorious "Blue House," kept from contact with his lawyers and loved ones (including his wife and children). Sounds like some country's got something to hide, and the Big Stick of Bad PR can beat it out! Change.org helps you demand that South Sudan release Mr. Ajak.

Meanwhile, Color of Change helps you tell New York Mayor Bill deBlasio to stop using heavy-handed police tactics in public schools, including arrests and summonses. They must have thought that being "tough" on schoolkids would "scare them straight," but it doesn't -- it actually makes it more likely that those kids will go to jail again and again when they're adults, and surprise, surprise! Black and Latinx kids are the ones more likely to find themselves in the "school-to-prison pipeline." Turns out having a police officer serve a summons to you in school is not the kind of thing that gets young people to trust police officers! You've no doubt seen smartphone-captured video of police bodyslamming students in classrooms, and you may have wondered why that was ever necessary, particularly after learning that most of the time police come to school to settle decidedly minor disputes. If you want school to teach folks to be civilized again, getting police out is one step.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 1170/S. 478, the Social Security Expansion Act, then Social Security Works still helps you do that. Our Glorious Elites constantly act like privatization and cutting benefits are the only ways to keep the promise of Social Security -- which is, to review, that all Americans who work their whole lives and pay into the system deserve to enjoy a dignified retirement -- but we know, likely because our livelihood doesn't depend on not knowing, that we could lift the cap on payroll taxes so that income over $132,800 can be taxed into the system, and we also know that we could expand benefits thereafter so we can create, shall we say, a more perfect retirement for Americans. And who would oppose that? Folks who think that only folks with money should continue to have money, that folks with money are somehow better than the rest of us? Well, this is America, and they don't get all the say around here.

Action: concerning expanded democracy and "national emergencies."

First things first. H.R. 1, the For the People Act, would enact a series of reforms in voting rights, redistricting, campaign finance, and ethics. You may know it as "the bill that would make Election Day a national holiday," but H.R. 1 would do a great deal more than that. Among many other things, it would plug the hole our Supreme Court blew in the Voting Rights Act by empowering our Judiciary Department to go after states and municipalities when they suppress voting rights. H.R. 1 would also create redistricting commissions for every state, so that state legislators wouldn't be able to gerrymander districts toward the benefit of one party or the other, and H.R. 1 would also create a public campaign finance system and shine sunlight on big campaign donors. All of these things will help good Americans participate more in the democracy that belongs to them and should work on their behalf, so when Mob Boss Mitch or his ilk call it a "power grab," just remember that these folks have spent their lives engaging in actual power grabs. Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to support democracy by passing H.R. 1.

Meanwhile, our President has declared a "national emergency" at the border so he can get the money to build his vanity border wall there, and he has already shot himself in the foot by saying, out loud, to reporters, that he "didn't need" to declare such an emergency but just wanted his little wall "done faster." The courts will probably suspend or strike down his order shortly, but that ain't enough for this loser: the American people should also rise up and squash his "national emergency" like a bug, so Public Citizen, CREDO, and Amnesty International all help you do that. Congress can do that by passing a "resolution of disapproval" which would nullify our President's little Executive Order, but far too many of them are far too cowardly to do it without the people lending steel to their spine. Also, if you want to join a "President's Day Protest" against this "national emergency," then MoveOn, CREDO, and Win Without War help you find one near you; protests will occur at noontime today. This "national emergency" doesn't just insult our democracy, it insults our intelligence, and we should let our President know we won't let his insults stand.

Finally, in a related note, we should also send a message to the corporations thinking of building this vanity border wall for our President that maybe there'll be a PR price to pay if they do that, so Sum of Us helps you tell Nissan to cut ties with contractor W.G. Yates and Sons if the latter won't abandon its efforts to build this vanity wall. You know, it's just occurred to me that if some Nissan spokeshack responds well we can't know what all of our contractors are doing, then maybe the correct response is I just told you! Not even if you can't know things like this about your contractors maybe you're doing business wrong -- just I just told you! Although, truth be known, if they can't keep track of such things, then at the very least they need to hire more people to do that -- or accept that they're just too big to be allowed to survive in a civilized society. How often do you or I get away with "I can't keep track of everything" in our daily lives? Not nearly as often as big corporations do, I can assure you. And we should try to put a stop to that.

Around the table: tales of corporate welfare and political folly.

Amazon scraps plans to build a second headquarters in Queens after facing fierce backlash over its planned collection of some $3 million in corporate welfare in order to build there. Folks who support the growth of Amazon's tentacles seem to have a hard time understanding that giving the biggest, richest corporation on the planet more money so they'll build there is the height of absurdity. Also, too, Amazon kills small businesses wherever it goes, so why would you want it in your hometown? Because you literally can't imagine a way to "create jobs" besides giving the rich even more money?

In a related note, Amazon doubled its profits to over $11 billion in 2018 and paid zero dollars in income taxes. Because of the aforementioned corporate welfare and executive stock option tax breaks, which argues for outlawing stock options as well as anything else does. Also, too, why do corporations need all these tax breaks when they don't pay taxes on their expenses to begin with? They don't pay taxes on the money they pay workers, either, because it's an expense, for frack's sake. If we taxed them as hard as we did in the '50s, they'd create jobs right quick.

Not even a full calendar day goes by before our President says, out loud, to reporters, that "I didn't need to do this" ("this" being "declare a national emergency over his vanity border wall") but "I would rather do it much faster." I can't even see Chief Justice Roberts rubber-stamping this reasoning -- I mean, if you don't "need" to declare an "emergency," how is it an "emergency"? Of course, you have to consider that maybe our President wants this effort to fail, so he can keep diddling the rage glands of his votaries all the way to re-election. No, his votaries won't remember that he shot himself in the foot, although that is always the risk when you "shoot from the hip." Or, you know, from wherever.

This may surprise you: McClatchy interviews with over 30 Democratic strategists reveals widespread fear that a Joe Biden Presidential campaign would fail, with one saying he'd be "a significantly weaker candidate than Hillary." Naturally, some Biden dead-enders see such widespread fear as evidence he'd be a great candidate! There's an elephant in this room, of course: being Barack Obama's Vice President for two terms makes him part of the problem, that problem being power rotating between malicious Republicans and weak Democrats, and a lot of voters are fed up with all of that. It'll be quite the learning experience for quite a few Democrats, not just Mr. Biden, when primary voters won't simply flock to "the candidate who can win." I mean, look where voting for "the candidate who can win" got America in 2016. (Hate to pile on, but maybe the reason Evan Bayh lost in Indiana in 2016 isn't that Democrats can't "bring back voters who haven’t backed Democrats in years," but that voters are generally sick of frauds like Evan Bayh.)

Finally, South Bend, IN Mayor Pete Buttigieg -- who, like 293 others, is running for the Democratic nomination for President -- says the epithet "socialist" has "lost its ability to be used as a kill switch on debate" and says folks today would rather know if a potential solution works than whether or not it's "socialist." I'd like to think he's right about all of that, but he definitely won't be right if we don't point out -- every single time it happens -- that folks throw the word "socialist" around when they can't win arguments on the merits.

Action: concerning Social Security, conservation, and paid family leave.

The Social Security Expansion Act (for which Congress.gov has no entry at this writing) would lift the payroll tax cap so that Social Security can tax income over $132,900 into the system. That would allow Social Security to expand the benefits it pays and meet the budgetary shortfalls that might afflict it decades from now should wages never, ever go up again. If your right-wing uncle bellows about liberals always wanting to spend money and never telling you where it comes from, remind him that lifting the payroll tax cap describes exactly where the money's going to come from. If he then objects that rich folks should therefore get six-digit Social Security checks every month when they retire, remind him that Social Security's objective is to ensure that all Americans can retire with dignity, not so that some retirees can buy a new Rolls Royce every month. Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to help more good Americans retire with dignity by passing the Social Security Expansion Act.

Meanwhile, to my amazement, the Senate has passed S. 47, a giant public lands bill that (among other good works) just so happens to reauthorize the Land and Water Conservation Fund forever, by a staggering 92-8 margin. Let's not go praising the Great God of Bipartisanship, though, because I'm pretty sure the fact that we have been agitating for a more permanent Land and Water Conservation Fund for several years (Congress let it lapse in 2015 and then let it lapse again late last year) has a significant amount to do with the Senate's good work here. So now the bill goes to the House, and you might think it's not a big lift to remind your House Reps that the Land and Water Conservation Fund gave us some of our most iconic public landmarks, but you never really know with these politicians, do you? Someone could get a bee in their bonnet that they can hold this popular bill hostage to some obscure lump of poison they've been trying to enact for years, so the Wilderness Society helps you tell your House Reps to pass S. 47 and protect the Land and Water Conservation Fund forever.

Finally, Sen. Gillibrand has reintroduced S. 463, the FAMILY Act, which would create a national paid family leave program in America -- you know, like the ones nearly every other nation on Earth have! Being without a paid family leave program is not something to shout WE'RE NUMBER ONE!!!! about, after all. The FAMILY Act would provide for 12 weeks of paid family leave for all Americans -- whether it's because they're sick or they need to care for someone in their family who's sick -- and would pay for it with a minuscule payroll tax of four-tenths of one percent, half paid by the worker and half by the employer, such that a person making $50,000 annually would only pay $100 annually toward the program. And if your right-wing uncle says there won't be enough people working to pay into the system to sustain it, remind him to look at the phrase "12 weeks" again; that leaves 40 weeks (and usually more!) to pay into the system. So Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to support working families by supporting the FAMILY Act.

Action: concerning transparency, drug prices, and the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve.

You remember how reporting on the Standing Rock protests exposed police abuses? Well, North Dakota's state legislature is going to fix that! SB 2209 would restrict public access to state records relating to "critical infrastructure," which of course would include the Dakota Access pipeline that prompted all those protests and all that police brutality in the first place; the state Senate has already passed the bill, and now the state House is mulling it. And here you thought these legislators would want their bosses, the good people of North Dakota, to know what's going on with their "critical infrastructure"! A few legislators say it's all about "cybersecurity," but if it were, you have to wonder why so many more legislators aren't running with that; it sure looks like they're just trying to ram a bad bill through without anyone knowing about it. But you can call North Dakota House leadership using this page; just click on a member and get their office phone number. And call legislators from both parties, because this is a bipartisan mess.

Meanwhile, H.R. 1046, the Medicare Negotiation and Competitive Licensing Act, would let Medicare negotiate drug prices on behalf of its recipients. You may recall that when Congress created the Medicare Part D drug benefit during Bush the Lesser's first term, they forbade Medicare from negotiating for better drug prices, because BIG GUMMINT!!!!!, and you may also recall how little the Obama Administration talked about Medicare drug price negotiation during the Affordable Care Act process. But if you understand how much negotiating power Medicare would have -- negotiating on behalf of some 44 million Americans, most of whom are seniors, who are (as you might imagine) the biggest consumers of prescription drugs by far in America -- you also see that such power could help bring drug prices down, by almost $85 billion annually, so says even the Koch brothers-funded Mercatus Center. Hence both Social Security Works and Public Citizen help you tell your Congressfolk to support Medicare drug negotiation by passing H.R. 1046.

Finally, the Bureau of Land Management (or BLM) plans to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR) to oil and gas drilling, which of course we've been fighting to prevent for decades, not just because the ANWR is a unique wilderness, but because scientists tell us there won't be that much oil to get out of it to begin with! Luckily for us, the BLM must take public comments on the matter before proceeding, hence Penn Environment helps you tell our BLM to keep oil and gas drilling out of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. Is it worth it to try, you may ask? I wouldn't blame you for asking, since this Administration really doesn't seem to care about the people's will at all. The answer is yes, you should try, not just because doing the right thing is always better than doing the wrong thing, but because if enough of us speak out against it and our BLM fails to do our will, we might be able to nail them for law-breaking in court. Indeed, that's all that's stopped this Administration's pro-pollution agenda so far.

Action: concerning war on Yemen, family separation, and clean water.

The House may vote this week on our involvement in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen, and Stop the War helps you tell your House Reps to vote to end our involvement in that war. Call me old-fashioned, but I don't think we do very much good when we interfere in other nations' affairs, and I would rather we declare wars the Constitutional way than let our Presidents do whatever they like. Too many good Americans are afraid of what'll happen if we don't, but is it really American to make so many decisions based on fear? Particularly when one could more easily argue that those same decisions actually help bring about the terrorist attacks we fear? The history of the world over the last century or so is the history of big nations trying to plunder small nations for their resources, and we've sadly been one of those big nations. But we could be an actual big nation by taking care of business here in America and then dealing with other nations on a more equal footing.

Meanwhile, Moms Rising helps you tell big banking corporations Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase to stop financing private prisons for detained immigrants. This Administration loves privatizing everything and causing harm to diddle the rage glands of its votaries, so we're putting pressure on big banks to do the right thing. Luckily, big banks could use all the good PR they can get, after all, and refusing to finance our Administration's family separation policy sure would give them some good PR. In signing this petition, you would also be pledging to "break up" with Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase and encourage others to do the same. If you long ago moved your banking to credit unions (and why haven't you done that yet? You won't find the membership requirements as restricting as you might think!), you can still encourage others to do the same. And you can avoid that Chase or Wells Fargo ATM next time you see it.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell our FDA to stop food producing corporations from using contaminated water on their crops. Congress mandated back in 2011 that the FDA set limits on bacterial contamination in irrigation water, but of course they haven't gotten around to actually setting those limits yet, and though this Administration's executive agencies do love to stall, fact is the Obama FDA wasn't any better on this matter. And what happened during all this delay? Two E.coli outbreaks in Romaine lettuce this year alone! They were all over the news! Folks who argue that "this Administration really clamps down on needless regulations" should attend the fact that these are the regulations that keep you from dying of kidney failure from E.coli in your salad. And pro-business "moderates" should attend the fact that a corporation will never save more money by using contaminated water than the rest of us will spend in increased health care costs.

Action: concerning net neutrality, government shutdowns, and William Barr.

First things first. Three fake net neutrality bills just debuted in Congress, these being H.R. 1006, H.R. 1096, and H.R. 1101. Republicans have been pumping out "pro-net neutrality" bills for years, bills that pretend to protect your right to go where you want on the internet without worrying about being herded into junk news ghettoes by big corporations, but their bills are full of loopholes that would let those big corporations throttle traffic and block websites, and their bills also try to reclassify broadband so that our FCC can't ever regulate net neutrality again. So why these bills now? Could Republicans be a bit nervous that our FCC's 2017 net neutrality repeal -- you remember, the one where the FCC came out and said it ignored most of the public comments it got -- is about to die in court? Whatever the reason, Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject these fake net neutrality bills and fight only for the real thing.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our government to insure that federal contract employees, and not just employees who work directly for our government, also get back pay from our most recent government shutdown, then Moms Rising helps you do that. And if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our government you don't want either another shutdown or a vanity border wall, then a group of good-government organizations still helps you do that. Our government has already provided for back pay to public employees, but contract employees don't work directly for our government; they work for private corporations that have contracted with our government, so even though taxpayers pay them, their bosses won't -- unless we make them. Of course, if we just stood up to our President every time he had a tantrum over his vanity border wall, we wouldn't have these shutdowns in the first place. See? Fixing one problem fixes the other!

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject the nomination of William Barr as Attorney General, then the National Women's Law Center still helps you do that. Mr. Barr's career has been one long lesson in believing folks when they tell you who they are -- he has been quite public with his animus toward Roe v. Wade, the Affordable Care Act, and the God-given rights of LGBTQ folks in America. And that's in addition to all the other reasons we should oppose him: he thinks the President should have more power than the Constitution grants, he thinks our government should let more contractors rip off the public, he's been far too cagy about whether he'll let the Special Counsel do his work, and he helped President George H.W. Bush pardon a crapload of folks who were neck-deep in Iran-Contra. If that doesn't sound like law-and-order to you, you need to tell your Senators with a quickness.

Around the table: legislators try to thwart the people's will, part 273.

Utah's voters approved a Medicaid expansion in November, so naturally state legislature are working to subvert their will via a scaled-back Medicaid expansion. With a bill that would be more expensive and cover fewer good Utahns, no less! I'm reminded that South Dakota's voters approved a campaign finance reform initiative at the polls in 2016 only to see their legislators repeal it in 2017. Legislators all over America seem to think they know better than their bosses, the people; I wonder how long the people will put up with that.

If, indeed, the "total mess" at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya really does turn into another Benghazi, don't expect our Congressfolk or our "liberal" media to take a critical attitude toward this Administration the way they did toward the Obama Administration. Certainly don't expect them to look into whether privatizing our security services at our embassies is really a good idea (spoiler alert: it's not), not when it's far easier to demonize workers striking over wage theft.

Our Supreme Court rejects an Alabama death row prisoner's request to be executed with an Imam at his side, because the prisoner took too long to make his request, or something. Alabama prisons employ Christian chaplains who can fulfill such requests for Christian death row prisoners, but the state claims having an Imam with a prisoner presents "unacceptable safety concerns," because of course they do. How many times must I tell these pimps! Everyone has rights! And yes it is civilized to allow even a man who raped and murdered an underage girl to die with a modicum of dignity! Doing so shows that we're a civilization worthy of outlasting our rapists and murderers! It's sad that I have to say any of this out loud.

This Venezuela coup must not be going so well, because now our Secretary of State says we're in Venezuela because Iranian terrorists have "active cells" there. But if that were significant, or even true, wouldn't we have heard about it weeks ago? Continually this Administration takes weeks to come up with these kinds of excuses for what it does, which I guess would be heartening, if our "liberal" media didn't just lap it all up.

Finally, Matthew Yglesias explains "Why Millions of People Are Getting Hit With a Surprise Tax Bill This Year," i.e., why folks aren't getting the refunds they've come to expect. Long story short: our federal government has withheld less tax money this year than in previous years years, which might actually qualify as a good work, though of course that wouldn't justify all the tax "reform"'s multitudinous evil works. But I still find it hilarious that the 2017 Republican tax "reform" stands to become even more unpopular by this April, and that this President may well go down in history as the one who "raised our taxes." It might even be as hilarious as the Obama Administration actually designing a tax cut so that good Americans wouldn't notice it.

Around the table: more stories of Republicans supporting all the wrong people.

Surprise, surprise, our Administration's CFPB has proposed slashing Obama-era rules regulating payday lenders. After all, who is more popular than a lender who traps you in a cycle of debt with 300% interest rates? Upon hearing that "(t)he industry feared the new regulations would force many of them to close their doors," I wouldn't blame you for reacting, we can only hope! That might also be an appropriate reaction if I were to suggest that the courts are probably going to strike down this new rulemaking process, too. (Nobody give me the "but where else will poor people turn when they need money" spiel. The U.S. Postal Service could do the job, as it did until the late 1960s, if Congress had the political will to allow it.)

America's Last Journalist, Greg Palast, informs us that "the so-called popular uprising" in Venezuela "is, at its heart, a furious backlash of the whiter (and wealthier) Venezuelans against their replacement by the larger Mestizo (mixed-race) poor." I don't know that the white supremacist in the White House thinks of any Venezuelans as white, but Venezuelans who count Europeans as their ancestors sure do, and they also think of Mestizos as lesser human beings, if they think of them as human beings at all. One hopes the Mestizos rise up and beat back this coup, as they did in 2002.

Our Supreme Court issues another stay of Lousiana's infamous anti-abortion law, while Justice Kavanaugh -- the only Justice to write about the stay, which of course he opposed -- busies himself trying to find the loophole that'll let our Court strike down the Texas law and let the nearly-identical Louisiana law stand. "Louisiana's four doctors getting hospital admitting privileges" ain't it, not when our Court also struck down Texas's law because it required abortion clinics to be "mini-hospitals," but that might not matter if our Court is bent on causing jurisprudential mayhem.

House Republicans have taken to spreading hysteria about violent crimes by undocumented immigrants, though by their logic we could just as easily cherry-pick 16 anecdotes from 16 Congressional districts over a 19-year period describing crime-by-citizens and justify building a wall to keep Americans out of America. Why, Rebecca Solnit provides five examples of white men committing murder and plotting terror in America just from the last two weeks of January, which by House Republican logic means we should build a wall to keep white males out of America. Oh, did I mention 16 crimes over 19 fucking years? It's like Republicans are trying to see how badly they can do science.

Finally, South Carolina police lobbyist and asset forfeiture defender actually comes out and says that, without the ability to forcibly take property from folks before they've been convicted of a crime, "what's the incentive to go out and make a special effort?" I'm old enough to remember when saying such a thing out loud would make you afraid to face your friends and neighbors; not so now in our sick, immoral and decadent society, where folks confuse cynicism with knowledge and think they're better than everyone else because they're more jaded than everyone else.

Action: concerning internet privacy, endangered species, and conservation funding.

You've heard all the news stories about social media corporations failing to protect our private information, and yet so many in politics would prefer that these corporations get to "police themselves"! When people screw up on the level that these corporations have screwed up, do we let them "police themselves"? Of course not! Hence Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass strong legislation protecting our private information online. That might seem like an uphill climb, particularly if you remember that our FCC did enact decent internet privacy regulations toward the end of 2016, only to see our Congress repeal those regulations in a "resolution of disapproval." Surely they've learned their lesson, right? We should never assume that our Congressfolk learn any lessons unless we've taught them those lessons again and again. But that's why we're here.

Meanwhile, Avaaz helps you tell our world leaders, in advance of a global wildlife summit, to add giraffes to the list of animal species the multilateral CITES treaty protects. Almost half a dozen African nations have already proposed adding giraffes to the protected species list, almost certainly because the world's giraffe population has gone down close to 40% over the last 30 years, putting them at risk of extinction. And a big reason their numbers are down? Illegal hunting, of course. Because giraffe steaks make good eatins for folks who might otherwise starve to death? Well, no -- because well-off folks like to hunt animals. Frankly I'm gobsmacked that anyone who's ever seen a giraffe would want to kill it for sport, and I'm even more gobsmacked when I hear testimonials from folks who've worked with giraffes and found them intelligent and gentle. I guess some folks are just that empty inside and need something, anything, to fill the void.

Finally, Congress still hasn't reauthorized the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which expired last September 30, and no all the shutdown drama is no excuse, not just because reauthorizing a popular conservation fund isn't exactly a heavy lift politically or logistically, but because this program actually pays for itself, via oil and gas drilling royalties. And you like the Delaware Water Gap? The Appalachian Trail? The Flight 93 Memorial? Well, the Land and Water Conservation Fund created all of these, and many more of our most popular and significant monuments. Of course, our current President only cares about the present -- certainly not the past, and certainly not the future. But those of us who do care about the past and the future can let Penn Environment helps is tell our Congressfolk to get off their duffs and reauthorize the Land and Water Conservation Fund already.

Action: concerning nuclear weapons, antibiotic abuse, and the minimum wage.

You've no doubt heard that our President has declared that he'll withdraw the United States from the famous Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (or INF), and we've already advocated against that foolish move. There is some doubt that a President can simply nullify a treaty, since it becomes law upon Senate ratification, but we can fight on other fronts, too, as both Roots Action and Win Without War help you tell your Congressfolk to stand for nuclear disarmament by supporting S. 312, the Prevention of Arms Race Act, which would prohibit funding of nuclear weapons banned by the INF. The bill would only allow funding and development of weapons that would violate the INF if our President jumped through at least seven flaming hoops (for example, he would have to prove that we simply have no INF-compliant weapons that could adequately defend our country); of course, our President's impatience with negotiating the finer points of law has already cost him virtually every significant effort to rewrite our clean air and clean water regulations, so if he interprets it as an outright ban, I wouldn't mind.

Meanwhile, Penn PIRG helps you tell pizza chain corporation Domino's to get antibiotic abuse out of its supply chain. Why Domino's? Same reason as "why McDonald's" -- because it's the biggest, and if it sources its meat more responsibly, others will follow. And Domino's has already committed to getting antibiotics out of its chicken supply; now it must follow with the meat we're all more likely to put on pizza, that being beef. In a land where seven out of 10 antibiotics go, not to sick people or animals, but to healthy animals so they can beef up (so to speak) and better endure the squalid conditions of factory farms, we have the right and the duty to attack the problem any way that'll work, and giving Domino's another good PR opportunity is certainly one of those ways. It is sad that we don't have a federal government that'll attack the problem, and that's been true regardless of which party runs things. But we're Americans, which means we're not prisoners of our government's inaction, either. So let's get to work.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 582/S. 150, the Raise the Wage Act, then Progress America still helps you do that. The Raise the Wage Act, as you know, would raise the minimum wage gradually to $15/hour over the next five years -- which right-wingers wailing about the "shock to small businesses" should duly note -- and would also raise the wages of tipped and disabled workers so that they ultimately achieve parity with the minimum wage for everyone else. The bill would also mandate annual increases to the minimum wage in line with increases in national median income, though it wouldn't allow the minimum wage to fall if median income also happens to fall. The current minimum wage of $7.25/hour, as you know, actually represents a wage cut from 50 years ago, when the $2/hour minimum wage actually had over $13.50/hour in contemporary purchasing power, so raising it to $15/hour not only wouldn't wreck our economy, but it would give our working families more of a fighting chance in making better lives -- the kind of fighting chance baby boomers had.

Around the table: Medicare-for-All won't kill the economy, and other lessons.

Dean Baker reminds us, once again, that installing a Medicare-for-All health insurance system is not going to break anyone's bank. In fact, upon hearing that corporations pay about $2,700 per citizen for private health insurance in America, that employer-side payroll tax looks even smaller (and, ah, those co-pays that have been coming out of your check might even stop coming out of your check). The main problem, of course, is that "we pay twice as much for everything," but with Medicare negotiating on everyone's behalf, we could bring a lot of those prices down. Better that than throwing up your hands or intoning the words "free markets" ad nauseam.

Aw, poor wittle Howard Schultz doesn't wike being called a "billionaire." I call you what you want to be called when you're part of a historically oppressed group, but no reasonable person would find billionaires "oppressed." And, seriously, "people of means"? Clearly I need to amend what I said the other day about Mr. Schultz maybe stealing more votes from Republicans than Democrats in a Presidential race -- I mean, sure, the super-rich might prefer Mr. Schultz to our President, and maybe convince a few other folks to do so, but "people of means" is a phrase guaranteed to offend Presidential votaries.

Netflix somehow made over $800 million in profits last year but paid zero dollars in federal taxes. Less than zero, actually -- they got a $22 million rebate. Nice work if you can get it! So whomever tells you that the Republican tax "reform" made it harder for corporations to get goodies from loopholes can explain how Netflix paid 13.6% on their profits over eight years and then paid a negative 2.6% rate the first year after the tax "reform" passed. BECAUSE TEH RATE IS LOWER STOOPID LIBRULZ!!!! is not the answer, not when they told us for years we could lower the corporate tax rate and close loopholes at the same time.

Surprise, surprise, our intelligence apparatus is starting to get sick of briefing our President, so often does he act like an entitled brat, and they've even stopped telling him things he doesn't want to hear, which admittedly doesn't look particularly courageous but then we haven't been banging our heads against the wall for upwards of two years. So I guess when terrorists attack, he'll just say THEY NEVERZ TOLDZ MEZ TEH THINGZ!!!!! But you know what we'll say? We'll say, you failed to protect our country.

Finally, and ho hum, our President squeals about TEH ILLEGULZ VOTINGZ!!!! by using statistics that don't tell anything close to the whole story. When Mr. President complained about "58,000 non-citizens voting in Texas," he forgot to add "over a 22-year period" because of course he did, and that's important, not just because Texas's lists of potential non-citizen voters hasn't actually revealed even one actual citizen non-voter, but because the lists certainly don't take naturalization into account, and over 180,000 folks became citizens in Texas between 2016 and 2018 alone. Also, Florida's Republican government tried to pull similar shenanigans in 2012, whining about TEH 180,000 ILLEGULZ VOTINGZ!!!, and then the number actually turned out to be "100." Which is, I feel compelled to remind you, 100 more than Texas's Republican government has found so far. But why wait for actual facts, when there are rage-addled votaries to be set off?

Action: concerning wealth taxes, animal trafficking, and paid family leave.

Sen. Warren (D-MA) has proposed an "Ultra-Millionaire Tax" aiming to tax not merely income but wealth, specifically the wealth of folks who have more than $50 million in net worth. The tax would be small -- a 2% tax on wealth between $50 million and $1 billion, and a 3% tax on wealth over $1 billion. That's two percent and three percent, not "20%" and "30%," "liberal" media! Two University of California economists estimate that the tax would raise $210 billion annually even though it's mere percentage points, and $210 billion every year could do a lot of good. The "Ultra-Millionaire Tax" proposal would also increase the IRS's budget (which should have been done, like, years ago) and would impose a sizable "exit tax" on folks who try to renounce their citizenship so they don't have to pay the wealth tax. Ms. Warren hasn't yet introduced a bill codifying these principles, but why wait? The tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) will help you call your Reps and Senators and tell them to support the Warren proposal to tax wealth.

Meanwhile, H.R. 864, the Wildlife Conservation and Anti-Trafficking Act, would turbo-charge wildlife trafficking enforcement in America, by incentivizing whistleblowers worldwide to report animal trafficking crimes, strengthening laws that go after traffickers, and dedicates all financial penalties toward wildlife conservation. Wildlife trafficking actually isn't an easy thing to go after, particularly in poorer areas of the world, so we should absolutely give folks more incentive to report these crimes. So I wonder what the far right in America will have to say about it. Actually, I don't: it'll be MORE TEH FRIVULUZ LAWSUITZ!!!! at one end and GOD GAVEZ UZ TEH ANIMULZ TO DOMINATEZ!!!! on the other, and while I do find Dominionist beliefs noxious, they're certainly not worse than the "frivolous lawsuit" crowd, who might better be described as the "protect unearned corporate CEO salaries" crowd. Anyway, the National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight animal trafficking by supporting the Wildlife Conservation and Anti-Trafficking Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to enact paid family leave in America by passing the FAMILY Act, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. If the FAMILY Act from this Congress is like past iterations from past Congresses, it would fund 12 weeks of paid family leave for all workers (including part-time and self-employed workers) from an 0.4% payroll tax, half borne by the employer and the other half borne by the employee. And again, "liberal" media, that's four-tenths of one percent, not "4%" or "40%." Journalists who get this kind of thing wrong should get fired! It's basic math! And here's some more basic math: if you make $50,000 annually, your contribution to the family medical leave fund, annually, would be $100, or not even two dollars a week. If some right-winger tells you it's too expensive to pay for family medical leave for everyone, just remind them that the cost of one cheap cup of coffee simply isn't a whole lot to ask for everyone to have the same peace of mind that workers in just about every other nation have.

Action: concerning our Estate Tax, voting rights, and government shutdowns.

Perhaps in response to Senate Republicans' latest push to abolish the Estate Tax entirely, Sen. Sanders has introduced S. 309, the For the 99.8% Act, which would actually reform the Estate Tax. S. 309 would subject estates worth over $3.5 million to the tax (the low threshold is currently $11 million thanks to the 2017 tax "reform"), and would not only bring back the 77 percent rate on estates over $1 billion, but would create several new brackets (for example, estates over $50 million would face a 55% tax) that would make the Estate Tax more progressive. These are all marginal tax rates, of course -- an estate worth $50,000,001 would only face the 55% tax on that last dollar, since it's the only dollar over $50 million. And no the Estate Tax doesn't kill family farms! People who tell that lie should be ashamed of themselves! Tools for calling your Reps and Senators are in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom, if you're on a cellphone).

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act, then Common Cause still helps you do that. If you've been hearing that "Mitch McConnell calls a bill proposing to make Election Day a federal holiday a 'political power grab,'" well, that's H.R. 1, and making Election Day a federal holiday is just one thing it would do -- H.R. 1 incorporates excellent (but sadly unpassed) bills like the Voting Rights Advancement Act, the Fair Elections Now Act, and the DISCLOSE Act, all of which have deserved our support in the past. Mr. McConnell should consider whether a federal campaign finance system is really a "power grab," or whether disclosing the names of big campaign donors in ads is a "power grab," or whether patching the hole our Supreme Court blew open in the Voting Rights Act -- a hole that's allowed a lot of vote suppression in America -- is a "power grab." I mean, the man whose entire career represents a power grab from the people really has no room to talk.

Finally, federal funding runs out at the end of next week, with our President threatening to declare a "national emergency" if Democrats won't give him his border wall funding, so Demand Progress (among other good government groups) helps you tell your Congressfolk that you don't want our government shut down over our President's vanity border wall. Our President will yell that he's "keeping a campaign promise" -- and that's the most generous thing I can say about his stubbornness -- but which is more important? Keeping a campaign promise that induced no more than 46% of the electorate to vote for you, or doing the people's will? Polling consistently shows a majority of Americans don't want our government to shut down again and don't want a border wall; it's really as simple as that. Of course, if you watch a lot of cable news, you're likely too conditioned to think in terms of "winners and losers" and "this is my team" to remember that a democracy is supposed to serve the people's will. Still, I'm happy to remind you of that, as often as you need it.

Action: concerning the war in Yemen, tampons in public schools, and tax credits for electric cars.

H.J.Res. 37/S.J.Res. 7 is the new War Powers resolution that would end our participation in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen; Reps. Khanna (D-CA) and Jones (R-NC) are the main cosponsors in the House, and Sens. Sanders (I-VT), Murphy (D-CT), and Lee (R-UT) are the main cosponsors in the Senate. The Senate passed a similar resolution late last year by a wide margin, but they did that knowing that the House would put the kibosh on it in their Farm Bill; since then Democrats have retaken the House, but when have you ever known Democrats to be significantly less deferential on foreign policy to our President than Republicans? Really, it is like they've all gotten this Constitution thing exactly backward: Congress is supposed to make war-related policy, while our President is supposed to execute that policy. You know, as the leader of the executive branch? Anyway, H.J.Res. 37/S.J.Res. 7 merits a phone call to your Congressfolk; the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) will help you find your Congressfolk's phone numbers.

Meanwhile, one Matthew Kirby, of Wilmette, IL, has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell our Education Secretary to require all public schools to provide free access to products like tampons and pads. Currently only three states provide that access, in a world where all girls of reproductive age need them, and they need them when they need them, too, and not only when they can get to the store or the house to get them. Don't be the one who says this is a slippery slope to free condoms in our schools! Do you see the words "free condoms" anywhere in that petition? No, you do not. Also don't be the one who says "why should government have to do this for people?," not when state governments are perfectly happy to make it harder to get these products by levying regressive sales taxes on them. And certainly don't be the one who giggles at the mere prospect of free tampons in schools like you're 14 years old or something, not if you don't have the experience of bleeding uncontrollably from your genitals. Seriously, empathy is not a cuss word.

Finally, you may know that our Administration has a hard-on for ending the tax credit for electric cars, because if it might improve our lives but also cost some boss some money, it's evil and must die a humiliating death. Am I not describing our Administration's attitude correctly? Have I failed to be appropriately generous to them? The answers are "yes" and "hell to the no," respectively -- when evil people show you who they are, you'd best believe them, since being all post-modern about it could hurt you and the country you love. Anyway, Penn Environment helps you tell your Senators to stop making it harder to get and drive electric cars. A lot of right-wingers will say why should big government make it easier for you to get electric cars? And a reasonable answer to that would be: why the hell not? Folks who respond TEH BIG GUMMINT!!!!! to every mild proposal are really telling you they can't win the argument on the merits. And where are they when big fossil fuel corporations get subsidies they don't need? Nowhere, that's where. So they don't get all the say around here.

Around the table: starring jobs that create jobs! Which are not boss jobs.

If you thought about it for a minute, you'd realize that yes, manufacturing jobs actually create even more jobs simply because of all the jobs folks need to have to support them, but it's still nice to have some data behind it. When you think that auto workers not only support the jobs that make the tires and the windshields but also the jobs at the restaurant where they go after work -- not to mention the taxes all those workers pay! -- then you know that when bosses say "American workers make too much money," you can just tell them "that's the price you pay for American workers creating jobs."

Surprise, surprise, an anonymous-of-course Democrat has been talking about ginning up a primary challenge for Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). That'll show her! Even Ms. Ocasio-Cortez couldn't care less if she gets primaried next year, but I gotta say that talking about all the "numerous council people and state legislators who’ve been waiting 20 years for that seat" sure ain't winning talk. A seat in Congress is no pearl of great price, but it still goes to the one who seizes the moment more than the one who "waits their turn."

Alan McLeod at FAIR reminds us that our "liberal" media define "'the Venezuelan people' as a term that exclusively means "anyone who agrees with US policy." Remember that when you read individual letters-to-the-editor claiming they "speak" for those Venezuelans who returned Mr. Maduro to office at a higher clip than anyone did for our last two Presidents, and remember, also, when they show you photos of anti-Maduro protests, they're not telling you about the sizable pro-Maduro protests, let alone the polling information showing that the Venezuelan General Assembly (headed by Venezuela's putative savior, Juan Guaîdo) is about as unpopular as Mr. Maduro. Also, too, how much good has American intervention done lately? Besides for American corporations, I mean?

Former CEO/independent Presidential hopeful Howard Schultz says Elizabeth Warren asked him for a donation once but he wouldn't do it because he thinks her policies would "lead to socialism." I'm sick of people who throw the word "socialism" around to describe whatever they don't like. I'm even sicker of people who once depended on public housing (not to mention everything else taxes pay for!) throwing the word "socialism" around. But you know what I'm most sick of? People who call things "socialism" and then, when mildly pressed on whether that's what they really mean, retreat to calling them "a level of socialism." The world would be a much better place if folks would just keep their mouths shut when they don't know stuff.

Our Supreme Court temporarily stays a Louisiana anti-abortion law from going into effect until later on this week. I thought they'd either let it go into effect or stop it entirely, but I should have considered that they might issue a temporary stay and let the drama go on another week -- as a prelude toward issuing a ruling that would let the Louisiana anti-abortion law go into effect permanently, though it differs little from the Texas law our Court struck down. I guess I should have figured that Chief Justice Roberts would want to peruse every definite article in a law to make sure it's the "same" law they already struck down.

Finally, there's Kellyanne Conway, the pride of Atco, NJ, saying that if Sen. Booker "were a Republican running against (declared female candidates), they immediately would call him a sexist for running against these women in the Democratic field." Just like we called every single male Republican candidate in 2016 a "sexist" for having the temerity to run against Carly Fiorina? Wait, we didn't do that? Of course we didn't do that. We might have called them sexist because they were being sexist, but not for running against a woman for the nomination. Stupid people need to go away.

Around the table: featuring the continuing misadventures of President Manchild.

Although I think telling big Democratic donors they need to pay more attention to getting the message out in rural areas is not where we should concentrate our efforts, certainly Democrats should attend the fact that advertising in rural areas is a lot cheaper than in urban ones, and unions ought to think outside "we're giving to the Democratic candidate" as the solution to most political advocacy problems. Knowing Democrats, though, I bet they blow their rural ad budget on ads trumpeting "entrepreneurship" and "innovation," rather than tax-funded college and trade school and treatment for drug addiction, which we know rural folks would rather talk about.

Our Glorious Administration spent valuable time during the shutdown gutting an Obama-era regulation requiring employers to submit detailed reports on workplace injuries to our government. Because they only care about bosses, not workers! It's a shame I even have to say it out loud! Of course, given our Administration's track record in trying to gut regulations, this'll probably die in court, too -- though if you get seriously injured on the job in the meantime, that probably won't be as much comfort to you.

And now, another reminder that just because we hate our President doesn't mean we should love our FBI: they investigated a California antifa group as a "terroristic threat" after one of its members got stabbed at a neo-Nazi rally. The FBI sure put on its kid gloves talking about the KKK, too, actually saying that "some perceived" the KKK's agenda "to be supportive of a white supremacist agenda." "Some perceived"! That's not tough-cop talk, is it? In fact, it's very post-modern of them to suggest that lynchings and assaults and murders and cross-burnings and actual terroristic threats on black folks' doorsteps are justd a matter of perception.

Gunar Olsen at FAIR catches our "liberal" media worrying about a "quick exit" or a "rushed exit" from Afghanistan. Yeah, I guess 17 years isn't that long a time -- especially when you consider how long it took for us to decimate the Native American population! I'm not kidding; one "liberal" media pundit -- Max Boot, who gets unearned plaudits from folks for hating our President as if that's some big accomplishment -- actually referenced our 300-year effort to destroy the American Indian as justification for suggesting that, hey, wars take a long time if you do them right. Our war in Afghanistan has now gone on a full decade longer than World War II.

Now our President says his intelligence chiefs told him they were "totally misquoted and totally taken out of context" -- quite a feat, to be both at the same time! -- when they contradicted him on virtually every cornerstone of his foreign policy as evidenced by transcripts just about anyone can find on the internet. I really thought he'd go the "fake news" route before he went the "those people who work for me suck at their jobs" route; I just got the order wrong, then. And so did he -- if he just went the "fake news" route, he'd still be a jerk, but he might not have shown the entire world, yet again, that he's the worst boss anyone has ever had the misfortune to work for.

Finally, in a peripherally-related note, Administration Press Secretary-still Sarah Sanders says God "wanted" our current President to be elected President. And this might be true! Just as it might also be true that God chose him in order to a) make us, at last, completely sick of the drama that surrounds such men and b) make us, at last, stop admiring people merely because they've accumulated a lot of money. I mean, if God chooses you for something, you'd best not do a victory lap about it, because you don't know how the story's supposed to turn out.

Action: concerning our Estate Tax, antibiotic abuse, and William Barr.

It begins again: Senate Republicans have apparently read the mandate handed down by the voters in November to read "let's repeal the Estate Tax!" You'd be tempted to say "they never learn," but of course learning has nothing to do with it: Mob Boss Mitch knows that if you placate every whiny desire of wealthy donors, you'll get more campaign money from them, and thus you'll keep getting elected. To what end? So you can finally get hemp farming legalized after 34 years in the Senate? Not likely -- the only end Estate Tax repeal really serves is the end of democracy. Seriously, you have a better chance of one day paying the Estate Tax if you actually support a robust Estate Tax on estates over $1 million. You can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to call your Senators and tell them to reject Estate Tax repeal.

Meanwhile, virtually everyone in America wants to see fewer antibiotics in farming, but of course our Administration knows better than everyone else, as our EPA has recently approved a plan to expand spraying of antibiotics on Floridian citrus trees. Sick trees, healthy trees, how can we tell from up here? One more time: using antibiotics on plants and animals that aren't sick gives bacteria a better shot at adapting to them, and thus renders antibiotics useless a whole lot faster. Who will be sitting around the campfire in a hundred years saying the next cut any of us get could kill us, but at least our government was able to con good Floridians into delivering their electoral votes to the Republican Presidential nominee in 2020? The answer, of course, is "no one." Particularly if we let Penn PIRG help us tell our EPA to help preserve good Americans' health by rejecting its planned expansion of antibiotic spraying.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject the nomination of William Barr as Attorney General, then the National Women's Law Center still helps you do that. Why? Let us count the reasons: his work helping George H.W. Bush pardon half a dozen participants in the Iran-Contra scandal before Mr. Bush himself could be hauled into court, his belief that Presidents ought to be able to do pretty much what they like without very much constraint from the legislative or judicial branches, his apparent hostility to our Special Counsel's continuing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election (and Administration culpability therein), his persistence in believing the whistleblower provisions of the False Claims Act are unconstitutional years after our Supreme Court unanimously ruled that they are -- did I miss anything? Oh, right: he's a fellow who thinks incarceration solves every problem.

Around the table: Howard Schultz does not hear you either, America! And other tales.

Ho hum, our intelligence agencies tell Congress that our Administration is dead wrong on a litany of foreign policy-related issues -- North Korean nuclear aspirations, Iranian nuclear accomplishments, ISIS's "demise," the danger presented by climate change, and the border "crisis." Didn't any of these clowns do the reading for Dystopia 101? Spooks and strongmen disagreeing on the important stuff isn't the kind of chaos that helps an aspiring dictatorship along! Naturally it didn't even take our President a full calendar day to slam our intelligence agencies as "naive"; I thought he might at least have tried to call it "fake news" first.

The Great Independent Bipartisan Hope, former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, says he can't run as a Democrat because their views "don't represent the majority of Americans," adding, as a for-example, "I don’t think we want a 70 percent income tax in America." You of course will recall that Americans have been polled on this very question, and a solid majority -- 59% -- approved of a 70 percent rate. Democrats supposedly worry that Mr. Schultz would steal votes from the eventual Democratic nominee, but I think he'd more likely steal votes from the Republican side, since he really represents no one but Our Glorious Elites, who normally prefer Republicans. If all else fails, Democrats can always call him the Pumpkin Spice candidate.

Infamous tech corporation Foxconn, which had promised to create 13,000 blue-collar manufacturing jobs in Wisconsin for a mere $4 billion in tax breaks, now says it'll hire mostly engineers and researchers to work there, and may or may not ever create 13,000 jobs. And there's yet another lesson in not throwing money at a problem! At least our President got a photo op and a fake reputation as a blue-collar job creator out of it. In fact, he made out better than Foxconn, which may not even get very much corporate welfare from Wisconsin anymore. Funny how that worked out.

Let's not make too much of our President making "jokes" about how climate change isn't really real because the Midwest and the Northeast is about to get slammed by a cold snap -- he's pretending not to know the difference between climate and weather, thus saying it's OK for his votaries to ignore the difference. Actually, it's worse than that: focusing on weather is short-term, while focusing on climate is long-term, and you know how our President thinks focusing on the long term is for "losers" like us.

Ian Millhiser at Think Progress thinks our Supreme Court could kill Roe v. Wade as early as today by letting an anti-abortion lower court ruling stand. I'd like to think Chief Justice Roberts is a little cleverer than that, since our Court has already struck down a law that's almost identical to this one, and if he doesn't join our Court's four liberals to strike the ruling down, he'll go down in history as a Chief Justice who disregarded precedent pretty blatantly. I'd have no worries about Justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch being similarly clever, of course.

Finally, anonymous bankster says, of the upcoming Democratic primary race, that the nominee "can't be Warren and it can't be Sanders." I suspect that, for most Americans, that's virtually an endorsement of either one! I do hope they left Sherrod Brown off their hate list because they don't think he has a chance (the alternative -- that he's reassured them he won't be trouble -- would be much worse). And of course they'd be happy with Beto O'Rourke! Now you don't have to watch any of his videos.