Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence and sane drug policy.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass six good House-passed bills that "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell won't even allow them to vote on, well, you can still call them and demand both that they vote on it and that they pass it. We need to call them, because if we don't, these Senators can always say "well, I didn't hear about it from my constituents," and we should never let them use that excuse -- particularly during the month of August, when they're all in their home states meeting with constituents, at least nominally. You better believe their big donors are trying to get their attention this month! The six bills in question, as you may recall, are H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Anyone who opposes voting rights, civil rights, fair pay, better pay, internet freedom, and secure elections doesn't deserve to be a Senator anyway.

Meanwhile, H.R. 1456/S. 597, the Marijuana Justice Act, would not only remove pot from federal scheduling (which would essentially legalize pot), but would withhold federal funding for prisons in states that haven't legalized it and have arrested a disproportionate number of folks of color for pot-related offenses. The bill would also expunge federal convictions for pot-related offenses and establish a Community Reinvestment Fund to help communities ravaged by the notorious "war on drugs." We spend too much time and money chasing after pot-smokers when they do about as much damage as drunkards do, and you no doubt recall how our effort at banning alcohol went. Of course, we also spend so much time and money chasing after pot-smokers because our government thought it was a great way to oppress civil rights protestors! Don't just take my word for it, though -- take the word of President Nixon's domestic policy guru/Watergate co-conspirator John Ehrlichmann! Change.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact saner drug policy by passing the Marijuana Justice Act.

Penny Rants for Monday, August 19, 2019: special "media coverage of Democratic Presidential candidates still sucks!" edition.

Julie Hollar at FAIR catches our "liberal" media reframing attacks on Joe Biden as attacks on Barack Obama. They take their cue from Mr. Biden on this one, of course, just as objective journalists would! Of course, in the real world, where we observe and tabulate behavior more scientifically, we find the Democrats running for President going very far out of their way not to attack the Obama legacy, such as it is, and when your right-wing pals start yelling ZOMG ALL THEY DOEZ IZ ATTACKZ TEH OBAMAZ!!!!!, the bank-shot response will be "you mean like you did for eight years?" Democrats shouldn't take every criticism of policy as an attack on a person, since that's what folks do when they regard politics as a spectator sport, rather than the participatory exercise it actually is. And if I were Mr. Biden, I wouldn't be so confident that "Democratic primary voters" will make the "judgment" he hopes they'll make. After all, if the Obama Administration were that great, we wouldn't have the President we have now.

Sen. Bernie Sanders told ralliers that the Washington Post doesn't exactly like him, and our media protested that couldn't be true because OUR BOSSEZ DO NOTZ TELLZ UZ PRECISELYZ WHATZ TO DOZ!!!!, and then we are reminded that "liberal" media bias against Sen. Sanders is actually a thing that exists and can be measured. You may remember the 16-negative-headlines-in-16-hours spasm in which the Washington Post indulged back in 2016, but you may not remember the litany of Sanders-is-factually-correct-but-understanding-the-world-is-hard-so-he-must-be-wrong "fact checks" the paper has performed on his assertions since then. Calling his policy prescriptions "unrealistic" is just icing on the cake (and, you know, plenty of can't-happen stuff has actually happened), but saying his attacks on our media "echo" our President's is just plain wrong. Sen. Sanders accuses our "media" of bias, while our President calls their accurate reporting on him "fake news"; I wonder why they would want to equate the two.

Naturally it ain't just Bernie Sanders our "liberal" media doesn't like -- the New York Times treats us to a story of Democrats "worrying" about whether Elizabeth Warren has what it takes to defeat the beast, full of the usual anecdotal evidence and "conventional" "wisdom." The article worries about her "professorial style" in paragraph six, but it had already demolished that worry in paragraph two in telling us that "(f)ew candidates inspire as much enthusiasm as she does among party voters" -- after all, folks with "professorial style" don't "inspire" "enthusiasm," do they? Naturally the article also worries about her "uncompromising liberalism," even though at least one candidate stands to her left, and uncompromising centrism is clearly overrated as a winning formula. (Aside to the Democratic voter who says "(i)f it were completely up to me, I’d vote for her": it is completely up to you. Your job is to express your will, not get caught up in the 13-dimensional chess games Our Glorious Elites would rather you play.)

Our New York paper of record went on to cover the Beto O'Rourke campaign "reboot" with horserace analysis over whether Mr. O'Rourke can "break through." And the analysis ain't even that deep: can Beto somehow stand out among all the other candidates "taking the fight" to our President? seems to be the beginning and end of it; we don't even hear from moderate Democratic voters or think-tank punditoids, as we often do with Messrs. Warren and Sanders, respectively. Certainly the Times offers no analysis of whether "taking the fight" to our President doesn't play directly into his hands -- he loves it when you say his name and treat him like he's the center of the universe, and I'm old enough to remember when "taking the fight" to George W. Bush wasn't enough to beat him, either. The more you talk about how you want to make America a more perfect union, the less you talk about our President, but our "liberal" media is content to imagine that by criticizing Messrs. Sanders and Warren over "electability" concerns and Mr. O'Rourke over "visibility" concerns, they're being fair and balanced!

Action: concerning lead poisoning and obnoxious racism.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: HB 930 would protect Pennsylvania's children against lead in their schools' drinking water, by requiring testing, mandating testing result disclosure to parents, and keeping lead levels in school drinking water below five parts per billion. We're now five years after the Flint drinking water crisis, and residents across Pennsylvania are finding lead in their school drinking water, but we still don't have vigorous standards against lead, though any amount of lead causes brain damage in children, and they don't exactly grow out of that. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your Pennsylvania state Reps to protect our children by cosponsoring and passing HB 930. What's the argument against testing our schools' water for lead, I wonder? That "we don't have the money"? If a civilization accepts that as a reason for failing to protect our children, then that civilization deserves to die -- particularly if it keeps handing out endless welfare to corporate cronies.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Twitter to do a much better job policing hate speech on its site, then Color of Change still helps you do that. And to those who squeal TEH FREE SPEECHEZ!!!!, recall that our First Amendment protects us from our government, not from commercial media -- just as your local newspaper is under no obligation to print your neighbor's rants about black folks merely because he wants to be heard, Twitter can ban any speech it likes, and its executives need only worry about whatever PR backlash might result. And if (as Dean Baker said not long ago) Facebook is a publisher and thus should be held to the same standards to which we hold other publishers, then so is Twitter. Twitter's CEO, unfortunately, seems to think obnoxious racism is difficult to define. Here's a clue: when they start putting up swastikas, it means they're obnoxious racists. I mean, you'd have to be, to take up the banner of a nation we defeated in war over 70 years ago.

Action: concerning financial predation and the death penalty.

Because our Administration hates all regulations that actually help good Americans, our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) wants to gut its whistleblower protection program. You can understand why governments hate whistleblowers -- because they expose the wrongdoing of politicians and political appointees! -- but the sheer hatred of the last two Administrations is still a bit surprising. Our SEC's proposed rules would automatically disqualify any whistleblowers who take their concerns directly to SEC Commissioners, would disqualify whistleblowers merely because they filled out paperwork wrong, and would put an arbitrary cap on whistleblower rewards; I'm no great defender of filling out paperwork incorrectly, for example, but the SEC's proposal would be like taking a sledgehammer to an ant. Why, it's almost like they're coming up with ways to protect their cronies from scrutiny! The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell our SEC to abandon its plans to make whistleblowing on financial firms a lot harder.

Meanwhile, the ACLU helps you tell Missouri's Governor to grant clemency to Russell "Rusty" Bucklew, because lethal injection would be, in his case, cruel and unusual. Mr. Bucklew suffers from a rare disease that grows tumors full of blood in his head and neck, and if he gets lethal injection, chances are those tumors would rupture and cause Mr. Bucklew to choke to death on his own blood. If you're reading that and saying so what? He's gonna die anyway, then you're doing civilization wrong -- we're supposed to be leaving as good example for future generations to follow, not wallowing in considerations of expediency until we become corrupt and cynical. And if you're familiar with the crime for which Mr. Bucklew got convicted, you might well be tempted to ask he sure didn't treat his victims with very much mercy, so why should we? Answer: the whole point of civilization is to lift ourselves above the murderer's level, not bring ourselves down to it. Maybe setting a good example will come back into vogue one day, but only if we lead.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2155, the Stop Wall Street Looting Act, then Color of Change still helps you do that. S. 2155 would make it a lot less attractive for big private equity corporations to do the thing they've done with impunity the last decade -- buy up large retail corporations, run them into the ground, and suck their wealth out in bonuses and fees on their way out the door. To think they have the gall to say we shouldn't "punish success," and that our richest Americans are merely the ones who have worked the hardest! How does running corporations into the ground and extracting their wealth benefit our civilization? Hell, how does it even qualify as "work"? And these predators have wiped a million jobs from our economy over the last decade; funny how folks who squeal about an increased minimum wage "killing jobs" have nothing to say about that. A lot of these folks are just nihilists, of course, but civilized people don't admire wanton destruction, let alone predators getting rich off it.

Action: concerning racism, immigration, and debt.

Wondering how hate groups get such a foothold on the internet? It ain't because they're right or because they're popular -- it's because they get money to spread their hate, and big charity corporations enable this horror by allowing some $11 million to flow through their "donor-advised funds" (or DAFs) between 2014 and 2017. Don't get the idea that "helping racists donate money to racist groups" is some kind of free speech issue, because a) money ain't speech and b) our First Amendment doesn't exist to promote hate speech, but merely to prevent folks from being thrown in jail merely because their speech is noxious to civilized people. And, ah, what law compels big corporations to fund hate speech merely because some donor wants to? If a donor wants to donate that badly, they can just write a check and send it where it needs to go; our First Amendment does not require that funding hate speech be easier than that. Hence Color of Change helps you tell big corporations to stop enabling the funding of hate groups.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell nine big hotel chain corporations to refuse ICE in their apparent quest to turn American hotels into immigrant detention centers. It's hard for me to see exactly how ICE could compel hoteliers to do this on their behalf, except through intimidation, and indeed four big hotel chain corporations (Marriott, Choice, Hilton, and Hyatt) have refused to cooperate with ICE. You don't even need to find ICE particularly odious to demand that hoteliers stop enabling them! You only need wonder why our government can't provide proper housing for detained immigrants on its own. And you might well conclude that maybe our government spends too much taxpayer money on private prison corporations -- which apparently can't do the job, or else ICE wouldn't be turning to Motel 6. Remember when we all used to imagine that evil was administratively apt? Yeah, this Administration sure is full of "evil geniuses." Nobody ever said Lex Luthor couldn't work within a budget.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) not to make it easier for collection corporations to harass us, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. Yes, that's right, our CFPB, which exists to keep us away from financial predators, would allow debt collectors to call you seven times weekly per debt -- meaning per loan, per credit card, per health care bill, and heaven forbid have more than one of any of these -- and would also let debt collectors call your friends and family! I still know right-wingers who would say well, then, don't take on any debt you can't afford! They say this as if people plan to get slammed by unscrupulous health insurance corporations! But you may, if you like, point out them that debt collectors too often call folks about debts they've already paid or never had to begin with. Surely your right-wing acquaintances will find that objectionable. They are very proud people, after all.

Around the table: of unearned mandates, law-and-order posturing, and rich folks acting stupid.

Our Administration finalizes rules putatively allowing them to enforce the Endangered Species Act far less vigorously than before. Among the changes: our government can how "take into account" the purported "economic costs" of saving a species; perhaps our alien overlords will do the same when mulling whether to save humanity! And where does Commerce Secretary Ross imagine our President has a "mandate" to "eas(e) the regulatory burden on the American public"? First off, they're not "easing" a "burden" on "the public"; they're just making it easier for big corporate cronies to make more unearned millions. Second, 54% of the electorate wanted someone else to be President in 2016, so he has no "mandate" other than the ones our Constitution gives -- you know, the ones he ignores at every opportunity. So I guess we'll see these pricks in court, then.

Acting CBP Chief will not confirm for CNN's Jake Tapper that CBP is investigating any of our President's corporations for their well-reported reliance on undocumented immigrant labor. While it is true that "there are investigations going on all the time that you’re unaware of," it is equally true that I am not a schmuck, and I do not expect ICE to show up in Bedminster anytime soon, not because our President is innocent, but because they knows better. Or, maybe, because he's their bastard. I'd prefer the former reason, but either one is alien to a nation where we pride ourselves that no one is above the law.

Speaking of which, Current Attorney General William Barr tells the Fraternal Order of Police that those newly-elected district attorneys who do not shove their testicles in your face to prove their toughness are, of course, "anti-law enforcement." Here's a clue: if you say someone is "anti-law enforcement," you're pretty much telegraphing that you can't win the argument on the merits. It's like saying something is "socialist." And I'm going to go out on a limb and say that his statement that suspects should always "comply first" with police instructions and then "if warranted, complain later" will not resonate very much with families of folks executed by police after, say, pulling out their cellphone or telling a police officer they have a registered firearm in their car.

Visa CEO says he won't block gun sales, saying, as a matter of comparison I suppose, that "(w)e shouldn’t tell people they can’t purchase a 32-ounce soda" and "(w)e shouldn’t tell people they can’t buy reproductive drugs." I guess he brings "reproductive drugs" in because he's trying to say he's Hip Like Us, but comparing guns to soda is rock-stupid, because no Big Gulp has ever killed 30 people in 60 seconds. People like Mr. Kelly love saying everything is a "slippery slope," but actually almost nothing is -- civilized people have been debating the boundaries of what we allow and what we outlaw for thousands of years, but I guess corporate CEOs are too bold to acknowledge history and heritage.

Finally, wealthy supporters of our President who live in the Hamptons whine that they have to keep their support of our President "in the closet" (way to insult the entire gay experience, whiners!) for fear of ostracization and lost business, and even "physical violence." America is going into a "dark place," they say, and given our President's overt racism I sure would have said that differently! If rich folks really fear physical violence they can call a cop, but they don't seem to understand that when folks injure our community, we ostracize them, because that's how civilization is supposed to work. Or, to put it in a way our President's supporters might better understand: fuck your feelings.

Action: concerning Social Security, methane emissions, and working families.

You know how we've been talking about expanding Social Security, so that we can get ahead of talk from Our Glorious Elites about cutting "entitlements"? Well, H.R. 860/S. 229, the Social Security 2100 Act, would do just that, by actually increasing benefit amounts, increasing the amount of Social Security benefits retirees can enjoy tax-free, and creating a Consumer Price Index that accurately reflects seniors' economic trials. You know, rather than using "Chained CPI," which assumes that if something becomes too expensive, folks just switch to something cheaper. Can you imagine seniors "just switching" to cheaper drugs? No, you can't. Social Security has helped hundreds of millions of Americans live a more dignified retirement, free of poverty and want, and this is despite 40 years of politicians and their corporate paymasters trying to wreck the program and advancing every problem they've created as a reason to cut the program. So Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our retirements by passing the Social Security 2100 Act.

Meanwhile, H.R. 2711, the Methane Waste Prevention Act, would require gas drilling corporations to capture 99 percent of the methane gas that escapes from their operations within five years. H.R. 2711 would also require gas drillers to flare (or burn) that minuscule amount of methane gas they fail to trap, and would require our government to set standards for gas drilling equipment so that it doesn't leak methane gas. Methane leakage is, as you know, a byproduct of hydraulic fracturing (or fracking), and it tends to trap far more carbon emissions in our atmosphere than even coal does. And methane is also, you know, usable fuel which does us not one bit of good if it's floating around in our atmosphere. Don't abide any whining about how all this is so hard and will cost gas drilling corporations money; their money isn't more important than our air and our climate. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our clean air and help slow the advance of climate change by passing the Methane Waste Prevention Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject our President's nomination of Eugene Scalia to be our next Secretary of Labor, then CREDO still helps you do that. We don't oppose him because he's the late Justice Scalia's son, but because, well, of his entire career helping big corporations run roughshod over working people; the Wall Street Journal called Mr. Scalia one of the banksters' "go-to guys for challenging financial regulations," which doens't exactly speak to his love of working people, as does his work helping WalMart overturn a Maryland law which would have mandated that WalMart contribute something-anything to their workers' health insurance. Mr. Scalia also seems to have a unique animus against ergonomic safety regulations, which you'd only find sympathetic if you haven't noticed that technology has created more desk jockeys than hard hats over the years. He even lamented that such regulations would force businesses to "hire more workers," to which the only reasonable response would be: we can only hope!

Action: concerning good House bills and a bad Senate bill.

It's Monday, so it's time once again to call our Senators and tell them to pass the following bills: H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. The House passed all these bills, but the Senate won't even vote on them, because Senate Majority Leader "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell (E-KY) won't even hold a vote on any of them. He even calls himself the "Grim Reaper" now! Who but an insane person would be proud of the fact that they refuse to pass legislation promoting voting rights, civil rights, equal pay for women, a higher minimum wage, freedom from corporate interference on the internet, and safe and secure elections? Seriously, let that be your meditation object as you call your Senators. You'd think a few of them would want to go on the record supporting the things I've listed above, but too many of them think of politics as nothing more than team sports -- a profound offense to those of us who call America our team.

In the wake of a mass murder apparently perpetrated by someone who really, really hated immigrants, Republicans have responded swiftly -- with legislation that would further injure immigrants! Yay priorities! S. 1494, the so-called Secure and Protect Act, would (among other nefarious works) impose an unnecessarily high screening standard on potential aslyees, essentially prevent Central American refugees from even getting asylum in the U.S., and deny immigrants due process by subjecting them to abnormally fast "rocket docket" hearings. Naturally, Judiciary Chair Lindsey Graham (R-SC) called a Committee vote on the bill without even letting Democratic members speak on it, which is what you do when you're really confident in your bill. And aslyees and refugees are actually the least likely people to commit terrorism, because, you know, they're fleeing terrorism in their home countries. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to resist this persistent posturing about immigration by rejecting the so-called Secure and Protect Act.

Around the table: Joe Biden revises his career yet again, and other dramas.

Jesus Mary and Joseph now Joe Biden is trying to convince us he opposed the Iraq war and "was as outspoken as much as anyone at all in Congress," including, I presume, Barbara Lee, Bob Graham, and Ron Paul. Sooner or later even deaf, dumb, and blind infants will tire of Mr. Biden's attempts to revise his 40 years of professional capitulation to the right. And this is why he'll lose in 2020.

Alan McLeod at FAIR catches cable news channels suggesting that if you can't afford that vacation, you could just put it on a credit card! Remember when our Administration was telling folks furloughed over our President's vanity border wall tantrum that they could just take out a loan to make ends meet? This is what we get when we enable a bankster class that does no work other than converting other people's debt into their wealth.

Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals upholds North Dakota law insisting that voters all have a residential street address in order to have Voter ID (and therefore to vote) -- though around 20 percent of the Native American population actually don't have these street addresses. Which our own Supreme Court will be anxious to overturn citing the "undue burden" standard in Planned Parenthood v. Casey! I kid, of course -- these Justices are very, ah, selective about their precedents.

Former #1 overall NHL draft pick Joe Murphy, who carved out a solid 15-year career as a second-line winger, is now 51, homeless on the streets of Kenora, Ontario, and showing symptoms of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (or CTE). We know football is bad for the human brain, but I bet one day we find out that hockey is even worse -- the game's effects on its players' brains hidden by the anonymity that's more likely to be their lot once they stop playing and return to their Canadian hinterland hometowns, as they tend to do.

In case you were tempted to argue that recent mass shootings mean we should give our FBI "more tools" to stop them, Chip Gibbons at In These Times reminds us that not only is the FBI more obsessed with "black identity extremists" than white racist terrorists, but it already has "extraordinary tools" that it's just not using against white racists. In other words, our FBI would rather use its vast powers against good Americans than use those powers to protect us. And naturally Joe Biden would pass a "domestic terrorism" law to respond to mass shootings, which surely wouldn't have the same ill effects as all that anti-crime legislation he's enthusiastically pushed over the years.

Finally, why does our President give a thumbs-up for the camera as he's taking a picture with an infant orphaned by the El Paso shooting? To get us to talk about that, and to get embroiled in yet another one of his dramas, that's why -- and, unfortunately, fighting drama means calling attention to the fact that it is drama. Think of it as a periodic vaccination. Also, think of what our President might not want you to find out as you're obsessing over his latest drama -- like, just as a for-example, that he still uses undocumented immigrant labor while he rails against undocumented immigrants.

Action: concerning good science, bad science, and bad media.

You've heard, no doubt, about our Administration's multitudinous attempts to hide and purge scientific information that good Americans deserve to know. Hence S. 2220, the Open and Responsive Government Act, would amend the Freedom of Information Act so that folks couldn't hide "confidential" information from the public unless it would actually cause them substantial harm. S.2220 would also specify more precisely that you can't withhold a big slab of information from the public merely because a portion of it might meet the "substantial harm" standard. These are good ideas, of course, but why are they urgent now? Because our Administration's EPA has packed its scientific advisory boards with (you guessed it) industry figures who could claim all kinds of "substantial harm" if FOIA requests would require answers from them. Of course, I'd rather not have this revolving door between corporations and our government in the first place, but in the meantime, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Open and Responsive Government Act.

Meanwhile, Sky Gray, of Asheville, NC, has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell online retail corporation Amazon to stop selling "conversion therapy" books. "Conversion therapy" -- which aims to "convert" gay folks (including children!) into straight folks by, among other odious methods, making them re-enact their sexual abuse -- is now illegal in 14 states. Are you feeling a little anxious about whether you're "suppressing free speech" by telling Amazon to do this? Rest assured that you're not -- Amazon can always say "no," after all, if they think they can withstand the bad PR that'll result. But our First Amendment only guarantees writers of "conversion therapy" books the right not to be imprisoned by our government for their speech -- it does not guarantee an audience for your speech, and it does not guarantee you the right to make money off your speech. In a sane and moral society, such books would be available at the gay-hating version of Paladin or Loompanics -- but not necessarily on America's biggest bookseller.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell corporations to stop advertising on Tucker Carlson Tonight and The Ingraham Angle on the Fox News (sic) Channel, then Color of Change helps you do that. Why? Well, because of everything they've ever said and done, really, and why do such terrible people get so many TV shows? It's like our media only care about drama! But both talking heads have also spread around plenty of racist pablum over the last few years, and with so many white supremacists going around shooting people these days, well, it's not a good look. And I wish we lived in an America where simply "changing the channel" was enough, but it's not enough, because even if we're not watching it, we're still paying for it, and corporations are still advertising on it. In the absence of a good a la carte cable packaging law, we can at least wield the Big Stick of Bad PR on their advertisers.

Action: concerning social media and Arctic drilling.

CREDO helps you tell big tech corporations Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to ban white nationalist and other hate groups from their platforms. And again, it's not a matter of "free speech no matter how noxious": our First Amendment guarantees that folks can't be put in prison for the mere fact of their noxious speech, but it does not guarantee a platform for your noxious speech, let alone a living. And let's also bury the suggestion that we merely oppose speech "we don't like" -- nobody should like it when far-right assholes cheer another racist for carrying out a mass murder! Big tech corporations (Facebook especially) act like it's so hard to keep assholes from ruining their platforms, but it really isn't -- they could stop valuing executive salaries like they're the only thing worth preserving in civilization and break off some of that money to hire more people to monitor speech on their platforms. For such powerful people, our big tech CEOs sure do act helpless an awful lot. And we shouldn't tolerate such weakness.

Meanwhile, our Department of Interior plans to push ahead with oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR) this year, but Environmental Action helps you tell our Secretary of the Interior not to allow drilling in the Refuge. We call it a "refuge," after all, because we'd like some part of the old world to keep going, uninterrupted by the churning of the new one. Of course, the folks in charge of our government now, though they call themselves "conservative," don't value the past except insofar as they can convert it into money for some crony or other. And that's all we'll get by drilling in ANWR, scientists having found that we're not going to extract very much oil from the area. There is something truly noxious about converting wild places into nothing more lasting than money, which always gets spent and always cries out for replacement. Of course, such noxiousness is our President's calling card. Might we at least convert his bad example into a warning for future generations?

Around the table: no, every problem is not a Gordian knot! And other insights.

Politico wonders: "How Do You Solve a Problem Like 8chan?" Simple: you do what Dean Baker suggested we do last week -- you hold corporations like Facebook and Twitter accountable for the public postings of their users, in much the same manner you hold book publishers accountable for what they put out. (People who post privately to their friends will have to rely on their friends to tell them when they're full of it.) But you certainly don't throw up your hands and say the First Amendment "protects" hateful speech without specifying exactly how it does that (i.e., that it protects you from your government, and not your publisher).

And now for the WHEREZ TEH DATAZ!!!!!! crowd: researchers using FBI data on 248 active shooter incidents over 17 years, find that semiautomatic weapons "roughly double" victims' chances of getting killed or wounded. My initial reaction: they only double your chances of getting killed or wounded? But the Brigham and Women's Hospital study didn't count incidents with the largest death tolls or with multiple shooters. Headline from the no-gun-control-ever lobby: SEE TEH SEMIZ DON'TZ KILLZ TEH PEEPULZ MORE EFFICIENTLYZ HAHAHAHAHA!!!!! Of course, the more pertinent finding (and the one that aligns with common sense) is that semis do hit more people and thus result in more deaths.

Ben Freeman, Nia Harris, and Cassandra Simpson at TomDispatch explode the myth that military spending creates jobs. You've likely started to suspect that military spending enriches big defense contractor CEOs more than anything else, but it's nice to have some facts behind it. Lockheed's share of taxpayer money went up about 37% between 2012 and 2018, but their total workforce went down almost 13% -- and their CEO's salary went up 32%. Two other big defense contractors also cut jobs over that time, and two more only "gained" jobs because they bought other corporations. Stick that in your Tea Party uncle's hat next time he talks about defense creating jobs -- and then pivot to things that actually create jobs, like infrastructure, renewable energy, and health care spending, and you'll likely find a sympathetic audience. If only Democrats would act on this insight!

Another day, another finding that the 2017 tax "reform" hasn't goosed up capital investment like its supporters said it would, and this finding comes from our Administration's Commerce Department, which you would think would have an interest in saying the exact opposite. Then again, maybe not, as long as our President is willing to say whatever. But cutting the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% did not, in fact, "free" corporations to spend more money on capital projects. Historically, the only thing that does that is a higher tax rate, since corporations will spend more money on capital projects once they realize it's going to get taxed away if they don't. (That's also why corporations don't really need "incentives" to do research and development -- research and development are expenses, and corporate taxes only tax profits.)

Finally, our President voices his apparent belief that his "rhetoric" not only doesn't divide our nation but actually "brings people together." And it is possible that he may be right about that one day -- at that moment where we can all observe his rhetoric bringing people together against him. Sadly, that moment isn't now, because his votaries are still too eager to make excuses for him -- this, even though conservatives always told us conservatism wasn't about making excuses for people!

Action: concerning banksters, pollution, and privacy.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2155, the Stop Wall Street Looting Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. You may well be saying to yourself, self, I'd very much like to stop Wall Street looting, too, but would this bill really do that? The answer is yes, S. 2155 would basically take all the joy banksters feel when they suck all the assets out of a corporation -- it would impose a 100 percent tax on all the fees private equity firms impose on a corporation for two years after they buy it, it would make those firms actually take on more of the debt they've assumed rather than simply transfer it back to the corporation they've bought, it would give workers more of a chance to recover what they've lost after their employer goes bankrupt, and it would make private equity firms' doings more transparent. These firms don't just kill big chain stores like Sears and Payless -- they kill local newspapers all over America, too (the Denver Post being the most famous example). And S. 2155 will help us stop them.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: SB 707, 708, and 709 would give the state Attorney General "concurrent jurisdiction" over certain clean air and clean water laws in the state, and thus give our AG the power to initiate investigations into these matters. Given that our Attorney General is supposed to, you know, enforce the law on behalf of the people of the Commonwealth, you would think our AG would be able to do that on his own, but no -- current law mandates that our AG must first get a referral from the state Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) or a local district attorney. I have to admit I'm at a loss to explain why the state of Pennsylvania does it that way -- it sounds a lot like a decades-old turf battle won in favor of someone who may not even be alive now, frankly. But we don't need to put up with inter-bureaucratic turf battles, because our Attorney General answers to us. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your PA state Senators to help our state government protect us from pollution by passing SB 707, 708, and 709.

Finally, in the wake of yet another data breach exposing the private data of over 100 million good Americans, Fight for Privacy helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass strong legislation that protects the privacy of good Americans' online information. There's no use saying if you still want privacy, don't put your information online, because putting your information online is basically necessary now, unless you pay for everything with cash and never take out a loan. I will say I continue to be disappointed with our Congressfolk's apparent inability to process the fact that we should be able to opt in to corporate attempts to sell our data to third parties. It wouldn't "break the internet" (as Sen. Toomey infamously put it in 2011), and it wouldn't even be very hard to do -- and it would protect a lot more people from a big bank that somehow decides to put all of its sensitive information on a freaking Amazon cloud server. When will folks realize that "cloud computing" doesn't actually make our lives better? It only makes it easier for big corporations to make big money.

Action: concerning Social Security, renewable energy, and Presidential bad behavior.

2020 is coming, which means more fearmongering from the Koch brothers and their like-minded ilk about "runaway" "entitlements," and which likely also means that our President will go back on his promise not to touch Social Security because of TEH DEFICITZ!!!! he made worse with his tax cuts for the rich (probably not until after re-election, though). And it also means that the "liberal" media outlets that supposedly hate our President will be considerably more blunt then he about the "need" to cut "entitlements." So let's head them off, by telling our Congressfolk that we must expand Social Security, not cut it, as Social Security Works helps you do. The haters keep trying to sound "reasonable" and "serious" about cutting Social Security, and they keep failing -- but only because we stand up to them. We worked for it, we paid into it, we fought for it, and when we retire, we deserve to enjoy it. So don't let the haters and their scare numbers take it from us.

Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend funding for clean energy programs. Would it be crass to mention to them that they take big campaign donations from the fossil fuel corporations they still subsidize even though they don't really need it? No, it would not be crass. Would it be crass to mention that we just had the hottest June in recorded history and massive heat waves devastating the country in July, and that using more renewable energy and less fossil fuel energy would help us suffer less of that? Would it be crass to mention the increased health care costs from dirty air and dirty water caused by pollution from fossil fuels (and, ah, not from renewables)? The answers are, in order, "no" and "no." And though renewable energy has grown tremendously across America over the years, it still only provides about 10% of our electricity, and it still needs support from our government -- which really means support from us, the taxpayers. We should get the livable future we pay for, right?

Elyse Marin has begun a petition on Color of Change which helps you tell the Anschutz Entertainment Group (or AEG) to stop hosting our President's rallies. That's right, it's time for the Big Stick of Bad PR again -- if you're a corporate sponsor giving stadium space to our President so he can have his little Nuremberg rallies where his votaries all squeal "lock her up" and "send her back" and other noxious crap, then you deserve to be pointed out and shamed until you change your behavior. I know there are still folks who are so proud of their cynicism that they'll say well how do you say no to the President, huh? Gosh, 54% of the electorate said no to him on Election Day 2016 (though, as you know, he's not a man who takes "no" very easily!), and anyway, saying no to our President is part of our birthright as Americans, a lesson I bet meant a lot more to the cynics when Barack Obama was President. Is it too much to ask that no big arena in America enable our President's obnoxious behavior?

Action: concerning good bills, soldier pensions, and mass shootings.

That stack of good House-passed bills keeps piling up on Mitch McConnell's desk, and he doesn't care what you think about that, but that's OK, because we don't care what he thinks! Go ahead and call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the Securing America's Federal Elections (or SAFE) Act. Mob Boss Mitch ain't the boss of your Senators, after all -- you are. People say I'm naive for thinking we can get Republican Senators to pass bills supporting voting rights, civil rights, internet freedom, better paychecks, and secure elections. But what would they hate even more than passing these bills? Being humiliated and jobless, that's what, and if enough of us speak up, they'll either bow to our will or be humiliated and jobless. Having the better arguments ain't enough -- we also have to deploy them, in force.

Meanwhile, our Supreme Court gave our President the green light to appropriate some Defense Department funds for his vanity border wall, and then the Pentagon announced late last week that it would divert almost $225 million in military pension funds toward the wall. Taking from our troops' retirement to keep drama going -- how utterly despicable! I wonder how our President's votaries will explain it away. Perhaps they'll say it's only $224 million, which I'm sure will comfort our retired soldiers as they make ends meet. Or they'll say they're taking a lot more from real defense spending, so shutup or he's cutting money for weapons we don't even use, and that's a good thing -- but neither of these arguments can magically convert taking pension money into a good thing. Our President's phone number is 1.215.456.2011. He doesn't care what you and I think, but he's also sensitive to bad PR, so doing our duty might actually yield a result here.

Finally, on the heels of yet another mass shooting perpetrated by yet another white supremacist asshole, too many of our politicians are offering "thoughts and prayers" again, apparently having completely forgotten the backlash they got over their "thoughts and prayers" last year. Hence Greyroots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to get to work and pass some common-sense gun control legislation for once. Since I oppose very much control of handguns and hunting rifles, I'm going to use Greyroots' contact tool to specify the common-sense legislation I want -- legislation that would amend the National Firearms Act to make it just as hard for folks to get semi-automatic weapons as it is to get automatic weapons. And all that bill did was get tommy guns off our streets. Our main job as civilized people is to fix problems without resorting to violence; if we don't commit to that, we'll never have enough weapons for the resulting apocalypse anyway.

Around the table: concerning the "liberal" media, Medicare-for-All, taxing the rich, job-killing pollution, and meatless meat.

Julie Hollar at FAIR notes that CNN approached its recent Democratic Presidential debates in a matter "more befitting a football game than an exercise in democracy," which "Shows the Need for Independent Debates." I'd have PBS do the debates, frankly, since they're more accountable to us than cable news networks, which are both the devil and the spawn of the devil. Which is worse, though: relying on far-right talking points for your questions, or turning every debate into a big drama? The answer: they're both wings of the same evil bird.

Marcia Angell at USA Today puts it better than anyone else I've heard: "Not only can we afford Medicare for All, we can’t afford anything else." The article makes other good points, but go ahead and use "not only can we afford Medicare for All, we can't afford anything else" as your meditation object. But since people are still going to ask how we'll pay for it, how about assessing employers a fee per employee? It'd have to be lower than what corporations are paying private insurers per employee now, but with Medicare's low overhead, that shouldn't be difficult. And no corporations won't "just fire people" in order to pay out less money -- though banksters are doing their best to change this, corporations still have to do things to make money, and doing things means having workers.

Steve Wamhoff at the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy informs us that a "wealth tax," such as that proposed by Sen. Warren (D-MA), would be much easier to implement than you think. You can almost dismiss Mr. Delaney's "concerns" merely because he raises them, but I find it quite interesting that the wealth tax's opponents won't tell you it's immoral or counterproductive but "unworkable," when valuing unsold assets actually isn't a complete mystery -- as you'd know if you've ever shopped around for a house. Also, too, don't believe the hype that a wealth tax would be "too complex," and certainly don't believe it from rich folks who seem to spend all their time making our tax code actually too complex.

Surprise, surprise, our EPA fines Koch Industries subsidiary Georgia-Pacific $600,000 for violating the Clean Air Act at its Crosset, AK paper mill, and requires that the mill install $4.9 million in equipment that'll help it comply -- and then Georgia-Pacific partially closes said plant, firing over 500 workers. And now the Kochtopus will point to this occurrence and say SEE? TEH REGULASHUNZ KILLZ TEH JOBZ!!!!! Given that the Crosset plant is polluting so much that a) it's been all over the news and b) even this EPA fined them, you might well conclude that pollution kills jobs, not efforts to stop pollution.

Finally, Rowan Jacobson at Outside explains how alt-meat (i.e., meat from plant-based sources that has both the taste and texture of meat) has risen so quickly that it might be "The Beginning of the End of the Meat Industry." Perhaps not surprisingly, some big meat corporations are suddenly anxious to get Big Gummint help in the form of labeling laws! But others, like Tyson and Perdue, are making noises about going along, and anyway I'd prefer a world where your choices are either alt-meat or meat from small producers. (Warning, though: Impossible burgers use at least one genetically-modified ingredient, and they're apparently the class of alt-meat burgers.)

Action: concerning campaign finance reform, data security, and working families.

S.J.Res. 51 would amend our Constitution so that federal and state governments could regulate campaign finance, as they did before our Supreme Court's notorious Citizens United v. FEC decision, which cited "corporate personhood" in striking down many of our campaign finance laws. I bring up those halcyon days of campaign finance regulation because far too many right-wingers get far too much say in America, and they really get their shovels dirty trying to criticize the amendment. ZOMG TEH INCUMBENTZ WILLZ PREVENTS TEH OPPONENTZ FROM RAIZING TEH MONEYZ!!!! is just one of the many things that never happened back in the day when we regulated campaign finance a lot more stringently than we can now thanks to our Supreme Court. ZOMG TEH PREACHURZ WILL BE TEH SILENCEDZ!!!! is, of course, another. People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to do the people's will on campaign finance reform and pass S.J.Res. 51.

Meanwhile, hot on the heels of yet another reported data breach exposing the personal data of over 100 mullion customers, this one at Capital One, Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass vigorous reforms that would help good Americans protect their personal data from hackers and indifferent corporations. These reforms would include stricter enforcement of our laws and harsher penalties for breaking them, as well as a "credit freeze by default" for all Americans, which would automatically freeze your credit at all three credit reporting bureaus until you ask for a freeze to be lifted. A lot of good folks don't go through the trouble of a credit freeze because it can be tedious and confusing, and instead of complaining that folks are lazy and they should just go ahead and do it because it's important, we should ask why it can't be easier. This is the future, after all.

Finally, you may recall that former Administration Labor Secretary Alex Acosta resigned recently, due to the cush plea deal he appears to have negotiated (as a federal prosecutor in Florida in 2008) over the Jeffrey Epstein sex crime case ("the best people!"), but as you surely know by now, they always find someone worse, and so it goes with our President's new nominee to be Secretary of Labor, Eugene Scalia. Yes, he's the son of the late Supreme Court Justice, but more pertinent to his potential new position is his long career helping corporations screw over their workers and advocate against government regulations -- indeed, given that all of this is right up our President's alley, you have to wonder why he didn't pick Mr. Scalia first, instead of Mr. Acosta, who may not have been anti-worker enough for our President's liking, and who certainly wasn't dramatic enough. So CREDO helps you tell your Senators to reject the Scalia nomination.

Around the table: starring Saint Reagan, the racist! And Rand Paul, the bastard!

Jim Naureckas at FAIR reminds us that "Ronald Reagan's Racism" -- as recently exposed on previously-unscrutinized Nixon tapes -- "Should Come as No Surprise." Nor, I might add, should his cleverness about hiding his racism come as a surprise -- as Mr. Goldwater explained his opposition to the Civil Rights Act by saying "(y)ou can't pass a law that will make me like you or you like me," Mr. Reagan framed his opposition to a successful open housing referendum by saying "I have never believed that majority rule has the right to impose on an individual as to what he does with his property," all of which, of course, distracted us from these initiatives' true aim: to prevent people from taking away the rights of other people on the basis of skin color. It almost makes our current President's artless brutality refreshing. I said "almost."

The incomparable Dean Baker asks a question I haven't heard anyone else ask yet: "Why is Facebook, the World's Largest Publisher, Immune to Publishing Laws?" Long story short: people post a lot of false (and damaging in the legal sense) stuff on Facebook, but if our laws treated Facebook as a publisher, which it is, then Facebook would have to a) remove the false/damaging stuff and b) post prominent corrections so that everyone who saw the false/damaging stuff would see the correction. You know, like every other publisher has to do. That might sound like a lot of work, and might actually require Facebook to hire more workers and pay them well, but I've always believed that work builds character, and that adherence to the values of our civilization is the best job-creator.

Ho hum, more than half of our President's trade-aid-to-farmers went to only one-tenth of the farmers in the program. And our USDA claims that this is how the program is supposed to work! No, really, they said, and I quote, "the more acres they farm and bushels per acre they produce, the more assistance they receive." I guess they no longer believe that economies of scale "reduce costs." (As an aside, I'd be wary of suggesting that this is uniquely "a time when the number of mid-sized family farms is declining," because that's been happening for decades, and it's because our government no longer cares about consolidation or monopolies.)

Rand Paul offers to pay Ilhan Omar's way back to Somalia so she can "appreciate America more." Yeah, let's send people running from people trying to kill them back to the people who were trying to kill them, hardy har har. One more time: trying to improve America does not make you "ungrateful," nor does it mean you "don't love America enough." It's like these people think "a more perfect union" is some kind of magic spell, and not a phrase that actually means something.

Finally, let's address the ubiquitous center-right talking point that you shouldn't support an actual liberal for the Democratic Presidential nomination because Democrats wouldn't have the numbers in Congress to pass the legislation they propose. I was about to say this is something only cowards say -- don't support someone you believe in, it'll all end in tears! -- but it's actually worse than that: the No-We-Can't Caucus aren't cowards themselves, but folks who want you to be cowards. And why? Because they fear what we can do and will do when we stop obsessing about them! Our job as citizens, after all is to communicate our will to our representatives in such frequency and in such numbers that they do our will; our job is not to figure out which nominee is the most likely winner so we can be winners too, because that's playing their game. And history is, as usual, also instructive: the day before Election Day 1980, Democrats held 58 seats in the Senate, and you know what happened after that -- an "unelectable" extremist changed everything about politics for the next several decades.

Action: concerning debt collectors, food safety, and prison privatization.

Because our Administration only works for bosses and not for people, our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) is as we speak planning to allow debt collectors to harass and abuse customers even more than they do, in part by allowing debt collectors to send an unlimited number of texts and emails without customer consent. If you're sitting back thinking well then they shouldn't have run up the debt in the first place!, please do two things: a) slap yourself, b) contemplate that not getting deathly ill or having massive student debt may be a matter of luck rather than superior intellect, and c) consider that debt collectors often have bad information and thus call people who do not actually owe them any money! Now imagine debt collectors calling every damn day to demand payment on an unowed debt. Empathy: it's not actually that hard! Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your CFPB to scrap its plans to let debt collectors harass and abuse good Ameicans even more than they do now.

Meanwhile, Penn PIRG helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to implement a new rule limiting the amount of pathogens like E.coli in the water they spray on our food. Sounds fairly commonsensical, doesn't it? Not to this Administration, where they seem to think that delay, delay, delay is the American way. And they're slow-walking these food safety rules a little over a year after an E.coli breakout among Romaine lettuce killed five folks and sickened another 210 across 36 American states. If "five deaths" doesn't sound that impressive to you, please do four things: 1) slap yourself, 2) consider whether anyone should die from a damn salad, 3) imagine it happening to someone you love, and 4) slap yourself again, because even contemplating 2) and 3) isn't enough to expiate your sin. And if you're tempted to think the FDA's delay saves corporations money and regulatory headaches, think about how rising health care costs might mean more than that. And maybe slap yourself again.

Finally, we've managed to get six big banking corporations to stop giving new loans to private prison corporations, and the commitments from JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, SunTrust Bank, BNP Paribas, and Fifth Third Bancorp represent almost three-quarters of the money private banks currently get -- but that still leaves over a quarter of the money! Hence Moms Rising helps you tell PNC, Barclays, and other banking corporations to stop profiting from our Administration's cruelty. And I don't think I have to tell you stories of kids being torn from their parents and sleeping on concrete floors in detention centers in order to persuade you to join this call. All I need to tell you is that imprisoning folks for whatever reason is something we should be doing, as a civilization and as owners of our government. We should not leave it up to some private corporation that cares first and foremost about their bottom line. And once we fully grasp that our own taxpayer money funds cruelty, we'll be better positioned to stop it, as is our right and our duty.

Action: concerning corporate spying, forest regulations, and immigration.

Have you heard of Sensorvault? Sensorvault is Google's database of location data culled from folks who use Android phones and folks who use iPhones with Google apps installed -- meaning Google has known where you've been at pretty much any time over the last decade. And Sensorvault holds that information indefinitely, meaning that law enforcement can access it at will -- and our legal system has been issuing warrants allowing law enforcement search geographic areas where crimes occurred rather than suspects, which instantly turns those investigations into fishing expeditions. And if you're at a protest just as a crime is occuring a mile away, you could get swept up in that fishing expedition, which would infringe upon your right to free speech. And, ah, you can easily imagine our government concocting "crimes" just to harass a lot of protestors, right? Yes, you can. We need much better laws governing the use of this location data, but for now, CREDO helps you tell Google to shut down Sensorvault, since the Big Stick of Bad PR still works.

Meanwhile, our U.S. Forest Service has proposed rule changes that would allow it to fast-track certain logging projects, and though its supporters cite "analysis paralysis" and "frivolous lawsuits" as obstacles to projects that otherwise wouldn't actually hurt our national forests, I don't think a lawsuit is "frivolous" merely because it might prevent some corporation from making a few million extra dollars, and I also don't think that scientific analysis is really "paralysis." I'm sure some folks can name actual projects that wouldn't cause any damage so-why-make-them-wait, but I would hope we would make such decisions based on the science and not on anecdotes, and in any case we really should be asking the question "what's the rush, then?" There's also the matter of public commenting, which the new rules would curtail and which I consider sacred in a democracy. Hence the Wilderness Society helps you tell our Forest Service to reject its proposal to shield certain projects from public oversight and scientific data.

Finally, in the wake of this Administration's constant hysteria over BS-13 and "caravans" and "people coming to take your jobs" (like the people our President imports to do seasonal workers at his wineries?), Win Without War helps you tell our Department of Defense Inspector General to investigate our Administration's use of soldiers at our Southern border. Just as we shouldn't fear gun violence research, we shouldn't fear an Inspector General investigation into why we need our military when we already have a Border Patrol. And if our Inspector General concludes that we have a military down there in order to spy on activists and journalists and to terrorize people running from another country's catastrophe, well, I hope our Administration is big enough to handle the backlash! (And yes, I made that crack about our President using foreign workers at his own corporations for a reason. If we stop enabling bosses who import workers in order to drive everyone's wages down, we'll be able to help out refugees running from real horrors much better than we do now.)

Action: concerning data security, Arctic drilling, gun research, and cryptocurrency.

Lately our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) has fined Equifax $650-$700 million for failing to secure the private data of almost 150 million Americans, but that's not as big as it sounds -- if you don't believe me, divide the fine by the number of people it hurt! -- and good Americans need more protection than that. Hence H.R. 2545/S. 1336, the Data Breach Prevention and Compensation Act, would establish an Office of Cybersecurity within our FTC which would regulate data security at credit reporting corporations, would set strict notification requirements for data breaches, and would make penalties for losing consumer personal data a lot steeper. If you're one of those who reflexively respond oh great another bureaucracy, I would remind you that "just letting the corporations who know their stuff do it" clearly ain't working, and that's the world we're already in. Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect consumer data by passing the Data Breach Prevention and Compensation Act.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell the CEOs of BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and ConocoPhillips to back out of their apparent plans to drill in the Arctic. Drilling in the Arctic has been a fever dream of big oil since time immemorial, but we all know the reasons we shouldn't drill there -- for one, it's much harder to clean up an oil spill which will happen in the Arctic than it is even in the temperate Gulf of Mexico (and you recall how well BP cleaned up that spill, which is to say "not particularly well"). Here are some more reasons: it'll threaten the famous Alaskan sockeye salmon industry, wreck the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, endanger the Native populations of the region, and it won't even give us very much oil. If I, an hourly-paid schmuck, can recite these reasons off the top of my head, then I bet a lot of other people can, too -- and surely these not-very-popular big oil CEOs are acutely aware that There Is-So Such a Thing as Bad PR. If we need to remind them of that with (wait for it!) the Big Stick of Bad PR, hey, we're here to help.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Senate to fund gun violence research by our Centers for Disease Control and our National Institute of Health, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Congress last year passed a spending bill that explicitly authorized gun violence research by these agencies, but naturally they didn't actually give them a dime to do that research; what are they afraid of? I'm no great fan of keeping people from having handguns and rifles -- though I think it should be just as hard to get semi-automatic weapons as automatic weapons -- but there's no harm in researching gun violence scientifically, and our CDC and NIH have sterling reputations, though I imagine our President's trying to change that as we speak. Even the author of the Dickey Amendment that restricted gun violence research in the first place said before he died that he regretted his amendment's effects. I wish that remorse was more contagious in Congress these days, but hey, that's why we're here.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to block Facebook's efforts to create its own damn currency. Yeah, you read that right, and I'm sure Libra will be even more annoying than bitcoin has been over the years. They're selling cryptocurrency as, get this, a way of reaching the "unbanked" citizens of the world. Setting aside that we should never privatize currency, and setting aside, also, that Libra won't help the "unbanked" if they're also "uncomputered," there's a better way to help the "unbanked": stop treating the world as your personal fuckjar. Seriously, when we keep the world's biggest actors from exploiting good folks from other lands, those good folks will have more power to do the things they want to do with their lives, and they won't need Libra or whatever to do it. And an important step toward restraining the world's biggest actors would be to stop "freeing" obnoxious tech CEOs from "burdensome" regulations because they're such great "innovators." Mostly what they innovate is new ways to separate you from your money.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence, robocalls, copyrights, and immigration.

It's Monday again, so let's call our Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act, and H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act. And this week we add to that list H.R. 2722, the Securing America's Federal Elections (or SAFE) Act, which would (among other good works) mandate paper ballots for federal elections. The House has passed all these bills, but Senate Majority Leader "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell still refuses to hold a vote on any of them. Still, we have a voice, and we believe that secure elections, voting rights, civil rights for gay and transgender folk, paycheck fairness for women, higher wages for working families, and internet freedom for all Americans are all good things that our Senators should support, particularly if they want to remain Senators. You can find tools for finding your Senators' phone numbers in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone).

Meanwhile, both House and Senate have passed anti-robocall bills, but they didn't pass the same bill, so now House and Senate must conference out a bill that can go to our President, and you know how that can go -- for example, a lot of the worst parts in that 2017 tax "reform" bill somehow found their way into that bill during the House/Senate conference! -- so Consumer Reports helps you tell your Reps and Senators to agree upon the most vigorous anti-robocall bill possible. A conference bill should, for example, ensure that big telecom corporations give you free tools to end all those "spoofed" calls that pretend to be from your bank or our IRS or even your own damn number, and it should also crack down on international scam call rings. Remember: our Reps and Senators would be nothing without us, so they had better do our will here, not some big donor's will. I mean, nobody likes robocalls except scam artists and other people nobody wants to talk to on the phone. Surely Congress can hit a bank-shot layup?

In other news, H.R. 2426/S. 1273, the CASE Act, purports to streamline the process by which folks can redress copyright violations, but that ain't as good as it sounds -- by taking copyright-related claims out of our courts and creating a separate office within the U.S. Copyright Office to evaluate them, the CASE Act will open the floodgates for copyright trolls to slap copyrights on everything they can find so they can harvest settlements from the unsuspecting. If you think you won't be affected because you don't violate copyrights, ask yourself: have you ever shared a meme on Facebook or Twitter? If the answer is "yes," then it will affect you, once folks slap copyrights on everything in sight, knowing they'll get a quick hearing from the U.S. Copyright Office rather than letting the wheels of justice in our courts grind slow. Hence the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect us from copyright trolls by rejecting the SAFE Act.

Finally, we've been trying to get Greyhound to stop letting Border Patrol agents on their buses willy-nilly, but they don't care what you think, so the ACLU helps you tell Greyhound's owner, FirstGroup plc, to stop Greyhound from letting Border Patrol agents on their buses unless they have a warrant or are at an actual CBP checkpoint. Of course if CBP or ICE agents have a warrant, or the bus is passing through a CBP checkpoint, agents can get on board and search, but the CBP has been searching buses without warrants and declaring that pretty much anywhere is now a "checkpoint," and they've also taken plenty of folks of color off buses without having any real suspicion that they're undocumented immigrants. Again, Greyhound has demonstrated that it doesn't care about any of that, so we have to alert their owners to what they're doing. In a sane, decent, and moral society I wouldn't ever have to say this, but in this sick, immoral, and decadent society I often have to, so I will: law and order don't exist just to give us whatever results we want.

Around the table: the dark side of mindfulness, explained! Plus the usual "liberal" media foolery.

Zachary Siegel at The Nation interviews Ron Purser, whose new book McMindfulness examines "examines how spiritual practices and self-care became tools for corporate compliance." Well, when corporations place all the emphasis on "how you can deal with stress at your job," they not only erase their own responsibility for the stress they cause at your job through their terrible management, they condition you to "be content with injustice and inequalities that pervade society." Really, you're a lot less stressed when you have sick days, money in your savings account, and access to health care. That's not to say you shouldn't do deep breathing every once in a while -- indeed, I give this advice to my trolls often! -- but all this emphasis on coping keeps us from remaking our world into one that doesn't demand so damn much coping.

You know all those polls that just ask people if they consider themselves conservative, moderate, or liberal? Well, Jim Naureckas at FAIR, in making a larger point about what certain classes of voters want, links to a Pew Research Center poll that actually evaluates whether you're conservative, moderate, or liberal by your actual stands on actual issues. And what do we learn? That "56 percent of self-identified 'moderates' picked mostly liberal policies, as did 30 percent of 'conservatives' and 21 percent of those who said they were 'very conservative.'" I'd have framed Pew's issues differently -- they include no allusion to taxes on the rich, for example, and the liberal position on clean air/clean water regulations is less that the "costs are worth it" and more that they save money in health care costs -- but I think Pew's findings better correlate with our lived experience than the let's-all-get-along-with-evil-corporatists pablum our media generally serves up.

Mike Ludwig at TruthOut reminds us that making folks with felony convictions pay fines before getting their voting rights back is a "modern-day poll tax.". No, saying so does not amount to "letting people off the hook before they've paid their debt to society," because a) your voting rights should never be taken away in the first place and b) the quality of mercy demands that we take ability to pay into account when giving a sentence. Prisoners make absurdly little money while incarcerated, and while they're in prison they get gouged by medical appointments, phone calls, and high-priced goods in commissaries. Lawmakers would understand all of that, if they weren't so preoccupied with swinging their balls in our faces.

Ho hum, MSNBC (or, as Jeffery St. Clair calls it, "MSDNC") makes blatant errors in its apparent zeal to tamp down excitement about the Bernie Sanders campaign. Putting him third in a chart when he ranks second (or fourth when he ranks third) is Fox News-level BS, of course, but when Chuck Todd tells us Mr. Sanders lost five points in a poll when he actually gained five, or another program simply tacks on three points to Mr. Biden's showing in a poll just so it can put him in first, well, that's the kind of thing George Orwell warned us about. So, to sum: the same people who constantly tell us TEH BERNIEZ CAN'TZ TEH WINZ!!!!! have to fudge the data or lie about the data to make it seem like he "can't win," which should raise anyone's suspicions.

Finally, another day, another flatugasm from our President about how Barack Obama should be the one getting investigated, not him, for his "book deal" or something. Here's the thing, though: "(f)rom day one, they've looked into everything we've done" is exactly how democracy is supposed to work! They work for us, and they're supposed to check the power of the Executive branch! Is there no one in his Administration who can tell him how he sounds? Or are they all telling him that since he sounds like his most self-pitying votaries, it's OK? It's certainly enough to make you miss the crude artistry of Mr. Nixon, who famously said that he was OK with the media putting him under a microscope, but not a proctoscope.

Action: concerning banksters, energy efficiency, and marijuana policy.

S. 2155, the Stop Wall Street Looting Act, would restrain the noxious behavior of the private equity firms and hedge funds that buy up corporations, suck the wealth out of them, and leave their workers jobless. You have seen a lot of this in recent years, with the closures of thousands of ToysRUs, Kmart, Sears, and Payless stores, among others -- and in Philadelphia, with the recent closure of Hahnemann Hospital. Over a decade after the banksters almost destroyed this economy for good, they somehow have so much power that they can even dictate whether a corporation can continue! Dare I mention that these banksters are also invested in the private prison industry that's currently making big bucks separating families at the border? Hence Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect working families from vampire banksters by passing the Stop Wall Street Looting Act.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: Penn Environment helps you tell your state legislators to improve energy efficiency standards for almost two dozen appliances sold in the Keystone State. There's really no downside to appliances that use energy more efficiently -- they use less power, cause fewer carbon emissions, emit fewer pollutants, and (this is the one most folks will hear) cost less money on your energy bills. OK, there's one "downside" -- appliance corporation CEOs won't be able to make things as cheaply as possible, and thus make enough money to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home. They won't put it like that, of course -- they'll say your appliances will cost more money. But our post-apocalypse descendants won't be sitting around the campfire saying sure, our planet's almost unlivable now, but at least ovens cost a little less for a few years!

Finally, H.R. 3884/S. 2227, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act, would at long last essentially legalize marijuana at the federal level by removing it from Schedule I, where it's never belonged -- really, pot is as dangerous as heroin? As if! -- and would allow folks who have pot convictions in their past to apply for resentencing and expungment of their record. The MORE Act would also tax pot products and use that money to help communities most ravaged by the "war on drugs," i.e., communities of color. Hence the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to support saner drug policy by passing the MORE Act. Folks may wonder why I advocate for stronger laws protecting good folks from predatory corporations and more relaxed laws about marijuana. The reason is simple: corporations do a lot more damage than pot does, and our laws ought to recognize that.

Around the table: in which we lay the Mueller investigation to rest.

I touched on Charlie Sykes's piece on Politico last week, which argued that Democrats hopeful of recapturing the Presidency should remember 1972 and be cautious, but Josh Marshall does Mr. Sykes's piece more justice than I did. Mr. Sykes's "history is off," Mr. Marshall says, since President Nixon was rather more popular at a similar juncture in his first term than our President is, but one thing that's the same is that both Presidents aimed to divide the country, mainly through endless hammering of hot-button social issues. The one thing that's different? Mr. Nixon indeed had the "larger half" (in Pat Buchanan's words) of our divided country back in 1972, but our President has the smaller half now -- though, of course, we all saw how well that worked out for us in 2016.

You'll get a few paragraphs into this ProPublica story about how Chicago Mayor will (among other reforms) end suspension of licenses for unpaid parking tickets in that city, and you'll likely have the same reaction I did: Jesus Mary and Joseph people actually go into bankruptcy over unpaid tickets? I mean, no, it's not surprising per se, but it is no less appalling. Naturally most of the folks who face this problem are black, and if you're in the mood to say some variation of if you can't do the time don't do the crime, please do three things: 1) slap yourself, 2) note well that Chicago ain't even making very much money off their Draconian ticketing rules, and 3) ask yourself if getting your license suspended or your car repossessed by the city is really a fair punishment for unpaid parking tickets.

Ho hum, our "liberal" media has lost at least some of its "enthusiasm" for the coup in Venezuela that never succeeded, because if there's anything our media hate more than an actual liberal populist, it's a loser. Still, they've moved on to the next possible puppet of power, the former Venezuelan intelligence chief, described by one of our papers of record as "muscular," now there's some journalistic objectivity! I guess it could be worse, in that we could get a whole lot of "soul searching" from our media about "how we got it wrong," because it's tedious to watch people who don't have souls make a show of soul-searching in public.

Hard to believe, Harry, but CBP and ICE just held a Dallas-born brown-skinned person in custody for three weeks and I'll bet the only thing that prevented our government from actually deporting him was the Dallas News reporting on his plight. And CBP wouldn't let him use the phone while he was detained, though ICE did, and I bet that fact goes right into ICE's PR kit. Be prepared for your right-wing uncle to opine that if you're going to make an omelette, you're going to have to break a few eggs. Or deport a few American citizens!

Elizabeth Warren warns that "the odds of another economic downturn are high" "either this year or next year," and though I couldn't tell you whether the New York Fed's recession probability index is particularly edifying or whether our President's grandstanding on trade will actually do our economy any palpable harm, I do agree with Sen. Warren that debt makes every structure less sturdy, and a lot more debt (not just credit card debt and mortgage debt but student loan debt and corporate debt) makes it a lot less sturdy. I also notice that this recovery, such as it's been, has been going on for over 10 years, making it the longest in our history -- and that should prompt us to wonder when the other shoe's going to drop.

Finally, I did not pay attention to former Special Prosecutor Mueller's testimony before the House yesterday, and thus have no comment on it per se. I am surprised, however, that I've only just seriously considered that this whole investigation might have been a drama created by our President! Who better for our President's Deputy Attorney General to appoint to conduct such an investigation, after all, than the lifelong Republican with the by-the-book reputation who would take seriously the Office of Legal Counsel opinion that sitting Presidents can't be indicted? And if a few of the President's friends have to go to jail, well, we all know how he feels about his friends by now. Yeah, I know, our President supposedly said he was "fucked" after Mr. Mueller's appointment, but he says a lot of things, and he doesn't mean a lot of the things he says. Robert Mueller was never going to save us, and if this realization helps us get back to the very serious business of being thorns in our politicians' sides, then I guess the whole thing will have been worth it.

Action: concerning taxes, immigration, government spying, and pollution.

S. 309, the For the 99.8 Percent Act, would make our Estate Tax a lot more progressive, by lowering the threshold at which we start taxing estates, from $10 million to $3.5 million, and by creating 39, 45, 50, 55, and 77% tax brackets, such that if you died with an estate of $5.5 million, your first $3.5 million would face no taxation, the next $750,000 would get taxed at 39 percent, and the last $1.25 million would get taxed at 45%. The Reagan Revolution purported to release constraints on individual accomplishment, but what have we gotten with all these tax cuts for the rich we've enacted since the mid-'60s? A class of elites who have divorced wealth from work and who believe they have a right to insulate themselves from their communities, that's what. With the For the 99.8 Percent Act, we could begin to take our world back from them, and so CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to strengthen the Estate Tax by passing the For the 99.8 Percent Act.

Meanwhile, our Administration might soon deport a lot of Syrians with Temporary Protected Status back to the war zone from which they originally ran. Our Administration would like you to believe that folks with TPS are all terrorists-waiting-to-happen, but even more reasonable folks might well ask why some people get Temporary Protected Status that lasts for years or even decades. After all, it's temporary, right? But folks who get TPS come from countries that haven't resolved the problems that forced them to flee in the first place, which, in this case, include the decade-long military attacks within Syria from the Syrian government, Iran, ISIS, Russia, and the United States. So if none of that's gone away, our Administration sending Syrians with TPS back just to "prove" they're "doing something" would be cruel. We could forestall this cruelty by telling our Congressfolk to protect these good folks with legislation, as Win Without War helps you do.

In other news, ICE personnel have been collecting your driver's license photo without your consent! Do they need your consent, you ask? Well, are you the target of an ICE investigation? If no, then no -- they would need a warrant to get that photo, but you know our government thinks warrants are quaint, and anyway TEH CARAVANZ WILLZ KILLZ USZ ALLZ!!!!!! Have any legislatures authorized ICE to collect driver's license photos willy-nilly? No, they have not -- but too many DMVs have proven too cooperative when ICE "asks" to get these photos. But why do they need photos of your grandmother who's been here 96 years? For their facial recognition technology, of course -- you know, the technology that thinks all black folks look alike. Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to head off this clusterfrack of lawlessness and incompetence by banning ICE from accessing DMV databases.

Finally, the biggest oil leak in American history continues unabated, with the Taylor Energy Corporation still leaking 4,500 gallons daily into the Gulf of Mexico, as it's done for the past 14 years. I don't need to tell you how awful 4,500 gallons of oil a day is for the creatures who live in the Gulf, but I have to say I'm also appalled by the waste. This leak has spewed almost 23 million gallons of oil into the Gulf over the years; maybe that's the proverbial drop in a bucket to a big corporation, but the average American drives 12,000 miles a year, and at 25 miles per gallon, would use around 480 gallons of gas, deriving from about 1,000 gallons of crude, meaning you and about 1,640 of your friends could have been driving around on that oil all these years, instead of it just leaking away and polluting the Gulf. So Environmental Action tell our EPA to stop Taylor Energy from leaking oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Action: concerning working families, immigration, discrimination, and climate change.

H.R. 3590, the Building Our Opportunities to Survive and Thrive (or BOOST) Act, would enact a new tax credit of $3,000 annually for folks making less than $50,000 -- said credit would be higher for heads of household making less than $80,000 and married couples making less than $100,000 -- and the worst thing I can say about the BOOST Act is that it suggests we pay for it by repealing most of the 2017 Republican tax "reform" and enacting a fee on banksters with more than $50 billion in capital, when it should just be doing these things. Naturally the right is hysterical about it -- they're crying WHOZE WILL TEH PAYZ FOR TEH ITZ!!!! (psst: I just told you) and TEH PEEPULZ WILL WORKZ TEH LESSEZ!!!!, to which I have two responses: 1) you say that like it's an unqualified evil and 2) some folks clearly overestimate what folks would do with $3,000. Quit their jobs? C'mon, we all pay bills. CREDO helps you tell your House Reps to support working families by passing the BOOST Act.

Meanwhile, the tech corporation Palantir has become notorious lately for its huge contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (or ICE), and though corporate spokeshacks have long said Palantir software doesn't contribute to our Administration's deportations, internal emails beg to differ. And while I wouldn't be upset at the mere possibility that Palantir helps our government deports undocumented immigrants, fact is they lied about it, instead of making the case that they were helping our government do necessary work. But then again, perhaps they lied about it because they're also helping our Administration tear children from their families, which civilized people generally agree is inhumane. Palantir has already suffered a bit from the Big Stick of Bad PR, but that only means more of us need to wield it! Hence Free Press (among other good government groups) helps you tell Palantir to break off its ties to ICE.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell big corporations like AT&T and Amazon to stop donating big wads of cash to politicians who are pro-discrimination against gay and transgender folks, then CREDO still helps you do that. A lot of big corporations position themselves as gay- and transgender-friendly these days, but they still support candidates who aren't, and we're all tired of excuses like "we support them for the economic issues, not the bigotry." And in and of itself, corporate pro-gay and pro-transgender positioning is of limited utility, and if corporations align with Democrats on social issues, that's all the more incentive for Democrats not to pressure corporations on economic issues. Indeed, it's almost like that's the whole idea! But if corporations cut off monetary support for pro-discrimination politicians, just so happens they'll also starve right-wing economic ideas of oxygen, too.

Finally, our United States Geological Survey (or USGS), upon whose research the National Climate Assessment draws in part, will now use scientific models that can forecast climate change's effects only up until 2040, even though most models forecast through the end of the century, and even though basically everyone knows that the worst effects of climate change will come after 2040. That'll teach the National Climate Assessment to embarrass our President! Clearly this Administration -- currently dueling with Tha Bush Mobb for the dubious honor of "most anti-science government of modern times" -- would rather you didn't know how bad climate change is going to get, lest it affect their plans to help fossil fuel CEOs redistribute ever more income upward to themselves. So Penn Environment helps you tell our USGS to abandon its plans to fudge climate change science for the benefit of big polluting corporations.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence, net neutrality, humane immigration policy, and voting rights.

If you've missed previous opportunities to call your Senators to tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, and H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act, well, it's not too late, because Senate Majority Leader "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell still refuses to hold a vote on any of these House-passed bills, since "I get to decide what we vote on," like the voters made him Sultan-with-Absolute-Power or something. And now you can add H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act, which our House passed late last week. So, we've got bills that promote voting rights, civil rights for gay and transgender folk, paycheck fairness for women who don't get paid the same way men do, internet freedom for all Americans, and a $15/hour minimum wage by 2025; these are all good things, and our Senators should support them. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Senators' phone numbers. You may have to call local numbers; I've found the D.C. numbers hardly work anymore, for whatever reason.

While you've got your Senators on the phone: the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals may rule this week on our FCC's so-called "Restoring Internet Freedom" rule from 2017 -- the rule that repealed the 2015 Open Internet Order that made net neutrality the law of the land -- and if it strikes the 2017 net neutrality repeal down, the big telecom corporations will be in your Reps' and Senators' ears with a quickness, trying to get bogus "net neutrality" legislation passed so that big telecoms will still be able to block and slow down the websites you want to see. So tell your Senators that, if the D.C. Circuit rules against the 2017 net neutrality repeal, you want them to leave the 2015 Open Internet order as-is and reject any bill the big telecoms push. Big telecoms are among the least popular corporations in America because of their monopolist practices and lousy service -- but our politicians love them, because they give lots of money to political campaigns, so politicians would prefer to do their will, rather than ours. That just means we have to make our will unmistakeable. (Be sure to call your House Reps afterward.)

In other news, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight our Administration's monstrous behavior in re immigrants by passing H.R. 2203, the Homeland Security Improvement Act, and H.R. 3239, the Humanitarian Standards for Individuals in Customs and Border Protection Custody Act. H.R. 2203 would (among other good works) create a National Commission to investigate the inhumane practices conducted by our Administration and would prohibit family separation of would-be immigrants except under extreme circumstances (i.e., if the parents are abusing the children). H.R. 3239 would (among other good works) spell out food/water/shelter requirements for detainees -- you recall that this Administration told the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that no law actually compels them to provide soap to detainee children! -- and would establish procedures for our Homeland Security Inspector General and our Government Accounting Office to oversee our Administration's detainment practices. Our House could vote on both these bills any day now (they both passed out of committee last week), so let's make sure we communicate our will to our Reps.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you demand that state governments restore all voting rights to formerly-incarcerated citizens without making them pay fines or fees. Let's not get stuck in the weeds over whether you should pay all your debts to society in addition to serving your sentence before you get your right to vote back, because you should never lose your right to vote in the first place. I don't care if you're a murderer, a child molester, or a corporate criminal -- you should never lose your right to vote. I put "corporate criminal" in there, of course, just to remind everyone why certain state politicians pressed to force felons to lose their voting rights in the first place -- because of racism! Politicians know that our justice system mainly puts folks of color in prison, at much higher numbers than white folks and usually for much smaller crimes than the kind big corporate executives get away with, hence taking away their voting rights is a way of keeping them down even when they're out of prison. So let's not let racism rule our lives.

Around the table: concerning some of the difficulties we face in pushing the Overton Window leftward.

I sympathize with Alan MacLeod's frustration that "To Media, No Democrat Can Possibly Be Right-Wing" -- after all, it wasn't that long ago that Georgia Democratic Sen. Richard Russell helped found the Conservative Coalition, and that the American Conservative Union ranked the late Georgia Democratic Rep. Larry McDonald behind only Ron Paul as the most conservative House Rep. But I will say it's nice to finally hear our media call folks like Nancy Pelosi "center-left" instead of pretend (as they did for almost two decades!) that no one in America could possibly be further left than she. This is yet another reason I'm glad Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib are in Congress -- and in America.

In a peripherally-related note, the incomparable Duncan Black, a.k.a. Atrios, answers the vexing question "Why Don't Democratic Senate Candidates in Purple States Support Popular Things" (like a higher minimum wage), and he answers it better than anyone else I've heard. Races in purple states, he says, "are generally going to be tough/close races, but the calculation is not 'boy if I support a higher minimum wage then the voters will get mad.' The calculation is 'boy if I support a higher minimum wage then the voters will like that, BUT the Chamber of Commerce types will dump a bunch of money into the race to oppose me and run ads calling me a child molester (or highlighting something else that might be unpopular about me).'" All of that is true, but it also demands a counterpunch from the candidate like "how about that -- I support a minimum wage hike and suddenly my opponents are lying about me! Don't let them take you hostage!"

Dino Grandoni at the Washington Post explains, with the help of a perhaps too-understated headline, how our "EPA's New 'No Surprises' Inspection Policy Has Some Critics Worried." You remember from school how all your surprise quizzes didn't really count if you didn't do well on them? You don't? Of course you don't! It boggles the mind how Republicans can claim to be the "party of personal responsibility" but also ensure that polluters won't have to put up with surprise inspections which is often the only way to catch polluters. Of course, for our President's votaries, "personal responsibility" is only for black people -- "belonging to the club" is what matters to them, and that's what no-surprise-inspections signifies to them. If Democrats had any courage, they'd run attack ads on this basis, and make the moral argument I've described, but you already know what the chances of that are.

In a peripherally-related note, our President opines that wind power "doesn't work" without taxpayer help. Given the price parity wind has achieved with fossil fuels in many parts of our nation, I rather suspect it would work without subsidies, but gauging whether wind power would work without subsidies now really isn't the point -- we're supposed to subsidize good technologies that need more research and more time to develop. Also, too, oil and gas get about the same amount of subsidies annually as wind power, so if our President "(doesn't) want to be subsidizing things that don't need to be subsidized," where's his enthusiasm for ending that slab of corporate welfare? And if he's so hot to stop handing out taxpayer money to energy sources that "don't work," where's his enthusiasm for ending handouts for nuclear power, which has lost money for a much longer period of time? (I notice he didn't tell other heads of state about the "piles and piles of dead birds" no one finds at the base of windmills. Clearly he saves those stories for us rubes.)

Defense contractor apparently leaves voice mail message threatening Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-FL) over her introduction of a bill that would force public schools to ensure all their students are properly-vaccinated. Read the transcript of this phone call in its entirety, and you'll marvel at the continued existence of folks who have clearly never contemplated the benefits of deep breathing. And remember, folks: "I’m gonna kill your ass if you do that bill, I swear" is a terroristic threat, and therefore not protected by our First Amendment! I hope Rep. Wilson responds to this threat by fighting harder for this bill.

Finally, the New York Times reminds us that "Using Race for Gain" is an "Old Tactic" for our President. Yes, his settlement of that 1970s investigation into his apparent refusal to rent to black folks and his emptiest-wagon trumpeting of the "guilt" of the Central Park Five leapt to mind even before I got to paragraph nine. If you accept that race-baiting is a pattern with our President, as I do, then of course you regard reports that he "didn't...fully underst(and) what he was doing when he unleashed last week's racist tweetstorm as utter bullshit. And worse, as drama.

Action: concerning copyright trolls and corporate tax loopholes.

H.R. 2426/S. 1273, the Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement (or CASE) Act, should set off your alarm bells first with the tortured acronym of its title and then with the word "alternative," because guess what "alternative" they're talking about? That's right, an "alternative" to settling small copyright-related claims in a court of law! Why our courts and our laws never seem to be good enough for our politicians I'll never know, but the CASE Act would let "claims officers" in our Copyright Office to hear copyright complaints and assess fines -- which would essentially enable copyright trolls to stamp copyrights on everything that ain't nailed down and then get an expedited hearing about the matter which will almost certainly go in their favor. There's a reason they might not try that in an actual court of law, you know. Thus the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect law and order by rejecting the CASE Act.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to close corporate tax loopholes that benefit for-profit private prison corporations, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. S. 1827, the Ending Tax Breaks for Private Prisons Act, would prevent corporations that operate prisons from being able to call themselves a real estate investment trust (or REIT) subsidiary, which sure sounds like a loophole even if you've never heard of a REIT before. A REIT is, per section 856 of our Internal Revenue Code, "any corporation, trust or association that acts as an investment agent specializing in real estate and real estate mortgages"; mainly that means office complexes, shopping centers, and apartment buildings, but private prison corporations? That sure does seem to violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the law, and we could put "following the spirit of the law" another way: doing the right thing.

Around the table: dancing on the edge of "peak decadence."

Our President's racism is "Not Blundering," announces William Rivers Pitt at TruthOut, but is "Tactically Deliberate." "An instance of horrifying racism becomes merely 'expected' from the president," Mr. Pitt writes, "and then he moves on to another one, and then another, and another after that. He and his administration are laboring to normalize the grotesque." Of course, Tha Bush Mobb also "set() the bar so low it is barely visible," even though Mr. Bush took great pains to avoid saying something actually racist. And Democrats won't win by straining to be "the party of civility"; they need to be the party of changing the damn subject from this awful President's latest flatugasm to what we-the-people want our America to be. At last count, only two Democrats running for President (Sens. Sanders and Warren, in case you hadn't guessed) might be able to do that.

Philadelphia, PA District Attorney Larry Krasner argues that the death penalty violates the state constitution. But though the flesh is willing, the heart asks whether the death penalty "cannot survive the state Constitution’s ban on cruel punishments" merely because his office has found that the state overturned almost three out of every four death sentences between 1978 and 2015; you'd have to at least compare that data to what's gone on in other states over the same time period. Still, to decide that it's constitutional, I would think you'd also have to prove that it could work if the legislature could fix it, and I'm less certain any legislature can do that, and not just because executing the wrong person ain't something you can take back.

Study finds correlation between broadband availability and higher housing values in rural areas, and why not? People like their internet, and people get a lot out of it, too. Interestingly, the higher broadband speeds (250 Mbps and up) seem to have no effect on housing prices; possibly (the authors theorize) because speeds like that are relatively new to rural areas, or because rural folks don't care exactly how fast their broadband is. I incline more to the explanation that once folks get the opportunity to "becom(e) civically-engaged, reduc(e) isolation, and even (improving) income generation," they don't really care about exactly how few nanoseconds it takes to reap these boons.

Sam Pizzigati at the Our Future blog asks: "Have We Hit Peak Decadence?" I'll admit I was tempted to answer in terms of our President's ongoing dramas and what evils we seem willing to tolerate from politicians as long as they're on our "team," but I was pleased to see Mr. Pizzigati pivot immediately to the burgeoning "super-penthouse" phenomenon. As long as I've been alive, the penthouse apartment has been synonymous with decadence, but now you've got super-penthouses with 10,000 square feet, a 360-degree view of the city below, and (oftentimes) more than one floor. And the folks who own them don't own just one of them, either! Sadly, every time you think we've "peaked," there are more peaks to climb. Are billion-dollar, building-sized penthouses that far off? And how many more overworked, underpaid people will they create?

Finally, another day, another Republican warning that if Democrats move too far left, then 2020 could be 1972 all over again. I'd agree with Mr. Sykes that national Democrats shouldn't simply be the mirror opposite of our President on immigration, and I also agree that our President's racist "go back to wherever you came from" flatugasma resonated with a lot of Americans. But here's a major difference between 1972 and 2020: Richard Nixon knew better than to say the proverbial quiet parts out loud. And, as I've suggested above, the best way to counter all these hypothetical attack ads on cherry-picked positions is to run ads about how your actual agenda will help us make a more perfect union. Of course, we have a more compelling reason not to make 2020 a "referendum" on our President: he loves being the center of attention, and people who love being the center of attention like that need to be ignored. (Not a lot of Democratic 2018 campaign ads even mentioned our President, you know. In fact, the only Democrat who did mention him in my media market lost.)

Action: concerning immigration and the minimum wage.

Tiana Smalls has started a petition on Change.org which helps you tell the Greyhound bus corporation to stop letting immigration agents on their buses without a warrant. "Without a warrant" is the key phrase here -- with a warrant, Greyhound would have to let them on, but Greyhound lets these agents on warrant or not, surely knowing that they transport a lot of immigrants all across our great nation, and thus Greyhound enables border agents in violating folks' rights. If you're tempted to say YOU JUST WANTZ TEH OPEN BORDURZ!!!!!, please attend the phrase "without a warrant" again. And generally I would advise you to look into your own past and see where your ancestors might were mistreated for being "strangers," because almost all of us have some of that in our history, and whatever privilege you now enjoy only came to you on the backs of the generations of good Americans who suffered hardship and ostracization.

Along those lines, CREDO helps you tell big online retail corporation Amazon to stop helping this Administration oppress immigrants. What's that, you say? Our President is always attacking Amazon's CEO, Jeff Bezos? Well, that's all drama, because Amazon has been gobbling up government contracts related to our Administration's animus against immigrants -- Palantir's Investigative Case Management system, which has helped our Administration ramp up surveillance and targeting of immigrant populations, now uses Amazon Web Services as a cloud computing host, and AWS also hosts a big chunk of our Department of Homeland Security's databases, too. Amazon is also trying to sell its notorious "facial recognition" software, the pretentiously-titled Rekognition, even though Rekognition is notorious in the first place because, like your Tea Party uncle, it can hardly tell black people apart. And being a part of the New Concentration Camps is surely Bad PR if anything is.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 582/S. 150, the Raise the Wage Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. Your House Reps could be voting on this bill any day now, and even though minimum wage hikes get routinely passed by states and localities all over America, and even though the $15/hour minimum wages adopted in some cities have not resulted in the hysterical forecasts promulgated by doomsayers, they're still at it, so they need to hear from you. But don't believe the hype that a higher minimum wage "kills jobs." Our CBO has indeed reported that a $15/hour minimum wage would displace somewhere between zero and 3.7 million jobs by 2025 (the median figure was 1.3 million), but consider that even this highly-unequal economy typically creates close to 2.5 million new jobs every year, and consider, also, that the CBO reported that 17 million workers would make more money. Surely that's a consideration, amirite?

Action: concerning Senate obstruction, our President's tax returns, and protections for working families.

Today's another good day to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, and H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act. (You can find your Senators' phone numbers using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page -- or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page.) Why is Mob Boss Mitch blocking them from a Senate vote? Because he doesn't want his members to go on record opposing voting rights, internet freedom, tools for workers to rectify pay gaps, and civil rights for gay and transgender folk. He also doesn't want our President to go on record as opposing these things, once he vetoes the bills. If this all sounds like the opposite of courage to you, well, you're not alone. And if House Democrats don't run thousands of ads in 2020 touting their votes in favor of these bills, that'll be the opposite of courage, too.

Meanwhile, now that the state of New York has passed a bill mandating that the state comply with Congressional requests to turn over tax returns on state residents, CREDO helps you tell House Democrats to actually request our President's tax returns. House Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal (D-MA) has been strangely slow in making that request, but that's why we're here: to remind our Congressfolk of our will. And though our President's apologists call this "Presidential harassment" -- a phrase that sure does sound like whining! -- fact is we have plenty of probable cause to start an investigation into his tax returns, beginning with his own refusal to release them and continuing on through New York Times reporting on our President's massive alleged tax fraud. And if we nail him for tax fraud, what will his apologists say? That it's OK for our President to cheat on his taxes? Well, perhaps I shouldn't tempt fate with these fools.

Finally, H.R. 2474/S. 1306, the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (or PRO Act), would, as its title suggests, give workers tools with which to organize and collectively bargain for better pay and working conditions. Specifically, the PRO Act would stiffen penalties for employers who interfere with employee organizing efforts (including votes!), and close a lot of current loopholes in our labor laws, which corporations have been driving Mack trucks through lately. You remember how our Supreme Court ruled that Kentucky nurses could be classified as "supervisors" on hysterically flimsy pretexts? Well, the PRO Act would fix that. You remember how FedEx classified all its drivers as "independent contractors" just so they could avoid paying health insurance and also so they could make their drivers pay for their own trucks? The PRO Act would fix that, too. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support working families by passing the PRO Act.

Action: concerning humane treatment of prisoners and unconstitutional war.

Two years ago, when Hurricane Harvey slammed into Louisiana and Texas, did our state and federal governments move prisoners who couldn't get out of the hurricane's way? No, they did not. And are they planning to do so now that another storm is about to hit the Gulf Coast? Not unless we tell them to, in numbers they can't ignore, so Roots Action helps you tell federal, state, and local officials to move their prisoners out of the storm's path. If you're saying if they didn't want to be left in the path of a major storm they shouldn't have done the crime, just navigate away from this page right now -- if you won't treat your prisoners humanely, you have no business calling yourself a civilization. And if you're saying WHEREZ IZ TEH MONEYZ COMINGZ FROMZ!!!!!, don't be the fool who advocated for more tax cuts for the rich and more corporate tax cuts. As anyone acquainted with arithmetic would tell you, actions have consequences.

Meanwhile, the House did pass an amendment to its defense authorization bill that would prevent our President from waging war on Iran without Congressional approval, but as you know, that's exactly the kind of amendment that dies in conference, hence Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1039, the Prevention of Unconstitutional War with Iran Act. You may have heard that the British Ambassador to the United States claimed that our President abandoned the Iran nuclear deal in order to "spite" President Obama. I don't know whether that's true or not -- it fits our President's penchant for drama! -- but he certainly didn't abandon it because it wasn't working, and now he has a Secretary of State and a National Security Advisor (both of whom he picked after firing their predecessors) who are constantly agitating for war with Iran. So let's remind our President that his job is to listen to us.

Around the table: tabulating yet more Presidential drama and Democrat weakness.

Factcheck.org reviews our President's recent speech trumpeting his alleged environmental accomplishments, and finds it wanting. I'd almost hoped to report that our President was as clever a liar as George W. Bush, but some of what Factcheck tabulates are just flat-out lies easily refuted, and naturally our President regurgitates the $100 trillion Green New Deal number when even its originator has admitted he doesn't really know how to measure the cost (like, by, you know, tabulating how much we'd save in health care costs, disaster relief costs, and the like). Also, too, we still have clean air and clean water to a large degree because our federal courts have slapped down almost every Administration attempt to gut clean air and clean water regulations.

Our President twitters that certain liberal Congresswomen who emigrated here should stop "loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run" and instead "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came." If you heard the ghost of go back to Africa!, I wouldn't blame you, and I doubt he really hears them as "loud" and "vicious" merely because they fight his evil -- rather, he hopes you do, so you'll live vicariously through him. Of course, people come here from "totally broken" places all the time -- often to avoid being murdered themselves! -- and then our First Amendment protects them when they opine, as we all do, about how we'd like to make a more perfect union. That's America, folks. And those who agree with our President really ought to consider, as always, whether constant enragement is really good for their health.

From Kaiser Health News we learn that despite federal laws that are supposed to prevent this sort of thing, rape victims still get billed for forensic exams they undergo afterward. Think of how you'd feel if you kept getting slammed with bills after you got raped! We need better, more precise laws -- the yet-to-be-reauthorized Violence Against Women Act cuts off certain federal grants to states that don't cover these costs, and maybe that was all that would pass in 1994, but a better idea would be to simply make it illegal to charge rape victims for rape kits. Sadly, that's the kind of thing politicians tend not to push on their own, but as part of larger legislative efforts. The next politician who does that might find it better to prioritize good works above "not stepping on other legislators' toes."

Please please please do not attend the "conservative" "reaction" to our President's apparent "cave" on his Census citizenship question, because like everything else with this President it's drama, and bad drama at that. His "conservative allies" can whine all they want about "whether they should support this guy if he's not going to fight," but rest assured they will all turn out for him in 2020, and they'll probably cite some unrelated, whipped-up drama about the Democratic nominee as being more important than whatever betrayal they've lately experienced.

Finally, dig this bit of moderate, centrist pandering emanating from Young Fresh Fellow Pete Buttigieg, who says (in re Medicare-for-All and student loan debt) that "we should be realistic about what’s going to work" and that "just flipping a switch and saying we’re instantly going to have everybody on Medicare just like that — isn’t realistic." If he'd read the Medicare-for-All bill, he'd already know that the bill won't get everyone on Medicare for four years, so discussing how we're "instantly going to have everybody on Medicare" is typical straw-man arguing. And of course saying Medicare-for-All is "pretty far out...from where Americans are" isn't borne out by polling consistently showing majority or supermajority support. The good news? The No-We-Can't caucus -- of which Mr. Buttigieg aspires to be leader, though his big-donor fundraising hasn't yet translated into better polling numbers -- ain't that big in America. The bad news? It sure does seem concentrated among Our Glorious Elites.

Around the table: here, have some more of the red pill!

Federal immigration officials are using "gang databases" to conduct their nefarious family-separation-at-the-border activities. You remember "gang databases," right? The databases you might find yourself in for no reason, particularly if you're a person of color? The ones you can't challenge if you somehow discover your inclusion therein, in violation of your habeus corpus rights? So, to sum, our government is using bad information to conduct bad policies. Of course, we as Americans deserve better, and I'll brook no rubbish about ZOMG TEH MS-13 GANGZ ARE COMINZ FORZ TEH YOUZ!!!!! Being afraid of MS-13 is a lot like being afraid of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction in 2002. And if Democrats don't run a Presidential candidate who actually tells the truth, our current President will use the BS-13 to fearmonger his way to victory.

Speaking of fearmongering, our Department of Defense does not actually have any evidence that Iran killed over 600 American troops during the Iraq war. As of late June of 2016, we've lost 4,424 troops in that nefarious war, so 600 sure does sound like a lot, doesn't it? And dig how they said "608," because an exact number is always true! Read the whole thing, because the pro-war arguments don't get any better -- they're easily refutable with mainstream media reporting, in fact, and this from a media that loves war. All of this does beg the question: if you're worried about Shiite Muslims having too much power in the Middle East, why topple Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Muslim, in the first place? And why should we as Americans allow the past to hold is hostage in the present and the future? Yeah, waging war on Iran sure does look like piling shit on top of shit and hoping it magically turns into a house.

And speaking of the forked tongue of certain Democratic Presidential candidates, Marjorie Cohn at TruthOut reminds us that "Kamala Harris Has a Distinguished Career of Serving Injustice." As soon as you realized that her position on federally-mandated busing is the same as the former Vice President whom she attacked in that debate, you probably already suspected that, but it's nice to have the full story of how she ran interference for jail trusties who illegally elicited confessions, how she wouldn't allow DNA testing on a death row inmate who was probably innocent, and how she opposed a bill requiring her office to investigate police shootings while she was California's Attorney General. And she didn't investigate the "foreclosure king," now-Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, when she had the chance! Also, too, where's she been on cash bail reform? Far behind Philadelphia's Larry Krasner, that's where.

Dave Zirin at The Nation explains "Why No One Watches Baseball Anymore," and I'd say the problem may be even worse than Mr. Zirin describes: the sheer length of the game turns people off, but even that is a symptom of the real problem -- that the game's gotten so damn thinky-think that players and managers hardly play anymore. Now they grow every pitcher to throw hard and strike people out, and every team carries 12 or 13 of them for every conceivable situation, so pitchers don't know what to do anymore when they get tattooed, as happens to all of them in time. And these days they grow every hitter to "be patient" and hit home runs, so now hitters can't execute a simple hit-and-run or a sacrifice bunt, which speeds up the game as much as it spices it up. You'll recognize baseball's other problems from, well, everything else in our civilization -- the Commissioner tinkers with "limiting mound visits" and "shortening time between innings" with all the imagination of an accountant, and cable TV deals and public stadium-financing make baseball owners rich without having to do very much actual work. Thus, between baseball's boredom and football's head trauma, basketball stands poised to become our national pastime.

Finally, former Air Force Colonel/failed House candidate Amy McGrath raised a boatload of cash on her first day challenging Mob Boss Mitch in Kentucky's 2020 Senate race, but then she took two distinct and opposite positions on the 2018 nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to our Supreme Court in a matter of hours. Folks, this is why Democrats lose elections -- not because they don't relate to racists enough, not because they're not pro-life enough, and certainly not because they're not "pro-business" enough, but because everyone can tell they don't mean what they say. Calling Matt Jones!

Action: concerning unconstitutional war, Senate obstruction, and working families.

The House plans to vote on amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act today, so now's the time to call your House Reps (using the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page, if you're viewing it on a computer, or the bottom of this page if you're on a cellphone) and tell them to vote in favor of a) the Khanna amendment that would prevent our President from participating in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen, and b) the Khanna-Gaetz amendment that would prevent our President from waging war on Iran without Congressional authorization. Just Foreign Policy also advises us not only to tell our Congressfolk to vote in favor of these amendments, but also to tell them to push for a recorded vote. Congressfolk would prefer to pass these amendments "en bloc" via voice vote -- which tells everyone how many folks voted in favor of an amendment but not which way individual Congressfolk voted. But how can we hold our representatives accountable for what they do if we don't know how they vote?

Once you're off the phone with your House Reps, you can call your Senators and tell them to pass the following bills: H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, and H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act. We've discussed these bills at some length; they would, respectively, protect voting rights more vigorously, extend civil rights protections to gay and transgender folks, give working folks more tools to fight pay discrimination, and reinstate the FCC's 2015 pro-net neutrality order as the law of the land. Of course Senate Majority Leader "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell won't bring these House-passed bills up for a vote, because (and I quote) "I get to decide what we vote on." By his actions, we know that Mr. McConnell believes the American people should not challenge the "right" of Our Glorious Elites to run (and ruin!) everything. If that belief sounds singularly un-American to you, then you would want to reassert your power as an American by communicating your will to your Senators.

Finally, H.R. 2474/S. 1306, the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, would (as its title suggests!) enhance workers' ability to protect themselves via collective bargaining on wages and working conditions. Specifically, the bill would make it harder for corporations to reclassify employees as "independent contractors," would clarify the National Labor Relations Act's definition of "supervisor" to prevent corporations from pretending their employees are "supervisors" when they're really not, and would stiffen penalties for many offenses corporations perpetrate against working folk. Right-wingers would complain that working folks don't have a "right" to organize, but these are the same folks who argue that bosses have the right to do whatever they like regardless of whom it hurts, so how much credibility do they have? People for the American Way (among other groups) helps you tell your Congressfolk to support working families by passing the Protecting the Right to Organize Act.

Action: concerning monopolies, ubiquitous advertising, and the minimum wage.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to break up big tech corporations. The House Judiciary Committee is holding hearings on this matter as we speak, so now's as good a time as any to communicate your will. I'm sure some folks out there think this world would be a whole lot bleaker without same-day shipping from Amazon and instant answers to almost any question from Google and the ability to connect with almost anyone on Facebook, but fact is Amazon's crushing of small businesses, Google's on-again, off-again collaboration with the totalitarian government of China, and Facebook's apparent inability to protect your private data (to name just three problems with big tech corporations!) all make this a bleaker world. Besides which, do you really believe the boons big tech have given us simply wouldn't exist without big tech monopolies? Small businesses invented virtually everything of consequence on the internet, then big corporations gobbled them up and acted like we could never live without them. But we can certainly dream better than that.

Meanwhile, a Russian corporation wants to put giant billboards in space. No, really: it wants to launch a bunch of satellites that'll display logos of prominent products three miles above the Earth. Thing is, you can't just "change the channel" if you don't like it (an argument I've long found wanting anyway) -- you look up, and it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it. What, are proponents of this plan really going to say just don't look up at the sky? But then, people say all kinds of stupid crap these days without any apparent self-editing. Let's head off such embarrassment by allowing Penn Environment to help us tell our Congressfolk to outlaw "space billboards." No use retorting that if some other country is going to do it, then why shouldn't we? That's not what being a civilized person is all about -- sometimes, it's about being civilized even when you know you're going to lose, because future generations might learn from you. So let's have them learn the right things, OK?

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to give working families a raise by passing H.R. 582/S. 150, the Raise the Wage Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. The Raise the Wage Act would raise the minimum wage in America from $7.25/hour to $15/hour over the next five years, and it would eventually bring minimum wages for tipped and disabled workers into parity with the minimum wage for the rest of us. You won't be surprised to learn that Republicans oppose the bill, given that so few of them know (or remember) what it's like to work three jobs because you have to, but you might be surprised to learn -- oh, forget it, you won't actually be surprised to learn that some corporatist Democrats also oppose the minimum wage. But states and municipalities have been hiking the minimum wage -- without ill effects -- at the behest of their voters for many years now, so it seems, as it too often does, like a lot of politicians are behind the times. But that's why we're here: to bring our representatives up to speed.

Action: concerning banksters, immigration, and privacy.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would impose a small financial transaction tax on big Wall Street banksters, then Americans for Tax Fairness would still help you do that. The bills in question are H.R. 1516/S. 647, the Wall Street Tax Act, which would impose a 0.1% tax on financial transactions including stock and derivative trades, and H.R. 2923/S. 1587, the Inclusive Prosperity Act, which would impose a range of taxes (from 0.005% to 0.5%) on same; the highest tax imposed here would be $5 per $1,000 in trades. Folks on the right are calling this a "tax on my 401(k)," as if all financial speculation winds up in pension funds, and as if $5 per $1,000 is onerous -- and as if reducing the number of trades banksters make, which these bills would do, wouldn't actually stabilize markets. Most people understand all of this intuitively -- unless, of course, their salary depends on them not understanding it. But if we get it, we must act.

Meanwhile, I have two private prison-related action alerts for you: in one, Color of Change (among others) helps you tell your Congressfolk to close a loophole that allows private prison corporations to avoid taxes, and in the other, Moms Rising helps you tell two big banking corporations to pull their investments from private prison corporations. Both of these are also concentration camp-related, of course, since this Administration thinks detaining immigrants in inhumane conditions and funneling taxpayer money to corporate cronies is a two-fer. Even the Obama Administration had started getting private prisons out of the immigrant detainment business; the least we can do is hold the folks who work for us (i.e., our government) accountable to us. And certainly private prison corporations deserve no special treatment from our tax code; at least S. 1827, the Ending Tax Breaks for Private Prisons Act, would stop private prison corporations from calling themselves "Real Estate Investment Trusts."

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell three big airline corporations (JetBlue, Delta, and American) to stop using facial scanning technology on their customers. Why? Well, we'll begin with the airlines' explanation: it makes things faster! After all, presenting your boarding pass or your passport (which biometric screening would replace) takes several seconds, and Delta claims that using biometric screening saves a whole nine minutes per flight. Would you want to take "I saved nine minutes per flight" to the Pearly Gates? I didn't think so -- it would display a distinct lack of imagination. The downside, meanwhile, is that we don't have a whole lot of law covering facial scanning, so who knows how long the airlines hold on to the information or which government agency they give it to without a warrant? Yeah, I know the airlines say they don't store the info, but you don't trust corporations more than you trust your government, do you? Of course you don't. So let's not trade liberty for convenience.

Action: concerning unconstitutional war-making and big telecom gouging of prisoners and their families.

Reps. Khanna (D-CA) and Gaetz (R-FL) have proposed an amendment to the defense authorization bill that would prevent our President from taking military action against Iran without Congressional authorization. Don't believe the hype that this President "doesn't want war," because no President is stupid enough to tell you they want war anymore -- they all act like "they have no choice," even when they themselves bring about the conditions that would "force" them into war, in this case by withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal that absolutely positively kept Iran from getting nukes. Also remember that this is the President who justified staying friends with Saudi Arabia by saying Iran was worse. Also remember that nine-year economic expansions don't last forever. The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to support an end to constant unconstitutional war-making by supporting the Khanna-Gaetz amendment.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to stop big telecom corporations from gouging prisoners by passing S. 1764, the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. The late Mrs. Wright-Reed started campaigning for affordable calls from families to loved ones in prison after realizing that she had enough money to get the medicine she needed to survive or talk to her grandson in prison, but not both, and the sad thing is I know some right-winger out there would respond to that story with some combination of she just should have found a way or get a job! or learn a new employable skill. I got a better idea: why don't we stop big corporations from stealing money from us? Why should anyone have to pay $25 for a 15-minute phone call? Is it civilized to heap punishment after punishment upon prisoners (and their families!) just to prove what big balls we have? Or is that just drama?

Around the table: describing the continuing follies of Our Glorious Elites.

Our President is still trying to think of a way to ask your citizenship status on the 2020 census. Whatever he tries (executive order, addendum to the form) will no doubt die a brutal death in court, and the sooner the better, but with this guy you always have to consider whether success is really his goal, and not just because he's made so much money off his own failures. He may aim to show his votaries that he's "trying," or put the scare back into immigrants filling out census forms. He already has Republicans thinking he's actually cut regulations, when courts have mostly stymied his efforts.

From Fox 5 in San Francisco we learn that housing prices have gotten so high in some places (like, ah, San Francisco) that some folks are willing to pay $1200 a month just to have a bunk. Just in case you didn't get enough of dorm living in college! Meanwhile, the absurdly rich still own dozens of homes they leave empty and don't even rent out to people because, really, they're just places to park money so it doesn't get taxed by The Man. I'm starting to think J.G. Ballard may not have known the half of it.

And now Joe Biden complains, after that rough first debate, that "(w)e're supposed to be talking about and competing about what we’re going to do about the future," not "go(ing) back and pick(ing) something about somebody’s past, out of context," which of course you'd say if you've established a nearly-50-year record of capitulation to power. Remember, "most qualified Presidential candidate ever" wound up being a liability for Hillary Clinton in 2016. All that being said, he's right about Sen. Harris essentially having the same position as him on busing. Get used to that from her.

From the "Things We Shouldn't Waste Our Time With But (Sigh) Have To" file: no, that meme about Democratic Presidential candidates saying bad words three bazillion times and not saying "America" enough times during the debates is ridiculously wrong. What a shame Factcheck.org even had to go through it! If I may misquote a proverb, stupid seems to get halfway around the world before smart can get its pants on. Are we lucky that stupid never even wears pants and constantly swings its balls in your face? I'm not sure.

Finally, one more time, no one has any business praising our President for making his much-feared July 4th speech relatively drama-free. Yet again he becomes President! But if a man spreads feces all over your walls 23 hours a day, you don't heap praise upon him for taking it easy that other hour. Also, my fellow liberals should really stop making fun of that part of his speech where our President appeared to suppose that George Washington's army defended airports. We should all know by now that our President acts stupid not only to distract liberals from his more nefarious doings, but to provoke liberals to act in such a way that it in turn inflames his votaries against our "arrogance." That's how it worked with Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, so we really ought to be wise to it by now.

Action: concerning overtime pay, student loan debt, and abortion.

H.R. 3197/S. 1786, the Restoring Overtime Pay Act, would essentially restore the overtime pay threshold the Obama Administration's Department of Labor set at around $47,400 -- meaning anyone who makes less than that annually must get time-and-a-half if they work overtime. A federal district court struck the Obama standard down in 2017, ruling (persuasively, I think) that the standard didn't follow the Fair Labor Standards Act, which exempts "any employee employed in a bona fide executive, administrative, or professional capacity" from getting overtime pay. But the Restoring Overtime Pay Act would mandate that employees would have to make around $47,400 annually to be exempted, which is not only a clever workaround, but one that'll get eight million more Americans the overtime pay they deserve! Hence the Economic Policy Institute helps you tell your Congressfolk to help working families by passing the Restoring Overtime Pay Act.

Meanwhile, Education Secretary DeVos -- who has somehow survived over two years in her position -- is actually considering selling federal student loans to banksters! Naturally our Education Department's position is ZOMG TEH DEBTZ IZ OVER $1.5 TRILLYUNZ WE HAVEZ TO DO TEH SOMETHINZ!!!! But using a crisis to justify just any old action is what despots do, and our Administration doesn't want to be looked upon as despots, right? I mean, in America, that's a bad look. Now, they might not actually be able to do this, because the law says they can't sell off federal student loans if that would cost taxpayers money -- and federal student loans generally already make money. But that doesn't mean they won't try, and then dare the courts to stop them. Indeed, that's what they've done so far, and they can't always fail. In any event, CREDO helps you tell our Department of Education not to sell student loans to banksters.

Finally, H.R. 2975/S. 1645, the Women's Health Protection Act, would stop states from outlawing abortion, or otherwise preventing women from getting abortions. This should be a no-brainer, since our Supreme Court's ruling in Roe v. Wade explicitly says states can't outlaw abortion, and even the Roberts Court has found it rather difficult to chip away at abortion rights. The Women's Health Protection Act would also stop states from enacting or enforcing those noxious "ultrasound" bills or making absurd demands of hospitals, to name just two roadblocks states have thrown up in recent years. No one, and I mean no one, likes the idea of abortion. But the idea of compelling women to be breeders no matter their circumstances is worse. If men could give birth, we'd be having a different conversation. Until then, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect women's health by passing the Women's Health Protection Act.

Around the table: concerning health care, bad arguments, bad technology, and patriotism.

Already tired of our "liberal" media calling Medicare-for-All "government-run healthcare"? Well, we've got a response when they say that: "we are the government." They're trying to make you think of spineless bureaucrats making big health care decisions -- you know, like spineless bureaucrats at private health insurance corporations do right now! -- but we need to keep practicing thinking of ourselves when we think of our government. And anyway, that silly polling about folks preferring to keep their private health insurance? Turns out that support collapses when you tell folks they can keep their doctors and hospitals under Medicare-for-All, which is true, since the Medicare-for-All bill would mandate that doctors and hospitals accept Medicare.

Dean Baker at TruthOut says we should "Replace Patent Monopolies With Direct Public Funding for Drug Research." You know, versus the system we have now, where the public funds a significant amount of drug research (some $40 billion annually!) but asserts no power over the results, which is just about a perfect way of socializing the cost while privatizing the profits. And patents bloat these profits, of course, because when you can't get a drug from more than one manufacturer, what are you gonna do about it? Big pharma says they need the patent monopolies because they do a lot of drug research that goes nowhere, but if they're spending $70 billion and we're spending $40 billion, well, let's just say our government could probably get the whole job done for less than $110 billion. And then we-the-people could keep the patents.

Been thinking lately (or for decades!) that maybe the punditry is behind the American people a bit? Jonathan Chait will prove that point for you with all his pearl-clutching about "unpopular stances" Democratic Presidential candidates supposedly take. Not "unpopular stances" like supporting Medicare-for-All, of course, but the "unpopular stance" of "replac(ing) all employer-provided private insurance with a government plan," see how long it took to get all that out? I wonder when I'll ever hear punditoids talk about Republicans taking "unpopular" stances, though they do that all the time. (No, they didn't criticize our President for taking "unpopular" stances during his campaign, but for being generally uncouth.)

FAIR describes "liberal" media efforts to sell "Mayor Pete" Buttigieg as the guy who can unite the big donors and the small donors. The New York Times, naturally, resorts to very fuzzy numbers to make this point, and though you don't need to do differential calculus to expose their flimsy argument, you can also think of Mr. Buttigieg as the Jon Ossoff of 2020. And Mr. Ossoff not only lost that 2017 special election during which he raised all that money, he proved that the district could be won by a different Democrat, since a different Democrat -- someone who actually gave a voters a compelling reason to turn out to vote, since "but I can win" clearly ain't cutting it anymore -- won that district just this past November.

Ho hum, those "aggression-detecting" microphones some schools are using, purportedly to head off the next school shooting, are doing a very bad job, since a girl with a bad cough can set them off (and a girl screaming at the top of her lungs for a drama class apparently can't). Get a cold, become a "misfit" targeted by overzealous school administrators! I hate to sound old-fashioned, but maybe, you know, we should get our heads out of our cellphones and pay more attention to each other, rather than letting "technology" do it for us? And as for heading off the next school shooting, we should a) make it just as hard to get semi-automatic weapons as it is to get automatic weapons and b) stop giving school shooters so damn much media attention.

Finally, Gallup finds a mere 45% of Americans are "extremely proud" of being American, the lowest number ever recorded, and though that number's been falling at least since George W. Bush won a second term, the poll theorizes that it won't go back up until our current President's out of office, whenever that is. Well, as a member of the "extremely proud" camp, I'll happily tell you that our President has nothing to do with my love of my country -- and that's how the Founders wanted it! We invest our love and our patriotism in each other, not in some diaper-loaded brat who got 46% of the vote, struts around like he got 66%, and whines like he got 26%.

Action: concerning immigration, Honduras, and equal pay.

You've all heard the stories coming out of the border concentration camps -- kids sleeping on cement floors, babies left largely unattended, and inadequate soap, food, and water. You may also have heard that our Administration has argued before the 9th Circuit that the law doesn't compel them to provide soap per se. Hence the ACLU helps you tell Congress to investigate the conditions at these concentration camps and hold Customs and Border Patrol accountable for their actions -- which include the deaths of six children in custody -- and Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to address this ongoing humanitarian crisis of our Administration's making. You know how I hate to pile on (i.e., that I don't)? Well, family separation at the border is actually fiscally irresponsible! $775 a day in taxpayer funding to care for one child at a concentration camp! This policy doesn't work on any level!

Meanwhile, the military coup in Honduras -- one enabled by the Obama Administration's hair-splitting over the precise meaning of the word "coup" -- is now 10 years old, and things ain't getting any better for the good people of Honduras, as poverty has grown and the government mocks law and order by imprisoning human rights activists and killing and injuring protestors in the street. But we have leverage: our Congress can pass H.R. 1945, the Berta Cáceres Human Rights in Honduras Act, which would suspend "security" aid to the lawless government of Honduras, and our government could actually enforce the labor standards enshrined in one of those notorious "free" trade deals, the Central America Free Trade Agreement. Hence the International Labor Rights Forum helps you tell our government to stand up for the good people of Honduras. I mean, if this were Venezuela, President Bolton would already have sent 5,000 troops, amirite?

Finally, CREDO helps you tell the U.S. Soccer Federation that the U.S. Women's National Team deserves the same pay and the same standard of medical care as the Men's Team. You may know that one of these two teams has won three World Cup titles and four Olympic gold medals since 1991, and guess what? It's the team that faces more discrimination! The Women's Team got a pay hike in their 2017 collective bargaining agreement with the Soccer Federation, but they still don't get equal pay with the Men's Team that, frankly, isn't nearly as accomplished, and yet the U.S. Soccer Federation still makes the Women's Team play more on injury-causing Astroturf and doesn't promote their matches nearly as much as they do the Men's Team. And no it doesn't matter that "women's soccer doesn't make as much money" -- what matters, in America, is the law, which requires that we pay men and women the same if skill level and responsibilities are the same. That is only fair, after all.

Action: concerning arbitration fairness, pollution, and high drug prices.

H.R. 1423/S. 610, the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal (or FAIR) Act, would (as its title suggests) invalidate any arbitration agreement a corporation forces upon an employee or customer if the dispute concerns employment, product safety, antitrust law, or discrimination. These little "agreements," as you know, force you into an arbitration proceeding generally of your opponent's choosing, which denies you your rightful day in court and also very likely denies you a positive outcome. If this bill passes, we'll never have to hear, again, of folks who get raped in nursing homes but whose families can't sue, or folks whose lenders illegally renew thousand-percent loans but can't sue, or folks whose banks use their names to open fake accounts but can't sue. Really, these are not "frivolous" lawsuits. So Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our right to a day in court by passing the FAIR Act.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell our Army Corps of Engineers to reject the Pebble Mine project in Alaska's Bristol Bay. You probably know the drill by now: mining for copper in Bristol Bay will not only pollute good Alaskans' water and disrupt the unique and fragile ecosystem, but it'll also be the death knell for the Bristol Bay's sockeye salmon industry, one of the world's most famous salmon fisheries and one that supports 14,000 jobs. You probably also know that not even that most inveterate corporate defender, former EPA head Scott Pruitt, could see his way clear to approving the Pebble Mine project, and you probably also know that a lot of Pebble Mine's potential investors have gotten cold feet. But none of that is any reason to be complacent, since we are currently ruled by a President who thinks it's honest work to buy low, suck the wealth out of the resulting failure, and foist the burdens of that failure on the taxpayer. So let's make sure we do our duty.

Finally, a Change.org petition helps you tell Pennsylvania state legislators to cap insulin prices in that state. In days of old (and, who knows, maybe tomorrow, too), right-wingers would have decried such things as TEH PRICE CONTROLZ!!!!! But arguing against "price controls," here, would be the same as arguing in favor of big pharma corporations setting insulin prices so high that diabetics start rationing their insulin and then die. Is it naive to suggest that right-wingers will perhaps exercise some shame at the prospect of being called objectively pro-diabetic death? I kid, of course -- right-wingers tend to recast any shame they deserve as liberal oppression, at which point I say: c'mon, we're either the people who want to give everyone participation trophies or we're the people who are waiting for you in the parking lot with baseball bats, but we can't be both.

Action: concerning law and order, immigration, and various good bills Mob Boss Mitch won't even bring up for a Senate vote.

First things first. Late last year, five-months-pregnant Marshae Jones started a fight with another woman, who then shot Ms. Jones in the stomach, killing her unborn baby -- but now the state has indicted Mr. Jones for manslaughter and let the actual shooter go free! Their reasoning: the would-be mother "initiated and continued the fight" with the shooter. Hopefully you'll recognize that as utter horsedoodle, since, hopefully, you never got away with anything as a kid by saying "he started it!" Call me old-fashioned, but I would charge the shooter for the shooting, in part because I accept our responsibility, as civilized people, not to respond to every provocation we get -- let alone with force! Hence Change.org helps you tell the Pleasant Grove police department to dismiss the charges on Ms. Jones and charger her shooter instead.

Meanwhile, hundreds of workers at the Boston furniture corporation Wayfair walked out last week in protest of their employer's furnishing of our Administration's border concentration camps for immigrant children, so Sum of Us helps you tell Wayfair's CEO to stop selling furniture to these camps. Now, you might be saying, I hate what our Administration's doing as much as the next guy, but don't these kids need beds to sleep in? But you should recognize that as a rhetorical hostage situation! You're not cramming these kids into squalid rooms, and you're not going before federal courts arguing that you don't have to give these kids soap because the law doesn't spell that out; our Administration is doing all that, and corporations like Wayfair are helping them. So if you bring the Big Stick of Bad PR upon corporations like Wayfair, you might help end our Administration's family separation policy, which will only help these kids.

Finally, your Senators are home this week, so go ahead and call them and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; and H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act. Long story short, since I've been telling the long story on these bills for months now: H.R. 1 would better protect our voting rights and make gerrymandering harder; the Equality Act would extend civil rights protections to gay and transgender folks, the Paycheck Fairness Act would help folks get equal pay for equal work, and the Save the Internet Act would restore internet freedom for people, not for corporations. I know, I know, Mob Boss Mitch says the Senate won't vote on these bills because (and I quote) "I get to decide what we vote on," but pressuring our Senators to pass these good bills is still our duty as Americans. And, you know, all Mitch McConnell has been doing for a dozen years is blocking good legislation. I shudder to think that's what he's taking to the Pearly Gates.

Penny Rants for Sunday, June 30, 2019: concerning certain law and order matters, plus did you know David Brooks is a "moderate" now?

In yet another decision purporting to demonstrate "non-partisanship," our Supreme Court rules that federal courts can't strike down state redistricting efforts that demonstrate extreme partisanship. The best I can say about their ruling is that it cuts both ways, and already has -- Pennsylvania state Republicans twice tried to interest Justice Alito in the state Supreme Court's redrawing of state districts before the 2018 election, but Justice Alito didn't bite either time. I could add, I suppose, that the ruling affirms Congress's right to make the process fairer (i.e., in the For the People Act), but that's not some elephantine act of generosity. And, at the risk of beating a dead horse, this Court would turn over every rock in Arizona to find an "animus" against religious folks whenever someone enacts an anti-discrimination statute protecting gay and transgender folks from bigotry, but seems utterly incurious about the actual animus of Republican politicians stupid enough to put their explicit intent to use the redistricting process to expand their power in writing.

Meanwhile, our Supreme Court's ruling striking down our Administration's attempt to add a citizenship question to the census form will do some good in the short run, and I can't help but dig Chief Justice Roberts's understatement in saying Secretary Ross's reasoning behind the question "seems to have been contrived." I'm not as disturbed as other folks that our Court seems to think a citizenship question on the census is A-OK as long as you follow the Administrative Procedure Act in getting it done, because I'm not sure any Administration could get that done if they get too many public comments against it, which they almost certainly will. I'm far more disturbed that four of nine Supreme Court justices seem to think the Administrative Procedure Act doesn't mean a damn thing. I'm also annoyed to hear our President wonder, out loud, if he can "delay" the census, for "no matter how long." He can't, because our Constitution says we have to conduct a census every 10 years, and does not add "or whenever our President stops throwing a tantrum about a citizenship question."

Another day, another "moderate" warning Democrats to reject the numerous populist and popular positions they're just now starting to take again after all these years. And I know what you're saying: when did David Brooks become a moderate? I won't tabulate my objections to his argument, since they number approximately one per point made, but I will point out that the math he presents doesn't work the way he wants you to think it does. I don't even mean all his cherry-picked polls about the economy and health care; I mean presenting Gallup's notoriously misleading polling about how conservative, moderate, or liberal Americans think they are -- as if every last one of them will vote, let alone vote as a bloc, let alone vote in precisely the way they describe themselves. If you know any conservatives who would rein in corporate campaign spending or any moderates who would raise taxes on the rich or any liberals who would regulate handguns and rifles pretty much as we do now -- hell, if you know anyone who's ever described "holding their nose" in the voting booth -- then you know what I mean.

Action: concerning voting rights, pollution, and taxes.

People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4/S. 561, the Voting Rights Advancement Act. I know, the For the People Act passed the House, but Mob Boss Mitch won't let the Senate vote on it, so it's time for Plan B, which is "squeeze the politicians on the specifics." The Voting Rights Advancement Act would plug the holes our Supreme Court blew out of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder -- and would do so in a way that doesn't "single out" Southern states (our Court's main problem with the Voting Rights Act) but would "single out" any state or locality with an established, demonstrable record of voting rights violations. Republicans have been opposing voting rights reforms for-freaking-ever; why, it's almost like they're afraid people won't vote them into office unless they have a few dozen ways to suppress the vote! And of course vote suppression makes it more difficult to punish politicians who suppress the vote -- but this is a democracy, and we can still speak out in force, so we can still make it right.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would keep ubiquitous PFAS chemicals out of our food and water. PFAS chemicals appear in just about everything, from firefighting foam to food wrappers; the Sierra Club calls them "forever chemicals," because they're just about indestructible. If you're thinking maybe you like "indestructible," recall that indestructible chemicals don't break down into more harmless chemicals, and that PFAS chemicals increase your risk of kidney damage, thyroid problems, and cancer. Also, the FDA's found them in foods ranging from sweet potato to chocolate cake, and over 100 cities have found them in their water supply. So, yeah, it's well past time we did something about all of that. Various Congressfolk have introduced over 20 bills that would address the problem, and now we've got to get Congress to move them, so they can become law and protect us from serious health care problems.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to impose a financial transaction tax on Wall Street banksters. A few bills in Congress would do that: H.R. 1516/S. 647, the Wall Street Tax Act, would impose a 0.1% tax (that's one-tenth of one percent, not "one percent" or "10 percent," "liberal" media!) on financial transactions including stock and derivative trades, and H.R. 2923/S. 1587, the Inclusive Prosperity Act, would impose a range of taxes, from 0.005% to 0.5% -- none of which are "five percent" or "50 percent," though, again, our "liberal" media will report it as such by "mistake." Seriously, a financial transaction tax (which supporters often call a "Robin Hood Tax") is fairly popular across the board -- with everyone, it seems, except politicians. And politicians have betrayed us in the past -- remember when candidate Obama supported it, only to be "talked out of it" by Larry Summers once he became President? We can prevent that from happening again only by communicating our will to our Congressfolk until they do our will.

Action: concerning "limited strikes," gun violence research, and corporate welfare.

Just Foreign Policy joins with Change.org to help you tell Rep. Engel (D-NY) that it is unconstitutional for our President to conduct a "limited strike" on a foreign country without a Congressional declaration of war. Seeing the differing responses of Rep. Engel and Sen. Sanders (I-VT) on the matter is rather like reading a Goofus and Gallant strip, except that the guy with the unkempt hair is actually Gallant here. It should be fish-in-a-barrel easy to refute Mr. Engel's suggestions that military strikes without Congressional authorization are OK as long as someone, somewhere, can define them as "limited," but sadly our "liberal" media doesn't seem prepared to do it, as they parrot the lines Mr. Engel himself parrots. And I hate to be a hard-ass (OK, I don't), but "t(ying) the President's hands" isn't a bug in our Constitution, it's a feature. The Founders were fairly disgusted with untrammeled executive power exercised by a wannabe tyrant, as you may recall. You know, like the 46% President we've got now.

Meanwhile, our House slipped $50 million for gun violence research (to be conducted by the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control) into a must-pass budget bill, so CREDO helps you tell your Senators to ensure that this legislative rider makes it into their budget bill, too. I've laid out my boundaries on gun control -- I want semi-automatic weapons treated the same as automatic weapons (which means there'll be almost no semi-automatic weapons on the streets), but I don't want universal background checks or greater limits on gun or rifle ownership. That being said, I, at least, am confident enough in my beliefs that I see no harm in funding more federal research on the matter. Oh, and that absolutely is my way of saying the rabid pro-gun crowd is not secure enough in their beliefs to endure the trauma of research that might (or might not!) tell them what they don't want to hear. And any Congressfolk who are "afraid" the research will "automatically" (semi-automatically?) lead to gun bans can, you know, perform oversight duties.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: the Sierra Club helps you tell your state Senator to oppose SB 618, which would give corporate welfare handouts to big coal corporations to burn off their coal waste. These handouts would total over $750 million over the next 17 years, and if you're thinking maybe we should give corporations some incentive to deal with their waste, consider, first and foremost, that giving corporations "incentives" to do the right thing is always a bad idea -- almost certainly they'll take the "incentive" and do nothing. Consider, also, that burning off coal waste in this matter doesn't reduce the volume of the waste very much and adds to the pollutants already in our air. Consider, finally, that there are better ways to ameliorate this problem, like revegetating on top of the coal waste, which not only works better but costs less. You thought conservatism was about being fiscally responsible? If so, then the funnel-taxpayer-money-to-cronies-at-all-costs crows is not conservative.

Around the table: more lessons in the abject folly of bipartisanship-above-all.

House votes down Amash/Lofgren amendment that would have curtailed warrantless spying on Americans by a 175-253 vote. Which means, of course, that a crapload of Democrats opposed both law and order and your right to privacy. Yay bipartisanship! That's why "electing more Democrats," which you can do once a year, is nowhere near as effective as pressuring your Reps and Senators to do the right thing, which you can do every day.

It's not particularly surprising that a group of billionaires has written an open letter all but begging our government to tax them more for the good of all Americans. If anything, it's more surprising that our irony-addicted media hardly notices when these things occur. Why, it's almost like their jobs depend on them not noticing it!

Fox News talking head tries to get job with our Justice Department, is rebuffed by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, then calls Mr. Sessions America's most "dangerous person" because of his recusal from the Russia probe. Gosh, corrupt much? And cable news is notorious for asserting that they don't need to do conflict-of-interest disclosures about their hosts and guests because how dare you imply we're dishonest! Trying to get informed by watching cable news is like trying to get healthy by eating M&Ms.

From the "It's Not Only Inhumane, It's Fiscally Irresponsible!" file: Department of Health and Human Services official says it'd cost less money to keep immigrant children with their parents than separate them and put the kids in tents. Now guess which one our Administration is so proud of itself for doing! Remember: this is also the guy who puts his golf trips on the public dime and then turns around and says we can't afford health care for transgender soldiers.

Finally, Cenk Uygur tells us that Joe Biden isn't the "most electable" candidate but, in fact, the least electable candidate. Long story short: a candidate who overtly promises no change -- which is worse than merely "not promising change"! -- is profoundly misreading an electorate which is fed to the up. Also, too, as Mr. Uygur says, there's nothing actually "likable" about the Iraq war, mass incarceration, bankster deregulation, or bankruptcy "reform," but that's almost all of Joe Biden's Senate career right there. Recall, of course, that he didn't just "deal" with segregationists when he got to the Senate in 1972, but collaborated with them.