Thieves in the Temple.

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?

Action: concerning free speech and pollution.

Google is, as we speak, trying to put together a search engine that'll let China block its citizens from searching for information about human rights abuses! What is the Chinese government afraid of? That their citizens will discover their government throws dissidents in jail on BS charges and detains hundreds of thousands of Muslims in "re-education camps"? I know what Google's afraid of, though: the Big Stick of Bad PR, which you can help wield, as Sum of Us helps you tell Google to abandon its plans to help the Chinese government censor its citizens' web searches. This ain't small potatoes stuff: information now travels faster than it ever has, and though Will Rogers might protest that this only means lies travel faster than they ever have, I prefer a world in which we have more of a fighting chance to learn the truth. And I want good Chinese citizens to have that fighting chance, too.

Meanwhile, our Administration has announced plans to gut Obama-era standards limiting carbon pollution from newly-constructed coal plants, not long after announcing plans to gut Obama-era standards limiting methane emissions from oil and gas drilling corporations. Remember when we fought to get carbon emissions standards applied to already-existing power plants, not just new ones? Well, it's a new day, one where our EPA doesn't care about the air you breathe and the water you drink; they now only care about ensuring that executives of dying industries (and coal surely is dying) keep raking in unearned dough. Hence the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell our EPA to reject its own plans to put polluters first. When will we have a government that values its real bosses, the American people, more than it values corporate bosses? Only when we demand it and fight for it.

Action: concerning free speech and climate change.

It's the holiday season here in America, and what does that mean? It means Congress will try to attach all manner of offensive legislation to must-pass budgeting bills, that's what! And by attaching the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, Congress aims to do some truly bipartisan evil! Here as elsewhere, of course, "bipartisan" doesn't mean "broadly popular or useful," but just some fecal slab elites from both parties happen to support. The Israel Anti-Boycott Act, as you may recall, would (in its own words!) "prohibit() any U.S. person engaged interstate or foreign commerce" from participating in any foreign- or international organization-led boycott against Israel. That should strike you as unconstitutional, and it should also strike you as unpopular, since they're trying to sneak it through without debate. So the Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject making the Israel Anti-Boycott Act a part of year-end spending legislation.

Meanwhile, our Administration released its National Climate Assessment last Friday, an Assessment which said that doing nothing about climate change would cost good Americans half a trillion dollars annually in health care costs and storm rebuilding costs and the like. And how much coverage did our major news networks give it? Rather little -- but hey, it's not like it related to our survival as a species or anything. It's all about 75-degree Christmases! You can almost sympathize with our major news organs' unwillingness to face something that could cause the annihilation of humanity, except that, well, our major news organs are supposed to lead. And you know, back in the day, we wouldn't be sitting around moping about climate change -- we would be resolving to kick its ass. So Public Citizen helps you tell the big news corporations to cover climate change a whole lot better than they've been doing.

Action: concerning war on Yemen, spoof phone calls, and law and order.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation sponsors a toll-free number, 1.833.STOP.WAR (or 1.833.786.7927), with which you may call your Senators and tell them to pass S.J.Res. 54, which would end our participation in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen (and thus also the near-famine conditions therein). CIA chief Gina Haspel did brief a few Senators on the CIA's findings in re the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khasshogi, and, well, let's just say even our Republican Senators were loathe to toe the Administration line that there's no "smoking gun" linking the Saudi crown prince to the murder (Sen. Graham even said there was a "smoking saw," referring to the bone saw that carved up Mr. Khasshogi's body). Still, even the most welcome Republican skepticism doesn't translate into action very often -- Sen. Corker (R-TN) still says he might go for an amendment that would essentially gut the bill and turn it into something else. A phone call to your Senators could help forestall such a catastrophe.

Meanwhile, did you know professional phone spammers are able to "spoof" phone numbers to make it look like your bank or your utility provider is calling you? You can easily imagine the problems that would cause! But this is America, where we find solutions to problems, and thus Consumer Reports helps you tell our FCC to require phone corporations to implement technology that would confirm a call actually comes from the number it claims to come from. I'm old enough to remember when Michael Powell's FCC loosened media consolidation rules but also let folks move their phone number from one service provider to another for the first time; is it too much to ask that our current FCC also have a vestige of real conservatism left in them? I mean, fighting ripoff artists used to be a conservative cause. Sadly, today's "conservatives" tend to defend the ripoff artists -- and that's why we fight.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Greyhound Buses to stop letting Border Patrol agents to board their buses and search passengers without a warrant, then Color of Change still helps you do that. This is all pretty simple: produce the warrant, and Greyhound should cooperate, but if you can't get a warrant because you're going on a fishing expedition, nobody has the obligation to enable you. When law enforcement says it's too tough to catch criminals, we should remind them that our Founders deliberately created a Constitution that made it tough to catch criminals. Depriving someone of their freedom or their property, after all, is really something we ought to make sure we get right. Of course, folks who live in a state of euphoric rage over TEH ILLEGULZ TAKINGZ TEH JOBZ AND KILLINGZ TEH PEEPULZ!!!! are not necessarily receptive to this message. But our ministry isn't for them -- it's for the reasonable. And the reasonable outnumber the crazy in America.

Around the table: in which we begin to calculate what public schools lose to corporate welfare.

Our Administration declares its goal of ending subsidies for electric cars and renewable energy. This Administration's severe animus toward renewable energy stands in stark opposition to the people's will -- regular Americans probably support renewable energy to about the same degree they opposed "free" trade agreements in 2016, and how did this President come to power? By opposing "free" trade agreements. The good news? That suggests that the next President could easily come to power by bear-hugging renewable energy.

A Good Jobs First study estimates that public schools across America lose nearly $2 billion annually to "economic development tax incentives granted to corporations," i.e., i.e., corporate welfare. The bad news? The real number is almost certainly higher, as more than a few state and local governments are not following the law and reporting their corporate property tax breaks -- which, as you know, directly affect public school funding like all other property taxes do. The good news? At least we know what we know. Hell, some enterprising Democrat might even use it in campaign ads. A man can dream.

Washington head coach Jay Gruden, who has now lost two quarterbacks to broken legs this year, says he's not likely to sign former 49ers QB/police brutality protestor Colin Kaepernick, suggesting he might have been more inclined to sign Mr. Kaepernick if it were week one and if his "skill set" were a bit different. How do we know that's utter BS? Because Mr. Gruden's current starting QB has been there a month -- and, perhaps more importantly, because his current starting QB is Mark Freaking Sanchez Who Has No Skill Set. Q.E.D., pimps!

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is apparently "laying the groundwork to launch a bigger Presidential campaign than his first," which is an awful lot like saying he didn't win the primary in 2016 because raising over $200 million didn't make him big enough. Mr. Sanders has been going around the country stumping for other candidates and debating anyone who'll take him on, so another Presidential run sure wouldn't be a shock. I just hope by "bigger" he doesn't mean "with a lot more Democratic consultants," because no one snatches defeat from the jaws of victory like the Democrat consultant class.

Finally, in a peripherally-related note, former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick has told "close allies" he will not run for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2020. I had fallen asleep even before the part where he followed up two terms as Governor with a tenure at Bain Capital. You remember Bain Capital, that stick Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney over the head with in 2012? And Mr. Patrick's supporters, by the way, are dead wrong that his background as a prosecutor and a businessman would "blunt some Republican attacks." We now have 16 years of data telling us that no amount of pretending to be (or being like) a right-winger ever blunts attacks from right-wingers.

Action: concerning trade, forced arbitration, and endangered species.

Canada, Mexico, and the United States signed the USMCA trade deal late last week -- but still has to be ratified by our House and Senate to take effect. The USMCA has its good points -- namely it's near-obliteration of the "investor-state dispute settlement" (or ISDS) system, which nullifies our laws and bleeds taxpayer money -- but it also has its bad points (namely its corporate welfare for Big Pharma and its weak enforcement mechanisms for labor and environmental standards), so Public Citizen helps you tell your Reps and Senators to demand improvements to the USMCA before approving it. I must say I'm quite pleased to hear no one in Congress demanding a "fast-track" process for trade deals, since "fast-track" processes tend to cut the people out of the process by cutting Congressional debate out of the process. And really, what are "fast-trackers" going to do? Say we need to sign the USMCA now for national security purposes?

Meanwhile, H.R. 7109/S. 3615, the Restoring Justice for Workers Act, would amend both the National Labor Relations Act and the Federal Arbitration Act to prohibit "predispute" forced arbitration agreements between employers and employees -- to which more than half of all employees must now submit! -- as well as class action or collective action bans. The bill would also prohibit retaliation against employees who won't enter into arbitration agreements with their employers. Bosses like to tell you arbitration is better for employees than class action suits (spoiler alert: they're wrong), but then why do they feel they have to force you into arbitration as a condition of employment, or force you to waive your right to a class action lawsuit? I mean, that's awfully suspicious, isn't it? So the Economic Policy Institute helps you tell your Reps and Senators to support the Restoring Justice for Workers Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Reps and Senators not to screw around with the Endangered Species Act, then Environmental Action still helps you do that. Various Congressdolts have proposed "reforms" that would, in essence, gut the Endangered Species Act, "reforms" which have included forcing our government to rescue endangered species in a mere five years (why, it took 40 to save the bald eagle), mandating a full vote of Congress to even designate a species as endangered, and allowing Governors to nullify endangered species designations. But it ain't just Congress: our current Administration wants to introduce more economics into the whole process. Because mammon is everything to our President and his corporate cronies! They should be ashamed of themselves -- and, more to the point, we should shame them, whether we think it'll do any good or not.

Action: concerning nuclear weapons, climate change, and self-driving cars.

Our President has declared he'll withdraw our nation from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (or INF) Treaty, which was one of the signal foreign policy achievements of President Reagan's second term. Observers disagree as to whether our President can actually pull us out; the Senate did ratify the treaty, which makes it American law. But here's one thing we can more easily agree on: whining about other nations getting to "do" weapons is no reason to abandon international treaties that actually help keep us safe. And here's another thing we can more easily agree on: either House of Congress can simply refuse to fund the "doing" of intermediate nukes. Don't get too hopeful now that one of those Houses will be in Democratic hands in January; you know how Democrats like to prove they can be just as "tough" in foreign policy as right-wingers. So Roots Action helps you tell your Reps and Senators to refuse to fund intermediate nukes.

Finally, in the wake of our Administration's National Climate Assessment concluding that, basically, climate change will wipe us out unless we act, the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to take serious action on climate change. Their actions could include, but would not be limited to, the OFF Fossil Fuels Act (current bill number: H.R. 3671) or the 100 By 50 Act (S. 987), both of which would begin the work of weaning us off fossil fuels, while helping fossil fuel workers retrain to work on the new power grid. Don't believe our President's various dismissals of his Administration's NCA -- for example, retorting that our water and air are cleaner than ever a) underscores how unsuccessful his efforts to gut clean air and clean water regulations have been and b) actually has nothing to do with climate change! And certainly don't embrace cynicism and fatalism, because these are not the attitudes that ended slavery.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject S. 1885, the AV START Act, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. S. 1885 would let corporations sell self-driving cars without meeting federal safety standards and would prevent states from passing their own laws regulating self-driving cars; given that self-driving cars have killed two people and injured another this year, do either of these things sound like good ideas to you? I'll tell you what they do sound like: they sound like corporate welfare given to self-driving car manufacturers that haven't done the work to ensure their products are safe for people. Why, it's like our government is picking winners and losers with the AV START Act. And the losers? Folks who don't want to get run over by self-driving cars. Seems like our government always wants to make us the losers. And that's why we fight.

Around the table: why local food is better, and other lessons.

Helena Norberg-Hodge reminds us that "Unlike a Globalized Food System, Local Food Won’t Destroy the Environment." Think of all the things we wouldn't be doing if we grew all our food locally -- things like seed extinction, monoculture farming, antibiotic abuse, factory farm pollution, high-fructose corn syrup subsidies, and crops genetically modified to better withstand resist proprietary pesticides, to name just a few. It's enough to make you think that the only thing Big Food does "efficiently" is delivery money into executive bank accounts.

"N.J. Attorney General to Cops: Stop Working With ICE" is a misleading headline, because ICE can, you know, get a warrant and thus earn the cooperation from police that such warrants mandate. Of course that subtlety seems lost on the ICE deputy director who squeals about "public safety" and issues ominous warnings that ICE will just have to arrest more people, which will "inevitably" result in "collateral arrests." What's preventing ICE from just getting warrants again? I sure hope it's not the Bush Mobb-era notion that warrants are "quaint."

When you hear that our government takes upwards of 10 years to process workers' claims for nuclear contamination compensation largely because nuclear labs don't necessarily document problems the way they're supposed to, you may feel compelled to ask: is this what folks mean when they demand small government? Because this is what we get when we demand small government, and no use telling me you just know some of these claims are BS -- if you had a comp claim that you knew other people were telling their friends "must be" BS, how would you feel? (Note well, also, that Tha Bush Mobb dragged its feet on giving these workers justice wherever they could.)

While our government's Office of Special Counsel tells federal workers they'd best not talk about resisting or impeaching our President while they're on the clock -- and the worst I'll say about that is that maybe the OSC takes their interpretation a bit too far -- that very same OSC found that half a dozen Administration officials, including our deputy press secretary, violated the Hatch Act, but let them all off with warnings. Who thinks OSC will be similarly-restrained with rank-and-file federal workers talking about impeaching our President? Not me -- this Administration, like so many others, thinks law and order is for "little people" like us.

Goldman Sachs analysts ask, in re gene therapy treatments, "Is curing patients a sustainable business model?" That's very unfortunate wording right there, but if a treatment obliterates a sector of the health care economy, that doesn't mean it's evil; surely no one would wish to have leprosy or smallpox back as part of a perverse "job-creation program" because they once kept doctors and caregivers busy. (Oh, and Gilead's sales of their miracle Hep C drug could also be falling because now more people know how expensive it is and how noxious a corporation Gilead is.)

Finally, House Democrats forge ahead with their Leviathan of a voting rights/campaign finance reform/anti-corruption bill. And now that they've apparently purged attempts to simply repeal Supreme Court decisions without actually amending our Constitution, now I'm wondering if H.R. 1's pack-everything-in-one-bill might actually be the right approach. Any Republican who votes against it can be portrayed in campaign ads as "anti-voting rights" or "anti-campaign finance reform" or "pro-corruption." I mean, we're still relying on Democrats to run those ads, but at least they'll put Republicans on the spot. (Of course, when Republicans whine that we're trying to do too much at once, we can respond, paraphrasing William Lloyd Garrison, that you don't pull a baby out of a fire gradually.)

UPDATE. I really should have checked the date on that Goldman-Sachs article referenced in the fifth paragraph above -- not only is it from April, but I wrote about it then (and rather less generously than I did above, I think). I still think the insight contained therein is worth keeping.

Around the table: can we green and grow our economy at the same time? Of course we can! And other lessons.

Dean Baker says we can-so green our economy and grow our economy at the same time. Maybe we should abandon the growth ideology and maybe we shouldn't, but we certainly shouldn't refuse to consider solutions that might better bring about a renewable power grid because they also fit in with virtually everyone's notion that economies should grow; doing so would be a textbook example of letting the perfect murder the good. And Mr. Baker reminds us that economic growth doesn't necessarily depend on increased resource use -- advances in software, education, and health care, for example, create economic growth without necessarily burning more fossil fuels, and since folks do plenty of things that spur economic growth but don't depend on increased fossil fuel use, we can't even conclude that limiting our access to fossil fuels would grind our economy to a halt.

Some big health insurance corporations have taken to refusing to pay ER bills if they feel they don't "meet the definition of an emergency," in one big health insurer's words. No, this isn't the way to reduce ER abuse, particularly since people only take their kids to the ER for the sniffles when they a) don't have health insurance and b) can't get to other options like urgent care clinics. You know what would curb ER abuse? A Medicare-for-All system covering all of us, that's what. And where are the conservatives who would denounce insurance corporations for interfering with the judgment of individuals? (At least Brittany Cloyd's story had a happy ending, because she fought her insurer until she won. Might she want to run for public office?)

New York state Attorney General finds that state hospitals are charging sexual assault survivors for rape kits. Which is actually already illegal! You know, I think there's a solution to this problem, let me see if I can think of it -- hold on, still thinking -- oh, right: a Medicare-for-All system that covers all of us, and of course covers the cost of rape kits like any civilized nation would do. (To think that collection agents actually came after some of these women for the money! This is what happens when we decide the work of a civilized, striving people is just too hard and we "simplify things" by chasing exclusively after money.)

In other dismal health insurance news, the number of uninsured children in America actually ticks up for the first time in at least a decade. I figured that Congress's allowing CHIP to lapse at the end of September 2017 had to be a big reason why, but our Administration has been screwing around with health care policy in plenty of other ways, particularly where immigrants are concerned. (C'mon, if you're going to depend on their labor, you can't deny them or their kids health care. That's just cruel.) Let me guess our President's reactions: TEH FAKE NEWS IT'S TEH DUMOCRATZ' FAULTZ!!!!!

Finally, contractors seem to be bilking FEMA and good Puerto Ricans for rebuilding and repairs in the wake of Hurricane Maria. I wouldn't expect our President to ride to Puerto Rico's rescue, however, since he himself seems to have made a mint during the 1990s with that extortionate All County Building Supply & Maintenance contracting markup scheme. So, though it'd be easy for him to say "I can get a better deal," more likely we'll hear TEH FAKE NEWS IT'S TEH DUMOCRATZ' FAULTZ!!!!! here, too.

Action: concerning the war in Yemen, the war on the popular will in Michigan, and the war on elephants.

The Senate voted 63-37 vote to advance S.J.Res. 54, which aims to get us out of the war on Yemen, but they still must vote to pass the bill, and the sticking point for many Senators seems to be our Administration's apparent refusal to allow CIA chief Gina Haspel to brief them on the CIA's conclusion that Saudi Arabian crown prince Mohammed bin Salman did in fact order the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. But if our Administration does make her available (which it might, although our President has contradicted the CIA's findings!), those Senators may declare themselves sated and vote the bill down -- unless we remind them that we should get out of Yemen because Congress never authorized our involvement there and because we are helping create a human rights catastrophe there. So let's call our Senators and tell them to pass S.J.Res. 54; the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a smartphone) will help you do that.

Meanwhile, from the "Nobody Could Have Predicted!" file: after passing minimum wage and paid sick leave initiatives so that voters wouldn't get to vote on them in a ballot initiative on Election Day, Michigan's reactionary state legislature has already started gutting the minimum wage and paid sick leave standards they passed! The state Senate has passed legislation accomplishing that aim, and the state House will follow suit very soon, before that pesky incoming Democratic Governor takes office, because, as in Wisconsin, evil sure doesn't have a hard time setting priorities. So, if you want to call Michigan state House leadership (you can find phone numbers for them here) and use the Big Stick of Bad PR on them, hey, I won't stop you. I also won't stop you from telling said state House leaders that the entire country is watching them try to subvert the will of the Michigan people, who are their real bosses. I mean, gosh, we're all about freedom here at Thieves in the Temple.

Finally, fewer than half a million African elephants still roam our planet -- but our Administration wants to make it easier for folks to go off and kill these elephants so they can bring "trophies" home. Why would any reasonable person think they're hot stuff because they killed an animal that hasn't developed firearms of its own? And why should our government encourage such behavior? OK, watch our President for 30 seconds and that question answers itself, but the "freedom" to kill an endangered species and beat your chest about it is not exactly the freedom we're all about here -- surely the elephant should have freedom, too, if it's not hurting anyone? Surely being a hunter and being a civilized person aren't mutually exclusive propositions? Hence Environmental Action helps you tell our Fish and Wildlife Service to curtail granting permits to kill elephants for "trophies." And then maybe we won't see as many elephants wailing over their dead.

Around the table: with more sad proof that bailouts and tax cuts don't create jobs.

It really is understatement to note that "GM Announcement Confirms Tax Cuts Don’t Prevent, May Encourage Layoffs." Not that this would surprise you if, for example, you didn't routinely give your children cookies before they did their homework. Seriously, how hard is this? Threaten to take away a corporation's profits through taxation, and they'll spend it on jobs and building stuff. (As an aside, I don't know that GM's problems come from their aversion to building SUVs, even though they're "wildly popular." When corporations decide to make mostly junk food, people learn to crave mostly junk food. And SUVs are the junk food of American cars.)

We are also reminded that GM has received "billions" in public subsidies over the years, and that didn't save those almost-15,000 jobs, either. That would include some $50 billion in American bailout money after the 2008 bankster Armageddon. Nice work if you can get it! Sadly, I expect most of our President's votaries will only remember the mean things he said to GM after the layoffs, and thus presume he actually did something about it. Hell, yelling about stuff is exactly the same as "doing something," right?

Michigan's still-reactionary state legislature might try to ram a bill through while they still have a Republican Governor that would allow corporations to create their own private police forces. No use dreaming libertarian dreams of ending the war on drugs and suchlike -- if you think police officers are bad now (and a few of them are), just wait until they don't have to account to their bosses, the taxpayers, at all! Seriously, when I get action alerts, you'll get action alerts.

Though voters in Wisconsin turned Republican Scott Walker out of office in favor of Democrat Tony Evers, state Democrats fear that Republicans will try some lame-duck shenanigans that could cut the incoming Governor out of the redistricting process altogether. And Republicans are saying who, us? -- which should be of no comfort, since Republicans have spent the greater part of the decade springing their most nefarious works on the voters without warning. How much is enough for a party that got 46% of the votes for Assembly seats but still wound up with 63% of the seats? The answer is: nothing is ever enough for a desperate and intellectually bankrupt party.

Finally, apparently because he couldn't get away from CNN while traveling abroad, our President thinks we should create a "Worldwide Network" (caps in original) to counter the "unfair and false" coverage CNN is supposedly giving him. All together now: waaaaaaaah! I mean, if Barack Obama had mooted creating a giant propaganda network to promote his Administration, right-wingers would justifiably be giving him what-for, but our President's most devoted followers seem to live vicariously through our President's self-pity, while simultaneously imagining that only Those Other People do that. But whining is whining, no matter where it comes from. And our President is not America; we are.

Action: concerning taxes and conservation.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell the incoming Congress to repeal the Republican tax-cuts-for-the-rich and advance forward better tax proposals. Our duty is our duty, so it doesn't matter that the Republican-held Senate won't pass them! Or, perhaps, it does matter, in the sense that Republicans will have to explain why they won't close corporate tax loopholes, which are popular with approximately no one outside of corporate board rooms. They'd also have to explain why they don't want to raise income taxes on the super-rich, raise the corporate tax rate, or raise the Estate Tax on millionaires and billionaires, to name three actually-popular initiatives. And remember that Republicans passed a tax cut and still lost the House, which suggests that their tax cut propaganda doesn't sway Americans like it used to. Certainly not when Americans don't even notice a tax cut in their paychecks!

Meanwhile, speaking of taxes, People for the American Way helps you tell Congressional Democrats to investigate allegations of tax-dodging that have plagued our President. I didn't want to make this the new Democrat House majority's primary focus, since our President doesn't deserve to be our primary focus -- no, the Founders would instruct us similarly, and about any President! -- but the allegations against him require our attention as defenders of civilization and lovers of law and order. And this petition would also help you demand that future Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates be legally required to release their tax returns, since custom and tradition weren't enough to persuade this President into doing so. Like conservatives, liberals would prefer that custom and tradition work their will. But when they don't, our laws must step in.

Finally, you know that our Administration is working to loosen up the "Roadless Rule" so that more logging corporations can cut down thousand-year-old trees in places like the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, but S. 3333, the Roadless Area Conservation Act, would stop that effort in its tracks, so to speak. I've long said that a new desk for your office is less valuable to our civilization than a thousand-year-old tree, but I've neglected to mention other good reasons for keeping the Tongass wild -- like the 300 species of birds (including the bald eagle) that fly through the Tongass, or the species of moose, bears, and deer that walk the land or the salmon that swim its rivers. And we'd destroy all that for what? Not even for a new desk or chair, really, but for yet another opportunity for corporate bosses to get richer! So Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to support wild places by passing the Roadless Area Conservation Act.

Around the table: how to convert conservatives into liberals, maybe! And other tales.

From the "I'm Not Sure I Should Share This" file: a Yale study suggests we can more easily convert conservatives into liberals merely by first making conservatives feel safe. But the Yale study appears to have converted conservatives into social liberals, which seems to be an easier lift than turning them into economic ones. And even though I've long believed that most folks' emotional attachment to racism and nativism is actually pretty soft, we also have to remember that their newfound sense of safety (and thus their newfound attachment to openness) can be pretty soft, too, if they and their communities don't tend to it properly.

This really should be said a lot more often: "Bake Sales Can’t Fix This: Corporate Tax Cuts Leave Public Schools Desperate." No, really: I've had people tell me the answer to public school funding problems is to get a corporation to donate sports uniforms. And too many of the folks who'd say that would read the tales of corporate donations and online funding platforms and foundational grants and say see? The free market provides! Except that, well, it doesn't, as anyone with more than a glancing relationship with arithmetic would tell you.

"The Science is Clear," declares Elizabeth Shogren and Susie Neilson at Wired, "Dirty Farm Water is Making Us Sick." You know, given how unpopular food poisoning is -- I mean, even our "liberal" media covers it pretty intensely! -- you'd think it'd be easier for enterprising Democrats to draw a direct line from the FDA's delay in implementing new irrigation water-testing rules to our present inability to get Romaine lettuce that doesn't make us violently ill. But Democrats are too afraid of big ag corporations to do that, even though there's a Mack truck-sized opening for the "reasonable," "moderate," "fiscally-sound" Democrat to point out that the FDA rule delay (by the FDA's own analysis!) will cost consumers nine times more money in health care costs than big ag corporations will save in rule-compliance costs. And though I expect the FDA's delay will get struck down in court one day, you won't get much comfort from that if you've died of kidney failure in the meantime.

Uh oh: a Sierra Club FOIA request turns up emails showing former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt actually getting interview questions in advance from Fox and Friends -- and, in at least one instance, he approved a part of the program's script. What will Fox News votaries say about this pattern of obvious collaboration between media and governmental officials, the kind of collaboration warned about in dystopian novels and anti-Communist screeds? They'll say oh, news programs ask pre-interview questions all the time, though they do that with folks hawking their new books, not public servants. I guess the more cynical among them will say you just know MSNBC did that with Obama, though a) "you just know" does not actually describe evidence of a thing and b) if that were true, would that make it right?

Finally, a Fox News personality exclaims on Twitter that seeing our military use tear gas on migrants attempting to cross the border was the "HIGHLIGHT" (caps in original) of her Thanksgiving weekend. I guess some people feel closest to the spirit of the holidays when they watch other people suffer. And did she call it a "HIGHLIGHT" on any of those days the Border Patrol used tear gas on migrants during the Obama Administration? Somehow, I doubt it -- you know liberals never get any love from right-wingers when they act like right-wingers. Anyway, you've heard of this Tomi Lahren, I trust? She's pretty notorious. I don't think we've covered her flatugasms before in this space. But I'm certain we won't be covering them again -- she is, like so many inexplicably well-paid monsters before her, dead to this blog.

Around the table: Republican criticisms of our President are meaningless, part 802.

I do admire a headline which says our President "demands action to reduce deficit, pushes new deficit spending." I don't oppose being demanding per se, nor do I oppose coming up with a plan to achieve apparently contradictory goals -- I've long said we can pay for Medicare-for-All by cutting corporate welfare and raising taxes on the rich. But folks who've actually, you know, done work ever have the cachet to tell people to reduce the deficit and add new spending at the same time; when a guy who's been a millionaire since he was 8 and has never had to work tells people to do that, we can safely assume he's just being a jerk. (Also, too, he just cut taxes on the rich and on corporations, and that's ballooned the deficit -- not, you know, excessive Department of Commerce spending.)

Our President's own National Climate Assessment instructs us that doing nothing about climate change (which is our President's stated course of action) will cost Americans over $500 billion every year, mainly in health care costs and in damages from hurricanes, rising sea levels, and the like. But I bet doing nothing about climate change delivers more money into the bank accounts of fossil fuel corporation bosses, and since bosses are the only people our President really cares about, I'm sure he thinks everything's going according to plan.

The incomparable Adam Johnson at FAIR catches NPR doing PR for Amazon's super-speedy delivery processes, ignoring the costs to our environment and our workers. And on Morning Edition, too -- usually NPR has the sense to bury its corporate flackery on its more business-oriented programming! I don't have to mention that shipping everything now-now-now results in worker abuse and higher greenhouse emissions, but I do feel compelled to point out that "a meticulous shaving off of minutes and seconds on the journey of the package" is not the kind of life achievement you bring to the Pearly Gates.

Proud Boys co-founder says he's quitting the Nazi wannabe group. Supposedly to help certain Proud Boys get better sentencing over that October gay-beating that was all over the internets, and possibly, even, because of the admittedly surprising news that our FBI now classifies Proud Boys as an "extremist group," but I bet he's really leaving so he can move on to bigger and better things, like maybe his own cable news show. I wish I were kidding. (As an aside, what grown man calls himself a "proud boy"? That's like bragging that you're immature!)

Finally, Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker says that our President "tries to divide" our nation with "anger" and "hate." He's criticized our President in harsh terms before, but his criticisms, however trenchant or obvious, have not prevented him from voting in jackboot lockstep agreement with our President's nefarious agenda -- I mean, how else would he have been "effective at getting a lot of things done"? Of course, Mr. Corker will be leaving the Senate soon, to be replaced by another Senator who'll vote in jackboot lockstep agreement with our President's agenda -- one Mr. Corker pretended to dislike, no less! I really do wish their words meant more, but they don't.

Action: concerning refugees and the war on Yemen.

In the middle of that fecal storm of bratty behavior he served up last week -- seriously, he should be ashamed of himself! -- our President authorized our troops stationed at the southwest border to use lethal force against anyone who comes over. But just as a man who has to tell you how tough he is all the time is actually weak, and just as a man who has to tell you what a great job he's doing all the time is doing a bad job, a nation that has to shoot refugees without telling which of them have legitimate claims for refugee status and which don't is, frankly, not a great nation. But then our President doesn't care about America actually being a great nation -- he only cares about diddling the rage glands of his most devoted followers, a strategy which has now cost his party the House and (by my count) at least two Senate seats. So Win Without War helps you tell Defense Secretary Mattis to bring our troops home from the border.

Meanwhile, word on the street is that our Senate could vote as early as tomorrow on S.J.Res. 54, which would end American support for the Saudi/UAE war in Yemen. Our President has said he'll end plane refueling support for this war effort -- which has, as you know, left millions of good Yemeni on the brink of famine -- but he has pointedly not said he'll end other American logistical support for the war effort, and he has more pointedly said that we should just live with our alliance with Saudi Arabia because "(t)he world is a dangerous place!" (exclamation point in original because of course it is) and because Iran is worse, neither of which you would recognize as convincing explanations unless you were a professional cynic. Which you're not, if you read this blog. Anyway, Win Without War helps you tell your Senators to support S.J.Res. 54 and end our involvement in the war on Yemen. Mr. Khasshogi's murder may have moved the needle a bit, but that's all the more reason we must move it more.

Around the table: liars and what to do with them.

The Intercept and Documented get their hands on anti-Medicare-for-All lobbyist papers. So how do they plan to turn us against Medicare-for-All? With the same crap they've been flinging against the wall for years -- ZOMG BERNIE SANDERS SPENDZ TEH 32 TRILLYUNZ!!!! (which doesn't mention the $46 trillion we're already planning to spend over the next decade), ZOMG 156 MILLUYNZ PEEPULZ LOSEZ THEIR PRIVATE PLANZ!!!! (they really think we're all that emotionally-invested in our private health insurance?), ZOMG TEH GUBMINT RUNZ EVERYTHINGZ!!!!! (eh, that's our government, which can't possibly bollocks health care up worse than private health insurers have already done), and ZOMG ITZ TOO HARDZ POLITICALLYZ!!!! (well that's not the attitude that ended slavery!). I guess it's a good sign that we're past both the "first they ignore you" and "then they ridicule you" phases and we're now well into the "then they fight you" stage. The "then you win" stage follows that, as you know.

Seems it wasn't just big fossil fuel money that sank a bunch of climate- and renewable energy-related initiatives this past Election Day: it was also "liberal" media indifference or hostility that killed them. Except in Nevada, where a 50%-renewable standard for utility corporations passed with 60% of the vote, largely because said utility corporations didn't fight it. It is well past time for pro-renewable energy advocates to start fighting the crappy arguments deployed against us -- no, energy prices won't rise sky-high, or even appreciably, if we shifted to renewables, and even if they did, your descendants sure as hell won't be sitting around the campfire saying the planet is almost completely uninhabitable now, but at least our forebears didn't pay as much for electricity!

Lost in the onslaught of fecal matter unleashed by our President this week is his Administration issued new restrictions on journalists at White House press conferences, including a proscription on follow-up questions, except, of course, at the White House's discretion. So when our President or our Press Secretary says (hypothetically, I hope!) that Iranian nationals are trying to get into America illegally for the exclusive purpose of molesting American children, our media won't be able to follow up with "what's your evidence for that assertion?" You know what I think our media should do? Boycott Presidential press conferences.

And maybe more: when our President says the CIA didn't conclude that Mr. bin Salman had anything to do with Mr. Khasshogi's murder though of course they concluded that he did, I think maybe the press should simply stop talking to our President entirely, since he's just going to lie anyway. The lack of attention will infuriate him, of course, but that's just icing on the cake. People who lie to you all the time don't deserve any of your time. And pursuing this program just might lead to good old-fashioned journalism, which would concentrate on what leaders do instead of what they say they do.

Finally, speaking of the Khasshogi murder, dig the arguments our President makes in justifying staying with Saudi Arabia, arguments that not only insult our intelligence but our sentience. "The world is a dangerous place!" doesn't justify excusing any evil, nor does saying IRAN DOES TEH WORSEZ!!!!! And making a fanciful list of all the hundreds of millions of dollars big corporations would lose if we ended our alliance with Saudi Arabia is what, class? A rhetorical hostage situation, of course -- our President's saying don't make the Saudis do the right thing, or the money gets it! (And, really, we all know what he means by "the money" -- he means his money. He's apparently forgotten having said how much he likes the Saudis because they buy things from him -- or, more precisely, he hopes you've forgotten it.)

Action: concerning prison slavery, fraudulent fees, and methane pollution.

Color of Change helps you tell the state of California to stop exploiting prison workers (who make as little as $1/day!) to fight wildfires. I have nothing to say to folks who think of prison workers as a giant pool of people they can use and abuse as they like, but to folks who wonder how California will ever make ends meet if they spend all more money paying prisoners to do the back-breaking work of fighting wildfires, I have this to say: your wonderment is a hostage situation -- don't pay prisoners what their work is actually worth, or we'll all burn up!. Too often we imagine that the world around us is the only world that can be, but we can bring back a world where states tax rich folks hard and stop funneling taxpayer money to crony corporations. At that point we'll actually find it a lot easier to do the right thing, but let's tell California to do the right thing anyway. Doing the right thing builds character, after all.

Meanwhile, Comcast has lately agreed to refund well over half a million dollars to Massachusetts customers who signed long-term cable contracts only to find themselves slammed with fancy-sounding fees that inflated their bills up to 40% above advertised prices. And when they realized they'd been had and tried to cancel their cable, Comcast slammed them again with a $200 "early termination" fee! Nice work if you can get it! And since it's absurd to think Comcast would only try this in Massachusetts, Consumer Reports helps you ask your state Attorney General to investigate whether cable corporations' add-on fees in your state amount to a fraudulent price hike. We imagine America as some kind of "free" market Wild West, but we must insist on laws (and law enforcement) that won't let corporations pull this kind of bait-and-switch on us. Indeed, things like this used to be a law-and-order issues for conservatives. I wonder what changed.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to reject its proposed plan to weaken its own methane emissions standards, then both the Sierra Club and the Union of Concerned Scientists still help you do that. You probably know the drill by now: oil and gas drilling corporations leak methane the way some folks leak gossip, methane emissions pack a far larger climate change punch than even coal emissions do, and when corporations ventilate methane into our air willy-nilly from drilling projects on public lands, they're also cheating American taxpayers out of royalties (since methane is a usable energy source, and, you know, public lands belong to the public). Always it seems like our Administration's EPA cares more about protecting polluters than protecting good Americans from polluters. But luckily, we are always here to remind them whom they are really pledged to protect.

Around the table: how Tammy Baldwin won re-election, and other lessons.

David Rosen at TruthOut reminds us that "Regulations Protect Us All." He not only lists the various crises brought about or helped along by lax regulatory oversight (the bankster meltdown of 2008, the Spillageddon in the Gulf of 2010, the Flint lead poisoning crisis of 2014) but he reminds us that our "liberal" media too often buy what anti-regulatory groups are selling without being too critical of it. Regulations actually save money, after all -- they just don't deposit that money directly into CEO bank accounts, as anti-regulatory efforts tend to do. Also, too, "(i)t’s pretty rich for corporations to demand longer, more nuanced, more detailed rules full of loopholes and exceptions to boost their bottom lines, and then turn around and whine about how complicated the rules are."

Mary Bottari at the Center for Media and Democracy describes how Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin fought off $14 million in outside spending attacking her and defeated her far-right opponent by 11 points. How did she do it? She punched back hard against an early attack ad, she defined her opponent as a corporate shill, defended popular causes like fair trade and expanding access to health care, and made those causes personal for her (she lost her mother at an early age to opioid addiction and got seriously ill as a child) and for Wisconsin voters (explaining how "free" trade hurts Wisconsin's massive paper industry). It didn't hurt that her opponent ran truly awful attack ads unbecoming a civilized person, let alone a nurse, or a candidate for U.S. Senate.

Investment bank study finds that building a new utility-scale wind or solar farm costs about as much as running an existing coal power plant. And, you know, eventually we'll run out of coal, but the sun rises every day and the wind always returns (and, ah, there is such a thing as battery storage for relatively lean times). But please, right-wingers, let's hear more bogus stories about "wind turbine syndrome" and "piles of dead birds," and let's pretend that coal miners couldn't possibly adapt to a more renewable future.

And on cue: our "liberal" media stops covering the caravan coming up from Honduras, and now our President is pulling troops from our southwest border. Remember how much ebola was in the news before the 2014 elections and then wasn't in the news at all after that? Good times! But seriously, you can't pull out before an "invasion," can you? Our brave and bold President can. And of course his votaries will tell the story that their Personal Lord and Savior put troops on the border and scared the caravan away. I can't even dismiss the possibility that they'll say he did it with dust from his magic horn.

Finally, it's bad when my veteran co-workers are bringing up our President's statement that the retired Navy Admiral who got Mr. bin Laden -- and who's been very critical of our President lately -- maybe should have gotten to Mr. bin Laden sooner. I have three things to say about that. One, if you can't ever concede even a relatively unimportant point in an argument, you're not being tough so much as you're being weak. Two, a big reason we "didn't get bin Laden sooner" was that George W. Bush didn't "lose a lot of sleep" over it -- or, you know, preferred him alive so he could be a villain in future election campaigns. And three, our President isn't popular with our military so much as he's popular with folks who need everyone to watch them worship our military, and you remember what Jesus said about people who pray in public.

Action: concerning privacy, clean water, and worker rights.

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass real reforms defending consumer privacy from big tech corporations. Sadly, the reason we need legislation to accomplish this (and I really wish journalists would mention it a bit more!) is that Congress passed one of its notorious "resolutions of disapproval" repealing FCC privacy rules which would have (among other good works!) forced big corporations to allow consumers to opt in to letting corporations sell their data, rather than forcing consumers to opt out. But big tech corporations like Facebook have been earning themselves a lot of bad PR for their inability/unwillingness to protect their customers' private data (and for employing Nixonian tactics against their critics) -- and corporations like Facebook monopolize their fields, so our government has to step in and curb their power, whether they want to or not. Concentrated power: it's evil everywhere!

Meanwhile, as you may know, the Delaware River Basin Commission (or DRBC) proposed banning fracking in the basin of the Delaware River earlier this year, which is good, but also proposed letting corporations dump fracking wastewater in the Basin and draw Basin water out to frack with! Welcome to yet another King-Solomon-actually-splitting-the-baby-in-half "compromise"! I mean, the whole point of banning fracking is to keep pollution out of our water, so if you go ahead and allow fracking-based pollution in water nearly 15 million good Americans drink and wash with, you've kinda missed the point. Still, Pennsylvania Gov. Wolf has one of four votes on the DRBC, so Food and Water Watch helps you tell Gov. Wolf to support a fracking ban with considerably more teeth. Remember, folks: the money you make from polluting water quickly goes away, but clean water lasts forever -- if we maintain it.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our National Labor Relations Board (or NLRB) not to repeal its "joint-employer standard," then the Economic Policy Institute still helps you do that. Big chain corporations have long claimed that their workers' "real" employer was the particular franchise where they worked; thus workers would have had to redress grievances over pay and scheduling and such with the franchise. Of course any fool can see that's absurd, since franchises obey (or cope with) orders from the top, so the NLRB created a joint-employer standard to help workers redress grievances with their real bosses. Now that Republicans dominate the board, they're trying to scuttle the standard. But don't believe the hype that TEH STANDURDZ HURTZ TEH SMALL BIZNIZZIZ!!!! Your local McDonald's ain't a "small business." Obviously.

Around the table: a potentially-major Presidential miscalculation, and other items.

House Democrats propose requiring a three-fifths majority to raise tax rates on the bottom 80 percent of taxpayers. Maybe this proposal makes raising taxes on higher incomes easier and maybe it doesn't, but anyway I'd prefer not to change House rules concerning majority votes for certain legislative aims, even if I agree with those aims (and I surely agree that working folks shouldn't pay more taxes). I'd prefer they reductions in middle-class tax rates with top tax-bracket income hikes, and then (since most Americans would support that program) just keep explaining past the haters and their lies.

Our Administration is mulling actually delivering an enemy of Turkish President Erdogan into his hands. Well, I guess we now know why Mr. Erdogan threw the Saudis under the bus over Mr. Khashoggi's murder. The good news? "Career officials" at three federal agencies were "furious" over the idea. The bad news? There are fewer "career officials" in our government than there used to be. And our President fist-bumped Mr. Erdogan not too long ago -- over his authoritarian tendencies, no less! I wonder how he'll feel about that if Mr. Erdogan persists in his requests.

ProPublica finds our Administration doing its damnedest to funnel Veterans Administration money toward private care for our veterans. Private health care is, of course, more expensive than single-payer health care (which our Veterans' Administration is), and the VA's well-covered problems in recent years started with Congressional sequestration dramas. This is how they win: they squeal TEH GUVMINT DOESN'T WORKZ!!!!! and then run our government badly to prove their point. I'm really surprised more members of our "liberal" media aren't on to this oh no wait I'm actually not surprised.

Speaking of our "liberal" media, FAIR catches them pretending they have no responsibility in reflexively trumpeting our President's squealing about caravans of foreigners coming to destroy us. Actually, their editorial pages exposed our President's racist game while it was going on, but their news pages covered it like it was real news! And then after the midterms, their editorial pages covered the caravan controversy like "everyone knew" it was BS! If I were more generous, perhaps I'd posit this schizophrenia as an improvement in media coverage -- over, you know, merely treating racism as something that "deserves a hearing." But I yearn for truth from our media, not coverage that's merely marginally better than awful.

I suppose it makes sense that our President would find Sean Hannity a suck-up who asks "dumb" questions, since the kind of loyalty he demands from everyone else seems to sicken him. You might even suppose (as the article's author does) that he keeps calling on CNN's Jim Acosta because he loves drama. But you might also suppose that reports of "discord" within our President's inner circle are also drama, and thus worth very little of our time. Still, I have to point this out occasionally, just as vaccines have to have a little bit of the disease they're fighting in them so they can teach your body what to fight.

Finally, Heather Digby Parton at Salon may have hit on something big here: that our President may be undercutting his obvious "Discredit Everybody Until Nobody Believes Anything Anymore" strategy by being completely untrustworthy himself. Indeed, this isn't a new strategy -- candidates always fill the air with BS so that more independent-minded voters throw up their hands and stay home on Election Day. But given the highest midterm turnout in 52 years earlier this month, we also have evidence that his strategy is not working. So when's that terrorist attack coming?

Action: concerning voting rights and food safety.

You've heard that House Democrats plan, as their first act next year, to pass a "magnum opus" bill covering voting rights, campaign finance reform, and ethics reform? And you've also heard me say they'd be much better off trying to pass something more digestible first? That means now is a good time to call Democrat House leadership (here's phone info for Rep. Pelosi, Rep. Hoyer, and Rep. Clyburn) and tell them to pass the Voting Rights Advancement Act first. The VRAA would ensure that our Justice Department could act on voting rights violations coming from any state or municipality -- not just the Southern ones, which seems to be the problem the Supreme Court had with the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder. We may be done with poll taxes and literacy tests, but you see what's going on in Georgia and Florida -- and you also see states passing Voter ID laws, getting rid of early voting periods, moving voting machines out of low-income neighborhoods into wealthier ones, and using the Interstate Crosscheck database to deregister good Americans on mere "suspicion" of "voter fraud." So let's try to get House Democrats to do something we can all understand and support.

Meanwhile, a drug-resistant Salmonella outbreak has plagued raw turkey for over a year now, so far linked to over 160 illnesses (and one death) in 35 states -- and yet we still don't know which turkey brands are making consumers sick, so Consumer Reports helps you tell our USDA to tell consumers which brands of turkey are part of the outbreak. You might be saying, you really want our government to sound an alarm about turkey a week before Thanksgiving? But which is more important: turkey-producing corporations' business or people's health? I mean, if they didn't want the bad PR and lower sales associated with a year-long food poisoning outbreak, then maybe turkey producers should have fixed it before it came to that! It's sad that we even have to say that out loud. (Oh, and not to pile on, but I did say "drug-resistant" Salmonella; with all the antibiotics we pump into our feed animals, we're going to be hearing that a lot more in the coming years.)

Around the table: more lessons about the folly of "bipartisanship."

Our President declares that the California wildfires are the result of bad "forest management," but scientists inform him, gently and not, that he's dead wrong about that, too. "These aren't forests," says one, "(t)his is supposed to be the rainy season," says another, and our government's own National Climate Assessment warned, just last year, of "the increase in wildfire risk resulting from the combined effects of high precipitation variability (wet seasons followed by dry), elevated temperature, and low humidity." Of course, when our President mentioned "forest management," I'm sure he intended to suggest we should sell all of our public forests to big logging corporations. They'll take care of those pesky trees!

Joan Walsh writes that "Yes, There Was a Big Blue Wave Last Week," although I think she's a bit generous to suggest that the pund-idiots who got it wrong on Election Night "unwittingly" fueled our President's claims of "voter fraud." I think it was quite witting, actually! In any case, Democrats have picked up more than a few House seats since Wednesday morning, when I also looked over the results and wasn't particularly impressed, and I certainly should have remembered that it actually takes a long time to count a lot of votes, just like it did in 2016. Despite the apparent failure of high-profile candidates like Beto O'Rourke, Andrew Gillum, and Stacey Abrams, Democrats' popular vote margin also so far exceeds the Republicans' popular vote margins in their 1994 and 2010 wave elections.

But of course Democrats did much better in Republican-inflected suburbs than in rural areas, and though winning in the suburbs seems like an easier task, Matthew Hildreth at the Daily Yonder reminds us that rural voters already support what Our Glorious Elites call "far-left" or "liberal" policy initiatives. This is true even though over two-thirds of rural voters call themselves "conservative" or "moderate." The problem, of course, is that most rural voters think Democrats don't fight for them. There's a solution in there, somewhere -- and when rural support for Medicare-for-All (a healthy 63%) actually lags behind rural support for treating-not-imprisoning drug addicts (77%) and taxpayer-funded community colleges and trade schools (66%), the solution is most emphatically not "acting more like a Republican." (Also, too, Republican policies help big ag corporations crush small farmers. Democrats could actually stand up for small farmers, maybe?)

Sadly, some folks still just don't get it, as a center-right Democrat and a far-right Republican collaborate on an op-ed extolling the need for "more bipartisanship." Guess who that leaves out? I mean, if, say, Barbara Lee and Richard Hanna had written such an op-ed back in 2016, every winged monkey in America would squeal BIAS!!!!! at once. OK, the House should implement the two reforms Messrs. Kilmer and Buck propose in paragraph seven, but their focus on every House Rep getting heard is secondary to our purpose of every American getting heard, and every time I read about the "importance" of "bipartisanship" I'm reminded not only that one party spends all its time stamping its feet and the other party spends all its time appeasing it, but that Americans don't care about "bipartisan" government as much as they care about good government. And that's as it should be.

Finally, even Sen. McConnell (E-KY) is getting on the let's-have-more-bipartisanship train. Given his leadership in totally nullifying the will of the voters for at least the last 12 years, it is hard to listen to anything he says about bipartisanship without either giggling or throwing a shoe at him, but it might actually be a good sign that he's the one mouthing these ridiculous pablums -- I mean, a real mob boss lets his underlings say the truly ridiculous shit so he can pretend to disown it. (Also, too, I wouldn't brag about getting more appropriations bills done before the start of the fiscal year if I were him. That's like schoolkids boasting that they go to school most of the time.)

Action: concerning banksters and facial recognition software.

H.R. 7006/S. 3542, the Too Big to Fail, Too Big to Exist Act, would (as its title suggests) break up the biggest banksters in America, by requiring that none of them would be able to control assets representing more than three percent of America's gross domestic product (or GDP); currently a mere six banks control assets that equal half of America's GDP, and that is (as a conservative might say) too much power concentrated in too few hands. All those big name banksters who've been running roughshod over our economy this last decade-plus? Yeah, this bill would smite them all. The bill would also prevent banks from using FDIC-insured deposits to indulge in the kind of hifalutin speculation that crashed our economy in 2008, thus re-erecting a Glass-Steagall-style wall between traditional banking and securities speculation. So CREDO helps you tell your Reps and Senators to pass the Too Big to Fail, Too Big to Exist Act.

Meanwhile, Demand Progress helps you tell our Transportation and Safety Administration (or TSA) to shut down its facial recognition program. The TSA has come out and said it wants domestic travelers to get "mugshots" so they can put this program into action! It's like you're a criminal even before you've committed a crime! And, as you know from other corporate antics, facial recognition software ain't good, particularly at identifying women and folks of color -- surely you've heard about that time Google's facial recognition software mistook a pair of black folks for apes. It gets better: TSA doesn't want to tell us what they'll do with their little "mugshots" -- might they share them with other law enforcement agencies without those agencies getting warrants? So, to sum: the technology isn't good enough, and it's also ripe for abuse. Why, that all sounds like it would do the opposite of keeping us safe!

Around the table: Democrats plan another mistake, plus somewhat better news.

Democrats plan a "magnum opus" of legislative provisions for their first bill, one that would address voting rights, campaign finance reform, and ethics. They've got the right idea, but as usual, they've got the wrong size: these all-encompassing pieces of legislation give Republicans too much space for prevarication (remember "death panels"?), and we can get more done with (and get more public support for) smaller bills. I think making H.R. 1 the Voting Rights Advancement Act would be the better idea, not least because we could put Republicans on the spot with it. After all, why do you oppose expanding voting rights? is a much more difficult question to answer than why do you oppose this big bill with all kinds of stuff in it? (Oh, and I'm also pretty sure they can't just overturn Citizens United with a bill.)

60 Minutes runs a lengthy report showing how European nations are actually doing more for their citizens' internet privacy than we are -- but doesn't mention that the FCC actually enacted privacy regulations in 2016, only to see Congress repeal them with a "resolution of disapproval" the next year. It's not like that was beside the point of the report! Anyway, Max Schrems's point about "forced consent" -- that it's wrong for a corporation to sell you a product and then say give us all your data, or you can't use the product -- should be attended by American jurists, maybe? It's not like there's no precedent in American law.

We could make too much of a U.S. District Court judge blocking further construction on the Keystone XL pipeline until our Administration does the proper reviews (and not just environmentally-related ones) as required by law, since our Administration could just show its work and OK I couldn't get through that sentence without spitting tea all over my keyboard. Also, too, if, per our Supreme Court, an Administration agency "cannot simply disregard contrary or inconvenient factual determinations that it made in the past," well, that doesn't bode well for the FCC's net neutrality repeal, does it?

In other good news, our Administration announces that it will stop refueling Saudi planes bombing the bejeesus out of Yemen, though it will still aid the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen with weapons sales and logistical support. This is a good thing, though we'll need to pressure our Administration to do more, and I bet Mr. Khashoggi, now sitting comfortably in the beyond, finds his role in this matter rather amusing. Rep. Royce (R-CA) could use some education, however, lumping the Houthis in with al-Qaeda when the Houthis are some of the world's best fighters against al-Qaeda.

Finally, Axios/SurveyMonkey poll finds that 61% of Democrats think Republicans are "racist/bigoted/sexist," while some 31% of Republicans think the same of Democrats. For the record, I don't believe Republicans are bigots merely due to party affiliation -- in fact, I believe all of us are susceptible to bigotry (calling racism a "virus" that could be "activated" really was the smartest thing Nate Silver ever said), and better public policy, public policy that doesn't merely redistribute worker income upward to executives, would better ensure that fewer folks drink from the cup of bigotry.

Action: concerning trade, clean water, and healthy food.

The governments of the United States, Canada, and Mexico plan to sign the new USMCA trade agreement -- the one that would replace NAFTA -- on November 30; after that, the pact will go to Congress for ratification, so now's a good time to tell our Congressfolk to ensure that we get the strongest USMCA possible, as Public Citizen helps us do. The USMCA would eliminate the "investor-state dispute settlement" system with Canada in three years, and drastically curtail ISDS use with Mexico; these are tremendously good things, because we deserve to know that investors won't be able to nullify our laws and exact tribute from us simply because they can convince some tribunal that our clean air and clean water laws "cost them money." But that doesn't mean we shouldn't demand more, such as the elimination of corporate welfare for big pharma and better enforcement of labor and clean air/clean water standards. So let's get cracking.

Meanwhile, our Administration has proposed expanding offshore drilling in almost all of our coastal waters -- except around Florida, of course, because they need Rick Scott in the Senate that badly. I would naturally have said hey, remember how well the Deepwater Horizon spill went?, but it turns out that the Taylor Energy oil spill of 2004 is about to overtake the Deepwater Horizon spill as the worst oil spill in American history. If you're wondering how a 14-year-old oil spill is still spewing hundreds of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico every day, well, Taylor didn't even tell anyone about the oil leaking for six years and still claims there's "no evidence" the spill is even happening. And this is the kind of thing our Administration apparently wants more of in our great nation! Hence Penn Environment helps you tell our Interior Department to scuttle its plan to expand offshore oil and gas drilling.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell your state Governor to follow the lead of Arkansas and ban dicamba usage on your state's farms. Arkansas banned dicamba usage during that state's main growing season after finding that dicamba doesn't stay put once it's sprayed on crops -- it drifts away for up to three full days, leaving a trail of destruction in its path, and if it drifts onto neighboring farms -- which, hello, happens all the time -- then it also damages other folks' crops, and therefore their livelihoods, and also therefore our food. Arkansas also found workers getting sick after working with dicamba, which couldn't possibly happen to consumers, could it? Naturally, Monsanto has a version of dicamba it uses with its proprietary soybean crop which it modified genetically to better withstand its dicamba. But our choice is simple here: we can either stand with farmers or stand with big corporations.

Action: concerning war, media, and immigration.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to end the war in Afghanistan. Their latest email missive informed me that some folks who were pre-teens when the war began in 2001 just got elected to Congress, which I found a bit sobering, but these new Congressfolk are considerably less emotionally-invested in this war than the folks who started it, and now (at last!) they get a bigger say in whether we keep that war going. Which we shouldn't, not least because we got Mr. bin Laden years ago. The forces of evil will try two tactics: 1) ZOMG TEH TERRURIZTZ WINZ!!!!!, and 2) let's privatize the Afghanistan War. Both arguments are moronic -- respectively, fearmongering is a way of announcing that you can't win the argument on the merits, and if we're going to fight wars, we should fight wars, rather than let mercenaries bleed the taxpayer. And taxpayers will be paying out the wazoo for bad results, if past privatization efforts are any indication.

Meanwhile, Media Matters's latest email missive opens with this blunt and completely accurate statement: "Fox News is a malevolent and destructive force." One almost (I said almost!) longs for the day when Fox's on-air "talent" went to some lengths to hide their racism, but now, with President Bigballs as their Personal Lord and Savior, they don't even have to do that anymore. And since we can't buy cable channels a la carte in America, we can't directly hit Fox News where it hurts (i.e., in their pocketbook). But we can tell Fox's corporate advertisers to stop sponsoring Fox News, which Media Matters helps you do. Do not tolerate any guff that boycott efforts like these "hurt free speech." Fox News punditoids have an inviolable right not to be imprisoned for their speech, but they have no "right" to six- and seven-figure TV jobs. Our First Amendment protects us from our government -- not from advertisers, not from activists, and certainly not from viewers.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) that their proposed expansion of the definition of "public charge" will unfairly punish immigrant families, then the National Women's Law Center still helps you do that. As you may know, we've always kept immigrants out if we can establish that they'll become a "public charge," or someone completely reliant on the taxpayer, but HHS has proposed calling anyone who has ever availed themselves of Medicaid or food stamps a "public charge," which would make a lot of folks who work and contribute to society (not to mention pay taxes!) into "public charges." Our Administration is basically trying to deport as many immigrants as possible, which is a stupid way to make policy. And either "public charge" means something or it doesn't; our Administration obviously prefers meaninglessness and nihilism. But we don't have to put up with any of that.

Around the table: more good (and bad) election news, plus our President's latest public tantrum.

"The Needle and the Damage Done" is the article title of the year, describing the return of the New York Times's infamous election-predicting "needle" from 2016 and the damage this "predicting" generally does to our discourse. I'm old enough to remember when the Eastern media outlets called the 1980 Presidential election a few minutes after 8 pm on Election Night and demoralized Idaho Democrats enough (it was only 5 pm there, and they were just getting off work!) that Senator Frank Church lost re-election by a point. But it's so much more sophisticated now, and this year's punditoids took one 8 pm forecast from Five Thirty Eight (of course!) to declare NO BLUE WAVEZ!!!!! while polling places in more than half the country were still open. I'd prefer that our voters stop obsessing over whether it's "worth it" to vote if your "side" can't "win," but maybe our "liberal" media can do less prognosticating and more reporting? This insane zeal to be "first" with a story helps keep our society sick, immoral, and decadent.

Here's another good result from Election Day: Colorado voters outlaw slavery as a punishment for a crime in their state, meaning prison laborers can no longer labor for nothing. We can make a very simple law-and-order argument supporting the Colorado voters' will: once you get your sentence for a crime, you cannot have further punishments heaped upon you. We'd use the same argument to oppose taking away felons' voting rights after they're out of jail (and, really, while they're in jail, too). Of course, if "law and order" only means GET TEH BLACKZ!!!!! to you, you won't see the point. Or much of anything else, frankly.

And here's another good result from Election Day: Louisiana voters amend their state constitution so that all felony convictions will now require a unanimous verdict. Yes, until this week, the state has used the 10-of-12-jurors standard to fill their jails with black folks, which has helped contribute to Louisiana's long standing as (until recently) the state with the most prisoners in our Union, which sure ain't something to yell WE'RE NUMBER ONE!!!!! about. A big part of this victory: Louisiana felons getting back the right to vote after five years out of prison, though I'm certain they don't account for all of the measure's 64-36 margin.

And here's some bad news from Election Day: pro-renewable energy ballot initiatives failed in three states after big fossil fuel corporations dropped over $100 million fighting them. This should remind us who really benefits from the "climate change hoax": big corporations with this kind of money to burn on convincing people climate change isn't really happening, and not scientists reporting that climate change is, in fact, happening. Shame the FCC took away our net neutrality, too, because network neutrality is the greatest tool we've ever devised to cripple the power of campaign spending. I regret having not already figured out how to do that.

Finally, there's really very little to say about our President's insane press conference after the midterms. Except the usual: our President should be ashamed of himself for being a grown man acting like that in public. (And then his press secretary spread an obviously-altered video of a journalist's "outburst" that "caused" our President to revoke his press credentials, because when you can't win the argument on the merits, you lie. It's the only tool they've got left in their toolbox. Well, not the only one, I suppose -- would now be a good time for that terrorist attack?)

Horror and hope, 2018 edition.

First, the good news. Colorado and Michigan voters passed ballot initiatives creating redistricting commissions for their states; Utah voters also mulled the matter, and with 95% of the vote counted at this writing, the "yes" votes have a narrow lead. Idaho, Nebraska, and Utah voters passed ballot initiatives expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, while Maryland and Nevada voters approved same-day voter registration. Florida voters restored voting rights for some ex-felons by a 25-point margin, while Massachusetts voters banned gender identity discrimination by a 40-point margin; Michigan voters legalized recreational marijuana, while Utah voters legalized medical marijuana. So a lot of so-called "purple state" and "red state" voters approved good policy on Election Day -- which they've done a lot in recent years, often over the wishes of their elected representatives -- and that's always a good thing. And the election results broadly instructed us that our President's support for avowed white supremacists remains an anvil around the Republican party's neck. In a nation where too many of us still have too many private racisms, we shouldn't over-congratulate ourselves for that, but at least those morons walking around in their Hitler T-shirts whining about how "oppressed" they are received no mandate whatsoever from the voters this week.

And now, the bad news: for the third consecutive even-year election cycle, Republicans outperformed the polls, such that Democrats took back the U.S. House, but flipped fewer seats than estimable organizations like the Cook Political Report and Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball predicted they'd flip, and Democrats lost seats in the U.S. Senate, which likely guarantees Justice Thomas's retirement in 2020 and makes taking back the chamber later that year a much longer shot. Democrats flipped seven Governor's offices, but flipped only six state legislative houses, gaining around 350 legislative seats, which actually isn't that impressive (America has almost 7,400 state legislators). These gains at the state level will make a right-wing Constitutional convention considerably more unlikely, but they don't assure better redistricting next decade, let alone better policy -- for example, while I'd love to savor Scott Walker's defeat in Wisconsin, and I will, Republicans still have huge majorities in both legislative chambers there.

How did Republicans outperform the polls? By running on their record of good works animated by good policy and skillful communication with voters? Ah, you know me better than that by now. Republicans won, to some extent, with the vote suppression tactics (gerrymandering, Voter ID, Interstate Crosscheck, and the like) that have characterized Republican stamp-out-the-vote efforts since 2012. Obviously we should fight vote suppression wherever we find it (and we have fought vote suppression tirelessly at this blog). But the main reason Republican politicians seem harder to kill than zombies? Democrats just don't seem to have a clue. Republicans all over America have run this vote suppression scheme three times now, and Democrats have been caught flat-footed each time; the higher turnout this midterm no doubt delivered them the House, but we deserve the credit for that, not them.

And this apparent cluelessness goes deeper than their inability to win races on the ground -- they don't seem to have a clue about what to do when they have power, either. When they have power, they piss it away trying not to offend corporatist donors and trying to "build bipartisan consensus" with a party that deserves oblivion. We used to get mad at Tha Bush Mobb for insisting that they "create reality," but the truth is the Democrats do the same thing -- they piddle away the mandates the voters give them, and when Republicans storm back into power, Democrats tell us the landscape is difficult and all they can do is play for time. Well, since we're talking about time, this state of affairs describes the last 38 years of American politics. And how did that era start again? With the 1980 Republican Presidential candidate who decided he was going to change the landscape! I know changing the landscape is an easier task, logistically, when you have big corporate power behind you, as Mr. Reagan did, but surely if this is the greatest democracy on Earth, it's not that big a lift for those enterprising Democrats who can get the American people behind them.

So change is absolutely possible -- if we demand it. Now, you will not find very many echoes of my theses in "liberal" media analyses. They'll proclaim that Democrats ran too many far-left candidates and should have run more "electable" candidates who could "win" (again, in this self-fulfilling prophecy of a "landscape"). Never mind that for every Kara Eastman the pundits can cite I can find an "electable," "mainstream" Democrat who also got the silver medal on Tuesday. Never mind that the Democrats' Senate losers on Tuesday were all "electable" "compromises" with the "harsh realities" of the political "landscape." The fact is this: when you do no good works with your power, people won't work that hard to keep you in power -- and this is as it should be! We beat up on our fellow Americans for not being more engaged with politics, but the sickness, immorality, and decadence of our political class is a far bigger and far more urgent problem. If you fix the latter, you will fix the former. I know it's a big task, but only the big solutions last. And this humble blog will continue to help you push the big solutions on your representatives -- until they have no choice but to follow the popular will, regardless of their party or ideology.

On Election Day.

Today is Election Day, which means you ought to go out and vote, if you haven't done so already. If you have any trouble voting, of course, you should call 1.866.OUR.VOTE (or if, like me, you hate mnemonic devices for remembering phone numbers, 1.866.687.8683). (You can also text "Our Vote" to 97779, or visit 1.866.OUR.VOTE's website here.)

What would be a good reason to call 1.866.OUR.VOTE? Being told you can't vote if you have unpaid parking tickets or child support, getting challenged by official-looking people (or people with guns, even!) who don't have any actual authority to challenge voters, getting a flyer telling you Election Day is on Wednesday for people like you wink-wink. But what if you show up at the polls and the election worker says they can't find your registration? Well, you might be a victim of lousy recordkeeping, or you might be a victim of the notorious Interstate Crosscheck database, which, as you know, helps nefarious state governments deregister voters with the same name as voters in other states, though most names are, as you know, quite common (and Interstate Crosscheck doesn't check middle names or Social Security numbers!) That'd be a damn good reason to call 1.866.OUR.VOTE.

Note well that if you find yourself deregistered when you know you've done nothing wrong, your disgust will be palpable and righteous, and you may just want to throw up your hands and say to hell with these clowns and then go home. But before you do that, remember that this is exactly what they want you to do. It's the same reason they saturate the airwaves with negative ads the days before Election Day: because they want you to stay home out of disgust, so you won't vote against their cronies. Don't let them manipulate you, and don't let them win. Make the call to 1.866.OUR.VOTE, describe your problem to them, and let them help you take the next step.

Do I have predictions about how today will go? Yes, I have a few: I predict that you, dear reader, are not the kind of person who has been investing their entire identity in a Democrat "blue wave" today. And I also predict that, if Democrats lose Senate seats and only pick up a dozen House seats, you will remember that this is where we were two years ago, and that if the corporatists and the racists and the woman-haters win again, they'll be just as unpopular tomorrow as they were today -- they will have no mandate, and again they will have us to deal with. But here's the most important thing I predict: that you, dear reader, have already spent the last two years calling and writing your Reps and Senators every day -- and perhaps you've even been challenging them at the few townhalls they've held, and bird-dogging them at public events -- and thus you already know that your duty to our country doesn't end today, but begins today. Voting happens one day out of the year, and then Our Glorious Elites want you to sit on your hands the rest of the time. You can confound their expectations, and their nefarious goals, by expressing your will to your representatives every day after today. And this blog will continue to help you do that, as it has done since 2005.

So good luck today, and God bless.

Action: concerning government spying, antibiotic abuse, and cruelty to immigrants.

You may have heard that our military is trying to figure out if they can predict mass protests (i.e., against our President) from social media activity beforehand. Before we get into figuring out exactly which Philip K. Dick short story our government is trying to make into public policy this time, let's step back: why would our government want to know about protests beforehand? I can think of only one reason: because they don't want any good Americans to protest! And I'm sure they felt exactly the same way when Tea Partiers were making asses of themselves in our streets and on our public lands! Hence Free Press helps you tell Congress to pimp-slap any Administration effort to obstruct lawful protest in America using surveillance. Seriously, if they want to figure out when the protests are coming, all they have to do is note when they're about to do something that's going to hurt good Americans. Seems easier to just stop hurting Americans than to do all this hifalutin spying.

Meanwhile, Penn PIRG helps you tell Darden Restaurants to get the antibiotics out of the meat it sells at its restaurants. Darden, as you may know, owns Olive Garden, Bahama Breeze, LongHorn Steakhouse, and the Capital Grille, among others; in total, Darden runs over 1,700 restaurants serving 400 million guests in North America annually, so it's got reach. And its shareholders have, in each of the last three years, put forward a resolution demanding that Darden meats stop relying on animals pumped full of antibiotics; the most recent iteration of that resolution got 40 percent. Add the Big Stick of Bad PR to shareholder pressure Darden's already getting and we may yet get Darden to rid its supply chain of antibiotic-drenched meat, and thus Darden could help us avert a world where antibiotic abuse in feed animals renders antibiotics useless for medical use, which would also be a world in which the next cut could kill us. So let's get to wielding that Big Stick.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Administration not to distend the definition of "public charge" so it can deport more immigrants later, then the National Women's Law Center and the Union of Concerned Scientists still help you do that. We've always tried to prevent immigrants from coming to America if it seems likely they'll become a "public charge," or someone who'll depend entirely on taxpayer assistance, but our Administration would dramatically expand the definition of "public charge" to include anyone who's ever used food stamps or Medicaid, when a lot of good Americans fall on hard times and need to rely on those services sooner or later. I guess it's asking too much for a President who was literally a millionaire before he was eight years old -- and not through his own hard work, but through his father's sketchy inheritance schemes -- to understand that hard-working people face hard times every once in a while. But we're happy to teach him otherwise.

Around the table: our Constitution may not save us! And other sad truths.

Heritage Action executive director pens editorial explaining why we should all vote for Republicans this year. Your jaw will hit the floor when he says electing Democrats will increase partisan bitterness, as if Beltway partisans like him don't already look for any excuse to ratchet up the bitterness; most of the rest of it is better, I suppose, but it'll only move you if you already believe it, and three paragraphs of pablum about health care reform being better at the state level is no answer to the reality that Republicans tried to take away our health insurance. The worst thing about this op-ed, though? How the last paragraph suggests that the "noise" in American politics comes from anywhere other than our President and his votaries. That's some hardcore gaslighting there.

Green Party candidate for state auditor of Missouri writes damning piece about how "liberal" media reporting -- at least as far as his own race is concerned -- only covers "Issues That Don't Matter." Worse than the big media organs' refusal to cover issues brought up by him (and his Constitution and Libertarian cohorts), worse, even, than those organs' fascination with the Democrat and Republican candidates exchanging "jabs" and "harsh words," was the journalist telling him that there just "wasn't room" for discussion of issues in his article, and anyway "we need to write about what interests our readers, and they just want to know what the Democrats and Republicans say." Typical, how journalists think so little of us! They can rest assured that most readers (definitely including myself!) return their contempt in spades. There's a solution in there, somewhere.

Nathan Robinson at Current Affairs warns us to "be careful" about assuming our Constitution will save us from things like our President's efforts to end birthright citizenship for certain brown-skinned babies born on American soil. Long story short: "(c)onstitutions are very important documents," but "(t)heir words do not mean anything, though, if there is nobody in charge who is willing to uphold them," like, you know, the five right-wingers on the Court right now (not to mention the sixth or seventh, if Justices Breyer and Ginsburg pass). Thus even an abjectly stupid argument about what one of the original writers of the 14th Amendment "thought" it meant (an argument Antonin Scalia would have rejected!) could become "precedent" in the hands of unscrupulous folks like Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

How about some good news? a U.S. District Judge rules that Wyoming's ag-gag laws are unconstitutional. This means not only that folks working to expose animal abuse at factory farms can breathe a little more easily now, but folks testing water downstream from factory farms to expose pollution can also breathe a little more easily, since Wyoming's ag-gag law prevented that, too. One day we'll all take for granted that corporations shouldn't have more rights than people, and this ruling helps bring us one step closer to that day.

Finally, how about some more good news? Our FDA has banned the use of lead acetate in hair dyes. Responding to a petition filed by several groups including Consumers Union and the Environmental Defense Fund, our FDA found the 1980 study allowing lead acetate in hair dyes to be scientifically deficient, but note well that scientists have said for years there is no "safe level" of lead in just about anything. Hair dye may not sound like such a big deal, but a lot of people use it, and you probably don't even know how many! So this is a big deal, and kudos to our FDA for doing the right thing.

Around the table: containing some good news about liberals reaching rural America.

George Lakoff, the author of Don't Think of an Elephant, advises us that relentlessly fact-checking our President's numerous big lies plays right into his hands. If you ever suspected that he seems to do better when everyone's talking about him, you'll find that point sympathetic. I wouldn't say fact-checking itself is useless, but I do agree that reporters would do better to focus on what he's actually doing, rather than what he's saying. Good luck getting lazy reporters to do that, though.

Ryan Grim and Briahna Gray at The Intercept describe several "insurgent" Democrats who are making inroads into rural areas the party has long written off -- by being actual liberals, as opposed to the center-right DCCC-approved candidates who dominate other races. In these areas of the country, folks respond positively to candidates who support clean water, Medicare-for-All, and a higher minimum wage. You and I have been saying this for years, of course, but it's nice to get some solid reporting behind it.

Three men convicted of trying to murder Somali refugees cite our President's anti-Muslim rhetoric and Russian propaganda in an effort to avoid life sentences. Now, did our President set the bombs in those apartment buildings? No, he did not -- the three assholes who are about to get life sentences did that. Getting hung up on who might have influenced someone to do something horribly wrong hurts our fight against evil. And while it's true, and irritating, that "(t)he speaker with the best bully pulpit in the world is never sanctioned for spreading fear and advocating harm," that doesn't justify giving his votaries lighter sentences when they commit crimes.

Fascist ascends to power in Brazil, and naturally our financial papers are creaming their pants over how good he'll be for "the markets." Yes, I imagine Mr. Bolsonaro -- who has said out loud that his political opponents should be exterminated and (like all small men) clearly hopes other folks will do it for him -- will greatly aid the effort of Our Glorious Elites to redistribute all the people's wealth upward to themselves, but Jesus Mary and Joseph they can't seem to mute their giddiness even a little. But selling off public works projects to cronies and hello, being a murderous fascist do warrant a bit more scrutiny than that.

After being the target of an apparent Democratic campaign to paint him as the "true conservative" in this race (and thus deprive the Republican of conservative support), the Libertarian candidate in Montana's U.S. Senate race suddenly throws his support behind the Republican. I'm sure that will annoy those Libertarians who've already voted for him, but I wonder if it'll annoy the rest of them, too -- one of the reasons you become a Libertarian is you don't like people trying to manipulate you, and I bet Montana's Libertarians are even more ornery than that. I could be wrong, though. We'll see soon enough!

Finally, because I know you were waiting for this with bated breath, Kanye West now says he's "distancing myself from politics" because he's been "used to spread messages I don't believe in." Yeah sure -- that whole "slavery is a choice" thing didn't sound like a guy being "used." More likely, he used our President to get some attention for himself, though I can't say our President deserves much better than that.

Action: concerning Administration bullying and campaign finance.

Our Administration's plans to force transgender folks to undergo genetic testing to determine their "true" gender, which presumably will be, by our Administration's definition, the gender they're born with. How does this promote freedom, again? It doesn't -- it promotes the "freedom" of rage- and fear-addled religious bigots to make everyone conform to their vision of how Americans should be. And here you thought being an American was all about everyone's freedom! Luckily, our government contracts out so many of its functions that it'll just about have to depend on various genetic testing corporations, like 23andMe, Ancestry, and LabCorp, and Sum of Us helps you tell those corporations not to cooperate with our Administration's plan to gender-test transgender folks. Transgender folks face enough bulling already; they don't need any more from our Bully-in-Chief.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Federal Elections Commission (or FEC) to ban politicians from using Leadership PACs as their personal slush funds, then Issue One still helps you do that. The FEC prevents candidates from using their own campaign funds on personal expenses -- an offense for which California Rep. Duncan Hunter got indicted in August -- but the FEC does not prevent candidates from using Leadership PACs for limo rides, expensive dinners, and trips to Disneyland, all things I wouldn't imagine even Chief Justice Roberts calling "free speech." Politicians who use Leadership PACs in this manner would likely argue that it's not a "necessity" for "survival" in the mean old political world, but sure ain't the attitude you need to have if you want to bring about a better world.

Action: concerning pollution, lead poisoning, and food safety.

Our President tried to ram through Keystone XL pipeline approval early in his term, but a U.S. District Court judge ruled in April that our State Department had to complete a lawful environmental review before issuing any permits. So now our Administration has apparently issued a draft of said environmental review that fails to fully evaluate the environmental impacts, not least of which is a proposed alternate route through Nebraska. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell our Administration to do a lawful environmental review before committing to build the Keystone XL pipeline. And if doing a lawful review means they can't build the pipeline, well, that's just too bad! Our President doesn't care about climate and clean water; he only cares about swinging his balls in everyone's faces -- which, sadly, resonates strongly among those Americans who blame everyone but themselves for their problems. But they're not a majority, and they don't get all the say about everything.

Meanwhile, as schools are finding lead in their drinking water all the way up and down the state of California -- including half the schools in San Francisco, which really should be collecting enough money in property taxes to fund solutions to this problem -- Cal PIRG helps you tell your local school boards to protect our children from lead in drinking water. The state of California allowed lead in plumbing fixtures until the year 2010, which wasn't that long ago, even if it feels like it. That means a lot of schools there (and plenty of other states!) still have lead in their water pipes, and if you've got lead in your water pipes, you're probably going to have lead in your water sooner or later. And, as you know, any amount of lead in drinking water can cause brain damage in children. And children are literally our future! It wasn't just a Whitney Houston song! So let's tell our school boards to get on the stick with getting the lead out.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell big food-producing corporations to get the glyphosate out of their food, then Only Organic still helps you do that. As you may know, the Environmental Working Group found the cancer-linked glyphosate (the main ingredient of Roundup, Monsanto's most famous herbicidal product) in two out of three of the oat-based foods it tested, and at a much higher level than scientists would call safe -- and a lot of our biggest food-producing corporations, like Quaker, Kellogg's, and General Foods, make these foods. And kids eat them in cereal and oatmeal and granola bars! The World Health Organization and the state of California have declared glyphosate a possible carcinogen, and the European Union has banned it from their crops entirely -- and yet our society just chugs along, our leaders in business and government saying their hands are tied. So let's give them some incentive to untie them.

Around the table: Presidential actions both meaningful and meaningless.

Our National Labor Relations Board (or NLRB) rules that San Francisco janitors broke the law by picketing in front of their place of employment. By what labyrinthine reasoning did they arrive at this conclusion? By concluding that the janitors really worked for one of the subcontractors their workplace used to get workers -- and thus the janitors were picketing the "wrong" place! But given that the NLRB's attempt to repeal the joint-employer standard (which should have saved the janitors from this particular chunk of Kafkaesque fecality) hasn't been finalized yet, the courts may yet have the last word.

Hoo boy, our President thinks he can simply issue an executive order to deny birthright citizenship to those children of undocumented immigrants born on American soil. Personally I think the 14th Amendment refutes that notion so clearly even Chief Justice Roberts would disagree with our President, but then our President probably doesn't care whether his gambit works or not -- his gambit will inflame the flammable yet again, and that's the only thing he's good at. Like that's a thing to brag about! Yeah, that setting a pile of kerosene-drenched rags on fire, I was aces at that. Sadly, inflaming the flammable (though, as I've said many times, the flammable don't constitute more than 25% of the electorate) remains our President's best midterm strategy.

Alex Ward at Vox informs us what sending a military force to the border to meet the coming "caravan" will mean, i.e., very little. Soldiers won't be able to confront or detain immigrants (because that'd be illegal!), but they'll be able to help Border Patrol agents get to their destinations more quickly and give medical attention to whomever needs it. So, our President wants to issue an executive order he almost certainly can't enforce and is sending the military to our border to do things they can't do -- are you sensing a theme here?

Jim Hightower describes, in considerable detail, the Republican party's efforts to suppress the vote over the last decade or so. Mr. Hightower takes six paragraphs reminding you (and we don't get reminded enough of this) that efforts to actually prosecute voter fraud have yielded bupkus as far as results -- Kris Kobach, who's gotten quite rich off his efforts to find voter fraud, found a total of nine fraudulent voters in eight years as Kansas's Secretary of State. Mr. Hightower's list of actual vote suppression tactics, while fairly comprehensive, does leave off the notorious Interstate Crosscheck, which I bet does more than anything else to de-register folks without their knowing it until Election Day.

Finally, in a peripherally-related note, Administration press secretary Sarah Sanders says our President won the 2016 election "by an overwhelming majority of 63 million Americans," though virtually everyone who isn't willfully ignorant knows Mrs. Clinton won almost 66 million votes. They just keep lying; what else can they do? If we were a little more arithmetic-literate in America, we would also see that 63 million people isn't a majority (let alone an "overwhelming" majority!) of just about anything, not in a nation of 200 million registered voters. "63 million," in this context, is just a scare number, and we must expose all scare numbers.