Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning conservation, social media, and pollution.

Long story short: tell our government to protect old-growth forests, tell YouTube to stop putting up 2020 election denialist claims, and tell our EPA to regulate truck emissions as vigorously as possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell our U.S. Forest Service to protect old-growth forests from logging corporations as vigorously as possible. Once again, while it’s good our government would actually propose to protect old-growth forests – all the Trump Administration ever cared about was making money for bosses, you recall – our Forest Service would still allow far too much logging of these forests to take place. Thousand year-old trees trap carbon emissions like nobody’s business and help keep our air and water clean; in that context, cutting them down so you can make money you’re just going to spend anyway doesn’t seem very far-sighted. But that only means the most far-sighted among us must make ourselves heard.

Both Care2 and Common Cause help you tell YouTube to stop letting users post false claims about the 2020 election. Which Joe Biden won, which was not “stolen” from Donald Trump, which was not plagued by “voter fraud” – you get the picture. YouTube stopped posting such videos for a while, but lately they’ve reversed course; they must think we’re not looking anymore, or that 2020 election deniers have anything to offer YouTube users except masturbatory rage. But Fox News just had to fork over $787.5 million because they amplified this crap in their coverage; we can help YouTube avoid such a fate by reminding them that our First Amendment doesn’t permit or obligate them to publish just any old lie.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to protect us from truck pollution as vigorously as possible. This may be The Future, but we still ship most of our goods on our roads, and tailpipe pollution causes a lot of health problems (not to mention climate change!), so we ought to make that process as painless as possible. And not for nothing, but the ill health effects of tailpipe pollution do hit Black and Brown communities harder, no matter how many right-wingers say so the roads are racist ha ha snort? We built a disproportionate number of those roads through Black and Brown neighborhoods, so again, we should make that fact as painless as possible.

Action: concerning regulations, food stamps, and defense spending.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the REINS Act and pass the RESTORE Act and the People Over Pentagon Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the REINS Act. Is the REINS Act really back, yet again? Yes, it is – the return of the REINS Act when Republicans control at least one House of Congress is now as predictable as water being wet, bears pooping in the woods, or the Pope being Catholic. The REINS Act would give Congress the right to examine Executive branch regulations again, even though Congressional laws already authorize our Executive branch to issue regulations, meaning Republicans actually want more bureaucracy. And you know as well as I do that they mean to go after anti-pollution regulations and anti-financial predator regulations, so let’s not give them more tools to create drama and chaos.

The Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the RESTORE Act, which would stop the cruel practice of banning people with felony drug convictions from our food stamp program for life. Yes, for life – because, as we know, no one ever rehabilitates themselves, nor do we put too many people in jail for drugs! Seriously, politicians who want to prove they’re “tough on crime” and “tough on Those People who use food stamps” push bans like this, but that’s exactly the kind of “toughness” that poisons a civilization. If we let people who stoke rage run our civilization, it won’t be very long before we don’t have a civilization, and passing the RESTORE Act would help us avoid that tragedy.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the People Over Pentagon Act. No doubt someone will retort that what good is putting people first if we can’t protect them ha ha ha snort? Of course, that supposes that we can only protect Americans if we spend so much money on defense – and that all the money we spend on defense actually protects us! We pissed away trillions of dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the money we could spend teaching children to think or ensuring everyone has health care would protect our civilization a lot better than all the corporate welfare for defense contracting corporations ever could. And it’s well past time we got that right.

Action: concerning harassment of protestors, government spying, and petrochemical pollution.

Long story short: tell DeKalb County’s District Attorney to drop charges against the fund bailing out Cop City protestors, tell Thermo Fisher to stop helping China collect DNA on Tibetans, and tell our EPA to regulate petrochemical pollution as vigorously as possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Color of Change helps you tell DeKalb County District Attorney Sherry Boston to drop “money laundering” and “charity fraud” charges against the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, which has been paying bail for Cop City protestors arrested on trumped-up “domestic terrorism” charges. Think of how a government might call any charitable donation you might make, to a cause you believe in, “domestic terrorism” and I think you see the problem here. Plus they’re protesting the construction of a police training center in an urban forest; do police really feel “terrorized” by protests? Do we? Let’s reserve words like “terror” for those who actually blow things up and mass-murder people.

Eko helps you tell Thermo Fisher Scientific to stop helping the Chinese government collect DNA samples from Tibetans. You don’t have to know that Tibet has been an “autonomous region” of China for over 70 years, or that China has met Tibetan protests with all the repressions a modern police state deploys, to see that Thermo Fisher has aided and abetted evil here, and we can help stop that by deploying, once again, the Big Stick of Bad PR. Unfortunately, by “once again” I also mean that Thermo Fisher also supplied DNA kits to China to be used in Uyghur labor camps. But while it may feel like our work as civilized people is never done, it’s still the best work in the world.

Finally, the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to protect us from petrochemical pollution as vigorously as possible. You probably already know the story: our EPA has proposed pretty good regulations, but they could be better! They could, for example, strengthen leak-detection requirements and monitor more petrochemical plants at the fenceline, so we’ve got to communicate our will. You know the big petrochemical corporations will be communicating their will, which will be comprised of word salad about “stifling innovation” and “killing jobs” and “the burden of compliance,” so we’ve got to get ahead of that noise. And remember: “compliance” isn’t a “burden” when you’re not trying to cheat.

Penny rants for June 7, 2023.

Ho hum, 11 Oregon counties want to secede from Oregon and join Idaho, and you know why. NBC doesn't report it this way, but I'm pretty sure these folks want to secede over immigration and transgender folk and STOP TEH STEALZ!!!! more than over feeling “used” by Multnomah County, and anyway when will they realize their real enemies aren't haughty cityfolk but big ag corporations making it impossible for them to make a living? And don’t be intimidated by maps showing the size of the counties that would secede, because fewer than 207,000 people inhabit them; for your reference, Congressional districts typically contain 640,000 residents. All 11 counties sit in Oregon’s already heavily-Republican 2nd district; their secession alone wouldn’t flip that seat, although the state legislature might see secession as an opportunity to redraw the boundaries to make the 5th district more friendly to Democrats. And I’ve just given this process way more thought than has anyone trapped in a feedback loop of masturbatory rage in the 2nd district.

When I hear that Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) has declared both his D.C. home and his Arizona home as his primary residence at different times and for different reasons, all I can say is maybe Kyrsten Sinema has a better shot getting re-elected than I thought! Partisan Democrats will tell me this is much ado about nothing, but even though Mr. Gallego appears to have adhered to the letter of the law, good Arizonans won’t just hate that he ever declared D.C. as his primary residence, they’ll also hate that he declared it to get a Veterans Administration loan a year after getting a refi on his Arizona home. And when he says hey, have you seen interest rates lately?, they’ll hate that he bought a $940,000 house with that VA loan, which sure doesn’t seem like the purpose of government assistance. Don’t any of these folks ever give a minute’s thought to how anything they do looks? So many “breaks” you can get in life just aren’t worth it, and if you make over $150,000 a year like Mr. Gallego does, you don’t need them as badly as most folks I know.

Nikki Haley, at a CNN “town hall,” blames the spike in suicidal ideations among teenage girls on – wait for it! – the possibility that there are trans girls in their locker rooms. I’m almost ashamed that I even bothered to look this up, but apparently she referenced a CDC study (CDC, tsk tsk!) saying that nearly a third of teenage girls contemplated suicide in 2021 (a hike from 2019), but you can look at the year 2021 and say maybe the pandemic, which arguably hit schools harder than any other institution, had more to do with that than trans girls in their locker room. You might also note that more Black and Brown girls contemplated suicide than white girls – and you might also imagine that Black and Brown girls had other reasons to contemplate suicide than trans girls in their locker room, like, you know, racism – and of course gay/lesbian/trans/questioning girls also had comparatively high rates. Because we treat these kids like shit, maybe? Anyway, I’ve got good news for you: even if she does another 10 CNN “town halls,” Ms. Haley will never get enough Trumpholes to vote for her.

Action: concerning taxes, Social Security, Medicare, and stock buybacks.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to tax corporations the rich harder, tell Democrats to boycott Speaker McCarthy’s Social Security/Medicare-cutting commission, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Reward Work Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

In the wake of this debt limit “deal,” Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to extend the Trump tax cuts for the rich and for corporations, while Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to start taxing billionaires a lot harder if they’re really serious about our national debt. Which they’re not, like ever, but the more we tell them they need to tax the rich and corporations harder, the tougher it’ll be for them to pretend they don’t hear us. I’m old enough to remember when Democrats were too scared to even talk about it, so I know we’ve made progress – and if we keep at it, we’ll make more.

Social Security Works helps you tell Congressional Democrats to boycott Speaker McCarthy’s Social Security/Medicare “reform” commission. He announced it right after getting his debt limit “deal,” and we know why: because we all got in his grill about never, ever cutting Social Security and/or Medicare benefits and as a result he not only didn’t get those cuts, he didn’t even try all that hard for them. But if any Democrats take part in this commission drama, they could make it easier for Congress to cut Social Security and Medicare without input from the American people, and we should never let such a thing happen. So it’s time to get in their grills again.

Finally, Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Reward Work Act, which would absolutely reward work by a) outlawing stock buybacks and b) making corporations put workers on their boards. Thus corporations would (in reverse order) support jobs by hearing more from the people who actually do them and actually investing in those jobs, which they don’t have to do as long as we allow them to plow their profits into consolidating shareholder power into fewer and fewer hands. The way the game is now, all corporate executives care about is making more money for less work, so our government has to step in on our behalf to fix that.

Around the table: now with even more beatdowns for drama hounds!

Fresh off giving us exactly zero criminal allegations against President Biden and his son on “Judgment Day,” now our House Oversight Committee has started investigating FTC Chair Lina Khan, supposedly for “acting in defiance of legal precedent” (it’s not like we’ve had antitrust laws on the books for over a hundred years or anything!) and for “deviat(ing) from its mission to protect America’s consumer,” by which they must mean America’s job-killing CEOs who can no longer redistribute your income upward to themselves as easily as they could when we just let them buy whatever corporations they wanted whenever they wanted. Good luck with all of that, Gomer, ahem, Comer.

Ho hum, our “liberal” media falls all over itself calling the whole debt limit “deal” a “triumph of bipartisanship.” An alien confronting this phenomenon for the first time would conclude that “bipartisanship” must mean “when one side gets some of its aims enacted and the other side doesn’t,” and very little “liberal” media coverage from the last several decades would dissuade them from that conclusion. Also too, we hear more than enough from our “liberal” media about “winners and losers” among the political parties, but not nearly enough about whether we the American people win or lose with these debt limit dramas.

In a related note, ha ha ha the debt limit “deal” has a good chance of actually increasing spending on food stamps! Of course, actually doing something was never a Republican aim – with Republicans these days, the only aim is drama. Less a laughing matter, of course, is that decreased IRS spending, which Republicans just had to have, will increase the deficit, because our IRS won’t be able to go after rich tax cheats as well as they could before. Still, the debt limit deal managed to preserve over two-thirds of the Inflation Reduction Act’s boost in IRS funding, and as Saul Alinsky might say, if you start with nothing and you get something, you win. (Republicans could say it, too, except they’re afraid of getting radical leftist cooties.)

The incomparable Sonali Kohatkar reminds us that when we advocate for a four-day work week, we need to attend the pitfalls! Like, for example, corporate efforts to cram 40 hours into four days when it should be 32 hours, or our need to make the same money in a 32-hour work week as in a 40-hour work week, or the temptation to use the shorter work week to do more side hustles (when working less is the entire point!). Personal to anyone who responds with “no one wants to work anymore”: virtually every economist worth a damn will tell you that people are far, far more productive today than they were even 50 years ago, so CTFO.

The Columbia Journalism Review tells us about Defector, the worker-owned sports/culture media website that has billed itself, not without justification, as “the last good website.” (Full disclosure: I pay real cash money to read it; Drew Magary’s annual “Why Your Team Sucks” NFL previews are alone worth the price of admission, but the other stuff is also terrific.) So much about Defector is great that I went and digged through this article for criticisms, and here they are: they don’t get many scoops and they don’t cover controversial topics like sports betting very much, each exactly the kind of editorial quirk you’d find in a worker-owned media outlet, not that I'd know that from experience or anything.

And now here comes Cornel West to declare a run for President and actually make me think twice about declaring my vote for Joe Biden months ago. Like Bernie, he supports all the right things, and his candidacy is far, far better news than that of antivaxxer Robert Kennedy, Jr.; Mr. West is probably about as well-known as any American scholar, but still not as well-known as, say, almost any reality TV star, and if you’re still afraid he’ll take enough votes from Joe Biden to elect Donald Trump, I would refer you to the election of 1948, where an unpopular Harry Truman faced two Democrats running to his left and right in the general election and still got over 300 electoral votes. (If Mr. Trump somehow loses the nomination and still runs as an “independent” – which of course he will, because grift – Joe Biden might get 400 electoral votes whether Cornel West is running or not.)

Finally, when I hear that Donald Trump wants to know exactly who in our FBI and Justice Department is actually working on active federal probes into his misbehavior, I’m beyond thinking he’ll purge them all if he wins another term as President. I mean, of course he will! And his millions of votaries who all squeal TEH LAWZ ANDZ TEH ORDURZ!!!!! when police kill another Black man for brandishing a cellphone will all cheer him on. But it couldn’t be that Mr. Trump wants their identities exposed so his votaries kill them before he has to purge them, could it? After all, as any boss knows, it’s so much better to get volunteers to do your work for you than people you have to pay – or, in his case, people you try to avoid paying.

Action: concerning corporate "personhood," debt limit dramas, and abortion rights.

Long story short: tell tell Delaware state legislators to kill a bill that would give corporations the right to vote there, and tell your Congressfolk to repeal both the debt limit and the Comstock Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Delaware residents, take note: Common Cause helps you tell Delaware state legislators to reject HB 121, which would give artificial entities – like corporations, trusts, and partnerships – the same right to vote in elections that actual people have right now. I trust I don’t have to explain why that’s the stupidest idea anyone ever had – corporations and other artificial “people” already have too much power to do evil, and if we give them the right to vote on top of that, we might as well just let fascism in through the front door. Now, this is a state bill, not a federal one, but this is also an idea that could spread like a superbug, first to other states and then to our Congressfolk. So, to quote a phrase, let’s kill it in its crib.

In the wake of this latest debt limit “deal,” Daily Kos helps you tell our President and Congressfolk to get rid of the debt limit for good. Because they only use it for evil, that’s why! And not just when Republicans have control of at least one House of Congress, either – you recall it was like pulling teeth to get it done in late 2021 when Democrats nominally controlled both Houses of Congress, right? And I bet you still have bad memories of the debt limit hostage crises of 2011 and 2013. Anyway, now’s probably the best time to tell your Congressfolk you never want to see a stupid drama like this again. We’ll have to tell them again and again, but no use holding our tongues now.

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Comstock Act, which prohibits our Postal Service from delivering obscene materials or abortion medicines (among other things). With the fall of Roe v. Wade, right-wingers have gone crazy citing the Comstock Act, though Congress passed it in 1873 when the world was a lot different – one could argue that at that time that you would more likely get unsafe abortion medications through the mail than safe ones. You would have a tough time arguing that today, though right-wingers will try. Let’s not deign to argue with bullshitters, though – let’s just get rid of the law they want to use to hurt women.

Penny rants for June 5, 2023.

First they said “greedflation” – the notion that corporations were raising prices because they could – was a “fringe” theory “nobody” believed, then they said that yes actually greedflation was really happening, and now they’re saying greedflation is actually a good thing. Why? Because it’s “keeping us out of recession,” but that’s a rhetorical hostage crisis if ever I saw one: you better let corporations charge whatever they want, or the economy gets it! And if you see through that line of dung too quickly, they’ll tell you that wage growth is the real cause of inflation, though we’ve lately seen inflation go down much faster than wage growth. Also, “(s)trong consumer spending — the very factor that, by the Journal’s own admission, is preventing an economic downturn — has been possible partially due to strong wage growth.” Also, charging people more money because you can is immoral. Let me know if you think I’ve forgotten anything. I really want these zombie lies to die already, and I’ll keep the headshots coming until they do.

In case you were wondering why right-wingers were mad at Chick-Fil-A, which should be their very favorite corporation, apparently it has to do with Chick-Fil-A having an “executive position overseeing diversity, equity, and inclusion policies in the company” – one not filled by a white person, no less – plus Chick-Fil-A CEO Dan Cathy once shined a Black man’s shoes as a way of dealing with racial tensions in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. And just like that, decades of Chick-Fil-A hating gays go out the window! I swear, people don’t appreciate a damn thing these days. Naturally some of the right-wing blowhards urging their brethren to cancel Chick-Fil-A have also gone on the record as opposing cancel culture. Of course, the less obnoxious you are, the less you have to worry about “cancel culture.” (I would also say the shoe-shining bit is in fact a weak response to a big problem, but I’m pretty sure right-wingers just saw TEH BLACKZ!!!!! and went nuts. Hey, some people give me no choice but to think little of them.)

Action: concerning health care and Congressional corruption.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare to include all Americans and outlaw ownership or trade of stocks by members of Congress. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

National Nurses United helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass Medicare-for-All legislation. And yes, you can not only pay for it – by harvesting the money big corporations already pay private health insurers with an employer-side payroll tax – but you can cover everyone! Even after the Affordable Care Act addressed these matters, we’re still paying for executive salaries and hedge fund-provoked surprise bills and the stock prices über alles corporate attitude; cut all that out and we’ll cover many more people. Don’t let your friends complain about “bureaucrats running everything,” because better a government bureaucrat, one you can shame into doing better, than a corporate one over whom you have no control.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation outlawing them from owning or trading individual stocks. Even some Republicans are making happy noises about getting this done in this Congress, and though we shouldn’t substitute hope for work, we should note that nobody expected the Postal Service Reform Act to get done last year, either. Certainly everyone in Congress knows that the folks at home already think they’re corrupt as hell, and that Congressfolk owning stock in corporations they might have to oversee at some point is an invitation to further corruption. Still, we should make sure they get this done.

Action: concerning plastic pollution and clicking-to-cancel.

Long story short: tell our EPA to curtail single-use plastic production, and tell our FTC to enact a vigorous “click-to-cancel” rule. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Penn PIRG helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous plastic-reduction regulations possible. So far our EPA plans to stamp out the idea that converting plastic to fuel is “recycling” – fuel only gets used once, too! – but our EPA could do a better job stamping out single-use plastics, which cause a lot of pollution and health problems these days. We’ve only ever recycled about 10% of all the plastics we’ve made, and folks now ingest the equivalent of a credit card a week on average, so we’ve got to stop making so much damn single-use plastic in the first place. Doesn’t matter if it’s convenient! In America, we shouldn’t settle for mere convenience.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to enact the most vigorous “click-to-cancel” rule possible, so good Americans can get out of subscription-based services a lot more easily. Who wants to be paying for gym memberships and streaming services they’re not using but aren’t canceling because of the hoops they have to jump through to do that? I wonder what sort of comments corporate hacks will write to our FTC! Actually, I don’t: it’ll stifle innovation the burden of compliance costs we’ll have to fire people we can’t compete with foreign corporations. That’s all rubbish – but it’ll win the day if we don’t speak out.

Action: concerning taxes, stock buybacks, and sacred lands.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to tax the rich and corporations harder and pass the Reward Work Act and the Ruby Mountains Protection Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

You’ve heard about the debt limit deal President Biden and Speaker McCarthy negotiated, but Demand Progress still helps you tell your Congressfolk to get rid of the private jet tax deduction from the 2017 Trump tax “reform,” while Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations. As they consider this deal, we need to remind them of what their real priority should be: making sure folks with enough money to ruin the world pay their fair share of taxes so we can all have health care and roads and bridges and cops. If nothing else, they’ll more likely remember next time – and if they don’t, we’ll remind them again.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Reward Work Act, which would ban stock buybacks and let workers elect a third of all corporate boards. If you’re not seeing right away how that would “reward work,” recall that quite a few corporations (Bed, Bath and Beyond most recently) have gone belly-up after using their profits to buy back stock rather than, you know, pay workers, develop new products, or improve their operations. Stock buybacks, in short, don’t “reward work,” they reward wealth. And getting more workers on corporate boards will also help keep executives from doing only what’s best for them – which will also reward work. So let’s get this done.

Finally, the Native Organizers Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ruby Mountains Protection Act, which would permanently protect the Ruby Mountains of Nevada – a sacred land to certain Shoshone nations – from oil and gas drilling. The energy you extract from the ground will get used up eventually, and the money big corporate executives make from oil and gas drilling will get used up eventually, but sacred lands are forever, if you can keep them. And the Shoshone have already prevented our government from drilling for oil and gas in the Ruby Mountains in 2019, so we know this can be done; our Congressfolk just have to have the will to do it. And they won’t, unless we express our will in numbers they can’t deny.

Around the table: ChatGPT is "way stupider than people realize"! And other total non-surprises.

Now it can be told: an AI expert informs us that “ChatGPT is Way Stupider Than People Realize,” because “large language models are good at...saying what an answer should sound like, which is different from what an answer should be.” If you were one of the many teachers who easily detected your students farming out their essays to AI, you already understand this. Of course, if you’re a CEO desperately trying to cut jobs so you can pretend your corporation’s “efficient” and thus goose up your stock prices beyond what any moral or economic reality would justify, then your job depends on you not understanding this. (And sadly, “(i)t gives an answer with complete confidence, and I sort of believe it. And half the time, it’s completely wrong” might as well describe almost any politician you’ve heard of.)

Ho hum, Gov. DeSantis (F-FL) is putting his state workers’ pension funds into the grubby hands of underperforming hedge funds that donated to his campaigns because of course he is. After all, if you want to present yourself to rich right-wing donors as an electable candidate, you can’t just do the culture war stuff, you also have to do the grift! Meanwhile, public employees in Florida haven’t gotten a cost-of-living increase in 15 years! I’d say it doesn’t pay to make everything subservient to one man’s power, but a significant part of Florida’s population apparently doesn’t care, and deserves whatever horrors befall them. (My estimate that a quarter of the electorate is batshit insane applies nationally; surely some states have more batshit insane voters than others.)

Lo and behold, former Rep. Kurt Schrader (D?-OR), who did his damnedest to kill Medicare drug price negotiation even though over 80% of Americans strongly support it, has just gotten a job for a big pharma lobbyist. I wonder if that’s a good hire, considering that his name is now dogshit. I’ll never forget the why-am-I-here-don’t-waste-my-time-just-elect-me-already look on his face as he “debated” the woman who ultimately defeated him in the 2022 Democratic primary – or his whining afterward that the Republican wave of 2022 would begin in his district. His district did flip, but narrowly, and, ah, what wave? I would like to think the times are passing Kurt Schrader by, though big lobbying money might prevent him from realizing that for a little while.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that our Surgeon General says that social media can present “a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.” When you’re on social media, you always feel like you’re performing, and why do kids really need that sort of pressure? So they can handle it later? That’s like setting people on fire to prepare them for an eternity in hell. This is why sane people like us have been telling social media to avoid roping kids in. After all, our Congressfolk are about as hands-off about social media as they are about guns – or financial predators. (Our Surgeon General’s advisory does inform us that social media can help marginalized folks find each other and support each other. I have no doubt that’s true – until Elon Musk takes over!)

Ho hum, ”The U.S. Is Unhappy That Mexico Is Spending Money on Its Own Citizens.” One day we’re going to take a good, hard look at our history – and not just our history, but the history of every nation that ever ruled the Earth – and we’re going to find that even when we treated our own citizens well, we did it on the backs of nations that treated their citizens like dung. My hope is that when regular folks read sentences like “President Lopez Obrador’s federal budget for 2023 gives priority to social spending and signature infrastructure projects, rather than the investments needed to address bilateral issues with the U.S. such as migration, security, and trade,” they’ll see it for the whining it is. (AMLO has cooperated with the U.S. more on immigration, though I doubt he’ll ever get much out of that.)

Finally, because the news can’t be all bad, scientists at U. Mass-Amherst have developed technology that can harvest electricity from air moisture, even in the Sahara desert. All my peeps on the Eastern Seaboard are no doubt exclaiming at last! A use for all this damn humidity!, but this technology can work with any amount of humidity in the air, though I imagine it’ll be less effective in the desert. Now comes the part where the big corporations that fund scientific breakthroughs sit on the funding that could make this technology affordable and available to all. Have I mentioned that government funding would comprise an alternative to this reality? Yes, I believe I have.

Action: concerning climate change, right-wing bullying, and data privacy.

Long story short: tell our EPA to stop carbon capture foolishness, tell Target to stop cowing to right-wing bullies over pride merchandise, and tell our CFPB to regulate data brokers to the fullest extent of the law. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Food and Water Watch helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to reject corporate carbon capture shenanigans. Carbon capture sounds like a way to deal with climate change, but so does nuclear power, and like nuclear power, carbon capture has a long record of failing to do what corporatists say it does – it allows big fossil fuel corporations to squeeze more usable energy from fossil fuels, sure, but that’s no substitute for the renewable energies that already cut climate change. We should be doing more of that, and doing less helping big fossil fuel corporations to pretend they’re doing more than they’re doing. Yeah, it’s hard to transition to renewables, but is America the can-do country or isn’t it? We all have to answer that question sooner or later.

UltraViolet helps you tell Target to stop cowing to right-wing bullies over pride-related merchandise. Now you may well ask: why do we care what Target does? We don’t do it for Target’s soul, not least because Target is a thing without a soul; we do it to demonstrate to the world that bigots don’t surround us – we surround them. Too many decision-makers, be they on school boards or in corporate boardrooms, let themselves be taken hostage to one or two bigoted complaints, and that’s when we must raise a million voices at once and deliver lonely bigots to the oblivion they deserve. Right-wingers think they own the Big Stick of Bad PR, but they’re as wrong about that as they are about everything else.

Finally, Stop Data Brokers helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to write the most vigorous rules possible preventing data brokers from abusing us. Data brokers have been buying and selling our personal information for over a decade and our government has done nothing about it. But when data brokers get to do whatever they like, bad things happen, like domestic violence victims suddenly finding their new address out there, or police officers buying up your data to go on fishing expeditions without a warrant. Maybe our CFPB (whose purview is basically financial in nature) isn’t the best agency to rein in data brokers, but I’m sure they can do some good – if we speak out.

Around the table: finally they admit greedflation is real! And other miracles.

Apparently the “fringe theory” of “greedflation” is finally “get(ting) its due,” now that even the Wall Street Journal thinks greedflation is real. Of course, nobody who’s been saying it for two years (whose number even includes several members of our “liberal” media) is “fringe” to anyone but a corporatist paid to ignore what’s right in front of their face. I only wonder whether Lael Brainard was being too circumspect in describing a “price-price spiral,” “where companies mark up prices far higher than the increases in their input costs,” because “greedflation” is a much easier way of saying that.

Judges have been slow to accept that they should enforce antitrust law, but Massachusetts U.S. District Court Judge Leo Sorokin not only struck down the American/JetBlue “Alliance,” but excoriated the paid hacks who testified on the “Alliance”’s behalf. If, like me, you think even psychology is a more rigorous science than economics, you’ll find Judge Sorokin’s notes fairly affirming. You may also, like me, find the “economic consulting” gigs Mr. Stoller describes to be a kind of welfare-for-the-rich, a far more pernicious kind of welfare than food stamps could ever be. By the way, bringing back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income would fix it. Imagine a world where it simply didn’t pay to lie about how money works!

Rick Scott thinks he’s so, so funny for saying Florida is “openly hostile” to socialists, though it’s no laughing matter that the actual travel advisories from the NAACP and the Human Rights Campaign that he mocked describe a burgeoning fascist state where you might actually die for being Black or gay, respectively. Also too, imagine being a guy who went to college on the G.I. bill. Now imagine being a guy who ran a hospital that defrauded Medicare and Medicaid so badly they had to pay a $1.7 billion fine. And now imagine being a guy who talks shit about "socialism" all the time. Actually, you don't have to imagine any of that: Rick Scott is all three of those guys! (And anyway, anyone who’s ever driven a car or used a library or called a cop is a socialist.)

I’m a bit perplexed at a Georgia Republican district chair seems to feel personally assaulted by all the globes everywhere that “brainwash” people into thinking the world isn’t flat, not just because people have known the world is round since long before Columbus, but also because globes are actually a lot less common now that we can get planetary images in so many other ways. Globes taught me everything about geography when I was a kid, but getting one in my 40s turned out to be a chore! Oh well, I guess some people never stop whining, and Georgia may finally be becoming a place where a woman like Kandiss Taylor can only get to 49% in a statewide election.

Good news, everyone: Texas Republicans failed to ram through their bill mandating that all state public schools commit the sin of idolatry by posting the Ten Commandments in every classroom. If you were among those who spoke out about this matter, congratulate yourself! Note well, however, that this is only one victory; the forces of religious folly have won plenty of times in Texas in recent years. Also note well that the ACLU’s statement about parental rights is not inconsistent with anything they’ve ever said about teaching Black or gay history in schools: the key phrase in “(p)arents should be able to decide what religious materials their child should learn” is religious materials.

Finally, Rep. Lauren Boebert (E-CO) apparently stonewalled cops after her son called 911 to allege abuse by his father/her soon-to-be-ex-husband, but I don’t celebrate this news at all. I might question the timing of its release (she just announced that she’s filed for divorce, while her son called 911 in December), and I do celebrate some of her other reversals, but I do not celebrate her acting like or being someone who felt she had to keep the family together by herself. And I also don’t blame her for trapping herself in a bad marriage! She married when she was 20, and I was pretty dumb at that age myself.

Light posting notice.

Posting will be light until early next week, so I wish all of you a happy and safe holiday.

Action: concerning government spying and corruption.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect us from government spying, prohibit themselves from owning or trading stocks, and impose an ethics code on our Supreme Court. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the NDO Fairness Act. NDO stands for “non-disclosure orders,” which prevent big telecom corporations from telling you that your government has been rifling through your data; does that sound like something that should happen in a free country? No, it does not. The NDO Fairness Act would limit NDOs to 90 days and make our government prove they should be longer, plus it would make courts prove that NDOs actually protect someone from harm and prove that they’re as narrowly-tailored as possible. All of that should result in fewer NDOs! And a free country deserves no less.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation preventing them from owning or trading any individual stock. How are Congressfolk supposed to save for their retirement, then? I can almost hear a concern troll say; I guess they’ll just have to get by on their six-figure salaries while they’re serving and their huge pensions after they leave. Congressfolk shouldn’t invest in corporations they might have to punish in some way or other as part of their jobs serving the American people! It’s appalling that I even have to explain that! And we sure don’t have to put up with folks who pretend they don’t understand it.

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass an ethics code for our Supreme Court Justices, who somehow have fewer ethics standards to follow than any other federal judge. With all of Clarence Thomas’s troubles, and Justice Kavanaugh’s ethics complaints, and Justice Gorsuch's suspicious home sale of 2017, and Justices Sotomayor and Kagan owning land while ruling on eviction moratoriums, and Chief Justice Roberts’s wife’s recruitment of lawyers for corporations that had business before the Court; it’s well past time we cleaned out the Augean stable that our Supreme Court has become.

Action: concerning taxes, drug policy, and Medicare for All.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, pass the RESTORE Act, and pass Medicare for All legislation. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Tired of this debt limit drama already? Then let Americans for Tax Fairness help you tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations if they insist on having this drama. Our media love to pretend that Republicans taking power just means an automatic debt limit crisis like that isn’t evil, and our media also love to pretend the only two choices we have are default or let Kevin McCarthy’s Band of Horribles cut all kinds of services that people need and none of the corporate welfare their rich donors eat up like Halloween candy. But those aren’t our only choices. They will be, however, if we don’t get in our Congressfolks’ grills about this drama.

The Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the RESTORE Act, which would repeal the ban on food stamps for folks with drug convictions. When are we going to get tired of swinging our balls about crime? When is the punishment given by a judge going to be punishment enough? We heap punishment upon punishment upon criminals when every additional punishment we heap upon them makes it less likely we’ll be able to rehabilitate them into functioning members of society – and more likely they’ll go back to prison. Rehabilitation is the duty of a civilized people, but endless, unquenchable revenge hollows out our souls and makes us uncivilized.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass Medicare-for-All legislation. Most Americans like the idea of expanding Medicare to include everyone, until some fool tells them ZOMG THEYZ WILLZ RAISEZ TEH TAXUZ!!!! But you don’t need to raise taxes on good Americans to pay for Medicare for All – you need only institute an employer-side payroll tax (that means only the employer, not the employee, pays it) which would capture all the money corporations are already paying on overly-expensive private health insurance. So, you’ll pay nothing extra, and your boss won’t pay any more, and we'll be able to cover everyone – what’s not to like?

Readings for May 23, 2023.

Matt Stoller tells us that our FTC has filed a lawsuit aiming to block the proposed $27 billion Amgen/Horizon merger, and big pharma seems awfully mad about it. As usual, Mr. Stoller explains the politics behind these mergers better than anyone else, noting that these corporations constantly yammer on about how any does of accountability for their evil “stifles innovation,” but “large pharmaceutical firms don’t do drug development anymore; they are by and large middlemen who harvest the intellectual property developed by others.” I might have said “vampires who suck the lifeblood from” instead of “middlemen who harvest,” but Mr. Stoller goes on to explain further and better, and yes, at least one big pharma CEO (admittedly one screwed over repeatedly by the biggest of the big pharma antitrust offenders) has said the FTC suit’s a good thing.

Judd Legum at Popular Information instructs us that when our “liberal” media talk about big retail corporations like Target losing half a billion dollars due to rampant “organized retail crime,” that’s “objectively false.” And it’s “objectively false” because even corporate lobbyists will tell you that close to two-thirds of inventory shrinkage (or “shrink”) happens for reasons other than “external theft,” a category that includes shoplifting and “organized retail crime.” Indeed, “organized retail crime” only makes up around 5% of all shrink, if the National Retail Federation’s 2020 estimate is of any value. The NRF also tells us that bad management accounts for a little over a quarter of shrink quelle surprise! and that internal theft (i.e., by employees) accounts for close to 30% of shrink, but please, let’s get even more hysterical about “rampant crime,” and in so doing continue to insult the actual victims of crime.

Why can Ron DeSantis never beat Donald Trump, according to ex-Republican Mike Lofgren? Long story short: “because no one else can command his coalition of damaged, discarded, marginal people.” “And what do these people want?” Mr. Lofgren writes. “They don't want better health care, fiscal responsibility, better infrastructure, clean drinking water or anything on a policy menu that serves rational ends. They don't necessarily even want a competently administered fascist state...What they truly want is demons to wrestle with till the end of time.” Which Donald Trump delivers, and which Messrs. DeSantis, Abbott, et al struggle to match, despite their best efforts. I still think the real number of “damaged, discarded, marginal people” comprises no more than 25% of the electorate, but add in all the Republican loyalists “holding their nose” for Mr. Trump and you can see why we’re going to have to deal with all this again in 2024, and probably 2028 as well.

Action: concerning monopolies, pollution, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell our FTC to stop the proposed Kroger/Albertsons merger, tell our EPA to stop power plant pollution, and tell President Biden to get with the firing of Postmaster General DeJoy already. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to stop the proposed Kroger/Albertsons merger, which would, and stop me if you’ve heard this before, put over two dozen supermarket brands under one owner, which would in turn close stores, kill jobs, and raise prices for good Americans. Raise prices, you say? Obviously! We’ve witnessed over two years of corporations raising prices because they could, and making corporations bigger, and therefore more powerful, only means we'll have a lot more inflation. Now, by all the evidence, our FTC finds all of these statements sympathetic, but we still have to speak out.

Both the League of Conservation Voters and Penn Environment help you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to limit power plant pollution as vigorously as possible. And you can sign both petitions if you like, since the first deals with power plant pollution generally and the second deals with coal wastewater pollution specifically. Don’t believe the hype that Joe Manchin will single-handedly repeal his own Inflation Reduction Act if we make power plants pollute less, because do Americans let themselves get taken hostage all the time? No, we do not – in fact, all this relentless hostage-taking is kinda un-American. ZOMG I said the “u” word! I try to avoid saying it, but when I say it, I don’t regret it.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to take the necessary steps to fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy already. One more time: his 10-year plan to “revitalize” our Postal Service involves service cuts, slashing jobs, and raising prices; what a visionary plan that is! Is this why fools say the private sector works so much better than the public sector? Because worse service, fewer jobs, and higher prices sure don’t sound better! Figure in also that service cuts translates directly to good Americans not getting life-saving medicines through the mail, and you’ll see that we still need to save our Postal Service.

Around the table: today featuring *half* good news!

Lo and behold, job satisfaction sits at a 35-year high, per a Conference Board survey. At the end, this article finally mentions “higher pay” (it hasn’t been keeping up with inflation, but when does it ever?) as a possible reason for the higher satisfaction, though we also know that folks who weren’t working during the pandemic had time to take stock of their lives and decide they didn’t need all that toxic BS at their particular workplace. (Makes sense, also, that folks with hybrid remote/in-person work arrangements were happier than folks doing just one or the other; now we just need to stop bosses from saying that folks absolutely must commute to work because the economy will die if they don’t, when mostly they just want to spy on workers a little better.)

Minnesota becomes the fourth American state to make phone calls free for prisoners. Big telecom corporations charge prisoners an arm and a leg to make phone calls to their loved ones, because prisoners are literally a captive market, but prisoners who can stay in contact with family members tend not to go back to prison, though private prisons may feel differently about this fact than you or I. Objections range from free phone calls? When did prison become Club Med? (yes, folks have said this to me, sigh) to but you can stuff a burner phone into a dead cat and throw it over the prison wall (that came from the man who served as FCC Chair from 2017-2021), and all I can say to such people is: when does your anger ever bottom out?

Ho hum, big pipeline corporations let their pipes sit out in the sun for years, often without the proper crack-resistant coating, though 50-year-old federal regulations outlaw this. But perhaps, like me, you see the gnarled hand of stock prices über alles here like everywhere else. I mean, these corporations have more than enough money, but they have enslaved themselves to the fiction that if stock prices don’t shoot up every month, they’re doomed. Don’t feel sorry for them, because they have the power to escape, and I rather suspect they just don’t want to, because this particular kind of slavery makes executives very rich – and the rest of us very miserable.

Surprise, surprise, a federal Department of Labor review finds that Iowa’s child labor bill (which Gov. Reynolds hasn’t signed) violates federal law, which seems obvious enough that one might momentarily wonder if Republicans were just creating drama here, by passing a controversial bill they knew wouldn’t see the light of day anyway. I might think that, too, except I can’t believe there’s a vocal minority of regular folks clamoring for kids to work in sweatshops, like there’s a similar minority clamoring to make all abortions illegal. Remember that when they say no one wants to work, the truth is that no one wants to work for dung pellets, which would be every executive’s preferred method of paying workers.

Speaking of actual Republican dramas, Sen. Ted Cruz (E-TX) has launched a very serious Senate probe – into Bud Light’s brief partnership with transgender actress Dylan Mulvaney! And he goes out of his way to refer to Ms. Mulvaney as a “he,” which is very grown up! Is this what you do ahead of a potentially tough re-election campaign? I know people are more ambivalent about transgender folks than I’d like, but at some point these right-wing dramas have to alienate so much of the electorate that Republicans will have to notice. At any rate, I hope Ted Cruz loses his race to a dead shrub. No point to telling me he’s smart when he won’t use his smarts to do good works.

Finally, in the wake of its $787.5 million settlement with Dominion and with another sizable settlement with Smartmatic likely, Fox News has apparently gutted its entire investigative unit, and that’ll teach good Americans not to hold big media corporations accountable! Now, don’t be the one saying they had an investigative unit? because that would be very snarky. But the same Fox executives who trumpeted the Big Lie for the money and then lost a lot of money and now are taking out their mistakes on the rank and file probably think you don’t need to do “investigating” in order to do journalism; they’re wrong, of course, but their attitude is also the cable news norm now. Hence another reminder not to watch cable news, because it’s irredeemably evil.

Action: concerning abortion rights, Medicare for All, and railway safety.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Comstock Act, pass Medicare-for-All legislation, and pass the Railway Safety Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Comstock Act, which literally prohibits our Postal Service from mailing any abortion medicine. That law passed in 1873, when the world was considerably different, and the only reason our Postal Service mails mifepristone now is that the Second Circuit’s U.S. v. One Package ruling in 1936 held that our government could not use the Comstock Act to bar any shipment of contraceptives if a medical doctor ordered it. But one wonders if current federal judges would extend that to actual abortion drugs, or if they’ll prefer to enforce the text of the Comstock Act, so we’ve got to repeal it.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass Medicare-for-All health insurance legislation. Medicare for All would be cheaper than our current public/private hybrid system, but don’t take my word for it: take the word of the Koch brothers-funded Mercatus Center, which said Medicare-for-All would cost $32 trillion over 10 years, less than the $48 trillion over 10 years our Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has forecast we’ll spend. And the way to fund it? An employer-side payroll tax capturing the money big corporations already spend on private health insurance, meaning no working families need pay more in taxes. Seems like a no-brainer to me!

More Perfect Union helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Railway Safety Act, which would help stem the tide of railway derailments like the one in East Palestine, Ohio earlier this year by forcing trains carrying hazardous materials to have better wheel-bearing systems, hiking fines on corporations that don’t do enough to prevent these derailments, and requiring that trains have at least two workers. Hard to believe big railway corporations have been “getting by” with just one worker per train, but like most corporations, railway corporations care about money and don’t care about safety. Oh, they talk a good game about safety, but we’re not schmucks. So let’s get this bill passed.

Around the table: featuring the latest college admissions hustle, and other follies.

I’ll admit I’m torn about our Supreme Court’s decision to shield Twitter from being sued under the Anti-Terrorism Act. I mean, we do brandish the word “terrorist” too easily, I always fear good Americans getting ruined over trumped-up “terrorism” charges, Section 230 remains a major impediment to suing social media corporations, and I prefer to blame actual terrorists for actual terrorism rather than the social media platforms that (at best) enable them. On the other hand, Twitter didn’t merely host terrorists’ content, but actually went out of its way to ensure its users saw it; no law (or “commitment to free speech”) compels them to do that, and we ought to do something about that. (I would hope anyone would recognize “the algorithms did it, so no one’s responsible” as horsedoodle.)

When I hear that “The Newest College Admissions Ploy,” according to ProPublica, is “Paying to Make Your Teen a ‘Peer-Reviewed’ Author.” I have to say it sure does seem like another way to keep poor/Black/Brown kids out of colleges, as most of them can’t afford $2,500 (or $10,000!) for pretend-publication of “academic research.” It’s also a way of filling teenagers with even more angst about that college education they’re going to spend the rest of their lives paying off. But wait, there’s more! Some journals seem to publish just any old thing, and some of the students’ mentors lie not just about how much of the kids’ work they did but about their credentials. “Ph.D.” or “Ph.D. student,” who can tell the difference?

I’m shocked, shocked, I tell you! that our IRS has admitted that it audits Black folks up to five times more often than taxpayers of other races. Why, it’s as shocking as hearing that they go after mostly poor people because they can’t afford the lawyers! Full disclosure: it actually is a little shocking to hear them actually admit it, rather than just do it and not admit it. And stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but our IRS blames a flawed algorithm for all the audits of Black folks, which lends credence to the notion that when the programmer’s biased, the software’s biased. More money for our IRS should help this problem, too, since now our IRS can go after some rich tax cheats, instead of just picking low-hanging fruit among folks who might have wrongly declared eligibility for the Earned Income Tax Credit.

I hope our Food and Drug Administration does approve over-the-counter birth control pills, and I know it’ll help women who don’t have enough health insurance or who live in areas that don’t have family planning clinics, but I still worry about the cost. The pills I take are much, much cheaper in large part because I get them via prescription even though they’re available over-the-counter. I would hate for price to be another obstacle for poor women, nearly as much as I hate it when Republican ball-swingers pass comprehensive abortion bans and then can’t understand why a constituent dies from an ectopic pregnancy or a doctor is afraid to give chemotherapy to a pregnant woman.

Finally, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (E-AL), who thinks there’s a lot more in the Durham report than there actually is, says on Newsmax that “(i)f people don’t go to jail for this, the American people should just stand up and say, ‘Listen, enough’s enough, let’s don’t have elections anymore.’” Always right-wingers love democracy until it tells them what they don’t want to hear! Alabama had the dumb luck of having Doug Jones, who put two of the Birmingham bombers in jail, as their Senator, but apparently they preferred a guy who thinks democracy is all about him stamping his feet and getting his way.

Action: concerning bankster pay, fuel efficiency, and uranium pollution.

Long story short: tell our SEC to curb CEO pay at crashed banks, tell our EPA to enact the strongest possible fuel efficiency standards, and tell the Biden Administration to keep uranium mining corporations away from the Grand Canyon. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to write the most vigorous clawback rule possible for bank executives. The Dodd-Frank law mandated that our SEC write a rule allowing our government to “claw back” CEO compensation after a bank fails, and sadly, our SEC is just now getting around to writing it, but we might as well take this opportunity to help give banksters a reason not to take massive risks with our money that crash banks. As it is now, banks crash and the CEOs get a golden parachute to go away – and that hardly ensures they’ll take care of our money, does it? A good clawback rule will do much better by us.

The Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the strongest fuel efficiency standards possible. Because literally no one on Earth says I want my car to be less fuel-efficient so that I can pollute more and pay more for gas! Auto CEOs may make all kinds of excuses so they don’t have to make better cars, but we don’t have to listen to them. And certainly don’t let people tell you that stronger fuel efficiency standards mean nothing because we’re still driving and driving means polluting. We don’t let the perfect murder the good, and no law of physics says you can’t support stronger fuel efficiency standards and a more walkable world at the same time.

Demand Progress helps you tell the Biden Administration to keep uranium mining corporations away from the Grand Canyon. Allowing uranium mining to pollute the drinking water around the Grand Canyon area would come perilously close to is nothing sacred? territory. I mean, anyone who’s ever seen the Grand Canyon wouldn’t want any kind of pollution nearby, even before they realize that the Colorado River that runs through the Canyon provides clean drinking water to seven U.S. states. And those who insist you can have both the Grand Canyon and uranium mining are wrong – once uranium mining corporations come in, clean water goes, and once it’s gone, we ain’t getting it back.

Readings for May 17, 2023.

If you’re tired of airline food that “verge(s) on parody,” you may be interested to know how much better airline food used to be. What happened? The fifth paragraph gives a hint: “(o)nce upon a time in the pre-Reagan era, flying in the United States still had a whiff of glamor.” See? Reagan ruins everything! Even I remember eating actual meals on two-hour flights as a kid, and though I think of them the way I think of school lunches, they were also demonstrably better than literally everything I’ve had on an airplane over the last 20 years. The challenges of making food taste good in an artificially-dry environment are real, but they’re only “impossible” because big airline corporations value stock prices über alles. You’ll find contemplating the difficulties of cooking on a zeppelin entertaining, plus you’ll learn how the convection oven (and strong federal regulation!) made airline food better.

Alley Wilson at Global News takes us to “Canada’s first dementia village” in Langley, British Columbia, where folks suffering from dementia can live relatively dignified lives. It’s a gated community purportedly designed so that folks suffering from dementia can “move about as they wish,” since staying inside all the time (as you would in a nursing home or other institution, or, hell, at home) doesn’t actually help those folks very much. If you want to stave off the worst effects of dementia as long as possible, you’ve got to go places, hence there are cafés and chair yoga, not to mention specially-trained staff I’m sure are much easier to find and train in a nation that makes sure everyone has health care. I have to say I still remember The Prisoner vividly enough to really wish this place wasn’t called “the Village.”

Finally, Tom Scocca at Indignity takes on one of the worst takes on Jordan Neely’s murder, one coming from newly-minted never-Trump New York Times columnist David French. “The rule of law is failing on New York subways,” Mr. French writes, but “rule of law” doesn’t mean “don’t execute someone for screaming” but “Mr. Neely should have been locked up” – though he had been unconstitutionally-detained for 15 months without trial on an assault charge. Thus Mr. Scocca is left to write, that while the killing would not have happened if he’d been locked up, “the killing also would not have happened if Penny hadn't killed him.” Perhaps you thought punishing the right people was the conservative thing to do; how strange that today’s “conservatives” don’t seem up to the task.

Action: concerning Israel and Palestine, internet freedom, and factory farms.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Palestinian Children & Families Act, reject the STOP CSAM and EARN IT Acts, and pass the Farm System Reform Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Palestinian Children & Families Act, which would prevent our government from giving aid to Israel if Israel then uses it to detain and torture Palestinians, demolish their homes, or annex their land illegally. This really isn’t so much to ask, and does anyone really want to be the person who says if they need the money to hurt people, we should give it to them? You know, versus let’s make sure our taxpayer money doesn’t do evil? Because Israel is doing evil in Palestine, and if we don't want to remember them as folks who, having had evil done to them, did evil to others, we should pass this bill.

Restore the Fourth helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject both the STOP CSAM and EARN IT Acts, which aim to fight child sex trafficking, but which will more likely prompt ISPs to censor all sexual material. How? ISPs voluntarily make 99% of all reports of child sexual exploitation at present, but passing these bills would require them to get warrants to search their own data (since they’d be acting on our government’s behalf), meaning they’ll simply censor any sexual content on their servers so they don’t have to report at all. More censorship and less law enforcement – what a terrible idea! But if we speak out, we can stop it.

Finally, Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Farm System Reform Act, which would enact a moratorium on new (or expanded) factory farm construction and phase out factory farms completely by 2040. That’s 17 years, which is plenty of time for a big corporation with lots of money to wind their factory farms down! As we discussed yesterday, factory farms pollute our water and crush small farmers with impunity, but those aren’t the only two reasons to oppose them – by cramming too many animals into too small a space and pumping them full of antibiotics, they also help create superbugs. So we’ve got to pass this bill, no matter how much big ag whines about it.

Around the table: of Nazi wannabes, scaredy-cat Presidential candidates, and Democrat weakness.

So Rep. Paul Gosar’s (E-AZ) 19-year-old digital director is a superfan of Nazi wannabe Nick Fuentes. This article helpfully leads off with eight paragraphs describing Mr. Fuentes responding to a rift (i.e., drama) within his ranks by demanding that his followers “pledge your allegiance to me forever.” Jesus Mary and Joseph anyone who makes you take an oath of loyalty to them should be shunned and shamed until they’re completely alone in the world. Being completely alone in the world is a horrible thing, so I don’t say that lightly. But hey, what you deserve is what you deserve. And Nazi wannabes deserve loneliness.

U Cal-Berkeley researchers find that, contrary to what right-wing economists constantly tell us, that counties that have hiked their minimum wage over the last few years have seen more job growth, not less. They also found that mid-wage workers did not see lower wages as a result of minimum wage hikes, though right-wing economists have warned about that, too. But the research finds this wage and job growth happens more readily in areas with fewer employers, another condition we shouldn’t let exist (and exists mainly because we let corporations get so big). Still, this is another lesson to ignore the Henny Penny tales of right-wingers.

Dig Nikki Haley’s utter inability to decide what she thinks about E. Jean Carroll’s defamation/sexual assault judgment against Donald Trump! “I have always said that anyone that feels like they have been sexually assaulted in any way should come forward and have their voice heard. I also think that anyone that’s been accused should be able to defend themselves. I was not on the jury. I am not the judge. I think that both of them had their voices heard. There has been a verdict and there has been an appeal.” And they say Hillary Clinton never says what she means! Seriously, you don’t need to be judge or jury to know Donald Trump is a predator, and if you’re that afraid of his votaries, don’t run for President.

Ho hum, House Oversight Committee releases 65-page report purporting to describe vast corruption in the Biden family but describing exactly zero criminal acts. Remember when last Wednesday was going to be “Judgment Day” for the Biden family? Good times! This should be yet another lesson about the right’s propensity to brutalize good Americans with lengthy, empty arguments – indeed, I feel like I’ve offered dozens of these lessons – but I have a feeling our “liberal” media will never learn it. Partly that’s because it requires reading, and not getting clicks or juicing up your stock price.

When I hear that “centrist” Democrats have privately assured Speaker McCarthy that they’ll vote for him for Speaker if far-right Republicans try to depose him, I must wonder: do these clowns understand how things work? Is there a hostage crisis they won’t help create by offering themselves up as hostages? Let far-right fools depose Mr. McCarthy and force Republicans to have a new Speaker every three months. Default doesn’t have to happen first; these “moderate” Republicans everyone talks about could step up and help prevent a default. But give in now and Republicans will hold the country hostage again and again and again. They deserve oblivion, but so do their enablers.

Finally, when I hear that Joe Manchin is still flirting with that independent Presidential run he’ll never actually embark upon, I’m pretty sure he thinks this particular drama (like his I’ll-scuttle-my-own-climate-change-law BS) will get him the right kind of attention in his inevitable West Virginia Senate re-election campaign. He might even be right about that! Of course, the easier path for him would have been to do things for his constituents and then explain to them why he did them. Given that West Virginians actually liked most of those parts of Joe Biden’s agenda that Mr. Manchin single-handedly scuttled (i.e., paid family/medical leave), this wouldn’t have been as hard as he might think.

Action: concerning subscriptions, "forever chemicals," and factory farm waste.

Long story short: tell our FTC to make it easier for us to end subscriptions, and tell our EPA to regulate PFAS chemicals and factory farm waste. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to make it far easier for us to cancel subscriptions to services ranging from gyms to streaming services. Our FTC has proposed a “click to cancel” rule, meaning if you sign up for a subscription with a single click on your computer, you should be able to cancel it with one click, too. That’s a great idea, not least because we’ve all kept paying for things we’re not using merely because they’re tough to cancel (over $700 for a gym I stopped using, in my case). But you know big corporations will whine at length about their “right” to unearned money, so we’ve got to make sure our FTC hears us.

The National Resources Defense Council helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous anti-PFAS chemical rule possible. They call them “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down very easily either in our air and water or in our bodies. And kids, especially, need less of this crap in their lives, since scientists have linked PFAS chemicals to developmental issues, as well as cancer and immune suppression. The big plastic corporations whine to our EPA about how hard it is to overhaul their production lines, but they’re sitting on record profits like every other big corporation, and America is a can-do country. So, again, we’ve just got to be louder than them.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell our EPA to stop factory farms from polluting our clean water with their liquid manure. Factory farms produce pig and cow poop by the ton, and that poop overwhelms water tables and makes our water undrinkable; factory farms often store all that poop in lagoons, but all it takes is one big storm to break that lagoon wide open. How often do big storms come along these days? They say “economies of scale” make everything better, but they don’t, and we’ve enabled the big ag corporation at the expense of the small farmer for far too long. If our EPA can get a hold of factory farm waste, we can start bringing big ag to heel.

Readings for May 16, 2023: special "AI's creators still suck!" edition.

Naomi Klein surveys the AI landscape and concludes that tech CEOs are “kidding themselves” that AI will “benefit humanity.” Benefit their continuing efforts to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes, maybe! “There is a world in which generative AI, as a powerful predictive research tool and a performer of tedious tasks, could indeed be marshaled to benefit humanity,” she writes. “But for that to happen, these technologies would need to be deployed inside a vastly different economic and social order than our own, one that had as its purpose the meeting of human needs and the protection of the planetary systems that support all life.” They’d also have to happen in a world where big corporations had any respect for data and the folks who create it, which, of course, they do not. Also too, it’s a bit rich for Our Glorious Elites to say “AI will solve the problems” that Our Glorious Elites could already have helped us solve, if they but had the will.

In a related note, Alex Pareene at Defector reminds us that “The Computers Are Coming for the Wrong Jobs.” AI “is well-suited at the task of blandly rewriting copy, which makes it the perfect employee of the sorts of content mills that exist to aggregate and rewrite tech or entertainment news,” but not so good at, you know, any kind of expression that requires an understanding of language, which certainly includes the kind of scriptwriting that big corporations seem to think is so easy for some reason. (No use telling me most big Hollywood scripts follow the same template these days, because, as we all know, those templates come and go.) Also, “AI as it currently exists – that is, “large language model” programs like ChatGPT – only appears ‘free’ or even ‘cheap’ because it is being heavily subsidized by investors and tech companies that hope to eventually pass along the costs of training and operating these programs to clients like, say, large film and television studios.”

While we’re still on the subject of scriptwriting, turns out the Hollywood writers’ strike “shows how to fight back” against corporations wanting to “replace” you with AI. They’re demanding that studios not replace them with AI, and if they can hold out, they’ll get what they want – and they’ll teach the rest of us that we can protect our jobs, too, since corporations are coming after all of them, not just the ones that produce words. And don’t be heartened by the notion that big entertainment corporations just want to generate scripts with AI and have humans rewrite them so they don’t suck, because studios pay less for rewrites than for original writing. Anyway, don’t watch any scab- or AI-written entertainment; it won’t kill you to give, say, Mad Men another go, and remind yourself what real writing is like.

Finally, this Associated Press report warns that AI-generated ad content could be far worse than deepfakes and memefarms. “Sophisticated generative AI tools can now create cloned human voices and hyper-realistic images, videos and audio in seconds, at minimal cost,” they write. “When strapped to powerful social media algorithms, this fake and digitally created content can spread far and fast and target highly specific audiences, potentially taking campaign dirty tricks to a new low.” Indeed, the Republican National Committee has already created an ad full of AI-generated images (which they identified as AI) of boarded-up storefronts and crime waves coming from Brown people, but at least two can play at that game. Just wait until I get around to creating an AI ad showing what America would be like if Republicans took over; I bet Congress would ban AI in campaign ads with a quickness!

Action: concerning debt limit drama.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Protect Our CREDIT Act, raise corporate taxes, and tax private jet usage harder. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Protect Our CREDIT Act, which would allow our President to raise the debt limit as necessary. Because Republicans constantly try to hold us all hostage with the debt limit, so they can cut services we all pay for and depend upon! I hate giving Presidents more power, but you know what I hate even more? Politicians who take us hostage so they can hurt us. And no, it wouldn’t violate Article I, Section 7 of our Constitution, which says “All bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives”; the debt limit isn’t about "raising Revenue" so much as the revenue already raised and spent.

In a peripherally-related note, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise, not cut, corporate taxes. Yes, corporations are also using the debt limit to extract more corporate welfare they couldn’t extract without a hostage crisis; the link above lists some of those. And none of the little accounting tricks on corporate wish lists create jobs – seriously, can anyone argue that letting corporations write off assets 10 years in advance “creates jobs”? No, they cannot – they just enable corporate executives to redistribute yet more of your hard-earned income upward to themselves. Republicans sure do enjoy giving us the back of their hand, but we don’t have to take it.

Finally, in another peripherally-related note, Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to tax private jet usage harder, not least because that’s about the most wasteful form of travel there is. Problem, of course, is too many Congressfolk have either taken rides in private jets or have private jets! Clearly they don’t understand the whole idea of serving the people. But private jets now make up about one-sixth of all flights while contributing very little to our Federal Aviation Administration, plus they use runways and airports paid for by what? Taxpayer dollars, that’s what. And these planes just piss out carbon emissions. So yeah, we’ve got to tax them harder.

Around the table: the drama, it burns! Part 398.

Florida Gov. DeSantis signs SB 1580 into law, which means that Florida doctors and health insurers can now simply refuse to provide any health care to anyone if it contradicts their “sincerely held religious, moral, or ethical belief.” Remember, the next time Mr. DeSantis says governing is less about “virtue signaling” and more about “results,” that all of his “results” are all about “virtue signaling,” even if his chief "virtue" is being an asshole. We’ll get another reminder of all that when Neil Gorsuch (the author of Bostock v. Clayton County, you may recall) rules that the bill’s proscriptions against discriminating on the basis of “sex” actually compel Florida doctors to treat transgender folks regardless of their "beliefs."

What is “The Ugly Truth Behind ‘We Buy Ugly Houses,’” according to ProPublica? That HomeVestors preys upon desperate homeowners and isn’t above flat-out lying to them to get them to sell their homes for less. That’s after you consider that HomeVestors does some of its most lucrative advertising in neighborhoods just slammed by a hurricane, and that HomeVestors might not stop bugging you if you just got divorced or if you’re a senior who just broke your hip. And I wouldn’t point to a 96% approval rating if I were them – 4% of your customers hating you is actually a lot.

Ho hum, a lousy ABC/Washington Post poll “Creates” the “Illusion of Public Opinion on Debt Ceiling.” The amazing thing is that even a biased poll which teaches nothing about the issue can’t convincingly argue that people prefer the Republicans’ position – which, to review, is “hold the debt limit hostage to force spending cuts that hurt people.” A mere 26% of poll respondents actually thought we should tie spending cuts to the debt limit, reminding me, once again, of my working theory that about 25% of our electorate is batshit insane. (58% of poll respondents said no to that, but don’t worry: somehow the Post was able to claim that folks were “evenly-divided” on the matter.)

Lengthy Office of Special Counsel report finds that the former U.S. Agency for Global Media “breached editorial firewall regulations, engaged in gross waste of public funds and abused his authority.” Before serving the public, such as he did, this individual was a right-wing documentarian, his most recent film being 2020’s Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words, which should clue you in to which President appointed him. If you need another hint: the best people!

As if we needed another reason to rue CNN’s decision to give Donald Trump and his biggest supporters free airtime the other night: America’s Last Journalist, Greg Palast, reminds us that all of Mr. Trump’s ramblings about the “stolen” 2020 election may not have convinced very many good Americans – but it did prompt legislators in several states to pass laws suppressing the vote. They pretended it was all true! You’ll still want to read Mr. Palast’s extensive takedown of 2000 Mules. You won’t convince Trump votaries they’re wrong, because nothing can penetrate a feedback loop of masturbatory rage. But you might be able to stop someone else from entering that loop.

Finally, as if we didn’t have enough of a reason to abandon Twitter to permanent oblivion: Twitter apparently enabled the proliferation of animal snuff films through its autocomplete function. Put in the word “cat” and it would autocomplete to “cat in a blender” which would lead you to some truly evil video footage; put in the word “dog” and it would autocomplete to “dog stabbed by screwdriver” which would lead you to, well, you get the idea. Of course, Twitter responded first by ignoring the issue, then by responding to media inquiries with a poop emoji, and finally by taking down autocomplete for all searches, thus demonstrating that they don’t know what they’re doing and they’re assholes. I left Twitter years ago over much less than this, and I think you should leave Twitter, too, if you value your immortal soul.

Action: concerning algorithms, bad media, and saving our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell big corporations to stop using algorithms to discriminate against people, tell big cable corporations to deplatform Fox News, and tell our USPS Board of Governors not to slash letter carrier jobs and pay. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Consumer Reports helps you tell big corporations to stop using algorithms to commit acts of racial bias. You have likely already realized that they only use algorithms so they won’t have to pay workers, but you may not have fully realized that when biased folks write algorithms, they produce biased algorithms, which help corporations discriminate against women and Black and Brown folks. But this actually represents an opportunity to get corporations to look at their own algorithms and fix them so that they don’t, for example, deny Black folks loans when they try to move to the suburbs. And if right-wingers call that “woke,” just ignore them, because they’re wrong.

Inequality Media helps you tell big cable corporations to deplatform the Fox News Channel. Because it has done uncountable harm to our country for over two decades, trapping millions of otherwise good and decent Americans in a feedback loop of masturbatory rage, and though we can’t reason with those folks anymore, we can at least cut their drug off at the source. And even if you’re not watching Fox, you’re still paying for it – more for it than every other “free” cable channel except for ESPN, in fact. And for the hundredth time: our First Amendment does not guarantee you a platform for your speech, only that our government won’t put you in jail for it. Our pressure’s worked before, so let's make it work again.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell our USPS Board of Governors not to slash letter carrier jobs and pay. They’ve raised prices, cut services, and slashed jobs, and now they want to cut jobs and pay of postal carriers – particularly rural ones – and why? Because an algorithm told them to! Think maybe they only write algorithms that tell them what they want to hear anyway? We don’t need fancy software to tell us that rural communities need our Postal Service perhaps even more than urban ones – not just for life-saving medicines, of course, but also for voting by mail, since a lot of rural communities don’t even have polling places. So it’s time to give our USPS Board of Governors hell, again.

Action: concerning AI, social media, and judicial ethics.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to ban AI in weapons systems, reject efforts to give our President the power to outlaw social media, and force our Supreme Court Justices to adhere to a code of ethics. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban the use of Artificial Intelligence (or AI) in weapons systems for all eternity. If AI weapons turn on us – and we have every reason to suspect they will – then all the soldiers’ blood we’ve saved won’t mean a damn. Now, your right-wing uncle will say “but that’ll make it harder to win wars!” To which we might reasonably respond: we can only hope! Nations tend to fight wars they think they can win, after all, and anyway war should be hard! It’s like no one’s ever seen “A Taste of Armageddon.” Even if other nations want to use AI in their weapons, there are such things as treaties. Diplomacy! It’s not actually a cuss word.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the RESTRICT Act, since it would give our Executive branch the power to outlaw using social media platforms, and you can think of a few Presidents who should never have that kind of power, right? You know, besides all of them. Folks who have real concerns about the power of social media to distort the truth – and, frankly, that number should include all of us – have no obligation to pursue just any old solution in order to rein in social media. Better solutions would include forcing social media corporations to hire real live human beings to moderate their content, but they won’t do that – unless we make them.

Finally, both Daily Kos and Public Citizen help you tell your Congressfolk to force our Supreme Court Justices to adhere to a code of ethics. Not just because of Clarence Thomas’s troubles (including, let’s not forget, his wife’s participation in January 6), but also because of Justice Kavanaugh’s dozens of ethics complaints, Justice Gorsuch's suspicious home sale of 2017 Justices Sotomayor and Kagan owning land while ruling on eviction moratoriums, and Chief Justice Roberts’s wife’s recruitment of lawyers for corporations that had business before the Court. It’s like the Augean stable, isn’t it? So our Congressfolk need to start shoveling.

Action: concerning local news, climate change, and school meal nutrition.

Long story short: tell our FCC to hold Sinclair accountable for abandoning local news, tell Google and YouTube to enforce their policies against climate change denialism, and tell our USDA to enact the most vigorous school meal nutrition standards possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Free Press helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to hold Sinclair accountable for wiping out local newsrooms. Local news serving the public interest isn’t just a good idea, it’s the law, and it would be hard to see how gutting five local TV station newsrooms and filling the resulting gap with nationally-produced product (which will inevitably reflect the right-wing views of Sinclair’s owners) serves the public interest, let alone follows the law. No use retorting that there are so many news sources out there that local public newsrooms don’t matter, because most news sources chase sensationalism and don’t serve local communities. So let’s remind our FCC of its job here.

The Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell Google and YouTube to enforce their stated policy against climate change denialism. Yes, they do have policies against that, yet at least 200 videos totaling over 73 million views still remain on YouTube, while Google still places ads with climate change denialist articles, so clearly they have some way to go before they fulfill their promises to us. Used to be editors took care of this sort of thing, not least because of the lawsuits that might result. Think people won’t sue over climate change denialism? They already have! And when more folks find their homes underwater or their loved ones dead from heat exhaustion, there’ll be a lot more lawsuits!

Finally, the Center for Science in the Public Interest helps you tell our U.S. Department of Agriculture (or USDA) to enact stricter school meal nutrition standards. The one accomplishment of Tom Vilsack’s first go-round as USDA Secretary was stronger school meal standards, which Republicans tried to scuttle because haters gonna hate. One can actually be conservative and pro-nutrition at the same time! Anyway, Mr. Vilsack’s second go-round has already improved on his first, since he’s on board with the Biden anti-monopoly program and now has proposed to cap sugar in school meals. The proposed rule could do better on salt and grains, but that’s why we speak out.

Action: concerning the minimum wage, law and order, and stock buybacks.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass a $17/hour minimum wage, reject the Protect and Serve Act, and pass the Stock Buybacks Accountability Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a $17/hour minimum wage. When your right-wing uncle says $17 an hour? When will it end?, remind him that a) it’ll end when we get justice, b) the federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25/hour for over 15 years, and c) California and New York passed $15/hour minimum wages back in 2016 – only after years of agitation by good Americans taking to the streets – but thanks to inflation you’d need to make $18.86/hour now to have that same buying power. So $17/hour isn’t a whole lot to ask, is it? Remember: when they got no leg to stand on, cut ‘em down.

Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called Protect and Serve Act, which would give police officers hate crime protections, and what a slap in the face to anyone who’s ever suffered a hate crime. There are already enough laws protecting cops! What the authors of this law really want is to “protect” them from criticism. In fact, that’s what the whole Blue Lives Matter crowd really wants – for no one to ever say a bad thing about a cop, even when they murder someone for pulling out their cellphone, or murder someone who just told them they have a handgun in the car and have a permit to carry it, or kneel on someone’s throat for 12 minutes, and I could go on.

Finally, More Perfect Union helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stock Buyback AccountabilityAct, which would quadruple the (admittedly fairly new) tax on stock buybacks, so that corporations will spend more money on, you know, research and development and less money on concentrating executive power. That’s what stock buybacks do – they take power away from a mass of shareholders, which drives up the stock price because everyone in corporate America buys into the fiction that a corporation with fewer shareholders is more “efficient,” or “valuable,” or something. But what it really does is rot the soul of our economy, and our laws must stop such rot.

Action: concerning debt limit drama and idolatry in the classroom.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to end this debt limit drama without cutting the essential services we pay for, tell Republicans to stop trying to cut Medicaid, and tell Texas state legislators to reject a bill that would put the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Concerning the debt limit hostage drama: Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to sign a discharge petition to lift the debt limit, while the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Senators to exchange no service cuts for a debt limit bill and Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Senators not to “negotiate with MAGA hostage-takers,” as they put it. Far too much media talk centers around how both sides are going to present whatever fiasco they manage to pass as a “victory,” and none of them ask when are the American people going to start winning? We’ll start winning when we make them lift the debt limit without hurting us. We're right and they're wrong, so we can do that.

In a related note, Civic Shout helps you tell Republicans to keep their grubby mitts off Medicaid in their debt limit drama. They only pretend to care about the debt when a Democrat’s President, and the only way they’ll cut the debt is to slash services that actually help people – services we pay for with our tax dollars, I feel compelled to mention again. Never do they consider, say, raising taxes on billionaires who don’t work for their money anyway, because there is no work that makes a man a billion dollars. There’s only scamming, and civilized people don’t reward scammers – nor do they balance budgets on the backs of folks less fortunate than they. Republicans are beyond disgusting.

Finally, Faithful America helps you tell Texas state legislators to stop trying to put the Ten Commandments in every public classroom. If your neighbor asks what’s wrong with this, ask them how they’d feel about putting up, say, the fourth Surah of the Qur’an. If they respond with any version of “well, my religion’s right and theirs is wrong,” then you might remind him that Jesus instructed us that we should not be like the “hypocrites” who “pray publicly.” And you might also tell him (as this clever Texas state legislator did) that putting up the Ten Commandments in public classrooms is idolatrous. In any case, next time his hedge trimmer breaks, maybe don't volunteer yours so quickly.

Action: concerning endless war, stock buybacks, and judicial corruption.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Iraq AUMF, pass the Stock Buyback Accountability Act, and enact a code of conduct for Supreme Court Justices. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Win Without War helps you tell your House Reps to repeal the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) in Iraq. Tha Bush Mobb bullied Congress into passing that in 2002, and make no mistake: in bullying them, they were bullying us, and that’s a humiliation we can’t let stand anymore. And of course Presidents of both parties have used the 2002 AUMF to justify all manner of unconstitutional war-making since then, from bombings in Syria to assassinations in Iran; no President should be able to start and conduct wars without the permission of the American people through their representatives in Congress, because that’s tyranny. We still fight tyranny in America, right?

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Senators to pass the Stock Buyback Accountability Act, which would, among other things, quadruple taxes on stock buybacks. Stock buybacks used to be illegal because they concentrated shareholder power into just a few hands, and the recent Bed, Bath, and Beyond bankruptcy filing demonstrates pretty well why that was a stupid idea, as their executives plowed $12 billion into stock buybacks over the last nine years, meaning less money to invest in infrastructure and less money to pay the workers who gave their time and work only to get shafted. Remember: workers, not bosses, make the world go round.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a code of conduct for Supreme Court Justices, who are, somehow, the only federal judges who have no such code. As terrible as the Clarence Thomas/Harlan Crow drama has become – apparently Mr. Crow even paid for Justice Thomas’s grandnephew to go to private school, which is totally what Just Friends do! – we have also lately learned that Justice Gorsuch sold a house he’d been having trouble selling to the head of a big law firm that’s had business before the court mere days after being confirmed. If they can’t avoid the appearance of evil, we have to make them.

Action: concerning our "liberal" media and food safety.

Long story short: tell the New York Times to correct the record on Iran’s alleged nuclear program, tell your cable corporation to stop carrying the Fox News Channel, and tell our FDA to stop letting big food corporations add sesame to food just to avoid regulatory scrutiny. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

FAIR helps you tell the New York Times to correct the record on our intelligence community’s findings on Iranian nukes, i.e., that we have not, in fact, proven that they are building them. Seem too much like inside baseball? I’ll bet the 2002 yellowcake uranium claim did, too, but it helped propel us into that stupid war with Iraq, the one where we accomplished nothing positive and helped create ISIS, and the one where numerous Americans felt perfectly fine accusing their friends and family of treason for opposing the war. Yeah, still sore about that, and if Donald Trump comes back to power, this stupid drama (did I mention stupid?) could play all over again in Iran. How about we strangle that drama in its crib?

Inequality Media helps you tell your cable corporation to deplatform Fox News, which is to say stop carrying it. This $787 million Dominion settlement sure couldn’t have come at a worse time for Fox News, as they’re about to renegotiate carriage fees with cable corporations, and the only channel that costs you more on your cable bill is ESPN. Thus it’s time, once again, to bust out the Big Stick of Bad PR. The good news? It works – popular pressure led both Verizon and DirecTV to stop carrying One America News Network. People who still want to mainline masturbatory rage can go to Fox Nation on the internet, but getting Fox on cable TV makes their bad habit harder to break, and we should help people break their bad habits.

Finally, the Center for Science in the Public Interest helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to stop letting big food corporations add sesame to their products just to avoid implementing stricter controls on allergens. Our FDA just started requiring that food corporations start telling you if their products contain sesame, but now these corporations are adding sesame to foods that didn’t have it before so they can avoid regulatory scrutiny! That’ll come as a big surprise to the million-plus Americans with sesame allergies. Don’t listen to the fool who says well they should just read the label then, like everyone reads every word on every label on everything they buy, and I'd lay money the fool who says that doesn't read any labels.

Action: concerning Medicare-for-All, banking regulation, and campaign finance disclosure.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to co-sponsor Medicare-for-All legislation and pass the Secure Viable Banking Act, the Honest Ads Act, and the DISCLOSE Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to co-sponsor Medicare-for-All legislation when it’s reintroduced. Don’t brook any wobbliness on this matter from your Congressfolk, because when they say “I’m afraid of the attack ads I’ll get if I co-sponsor this bill,” they’re lying. How do I know they’re lying? Because every Democratic House Rep who represented a district won by Donald Trump and supported Medicare-for-All in 2020 won! And if I know that, I’m sure they know it, too. They may even have seen Bernie Sanders get an ovation from the crowd in a Fox News town hall for his support for Medicare-for-All! So, no BS from your Congressfolk.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Secure Viable Banking Act, which would restore a lot of Dodd-Frank restrictions on banks that Congress repealed in 2018, the same restrictions that would have prevented the Silicon Valley Bank (and now you know why it’s called the Secure Viable Banking Act!) from going under earlier this year. It’s a shame we’re fighting just to get back the weak Dodd-Frank reforms, but we’re not just fighting for that, but for bank regulations in general – the more we demand better banking regulation, the less our Congressfolk (and Our Glorious Elites) can simply ignore it. And that message is always worth sending.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Honest Ads Act and the DISCLOSE Act, which would expand federal truth-in-political advertising laws to social media and mandate disclosure of folks who contribute more than $10,000 to political campaigns, respectively. Again, we might want more from our efforts – a Constitutional amendment ending corporate “personhood,” for example – but by communicating our will on these bills, we are also communicating our will that we can’t stand the billions of dollars that go into campaign ads for candidates who shouldn’t be elected to a damn thing. And that, also, is a message worth sending.

Around the table: of corruption, bad arguments, and surprising findings about guns.

Uh oh: the now-notorious Crow Corporation said more than once that eviction moratoriums were killing their business while Harlan Crow’s “vacation partner” Justice Thomas voted twice to kill them. Still right-wingers will claim one has nothing to do with the other, presumably because the Crow Corporation wasn’t actually a plaintiff in either case. But in a civilized society, you avoid even the appearance of corruption by, you know, not taking expensive gifts from powerful people. One might even say that serving power is innately corrupt. It’s me. I’m the one who would say it. I’m saying it.

In a peripherally-related note, we are reminded that some two dozen Congressfolk are farmers and thus maybe shouldn’t be influencing Farm Bill legislation that might direct more government subsidies their way. I think this is all pretty simple: if you dedicate yourself to a life of service, divest yourself of anything that’ll prevent you from serving your constituents, and if you can’t, don’t serve. And if that’s impossible for some politicians because their legislative jobs are part-time and relatively low-paying (neither of which applies to members of Congress!), then we ought to change that, too.

Embedded in this meditation on the firing of Tucker Carlson and the Joe Biden re-election announcement happening more or less at the same time is the insight that many Trump supporters believe their guy got swindled mainly because they love him so much. I’ve had Trumpholes try to feed me this patently illogical crap, telling me that my lack of love for Joe Biden is somehow less valid than their undying love for Dear Leader, as if their feelings are more important than anyone else’s vote. I guess they figure their feelings got him elected in the first place because it sure wasn’t more votes amirite?, but grown adults know that the thrill of actually getting an inside straight doesn’t compare to the misery you’d feel if you constantly tried to draw to one.

North Carolina Supreme Court, now a majority-Republican court, reverses itself on gerrymandering Congressional districts, meaning the supermajority-Republican state legislature will probably gerrymander themselves three or four more House seats in 2024. New York and California Democrats better get their act together, then! (Wisconsin’s Supreme Court might also have something to say about their supermajority Republican legislature’s gerrymandering.) Anyway, you may have thought judges cared about their legacy, but apparently not when Republicans are thisclose to controlling everything and everyone.

What is “the thinking error that makes people susceptible to climate change denial,” according to Jeremy P. Shapiro at The Conversation? “Black and white thinking,” because that sort of thing does “simplif(y) the world,” after all. You’ll recognize many of the symptoms of black-and-white thinking, chief among them a tendency to find the one counterexample out of a million and assert that disproves all trends, but you might also suspect that perhaps it’s not so much that regular folks are such black-and-white thinkers but that Our Glorious Elites pound us into submission with their fake black-and-white thinking.

Finally, the headline may read “More Republicans Blame Mass Shootings on Video Games Than on Easy Gun Access,” but I think the Morning Consult survey described therein has far more interesting findings – that over 40% of Americans think TV and films brandish too many guns, certainly, but also that nearly six out of 10 Republicans blame “easy access to guns” for all the mass shootings! That’s a fact that seems lost on Republican politicians, who trap half of their votaries in a feedback loop of masturbatory rage and expect the other half to be good soldiers. This other half ought to step up and demand better from their party, maybe?

Action: concerning "free" trade, climate change, and chemical safety.

Long story short: tell IPEF negotiators to put people and planet before products in any trade deal they craft, and tell our EPA to fund more climate change projects in low-income communities and crack down on PFAS chemicals as vigorously as possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Trade Justice helps you tell Indo-Pacific Economic Framework negotiators to put people and planet over profits. And if they can’t, they should just scrap the whole thing! It’s not like good Americans are chomping at the bit to get another “free” trade deal done, after all – in fact, it’s rather the opposite, as good Americans kept on their Congressfolk in 2016 over the Trans-Pacific “Partnership,” and then elected Donald Trump President in large part because he was the first Presidential nominee in recent history to oppose “free” trade deals. So let’s not let these negotiators think they can just ignore us and do whatever they like. You know, like Larry Summers would.

Hip Hop Caucus helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to put more Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund projects in low-income communities. Low-income communities have borne the brunt of big polluting projects – so much so it was once a joke on Mystery Science Theatre 3000 – so they should get some more love when our government funds climate change-fighting projects. Of course, the low-income communities that have suffered more also need it more, so it’s not just altruism that guides us here. Why, it’s like altruism and pragmatism work hand-in-hand more than Our Glorious Elites want you to think!

Finally, the League of Conservation Voters helps you tell our EPA to crack down on PFAS chemicals as vigorously as possible. They don’t call them “forever chemicals” for nothing! (They call them that because they stay in your body a long, long time.) Wondering why our government has dragged its feet on this matter? I mean, the Trump EPA dragged its feet on everything it could for four years, but I’m sure that’s not the whole reason. PFAS chemicals are so ubiquitous – they’re in everything from food wrappers to firefighting foam to nonstick saucepans – that our EPA may have gotten cold feet before causing upheaval. But hey, this is America, the can-do country; surely big PFAS-producing corporations can figure this out.

Action: concerning debt-limit drama, drug treatment, and discrimination.

Long story short: tell your Senators and our President to hold the line against Republican debt-limit drama, and tell Pennsylvania state legislators to reject an anti-drug treatment center bill and pass an anti-discrimination bill. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The House passed their debt-limit hostage-taking bill last week – by a mere 217-215 margin – so Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Senators to reject any negotiation with the House over this bill and tell your Senators to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, while Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell President Biden to keep standing his ground against Republican hostage-taking. Even Moody’s tells us Republicans would kill three quarters of a million jobs, as they cut services good Americans need – and refuse to tax the rich and corporations any harder – so it's up to us to make Republicans back down. Remember: never negotiate with drama hounds. People who are dramatic all the time need to pay a price.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: People’s Action helps you tell your state legislators to reject SB 165, which would outlaw overdose prevention centers in the Commonwealth. Now you may read the bill and ask: do overdose prevention centers really let people shoot up? Yes – under medical supervision, because most folks don’t just quit drugs cold turkey; in fact, most folks relapse repeatedly while trying to quit, and they might as well relapse in the presence of medical professionals, versus an empty lot somewhere. When politicians try to get between doctors and patients just so they can “look tough on crime,” remember that looking tough ain’t gonna get nobody through the Pearly Gates.

Finally, also for Pennsylvania residents, the ACLU helps you tell your state legislators to pass HB 300, which would prevent Pennsylvania businesses and public places from discriminating against folks based on gender. That includes discrimination against gay/lesbian folks and also against transgender folks. Right-wingers have shifted their hatred from gays to transgender folks, largely because the public at large is more conflicted about the latter; I couldn’t tell you why women are so conflicted, but men are conflicted because men always like knowing who to fuck. I hope saying so at least makes a few people think; in the meantime, we should protect transgender folks from discrimination.

Around the table: the drama, it burns! Part 397.

From the “Our ‘Liberal’ Media Still Sucks!” file: “liberal” media outlets help right-wingers blow up Bud Light’s brief association with a transgender Instagram influencer into a “controversy.” Some folks will complain that FAIR mainly “picks on” articles in the business press, but the notion that business articles must be worse than regular news stories didn’t exactly get handed down on stone tablets from Mt. Sinai. And seriously, this is all a “warning” to big corporations that right-wingers will throw the biggest tantrums over the littlest things? I’ve got a better lesson: nobody should capitulate to tantrums from anyone, ever. Bud Light will learn that when their sales go back up.

When I hear that anti-racist teaching is actually picking up in blue states just as it’s dying out in states like Florida, all I can say is: well, that was always the risk of creating drama! If you go around attacking people all the time, as right-wingers love to do, nobody should be surprised when people strike back. And if you can’t handle the bad things about our nation’s past, like the Chinese Exclusion Act, how do you expect to handle the bad things about your own? How do you expect to grow and build character? Learning about racism, and accepting my role in both problem and solution, has sure built up my character!

Stephen Miller’s so-called America First Legal group has filed an EEOC complaint against Mars. Inc., claiming that its “efforts to increase diversity and representation of minorities within its workforce constitutes discrimination and a violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.” This lawsuit looks like drama (after all, Mars makes the green M&Ms that aren’t sexy anymore!), but chances are better than even that they’ll find a right-wing judge, somewhere, with some lawsuit if not this one, who thinks efforts to address discrimination are themselves discrimination, and one sore on the body politic can too easily fester into a disease. If Stephen Miller ever read “Deutsches Requiem,” he clearly decided it wasn’t a cautionary tale so much as an instruction manual.

No need to think too deeply about Joe Manchin’s vow that he’ll help repeal his own bill if President Biden continues to use it to boost renewable energy production. His argument is a cluster bomb of stupid – he negotiated the damn bill; did he simply forget that boosting clean energy production was one of its main purposes? – but it’s also the kind of desperate posturing politicians do when they’re about to lose re-election by 20 points. When he leaves office, nobody will remember anything about Joe Manchin except the damage he did, and that’s a hell of a thing to take to the Pearly Gates.

From the “Drama Drama Drama Drama Drama Drama!” file: certain “friends” are supposedly encouraging former U.S. House Rep./lewd photo-taker Anthony Weiner to run for office again – to “take (the city) back from AOC,” according to his right-wing radio co-host, Curtis Sliwa. Trigger warning: by the end of the story, some Democratic pol will talk about “the crime wave we have” like that’s a real thing that’s happening. So let’s see, any regular Americans urging Mr. Weiner to run for office? No – only his celebrity “friends.” Still, it can’t hurt to remind everyone that if you’re the Medicare-for-All Guy, you can’t also be the Sending Dick Pics to Women Who Aren't Your Wife Guy.

Finally, from Rick Wilson we receive a dire warning that Tucker Carlson might actually be the individual best able to take on Donald Trump in the Republican Presidential primary. Why, it could even wind up as a Trump/Carlson ticket, which would make Mr. Trump a more formidable candidate, though Mr. Carlson could also win the nomination and Mr. Trump could then run as an “independent” because grift, and that might be enough to deliver even Texas to Joe Biden in 2024. In the meantime, I keep thinking we’re at the point where Fox will start replacing their on-air “talent” with actual rabid raccoons – and then I keep learning exactly how many hungry right-wing drama hounds there still are.

Action: concerning "free" trade, housing policy, and fuel emissions.

Long story short: tell Indo-Pacific Trade Deal negotiators to put people and planet above profits, share your story about background checks and renting apartments with our CFPB, and tell our EPA and NHTSA to enact the most vigorous fuel emissions standards possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Trade Justice helps you tell Indo-Pacific Trade Deal negotiators to ensure that any trade deal prioritize people and our planet over profits. If you think of the notorious “Trans-Pacific Partnership” when you hear about a proposed Indo-Pacific Trade Deal, I wouldn’t blame you, and frankly, I’d prefer no “free” trade deal at all. But our leaders may finally be listening to us; after all, the USMCA trade deal is a dramatic improvement upon NAFTA – for which both former President Trump and House Democrats deserve credit – and I certainly don’t let the perfect murder the good. Still, we should remain on our guard, so that we don’t let the evil murder the good, either.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your story about background checks and renting apartments to our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB). Our CFPB wants comments about this matter, particularly because we all suspect that landlords use background checks to raise rents, and don’t let folks retort so what, landlords will use any excuse to raise your rent, because the whole point of this particular CFPB rulemaking process is to prevent landlords from using any excuse to raise your rent! And background checks tell us nothing about someone’s ability to pay rent.

Finally, Consumer Reports helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (or NHTSA) to enact the strongest fuel-emission standards possible. Don’t listen to the folks who say all regulations hurt small businesses, because how many small businesses manufacture cars? Exactly. Also, regulations capping fuel emissions result in cars that get more miles to the gallon, pollute less, and cost less to fill up. Who could possibly be against these things? Oh, right, auto manufacturing corporate executives, who don’t want to spend money to make money. They shouldn’t get all the say about this matter – but they will, if we don’t speak up.

Action: concerning wildlife conservation, environmental racism, and corruption.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act and the Environmental Justice for All Act, and tell your Senators to investigate alleged corruption on the part of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act, which would give our government more funding to enforce the Endangered Species Act. The bill would allot about $1 billion more annually to wildlife conservation; that’s $1 billion out of at least $5 trillion in expenditures, so don’t let right-wingers act like that’s some unconscionable amount of money. Don’t let them tell you wildlife conservation and protecting endangered species are some kind of luxury, either, because they’re not – not to a great civilization, anyway, and a civilization that pretends the “free” market must do everything most certainly is not great.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Environmental Justice for All Act, which would, at long last, attack the system that allows big corporations to situate their most noxious power plants in majority-Black or majority-Brown neighborhoods. The bill would (among other things) let good Americans sue for discrimination over the pollution and bad health they’ve suffered and would take past environmental racism into future permitting decisions. We also need to enforce the Fair Housing Act in a way that honors Dr. King and all those who fought for it, but in the meantime we need to pass this bill to help stop environmental racism.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to investigate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for his acceptance of expensive gifts. Republicans will act like such an investigation is a partisan issue – I’m sure they’ll say “witch hunt,” too, which insults everyone who ever died in an actual witch hunt – but when they do, all you have to say is: if you’re a judge, is it OK to get large gifts from people who might have a case before you one day, let alone fail to follow the few disclosure laws we do have? Some folks will say “yes,” and you can dismiss them, shun them, and shame them. But the rest should have something to think about.

Action: concerning profiling, energy efficiency, and abortion rights.

Long story short: tell our government to cut it out with the “terrorist” profiling of good Americans, tell our Department of Energy to enact the most vigorous washing machine energy standards possible, and tell Google to stop enabling law enforcement to punish folks who get abortions. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell our government to stop funding programs that profile good Americans for their alleged “terrorist” activity. Spying on good Americans’ normal activities for “terrorist” “tendencies” hasn’t prevented any terrorism or they'd brag about it, but it has enabled a lot of law enforcement fishing expeditions, a lot of which they undertake to justify the program in the first place! Why, it’s almost like that’s the whole idea. And no, using those programs to “go after white supremacists this time” isn’t a good reason to give our government any more broad spying powers. As we should all know extremely well by now, those powers can be turned on anyone, anytime.

Penn PIRG helps you tell our Department of Energy to strengthen energy efficiency standards for washing machines. Or, as a right-wing drama hound might put it, THEYZ AREZ TEH COMINGZ FORZ TEH WASHING MUSHINEZ!!!!!!! In actually, they are not coming for your washing machine, but ensuring that future washing machines use less water and electricity. I don’t imagine that right-wingers are coming up with these arguments on their own; I rather suspect that big corporations are feeding them these arguments so they can spread them around on social media. But they’re absurdly stupid, and we don’t have to let them win the day.

UltraViolet helps you tell Google to stop collecting location and search data from good Americans just trying to navigate this post-Roe v. Wade abortion rights hellscape. I bet some right-wingers call that an anti-law and order stance, but it’s not – police officers enjoy no Constitutional right to easy investigations, nor does any Constitutional right compel big corporations to collect and such data so they can turn it over, at least not without a warrant. But if states really want to prevent abortions, they have plenty of other ways to try and do that; a lot of them involve more access to birth control, so they likely won’t try them, but that doesn’t mean we’ve got to get all Big Brother on each other.

Action: concerning facial recognition, the care economy, and renewable energy.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to ban facial recognition software at performance venues, invest more in our care economy, and ensure that any effort at permitting reform benefit renewable energy exclusively. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell Congress to prohibit performance venues from using facial recognition software on event-goers. You don’t even have to know that facial recognition can’t tell Black people apart any better than your January 6-addled uncle can to tell Congress to ban its use; you only need know that facial recognition enables law enforcement fishing expeditions, and opposing those, I would think, would be something conservatives could get behind as well as liberals. If your right-wing neighbor retorts BUTZ I SUPPORTZ TEH POLICEZ!!!!, just remind him that could be him getting profiled and wrongly-arrested the next time Bruce Springsteen rolls into town.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell Congressfolk to invest in our care economy. Sound like a tall order for a Republican House that cares only about drama? Doesn’t matter! Right is right, and duty is duty, and Congress has a duty to help us make our lives better, not stand by while nursing home corporations and child care corporations continue to gouge good Americans who can’t do without them. They say inflation is bad, but inflation has, for a very long time, been really bad in areas of our economy that folks can’t simply refuse to participate in – if you have kids or elderly parents, they need care. So our Congressfolk have got to help, not hurt.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure that any effort at permitting reform benefits renewable energy producers exclusively. Because there’s enough filth in our air and water already, and when politicians talk about the shift to clean energy “killing jobs,” they’re full of soup. Solar and wind and geothermal all create jobs; what they don’t do as well as coal and oil and gas corporations is redistribute more of your wealth upward to executives so they can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. Republicans (and Joe Manchin!) are trying to take us toward more pollution and unearned income for bosses, so we’ve got to step up.

Around the table: greed is still the problem, part 877.

Diana Moskovitz at Defector reminds us that “Greed is Still the Problem” with internet media outlets blowing up like Buzzfeed’s news division just did. Everyone thinks it’s “news doesn’t make money” when the truth is that news doesn’t make unearned stupid-money for speculators. Yes, the Google/Facebook ad monopoly is also a major obstacle for internet media, but the main problem isn’t that they can’t literally charge people per screen view like they used to be able to charge people per newspaper, but that the banksters controlling internet media are used to making billions of dollars without doing any real work of any benefit to anyone, so they kill it off and drain their blood like the vampires they are. (And anyway, they could charge folks a buck – or less – a month for unlimited views and I suspect they’d be fine.)

At least six of our nine Supreme Court Justices are millionaires – worth at least $24 million as a group, not counting homes or retirement accounts, so that figure’s undoubtedly considerably larger. “Not counting homes or retirement accounts” may explain why Justice Thomas – in trouble for receiving free vacations from a "good friend" who might well have business before our Court – isn’t one of them; I could explain Justice Kavanaugh’s non-presence on that list differently, of course. Seriously, though, money corrupts; Justices Kagan and Sotomayor are landlords, and though they both voted to keep the Biden eviction moratorium, “their positions as landlords could have weakened their will to convince other justices to join their side.” At least in theory!

Count me as not caring that 44 percent of Republicans don’t want Donald Trump to run for President in 2024. He’ll get the 25% of the electorate who are bat-guano insane (I expect these folks comprise most, though not all, of the Republicans who’d say they want him to run for President), and he’ll easily get at least 20-22 more percentage points from people who “can’t stand him” but will “hold their nose” because of all their imaginary complaints about Joe Biden; as history has shown, that might be all he needs. Polls arguing that Democrats don’t want Joe Biden to run are meaningless for somewhat similar reasons (except that our complaints about Donald Trump are quite real).

I wonder if we should even keep pointing out that Ron DeSantis isn’t fighting Disney particularly effectively – Disney easily beat back his effort to take their relative independence away, and his “revenge” plan of maybe one day putting a prison near the park will hardly inconvenience them, but of course the drama he’s creating is not only the strategy, the drama is the point. The masturbatory-rage crowd won’t say he’s “petty” for demanding more monorail inspections, they’ll say he’s “sticking it” to the “woke” crowd. Of course, if Mr. DeSantis could govern, let alone lead, he wouldn’t need to create these dramas.

Finally, physicist Michio Kaku explains why we shouldn’t go very far out of our way to contact alien life forms disk – because they might crush us without feeling animosity toward us, or even noticing us. And that could well happen! But another possibility, one I entertain more frequently, is that we shouldn’t contact alien life forms because we’ll just infect them with all our decadent maladies. Perhaps I’m arrogant for thinking that, but thinking that is a better way to get us to change our ways that than thinking we’re just ants on a turtleshell.

Action: concerning the debt limit, Oak Flat, and health care.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject Republican debt-limit bills and pass the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act and the Abortion is Health Care Everywhere Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

You want action alerts against the Republican debt-limit bill? I’ve got ‘em, from Coalition on Human Needs, Moms Rising, and Daily Kos. They’re trying to justify their whole debt-limit drama by cutting services good Americans actually need, which is evil. The Moms Rising alert deals mainly with work requirements for SNAP and Medicaid, and some folks think that’s common-sensical, but they’re wrong: work requirements aren’t a good idea for a program that’s supposed to help you when you don’t have work. And finding and punishing fraud is a separate issue. How about we cut the budget of fighter planes that don’t fight?

The Native Organizers Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act, which would pretty much do what its title says – save the Oak Flat region of the Tonto National Forest from the Rio Tinto mining corporation. Numerous Native Americans consider Oak Flat sacred land – I guess religious conscience only matters when it’s right-wing corporatists not wanting to cover their employees’ birth control! – and the mining would also poison and deplete the water there. Despite Native Americans' heroic efforts in keeping Rio Tinto out, the project still isn’t dead; that’s why we step up, as we have before, and we keep stepping up until our Congressfolk act.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Abortion is Health Care Everywhere Act. Banning anyone who might counsel abortion from providing health care overseas (as the Helms Amendment does) hurts our efforts to get birth control and other health care to other countries, so let’s not let philosophical purity murder what works – and, you know, let’s not let it murder people, too. I suppose right-wingers will try to hide their sexist objective by yelling AMURIKA FIRSTZ!!!!! But unsafe abortions and maternal deaths – which the Helms Amendment surely causes – are an atrocity anywhere.

Around the table: evil people run from good people.

Supreme Court pauses lower court ruling on abortion drugs until appeals can work their way through the courts, meaning mifepristone will still be as widely-available as our FDA has mandated. Naturally Justice Alito writes a dissent casting doubt on our government’s willingness to enforce the law, which sure seems to me like a doubt Justices could deploy when it suits them. Also, folks yammering on about the Comstock Act might want to look at the Second Circuit’s United States v. One Package ruling from 1936.

From Emily Drabinski at TruthOut we learn about one way we can block right-wing book banning efforts: strong public library boards. They vary in strength – the ones in Florida generally operate in advisory capacities only, meaning they can’t do very much about Ron DeSantis – but others are stronger, and we can always make the weak ones stronger. Going back to childhood I’d always presumed I could handle everything I read, and I suppose maybe after all these years there still might be something out there I can’t handle, but I sure can handle a lot more than these right-wing book banners can – or more likely, want you to think people can, or kids can.

A Republican Muncie, IN county council member suddenly starts identifying as a “woman of color.” No, not for real – I mean, he did say it out loud, but I didn’t need the emoji-wink to tell he was doing some hardcore trolling; probably he imagines himself a satirist of Pythonian power. (Now would be a good time to mention that one of my favorite-ever filmmakers, Terry Gilliam, should really stop feeding into such nonsense.) Sadly, his trollery isn’t a teachable moment on transgender issues, but a teachable moment on, you know, not being a complete asshole in public, so better to point out his folly once and then let him sink into the oblivion he deserves.

Matt Stoller discusses how AI impacts anti-monopoly actions against Google. Hilarious to read that Google says it’s not a monopoly anymore because AI search engines exist; one almost suspects they sat on their own AI technology for years just so they could one day make this excuse. But any monopoly is an unqualified evil. No, there aren’t “good” monopolies, as our recent supply chain issues have (hopefully!) reminded us. A big problem is folks can’t imagine what an anti-monopoly world can do because they live in a monopoly world. You know what an anti-monopoly world did once? Oh, only defeat the Nazis.

Finally, the grandson of the man who shot Ralph Yarl for the heinous crime of accidentally going to the wrong house to pick up his siblings said his pappy imbibed a lot of right-wing media. And THAT! Is the MOST! SURPRISING! THING! I! Have EVER! HEARD! Moreover, the fact that he wouldn’t STFU about Stand Your Ground laws makes it less likely he’ll be able to deploy that argument in court! Seriously, though, it might also be time for a mass movement to get cop shows off the air. When you watch someone kill the bad guy a million times, you invariably start thinking about killing all the bad guys in your life, though your life is a thousand times more complex than a TV drama.

Action: concerning abortion rights, transgender rights, and alleged corruption.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act, and tell your Senators to reject the so-called “Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act” and investigate the gifts Justice Thomas has lately been reported to have received. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would codify abortion rights everywhere in America, even in the 12 states that have passed total abortion bans and the 15 that have restricted medication abortion. Remember when right-wingers were all about keeping things between you and your doctor? Abortion should be between women and their doctors, since state governments have proven so bad at doing it that they’re chasing gynecologists out of their states and preventing women who need an abortion to survive from getting one. And remember: if you’re against abortion, don’t get one.

The National Women’s Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called “Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act,” because it’s not a way to protect women and girls so much as a way of abusing transgender folks, plus it’s also a way to abuse women and girls by subjecting them to period police and genital inspectors at school. We worry enough about educators sexually abusing kids; how about we not give them a way to do that? And don’t listen to anyone who says “but this is a real issue,” because, really, it’s not – I mean, I would hope school sports aren’t the be-all-end-all for either kids or their parents! And really, do kids have a “right” to abuse trans folks? And do adults have a “right” to discriminate?

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our Senate to investigate Justice Clarence Thomas for the luxury trips he’s received for free from his putative friend, Harlan Crow. He’s been all I-didn’t-need-to-disclose about it (and he’s likely wrong about that), and he’s also been all he’s-my-friend about it, to which I’d say if he was really your friend he wouldn’t have put you in such a compromised position. Seriously, these trips (plus the house Mr. Crow bought from Justice Thomas and his two brothers) all smack of the infamous “non-repayable loans” the Mafia used to give out. Maybe Justice Thomas is comfortable with that, but civilized people shouldn’t be.