Thieves in the Temple.

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning expanded democracy and "national emergencies."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning corruption, pollution, and law and order.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Reps to pass the most vigorous version possible of H.R. 1, the For the People Act, then Common Cause still helps you do that. H.R. 1 essentially incorporates (among other goo ideas) the Voting Rights Advancement Act, the Fair Elections Now Act, and the DISCLOSE Act, all worthwhile bills that have merited our support in the past. The Voting Rights Advancement Act would have plugged the giant hole our Supreme Court blew in the Voting Rights Act by establishing a new pre-clearance formula for states with a long history of voting rights violations. The Fair Elections Now Act would have established a public campaign finance system that wouldn't have outlawed massive bajillionaire campaigns but would make them more politically toxic. And the DISCLOSE Act would have forced big campaign donors to disclose their identities. H.R. 1 wouldn't just do these good works -- it would also set up nonpartisan redistricting commissions in the states and enable automatic voter registration at the federal level. These are all good things! So let's do them.

Meanwhile, you may have heard that scientists have linked PFAS chemicals (PFAS basically stands for "per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances") to cancer, liver damage, and asthma, which is very unfortunate, since you can find PFAS chemicals basically all over the place -- in non-stick saucepans, food packaging, and firefighting foam, to name three fairly common places, and now in our drinking water as well. Our EPA had apparently planned to release a draft action concerning PFAS, but then the shutdown happened, and seriously do you really expect our EPA, as it's currently constituted, to do the right thing about this matter? This is an EPA, after all, that seems to care only about "liberating" corporate executives from ever having to worry about their products harming people's health. But we don't have to wait for them: we can prod Congress to act, and so the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to help keep our water clean by acting against PFAS chemicals. Don't be the one to tell me about the far worse things PFAS chemicals replaced -- science always advances, and as civilized people we have a duty to keep up.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell big tech corporations Amazon, Microsoft, and Google not to sell facial recognition software to any of our federal, state, or local governments, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. You would, I hope, be wary of using any fancypants technology until we're sure it won't hurt us -- I mean, that would be a conservative way to be! -- and of course we can't be sure of that with facial recognition technology, not when the technology seems to work much better with white men than any of the many other demographics in our melting pot, and certainly not when the vast majority of faces law enforcement will have on file are non-white. And law enforcement mostly has photos of suspects, not convicted criminals -- I mean, some 117 million faces appear in law enforcement files, and though we're the most incarcerated nation on Earth, we haven't put more than a third of Americans in jail. We really should take this innocent-until-proven-guilty thing as seriously as our Founders did.

Action: concerning war-making, shutdown worker pay, and pollution.

The Democrats' number two man in the Senate, Richard Durbin of Illinois, has acted like a real number-two man in recent days by expressing support for our President's reported machinations in Venezuela, where he would apparently like to see a military coup. Rep. Gabbard (D-HI) got a zinger off in response -- "(w)e don't want other countries to choose our leaders, so we have to stop trying to choose theirs" -- but Mr. Durbin is part of party leadership, and you know how our politicians and our "liberal" media get when they can sniff out a war coming: they bend to the will of the President, no matter how hated he or she might be, instead of bending to the people's will, as is their job. Hence Just Foreign Policy joins with Change.org to help you tell Mr. Durbin to resist our President's apparent desire to go to war with Venezuela. It's a shame we have to remind Mr. Durbin of his Constitutional duty (i.e., that Congress declares war, not the President), but we do it because we love our country.

Meanwhile, the agreement to end for-now the partial government shutdown guarantees that federal workers will get back pay, but not federal contract workers, who ostensibly work for a private corporation even though taxpayers pay their salaries. And don't be the one who says "well, the law says what it says," not when H.R. 678/S. 162, the Fair Compensation for Low-Wage Contractor Employees Act, would change the law to ensure that we don't leave federal contract workers out in the cold. Federal contract workers are some of the lowest-paid workers in our government, and if we must outsource federal government functions to private contractors, we should at least avoid the appearance of using these workers' employment status to avoid paying them whenever our President decides to have a month-long tantrum over his vanity border wall. Hence UNITE HERE helps you tell your Congressfolk to support all federal workers by passing the Fair Compensation for Low-Wage Contractor Employees Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject the nomination of acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler to a full-time gig as EPA Administrator, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. Mr. Wheeler is supposed to be a saner, more competent, less greedy version of Scott Pruitt, but I don't want any version of Scott Pruitt to lead the EPA, especially when I look at Mr. Wheeler's record so far and see nothing but rolling back of regulations that protect our clean air and clean water. His clean air and clean water, too -- I mean, he doesn't live in a domed city with its own aquifer, much as I'm sure he'd like to. I must say it continually amazes me that today's "conservatives" can look at the Pruitt/Wheeler record at the EPA and see "conservatism." What, exactly, is today's EPA "conserving" besides the "right" of corporate executives to make even more unearned money? How is "increasing executive pay at any cost" a bedrock principle of civilization?

Around the table: more folly about "bipartisanship" and "independence."

Sam Knight at TruthOut reminds us that Joe Biden's vaunted "bipartisanship" is a sham that actually helps promote the Republican agenda. Read the whole thing, because it's a pretty devastating analysis -- he downplayed how much his $200,000 speaking gig helped out the Rep. Upton (R-MI), and then cast Mr. Upton as a health care fighter who "saved lives" without mentioning that Mr. Upton freaking voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Plus, you know, Mr. Biden supported "free" trade, mass incarceration, the Iraq war, and bankruptcy "reform" while in the Senate. Seriously, read it even if your first thought upon reading the headline was "well, how well did Mr. Biden's 'bipartisanship' work with Republicans in eight years as Vice President?"

Trevor Aaronson at The Intercept suggests that our courts might be a "better battlefield" to fight our President's lies -- specifically citing the 2001 Information Quality Act, which mandated the creation of standards for information our government agencies put out, and perhaps more importantly, let federal judges force our government to retract published info that doesn't meet those standards. Very few plaintiffs have tried suing under the Information Quality Act, and I wonder which federal judges (cough Roberts Kavanaugh Gorsuch cough) will throw out lawsuits because plaintiffs don't have "standing" to sue, though it seems to me pretty much any American who feels lied to by our government would have standing to sue.

Didn't know there was a "Conservative Case for Antitrust," did you? Well, don't blame conservatism for that -- blame contemporary "conservatives" who seem to think conservatism is all about militarism and religious bigotry and who gets the most money. Certainly a "conservative case for antitrust" wouldn't surprise you if you've long thought of a viable conservatism as one that would oppose concentrated power anywhere. I might quibble with some of Jonathan Tepper's rhetorical strategies ("number of antitrust lawsuits filed by TR and Taft" is a statistic begging for more context), but I wouldn't quibble with the overarching notion that truly free markets require market competition. It even warmed my heart to hear Friedrich Hayek prefer "inefficiency" to monopoly.

The flesh is willing with Elizabeth Goitein's quite reasonable and thorough assessment that the longer our President waits, the worse his case for declaring a "national emergency" over the Southern border becomes, but we all know that for this President, the past isn't just another country but an alternate universe. And worse, if terrorists inflict a 9.11-style attack during the next government shutdown, Our Glorious Elites will declare that we are all Americans now and that we must cleave to our President in These Difficult Times, never mind the multitudinous ways he would have failed to protect us, and our "liberal" media won't be very interested in recalling how our President could have declared his little emergency right away but dithered for months on end.

Finally, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz mulls an independent run for President, and Jonathan Chait explains why he's a fool to try. Mr. Chait's analysis is mostly pretty solid -- it warms my heart to hear a media pundit actually say the center isn't where conventional wisdom says it is, and it warms my hear further to hear Mr. Chait describe opposing the massive corporate tax cut of 2017 as a "layup," one that Mr. Schultz misses, no less -- but I don't think the problem with a Schultz candidacy is he thinks expertise in one field will translate to another, but that as a billionaire he's surrounded himself with people who'll never tell him when he's full of shit. That would explain his apparent belief that Americans yearn for a great nonpartisan independent hope even better than a general theory of how we misread the "center" would.

Action: concerning the next government shutdown drama.

Late last week, our Congress reached an agreement with our President to end the partial government shutdown, but that agreement only lasts until mid-February, at which point we will face either another government shutdown or the spectacle of our President declaring a "national emergency" so he can build his vanity border wall. Thus today I urge you to call your Reps and Senators, using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a smartphone), and tell them, explicitly, to prevent either of these occurrences from happening next month.

Don't believe the hype that Congress is somehow powerless to prevent these things. Congress can vote in favor of their next appropriations bill in numbers that will override a Presidential veto, and they can repeal the National Emergencies Act which gives our President the power to declare a "national emergency" at the border. The first course of action does contain one significant peril: that House Democrats would cave to a Republican-flavored appropriations bill with all sorts of poison pills in it so that they can get the vote numbers past the two-thirds threshold that would override a veto. But this fact doesn't make hostages of us, for we have an absolute, inviolable right to give our honest counsel to our Reps and Senators, and they have an absolute, inviolable duty to do our will. Hence it's not a heavy lift for us to tell our Reps and Senators to stop playing games with appropriations bills and pass a bill that funds those parts of our government at appropriate levels, regardless of whether our Congressfolk act like it's a heavy lift for them.

Generally I encourage you to keep your messages to your Congressfolk short and sweet, but this is one time you may want to game it out for your Congressfolk at some length. I've said on numerous occasions that a government shutdown would be a perfect time for the kind of 9.11-style terrorist attack that "rallies America around our President." While it also seems that our President is too fixated on Venezuela to be hunting bigger game, or that he uses a government shutdown to demonstrate how "unnecessary" we should find our government, these could both be feints, and I certainly do not put it past this Administration to have already discussed the political "opportunities," such as war against Iran or a new wave of anti-free speech legislation, that a terrorist attack could bring. I think you'll want to tell your Congressfolk that if they're gaming it out this way, you're on to them. If enough of us say it, out loud, to our Congressfolk, I believe we'll make a difference. They can't function unless we're as naive as they need us to be, so let's show them we're not.

I suppose I should address the possibility that your Congressperson believes we should build a wall along the Southern border, by any means necessary. You'd be right to argue that a vanity wall would do nothing for border security and that there is no "national emergency" along the Southern border, but you won't win the argument merely by saying that. You will also have to remind your Congressfolk that our President couldn't get his wall out of a Republican-dominated Congress, either -- one that could easily have bypassed a Democratic filibuster by including border wall funding within a budget resolution passed via the reconciliation process -- and that, more to the point, our President is acting like a spoiled brat and that America is sick of all the drama he creates. When our Congressfolk finally get it into their heads that America is sick of the drama, they will bend to our will. But if we don't tell them that, in so many words, they'll pretend it's not happening. And you never give your Congressfolk that kind of opening.

So I guess a good script for your phone call would go something like this: "I'm calling to tell you to fund our government appropriately for the rest of the year, without poison pill amendments and without funding for our President's vanity border wall. I also urge you to repeal the National Emergencies Act which supposedly gives our President the power to build his wall. Like most Americans, I am sick and tired of all the drama our President creates, and it's your job, as a federal elected official, to demand more from our politics than just drama. His vanity border wall will do nothing to secure our borders, and frankly I'm afraid that another partial government shutdown will leave us vulnerable to a 9.11-style terrorist attack. And I'm further afraid that our Administration has already decided that a 9.11-style terrorist attack would be another big drama that would yield immense political benefits for them. So I think you would do well to be able to tell our posterity that you didn't let that happen." Tough toodles if they don't like what they hear; they're Congresspeople, and you're their bosses, so you have an inviolable right and duty to tell them what they don't want to hear.

Good luck and God bless.

Around the table: how our government shutdown actually ended, and other truths.

Ho hum, our "liberal" media sure do seem awfully anxious to overthrow the government of Venezuela. You don't have to love the Maduro regime to see where further American interference will lead, because you've seen where it has led -- to bigger and bigger problems "requiring" more American intervention, almost like that's the whole idea. You also don't have to love the Maduro regime to acknowledge that American interference has already helped send Venezuela's economy into a tailspin. I'm a little surprised that our President seems so transfixed on war with Venezuela as his ticket to unearned prestige and perhaps an unearned re-election -- although I guess it's easier than waging war with Iran! -- but then I wonder if that, too, is a feint, to take our eye off the next terrorist attack happening after the next government shutdown in a few weeks.

Eric Levitz at New York magazine reminds us that our Founders also regarded excessive wealth as evil, and regarded controlling the unbridled expansion of private property as a moral duty. Go ahead and read the article in its entirety; just don't get too distracted by infamous multimillionaire Sean Hannity's counterarguments, since they suck -- saying that you "better guard your nice things" from the "excess police" is weak tea, which testifies not only to the paucity of his arguments but the goodness of the American people, which has boxed him in with regards to what he can reasonably argue about the societal benefits of unbridled wealth. (And seriously, if your "dream" is to have the most money ever, you need a new dream, one that'll maybe benefit others in addition to yourself.)

Another day, another reminder that our Social Security program is most emphatically not "going broke" and that eliminating the cap on earnings to be taxed into the system would go a long way toward solving the "modest fiscal challenge" Social Security faces. No one said more people weren't retiring or that the system wouldn't face some additional strain, but today's politicians pretend the only solution is to completely raid the fund on behalf of big donors, even as they're instituting massive tax cuts for the rich that make the problem they're purporting to address ("runaway deficits," naturally) much worse. Social Security, having its own funding stream, doesn't actually contribute to the deficit, except in right-wing fever dreams.

Heather Vogell at ProPublica informs us that federal regulators have been slow to stop the flow of laundered money (i.e., from drug lords, terrorists, and the like) into and out of hedge funds. The PATRIOT Act mandated that our government write regulations requiring hedge funds to install anti-money laundering (or AML) programs, but here we are, over 17 years later, with no regulations written. Naturally, hedge funds "want" AML programs and federal enforcement, but just so happen to have eighty bajillion objections that of course must take precedence over the public good. I'd object that if they've done nothing wrong, they have nothing to fear, but I also wonder why our government doesn't simply do the regulating itself, instead of telling the hedge funds to do it (which, of course, they haven't done, either).

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fines a man who spent eight years swindling veterans out of their hard-earned pensions a mere one dollar, after said man swears he just can't pay more. They call it the "Mulvaney Discount," after former acting CFPB administrator/current acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, because it's not the first one. While it is possible that the CFPB will pursue action against the corporations this man owned, and maybe then swindled veterans will get some justice, a one-dollar fine makes a mockery of law and order in America -- particularly in a nation where (as the article makes sure to point out!) cash bail puts folks in jail for months without even convicting them of a crime.

Finally, we are reminded that the politicians didn't end the partial government shutdown at the end of last week so much as the workers who, after exhibiting great patience in working for weeks on end without pay, took action last week. Air traffic controllers slowed flights in at least three major airports, flight attendants visited their Congressfolk en masse, and 14,000 IRS workers didn't come to work, and regardless of what you hear from right-wingers about how workers who serve the public are supposed to serve the public even when our President has a massive temper tantrum, these workers are all heroes. It gives me hope that the next shutdown might be even shorter, and our President humiliated for real this time. (No, I think his "emergency declaration" will ultimately die in court, just like most of his other "bold" acts have died in court.)

Action: concerning family separation at the border and facial recognition software.

You've no doubt heard, by now, that our Department of Health and Human Services's Inspector General has found that our Administration separated "thousands" more migrant children from their families than we had previously known, and that our Administration has done a bad job even keeping track of the families they've separated, likely because they don't care. OK, as far as I know, the Inspector General didn't speculate about whether or not our Administration cares, but obviously they don't. Still, duty is duty, so Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk and Department of Homeland Security Secretary-for-now Kirstjen Nielsen to reunite every last child they've separated with their families. Anything else would be cruel, and it takes rather little moral fiber to notice it's cruel -- which means our Administration has no moral fiber whatsoever. But they're not the boss of us, so we don't have to take it.

Meanwhile, Free Press helps you tell big tech corporation CEOs not to sell facial recognition software to our local, state, and federal governments. Why? Well, for one thing, our governments don't regulate the use of such software to protect our privacy, and for another thing, facial recognition software does a pretty bad job recognizing faces -- which is, you know, its purpose, as evidenced by the moniker "facial recognition software" -- to the point where it confuses members of our Congressional Black Caucus with suspected criminals. Starting to think that racism might be a feature, not a bug? Hey, you'd be naive not to! And, seriously, too many people think machines are the answer to all our problems. Machines are the answer to only one "problem," that of paying human beings to do jobs that human beings do best, and that's a "problem" only CEOs have. And they don't get all the say around here!

Around the table: the real effect of video games upon our culture, and other notes.

Mark Provost at TruthOut describes another type of border-crossing "caravan" you may not have heard about: the thousands of Americans who cross the border into Mexico every day to get dental care. About a quarter of Americans have no dental insurance, and the rest of us very likely don't have good dental insurance, and the town of Los Algodones, for example, is chock-full of dentists who have low labor costs and no malpractice insurance, to be sure, but no student debt, either. It's a bit of a stretch to call them "people currently fleeing the US’s health care system," since they're all coming back once they get their care, but it's also shameful that the richest nation on Earth can't provide such care for all its citizens.

Adam Johnson at FAIR describes "The Media's Profitable -- and Indefensible -- Addiction to Mugshots." If you've never had your mugshot in the paper, you may not know that it can get you fired, publicly shamed, and unemployable, and if that still seems like it's not that big a deal, consider that mugshots literally always depict people who have been accused, not convicted of a crime. Things like public shaming and loss of livelihood should only happen to the guilty, right? Or do we still inhabit a world where we "just know" who's guilty? Because that would most certainly not be a law-and-order world.

David Wong at Cracked suggests that "Violent Video Games Might Be Screwing With Your Brain" -- but not exactly in the way you might think. Long story short: video games don't "teach violence," but rather they "teach us that obstacles should be easy to eliminate," and if you take that attitude into the real world, where obstacles are actually difficult to eliminate, you'll get frustrated and lash out a lot more. Worse, we've "gamified" our social lives, with likes and upvotes and downvotes and blocks and bad online reviews, such that we've become "so impatient with problems that instead of seeing them through to a resolution, we are satisfied with solutions that make them merely disappear from our screens." I don't know if I'd attribute very much of our current political anger to this phenomenon, but Mr. Wong is definitely onto something here.

Measles outbreak leads to public health emergency in "anti-vax hotspot" nearly Portland, Oregon. Folks who won't get their children vaccinated because of bogus fears of autism or contamination aren't just putting their own children at risk but everyone else's, too, but let's not forget that this all began with an unscrupulous scientific researcher trying to help win a lawsuit and an American celebrity who studied vaccines at the University of Google.

Finally, seven million Americans have lost their health insurance since our current President took office. It's been a few years since that number went up, and our President said you'd have great health care, the best! If you're tempted to blame Democrats for this, recall that Democrats had literally no way of stopping Republicans from enacting whatever health care "reform" they liked, and Republicans failed -- and that our Administration has succeeded in making both the Affordable Care Act exchanges and the Medicaid expansion more difficult for good Americans to access. (I'll confess I was a bit floored by polling suggesting that close to one out of three Americans either think the Republicans successfully repealed the Affordable Care Act or aren't sure if they did.)

Action: concerning H.R. 1, the minimum wage, and drug pricing.

H.R. 1, the For the People Act, now has 225 co-sponsors, which means more than half the House has co-sponsored the bill, and I presume the House will begin deliberating the bill soon. I mean, yeah, the shutdown takes the oxygen out of the room, almost like that's the whole idea, but if we speak out enough, we can move the conversation in our direction, so Common Cause still helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the most vigorous reforms in H.R. 1 possible. As you know, H.R. 1 aims to reform voting rights laws, campaign finance laws, and ethics laws, and many of its reforms originally appeared in bills such as the Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Fair Elections Now Act, both of which deserved our support. But of course Mob Boss Mitch calls the bill a "power grab," fearing it'll increase Democratic political power. Maybe if he and his kind weren't such elitists, he and his kind would benefit from the bill, too!

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support working families by passing the Raise the Wage Act, then the Economic Policy Institute (among other good government groups) still helps you do that. The Raise the Wage Act (sorry, Congress.gov still doesn't have a bill number at this writing!) would gradually increase our minimum wage to $15/hour by 2024, which is five years from now, so don't believe the hype about the "shock to small businesses" the bill would cause. The bill would also index the wage to inflation, which means it won't be some politician or other's manufactured hostage crisis every year, and it would also phase out the far lower tipped worker minimum wage, and anyone who complains about that very likely has a heart of stone. Seriously, they should go to the doctor and get that checked out. The rest of us will welcome more good Americans being able to make ends meet -- and get ahead.

Finally, the big pharmaceutical corporation Teva has introduced its own generic version of the EpiPen drug -- and, at $300, it just so happens to cost the same as Mylan's generic EpiPen. You remember Mylan? The big pharma corporation that took massive PR hits for jacking up the price of its EpiPen to absurd heights? Achieving parity with Mylan isn't a good look for Teva, but we're here to help, as a Change.org petition helps you tell Teva to make its generic EpiPen more affordable to good Americans. After all, it's not like most folks just have $300 lying around for a life-saving drug. If you want to mention to them that the Affordable Drug Manufacturing Act would let our government manufacture generic versions of life-saving drugs whenever big pharma corporations price them too high, well, I won't stop you. Corporations do generally try to avoid governmental involvement in their affairs.

Action: concerning war in Yemen, soldiers' health care, and paycheck fairness.

Remember when the Senate passed a bill aiming to end our participation in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen last month -- but then the House promptly added a rider to the Farm Bill (of all things!) preventing a House vote on that matter for the rest of the year? Well, the calendar has turned and the House has changed hands, so why not let Roots Action help you tell your House Reps to vote to end our participation in the war on Yemen? A new year should create new possibilities, after all. Note well that the Senate's anti-war resolution probably got 56 votes last year because the Senate already knew the House wasn't going to pass it, making it a show of courage for a lot of Senate cowards, but Mob Boss Mitch will no doubt come up with a litany of absurd excuses not to even hold a vote on the bill if it passes this House. But that presents us an opportunity to embarrass them for their hypocrisy, and of course as good citizens we should not pass up such opportunities. They're teachable moments, after all.

Meanwhile, H.R. 663/S. 191, the Burn Pits Accountability Act, is back in Congress, with over 100 Congressional co-sponsors, and if the bill resembles past iterations (Congress.gov has neither a summary nor text for either bill at this writing), it would help our soldiers get the health care they need from burn pit exposure. Our military used burn pits to dispose of waste in Iraq and Afghanistan, and those burn pits had all kinds of trash in them -- chemicals, paint, plastic, rubber, human and medical waste, even munitions! -- and burning them does what? Puts all kinds of toxic crap in the air our soldiers breathe, of course! The Burn Pits Accountability Act would require our Department of Defense to ask soldiers whether they've been exposed to burn pits during routine health exams and exit interviews so they can better assist our Veterans Administration maintain its Burn Pit Registry, and that, at least, is a start. Hence the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America help you tell our Congressfolk to help our soldiers by passing the Burn Pits Accountability Act.

Finally, the Paycheck Fairness Act is apparently back, too (Congress.gov doesn't even have a bill number for it at this writing), and if it's like past iterations, it would prevent corporations from prohibiting employees from discussing their pay with their co-workers -- since these are the very discussions that let women know they're being shorted by their employer! -- and would limit the factors employers can use to pay women differently to "bona fide factors" including education, training, and experience. The 79-cents-on-the-dollar figure is the one you're likely most familiar with, but even when you adjust the data for education, training, experience, you still don't get women making a dollar for every dollar a man makes. And that's only fair! If the bill passes the House, Mob Boss Mitch will just say "the bill only helps trial lawyers," though that does tend to be a side effect of injustice. You'd think he'd want to remedy that by fighting injustice or something. Anyway, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to support fair pay by passing the Paycheck Fairness Act.

Around the table: tabulating an unusually high number of setbacks to civilization, sorry.

Supreme Court stays various injunctions against our Administration's transgender military ban -- meaning the ban is in place until all the legal challenges thereto can be resolved. Seems to me the conservative thing to do would be to leave the injunctions in place and let the lower courts work it out, but apparently that's insufficiently conservative to this Court's "conservative" majority. Dig, also, our Administration Solicitor General whining about how many federal courts are now issuing used-to-be-rare injunctions against "major policy initiatives." That couldn't be because so many of your "major policy initiatives" break our laws, could it? What a snowflake.

Apparently because absurdity just isn't absurd enough, Vice President Pence compares our President to Martin Luther King, Jr., saying that both men have "inspired us to change." I guess he means to equate the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, and the Open Housing Act with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which remains our President's only significant legislative "achievement." The only way our President has "inspired us to change" is that he's inspired so many more good Americans to confront corrupt bigoted assholes like him a lot more forcefully, but I don't praise or thank corrupt bigoted assholes for that, nor do I argue for their continuance in office because some good happens to come of their assholery.

Lo and behold, Senate Majority Leader/Obviously Great and Wonderful Real American Co-President Mitch McConnell, mere days after saying he won't allow a Senate vote on any shutdown-ending bill that wasn't obviously the result of spirited negotiations between Democrats, Republicans, and our President, now plans to bring a shutdown bill that meets precisely none of those criteria to a vote this week. No use lamenting that he has no principles, because folks like Mob Boss Mitch think principles are for us "little people," not their "betters," like him.

Buried in this article buying the Republican fiction that they can't get our President's nominees through quickly enough despite the fact that Democrats literally can't filibuster them anymore is Sen. Todd Young (R-IN) whining about how "(i)t's very difficult for a president to advance his or her agenda if you don’t have the right people in place." I also despise the holds and withdrawals of unanimous consent that comprise Senate Democrats' last tools to stall our President's nominees, but Sen. Young appears completely unconcerned about the people's right to advance their agenda through their representatives in Congress, or about our President's constitutionally-mandated duty to do the people's will. I don't give one rat's hind quarter about a President's "agenda," and that's how our Founders wanted us to be.

Finally, why does our "liberal" media suppose our President has ever been any kind of "deal-maker," like this shutdown mess should be some kind of surprise? It's not just that every "great deal" he's ever made only allowed him to suck out a bankrupt corporation's wealth like the vampire he is -- a good deal benefits everyone, not just the guy who makes it, but our "liberal" media haven't attended that aspect of deal-making in some time, so obsessed are they with "who wins" and "who loses" like everything's a damn horserace.

Action: concerning the government shutdown and law-and-order issues at the border.

A consortium of good government groups helps you tell our President and our Senate Majority Leader to end the government shutdown now. As I may have said, I don't oppose government shutdowns per se, but I oppose this shutdown, which our President has orchestrated not so he can protect America or end a humanitarian crisis, but so he can keep on diddling the rage glands of his votaries. And our House has passed several bills aiming at funding those areas of our government which are currently shutdown, but Mr. McConnell says no, because our President won't sign them, or because the bills aren't a result of negotiations between our President and the Democrats, or something. Of course, if a bill has 67 Senate votes, it doesn't matter if a President signs it or not. What's he afraid of? He should be afraid of losing re-election in 2020 as more good Kentuckians figure out he thinks he works for Our Glorious Elites and not them.

Meanwhile, Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate our President's deployment of military personnel at the southern border to "assist" with Border Patrol work. Turns out that using soldiers for domestic policing matters is just about always against the law per the famous Posse Comitatus Act, and never mind that Southern states pushed for such a law back in the day to get Reconstruction-era troops out of their hair, because keeping our law enforcement and our military separate is still a good idea, as anyone who thinks about it for a second will see. Our President, unfortunately, cuts the figure of someone who does not think about things even for one second -- he just says do it, and then one day the people who carry out his orders annoy him and he turns on them. You'd think more good Americans would know this by now. We'll just keep having to tell them.

Around the table: starring our snowflake FCC and Mob Boss Mitch.

You can almost feel the disgust emanating from the U.S. District Judge who struck down Wisconsin's recently-passed restrictions on early voting, saying these restrictions were virtually identical to the ones he struck down in 2016. Although my heart swells to hear the Judge say "(t)his is not a close question," I wish it were more of a consolation that Wisconsin Republicans seem to be this lazy, since they seem to suffer very little for it.

FCC unsuccessfully asks D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to delay hearings on a lawsuit against the FCC net neutrality repeal, citing, of course, the ongoing government shutdown. Well, that's not a good sign! Did they really think having another few weeks to brainstorm would deliver the magic legal argument that will win the case for them?

Rachel M. Cohen at The Intercept finds Democratic politicians generally unwilling to address one of the striking L.A. schoolteachers' biggest gripes -- that private charter schools are siphoning off money that should be going to public schools. Of course, you already know why -- because Democratic politicians want that charter school donor money to keep coming! (I know someone out there is already saying that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's criticisms of charter schools "cost her nothing politically," as if it's her fault she was only a child when Democrats started selling out public schools to charter schools.)

I was just going to ignore the story of how Vice President Pence's wife went back to work for a school that explicitly tells you that you have to oppose homosexuality to work there, but then Mr. Pence had to open his fat yap and say that media criticism of "Christian education" is "deeply offensive to us." So many of our political class seem to equate "religion" with "hating gays," and our Vice President is one of the worst of these. Also, "religious education" did kinda used to mean "schools without black kids in them." Also, I'm sick of people saying NO YOUR TEH OFFENSIVEZ!!!!! like they're the cleverest people who ever lived.

Finally, Sen. McConnell (E-KY) says that H.R. 1 -- which rolls up the Voting Rights Advancement Act, the Fair Elections Act, and the DISCLOSE Act (among others!) into one bill -- is a "power grab." Yes, the people are trying to grab power back from the politicians. And he acts like this is a bad thing? Of course he does: he believes power isn't for us "little people." Still, I guess it is a good thing to make Mob Boss Mitch talk in public as much as possible, particularly in advance of his 2020 re-election campaign.

Action: concerning the minimum wage, internet privacy, and the DREAM Act.

With a new Democratic House taking power, the Economic Policy Institute (among other groups) help you tell your Congressfolk to support working families by passing the Raise the Wage Act. (I have no bill numbers for its current iteration at this writing.) Raising the minimum wage to $15/hour would represent a vast change in working families' fortunes -- the current minimum wage of $7.25/hour actually represents a pay cut from the late 1960s, when the $2/hour minimum wage had over $10/hour in contemporary purchasing power -- and no, it wouldn't kill jobs, not just because minimum wage jobs are often the kind you can't kill, but because "the minimum wage vs. jobs" is the wrong focus. A better focus would be "absurd CEO salaries vs. jobs," since those salaries are the real job-killer in America. The Senate won't pass it, etc., but embarrassing them isn't exactly a vain pursuit, particularly if it instructs future Senates about the people's will.

Meanwhile, you may have heard that the big telecom corporations have been selling your location data to other corporations -- some of which will sell that data to just anybody, including bounty hunters. Thing is, your contract with your cellphone provider may prohibit data sales to "disreputable" folks or corporations, and even the big telecoms admit that they sell too much data to too many unsavory actors! Well, they said that out of fear that our government would regulate them -- a vain fear, since our government repealed FCC privacy regulations last year! -- but since the abuse is still happening, Free Press helps you tell our FCC to stop corporate abuse of our private data. Please do not be the fool who says well just stop using a cellphone then! Everyone uses a cellphone now, and everyone deserves privacy -- I mean, Chief Justice Roberts understands this, and crafts excellent jurisprudence based on that understanding.

Finally, you no doubt recall that our President tried to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (or DACA) program last year, and though various federal courts have blocked his efforts, now's as good a time as any to let People for the American Way help you tell Congress to pass a DREAM Act, so that immigrants brought here as children can contribute to America's heritage and one day gain citizenship. Sending immigrants back to nations they don't recognize as home, when they literally had no say in emigrating to America, should strike you as the height of cruelty, but of course our Administration cares about nothing but diddling the rage glands of its votaries, and thus still struts around demanding a brand new border wall before our government starts inspecting food and airplanes again. So when I said "now's as good a time as any" just now, perhaps I was being a bit glib -- now's a damn good time to change the conversation about immigration, even if our President doesn't want to.

Action: concerning mercury poisoning, law and order, and William Barr.

Another day, another Administration effort to gut rules that protect good Americans, as now the EPA wants to let power plants put more mercury in our air and water. Because what's healthier than mercury, particularly for growing children? And what's more popular than poisoning our air and water? It wasn't that long ago that most states put out health warnings about eating local fish because of all the mercury in it, but I guess our Administration wants to bring those glory days back. And the 900,000-plus Americans who submitted comments demanding stronger mercury regulations a few years ago? They must just be "little people" to this Administration. You just remember that "little people" made America great, and that a lot of "great men" deserve scorn, shame, and hatred. Penn Environment helps you tell our EPA to scuttle its plans to allow more mercury pollution in the air we breathe and the water we drink.

Meanwhile, the National Police Association is actually trying to get the Massachusetts Bar Association (or MBA) to disbar Suffolk County's incoming District Attorney, Rachael Rollins. Thinking she must have done something to deserve that? Well, no: they want her disbarred because she declared, while running for office, that she'd stop prosecuting all those petty crimes that seem to jail a disproportionate number of black folks. And yet every single DA in America prioritizes certain kinds of cases over certain others! It's called "prosecutorial discretion," and I presume the NPA has heard of it. And Suffolk County police aren't even complaining about Ms. Rollins, possibly because they feel the same way about the work they're being compelled to do, so I feel compelled to regard the NPA's complaint as an attempt at election nullification. So Color of Change helps you tell the MBA to dismiss the complaint against Ms. Rollins.

Finally, People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to reject the nomination of William Barr as our new Attorney General. We have so, so many reasons to oppose Mr. Barr, including his support for the noxious notion of the "unitary executive" President who can do pretty much whatever he likes, the likelihood that he'll end or otherwise obstruct the Special Counsel's ongoing investigation into Russian meddling/Administration collusion, and his, ah, peculiar attitude toward the False Claims Act, but we must also recall that Mr. Barr, while he was George H.W. Bush's Attorney General, approved all those pardons Mr. Bush handed out to Iran-Contra figures who were about to go to trial (and possibly expose Mr. Bush's own complicity in those wrongdoings). Sense a pattern? Then tell your Senators to reject the Barr nomination with a quickness. Lawlessness is this President's only remaining defense, and he's better at lawlessness than we are.

Around the table: celebrating our third consecutive day with at least one item of good news!

A ProPublica/WBEZ Chicago report describes how the meteoric rise of video gambling in Illinois has been little more than a "botched money grab," as underregulated gambling corporations make off with the money while leaving towns and counties even more destitute. Why, it's almost like that was the whole idea! The video gambling troubles began in 2009, at the height of the Great Recession, when "something had to be done" to raise money. And the gambling bill, with the Orwellian title of the Illinois Jobs Now! (exclamation point in original), was a truly modern bipartisan mess, created by Democrats too afraid to raise taxes on big donors and Republicans who had clearly abdicated conservatism (and who now say they should have studied the matter more, which is just dandy now that the barn door's open).

Well, how about that -- poll finds almost 60% of Americans support a 70% tax on income above $10 million. How "radical" can an idea be if a decisive majority of Americans support it? "Not radical at all" is the correct answer. Americans generally support higher taxes on the rich, but it's good to see such support when someone puts a number to it. Yet I do wonder if Rep. Ocasio-Cortez means to forestall a drive to set the top tax rate even higher -- say, at 91%, and on millionaire income -- which would, in turn, suggest that the Democratic establishment's hand-wringing over her is, that's right, drama. I'd be happy to be wrong about all of that.

You think the government shutdown's bad now? Well, three Bloomberg writers remind us that it could get a whole lot worse -- not just no food stamps and no housing assistance, but no court hearings, no flights, no buses. Why, even Wall Street might shut down! And then, if our President is really lucky, we'll have a terrorist attack to rally the country around him, I'm sure they've mooted this possibility at the White House -- I mean, they've lost all the arguments, so how can they hope to keep winning elections without sowing chaos? Remember: if terrorists attack, immediately blame our President for holding up government funding over his precious wall for however many months it's been by then.

Here's some more good news: federal District Court Judge halts our Administration's efforts to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census questionnaire, saying our Commerce Secretary broke "a veritable smorgasbord" of rules and laws in adding the question. Per the judge, he also "cherry-picked facts to support his views, ignored or twisted contrary evidence and hid deliberations from Census Bureau experts." All that sure doesn't bode well for the FCC's net neutrality repeal of 2017, particularly since the judge found that our Administration's census question did, in fact, violate the Administrative Procedures Act.

Finally, I don't go looking around for Iconic Photos of Our Age, but the sight of our President inviting the national college football champion Clemson Tigers to eat mountains of junk food is actually a pretty good one. Junk food is really the perfect metaphor for everything this Administration offers -- it might taste good in the moment, but it'll ultimately leave you fat and malnourished at the same time. And there ain't nothing else on the menu.

Action: concerning the Arctic Refuge, kids' apps, media consolidation, and climate change.

Our Bureau of Land Management (or BLM) has released its proposal to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (also known as ANWR) to oil drilling -- and, naturally, because they don't want to hear what you think about it, they announced their proposal in late December when folks are immersed in the holidays and have given us only a month to leave a public comment about it! So let the Sierra Club help you tell our BLM to keep big oil drilling corporations out of ANWR. You know (better than our BLM does, apparently!) the threat oil drilling poses to caribou within the Reserve and the Gwich'in Native Americans who live there, but don't forget to remind our BLM that just about nobody who's studied the matter thinks there's a whole lot of oil in ANWR to begin with! Is this the lesson we want to teach our descendents -- that when some corporation or other wants to make money, it can destroy whatever's in its way? And that our government should help them do that? Not in my America, it's not. But only if we act.

Meanwhile, you might think the children's apps in the Google Play Store wouldn't illegally collect data or manipulate kids into buying stuff or model harmful behavior, but, sadly, they do, as a Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood complaint to our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) documents. Like the app depicting a kid crying after you don't buy something! That's disgusting! Kids take it seriously when other people cry! And when the big corporations providing these apps say hey, we're just collecting information so we can target ads better -- corporate spokeshacks are not as smart as you think, after all! -- contemplate the horror of a corporation that thinks of children as just another moneyjar. You know, the way they already think about their parents! But at least parents can defend themselves better against such manipulation -- children need their parents' protection for a reason. Hence the CCFC helps you tell Google to adopt more vigorous standards that protect kids from privacy invasion and rampant commercialism.

In other news, one Digital First Media plans to buy Gannett newspapers, the nation's biggest newspaper publisher -- no doubt you've read USA Today and a slew of local and regional newspapers that used to be independent. Yeah, might as well get that out of the way early: having a thing such as Gannett isn't a good thing for America, even if their reporting is competent enough, but having it bought by an even bigger corporation owned by a freaking hedge fund is an even worse thing. What do you think Digital First will do once it gets its grubby hands on Gannett? If the experience of previous Digital First-owned outlets (like, say, the Denver Post) has any predictive power, there'll be censorship of journalists, firing reporters who don't toe the bottom line, and sacrificing anything and everything to the altar of mammon. Hence Free Press helps you tell Gannett's board to protect their newsrooms by refusing to sell to Digital First Media. We've got here the Big Stick of Bad PR here, so let's use it.

Finally, our Supreme Court has lately rejected Exxon's latest attempt to stall or stop Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey's investigation into whether it lied to investors and consumers about fossil fuels' role in climate change, so now's as good a time as any to tell your state Attorney General to join the effort against Exxon, as Corporate Accountability helps you do. You probably know the story by now: several media organs reported in 2015 that Exxon's own scientists had warned executives of fossil fuels' role in climate change as early as 1977, but these executives basically pretended that research didn't exist and spent their time stoking doubt in everyone's minds instead. And there you have the real role of money in climate change policy -- scientists don't "make money" from telling everyone climate change is real so much as fossil fuel corporations make money from telling everyone climate change is a hoax. Remember that the next time our President weighs in on the matter.

Around the table: what's even worse than pretending not to understand how tax brackets work, and other lessons.

You know what's even worse than Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) explaining how tax brackets work pretty thoroughly and our "liberal" media refusing to understand it? Right-wing fools calling the "Green New Deal" a "leftist fantasy program." Folks actually do want less pollution and more renewable energy in their lives, so calling their sincere hopes and dreams a "fantasy" is pretty insulting. Oh, but it's even worse than that: in an era where solar and wind production costs have almost achieved parity with coal and oil costs, calling renewable energy a "fantasy program" is also pretty insulting.

Ari Paul catches a New York Times op-ed asserting that pot is actually extraordinarily harmful. The Times probably thinks it's doing its due diligence in presenting "opposing views," but I only want opposing views that actually make good arguments, not "arguments" that present anecdotes as evidence and cherry-pick the data so obviously it'd make the Cato Institute wince. And people have been known to do evil after drinking a lot of booze, and that hasn't lately spurred a whole lot of righteous anger against legal alcohol.

If you're wondering why it's taken so long for Rep. Steve King (R-IA) to finally suffer for the racist claptrap he's been saying on the national stage for 15 years, well, I can't really tell you, and not just because "tipping points" like these really seem to come and go without very much changing. It's not like Republicans have never condemned his remarks before, but it's also not like they've done very much about his mouth before now, either. And I don't think Republicans were trying to get ahead of Democratic-sponsored censure resolutions, because don't they normally just ignore Democrats when they talk about racism? (As an aside, I bet Mob Boss Mitch is hopping mad about having had to say something about this.)

Researchers develop a font (which they've called "Sans Forgetica") that supposedly helps you retain more of what you read. It probably does put more markers in your mind than you'd get from Georgia or Trajan Pro III (my two favorite fonts, if you haven't noticed), but the size and smell of a good book put those markers in your mind, too, and anyway you can't read a whole book in Sans Forgetica because it'd hurt your head. The best way to remember what you've read is to read it more than once, and don't task yourself reading things you don't enjoy. And better it be a real book than an e-book (see "size," "smell").

Finally, because you deserve some good news, two federal courts effectively block our Administration's attempt to allow just any old corporation to cite just any old "religious" belief to deny birth control to its employees. You'll recall that our Supreme Court's infamous Hobby Lobby decision wouldn't expand such "religious conscience" exceptions beyond closely-held corporations, and while I suppose it's possible the two relatively new far right-wingers on our Court might be looking to widen these exceptions, this could wind up being the second time our Administration has failed to roll back the mandate. Don't think our Administration is trying to do everything badly, though, not just because that's 13-dimensional chess and you should avoid it, but because incompetence might really just be the better explanation.

Action: concerning the government shutdown, high drug prices, and cash bail.

In re our President's stated desire to invoke "emergency powers" to build his stupid border wall, more than a few establishment Republicans have worried out loud that a future Democratic President could use these same emergency powers to do something about climate change or guns without consulting Congress, and several members of the far-right Freedom Caucus in the House have expressed similar misgivings. And they're right to do so! Big decisions like these should be made by the people via their elected representatives in Congress. But if our President pulls this stunt, you think any of these Republicans will put their money where their mouth is -- by, say, repealing the law that gives our Presidents powers to declare these "national emergencies"? No, they won't, at least not unless we tell them to, in numbers they can't ignore. So use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to call your Congressfolk and demand they repeal the National Emergencies Act.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Affordable Drug Manufacturing Act, while Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Prescription Drug Price Relief Act. The Affordable Drug Manufacturing Act would allow our government to manufacture generic versions of drugs that big pharma corporations make too expensive for good Americans to afford, while the Prescription Drug Price Relief Act would mandate that these big pharma corporations price their drugs at or below the median price their drugs fetch in Canada, England, France, Germany, and Japan. Three of these nations have Medicare-for-All-style health insurance systems in place, as you know, so they don't spend a lot on their drugs. How would the big corporations make money? They'd make money because we all get sick sooner or later, despite our best efforts; they just wouldn't be able to take us hostage because we're sick anymore. And that's a thing worth fighting for.

Finally, Color of Change helps you tell the Bexar County, Texas District Attorney-elect to end cash bail there. Said Bexar County District Attorney-elect, Joe Gonzales, has been an outspoken opponent of cash bail -- but you know plenty of politicians who've talked a good game (cough Barack Obama cough) only to disappoint you once they get into office, so Mr. Gonzalez may well need a bit more steel in his spine, and we can give that to him. The immediate news hook is the death of Janice Dotson-Stephens, 61, in custody after spending six months in a Bexar County jail because she couldn't pay a $300 bond (recall that nearly half of all Americans couldn't scare up $400 on a moment's notice if they had to!), but fact is you're not supposed to go to jail when you're accused of a crime; you're only supposed to go to jail when you're convicted of a crime. And it costs the taxpayer money to put folks up in jail while they're awaiting trial; don't we aim to use taxpayer money more judiciously than that? So let's end this bad system.

Action: concerning tax policy, voting rights, pollution, and the government shutdown.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has lately said a 70% income tax on income over $10 million could easily fund the sort of "Green New Deal" that would put us on the path toward a renewable energy grid while creating jobs, and while I of course support both those ends, I'd go rather harder on the tax end than she would. I'd enact a 91% on millionaire income, but since we also need to prevent folks from exploiting our current loophole-ridden system, I'd also bring back the 55% tax rate on corporate profits, stop treating dividends as separate from income for tax purposes, and outlaw stock options. That would make taxes fair again, revitalize our economy, and give us our best chance to kill climate change dead. I think all that merits a phone call to your House Reps, who need to know that calling Ms. Ocasio-Cortez's ideas "radical" is even stupider than our not-that-recent history (we did have a 91% tax bracket and a 55% corporate tax rate during the '50s, after all) would suggest.

I've been looking for the right contact tool to express support for the ideas that H.R. 1, the For the People Act, would codify into law, and Common Cause has it: they help you tell your House Reps to make H.R. 1 as vigorous as possible. You've no doubt heard that H.R. 1 would strengthen voting rights, expose big campaign donors, make Congressional redistricting fairer, and shut the "revolving door" between corporations and our government -- among other worthy aims -- but it's our job, as citizens, to make sure H.R. 1 actually does these things. And Democrats have no excuse to weaken H.R. 1 -- the Republican-held Senate won't pass it anyway, so playing 13-dimensional chess games with this bill in the vain hope that the Senate might pass it is a vain endeavor. You know what isn't a vain endeavor? Humiliating those politicians who refuse to pass legislation that holds our government accountable to its owners, the American people. That includes Republicans -- and it also includes Democrats who'd weaken the bill.

Meanwhile, our President has nominated acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler to be his official choice for the job, and if you think Scott "Cone of Silence" Pruitt was bad, you're likely to find Mr. Wheeler to be significantly worse -- Mr. Wheeler worked most recently a coal corporation lobbyist, but before that he was Sen. Inhofe's Chief Counsel for over a decade, and before that he worked at the EPA, so he likely knows better than Mr. Pruitt how to destroy from within our EPA's ability to protect us from polluters. I mean, it could also be that Mr. Wheeler can't pass up wierd freebies any better than Mr. Pruitt could, since we've just learned that Mr. Wheeler has, shall we say, an expensive weakness for a certain kind of hamburger, but that's a hell of a thing to count on. Better to tell our Senators to confirm an EPA Administrator who'll actually protect our clean air and clean water more than he'll protect corporate paymaster profits, as the Environmental Defense Fund helps you do.

Finally, Moms Rising helps you tell our Congressfolk to end this ludicrous government shutdown. I actually have nothing against government shutdowns per se, but seriously, do we want to force Americans to choose between food inspections and a border wall that won't protect American but will diddle the rage glands of our President's votaries? How about between airline safety inspections and a border wall? Or between EPA clean air monitoring and a border wall? Or between health care for Native Americans and a border wall? Or, come the end of February, between food stamps for the working poor and a border wall? Of course, a lot of good Americans -- like air traffic controllers and TSA workers -- are already working without paychecks, so we're already forcing them to make dreadfully hard choices. But over the last quarter century, politicians have shut down our government for nothing but stupid reasons, and it doesn't matter that this border wall is "totemic" for our President. You know what's totemic for me? A government that does our will.

Around the table: time for another exciting installment of "when's that terrorist attack coming?"

As we count the cost of our ongoing government shutdown, I feel compelled to ask: when's that terrorist attack coming? I mean, our President could be hunting really big game here -- not just the right to strut around for years saying you should have given me that wall so I could have prevented that terrorist attack, but also expanded "emergency powers" legislation enabling him to do whatever he likes, whenever he likes. Hey, if I thought of it, you know he has. Just remember: if terrorists (or whomever!) do attack, the first thing out of our mouths should be our President failed -- the President who won't read intelligence briefings and won't staff a functioning State Department, and who also struts around like he alone knows everything.

Third Circuit Court of Appeals refuses to reinstate court order preventing the Republican National Committee from engaging in the kind of "ballot security" measures that just so happen to suppress minority voters, and Rick Hasen foresees "supercharge(d)" vote suppression in 2020 as a result. I do find it interesting that Mr. Hasen's Republican lawyer acquaintances would "bristle" at the kind of things the RNC used to do, but the RNC got in trouble (in part) for caging voters, and what's Interstate Crosscheck if not caging? Things like Interstate Crosscheck and Voter ID don't necessarily come at the end of a gun or a fist, but I'm not sure that's progress. It certainly ain't enough progress.

Ho hum, our President thinks he can unilaterally turn Medicaid into a block grant program though even many right-wing analysts disagree that he can do that. So I guess the Tea Party is right now taking to the streets to protest this AMURIKAN CAESAR!!!!!, right? I kid, of course. I'd be more confident that this latest attempt to subvert the rule of law will die in court, except that Tha Bush Mobb successfully imposed spending caps on two states back in the day, albeit spending caps so high those states had no chance of hitting them. And that's why I always say George W. Bush is worse than our current President.

I agree with Charles Eisenstein at Yes! magazine that "(p)eople are not going to be frightened into caring" and thus doing something about climate change, though I doubt most folks would find "deep and active care for the planet com(ing) through experiences of beauty and grief" to be useful advice. I do agree that the best climate change messaging is pro-clean water, pro-clean air, and anti-pollution messaging rather than TEH PLANETZ IZ GOINGZ TO DIEZ!!!! messaging; I even agree that local efforts to defeat the effects of climate change can do better than big centralized nationalized ones. But the main reason climate change messaging isn't working? Because we're not all saying "let's kick climate change's ass!"

Finally, because you deserve some good news, yet another ag-gag law goes down in federal court, and this time it's Iowa's. You may wince at the court's reasoning -- that our First Amendment protects lying, since someone who takes a job at a factory farm so they can do undercover reporting on animal treatment is lying -- since similar reasoning has also, at times, protected media outlets that lie. But of course our First Amendment not only protects lies, but efforts to expose those lies. (And dig the pork lobby's we-never-intended-to-infringe-on-your-rights-sucker act! As if corporations have literally no other way to "conduct our businesses and care for our animals" than to procure unconstitutional tools for dealing with undercover agents!)

Around the table: concerning the Green New Deal and Medicare-for-All, among other topics.

Ellen Brown instructs us that a nationwide network of public banks could fund the Green New Deal that's all the talk these days. I'd prefer bringing back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income myself, but public banks are a good thing (as the good people of North Dakota can tell you!), and I'm sure they can help. Be sure to note America's Last Economist, Michael Hudson, instructing us that hyperinflation has just about never resulted from "governments just printing money," but rather from "foreign debt service collapsing the exchange rate." The dollar is virtually a world currency, so I suspect that's even less likely to happen here.

I was ready for a big argument with Michael Corcoran at TruthOut about his statement that "Democrat Support for a Public Option" is the "Biggest Obstacle" to a Medicare-for-All health insurance system. I still regard all the ZOMG TEH 34 TRILLYUNZ OF DOLLARZ!!!!! scaremongering as the biggest obstacle, and if you slay that dragon, the others will fall more easily. But the litany of Democrat weakness he tabulates is still pretty depressing, and we all remember how President Obama put a wedge between us and single-payer with the "public option" he clearly had no intention of fighting for. And we also remember when Sen. Lieberman supported the Medicare buy-in until approximately the moment it had a chance of passing, which should serve as a warning to Sens. Harris and Booker as they try to "support" Medicare-for-All without actually helping us to get there.

Kelly Blanchard at TruthOut says "It's Time for an Over-the-Counter Birth Control Pill," but if you remember Carly Fiorina supporting that during the last Presidential campaign, you do have a question: what will the cost of the over-the-counter birth control pill be? Prescriptions do tend to save money on your out-of-pocket drug costs, even on drugs commonly available over the counter, so making birth control more affordable will also require intervention from our federal government -- which is always less likely when Republican winged monkeys get too much of the say about everything. Hard to believe that, for Barry Goldwater, the uterus was one more thing our government had no business interfering with.

Adam Johnson at FAIR catches our "liberal" media getting its shorts in a bunch about some prisoners, somewhere, getting steak once a year during the holidays. Yes, it's not fair that prison guards work without pay because our President holds our government hostage over a wall, but our "liberal" media don't bust out best stock photos when prisoners find maggots in their food. And I think it may be a bit sanguine to call this story "(c)lickbait that'll soon be forgotten" -- in fact, I bet a lot of our President's votaries will bring up TEH PRIZNURZ EATINGZ TEH STEAKZ!!!!! every time someone corners them in an argument about inhumane prison treatment.

Finally, American carbon emissions jumped over 3 percent last year. You may recall that the IEA found carbon emissions dropping worldwide as late as 2015. But dig our EPA Chief's attempt to take credit for carbon emissions dropping from 2016 to 2017 -- you know, before he stopped doing the things that helped carbon emissions come down! The road to hell is paved with the skulls of men like Andrew Wheeler.

Light posting notice.

Posting will be light a bit longer, as I am thisclosereally to getting book number three to the printer.

I do have goals for the new year, though. I want 2019 to be the year we start kicking this President to the curb. The Special Counsel's report notwithstanding I don't particularly want him out of office, but I want good Americans to shun and shame him out of any serious discussion about America's traditions and America's future. I guess I really want him to become the proverbial Mayor of Deadwood, a man who aches to get in on the action only to get pushed out of the way. But I also want 2019 to be the year that America gets tired of drama. And by "drama" I don't just mean all of the right wing's manufactured outrages -- I mean a culture that can't stop showing folks acting obnoxious in public, a culture that follows celebrities around and calls it "news," a culture that winks with approval at corruption. Big dreams, I know, but America is the place for big dreams.

Action: concerning health care, redistricting, and surveillance.

Sen. Warren (D-MA) has introduced a bill called the Affordable Drug Manufacturing Act (Congress.gov has no bill number as of this writing), which would allow our government to manufacture generic versions of any patented drug. If you call that "socialism," please consider that actual socialism would more likely entail our government manufacturing all the drugs, but Ms. Warren's bill would only allow federal manufacture of generics under certain circumstances, such as absurdly high prices, lack of competition, or shortages, and none of these circumstances are shining examples of free market efficiency, are they? People want our government to protect us from the things that hurt and kill us, and the best our opponents can do is squeal SOSHULIZMZ!!!!! whenever we propose making our government do just that? Thus we should call our Reps and Senators and tell them to support better drug policy by passing the Affordable Drug Manufacturing Act.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: Fair Districts PA helps you tell your state Assemblyfolk to reform the rules by which they consider legislation. We know these rules need reform, because House state Government Committee Chair Daryl Metcalfe (E-12) seemed to spend the entire spring gutting actually-bipartisan redistricting reform bills in 2018 once they got to his committee -- why, one of those bills had the support of more than half of the House, meaning that, well, if it'd come to a vote, it would have passed! I know right-wingers think (and might even say, since these are interesting times!) that Committee heads should have the power to gut bills at will, because what do us little people know about governing? But if, like me, you think "little people" is a disgusting epithet, and if, like me, you think us "little people" actually do know a lot, you'll find arguments for reform more convincing.

Finally, Amazon aims to get a contract from our Pentagon to build a "weapon of unprecedented surveillance and power," called the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure. (Yes, the acronym of that weapon's name is JEDI, which suggests that its namers have literally no idea what Jedis stood for in the Star Wars films.) JEDI would vastly increase our military's ability to share and sift through surveillance information, using "artificial intelligence," which doesn't impress you if you've found, as I have, that autocorrect incorrectly anticipates what you're about to type nearly 100% of the time. And if you're tempted to say if Amazon doesn't build it, someone else will, recall that Amazon has already collected so, so much data on Americans that it could quite easily correlate with DoD surveillance information. Luckily for us, Amazon employees seem to have some sway within their corporation, so Roots Action helps you tell Amazon employees to pressure their management to bow out of the JEDI bidding.

(Posting has been light for a while, and will remain light until the new year. The main reason for that? I'm putting together another Penny Rants volume for release in mid- to late February. I know what you're saying to yourself: self, didn't he just put out a second Penny Rants volume last month? Why, yes, yes I did -- and soon I'll put out a third one, covering the last two very, very interesting years. So be on the lookout for that, and in the meantime, continue to enjoy the holidays and have a safe and happy new year.)

Penny rants for Sunday, December 23, 2018: concerning veterans' health care, right-wing drama, and "political correctness."

You remember when long wait times at the Veterans Administration were all over the news? And you remember how right-wingers said privatizing the VA would solve the problem? Well, surprise, surprise, a ProPublica/Politifact investigation finds the privatized part of the VA hemorrhaging money and subjecting our veterans to, guess what, longer wait times. Well, that's what happens when private health insurance corporations charge close to $300 for referrals! And dig one of the privatizers suggesting you calculate their overhead using "an average cost" rather than total costs! You know, like right-wingers tell you to calculate the benefits from their tax-cuts-for-the-rich based on an "average tax cut" that sure ain't making its way into your bank account. Maybe we should spend less on corporate welfare and more on soldiers' health care? Maybe we should stop making our soldiers fight stupid wars so they won't need so much health care in the first place? If you think these are big asks, well, that's not the attitude that abolished slavery.

You may have heard that our President has stopped following Ann Coulter on Twitter after she criticized him for (momentarily!) caving on his desired border wall funding, and you may have also heard that our President's beloved Fox and Friends hosts slammed him for announcing that our military will pull out of Syria, so before we go any further, let's all take a deep breath and remind ourselves that this is all drama, and bad drama at that. I mean, these aren't the kind of pissing matches that even make for good reality show drama, if such a thing can be said to exist. Right-wingers stage these "disagreements" to look "independent," so that when you accuse them of marching in jackboot lockstep agreement, as they do, they can point to that one time one of them yelled at another and hope you momentarily forget that one counterexample doesn't obliterate all trends. And, really, how "independent" can you be if you're coming at our President because he's not nativist enough, or not enough of a warmongerer?

"Liberal" media poll finds a majority of Americans oppose our nation becoming more "politically correct." So Americans oppose right-wingers constantly having swordfights over who's more conservative, or Nazi wannabes demanding "safe spaces" for their racism or demanding that everyone call them "white nationalists" instead of racists? Apparently not -- Americans believe that "there are too many things people can't say anymore," presumably about women and people of color, since the article insists that Democrats had better heed this poll. But folks losing their jobs over what they say at work is not exactly a new thing, since our First Amendment protects you from your government and not so much from your employer, and if folks really feel oppressed at the prospect of being shamed by their fellow-Americans, all I can say is waaaaaaaaaah. And I can't shake the feeling that if this poll had asked if Americans should be more sensitive to what other Americans go through just because they're women or people of color, it would have found a majority favored that, too.

Action: concerning health care, nativism, and pollution.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to support real health insurance reform in America by passing legislation expanding Medicare to all Americans. The health insurance industry won't like it, of course, but they've bollocksed up health care so badly in America that tens of millions of Americans still don't have health insurance, meaning they skip visits to the doctor because they can't pay for them, meaning some of them die. And if a single-payer health insurance system brings down health care costs everywhere else in the world, there's no reason it won't do the same here. Oh, I know there are "reasons," but they aren't good reasons -- whining about TEH 34 TRILLYUNZ!!!! a Medicare-for-All system would cost over the next decade, for example, makes no sense in a nation where we're going to spend $49 trillion on health care costs over the next decade. So let's take control of our health care system and get better results for less.

Meanwhile, Win Without War helps you tell your Senators to reject our Administration's nomination of Heather Nauert as U.N. Ambassador. I mean, if we labored to keep John Bolton out of that job, why would we want Heather Nauert? And should a nominee's main qualification be that she makes her predecessor look better? Ms. Nauert used to work for Fox News, where she (surprise!) routinely attacked immigrants and Muslims, and she's spent the last 18 months as a State Department spokeshack. Clearly our President has fast-tracked her because he likes how she talks! But, frankly, we shouldn't be sending nativists or nativist-wannabes to the U.N. I mean, that seems self-evident, doesn't it? Maybe our Senators will grill her and expose her unfitness for the job, but they didn't exactly stop Ms. DeVos's nomination; is it too much to ask that our Senators at least expose their unfitness for their own jobs if they can't stop this nomination?

Finally, with the impending resignation of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, the Sierra Club helps you tell your Senators to demand a new Interior Secretary who will actually protect public lands and not rush to sell them off to big corporations. As seems to happen a lot with this Administration, Mr. Zinke got a lot of notoriety for his taxpayer-funded trips and his profligate spending (remember the $140,000 door? Good times!), but he also did more palpable harm as Interior Secretary, by scaling back national monuments, auctioning off public lands to corporate polluters, and rolling back protections for threatened species. And his number two man, former fossil fuel lobbyist David Bernhardt, sure as hell won't do any better, even if he doesn't literally ride into his first day on the job on a horse, like Mr. Zinke did. Mr. Bernhardt has never met a regulation he didn't consider a burden, and that's not the attitude that'll protect our public lands.

Action: concerning mandatory minimums, conservation, and William Barr.

Given that Senate Majority Leader McConnell (E-KY) has graciously allowed the Senate to vote on S. 3649, the FIRST STEP Act, now's a very good time to let the Drug Policy Alliance help you tell your Reps and Senators to support criminal justice reform by passing it. S. 3649 isn't everything we want, etc., but it would reduce some mandatory minimums, expand the "safety valve" for judges to grant sentences below mandatory minimums, and prevent prosecutors from heaping on longer sentences for firearm possession during first offenses. All of these things will help us actually rehabilitate prisoners (which is what civilized people do!), rather than simply heap more punishments on people in the vain hope that we'll look tougher. Sen. Cotton (E-AK) will try to sabotage the bill with amendments that would gut the bill, because he's so "tough," I guess. But how about regular Americans have a say here, rather than just law-and-order peacocks?

Meanwhile, Congress has also let the Land and Water Conservation Fund expire, as of September 30, so Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to support conservation efforts by reauthorizing the Land and Water Conservation Fund. Do not brook any absurd complaints from your Congressfolk about "fiscal responsibility" or hysterical hand-wringing about how it'll be "paid for," because it's their job to know that taxes don't actually fund the LWCF; royalties from oil and gas drilling do. They can't believe that "fiscal responsibility" is all about letting oil and gas drilling corporations get away with paying less money in royalties to the American taxpayer, can they? Well, our Congressfolk do believe a lot of strange things -- one of them apparently being that you can just let popular and well-running programs expire without suffering any consequences. They sure are lucky we're here to remind them of the consequences.

Finally, our President has nominated former George H.W. Bush-era Attorney General William Barr to succeed former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and if you're thinking a Bush-era Attorney General would be an improvement over Mr. Sessions or Mr. Whittaker, well, William Rivers Pitt at TruthOut reminds you that Mr. Barr did not exactly do yeoman work for the senior Mr. Bush. And he not only comes from an era that prescribed more punishment as the solution to every criminal justice problem, he's never left it! Even worse, he has long been an adherent of the notion that the President Must Always Be Obeyed, just like Supreme Court Justices Alito and Kavanaugh. Gosh, listen to such men and you'd never know our Founders rebelled against exactly the sort of fellow who thought he was right all the time and everyone had to bend to his will! So the Drug Policy Alliance helps youtell your Senators to reject the nomination of Mr. Barr as Attorney General.

Around the table: another net neutrality death, another Republican pretending to be human, and other sideshows.

You probably didn't hear about this, but the FCC just reclassified text messaging as a Title I "information service" versus a Title II "communications service," meaning that big telephone corporations will now be able to censor, block, or throttle your text messages if they like. Naturally the FCC claims it's all about preventing "spam," but that's utter BS, because what are they doing about the actual problem of spam phone calls? And don't think this won't happen to you, because corporations have been blocking text messages from political activist groups while screaming "controversy" for years now.

Color me unimpressed that Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) now makes the same complaints about the 2017 tax "reform" that the rest of us do -- particularly that it enables stock buybacks over worker raises. He voted for the damn thing, after all, and all he did at the time was turn the bill's 15-percentage-point corporate tax rate cut into a 14-point cut. And his proposed solutions (taxing stock buybacks at the dividend tax rate! Instead of, heaven forfend, outlawing stock buybacks like we did until 1982!) sound positively Clintonian in their capacity to a) lull voters to sleep and b) utterly fail to solve the problem. Marco Rubio: he gives empty suits a bad name.

So what's the worst thing about outgoing Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker signing legislation to curb the power of the incoming Democrat Governor and Attorney General? That state Republicans will get even more power to nullify clean air and clean water regulations? That early voting will get curtailed again even though courts have struck similar efforts down before? That Mr. Walker resorted to a Venn diagram to "prove" the bill doesn't hurt the incoming Governor all that much? That it lets state Republican legislators waste taxpayer money on private lawyers when they get sued? Or that Gov. Walker made sure he gave $28 million more in corporate welfare to Kimberly-Clark (which has, as you know, already laid off about one out of every eight of its workers in February, and after getting all that corporate welfare from the federal tax "reform" bill, no less) the day before signing a bill that would have prevented him from doing that? It's hard to know where to start. Indeed, it's almost like that's the idea.

William Rivers Pitt at TruthOut surveys some of the recent damage this Administration has done to veterans and refugees and concludes that it all "serves only as yet another bowlful of blood spooned to Trump’s execrable base." But, sadly, this base has been around for decades -- you remember all those "war on terror" voters and Tea Partiers and "Regulation Nation" teeth-gnashers and "All Lives Matter" squealers? Well, these are all the same people. And what really made them? A government of malicious Republicans and weak Democrats that funnels taxpayer money to its cronies and does little other than give us the back of its hand. Really, given how terrible our government has been over the last 40-odd years, we should take credit as Americans for not having more crazy people.

I have to dig into my "Stuff I Should Never Bother With" file to note that when right-wingers are passing around memes on social media attributing a quotation to Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) that she did not say because that quotation's been around since before she was born, they're admitting that they can't beat you any other way than by just lying about you. The good news? Right-wingers have apparently decided they can't beat Ms. Ocasio-Cortez any other way than to lie about her before she has even served one minute in Congress.

Finally, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke will, per one of our President's ubiquitous tweets, be leaving his post at the end of the year. Naturally he says he just can't "justify spending thousands of dollars defending myself and my family against false allegations," which I presume include the half-dozen open investigations of his work and conduct, including one referred to our Justice Department. Well, he rode into Interior on a horse, and it looks like he's going out a horse's ass. (And seriously, does our President really not understand that bad actions attract bad press?)

Around the table: in which even the good news is bad news (and some of the bad news is, at least, indifferent news).

Federal District Court Judge declares the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional -- but denies the state of Texas's request for an injunction, meaning that his declaration has, essentially, no legal force at present. Why, you might be tempted to call that drama! In the unlikely event our Supreme Court upholds this decision -- four Justices won't, and it's probably occurred to Chief Justice Roberts that a mandate tax that's currently zero could conceivably be raised by Congress tomorrow and thus render the decision nonsensical -- there's still Medicare-for-All, you know, which makes all these legal questions moot. Unless the five hard right-wingers on our Supreme Court now think Medicare is unconstitutional, that is.

On the other hand, this is probably a nothingburger, too: House passes a new Farm Bill with an irrelevant legislative rider preventing the House from taking up a War Powers resolution relating to the war on Yemen -- one day before the Senate, in a 56-41 vote, approves a War Powers resolution aiming to stop our involvement in that war. OK, maybe not a complete nothingburger, since even getting the Senate to express disapproval of our continued involvement in the Saudi/UAE war against Yemen has taken years, but it does anger a man that our "leaders" constantly shit all over everything. And I sure hope anyone running against the Senators who changed their votes for this Senate resolution will note that they only voted for it when it wouldn't make a difference.

Ho hum, Frank Clemente at the Our Future blog reminds us that "The GOP Tax Bill is Creating Jobs -- Just Not in the U.S." The 2017 tax "reform" "charges corporations just half the tax rate on foreign profits that it charges on domestic earnings" and thus "(i)t’s hard to imagine a stronger lure for corporations to pack up their plant and equipment and ship them offshore." I might not have been so understated. As an aside, it's always good to be reminded that our Administration did explicitly promise that every family would get a $4,000 raise from the tax "reform," and that corporations have spent 117 times as much money on stock buybacks as on worker pay raises.

Chalmers University of Technology study suggests that growing organic food will actually exacerbate climate change. How? Because organic farming doesn't pump out the same yields as conventional farming, thus requiring more land, leading to deforestation, which vastly increases carbon emissions. Sounds reasonable, right? But the study's authors seem to imagine a world in which a) any government would mandate that all farming be done organically and b) only large producers will do any farming. I can't imagine that folks who grow their own food organically won't be helping reduce climate change simply by relying less on industrial farming for their food needs. And those who complain that we'll never make that world? Well, that's not the attitude that ended slavery.

From the "No, Somebody Actually Does Gotta Say It" file: Benjamin Barber at Facing South reminds us that the ongoing imbroglio over the election in North Carolina's 9th U.S. House district reveals that the real "election fraud" threat seems to come from the right-wingers who whine about it the most. Unreturned absentee ballots that just so happen to come disproportionately from counties with larger minority populations -- gosh, who woulda thunk it? But please, right-wingers, keep using that Interstate Crosscheck database that unconstitutionally deregisters voters without checking if voters with the same first and last names in different states even have the same middle names.

Finally, after Sen. McConnell (E-KY) finally allows a vote on a criminal justice reform bill, Carl Hulse at the New York Times gazes in apparent open-mouthed wonder at just how many actors had to pressure Mr. McConnell to hold a vote on the bill. Your jaw will hit the floor, too, when you read that Mr. McConnell actually brought up Willie Horton back in 2016 in the process of telling his caucus the bill wouldn't come up then. Let's avoid calling Mr. McConnell a "law-and-order Republican," though -- recall how he moved mountains to get Don Blankenship's coal corporation off the hook after it polluted the drinking water of 27,000 good Kentuckians with a massive slurry spill, and you'll be reminded that, for our leaders, "law and order" is only for us "little people."

Around the table: Jesus Mary and Joseph not another "unity ticket," and other absurdities.

Our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau caught Wells Fargo charging much higher fees to students than its competitors -- and then promptly buried the report. Because how can we ever punish usurers and create jobs at the same time? Seriously, this is what our Administration thinks -- or wants you to think.

ProPublica and The Atlantic describe how eight years of Congressional budget-cutting has "gutted" our Internal Revenue Service. If you're of the mind that this is a good thing, you must be alright with corporations refusing to pay what they owe, and you must also be alright with working families paying more for roads and bridges and cops and libraries, since that's what happens when the folks at the top don't pay their fair share. What do you call a liberal? A conservative who just bottomed out over a pothole.

Kara Mannor at TruthOut reminds us that the Americans with Disabilities Act (or ADA) is not the legacy of the late President George H.W. Bush (who signed it into law) but rather the legacy of all the activists who fought for it. You could say the same of just about every good thing we've ever done as Americans -- that the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, for example, aren't a Lyndon Johnson "legacy" but a legacy of those who fought for them. Read the whole article, though, which takes us all the way back to that time, 90 years ago, when governments tended to classify disabled folks as "unemployable."

The government of Egypt is apparently trying to stop the sale of yellow vests, so they don't have a yellow vest protest movement like other nations do now. Well, it's a good thing there are literally no other articles of clothing that could possibly be repurposed into a mass movement against neoliberal economic policy! A government that must resort to banning yellow vests is a government that's lost all the arguments on the merits. And maybe, you know, not giving people the back of your hand all the time is a better way of forestalling protests.

Fast food corporation McDonald's pledges to curb antibiotic abuse in its beef by 2020. And a crapload of spokeshacks rush forward to say "but we don't want to stop using antibiotics on sick animals," when literally no one in America has called for that. But that's what people do when they've lost the argument -- they don't just invent opponents, they invent opposing arguments. And when four out of every five antibiotics in America go to nominally healthy feed animals to make them meatier and help them endure squalid living conditions, we know it's not an issue of "treating sick animals" per se.

Finally, I saved the biggest slab of stupid for last: no no no we should not fantasize about Joe Biden running on a "unity ticket" with Mitt Freaking Romney or any of the other far right-wingers our media calls "moderates" merely because they don't actually drag their knuckles on the ground. How many times must I tell these pimps! A ticket with a centrist Democrat and a right-wing Republican is not a unity ticket -- it leaves out the majority of Americans who want Medicare-for-All health insurance, protection from financial predators, and cleaner air and water. And sacrifices all of that to the altar of "entitlement reform," though our author (an advisor to at least five famous Republican politicians, how about that!) has the sense not to call it that. (Hate to pile on, but Ralph Nader is only from the "lunatic fringe" if you think product safety is the "lunatic fringe," and in no way shape or form was Jerry Brown a "front-runner" for the 1992 Democratic Presidential nomination.)

Action: concerning factory farm waste and high drug prices.

Factory farms sure do pump out the pollution, as anyone who drives by one with the windows down can tell you, but of course our Administration's EPA would like to exempt factory farms from having to report the toxic emissions from their waste. If you're saying well of course animal poop has toxic emissions!, you'll want to consider that factory farms pack a lot of animals into a very small space, which of course concentrates both animal waste and the toxic emissions therefrom, such that factory farm workers occasionally die if they spend too much time in a confined space with too much manure. Ask yourself: should anyone die from breathing in too much poop smell? And don't the folks who live nearby deserve to know what they're breathing? The Sierra Club helps you tell our EPA to require that factory farms disclose the pollution they pump into our air.

Meanwhile, you may have heard that the price of insulin has gone up about 1,000 percent over the last 25 years, to the point where diabetics are actually rationing their insulin (which, you know, results in death for some diabetics!), so Emily Phelps has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell Novo Nordisk, one of the worst offenders among insulin-selling corporations, lower the price of its insulin. You know the drill: insulin is a life-saving medicine and thus its price absolutely positively shouldn't go up 64% over four years when inflation as a whole has only gone up seven percent during that time. Novo Nordisk has actually pledged to limit their insulin price-inflation to single digits annually, but then they raised the price of insulin six percent in just two months. I guess greed is a hard habit to break. Novo Nordisk sure is lucky to have folks like us around to help them break it.

Around the table: the computer is to blame! And other follies.

Philadelphia City Council passes a vigorous fair scheduling law, mandating that larger employers give workers 10 days' notice of their upcoming work schedule. This bill takes aim at the many big chains operating in the city, not small businesses -- unless folks think a "small business" has 30 stores and 250 employees. Hopefully our NLRB gets the message we've been sending them about not letting big corporations pretend to be small businesses by pretending their franchises are independent "small businesses."

Wells Fargo improperly denies loan modification requests to almost 900 people, forecloses on nearly 550 of them, and then blames a "computer glitch" for all the trouble. This all sounds eerily like that scam where you fall behind on your mortgage payments, your bankster says they might be able to modify your mortgage, and while you're waiting for their decision, they take your home from you. Well, Wells Fargo tried blaming its employees in their account-opening scam, so now they're blaming their computers. And they say corporations don't learn from their mistakes!

Study finds that between 65,000 and 115,000 New York City residents would be pushed into poverty if our Administration forges ahead with its plan to widen the definition of "public charge" to include just about anyone who ever got public assistance, ever. These would be the folks who would avoid getting assistance via food stamps or Medicaid so that their later attempts at, say, securing a green card wouldn't go awry. But this story has a happy ending: our Presidents' many votaries get to diddle their rage glands over TEH IMMIGRANTZ GETTINGZ ALL TEH THINGZ!!!!!

Anthropologists warn us to avoid stereotyping Amish attitudes toward our environment. We might be tempted to think of them as natural environmentalists because they "live simply" or "live in nature," but Amish folks tend to regard nature as "a manifestation of God’s handiwork, created for the benefit of humans," and as something "temporary" and not necessarily to be regulated by our government. Even the most "temporary" of things could last lifetimes, of course, and the Amish man who pooh-poohs biodiversity by saying the Amish "privilege humans" posits the only alternative as "we should just open the doors and let in all the flies," when surely Creation offers us more diverse options than that. It sure does seem they're taking it in the ear from Big Ag corporations as much as every other small farmer, though.

Finally, in case you were wondering why Vice President Pence's Chief of Staff, Nick Ayers, declined to take the same job with our President Who's So Desperate to Finally Once and For All Get Rid of John Kelly, Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo reminds us that Mr. Ayers is a very wealthy man who made most of his millions in dark money advertising. If Mr. Ayers has indeed rejected our President's job offer so he can run a dark money group ostensibly dedicated to our President's re-election, as at least one news outlet has said, I guess that would explain our President's relatively sanguine public reaction, for whom does the grifter admire but another grifter?