Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning Medicare drug prices, abortion, product safety, and defense spending.

We've spent a lot of time trying to get Mob Boss Mitch to hold Senate votes on good bills passed by the House, but sadly, it's also like pulling teeth to get Democratic House leadership to consider some good bills. Case in point: H.R. 1046, the Medicare Negotiation and Competitive Licensing Act of 2019, which would, as its title suggests, finally let Medicare negotiate its drug prices on behalf of our seniors -- and would empower our government to manufacture its own generics if big pharma corporations refuse to negotiate in good faith. Why would Democratic leadership not want a vote on that? Could it be because Democratic leadership is far better at raising money from big corporations -- including big pharma corporations -- than they are at legislating? It's a question worth asking! Or, more precisely, it's a question worth making moot by demanding that Democratic House leaders allow a vote on the Medicare Negotiation and Competitive Licensing Act, which Social Security Works helps you do.

CREDO helps you tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 29975, the Women's Health Protection Act. The Women's Health Protection Act would prevent states from passing legislation outlawing (or putting onerous restrictions upon) abortion; you may have noticed that states have been doing a lot of these things lately. Would you respond that we should let the smallest government make the most decisions about the most people's health and welfare? I am, after all, neither immune to nor automatically disdainful of such arguments! But you're better off taking that argument up with our Constitution, because our Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision specifically says we cannot leave the legality of abortion up to the states. Given the current composition of our Court, that argument may not hold much longer. But I'll still oppose outlawing a procedure when only half of Americans (i.e., women) could ever serve time for it -- I mean, the only fair thing to do would be imprison men for the ill-considered sex that also contributed to the abortion, and I know no man in America would support that.

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would ban unsafe baby sleepers, like the Fisher-Price Rock 'n Play, and other unsafe baby products. An April Consumer Reports investigation revealed that sleepers like these have helped kill over three dozen babies, and you can't just pretend you're Brit Hume and say that's not so big a number, because every baby is the apple of someone's eye. And our Consumer Product Safety Commission knew, for several years, that the Rock 'n Play had helped kill babies, but took no action until the aforementioned investigation revealed more deaths than our CPSC had said. Consumer Reports will also help you call for a ban on crib bumper pads that help cause suffocation and strangulation, and tougher safety standards for dressers so they don't tip over on babies, since that also leads to over two dozen deaths annually. Again, if these numbers don't seem so impressive, just imagine it's your baby. That should do it.

In the wake of the news that our government is actually making a defense contractor pay for overcharging our government -- not a big-name defense contractor, nor a huge amount of money ($16 million) in the context of a $700 million-plus annual defense budget, but it's still a good work -- a consortium of good government groups (including Public Citizen, Roots Action, and Win Without War) helps you demand a $200 billion annual cut in defense spending. I often hesitate to put a number out there that looks arbitrary, but you don't even have to know that we already spend more on defense than the next seven countries combined to know that we can afford it -- you only need know that we routinely throw billions of dollars at weapons that clearly don't work. Which is to say they don't actually help defend us -- at "enriching corporate CEOs" and "funneling corporate welfare to big corporations," I guess these weapons do work. Call me old-fashioned, but I think defense spending ought to defend.

Action: concerning unconstitutional war-making, discrimination, and working families.

After last week's alleged attack on oil tankers in the Middle East -- a drama where all the actors involved can't even agree upon what really happened -- our Administration is even hotter for war with Iran. Fortunately, it's not their call to make -- it's our call to make, through our representatives in Congress. Hence both CREDO and the Friends Committee on National Legislation help you tell your Congressfolk to stop the march to war with Iran. Do not believe the hype from your elected officials about "tying the President's hands." How many times must I tell these pimps! Our Constitution demands that we "tie the President's hands" in war-making! It's a feature, not a bug! Our Constitution reserves war-declaration power for Congress, and reserves war-conducting power for our President, but having the power to conduct a war is not the same as having the power to start a war. That's the way our Founders wanted it, and that's the way it should be.

Meanwhile, the Tennessee Holler has reported that Coffee County (TN) District Attorney Craig Northcott has declared that he doesn't prosecute gay or transgender domestic violence cases. His his reasoning? "The reason there’s extra punishment on domestic assaults is to recognize and protect the sanctity of marriage," he says (so I guess he doesn't prosecute domestic violence in unmarried hetero couples either!), and since "there’s no marriage to protect," (because of course he doesn't "recognize" our Supreme Court's ruling legalizing gay marriage) "I don’t prosecute them as domestics." He can believe whatever he likes -- I, too, often think our Supreme Court is wrong! -- but his job is to enforce the law, which says gay marriages are marriages. And no, "religious" "conscience" plus "prosecutorial discretion" does not equal "I can do whatever I want." Hence the Tennessee Equality Project helps you tell Mr. Northcott to resign, now that he has professed his lack of devotion to law and order.

In a directly-related note, 18 Million Rising helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. The Equality Act would ensure that federal law grants the same protections under the Civil Rights Act to gay and transgender folk that other long-oppressed minorities (like women and folks of color) can get. If it bothers you that women and folks of color would no longer get more protections than gay and transgender folk, you really need to reacquaint yourself with the whole concept of fighting the real enemy. And if you subscribe to the notion that, say, the Equality Act will enable men to join the WNBA -- I wish I were kidding about this! -- then contemplate more closely how well someone who tried that would be received in any of his social circles. You might also want to contemplate more closely whether the slight possibility of such an occurrence is really worth continuing to let landlords refuse to rent to gay folks or employers refuse to hire gay folks or knuckle-dragging state legislators continuing to torment transgender folks.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2694, the Pregnant Workers' Fairness Act, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. The Pregnant Workers' Fairness Act would ensure that employers make "reasonable accommodations" for workers who become pregnant -- which would include giving them sit-down work wherever possible and being lenient on bathroom breaks since anyone who's ever been pregnant would tell you they always have to go to the bathroom. It would not, of course, include letting them spend their entire shift in the bathroom, since that would be an unreasonable accommodation; I put that there for those who have so little faith in our justice system that they fear "small businesses" getting swamped with "frivolous lawsuits." And the bill would also prevent employers from firing workers (or otherwise retaliating against them) just because they get pregnant. I mean, all that would be quite anti-family, don't you think?

UPDATE. One Taylor Swift, of Nashville, TN -- perhaps you've heard of her! -- also has a petition (on Change.org) which helps you voice your support for H.R. 5, the Equality Act. It has close to 300,000 signers as of Tuesday, June 18, 2019 at noon EST, so leveraging some star power to help this thing get passed would be worth your effort even if you've already called and written your Senators. Taylor Swift's a good egg.

Around the table: tabulating weak arguments easily swatted down if we but have the will.

My initial reaction to the news that our government had blurry, heavily-edited video of Iranian patrol boats in the vicinity of two oil tankers several hours after they suffered attacks was to call it drama -- why would we suddenly go to war with Iran now over something they've been doing for decades? Because our President, or John Bolton, wants a notch on their belt? It was just icing on the cake to hear later that the owner of one of the attacked tankers disputed our government's account of events. I said years ago that President Obama's competence in the service of empire was nothing to celebrate, but this President's inability to run a convincing false flag operation might be.

Michael Corcoran at TruthOut describes the current state of health insurance industry propaganda against Medicare-for-All. ZOMG 150 MILLYUNZ WILL LOSEZ THEIR PRIVATE INSURANZ!!!!! is not a talking point only John Delaney had been using -- and though it's true support wavers for Medicare-for-All once the pollster says psst you'll lose your private health insurance, that's a damn slim reed to hold onto, since "you can keep your hospital and doctor" if they have to take Medicare-for-All health insurance, as they will. And private health insurance plans are only popular when folks don't have to use them. This is a big country, so not everyone's going to have a problem with their health insurance at once, hence polls suggesting private health insurance is "popular" are intensely misleading. Also, too, when Third Way-types say we shouldn't do it because it's "ripe for attack," you should recognize such argument as cowardly. And stupid -- after all, haven't Republicans demonstrated they'll attack anything Democrats propose, no matter how weak?

JP Morgan/Chase CEO Jamie Dimon tells a business roundtable that "(s)ocialism means that the government owns and controls companies" and that government would use them for "political purposes, for jobs and votes." After we remind everyone that some people cry "socialism" at whatever they don't like because they can't win the argument on the merits, we have to remind folks that government corruption is easier to fight than corporate corruption because you have a voice in your government, and we also need to remind folks that restraining the power of the rich to run roughshod over the rest of us (which is what Mr. Dimon's really afraid of losing here!) is the best way to promote freedom for everyone else. People like Mr. Dimon complain about government "own(ing) and control(ling) (corporations)" because they want to do all the owning and controlling. And corporate CEOs need to ask themselves if they really want banksters like Mr. Dimon controlling them.

Ho hum, one of the House architects of the 2017 tax "reform" now says it's "way too early to tell" whether deficits will be worse over the next decade, even though deficit-neutrality was one of Republicans' big selling points and even though deficits are significantly worse now. He adds, "I don’t think anything could have been worse for the deficit than to stick with the old economy and stick with the tax code that was so outdated," although, as I'm now going to say with the Italics Hammer, deficits are worse now. No truth to the rumor that he then added BUT WE ALREADYZ PASSEDZ TEH BILLZ ANDZ OURZ DONURZ GOTZ ALL TEH GOODIEZ SUCKERZ!!!!!

Finally, our President invokes "executive privilege" to keep our House from accessing documents concerning its rulemaking on the census citizenship question. First thought: case is being litigated by our Supreme Court as we speak, so maybe he can. Second thought: House has oversight duties, particularly if they're going to create law on the matter (and Congress has introduced legislation addressing the citizenship question), so maybe he can't. Third thought: our Supreme Court can take care of itself without Executive branch help. Fourth thought: "executive privilege" can't be the answer to everything any more than "national emergency" can be the answer to everything.

Action: concerning debt in Puerto Rico, cruel immigration policy, and drilling in ANWR.

You recall that Hurricane Maria slammed Puerto Rico so hard that Congress needed to pass more disaster relief legislation to help it out, right? And you also recall that Puerto Rico was deeply in debt to begin with, and Congressional legislation passed under President Obama basically enabled banksters to keep scavenging the Puerto Rico economy? Crap like this wouldn't happen if Puerto Rico were a state, let me tell you! But H.R. 2526/S. 1312, the U.S. Territorial Relief Act of 2019, would wipe out Puerto Rico's debt and compensate debt-holders up to $15 billion -- even the hedge funds that swooped in like vultures, though they'd have to waive manager's fees, and I bet some of them find that so offensive they won't take the compensation. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to help out struggling U.S. territories wipe out their debt. And if you think that's "rewarding bad behavior," just slap yourself. Why should I bang my head against a wall?

Meanwhile, People for the American Way helps you tell our Administration to stop abusing immigrant children. I know it's hard to keep up with this ongoing humanitarian crisis our Administration has forced upon us, but long story short, our Administration still separates families at the border, still sets up these families (including their children) for human rights abuses, and no longer even provides legal services or recreational activities for these children, which sure will stop right-wingers from going on the TV and telling us that forced detention is like summer camp, right? I kid, of course -- right-wingers don't let the truth stop them! And though I know this Administration does not give one rat's hind quarter what you and I think -- not just about their inhumanity, not just about the political calculation that's gone into it, but also their who-are-you-to-tell-us-what-to-do attitude -- our duty to tell them what we think remains.

Finally, H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, would prevent our government from handing out oil and gas drilling leases in the Coastal Plain of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR) -- which sure is timely, since our Administration has apparently already told oil executives that leases in this area "will happen in 2019." Previous attempts to lease ANWR have failed, even in Republican-dominated governments, and H.R. 1146 currently has 180 co-sponsors, but let's not get complacent -- no, not even because we have the better argument (drilling in ANWR won't release all that much oil, but it will adversely affect caribou and Native American populations), because H.R. 1146 will only become law if we demand it, at every step of the legislative process. Hence the Alaska Wilderness League helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge by passing the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act.

Action: concerning pollution, robocalls, pensions, and antibiotic abuse.

Word on the street is our House would pass spending bills that would dramatically increase our EPA's overall budget, increase National Park Service funding, increase clean energy research and clean water infrastructure investment, and double research on dangerous (and ubiquitous) PFAS chemicals, among other things. Who would oppose these things? Only a Scrooge McSmallgovernment, that's who, and it's well past time we painted the objectively pro-pollution crowd into a corner. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your House Reps to support strong anti-pollution provisions in upcoming spending bills. And there won't be any "I decide what we vote on" from Mob Boss Mitch in the Senate, either, because the Senate has to pass funding bills, too, and shutting down our government isn't actually very popular, even if punishing those responsible for shutdown dramas has proven difficult.

Meanwhile, our Senate has passed a bill that would help good Americans stop robocalls from coming to their houses and cellphones! S. 151, the TRACED Act, would (among other things) force big telecom corporations to use call authentication technologies and mandate the FCC to write rules allowing customers to challenge calls' authenticity. That's a hell of a lot better than what the FCC would do, which is suggest to corporations that they should authenticate calls voluntarily. As if corporations ever do the right thing without being dragged kicking and screaming into it! Now it's our House's turn to consider the bill, so Consumer Reports helps you demand that our House pass the most vigorous anti-robocall reforms possible. I mean, robocalls are so unpopular that our Senate took the initiative and actually churned out a decent bill, so there's no reason our House can't do even better.

In other news, H.R. 1994, the Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement (or SECURE) Act of 2019, almost unanimously passed the House last week -- but that doesn't mean it's a giant ball of happy! The SECURE Act would (among its provisions) protect corporations from being sued if they select certain annuities for their 401(k) plans and then the annuities go belly-up, taking all the money with them. Why Congress would give welfare handouts like this may puzzle you, until you learn that House Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal (D-MA) has taken campaign contributions from at least nine insurance corporations or trade groups. So CREDO helps you tell your Senators to reject the SECURE Act's pro-retirement scam provisions and expand Social Security instead. See what we did there? We stopped talking about what they want us to talk about and started talking about what we want instead. We have to do that every day if we want to take America back from those who worship mammon.

Finally, fast food corporation McDonald's has lately committed to getting antibiotic abuse out of its beef supply chain, a far more important development than its previous commitment to getting it out of its chicken supply chain, and we have our pressure to thank for that development. Now Consumer Reports helps you tell another fast food corporation, Wendy's, to get the antibiotic abuse out of its beef. We use four out of every five antibiotics in feed animals, not sick people or sick animals, and we do it to fatten those animals up and help them survive the factory farm experience, neither of which is a particularly good reason to bring back the world where the next cut might kill you. (The Sierra Club also helps you tell our FDA to regulate antibiotic abuse on family farms more vigorously than they do now; we might do better with Wendy's than with our FDA, but duty is duty.)

Action: concerning campaign finance reform, violence against women, and evil media.

Our Supreme Court's Citizens United v. FEC ruling -- which used the ancient and nefarious doctrine of corporate "personhood" to expand big corporate campaign financing -- remains a blot on our culture. But H.J.Res. 2 would amend our Constitution to allow Congress to "regulate and set reasonable limits on the raising and spending of money by candidates and others to influence elections," which would include "prohibiting" "artificial entities created by law" "from spending money to influence elections." Big corporate campaign spending is popular with approximately no one -- except the big corporations who buy votes this way! Yes, that's an accurate way of putting it: money isn't speech, it's property, and everyone but a pedant sees that big corporate campaign spending results in corrupt corporate lackeys in office. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to slow the flow of big corporate money into political campaigns.

It's not just the American Dream and Promise Act, the For the People Act, the Equality Act, and the Save the Internet Act that aren't getting the proper attention from our Senate -- it's also H.R. 1585, the Violence Against Women Act Reauthorization Act, passed by our House back in April but still sitting on the Senate's general calendar two months later. I suppose that's an improvement over the aforementioned bills, but your Senators could still use your counsel; hence Amnesty International helps you tell your Senators to pass the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act. Are they refusing to pass it because it would give tribal courts more power to go after sexual violence, child abuse, sex trafficking, and the like? I sure hope not, because that would mark them as pedants -- and also as hostage-takers, since the bill would also help federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement entities communicate with each other about these issues.

CREDO helps you tell advertisers to drop the Fox News program The Ingraham Angle. CREDO cites Laura Ingraham's recent defense of evil white supremacist/anti-Semite Paul Nehlen as the immediate news hook (a simple graphic causes so much trouble these days!), but a better reason to tell advertisers to abandon her is everything she's ever done -- she's been an ambulance chaser for far-right causes for three decades now, and she doesn't obsess over nationalism and xenophobia these days because she's really given all that a lot of thought, but because she thinks that's where the money is. Let's prove her wrong. And while we're talking about it, Media Matters helps you tell advertisers to drop Fox News generally, since they're all pretty terrible. If you want to call your Congressfolk and demand that they pass a law letting you choose your cable channels a la carte so you don't have to pay for this rubbish, well, tools to find your Congressfolks' phone numbers are in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone).

Around the table: from the high cost of home ownership to corruption and censorship.

Sam Pizzigati at the Our Future blog foresees "A Nation Where Only The Rich Have Homes." Dystopia has landed in the Bay Area, where millionaires rant about homeless folks parked in RVs along the waterfront and GoFundMe campaigns have actually emerged to fund lawsuits fighting affordable housing. Why, it's like these folks have never heard of irony! If we taxed the rich a lot harder than we do, we wouldn't have any of these problems -- not homelessness, which is almost entirely a post-Kemp/Roth phenomenon in America, and not whining about homeless people getting a "better view" of the beach.

Barbara G. Ellis at TruthOut reports that well over half of rural voters also want Medicare-for-All health insurance -- and reminds us that rural folk "have horrifying mishaps the urban/suburban public are unlikely ever to experience," plus "the problem of long-distance travel to reach a medical facility." She also gives some good advice about how to talk to rural voters about Medicare-for-All -- or, to be more precise, how to listen to rural voters' health care stories. Strange that a "liberal" media that seems to love horror stories about health care doesn't typically run stories about folks getting mangled by tractors or crushed by jacks. Maybe they can't hear such stories because they have all that money in their ears.

Ho hum, YouTube doesn't abide by its own rules regarding harassment, mainly because of money from advertising. Using algorithms instead of human beings to "demonetize" websites that deserve it is undoubtedly part of the problem, though that doesn't fully explain why the history teacher making instructional videos about the fall of the Third Reich always seems to get shafted while the guy actually spouting racist rubbish gets off -- but who, exactly, would want to advertise with right-wing trolls who do little other than call their opponents foul names? It can't be all about the eyeballs, since anyone can get attention by merely being an asshole. Thus a Drop Fox-style campaign against YouTube seems long overdue.

Annoyed by all the drama our President has been fomenting about whatever agreement he has or doesn't have with Mexico over tariffs and immigration? Dean Baker comes to the rescue, as usual, by explaining how tariffs work. Long story short: consumers don't necessarily bear all the burden of tariffs, and tariffs can be an effective negotiating ploy, but in the hands of this President, tariffs will almost certainly become just another tool with which he enriches himself and his cronies. Also, too, assessing tariffs against Mexico makes no economic sense when you've been negotiating a trade deal with Mexico! Sadly, as I've said, it does make political sense.

I'm not sure this report about Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao greasing the skids for projects in the home state of her husband, Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell will have the negative effect against Mr. McConnell's 2020 re-election effort that I'd like it to have. I mean, yes, it is textbook corruption, but will Kentucky voters feel that way about it, particularly after Mr. McConnell shows ads touting his role in "the revitalization of Owensboro"? Statistics showing Kentucky ranking only 25th in Department of Transportation money since the beginning of 2017 aren't convincing, of course, once you see that email from February of 2017 regarding "Ky-specific issue(s)." And by "Ky," they didn't mean the jelly.

Finally, China's "Great Firewall" of internet censorship now blocks both the Washington Post and The Guardian in addition to most other major English-language papers of record. Most news reports speculate that China is doing all this censoring because it doesn't want its citizens to read about the 30th anniversary of the Tianenmen Square massacre, in which the Chinese government literally ran over protestors with tanks; I guess that could explain the timing, but with tyrants you still have to wonder. It couldn't also be that the Post and the Guardian have been highly-critical of our President, could it? I mean, tyrants do seem to attract each other.

Action: concerning internet freedom, war in Yemen, immigration, and the minimum wage.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1644/S. 682, the Save the Internet Act, then Free Press still helps you do that. H.R. 1644/S. 682 would "save the internet" by reinstating the 2015 Open Internet order that forced big telecom corporations to deliver all network traffic to its destination at the same speed, without discrimination. The FCC repealed that order in 2017, and I told you then that you wouldn't necessarily notice any change to your internet right away, because the big telecoms aren't so stupid as to take away all your freedoms at once. But they most assuredly have been working to do that -- Verizon's throttling of Santa Clara County firefighters in the middle of a wildfire is perhaps the most famous example, but researchers have also found Sprint throttling Skype and several big telecoms throttling Netflix and YouTube. That's how it begins; let's make sure this is also where it ends.

Meanwhile, one of the architects of our Administration's "national emergency" declaration enabling it to bypass Congress and the will of the people and sell arms to the Saudi/UAE coalition currently waging war on Yemen -- a former defense contractor lobbyist named Charles Faulkner -- has lately left his State Department job in a black cloud, and now some Congressfolk want to have a hearing on the whole matter this week. As well they should -- the Saudi/UAE bombing of Yemen serves no purpose but to put Yemeni citizens on the brink of famine and bring shame upon anyone who helps it, and of course this latest "national emergency" drama testifies to the ineptitude and cowardice of our President, who got 46% of the popular vote and naturally acts like he has absolute power. Hence Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban arms sales to the Saudi/UAE coalition. Doing whatever Saudi Arabia wants because TEH IRANZ!!!!! is no way to run a foreign policy.

In other news, American Dream and Promise Act has passed our House, meaning it goes to our Senate, where it may never get a vote. That would be a shame, because the American Dream and Promise Act would fix what our President broke when he issued an Executive order (one since stayed by our courts) ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (or DACA) program for those folks brought to America as children who now know no other home as adults. The American Dream and Promise Act would once again extend protection from deportation for these folks as long as they meet certain criteria, like continued settlement in our country, two years in our military, and continued enrollment in college. You might think, gosh, this is how a conservative would conduct immigration policy; pass judgment on the "conservatism" of today's Republicans as you like, but in the meantime, People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to pass the American Dream and Promise Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 582/S. 150, the Raise the Wage Act, then the National Women's Law Center still helps you do that. The bill would raise our minimum wage from $7.25/hour to $15/hour, and would ultimately bring the minimum wages for tipped and disabled workers into parity with everyone else's; anyone who says I JUST CAN'TZ RUNZ TEH BIZNIZZIZ!!! after that can first be pointed to the fact that the $15/hour minimum wage would be phased in over five years and second be told they just don't have very much of that can-do American spirit, do they? People in some parts of America already have a $15/hour minimum wage, and it hasn't exactly destroyed their economies -- when folks make more money, they have more money to spend, and thus pump more money into the economy. Of course, CEOs who think all economies should revolve around them find that intolerable, but they don't get all the say around here.

Action: concerning poverty, corruption, monopolies, and privatization.

Our Office of Management and Budget (or OMB) would like to calculate poverty using the "Chained CPI" measurement, which would essentially redefine inflation downward and thus redefine poverty upward. You may remember Chained CPI from the Social Security debates of the past decade -- Chained CPI portrays inflation as lower than it really is, by assuming that once an item's price rises a certain amount, consumers will simply switch to a cheaper item. Already sounds like a scam, doesn't it? And just as the last Administration mooted using Chained CPI to calculate Social Security benefits -- which doesn't work, because seniors have a lot of fixed costs and can't just "switch to what's cheaper" whenever they like -- this Administration wants to use it to claim that not so many folks are struggling, which means fewer of those who are actually struggling will get federal benefits like Medicaid. Hence the Coalition on Human Needs (among other good government groups) helps you tell our OMB to reject its plan to take health care away from more good Americans.

Meanwhile, S. 1393, the Ban Conflicted Trading Act, would (as its title suggests) make it against the law for Congressfolk to trade stocks. If that sounds extreme to you, consider how often Congressfolk ever do the people's will versus how often they seem to do some big corporation's will, and then recall that corporations trade stock and people don't. Americans are getting a constant reminder from our President of how much they hate corruption, and they generally figure that Congressfolk will do what pleases them before they'll do what's right, but really, why should we put up with that? And folks who say we can "trust" Congressfolk to trade stock and do the right thing are ignoring the evidence of their own eyes -- and they're making about as bad an argument as saying cable news guests can take money from big corporations and still pontificate "objectively" about matters that concern their paymasters. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to restore some faith in our democracy by passing the Ban Conflicted Trading Act.

In other news, our FCC has given its blessing to the proposed T-Mobile/Sprint merger -- even though we all know this merger, like all other big corporate mergers, will reduce competition, raise prices, concentrate economic power in fewer hands, and cause a lot of people to lose their jobs -- but our Department of Justice can still step in and stop the merger, so Free Press reminds you that you can still call our DoJ, at 202.804.1389, and tell them to block the proposed merger. Our DoJ -- led, such as it is, by William Barr, who is, among so many other things, a man who believes corporations know best about everything -- probably won't want to block the merger, but again: it doesn't matter what they want, it matters what we want. One day, we will live in an America where all Americans really believe that, and communicate their will to their representatives in government until they cry uncle. Until then, we just have to keep reminding folks that we really do have the power -- if we use it.

Finally, our President, who has repeatedly assured us that he will pick the "best people" to work in our government, somehow thinks Barry Myers should lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA runs, among other things, the National Weather Service, which has done such a great job over the years that Jim Freaking DeMint defended it while in the Senate. And, ah, what did Mr. Myers do for a living until recently? Why, run AccuWeather, a private weather forecaster which has long salivated at the prospect of either crippling or buying out the National Weather Service! Putting Mr. Myers in charge of the NOAA is real fox-in-charge-of-the-henhouse territory; that's a cliché, I suppose, but this Administration is so terrible you can cut them down with little more than cliches. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Senators to reject Mr. Myers's nomination to the NOAA. Don't believe the hype that since Mr. Myers has answered the conflict-of-interest charge by resigning from Accuweather, because he sold his stock to his own family at a very large discount; what does that look like to you?

Around the table: from centrist Democrats to empowered farmworkers.

Keith A. Spencer at Salon says "There Is Hard Data That Shows a Centrist Democrat Would Be a Losing Candidate." See? It's not just a feeling I have based on 100 million Americans sitting out the 2016 election! Seriously, Thomas Piketty (of Capital in the 21st Century fame) looked at 70 years of post-election data from America, France, and the U.K., and found guess what? That poorer working families used to always vote for liberal candidates, but now they don't, because generally there ain't one to vote for -- and while some of these voters now vote for faux-populist right-wingers like our President or Ms. LePen, many others simply don't vote at all. A solution presents itself! Anyway, it's nice to see Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Joe Biden portrayed as centrists.

West Virginia Supreme Court rules unanimously that gas drilling corporations can't drill on one person's property to reach reserves on adjoining properties without "express" permission from the owner. In a sane and moral society, conservatives would celebrate this ruling as a victory for private property, but in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, I suspect that any "conservatives" who weigh in on this matter will squeal about TEH JUDISHUL OVERREACHEZ!!!!!, since "conservatism," in these times, only ever seems to mean "whatever makes rich people more money."

Is it "news" that our "liberal" media always talks about American aggression as a "response" to vague or nonexistent "threats" from Iran? Perhaps not, but it's still good to be reminded -- as it is also good to be reminded that when someone says some nation or other is a "threat," you have every right to ask "based on what evidence?" "Because Iran humiliated us in 1979 and 1980" is not evidence, nor is a quotation taken out of context, nor is an attack on Saudi Arabian oil infrastructure that even our own intelligence forces won't say came from Iran.

Ho hum, our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau proposes gutting its own payday lending rule, and then payday lending bigwigs spend $1 million celebrating the proposal at one of our President's resorts. And that's why you don't put a "successful businessman" in office! As we learned, no doubt, when our President said he wasn't about to "hate" the Saudis because they spend so much money at his hotels. I expect we'll get further reminders of this kind of corruption as time goes on.

Finally, New York's farmworkers might get landmark labor legislation if the Farmworkers Fair Labor Practices Act passes that state's legislature and gets the Governor's signature. A state Supreme Court decision extended collective bargaining rights to farmworkers -- who, as you know, do not enjoy the protections of federal law in this area, which leads me to wonder if our national Supreme Court will forget its putative aversion to meddling in state affairs -- but the FLPA would go further, giving them, among other things, one day off weekly (!) and overtime pay. That latter item is very important, as farms often make their workers put in 13-hour days. When farmworkers get to organize for better working conditions, a lot of our work as citizens will become a lot easier, and don't believe the farm corporations' whining that it'll be "too expensive." They should learn to count the cost of bad actions.

Action: concerning patents and pollution.

Remember a few years ago, when our Supreme Court ruled that you couldn't patent human genes because, well, you didn't make them? Congress may undo that good work with legislation that would nullify the ruling and allow big corporations to patent human genes again, so Breast Cancer Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep big corporations from patenting our genes. Some Congressfolk will claim that this legislation doesn't do that, but all you need do to refute them is attend the discussion in paragraphs 8 through 11 of this article. Trigger warning: a lawyer claims the ruling has caused "a dead stop in research in the United States on isolated natural products." You'll recognize that as a hostage crisis -- give me monopoly power over human genes, or the science gets it! You'll also recognize it as absurd, since we're more likely to do good work about "isolated natural products" if many entities can research them, rather than one corporation valuing money more than science.

Meanwhile, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned our EPA's 2015 coal ash rule last year, ruling that it did not adequately protect good Americans from the water pollution caused by coal ash leaking into groundwater -- as mandated to do by the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which grants our EPA rule-making power in this matter. Yes, I totally put that last clause in there to forestall complaints about BIG GUMMINT!!!! But even though the coal ash rule dates from the Obama Administration, now this Administration must fix it -- again, as mandated by our laws and our courts -- and you can probably guess their enthusiasm for that task. Still: it doesn't matter what they want; it matters what we want -- if we speak out loudly enough. Hence Environmental Action helps you tell our EPA to comply with our courts and write a strong coal ash rule. That would be the law and order thing to do, after all.

Finally, H.R. 2156, the RECLAIM Act, would help states clean up air and water polluted by abandoned coal mines Reclaiming abandoned coal mines -- which put a lot of filth into our air and water, particularly in Pennsylvania and Kentucky, from which (perhaps not coincidentally!) many of H.R. 2156's sponsors hail -- would not only make our air and water cleaner, but would create jobs for workers abandoned by a dying coal industry. And H.R. 2156 actually has almost a dozen Republican co-sponsors and just passed out of the House National Resources Committee by a 26-10 vote; with Senate Majority Leader Mitch "I decide what we vote on" McConnell also hailing from Kentucky, maybe H.R. 2156 can pass both houses of Congress! But we've still got to stay on our Congressfolk, so Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to cut pollution and help out depressed areas of our country by passing the RECLAIM Act.

Action: concerning pollution and racism.

Our Administration plans to open up public lands near wildlife refuges and wilderness areas in California to oil and gas drilling. One wonders if this is their revenge on California for being a liberal paradise, but there's a bigger issue here: California is still woefully short on water, even a year after a seven-year drought finally ended, and supports an agriculture sector that produces about two-thirds of America's fruits annually. And California farmers responded to the drought by irrigating their crops with fracking wastewater, which testifies to that water shortage and suggests that, well, maybe gas drilling isn't the best use of our water tables to begin with. Hence Food and Water Watch helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management (or BLM) to reject its own plan to open up relatively untrammeled California lands to drilling. Remember: they'd rather ignore us, but if they do, we can stop them in court.

Meanwhile, Free Press helps you tell our FBI to stop trying to hide the onslaught of white supremacist violence in its official data. How are they doing this? By lumping all sorts of phenomena into one category, called "racially-motivated violent extremism," which would allow our FBI to lump white supremacists who shoot people with black protestors who get shot at by police. And that also means that the new category would also allow inattentive evil media outlets to run rampant with bogus statistics "mistakenly" attributed to black protestors! Well, as they say, a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can get its pants on, but our government should not enable lies to get around so quickly. And the problem isn't black protestors getting loud with people who don't listen; the problem is white racists shooting black and brown people dead. And our FBI needs to confront that, just as we all do.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to end our President's Muslim ban by passing H.R. 2214/S. 1123, the NO BAN Act, then People for the American Way (among others) still helps you do that. The NO BAN Act would repeal all three of our President's Muslim bans, would prevent future Presidents from issuing similar travel bans, and would strengthen the Immigration and Nationality Act by explicitly preventing discrimination on the basis of religious belief. Would it be too much to ask of our government to make decisions on who can travel to and from our country on a rational basis? Would it be too much to ask of our President not to stoke rage and hatred on our fellow citizens with his Executive Orders? I'm an eternal optimist, so my answer to both of these questions would be "no, it would not be too much to ask." But that's only true if we demand that it be true.

Penny Rants for Wednesday, June 5, 2019: Pete Buttigieg shows John Hickenlooper and John Delaney how it's done!

Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper gets booed at the California Democrats' state convention after declaring that "socialism is not the answer" to the problems of defeating our President in 2020 and "achiev(ing) big progressive goals." What does he mean by "socialism"? Well, he says that"(m)assive government expansions may not be strictly speaking socialism, but trust me: Republicans will make it seem like socialism." And he volunteers this strategy as a way of confounding Republican efforts to define Democrats! Enabling Republicans who call everything "socialism" is no way to fight them; hell, it's no way to fight. Still, it might be worse for him to offer "focusing on kitchen table programs that will actually improve people's quality of life" as an alternative -- as if "socialist" programs couldn't possibly do that! But here's what's worst: he insists we either take a center-right tack or the President gets re-elected, which is what, class? That's right, a manufactured hostage crisis -- don't communicate your will to your politicians, or your country gets it!

For all that, Mr. Hickenlooper fared better than former Rep. John Delaney of Maryland, who got booed at the same event for a full minute after telling the assembled that Medicare-for-All "sounds good, but it’s actually not good policy, nor is it good politics." It routinely gets majority support in poll after poll and it's "not good politics"? His objection to Medicare-for-All as policy seems to be that it'll "kick() 115 million Americans off their health care" -- though it would give them cheaper, better health care, not "no health care." And naturally he took the criticism with the confidence and professionalism befitting a man who ought to be a frontrunner, right? Well, no -- first he said that "(i)ntolerance to alternative points of view is not what the Democratic Party should be about," which begs the retort that you cant 't President if you call criticism "intolerance." And then he said "(m)ost Republicans favor doing nothing and eliminating the ACA. What’s your choice?" Well, my choice is not to be part of your damn manufactured hostage crisis! You can't keep putting out a menu of wet oatmeal and a bowl of dung and expect people to say how great your restaurant is.

And these putatively "sane," "sensible" "moderates" could learn a lot from South Bend, IN Mayor Pete Buttigieg about how to hide your centrism from the masses -- he told the California delegates that "the riskiest thing we could do is try to play it safe" in 2020, which is a stroke of genius even if, like me, you don't believe he really means it. The flesh is willing with statements like "(our President) wins if we look too much like Washington" and "when (our President) inundates the imagination with a horror show of taunts and tweets, let’s change the channel," and certainly I'd be glad if someone with a megaphone actually took on the noble project of "breaking the Republican monopoly" on words like "freedom" and "security." But the flesh has also seen this game before -- "new thinking, bold action, and a focus on the future" will remind you of, well, virtually every Democratic Presidential candidate who's either lost or disappointed you, and he opened with that. And what is this "new thinking"? We don't learn, which leads me to think that eight years of a President Pete Buttigieg will be eight more years of we-tried-but-Republicans-wouldn't-let-us.

Action: concerning war in Yemen, discrimination, and pollution.

Our President, as you know, has declared yet another of his "national emergencies" so he can sell weapons to the Saudi/UAE coalition that's currently raining down bombs on impoverished Yemenis. What's the "emergency"? Saudi Arabia needs weapons to defend itself from Iran, or something. Iran is now the excuse for everything, apparently. "Where's my tax cut? Iran took it!" (Maybe I shouldn't give our President any ideas.) Since our President has declared an "emergency," Congress can't stop him from selling arms using the Arms Control Act -- but we can tell Congress to simply ban arms sales to the Saudi/UAE war effort with new legislation, which Win Without War helps you do. I've said it before and I'll say it again: a President who needs to declare "emergencies" so he can accomplish unpopular legislative aims isn't a guy who "gets things done;" he's a weak man and a bad leader.

Meanwhile, H.R. 1756, the Preventing Credit Score Discrimination in Auto Insurance Act, would, as its title implies, would prevent car insurance corporations from setting insurance rates based on your credit score, and would prevent credit reporting agencies from furnishing car insurance corporations with that information. And here you thought your auto insurance corporation might raise or lower your rates based on your driving history! But now car insurance corporations charge folks more if they have low credit scores, which sure does seem like a recipe for car insurance corporations not getting paid, but it does trap lower-income folks in a cycle of debt. Too much of our economy seems predicated on punching people in the face when they're down; if you hate that as much as I do, then let CREDO help you tell your Congressfolk to fight financial predators by passing the Preventing Credit Score Discrimination in Auto Insurance Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our EPA to ban glyphosate, Just Label It still helps you do that -- but do it quickly, as the EPA's public commenting period on the matter ends tomorrow. Glyphosate was in the news after several juries found Monsanto liable for billions of dollars in damages when folks who routinely used RoundUp (Monsanto's brand-name version of glyphosate) got cancer, and we dump around 250 million gallons of the stuff on our crops annually in America. Note well, also, that Monsanto's genetic engineering projects tend to center around making their crops more resistant to RoundUp, rather than, say, increasing crop yields so farmers can produce more food. Upon hearing that many farmers are already moving away from spraying glyphosate on their crops before harvest, you have to wonder what the EPA's hesitance to ban it would be. And by "you have to wonder," I mean "because corporate welfare."

Action: concerning good legislation, bad corporate behavior, and war with Iran.

Congress reconvenes today, so today's a good day to use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a cellphone) to find your Senators' phone numbers so you can call them and tell them to pass tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act, H.R. 5, the Equality Act, and H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act. And if you want to tell Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to hold votes on all these bills, you can find his phone numbers at the bottom of this page. Why do we keep telling the Senate to pass bills they don't want to pass? Partly because they're all good bills that would (respectively) better secure our voting rights, expand civil rights protections to gays and transgender folk, and restore our internet freedom. But we also keep doing it because it gives us a way to hold our Senators to account, and because communicating your will over and over again is the only way to get things done.

Meanwhile, Peruvian indigenous farmer Máxima Acuña de Chaupe has, for several years now, fought the world's largest gold mining corporation, Newmont Mining, which wants to build an open-pit gold mine on land she owns, and has been sending thugs to her house to beat her up and bust up her house in an attempt to convince her to move. If you know someone who would respond "well she should just move somewhere else and farm there," remind them, gently or otherwise, that people farm everywhere, and a lot of folks farm because they wouldn't otherwise eat. Remind them, also, that no big corporation has a "right" to harass people off their land, and remind them that Newmont mines gold. Gold! Like we're all in Deadwood or something! Anyway, Sum of Us helps you tell Newmont to stop taking people's land by beating up its owners; Sum of Us will deliver your signature to Newmont's annual meeting tomorrow.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to pass H.R. 2354/S. 1039 and thus prevent our President from marching us off to war with Iran, then both CREDO and the Friends Committee on National Legislation still help you do that. Don't believe the hype that our President really doesn't want war with Iran, because warmongers always say "I don't want to fight a war" so that when they start a war, you're more likely to believe them when they say "I had no choice." Of course nobody put a gun to our President's head and made him replace his NSA chief with a man who's seemingly spent a lifetime trying to start a war with Iran, and nobody put a gun to his head and made him withdraw from an Iran nuclear deal that was accomplishing its goal, either. Certainly don't believe the hype that he hired John Bolton so he could "keep his enemies closer." You know a better way to neutralize your enemies? Don't put them in power in the first place.

Penny Rants for Sunday, June 2, 2019: confronting drama and the difficulties of vision.

I think my fellow liberals are reaching a bit in alleging that Robert Mueller's contention late last week that "if we had confidence that the President clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said that" is a "message to Congress" that they should, or must, impeach our President. Mr. Mueller also said that "(i)t would be unfair to potentially accuse somebody of a crime when there can be no court resolution of an actual charge" (referring to the Justice Department opinion that sitting Presidents can't be charged with crimes), saying that's why "we concluded that we would not reach a determination -- one way or the other -- about whether the President committed a crime." I'm tempted to say we need to spend less time trying to get our President out of office and more time proving he's unfit for that office, but even that isn't really the point -- we need to put our vision of a better America forward, and we need to keep putting that vision forward until it drowns out the drama upon which our President thrives. And it should go without saying that "we should work in a bipartisan manner with the people who are trying to destroy us" is not such a vision.

Sen. Sanders reiterates that taxes will go up to pay for Medicare-for-All, and naturally right-wingers respond with hysteria. The only flaw I'd find with this article is that it forgets to mention that the $32 trillion cost of Medicare-for-All over 10 years compares favorably with the $49 trillion projected cost over the next decade on the system we've got; possibly Mr. Corcoran figures it's piling on to spell that out, since he had already pointed out that TEH AVURAJ CANADIAN FAMILY SPENDS TEH $12,000 ANNYULLY IN TEH TAXEZ!!!! is not only flat-out wrong, but that the average American spends almost that much annually in taxes and premiums. And it's no use arguing that "the employer pays the premiums," because that could money could just as easily be part of your salary. Mr. Sanders might be thinking far ahead here: if he comes out and says he'll force corporations to count what they're spending on health insurance as worker salary and then extract that money as a payroll tax, the right will lie about it anyway, but if he calls it a tax at the beginning, and then explains how it'll result in lower health care costs without actually cutting into your paycheck, he might better fight those lies.

I try to avoid calling housing and health care "human rights" -- even though most of us, liberal and conservative, really have long assumed that they are -- but Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) makes the best case I've yet seen for calling housing a "human right" -- by saying that "our access and our guarantee to having a home comes before someone else’s privilege to earn a profit." If you're going to call something a "right," calling its main obstacle "privilege" is a damn good way to do it. Where it trips up a bit is "someone else's privilege to earn a profit" -- I might have said "some corporation's privilege to earn a profit," and not least because a corporation isn't a person and shouldn't have the rights of personhood that our Supreme Court has been granting it for close to 150 years. I would say you, as a person, have a right to earn a profit -- which is certainly not to say you have a "right" to gild the plumbing in your 19th vacation home, since your rights don't get to trample other people's rights, but you have a right to save money, both for future projects and as a bulwark against catastrophe. But I would not say a corporation has a "right" to make a profit. Hell, I wouldn't say it has a "right" to exist.

All the news programs seems to be talking about our President's announcement that he'll hit Mexico with tariffs until they fix the undocumented immigration problem, but all those folks who are cluck-clucking at his "stupidity" don't get what he's doing: he's linking the two issues that galvanize his base (trade and immigration) and using the one issue that attracts more independent-minded voters to him (trade) to bait them into aligning with him on the other (immigration). So when all the smartypantses on their TV say "tariffs don't work" and "you don't solve one problem by attacking the other," I can't be mad at anyone who gets mad at them -- TV is full of smartypantses, after all. And when my fellow liberals complain that "even the Republicans are against it," we'll have to remind them that that's part of the drama. This is why I say that, absent a complete collapse of the economy which I don't want to see and don't think tariffs against China and Mexico will bring about, that our President has a very good chance at winning re-election -- unless, of course, a courageous, straight-talking Democrat who changes the subject to the real causes of our problems wins the nomination, a phenomenon I haven't yet seen in my lifetime.

Around the table: featuring upwards of three government officials acting badly.

Uh oh: Federal Aviation Administration inspectors say their bosses pressure them to overlook airline safety issues. Lest you think this corruption unique to our current Administration, attend testimony that our FAA started treating airlines with kid gloves in 2015, replacing the regulatory model you'd come to expect from a government agency with a "mutual cooperation" model. Don't believe the FAA's hype that one death in 10 years justifies their "mutual cooperation" model, not if a) said model is only five years old and b) we all know it takes time for serious rot to set in -- just as big telecoms aren't censoring all your favorite websites just because the FCC repealed net neutrality, airlines aren't going to discard all their safety standards right away, either.

George Goehl asks "Who Is Blocking Medicare for All?" And answers: centrist Democrats and big health care corporations, both of whom would be endangered if Medicare-for-All comes to pass. Upon hearing that a consortium of hospitals, health insurers, and big pharma corporations spent $143 million last year to fearmonger about Medicare-for-All, I thought maybe there'd be better uses for that money. You know, like providing health care to actual human beings. I mean, that would really be the best way for big private health care providers to keep customers around. Or is that a quaint philosophy?

Ho hum, drama-addicted, six-figure-making HUD official possibly violates Hatch Act by tweeting something political from her government account, then says she "honestly (doesn't) care" whether she broke the law or not. Not caring about breaking the law would mean a lot more if the law in question was obviously unjust and oppressive, rather than a minor inconvenience easily avoided with a laughably small amount of restraint. She doesn't seem like the kind of person who values restraint, though -- she just jeopardized her career with a not-funny taunt of Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, for heaven's sake. In other words, she's the real snowflake, not those who'd criticize her. Funny how often it turns out like that.

In a peripherally-related note, minor-league baseball club apologizes for airing a purported Memorial Day tribute video that sandwiched a photo of Rep. Ocasio-Cortez between photos of Kim Jong Un and Fidel Castro while intoning about "enemies of freedom." I'll admit, though, that when I read "(w)e’re embarrassed we allowed this video to play without seeing it in its entirety first," I thought they meant to say "we're so sorry we did this thing we'd like you to think was a complete accident but was actually on purpose so we'd get free publicity." Anyway, skip the Fresno Grizzlies next time you're in town, and I say this as someone who has enjoyed plenty of minor league baseball games.

Finally, from the "Somehow Not 'The Onion'" file: our Department of Energy calls natural gas "freedom gas" and "molecules of U.S. freedom" in a press release. If you had been wondering exactly what kind of stamp Rick Perry would leave on the Department of Energy, now you know. (In a related note, a few weeks ago I dreamed that Rick Perry switched back to the Democratic Party for no particular reason. Of course Joe Biden promptly made him his running mate!)

Action: concerning government spying, electric cars, and pollution.

Even though our National Security Agency has (in what must be an unprecedented act!) declared that it doesn't need the power to spy on everyone's phone lines, our Congressfolk have shown an unwillingness to repeal the law that gives the NSA this power. Admittedly, that kind of cowardice is not unprecedented as far as our Congressfolk are concerned, but that's why we're here -- to lend the steel in their spines when they don't have it. They don't have it a lot, but we've got a lot! Hence Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, which gives the NSA its "authority" to hoover up all your phone data without so much as a warrant. Don't believe the hype that we "need" to spy on everyone's phone to be safe, particularly with even our NSA saying the opposite. Folks say you shouldn't give up liberty for security, but the truth is you can't even have security without liberty.

Meanwhile, apparently because Republicans cannot let our government do anything that benefits its owners, the American people, S. 343, the so-called Fairness for Every Driver Act, would not only repeal tax credits for electric cars, but would impose a fee on good folks who drive them! The "fairness" in the bill, apparently, refers to electric car-drivers paying less money in gas taxes (which help maintain highways) and thus gas-guzzling car drivers paying more, but S. 343 wouldn't bring about "fairness" but mere symmetry, and would penalize folks who have gone out of their way to pollute less. Boy, is that not a good look! And gosh, is there just no other way to fund highway maintenance and construction -- like, say, by raising taxes on corporations and the rich who don't pay their fair share of taxes in the first place? Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to promote clean energy by rejecting S. 343.

Finally, our EPA hasn't banned the pesticide chlorpyrifos, although scientists have linked chlorpyrifos to developmental difficulties in children, and although a federal court told our EPA just last year to ban chlorpyrifos as its own scientists recommended. Naturally our EPA is appealing that court's decision -- I wouldn't go counting on our Supreme Court to help them out if I were them -- and hence comes S. 921, the Protect Children, Farmers, and Farmworkers from Nerve Agent Pesticides Act, which would ban chlorpyrifos for good. Yes, chlorpyrifos is essentially a nerve gas, and though it does far more damage in the short run to bugs than it does to people (as you'd expect), what's the difference if you ingest many, many times more than a bug ever does over the course of your lifetime? Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight pollution and support families' health by passing S. 921 and banning chlorpyrifos forever.

Action: concerning disaster relief, abortion, and voting rights.

Our Senate finally passed a $19.1 billion disaster relief package for Puerto Rico, which is still suffering from the effects of Hurricane Maria -- but when our House tried to pass it on a voice vote, which must be unanimous, one House Rep, Charles "Chip" Roy of Texas's 21st district, said no, due to "concerns" about "securing the border," which is now apparently a reason to block any legislation. (Kentucky's incorrigible Thomas Massey thwarted a second attempt yesterday.) Anyway, all is not lost: small pro forma sessions will continue this week, and then all of Congress returns on Monday, at which point they can pass the bill with a simple majority. Hence you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to find your Reps' phone numbers and call them to tell them to pass disaster relief legislation. You may want to call their home district office numbers, since that's where most of them are.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell six big corporations to stop donating to the politicians who've enacted all these abortion bans across America. These big corporations will likely tell you that they gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to these politicians because of their "pro-business" views, not because of their hatred of women, but if the end result is near-total abortion bans in six states, then they're merely enabling woman-haters. And too many of these corporations have been positioning themselves as "pro-woman" lately, so it's well past time for them to walk the walk. Roe v. Wade is still the law of the land, and clear majorities now support legal abortion and Roe v. Wade, and what's the best way to fight abortion anyway? Birth control -- which right-wing politicians now also believe to be an unconscionable evil. But though these politicians remain stubbornly immune to the Big Stick of Bad PR, corporations are. So let's wield it.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to end the nefarious practice of keeping felons from voting, then Common Cause still helps you do that. My beliefs are pretty straightforward: prisoners should have the right to vote, not just once they've paid their debt to society and earned back their freedom, but also while they're behind bars. Giving prisoners the vote would curtail another nefarious vote suppression practice: the practice of packing non-voting prisoners into a district so that they can't vote but still count as residents of that district! If that reminds you of the Constitution's nefarious three-fifths rule during the years slavery was legal, well, you're not alone. And if prisoners could vote, the state would have less incentive to imprison the people it wants to silence -- an urge that, sadly, usually expresses itself as racial profiling. So let's stand up to all of that.

Action: concerning "national emergencies," unconstitutional war, abortion, and taxes.

Dig this: our President has used the Arms Control Act of 1976 to declare yet another "national emergency" so he can sell weapons to Saudi Arabia and the UAE without Congress's approval. If you're wondering what possible "emergency" could exist to justify such a sale -- presumably we don't need Saudi Arabia to protect us from invasion! -- you're not alone. Of course the "emergency" is Iran, though it's more likely kids on Yemeni school buses will feel the blunt end of the weapons sales. But if everything's an emergency, then nothing is an emergency -- and if a President faces so many "emergencies," it kinds reflects badly on him. You can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to find phone numbers for your Reps and Senators, so you can call them and tell them to stand in our President's way on this matter.

In a related matter, CREDO still helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2354/S. 1039, the Prevention of Unconstitutional War with Iran Act. So far, our Administration's efforts to go to war with Iran have included lousy intelligence and boasting from elected leaders that a war with Iran would be easy; remind you of anything? I suppose a war with Iran would have important differences -- per John Bolton, we'd be sending 120,000 troops there, which is even fewer than we sent to Iraq in order to subdue a nation with less than half the population of Iran. Also, evacuating non-essential personnel from the Baghdad embassy is a dramatic touch I don't recall Mr. Bush contemplating. You know what else is different, though? Americans have seen this play already and have more vivid memories of their disgust with how the Iraq war turned out than they do of 9.11, which is almost old enough to vote now. Our duty now is to remind America of that disgust.

Meanwhile, H.R. 2975/S. 1645, the Women's Health Protection Act, would prevent states from enacting medically unnecessary abortion bans that block women's access to health care. We don't "leave it up to the states" here, because our Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision explicitly prohibits leaving this matter up to the states. And that makes sense -- if our Constitution protects a right to abort a pregnancy, why would women need to get an ultrasound in one state and not another? Why would abortion be legal only up to six weeks into a pregnancy in one state and 24 weeks in another? Politicians could make all of this moot by putting a Constitutional amendment before us; wonder why they don't. And by "wonder why they don't" I mean "because they'd rather keep voters enraged than actually do something." The National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect women's health everywhere by passing the Women's Health Protection Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to let our IRS offer free online tax-filing, then Penn PIRG still helps you do that. You know that our government has an, er, arrangement with certain tax-filing corporations in which our IRS doesn't offer free tax-filing services online as long as these tax-filing corporations do -- and you may also know that these corporations do their damnedest to hide these free tax-filing services online so that you can't actually take advantage of them. But you may not know that TurboTax also diverts our soldiers from the free tax-filing services they're entitled to receive by offering "military discounts" that force them to pay for tax filing! That's a damn dirty trick, so go ahead and refer your Senators to the ProPublica article to which we've linked in the previous sentence. If they don't know about it, they need to know about it.

Around the table: confronting the drama of our times, again.

In more ordinary times we'd be pleased as punch to find Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) producing a policy paper excoriating corporations for their short-term obsession with shareholder value at the expense of research, development, and "long-term corporate capabilities," but these are not more ordinary times, and this is Marco Rubio we're talking about here, so not only is he short on actual solutions that might ameliorate the problem, he of course won't admit that public investment has ameliorated the problem fairly decisively in the past. Should I give him credit for slamming "outsourcing investment decisions to financial markets" as any good anti-bankster would? Nah -- not when the only alternative he'll entertain is corporations making all the important decisions, when corporations making all the important decisions is how we got here in the first place.

It may be premature to announce, as Colorado Gov. Jared Polis has done, that "the days of insulin price-gouging are over" in Colorado with the passage of a bill capping out-of-pocket insulin costs at $100 a month, but $100/month is a lot more manageable than $600 to $900 a month, which is the kind of thing that leads diabetics to ration their insulin, a strategy that might not be significantly safer than Russian roulette. So if insulin-producing corporations demand more money from health insurance corporations to make up the shortfall, will those health insurance corporations then pass that cost on to their customers? If they want to be even more popular, perhaps!

I don't think it's good news that our President might not really "mean it" when he calls the media "the enemy of the people," since his votaries, who live vicariously through their President's tantrums, do mean it. I also don't think that we should feel very sorry for media outlets like CNN, which has never really had an adversarial relationship with the Our Glorious Elites, no matter how much acting out they might do. If they really wanted to cultivate an adversarial relationship with our President, they'd go after, say, his attempts to gut clean air and clean water regulations, rather than the drama he creates to distract us.

Regarding that video manipulated to make Rep. Pelosi sound "drunk": I guess it's good that our "liberal" media did a better job debunking it than they did with all those more obviously-manipulated videos coming out of Project Veritas in 2009 and 2010, and I guess it's good that you might need someone to "interpret" the altered audio for you ("she sounds drunk, get it?"), but I fear it won't be long before more radical alterations of video become more common and less detectable. Still, if Ms. Pelosi were less of a corporatist and more of a populist, the release of an obviously-altered video aiming to make her look bad wouldn't have made a difference. I mean, this President is a fake populist, and that seems to insulate him from actual facts that actually make him look bad.

Finally, at the risk of seeming very late to the party, I enjoyed the Game of Thrones finale more than most folks seemed to do. And more than I expected to: the finale overcame, as well as could be done, the fatal flaw of the show's final season -- namely, that it frogmarched Dany into madness rather than (at least!) letting her go mad at her speed. We can all easily tabulate other wrong notes (Tyrion's nomination of Bran for King, for example, had at least one Hallmark card moment), but the thing I'll always remember about the finale is a group of survivors coming to grips with their complicity in creating the decadent society that almost destroyed them and everyone they knew and loved. I was even surprised to consider that all those pornographic scenes from the show's early years might have had an actual narrative purpose! Given Bronn's eagerness to spend state money rebuilding the brothels that made the show infamous, I don't know how it'll turn out for Westeros. But I hope we do at least as well when the most decadent human being ever to hold high office in Amerca -- a man whose continued presence in that office indicts us all -- goes before the voters next year.

Action: concerning endless war and endless corporate mergers.

With the war in Afghanistan now almost old enough to vote, Win Without War helps you tell your House Reps to co-sponsor H.R. 1274, which would repeal the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) which all future Presidents have misused to start military conflicts wherever they like. And unlike past bills purporting to repeal the AUMF -- you may recall last year's S.J.Res. 59, which would have repealed the 2001 AUMF but also expanded Presidential power to start war without Congressional authorization -- this bill would simply repeal the 2001 AUMF 240 days after its enactment, which surely would give our Executive branch enough time to wind down its "war on terror"-related activities, including the ongoing war in Afghanistan. Don't brook any foolishness about this bill "putting our troops in harm's way." You know what puts our troops in harm's way? Fighting stupid wars, that's what. So how about we maybe do less of that?

Meanwhile, in a related note, our Pentagon has requested $750 billion in this year's Administration budget, so a large coalition of good-government groups (including Roots Action, Public Citizen, and Social Security Works) helps you tell our government to cut at least $200 billion of defense spending annually. We already spend more on defense than the next seven nations combined; an actual conservative might say we must ask how much more money we must throw at a problem. In any case, you might want to comment (in the petition's comment box) on what you'd rather spend the money on. Plenty of options (i.e., better public education funding, higher Social Security benefits, actual infrastructure rebuilding) leap to mind, but you might also want to address the notion that "defense spending gives us innovative products," because more National Institute of Health and/or National Institute of Science spending would achieve the same end, for less money.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our FTC to block the proposed Bristol-Myers Squibb/Celgene merger, then CREDO still helps you do that. I am pleased to be reminded that both Bristol-Myers Squibb and Celgene just so happen to produce cancer-fighting drugs; since cancer is probably going to be the biggest health care problem we face over the remainder of this century, how do we think this merger would out for good Americans? With prohibitively expensive cancer treatments, that's how. This merger would be the biggest of all big pharma mergers, and you know what mergers bring, generally: less competition, fewer jobs, higher prices -- and even more profits for an already gluttonous pharmaceutical industry, who then use those profits not so much to research better drugs (they get corporate welfare for that already!) as for advertising and buying even more favorable laws from Congress. So let's put a stop to that.

Action: concerning media monopolies, paid family leave, and health care.

Word on the street is that FCC Chair Ajit Pai will recommend approving the proposed T-Mobile/Sprint merger, so today might be a good day to call our Justice Department at 1.202.804.1389 and urge them to reject the merger. In this era of right-wing dominance, our legal system tends to view the "harm" caused by corporate mergers very, very narrowly: they only seem to care whether or not a merger will dramatically raise prices for consumers. Mergers do tend to raise prices for consumers simply because they decrease competition, but our courts need to go back to viewing "harm" as broadly as they used to do. Ask one of the tens of thousands of people who are going to lose their jobs as a result of this merger whether it causes them harm. Ask the working families who get discounted service from T-Mobile and will almost certainly lose it in the merger whether it causes them harm. We know concentrated corporate power harms all of us, so let's get to fighting.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: Moms Rising helps you tell your state legislators to pass paid family leave and medical leave legislation. (Legislators plan to introduce bills toward both ends shortly.) America is, as you know, the only country on Earth that doesn't provide paid family or medical leave for its citizens -- and it is also, as you know, the only country on Earth that has seriously proposed raiding Social Security pensions to pay for family and medical leave! -- but we could pay for family and medical leave insurance with a minuscule payroll tax hike, or, heaven forfend, by amending the state Constitution so that rich folks actually pay a higher rate of taxes than working folk! Why would it be a minuscule tax hike? Because not everyone uses insurance at once! Indeed, that's how insurance has always worked. Six American states, the District of Columbia, and the rest of the planet already do it, so let's do it in Pennsylvania as well.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1384/S. 1129, the Medicare for All Act, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. Right-wingers love asking, where's the money for that?. Usually, the answer is "tax the rich so that gazillionaires don't have 22 vacation homes or start collecting mountains," but, truth be told, we're not going to tax the rich to the tune of $3.4 trillion annually, which is what the right-wing Mercatus Center tells us Medicare for All health insurance will cost. However, we also know that we're already planning to spend $49 trillion over the next 10 years on health insurance, which means that, yes, we already know where the money is; we just have to capture it. Capturing it will be harder to explain than to do, but we also know that this is America, the can-do country, and matters of accounting should never stop us from doing the right thing.

Action: concerning discrimination, aircraft safety, and internet freedom.

Last week the House passed H.R. 5, the Equality Act -- with eight Republican votes! Eight! It's a firestorm of moderation! I kid, of course -- I'm old enough to remember when the Republican Moderate Caucus in the Senate had two dozen members; now it doesn't even meet for lunch! Still, that might bode well for passage of the Equality Act in the Senate, since all 47 Democrats will vote for it and a handful of Republicans still style themselves as moderates. Perhaps a handful more will style themselves as independents who worry about more important things than continuing to discriminate against gays and transgender folk -- but only if we get in their grills! Hence you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a smartphone) to find your Senators' phone numbers so you can call them and tell them to pass the Equality Act. Maybe our President will veto it (at Vice President Pence's urging, no doubt!), but let's at least make him do it.

In the wake of numerous news reports about safety failings of the Boeing 737 Max plane, which caused two of them to crash in six months, Penn PIRG helps you tell our Federal Aviation Administration (or FAA) to mandate the "optional" safety features that could have prevented those crashes, and Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to increase FAA funding and take decision-making power about safety standards away from airplane manufacturing corporations. When folks started telling us that "the private sector does everything better," and started privatizing government functions, they assured us that government would still hold corporations accountable when they failed -- and then they started privatizing the accountability itself! It's like telling burglars to decide the length of their own jail sentences because, hey, they know best! Truth be known, airline deregulation has been a problem as long as I've been alive; maybe now's the time to stop all that?

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to vote for H.R. 1644/S. 682, the Save the Internet Act, then Free Press still helps you do that. Americans across the ideological spectrum -- yes, actual conservatives and actual liberals -- support the Save Internet Act, because it would restore net neutrality, the principle that big telecom corporations should treat all network traffic the same, and thus you, and not some corporation, should get to decide where you want to go on the internet. But politicians don't support it, because politicians care more about big telecom money than about people. Harsh? Nah, just truth. How do we know? They can't concoct a good argument against net neutrality -- take their complaining that internet regulation needs a "light touch," when net neutrality is obviously "light touch"! When an internet regulation doesn't mandate content or price, that's light touch.

Around the table: in which the calculus of defeat reveals itself, again!

Tennessee House Speaker Glen Casada, who has shepherded numerous anti-gay and anti-transgender bills through that state's House over the last few years, has announced he'll resign his leadership post in the coming weeks. A Tennessean report revealed that Mr. Casada had exchanged sexually explicit text messages about women with his Chief of Staff; that's despicable behavior, obviously, but would it be too much to ask that bad legislators resign in shame after trying to pass despicable bills? (Mr. Casada says he'll keep his House seat; other Republican legislators have objected, but I doubt that'll amount to much.)

Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) becomes the first Republican House Rep to call for impeachment of our President, and Mehdi Hasan at The Intercept wonders why more Democrats aren't calling for it. They probably think it's "smart politics," but then they also think that running yet another center-right milquetoast who wants everyone to "get along" in the name of "bipartisanship" will beat our President in 2020, just like it didn't do in 2016. And they're also wrong, as Mr. Hasan says, to suggest that they don't want to do anything to rile up our President's base, because anything riles them up, and bases don't win elections without a lot of help. (And Jesus Mary and Joseph our President needs to shut up about "TREASON!" He's going to make the word meaningless, and that's one of those words we need to define accurately and precisely.)

I don't know that the Venezuelan media offer "far more diversity" than American media, but Lucas Koerner and Ricardo Vaz at FAIR make a fairly compelling case that the Venezuelan press is far more diverse than our "liberal" media would like us to think. No, I think imputing malice to our "liberal" media is entirely appropriate there -- weren't they just doing their damnedest to create the impression that a coup was about to take down the Maduro government any second now? Yes, they were. And the "facts" our "liberal" media often presents are easily refutable by folks who've actually spent any time in Venezuela. Maybe there's a solution in there, somewhere.

Fresh off his pardoning of a bankster who wrote a glowing book about him, our President is apparently thinking of pardoning a few actual American war criminals on Memorial Day. On Memorial Day! Could it be that our President really is a Democratic plant trying to make the very idea of ever voting for a flag-waving jingo again revolting? That's not the way to bet, of course, and (as Sen. Graham might say, if he weren't such a toady these days) the whole idea of being an American is most emphatically not to prove that you can act just as uncivilized as your enemy. (As an aside, I think the Times is rather optimistic to suppose that Attorney General Barr might be trying to prevent this from happening; Mr. Barr is, after all, the man who helped Bush the Better pardon all those Iran-Contra conspirators. I'd be happy to be wrong, of course!)

Finally, a warning about polls suggesting that folks feeling good about our economy won't help our President get re-elected: ask them again in late October of 2020. If the economy's still "good" then, and the Presidential candidates have spent six months tearing each other down, then I suspect a fatigued populace will be more likely to ascribe the drama to "both sides" and return our President to office, a tragedy continued Republican vote suppression will facilitate. But who knows? Maybe Democrats will nominate someone who changes the conversation away from our President and towards a just, sustainable, and hopeful future. I kid, of course.

Action: concerning trade, banksters, pollution, and voting rights.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to remove corporate welfare for big pharma from the recently-negotiated USMCA trade agreement. Folks call the USMCA "NAFTA 2.0," but it deserves better than that, since it vastly curtails the use of the "investor-state dispute settlement" (or ISDS) system that nullifies our laws and outsources our jobs. Unfortunately, the USMCA also extends monopoly patent protections for big pharma corporations (for drugs they couldn't have made without government funding, no less!), which keeps generic drugs off the market and thus keeps drug prices high. In an era where EpiPens cost as much as $600 a dose, where hedge fund managers drive up the price of drugs by 700% or more, where drugs sell for $1,700 a dose when they sell for $8 a dose in Australia, and where insulin costs so much that diabetics risk death by rationing it, our trade deals shouldn't make all that worse. So let's get Congress to fix it.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect good Americans from financial predators by passing the Loan Shark Prevention Act. The bill would, as you may know, set a maximum interest rate of 15% on "any extension of credit" -- unless the state in which the borrower lives sets a lower maximum rate -- and would explicitly prevent concocting fees to evade the 15% cap. Now, a 15% cap would just so happen to kill the payday lending industry, but let its defenders on both sides of the aisle make fools of themselves justifying the 300% interest rates on short-term loans that wreck soldiers' lives. As I've said, I'd set much lower limits on car loans (2%), mortgages (3%), and personal loans (6%), but the 15% cap would make credit card debt more manageable. And caps such as these don't destroy industries, though they may prevent such industries from buying more corporate welfare through campaign donations. What a shame that would be!

In other news, the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban PFAS chemicals from our products. I'm sure PFAS chemicals seemed like a wonder material once upon a time, but now they're everywhere, from Teflon pans to fast-food wrappers to fire-fighting foam to rain gear to popcorn bags to dental floss, and chances are you've got it in your bloodstream as we speak, because PFAS never breaks down. And scientists have linked PFAS chemicals to cancer, kidney damage, thyroid problems, and child developmental issues. This isn't a situation where you can just avoid bad stuff, because PFAS is, basically, everywhere and in everything. Some 20 bills currently under consideration in the House and Senate would address PFAS chemicals; now we just have to impress upon our Congressfolk the urgency of the problem. Don't be one of those who'd say "well, what are we going to make our dental floss out of now?" America is a can-do country, after all.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1/S. 949, the For the People Act, then People for the American Way still helps you do that, and if you want to call Sen. "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell and tell him directly to allow a vote on the bill, then his Senate website provides phone numbers if you scroll all the way down. Don't imagine that the House flipping back to Democrats this past November means "the people have overcome" all the voting rights issues. Democratic candidates got more votes than Republicans in Wisconsin state legislature races in 2018, yet Republican legislators still hold almost two-thirds of that state's seats, and that's because Republicans have aggressively gerrymandered the state. The For the People Act would fix that, by making states use independent commissions, and not self-interested legislators, to redraw Congressional districts. The For the People Act would enact reforms in voting rights and campaign finance, too. So let's keep on 'em.

Action: concerning immigration, war, pollution, and taxes.

Mark Morgan, our President's latest nominee to head Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, says he can look in the eyes of an unaccompanied minor at the border and decide right there whether or not he'll grow up to join the MS-13 gang. Where do we begin with that? That MS-13 isn't an existential threat, but something politicians throw around to justify racist immigration policies? That the science doesn't support the notion of unaccompanied minors (or, indeed, undocumented immigrants in general) committing more crimes than native-born Americans? That if you think you can tell someone's criminal future by "looking in their eyes," you're an arrogant drama hound who should be nowhere near any levers of power? Maybe that last one is the one you lead with, when you use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to find phone numbers for your Senators, so you can tell them to reject this absurd nomination.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2354/S. 1039, the Prevention of Unconstitutional War with Iran Act of 2019. The bill would prevent war with Iran without express authorization from Congress, which is how it should be, even if far too many allegedly smart people tell you that such bills "hamstring the President." Hamstringing the President is how our Constitution wants it! It's a feature, not a bug! I'd love to add "and this President exemplifies the kind of person who should not have any sort of unilateral power," but I'd be afraid of calling someone into existence who's far worse. Don't believe reports that our President has told his acting Defense Secretary he doesn't want war with Iran -- and "since when do you trust this guy?" is really the wrong answer. The right answer is: since when do you trust your President? Americans don't just "trust their President" -- Americans check their President.

In other news, our EPA has decided to ban methylene chloride -- used in paint strippers, linked by scientists to liver and nervous system problems, and declared by our EPA to be a likely carcinogen -- so yay EPA, right? Not so fast: our EPA has, incredibly, exempted commercially-used methylene chloride from its ban, meaning that folks who work with paint strippers for a living will still be exposed to the chemical. I'll say it again: this Administration hates doing anything for anyone other than bosses. And this isn't even an example of "streamlining regulations," since our EPA specifically calls for input on a new system of training and certifying workers, because, why not put all the burden to do right on workers, and none of it on bosses? Our EPA's public commenting process on this matter closes this week, so the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell our EPA to enact a real ban on methylene chloride.

Finally, the House passed the Taxpayer First Act earlier this year, and though the bill accomplishes many useful ends, it also prevents our IRS from ever offering a decent online tax-filing portal. Not impressed? Then consider that our IRS has a sort of gentleman's agreement with private tax prep corporations like H&R Block and Intuit, in which our IRS avoids offering free online tax-filing so that these corporations can do it -- but consider also that H&R Block and Intuit haven't just been forgetting to remind low-income Americans that they offer this service, they've been actively hiding this service! Thus we have yet another reminder that private corporations don't have to answer to you, but your government does. Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell your Senators to ensure that our IRS can offer free online tax-filing services to all Americans. They don't have to scuttle the whole bill to do that -- they only need to amend it. It ain't that tough.

Around the table: concerning law and order, journalism, corruption, warmongering, and abortion.

Ho hum, Renee Dudley and Jeff Kao at ProPublica find that at least two data recovery corporations promised better security from ransomware but mainly just paid off ransomware hackers and then charged their customers more money. Both these firms guaranteed data recovery without paying hackers off, of course, and now some hackers routinely recommended at least one of these two firms to their victims; the article also describes a third corporation which could be paying off hackers while overcharging its clients, including our police departments. Nice work if you can get it! I do wonder how many "law-and-order" types will continue to squeal about immigrants while shrugging at cybercrime.

Julianne Couch at The Daily Yonder describes a local journalist in Iowa who's actually doing local news in Iowa. Local journalist Sheri Melvold's daily hour-long program doesn't give any PR to for-profit businesses, but does help local residents find out if schools are closed, or where the next church dinner is, or whether the arts center needs help -- and though she won't put opposing politicians on the air to talk past each other, she doesn't let them just say whatever, either. It sure helps that KMAQ AM/FM is one of the few radio stations in America that hasn't been gobbled up by a big corporation forcing cookie-cutter programming down our throats. Let's have more stations like that!

You've likely heard by now about the NRA's, ah, financial troubles, and now the New York Times finds the NRA has bled over $200 million from its charitable foundation since 2010. The only question is whether the NRA actually used money its donors intended for charity for lobbying purposes instead -- or, worse, all the fancy clothes long-time CEO Wayne LaPierre apparently billed to his expense account. I'd prefer to hear about the NRA's ties to gun manufacturers, of course, since gun sales seems more their obsession than gun rights. In the meantime, I guess we can always remember that time Oliver North seemed like the most ethically-upright person in a room.

In the wake of our Administration's desperate efforts to provoke Iran into doing something-anything to justify some sort of military action, British General says, contra American government sources, that "there's been no increased threat from Iranian-backed forces" in the Middle East. Two predictions: 1) we'll be hearing numerous whispers about Gen. Ghika's supposed or actual character flaws, and 2) none of those whispers will prove he's wrong. Still, ain't nothing our "liberal" media loves more than a war, and I don't imagine they'll do a very good job being skeptical about our Administration's assertions. Just look at how happily they enabled our Administration's efforts to effect regime change in Venezuela (though, thankfully, the Venezuelans have thwarted their efforts thus far).

In a related note, I wouldn't put too much stock in reporting that our President "doesn't want a war with Iran," for at least three reasons: 1) it could be an abject lie, 2) it draws people into a drama over the "tension" between our President and the NSA he went out of his way to hire, John Bolton, and 3) it enables our President to say "I had no choice" if Iran does do something even mildly provocative. Nobody in America thinks of themselves as a hawk or a warmonger -- they think they have "no choice." Telling Americans they have "no choice" is really the only way to get us to sign on to evil anymore. Thus are the lessons of the "war on terror."

Finally, Dahlia Lithwick at Slate suggests that "Alabama’s Extremist Abortion Bill Ruins John Roberts’ Roe Plan." I agree that the Roberts Court would rather chip away at abortion rights a bit at a time, but I don't think the Alabama law "ruins" their effort -- reactionaries can't succeed unless they can point to someone even worse, and now the Roberts Court has their someone-even-worse, more than one of them, in fact. Even if the Alabama law dies at the hands of the Roberts Court, I think that aids their long game.

Action: concerning clean air, the Muslim ban, net neutrality, and prison privatization.

CREDO helps you tell our EPA to scuttle its own efforts to let corporations pump more soot into our air. When right-wingers tell you how our President has "freed" this economy by "unshackling" corporations from "burdensome" regulations, this is what they mean, whether they like it or not: dirtier air for all of us to breathe, and thus more sick and dead people. And at the risk of beating a dead horse: money goes away, but clean air can sustain a civilization forever. Right-wingers will probably pretend to agree with that statement, and them move on to asserting that "the science doesn't really conclude that breathing in soot is bad for people." No, really; they'll put it like that, because that's what they do: sow doubt about things we all actually agree about. That's what they have to do when they can't win the arguments on the merits.

Meanwhile, H.R. 2214/S. 1123, the NO BAN Act, would rescind our President's Muslim travel ban and prevent future Presidents from enacting similar travel bans that obviously target folks based on their religious beliefs. Actually, I should say their parent nation's religious beliefs, since you can't identify an individual's religious beliefs merely by identifying their home country. Our Supreme Court gave the Muslim ban its blessing, and I'll always be sore about their willingness to use a proctoscope to divine lawmakers' "animus" against religious bigots in their gay-marriage cake-baking ruling but their absolute disinterest in our President's obvious, stated animus against Muslims -- which, again, doesn't bode well for Chief Justice Roberts's efforts to convince everyone the Court isn't "political." Anyway, Demand Progress (among other good government groups) helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight bigotry by passing the NO BAN Act.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1644/S. 682, the Save the Internet Act, then Free Press still helps you do that. The Save the Internet Act would reinstate the net neutrality regulations the FCC enacted in 2015, before the 2017 FCC repealed them. Most folks would tell you they haven't really noticed a difference before and after net neutrality repeal, but big telecom corporations wouldn't block and censor and slow down websites right away, because freedoms best disappear a little at a time. You also have to consider that net neutrality repeal has a good chance of dying in court; big corporations won't want to do so much blocking, censoring, and throttling if the courts say they can't tomorrow. Indeed, that's why they largely obeyed net neutrality principles before the FCC codified them! But the courts could actually sanctify the FCC's repeal, so let's get our Congressfolk to pass the Save the Internet Act.

Finally, hot on the heels of announcements from Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase that they'll start to divest from private prison corporations, CREDO helps you tell Bank of America and SunTrust to divest from private prison corporations also. Getting two big banks to divest from corporations like GEO Group and CoreCivic is a big deal, but why stop there? All the big banks should know the Big Stick of Bad PR if they continue to invest in the private prison corporations now best-known for helping our Administration separate families at the border. Of course, I think the evil of private prison corporations goes deeper: they take taxpayer money to do our government's job (of incarcerating those citizens who've broken our laws), and they generally cost more than public prisons and do a worse job of treating prisoners humanely. That's what you get when you bring public functions to the altar of mammon -- more waste, less accountability, and more evil.

Action: concerning budgeting, drug addiction, voting rights, and monopolies.

"One major reason" Congress never passes a budget on time anymore, according to Public Citizen's latest email missive, is "poison pill policy riders" slipped into must-pass appropriations bills; you can name a lot of poison pills that have found their way into budgets over the years, like our President's months-long partial government shutdown over his vanity border wall. A Republican Congress wouldn't fund that wall, you remember, so he induced a shutdown until he got his way (or, more precisely, could con his votaries into thinking he got his way). But this year (as in recent years!), "poison pills" include riders preventing our government from finishing various campaign finance disclosure regulations. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass clean budgets, without noxious "poison pill" policy riders. How popular is anonymous big money campaign spending, after all? So popular Congress has to take the budgeting process hostage to enable it!

Meanwhile, H.R. 2569/S. 1365, the Comprehensive Addiction Resources Emergency (or CARE) Act, would allot $100 billion over the next 10 years to address opioid addiction -- and not in a punitive way, because that clearly ain't working. The CARE Act would spend money on treatment, support services, and early intervention, among other things, and it would give states and localities considerable power over how they spend that money, not that right-wingers will notice actual conservatism happening under their noses. If you still think we "have" to put drug addicts in jail, just ask yourself? Have you ever gotten high on anything (not necessarily something illegal!) that could have hurt you in some way? And did the threat of incarceration ever stop you from getting high on that thing? The Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to get folks affected by the opioid crisis real help by passing the CARE Act.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1/S. 949, the For the People Act, then People for the American Way still helps you do that. And since Senate Majority Leader "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell (E-KY) says he won't hold a vote on the For the People Act, because, and I quote, "I get to decide what we vote on," you can go to his Senate website, scroll all the way down, and find a phone number so you can call his office and tell him to hold a vote on the bill already. Use whatever number gets you through; hell, I've had to do that with my Senators for a while. Nine phone numbers I have in my cellphone for each of my two Senators! And sometimes I have to call all nine! But if we had the ethics, voting rights, and campaign finance reforms contained in the For the People Act, maybe, just maybe, our Senators would be a bit more accessible to us. We are their damn bosses, after all! And if we get in their grills enough that they pass the For the People Act, maybe they'll start acting like it.

Finally, American Family Voices helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to block the proposed Bristol-Myers Squibb/Celgene merger. I'm old enough to remember when Bristol-Myers and Squibb were two separate corporations! And now they want to get bigger? Big pharma corporations are already too big, and have too much power -- witness how often their price-gouging schemes actually get a lot of coverage in newspapers and TV news programs, and how little they suffer for it! When you're big enough and powerful enough, after all, you can buy Congressional legislation that protects and expands your power -- generally they're not stupid enough to take a quid pro quo bribe, but they all know the game, and this proposed merger would be the largest one ever. If we want to hear less about 800% price hikes for life-saving drugs, we should prevent big pharma corporations from getting so big in the first place.

Action: concerning health care, student loan debt, and social media monopolies.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1384/S. 1129, the Medicare for All Act, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. The main obstacle to this bill's passage, for real, is that, unlike everywhere else on Earth, employers buy health insurance in America, and that hides the cost from you, because if you had to buy it, or pay taxes to your government in order to buy it, you'd know how much it costs. Here's how much it costs, between governmental and private spending: about $10,000 per person in America. The average income in America is a bit under $50,000; force corporations to add that $10,000 in as salary, and then tax the resulting salary at roughly 16%, and we'd spend the same money on health care we're spending now, but we could cover everyone and cover them better -- and folks wouldn't see one penny missing from their paycheck. Think it over, and you'll see it works.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell our Education Secretary to scrap plans to sell off federally-backed student loans to banksters. Whoa, you ask, is she really thinking of doing that? Of course she is -- for her, as for the rest of this disgusting Administration, everything is an opportunity to make Our Glorious Elites more money, and "everything" includes those fraudulent loans that weigh down students with nightmarish debt. An individual with morals would consider helping out students with their fraudulent debt -- or, hell, even canceling it! Predatory colleges did lie to those kids about their job prospects, and even about their own ability to stay in business! But this Administration considers financial predators and for-profit colleges their constituency. Which is fitting, I suppose -- our President himself had to settle three lawsuits for $25 million concerning his "university" right after getting elected. See? He knows corruption!

Finally, hot on the heels of Facebook's own co-founder writing a New York Times op-ed calling for our FTC to break up Facebook -- and you should read it, both for its defense of antitrust action and its sad history of how we've abandoned it over the last several decades -- Demand Progress helps you call our FTC and tell them to break up Facebook. "Breaking up Facebook" would require Facebook to sell Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram, which might even enable you to enjoy those social media communities again, since they won't be under Facebook's thumb anymore (and will each have owners who might make them better applications). Our FTC is mulling a sizable fine for Facebook, as punishment for failing to protect customer private information, but even a $5 billion fine is peanuts to a powerful monopoly like Facebook -- a better punishment would be to take away their power to monopolize markets and do harm. Breaking up monopolies, after all, is fundamentally pro-freedom.

Around the table: starring weak Democrats, malicious Republicans, and actual hard-working Americans.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, now seeking the 2020 Democratic nomination for President, seems to aim for a "middle ground" on climate change policy. Never mind that this "middle ground" looks suspiciously like we'd just be clawing our way back to the Obama-era status quo, or that a "middle ground" is less likely to save our planet than an agenda corporatists will label "radical" and "extreme" -- dig this flatugasm from a Biden spokeshack: "What we learned from the Obama administration is unless we find middle ground on these issues, we risk not having any policies." Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph: "what we learned from the Obama Administration" is that once you signal to right-wingers that you won't fight, they'll just move further right, and you won't "hav(e) any policies" worth a damn.

In a related note, Mr. Biden thinks that, once our current President is out office, Republicans will have an "epiphany" and work with Democrats again. The evidence, of course, points to the opposite conclusion, especially when you remember that Republicans stonewalled the center-right Mr. Obama in 2009 and 2010 and were rewarded with 63 more House seats and six more Senate seats. The only thing that'll shake Republicans out of their stupor? Shame and humiliation in unmistakeable proportions in 2020. And Democrats will surely prevent that, by running out as many "electable" "non-ideological" "problem-solvers" as possible.

Rachel M. Cohen at In These Times visits Kentucky -- where high-paying coal miner jobs have left an indelible mark in residents' minds -- to describe some of the issues we'd have in shifting to renewable energy. A coal miner who has transitioned to renewable energy work warns that the transition costs money (he had to intern for six months) and might not persuade coal miners used to making high five figures who honestly believe that the coal jobs really are coming back. And a liberal activist also reminds us that even though Kentucky has moved right (especially in recent years), "FDR was just a peg or two under Jesus Christ here," which again suggests that maybe we need more actual liberals, and fewer "electable" centrists, running for office.

Greg Stohr at Bloomberg notices that "Mystery Delays Push Divisive Supreme Court Issues Into Election Year." Some analysts cite the contentiousness of the Kavanaugh hearings as a possible reason, but they may be misapprehending the lesson of those hearings a bit, i.e., that if those hearings had gone on into November, we'd probably have a larger Republican caucus in the Senate, and we might not even have a Democratic House! Delaying decisions on abortion, immigration, transgender issues, etc., into 2020 turns Republican voters out -- and regardless of the outcomes! If they rule the way Republicans would prefer, then "the President delivered," but if they don't, then "the President must be re-elected so he can get better judges on the Supreme Court." In the long run, though, this ain't gonna help John Roberts convince everyone that federal courts aren't political.

Finally, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) is the lone Republican to vote against one of our President's judicial nominees, specifically citing, as his reason, said nominee's 2011 characterization of former President Obama as an "un-American impostor." And Politico treats us to five paragraphs about how this is Mr. Romney's "latest break with the President," citing precisely two other "breaks." And note that the judicial nominee still got confirmed, because, like all the rest of them, Mitt Romney only stands on principle when it makes no difference.

Action: concerning debt, social media, climate change, and discrimination.

The Loan Shark Prevention Act (for which Congress.gov has no bill number at this writing) would cap interest on all consumer loans at 15 percent -- which would include credit cards and essentially eliminate the entire payday lending industry. Note well that the Loan Shark Prevention Act would prevent lenders from concocting fees to replace the money they'd lose. Myself, I'd add caps specifically on auto loans, mortgages and personal loans (I'd do 2%, 3%, and 6%, respectively), but a broad 15% cap would certainly save working people money on their credit cards. And banks wouldn't go broke -- they just wouldn't be able to buy Congressfolk as easily as they can now. And the folks who'd call the Loan Shark Prevention Act a "job-killing" bill? We could describe them as objectively pro-usury. You can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to find phone numbers for your Reps and Senators, so you can call them and tell them to pass the Loan Shark Prevention Act.

Meanwhile, you think Facebook's got it bad now, after being exposed as a corporation that's careless with our personal information? Then get a load of reports indicating that Facebook is aiding and abetting wildlife trafficking and looting of Middle Eastern archaeological sites, and has even enabled hate groups to hijack its software to auto-generate more video content. Facebook seems to think it's doing a great job at the last item, while admitting that it "could do better" about the other two, which we've totally never heard before! The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to fully investigate these allegations and punish Facebook as their investigations demand. Why the National Whistleblower Center, you ask? Because without anonymous whistleblowers -- who risk years of unemployment and abuse whether their identities get exposed or not! -- we'd likely never have known about any of these things going on. And why the SEC? Because Facebook is a publicly-traded corporation which may be injuring its shareholders with its actions.

In other news, Corporate Accountability helps you urge your state Attorney General to investigate allegations that Exxon knew climate change was coming, but lied to shareholders and the American public about it in order to keep making money. You may know the story by now: Exxon knew enough about the relationship between fossil fuel pollution and climate change by the late '70s that it taught scientists about it, but didn't come clean about it with shareholders or customers, instead embarking on a long and very well-funded campaign of obfuscation and disinformation. Change being the only constant, you'd think a corporation that knew about climate change would maybe adapt by gradually switching over to renewables, but, alas, Exxon did not face a 55% corporate tax during the late '80s, nor did its executives face a 91% income tax on millionaire income, so Exxon moved to protect its money rather than the planet on which its employees live. And for that, we should at least investigate Exxon.

Finally, the House Judiciary Committee passed H.R. 5, the Equality Act, out of committee last week, and the full House may vote on it this week, so the National LGBTQ Task Force helps you tell your House Reps to support civil rights for gay and transgender folks by passing the Equality Act. The Equality Act would extend full protections under the Civil Rights Act to gay and transgender folks, which will no doubt prompt some right-wingers to squeal BUT TEH CIVUL RIGHTZ ACTZ WAS FOR TEH BLACKZ!!!!!, which would generally represent more enthusiasm for black civil rights than they had when Congress was debating the Civil Rights Act. What a wondrous thing, when folks suddenly discover their support for past civil rights legislation in their efforts to keep other folks from getting civil rights! But for the gay and transgender folks who get shut out of jobs, apartments, and freaking bathrooms because of other people's bigotry, we need to pass the Equality Act.

Action: concerning Iran and "usable" nukes.

The government of Iran has sentenced Nasrin Sotoudeh to 38 years in prison and 148 lashes, for (among other "charges") "being a member of a human rights organization" and "encouraging corruption and prostitution," which you no doubt recognize as BS charges concocted by a government that's insecure in its power. And what has Ms. Sotoudeh, a human rights lawyer, actually done? Advocate against Iranian law mandating that all women wear the hijab, or head covering, for one thing. What's wrong with wearing a hijab? Absolutely nothing! What's wrong with threatening to imprison women who don't wear it? Absolutely everything! But no doubt she's also in prison for spending most of her career representing minors facing death sentences, opponents of the Iranian government, and abused children threatened with going back to their abusive parents. Hence Amnesty International helps you tell the Iranian government to free Ms. Sotoudeh.

Meanwhile, our government deployed a carrier "strike group" and a "bomber task force" to the Middle East last week, purportedly as a "warning" to Iran, but the Navy said the deployment was "regularly-scheduled," so our Administration's posturing about it sure smells like a false flag operation. But, as Zombie Lyndon Johnson would tell you, false flag operations work far better when Americans aren't so cynical about our President. A false flag op is about all our Administration has left, though -- pulling out of the nuclear deal which was working! may have induced Iran to demand more from the deal's European partners, thanks to the sanctions our government reinstituted after pulling out, but everyone remembers that our President only pulled out of that deal because he felt like it. Still, we might need to head off yet another stupid war, so Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation mandating no military action against Iran without Congressional approval.

Finally, our President's 2020 budget has so much to recommend it, and one of those things is, yes, the "low-yield" or "usable" nuclear weapon, which he'd like to put on our submarines. What an idea man! It's like he didn't grow up in a time when folks worried more about nuclear annihilation than anything else! It's like he has no idea that a "usable" nuclear weapon suggests that all the other nuclear weapons we have in our arsenal are completely useless! And it's like he thinks this is a bad thing! Happily, H.R. 1086/S. 401, the Hold the LYNE Act (thought of this, didn't you? I can't help it either), would prevent our government from researching, developing, or producing the Trident D5 low-yield nuke, so Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep "usable" nukes out of our President's hands by passing the Hold the LYNE Act. No, it really doesn't matter that this President is the very image of the person who should never have any weapons ever. He ain't the first, and he won't be the last.

Penny Rants for Saturday, May 11, 2019: concerning Democrat weakness, "liberal" media propagandizing, and more of President Manchild's shameful behavior.

From the "How Many Times Must I Tell These Pimps?" file: Joe Biden says our current Administration represents an "aberration" as far as the Republican Party is concerned. We could tabulate, with ease, all the ways in which that's so full of shit it's coming out its eyes, but let's instead remember that Hillary Clinton rode that trope all the way to 48% in the 2016 election. And then let us remind ourselves that trying to "appeal to Republican voters" is a vain cause: 25% of our current electorate is bat-guano insane, and another 25% will hold their noses in the voting booth because he's pro-life or appointed good judges or "slashed regulations." Better that our Democratic candidates consider why 100 million people don't vote in Presidential elections and maybe figure out how to turn some of them out. Hint: people who don't vote don't give one rat's hind quarter if Democrats think Republicans are good guys, because that's drama; these voters only care about their government doing right by them.

Dave Lindorff, writing at FAIR, catches our "liberal" media trying to fool large numbers of Venezuelans and Americans into thinking that attempted coup against President Maduro was actually succeeding. Seriously, the only other way to interpret some of these "news" "reports" is to assume incompetence on an unprecedented scale -- how does one invent an election the would-be coup leader Juan Guaido "won" (as CNN did) or fail to notice zero supporters in an airfield instead of "thousands" (also CNN) or run photos of Mr. Guaido addressing supporters on a completely different day (the New York Times)? Luckily, there are plenty of news organizations -- ones that aren't so insecure as to call themselves "The Most Trusted Name in News" -- doing good reporting on Venezuela right now; Mr. Lindorff lists a few, though you'll have to go to the internet to find them. And this, again, is why we need a la carte cable packaging. And net neutrality. And anti-trust enforcement.

The aforementioned New York Times does dig into our President's taxes, again, finding that he reported losses of over $1 billion on his federal tax forms between 1985 and 1994, and naturally our President responds by simultaneously calling the report a (sigh) "highly inaccurate Fake News hit job" and explaining the report's findings away: "(y)ou always wanted to show losses for tax purposes...almost all real estate developers did -- and often re-negotiate with banks, it was sport." So he says "show losses for tax purposes" and I say "steal food out of the mouths of our children and our children's children," and folks who agree that defunding schools and libraries and police officers is "sport" are not the kind of folks I want in my foxhole. (Hey, speaking of Fox, the Fox and Friends crew think the losses the Times report depicts a life that's "pretty impressive" and "beyond what most of us could ever achieve," without mentioning that such a life is more within your grasp when your father gives you hundreds of millions of dollars.)

Finally, speaking of our President, I really thought that 2017 ad that both extolled his record and told his critics to get off his back within 30 seconds was the most appalling example of self-absorption I'd ever seen, but this twittergasm -- "(d)espite the tremendous success that I have had as President, including perhaps the greatest ECONOMY and most successful first two years of any President in history, they have stollen (sic) two years of my (our) Presidency (Collusion Delusion) that we will never be able to get back" -- tops it. Or bottoms it, as the case may be. How can you be TEH GREATESTZ PREZNITZ EVAHZ!!!! and have your entire term as President "stollen" at the same time? For the man who won 46% of the popular vote, struts around like he won 66%, and whines like he won 26%, such mental gymnastics are child's play. And you know he misspelled "stolen" on purpose, in order to get everyone talking about that, and not about how shameful it is to see a grown man -- the nominal leader of the free world, no less! -- act like this in public.

Action: concerning health care, voting rights, and worker pay.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1384/S. 1129, the Medicare for All Act, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. You may have read Paul Krugman's recent New York Times column stating (among other things!) that although it "(c)ould" be true that Medicare-for-All will result in better health care, and that we'd pay less in taxes to support it than we're currently paying in premiums, these would be hard to sell to the American people. And indeed, when folks confront the loss of their private insurance and how we're going to pay for that, support does fall off. But Medicare-for-All wouldn't poll well in the first place if folks were that emotionally-invested in their private health insurance; their support wavers not because they really think their insurer's doing a great job, but out of fear of the unknown. And we don't let that keep us from doing the right thing, do we?

Meanwhile, Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to allow folks serving time in prison to be able to vote. No, letting prisoners vote won't turn prison into a "country club" (seriously, people say that to you whenever you argue that a civilization should treat prisoners better!), but it will prevent some fairly serious problems. One, our government won't be able to put people in jail just to prevent them from voting! I wouldn't argue they're doing that now -- I presume that putting folks in jail, particularly black and brown folks, is an end in itself, and our government looks at their inability to vote as icing on the cake -- but if I thought of it, you know they have. Two, denying prisoners the vote lets governments pack Congressional districts with large numbers of people who can't get proper representation! Sadly, state governments are already doing that. So let's put a stop to it.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell our government to give back pay to federal contractors during the government shutdown over our President's vanity border wall earlier this year. Federal employees got back pay, of course, but our government contracts a lot of work out to private corporations, and those workers didn't get back pay, though it wasn't their fault, or their employers' fault, that they didn't work. And a lot of these workers work low-paid jobs as cafeteria workers, security guards, and janitors. Which doesn't make their work any less important! And they have bills to pay just like the rest of us! Of course, our government shouldn't be contracting this work out to private corporations, and not just because these little government shutdowns leave them out in the cold. But we ought to do right by them while they're working for us, although our President is the kind of person who high-fives himself for sticking it to people who work for him.

Action: concerning voting rights, torture, pollution, and social media.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1/S. 949, the For the People Act, then People for the American Way still helps you do that. After all, if you've been watching this space, you've very likely already advocated for most of the things this bill would do, like redistricting reform, automatic voter registration, campaign finance disclosure for large donors, and public campaign financing. You've also very likely fought efforts to remove voters from voting rolls for no good reason other than that they might vote against the kind of politician who'd like less people to vote, and the For the People Act does something about that, too. Plus it'd make Election Day a national holiday and keeps House Reps from serving on for-profit boards. Who could oppose such things? The Republicans who parade their hatred of all that's good, that's who. And that's why we need the For the People Act.

Meanwhile, H.R. 2407's title, the Promoting Human Rights for Palestinian Children Living Under Israeli Military Occupation Act, will set off some rageheads right off the bat -- you'll hear them say how dare you call it an occupation! as if that's the worst thing a human being could possibly do. Or as if it's anti-Semitic! But criticizing Israel's actions in Palestine is not in-and-of-itself "anti-Semitic," and nor are attempts to induce better behavior from Israel. And even if you think people criticize Israel too much, you should be put off by reports of Israeli soldiers separating Palestinian children from their families and torturing them while in detention. These things may not create terrorists, but they do create broken people, and we can't keep creating broken people and calling ourselves civilized. Hence Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose cruel treatment of Palestinian children by passing H.R. 2407.

In other news, S. 1187, the Safe School Meals for Kids Act, would phase out food tainted by the ubiquitous pesticide chlorpyrifos from our school lunch programs. Scientists have linked chlorpyrifos to numerous neurological and developmental disorders, and indeed our EPA banned chlorpyrifos from home use almost 20 years ago. Yet our Administration drags its feet on imposing a broader ban, even though our courts have mandated it, and even though kids who eat fruits and vegetables sprayed with chlorpyrifos -- which they likely are, since big ag corporations spray about 10 million pounds of it on crops every year -- may well be getting 140 times what our EPA has considered safe exposure. After all, cutting pollution doesn't make executives richer! Where our Administration won't act, perhaps our Congressfolk will -- but not unless we act. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep kids safe from pollution by passing the Safe School Meals for Kids Act.

Finally, Roots Action helps you tell Facebook to stop with its bogus attempts at "fact-checking." You'd think we'd be happy that Facebook is actually checking facts, since so much BS gets spread around there, but they've partnered with decidedly-non-objective outlets like CheckYourFact.com -- a Koch brothers-funded project of the Tucker Carlson-created The Daily Caller -- and the right-wing Weekly Standard. That can't be an accident, could it? Nor could it be an accident that Facebook actually purged pages (including ZeroHedge) because the previously unknown website PropOrNot smeared them as pro-Russian propaganda hounds right after the 2016 election? It never occurred to them to seek out the decidedly non-liberal FactCheck.org? But all we need from Facebook, really, is an end to speech that our First Amendment doesn't protect, like terroristic threats. We certainly don't need "fact-checking" that's worse than the Wild West.

Action: concerning internet freedom, racism, and financial predation.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to promote real internet freedom by passing H.R. 1644/S. 682, the Save the Internet Act, then Free Press still helps you do that. Net neutrality -- the principle ensuring that you, and not some corporation, should get to determine where you go on the internet -- has actual bipartisan support across the political spectrum, with liberals and conservatives fighting for it, and nobody wants a corporate-controlled internet constantly herding you to junk news and junk culture websites but the big telecom corporations and their lackeys, but unfortunately their lackeys constitute a majority in the Senate! But as I always say: it doesn't matter what they want, it matters what we want. We the people have spoken numerous times over the past decade; we just have to keep speaking until they hear us. And castigating them for not hearing us would not be untoward of you.

Meanwhile, People for the American Way helps you tell our Department of Justice to require state and local police departments to report civilian deaths in custody, and to share that information with the public. Our Administration's first Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, acted like doing such a thing was insufficiently supportive of our police! That's rich -- since when is it "support" to turn a blind eye to injustice? And if I took race out of it -- that is, if I didn't mention that victims of deaths-in-police-custody sure do seem to be disproportionately nonwhite -- most folks would recognize how absurd it is to equate "support" with "doing nothing about good Americans dying in police custody." I mean, getting good data about the problem is the first thing we ought to be doing. But this Administration won't do it, unless we get in their grills about it.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell our FDIC to stop the proposed SunTrust/BB&T merger. Haven't heard much about these banks? Well, would you want to? Seriously, given our recent history, would we want a bank to be nationally-known? SunTrust and BB&T would become America's sixth-largest bank, with close to $450 billion in assets, if the merger were to proceed, and then you'd know their name like Bank of America and Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs; does that sound like something to which any corporation should be allowed to aspire? A merger this size will certainly result in jobs lost, jobs like bank teller and bank manager that regular Americans work, and nearly half a trillion in assets would mean more bankster power to influence legislation and condition corporations to play ever more hifalutin financial games that crash economies. And we've had enough of all that in America, even if our leaders pretend the 2008 financial crash happened in another universe.

Action: concerning war, financial predation, pollution, and racism.

With the Venezuelan non-president attempting, and utterly failing, to overthrow the democratically-elected President Nicolas Maduro, but our Administration still insisting it's considering a "full range of options" for military intervention there, Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1004/S.J.Res. 11, which would block our Executive branch from indulging in any military action in Venezuela without express authorization from Congress. Which is how it's supposed to be, after all! Congress declares the war, and the President fights it. Too many folks today think "the President declares the war," but that's not what our Constitution says -- our Constitution makes Congress declare war precisely so that an Executive doesn't get too powerful. Congress has largely abrogated this duty over the decades, but they'll get back on track, if enough of us speak out. Ideally, they'll have no damn choice.

Meanwhile, our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) put out decent payday lending rules in 2017 while Richard Corddray was still in charge, so naturally this Administration's now-defanged CFPB wants to put out new payday lending rules that roll back protections for good Americans against financial predators. Because freedom! I'm sure the same folks who reflexively say "if you can't do the time don't do the crime" about various worthwhile criminal justice reform initiatives will say "if you can't pay back the loan, don't get the loan" about payday lending rules, though they'd vastly overestimate the financial options available to the poorer working families whom payday lending corporations target with their 300 percent loans. Such folks always attack the victims of injustice rather than the perps, which isn't very "law and order" of them. Stop Payday Predators helps you tell our CFPB to reject its own efforts to expose more good Americans to payday loan predators.

In other news, our Administration is trying to roll back offshore drilling regulations our government put in place after the 2010 Spillageddon in the Gulf. You remember that, right? Almost five million barrels of oil spilled, almost $100 million lost by the Louisiana shrimp industry, all those animals coated in oil and dying of organ damage and hypothermia? This Administration, in its zeal to serve executives and only executives, would dramatically loosen testing requirements for the blowout preventers that would, as their name suggests, prevent another Deepwater Horizon blowout from happening. What is it about oil CEOs that makes them act like their mamas never taught them to clean up their own messes? Maybe it's the feeling that we might be able to power our nation without them! Anyway, Environmental Action helps you tell our Department of Interior to scuttle its own plans to roll back oil drilling safety protections.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Department of Justice to stop using the "Black Identity Extremist" as an excuse to spy on peaceful black protestors, then Free Press still helps you do that. You'd think our FBI would be more obsessed with unpeaceful white supremacists, since there seem to be more of them now than there were a few years ago and I wonder what changed? But, alas, our FBI still sees the actually-wronged trying to work within our democratic processes to make it right and calls that evil, as they've done virtually since their inception. But if they would take police brutality more seriously, they might find they have fewer black protestors to spy upon, and maybe they can get more important work done. Then again, spying on and harassing black protestors tends to create more of them, which means more money for spying and harassment, ad nauseam. After all, why solve problems when you can partake in endless dramas instead?

Action: concerning discrimination, pollution, health care, and our Grand Canyon.

The House Judiciary Committee held hearings last week on H.R. 5, the Equality Act, a bill which would extend the protections of the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act (among other laws) to gay and transgender folks. Because yes, landlords can reject you just for being gay or transgender, and so can employers, schools, and banks, and they should only be able to reject you for good reasons -- like, you know, being a bad tenant, employee, student, or borrower. So don't get flummoxed by all the whining right-wingers do about people being "forced" to hire gays when they're bad workers, not just because the Equality Act won't compel anyone to do that, but because you don't have a "right" to a certain kind of neighbor or student or employee if your "right" is all about denying other people their rights. So People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to support all Americans' rights by passing the Equality Act.

Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania state legislature is contemplating a swarm of pro-pollution bills -- namely, HB 430, HB 509, HB 762, HB 806, and HB 1055 -- and the Sierra Club helps you tell your PA state legislator to protect our air and water by rejecting these bills. How would these bills make our air and water dirtier? Mainly by giving the legislature veto power over clean air and clean water regulations issued by the Executive branch-- but also by rubber-stamping drilling permits whenever the state Department of Environmental Protection has a backlog, which surely wouldn't prompt gas and oil drilling corporations to flood the DEP with bogus permits, would it? And also by mandating a "collaborative" approach to regulating, rather than a "punitive" one, an approach I guess they'd also have us adopt with burglars, rapists, and murderers. The polluters have lost the argument, but they won't concede defeat unless we make them.

In other news, H.R. 1948/S. 518, the Lymphedema Treatment Act, would mandate that Medicare cover certain items used in treating lymphedema, including compression garments and bandaging systems. Lymphedema, as you may know, occurs when a blocked lymph node traps lymphatic fluid somewhere in the body, causing swelling in soft tissues. It might not end there, though: after swelling, you might get discoloration of the skin, dermal thickening, or ulcers (among other things) and you'd also be at a higher risk for infections. Lymphedema is often a side effect of cancer treatments that compromise the lymphatic system; there's no cure as of yet, but folks with lymphedema can manage the condition somewhat. And an astounding 58 out of 100 Senators (including 18 Republicans) seem to agree that Medicare should cover some of the equipment used to treat lymphedema, so Breast Cancer Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to help lymphedema sufferers get the treatment they need by passing the Lymphedema Treatment Act.

Finally, our Administration still has a jones to open up our Grand Canyon to uranium mining, even though such mining would pollute the Colorado River, and therefore also the drinking and irrigation water upon which close to 40 million good folks depend. But H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Protection Act, would permanently shield over a million acres of public land surrounding the Canyon from mining leases. The 20-year moratorium on uranium mining in the Canyon has certainly helped matters, but why not do better? Because our President believes that public lands exist only to make some boss, somewhere, some money? Because our Senate insists on inhabiting the wrong side of history, and our House might be too timid to oppose them? Because "free" markets and "socialism"? Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our Grand Canyon by passing the Grand Canyon Centennial Protection Act.

Penny Rants for Sunday, May 5, 2019: special "Our Glorious Elites still suck!" edition.

Ho hum, our President overcharges our government, and therefore you and I, for services rendered to our government at our President's Mar-a-Lago resort -- including an infamous $1,000 liquor tab. This means, essentially, that our White House "pays a bill" and our President "reaps the revenue." Nice work if you can get it! I was about to ask what insignificant or imaginary plaints beginning with "well what about" will fill the mouths of our President's votaries when they hear this news, and then I thought, "why bother? They're a minority, and we should ignore them -- according to their own feelings about minorities!" But that would all be a bit glib, really -- whenever our President "sticks it to the man," these folks imagine it could be them "sticking it to the man," even though they'd actually be sticking it to themselves. Could this disconnect have come about because our government has, for many years, given nothing to its owners but the back of its hand?

Speaking of Presidential corruption, apparently Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller wrote Attorney General William Barr twice about the latter's misleading summaries of the Special Prosecutor's report. And after the second letter, Mr. Barr called Mr. Mueller and said told him to call him if he had an issue. (Mr. Barr himself told this story, to Congress, so no use proclaiming TEH FAKE NEWZ!!!!!) Of course, the answer to "what's with the letter?" is obvious: a letter puts Mr. Mueller's frustrations in writing, and writing is, of course, harder to ignore than the he-said-he-said of a phone call. Mr. Barr went on to say that Mr. Mueller was really upset with (guess who?) the media, although, again -- and here we go back to "what's with the letter"! -- Mr. Mueller apparently didn't even mention the media in his correspondence Mr. Barr. And then Mr. Barr did what they all do when they're caught doing wrong -- acted "peeved" about the whole thing. Once again, we find that the kind of folks who accuse everyone else of whining do most of the whining themselves.

And speaking of that: I give Kyle Kondik at Sabato's Crystal Ball a lot of credit, not just for saying that assessing a candidate's "electability" is "like nailing Jell-O to a wall," but also for reminding us that the very fact of our current Administration "presents a great counter-argument to the idea that campaign professionals and pundits can confidently determine in advance who is electable to the presidency and who is not." I'd go further: Our Glorious Elites constantly tell us that actual liberals aren't "electable" because if they didn't, we might elect more of them, and get more good things done, rather than keep settling for the hostage's choice of weak tea from Democrats or poison from Republicans. I mean, we should take heart that they used to say Ronald Reagan was too extreme to win the Presidency! About 100 million Americans don't vote; if an actual liberal can capture even five percent of them, maybe the word "electable" will have a definition that better approximates reality.

Action: concerning Medicare-for-All, the For the People Act, and internet freedom.

The House of Representatives has begun to hold hearings on H.R. 1384/S. 1129, the Medicare for All Act, and they've taken some well-deserved flack for inviting a mere one Medicare-for-All supporter to testify at these hearings, but that's something we can counteract, by letting Public Citizen help us tell our House Reps to get health care for all Americans by supporting the Medicare-for-All Act. We spend more money, on crappier health care, than any other highly-developed nation, and tens of millions of Americans still don't have health insurance -- but heaven forfend we pass a bill that even right-wing think tank Mercatus Center says will save us money, because SOSHULIZM!!!!! Seriously, if you talked only to politicians and their "liberal" media enablers, you'd think Americans don't like Medicare-for-All. But if you talk to real Americans who live outside the Beltway, you'd find a nation full of people who've had it up to here with how badly private health insurance corporations have bollocksed everything up.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act, then Sign for Good still helps you do that. H.R. 1 would enact a suite of necessary reforms for which we've already agitated in our support for other bills; these reforms include automatic voter registration, national same-day voter registration, national early voting, prohibitions on various forms of vote suppression, state redistricting reform commissions, campaign finance disclosure for large donors, and public campaign financing -- among many others! Why would someone oppose these reforms? Perhaps because they worry that they'll start losing elections if we pass these reforms -- so it may be no coincidence that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has said the bill won't come up for a vote in the Senate because, and I quote, "I get to decide what we vote on." It's well past time to make him irrelevent, and H.R. 1 is one way to do that.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to restore internet freedom by passing H.R. 1644/S. 682, the Save the Internet Act, then the Electronic Frontier Foundation still helps you do that. The Save the Internet would restore your internet freedom by wiping out the FCC's 2017 net neutrality repeal and reinstating the FCC's 2015 Open Internet Order that codified net neutrality protections into law, and thus allowed you, good citizen, to go where you want to go on the internet, rather than have your favorite websites blocked and throttled by big telecom corporations. But what's that, you say? The FCC called their 2017 net neutrality repeal the "Restoring Internet Freedom" order? Yeah, they meant the "freedom" of corporations to block, censor, and slow down websites, which means they get more freedom than you do, again. As Americans, we don't need to put up with that.

Action: concerning war in Yemen, Venezuela, and Iran.

Word on the street sayas the Senate will vote today (Thursday) on whether to override our President's veto of the Yemen war resolution, so you can call your Senators today, using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or on the bottom of this page, if you're on a smartphone). We would need over a dozen more Republican Senators to vote our way this time, but we keep telling them, they'll know they're bucking the popular will if they keep standing with our President. Folks get this twisted by thinking of our President as "Commander-in-Chief," but our Constitution only charges him with the duty of prosecuting a war, not deciding when to go to war. And why should we be in Yemen? Because we like famine and bombing school buses? Because we like fighting people who fight al-Qaeda better than almost anyone on Earth? If the answers are "no," our duty is clear.

It's not just Yemen, though: Administration-supported opposition forces apparently failed to engineer a coup in Venezuela earlier this week, and if I may say so, this most recent coup attempt makes the folks who put Hugo Chavez out of office for a few days in 2002 look like super-geniuses. Our President sure knows how to pick a winner! He must think this is like the business world, where you pick losers and then make sure someone else pays you for your loss. Anyway, H.R. 1004/S.J.Res. 11, the Prohibiting Unauthorized Military Action in Venezuela Resolution of 2019, would do pretty much what its title says: prohibit our Administration from spending money to wage war in Venezuela unless it gets specific authorization to do so from our Congress -- again, as our Constitution mandates. So Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop any Administration efforts to wage unconstitutional war in Venezuela.

And it ain't just Venezuela, either: our Administration continues to rattle sabers with Iran, imposing tighter economic sanctions and designating Iran's Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization, which sure will make a lot of other militaries jealous. President Obama actually had Iran handled with the multination nuclear deal, but of course our current President pulled us out of that deal, and our Secretary of State has lately asserted that the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) already gives our President authority to attack Iran. However, H.R. 2354/S. 1039, the (guess what) Prevention of Unconstitutional War With Iran Act of 2019, would keep our Administration from waging war on Iran without (guess what) explicit Congressional authorization, so the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to prevent our Administration from waging unconstitutional war on Iran.

Action: concerning corporate welfare, government spying, and our President's tax returns.

H.R. 1711/S. 780, the No Tax Breaks for Outsourcing Act, would do a great deal to stop the flow of corporate money into overseas tax havens. The bill would end the practice of "corporate inversion" -- by which American corporations merge with foreign corporations in order to "become" foreign corporations and avoid paying taxes here -- by treating all corporations that do most of their business here (or if most of the shareholders haven't changed) as American corporations. The bill would also subject "offshore" profits to the same corporate tax rate as domestic profits (although of course it would continue to exclude foreign taxes paid). Afraid to act on this bill because Republicans won't pass it? "Republicans won't pass it" is the very reason to act on this bill -- let them explain how pro-corporate, and anti-person, they are! CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight real tax evasion by passing the No Tax Breaks for Outsourcing Act.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our government to stop spying on journalists covering our Administration's ongoing humanitarian crisis at our Southern border, then Progress America (among other organizations) still helps you do that. Various immigration-related government agencies have been monitoring journalists and then handing over the data to our Department of Homeland (sic) Security (sic); anyone think maybe getting a warrant before spying on people would be a good idea? Or is that too quaint? To those who would say that we shouldn't bother getting warrants because the situation is "so dire," I would ask: why would we think journalists covering the humanitarian crisis is causing the crisis, or exacerbating it? And to those who exclaim OBUMMER GASSEDZ TEH CHILDRENZ!!!!!, I would merely say that changing the subject concedes the point.

Finally, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell our Treasury Secretary to stop preventing our House of Representatives from getting our President's tax returns. People who call the House's attempt to get these tax returns a "WITCH HUNT!" should do three things: a) slap themselves, b) consider that calling something like this a "witch hunt" insults the memory of all the good women who died in real witch hunts, and c) recall that every Presidential nominee since Richard Nixon in 1968 has voluntarily released their tax returns. Frankly, what little we know of his tax returns suggests he's broken the law multiple times over the years, and the only folks who think he won't release them because he's under audit are the folks who want to believe it. And no, this doesn't set a "bad precedent" for the rest of America, because anyone might have to answer for their law-breaking at any time.

Action: concerning voting rights, clean water, and paycheck fairness.

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk and state legislators stop denying prisoners the right to vote. Why? Because denying prisoners the right to vote gives governments the power to deny the vote to whomever they can throw in jail. Could it be a coincidence that America not only incarcerates more people than any other nation on Earth, but incarcerates a disproportionate number of Americans of color? Even if it is actually coincidence, there's no denying that the result is racist. And there's another problem: the census counts prisoners for the purpose of apportioning Congressional districts, which means the unscrupulous can pack prisoners into rural districts and deny them a voice in those districts! If you're inclined to retort that we've always denied prisoners the right to vote, please re-read the previous four sentences, in which I explain why that's a bad idea. And maybe slap yourself.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to reject the proposed Pebble Mine in Alaska's Bristol Bay area, then the Alaska Wilderness League still helps you do that. You probably thought this was all over when Scott Pruitt's EPA announced its own lack of support for the mine, didn't you? But that only meant Pebble Mine supporters would try to get their foot in another door, hence the Army Corps of Engineers' public commenting period. You already know that Pebble Mine would not only pollute Bristol Bay waters, but kill the world-renowned sockeye salmon industry that thrives there -- which means, not incidentally, that Pebble Mine would also be a job-killer. But you probably also know that Pebble Mine is also the kind of project that might not ever get built, but will enable someone to bilk someone else out of a lot of money. Your comment could help stop all of that.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass H.R. 7/S. 270, the Paycheck Fairness Act, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. The House passed its version last month, with only seven Republican votes -- to think that only seven Republican House Reps can use this vote to tout themselves as moderates! In the Senate, of course, it's worse -- Republicans hold 53 of 100 seats, and of those, I can see two who would vote for the bill. That doesn't mean we give up, though -- it means we inform them of our will, again and again and again. And the Paycheck Fairness Act would make it easier for women to find out their bosses are paying them less than their male counterparts for no good reason. You'd think that'd be a conservative solution -- you know, to give good Americans tools to help themselves. Of course, today's Republicans are reactionaries, not conservatives. But that's just another reason to keep fighting.

Action: concerning discrimination, government spying, and internet privacy.

Sadly, pro-discrimination bills are advancing in the Tennessee state legislature -- HB 1274/SB 1499 would force the state to help localities defend their bathroom bills, SB 1297 would call the mere presence of a transgender person in a locker room an "indecent exposure" incident, and SB 1304 would let adoption agencies discriminate against particular parents as an act of "religious" "conscience." You'd think state legislators would have something better to do than make it harder for gay and transgender folks to live their lives! But this is now the hill far-right religious bigots will die on. The good news, I guess, is that they've already died on so many other hills, but that's only because we fought them, and kept fighting them after it seemed we lost. Hence the Tennessee Equality Project helps you tell Tennessee state legislators to oppose HB 1274 and oppose SB 1297, SB 1304, and SB 1499. And if you're in Tennessee, you can join protests at the capitol; you can get more information here and here. The legislature will start deliberating on all these bills today, so the quicker you act, the better we'll do. Good hunting!

Meanwhile, H.R. 1942/S. 936, the Ending Mass Collection of Americans' Phone Records Act, would, as its title suggests, stop our National Security Agency from collecting American phone records without a warrant. Proponents of government spying always gloss over those last three words, "without a warrant," in their never-ending efforts to smear those of us who respect our Constitution as "weak on terror," but no one opposes law enforcement carrying out its duties in a lawful manner. And considering how quickly our government can get warrants to investigate terror activities, you have to wonder why our government has needed more power -- and if you concluded that they "need" that power so as to silence its opponents and smear protestors as "terrorists" (or "socialists"!), I wouldn't blame you. So the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ending Mass Collection of Americans' Phone Records Act.

Finally, word on the street is that Congress is trying to draft online privacy legislation -- but that Congressfolk are already giving in to big telecom corporations. Not that this is a tremendous surprise, if you recall that the Republican-dominated Congress nullified FCC internet privacy regulations in 2017 using a "resolution of disapproval." Given our Congressfolk's propensity to wilt before the prospect of campaign contributions (or campaign contributions for potential opponents), we will no doubt have to lend some steel to their spines, hence Fight for the Future helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass internet privacy legislation that puts us, and not big corporations, in charge of our private information. That link has a lot of good information, such as Mr. Snowden's statement that "(a)rguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say." Indeed.

Around the table: how quickly Wall Street bonuses outpace the minimum wage, and other horrible truths.

Sen. Sanders says folks in prison should be able to vote, and gets an earful from center and right. Opponents center and right whine WHAT ABOUT TEH MURDURURZ ANDZ TEH TERRORIZTZ!!!!!, but they say that only to provoke rage in people. If folks in prison can vote, our government won't be able to throw people into prison to keep them from voting them out. Note well that the "war on drugs" mainly throws black and brown folks into prison, and you'll begin to see what that means.

Aimee Picchi at CBS News notes that if the minimum wage had grown at the same rate as Wall Street bonuses have grown since 1985, it'd be $33.51/hour today. And minimum wage workers do so much more for America than banksters do! No use whining that the minimum wage has gone up 116% since 1985, not just because it ignores Wall Street bonuses going up about 1,000 percent over the same time, but because inflation has gone up over 136% during that time. Something's tricking down, but it sure ain't wealth.

Fox News's Andrew Napolitano says that not only did our President obstruct justice numerous times during the Mueller investigation, his obstruction is also "immoral," because his obstruction didn't even "save a human life or to preserve human freedom" but merely "to save him from the consequences of his own behavior." Naturally Fox News relegated these insights to the internet, like all cable news corporations do when they don't want to rock the boat, but Mr. Napolitano's condemnation is still worth hearing -- and repeating.

You recall that deal that prohibits the IRS from offering free filing services to good Americans as long as private corporations like TurboTax offer the service? Well, it seems that Intuit (TurboTax's parent corporation) has inserted code on TurboTax's website that keeps Google from helping you find that free service!. So, in short: TurboTax has an agreement to keep the IRS from offering free filing services to taxpayers, says it'll offer the service instead, and then keeps you from seeing it in search engines. Nice work if you can get it! (Sadly for those who insist the "free" market must be allowed to solve every problem, H&R Block is doing the same thing.)

We learn from Motherboard that Twitter doesn't ban white supremacists from its platform the way it bans ISIS from its platform because the algorithms it uses to ban ISIS only catch a few peaceful Arabic-language sites, while a white supremacist ban would catch more than a few Republican politicians. And? You have a First Amendment right not to be put in jail by your government, but you do not have a First Amendment right to use Twitter, and if you think Twitter's banning you for no good reason, you have to prove it. I think right-wingers get so angry about the prospect of Twitter banning them because they can't prove it. I just wish their anger didn't scare Twitter into weakness. (And, ah, one more time: Twitter should hire people to moderate their boards instead of counting on computer software to do that. Hiring people is job creation, after all, and if Twitter can't pay people to do that very important work, then maybe Twitter shouldn't survive. Why is it always left to the liberal to be the hardass these days?)

Finally, George Goehl at The Guardian says something that should be fairly obvious in America: that if Democrats would fight big ag factory farms and all the pollution they cause, they'd win back rural voters. Of course, Democrats are counting on all that factory farm donation money, so they won't do something that might actually win back rural voters -- they'll go on pretending to be Republicans-lite about crime and drugs and immigration and "right-sizing regulations," which hasn't ever fooled anyone, really.

Action: concerning health care, food inspection, and cable fees.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1384/S. 1129, the Medicare for All Act, then Peoples Action still helps you do that. What would we gain by expanding Medicare to include all Americans -- you know, besides better and cheaper health care that leaves no good Americans out in the cold? We would get more power over our lives! How much power do you have over your health insurer when they slam you with a surprise bill? Can you go get yourself a better health insurance corporation? Not when you get health insurance through your job, and not when a mere five health insurance corporations cover over half of all insured, and not when buying insurance by yourself would cost you a lot more than what you're paying now. Now what would happen if your government slammed you with a surprise bill? You can fight that -- you can embarrass them in the media, and you might be able to get people fired, or even get people voted out. All we need, as Americans, is a fighting chance. The Medicare for All Act would help give us one.

Meanwhile, our Administration, ever sensitive to big ag bosses and their need for gilded plumbing in their 19th vacation homes, has proposed slashing federal pork inspectors by 40%, so that big ag corporations don't "suffer" from the PR headaches of poisoned food, never mind how much the rest of us actually suffer from poisoned food. Food poisoning is one of the few things that can get substantial coverage from our drama-addicted media, so naturally this Administration wants to relieve them of their responsibility not to make their customers sick. Also, our Administration would let big ag corporations use their own employees instead of federal inspectors -- think their employees might have some incentive not to anger their bosses with news of pus and bile and feces in their meat? -- and would speed up slaughter inspection lines because of course they would. Hence CREDO helps you tell our Department of Agriculture to abandon its plans to cut inspection workers and let more big ag corporations to inspect their own meat.

Finally, you love getting surprise fees on your cable bill, right? Well, H.R. 1220, the TRUE Fees Act, would make that a less ubiquitous occurence by forcing big telecom corporations to include most of their fees in their advertised price and to break down their electronic bills so that the consumer can see all the fees and taxes in their bill. The bill would also make big telecom corporations give consumers at least 21 days' notice before jacking up any fees, and if any consumers don't like it, they can end their contract with those big telecoms without any penalties. (Admittedly that latter part would mean more if big telecoms didn't have monopolies in most areas.) And the bill would also void forced arbitration clauses in customer contracts; we should get rid of forced arbitration clauses (which, as you likely know, deny you your day in court and put you in a "court" more to the corporation's liking) every chance we get. So Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to support price transparency by passing the TRUE Fees Act.

Around the table: stories about public banking, taxes, news deserts, retail worker activism, and "stability."

"I've Seen Goldman Sachs From the Inside," writes Nomi Prins at Truthout. "We Need Public Banks." There's a Mack truck-sized opening for the "fiscally responsible" "moderate" to point out that relying on banksters for infrastructure funding is far more expensive than relying on public banks. And it's no use complaining that public banks would be corrupt too, because as a citizen you can do more about public bank corruption. When they say don't let the perfect murder the good, this is kinda what they mean.

Misha Hill and Lorena Roque at the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy ask the right question about the "opportunity zones" created by the 2017 tax "reform": "Opportunity for Whom?". The answer: "opportunity" for big developers to get even more corporate welfare from the taxpayer, as they push folks of color out of historically black and brown neighborhoods. And I'll bet more than a few of them are keeping buildings empty to get even more corporate welfare from the taxpayer, too. (Stick around for the last five paragraphs, though, to learn that there really are solutions to urban poverty, and that they even go beyond "stop handing out corporate welfare.")

Daily Yonder publisher Dee Davis explains how her area of East Kentucky became a "news desert." If you're thinking "but now you can get any viewpoint on social media at the click of a button," think again -- the Clinton/Bush the Lesser era saw the mushrooming of religious broadcast stations at the low end of the FM dial, stations now "weaponized by conservative think tanks and by Evangelical church networks," and if you've watched Fox News for any length of time you'll recognize how "the emotional button-pushing remains constant" on these stations. Wishing for a time when you could read two real local newspapers in almost any area of the country may sound like a conservative dream, and maybe it is, but it's also a democratic one.

Bryce Covert at The Nation describes the works of Rise Up Retail, a group of retail workers who have agitated for better treatment under the law, many of them after losing their jobs at retail chains owned by hedge-fund managers. You know hedge-fund managers are vampires, redistributing the wealth of their workers upward to themselves and hollowing out the corporations they run, but you may not know that Rise Up Retail is getting good bills a hearing, like S. 3170 in New Jersey, the so-called "Toys 'R' Us" bill that would mandate more severance and notice for workers at corporations about to go under. What hedge fund managers did to Sears and Toys 'R' Us (and Ms. Covert goes into great detail about that) ain't illegal, but it should be.

Finally, I know you all had a good laugh when former Clinton impeacher Kenneth Starr said that impeaching our current President would be "so bad for the country," but let's not let pass his explanation, such as it is, of why impeaching our current President would be "so bad": "(t)he American people want stability." "Stability"? What about this Administration has ever evinced stability? Someone tell Mr. Starr that a rhetorical hostage situation only works in America if we're not already spitting laughter.

Action: concerning Social Security and economic policy.

Social Security Trustees released their annual report on Monday, and you've seen all the crappy headlines: ZOMG TEH SOSHUL SECURITEEZ CANTZ PAYZ TEH FULL BENEFITZ BY TEH 2035!!!! and ZOMG TEH COSTS WILLZ EXCEEDZ TEH INCOMEZ NEXT YEARZ!!!!! If you're old enough to remember the ZOMG TEH SOSHUL SECURITEEZ WILL GOEZ BROKEZ BY 2016!!!!, then you won't be impressed. But if you're acquainted with simple arithmetic, you can see that raising the ceiling on payroll taxes so that income over $132,900 can be taxed into the system will not only help keep Social Security solvent, but also allow us to expand its benefits so our seniors can have a more dignified retirement. And ideally we're all going to be seniors one day, so what we do for them we do for us, too -- particularly since we're all paying into the system now! Social Security Works helps you tell Congress to protect and improve Social Security by passing H.R. 860/S. 269, the Social Security 2100 Act.

Meanwhile, H.R. 2176, the Return to Prudent Banking Act, would (among other things) bring back the famed Glass-Steagall "wall" separating your bank account from a bank's risky investment activities. You still remember the big bankster meltdown of 2008, I trust? And you remember how politicians all went on the TV to blame anyone but the banksters? And you remember how banksters barely suffered for their evil, but the taxpayer had to bail them out? And you remember how well banksters have done in the succeeding years under a weak Democratic President and then an evil Republican one? Well, forcing banks to keep their speculative investments from crapping all over your savings and your investments would be a good way to start bringing the banksters to heel, as it is the duty of all civilized people to do. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back some sanity to banking by passing the Return to Prudent Banking Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to keep Stephen Moore off our Federal Reserve Board of Governors, then a group of good-government organizations still helps you do that. You know we should keep Mr. Moore off our Federal Reserve because he's long advocated the kind of economic flimflam that has destroyed state and local governments and served only to redistribute worker income upward to bosses. You may also have heard that he owes our government some $75,000 in unpaid taxes and that he owes his ex-wife four times that amount in alimony. His defenders will say these are the kinds of mistakes "big people" make all the time when they have a lot of money -- which only argues for not letting people get that "big" in the first place, as well for rejecting the me-first-and-only economic theories that cause all these "big people" "mistakes."