Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning our nation's budget, law and order, and dangerous baby products.

You've no doubt heard by now that our President has put out a budget that would, guess what, cut Medicaid, cut Medicare, cut Social Security, cut food stamps, cut housing assistance, cut job training funding -- but jack up funding for defense, since spending more than the next eight highest-spending countries in the world combined somehow just isn't enough. Even Republicans in Congress act like the President's budget is a dead letter -- retiring Sen. Mike Enzi of Wyoming, who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, announced last week he won't even hold a hearing on the budget, but that doesn't mean we can't weigh in anyway! And we must weigh in -- our President has decided to weigh in, after all, on "his priorities," so the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject our President's budget and fight for our priorities. Mr. Enzi is correct to note that "Congress holds the purse strings, according to the Constitution," but our laws require that our President submit an annual budget proposal; it's a real, legal thing that happens, so we, the American people, must attend to it.

Meanwhile, you've also no doubt heard by now the tantrum our Administration threw over its Justice Department prosecutors recommending seven to nine years in prison for Administration crony Roger Stone, the subsequent hullabaloo resulting in the resignation of four prosecutors in the Stone case (I feel their pain, but I wish they hadn't quit, since now our President will replace them with four new cronies) and over 2,000 former Justice Department officials demanding the resignation of Attorney General Barr for his interference in the matter. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell our House Judiciary Committee and the Department of Justice Inspector General to investigate our Justice Department for possible wrongdoing. Yeah, I know, look how well the impeachment investigation worked out. But this won't go before a Senate full of Administration lapdogs: this will go before a hostile House committee and an Inspector General mandated by law to be independent. Maybe our President will fire all the Inspectors General -- he's already tried! -- but let's at least make him humiliate himself before the people.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Consumer Product Safety Commission (or CPSC) to ban inclined baby sleepers, then Penn PIRG still helps you do that. Do it quickly, though, since our CPSC's comment period ends in eight days. Researchers have linked, at this time, the inclined sleepers to 73 baby deaths and over a thousand baby accidents and injuries to the inclined sleepers, and remember, 73 is the number of babies we know about. Manufacturers touted the sleepers as a way to rock babies to sleep faster and keep them asleep longer, but the sleepers allow babies to roll onto their stomachs while rocking, and then they suffocate because they can't get back on their back. Babies also suffocate when their heads fall forward (their heads tend to be disproportionately heavy) in the sleeper, or when their faces roll into the product's sides and they rebreathe carbon dioxide-filled air. We all know parents are exhausted (indeed, it's almost like our economy wants it that way) but we also need to get rid of products that kill their babies.

Around the table: more lessons about political courage and cowardice.

While you're reminding your Tea Party uncle that if he collects Social Security, uses Medicare, or drives on a road paid for with his taxes that he is also a socialist, you can also remind him, as Ralph Nader reminds us, that those who rail against "socialism" are too often the biggest practitioners of socialism-for-corporations. And it never helps to forget that our government followed the 2008 bankster crash by handing out "trillions of taxpayer dollars" to "reckless bankers and speculators." Maybe your Tea Party uncle was against that, too -- but it's awful hard to overcome decades of political propaganda about how you can only ever succeed on your own, without help from anyone, ever.

From the "It's a Shame We Even Have to Say It" file: no, Mr. President, it's not at all true that "nobody can even define" what Roger Stone did, not when our own Justice Department summed up the whole affair thusly: "Stone was found guilty of obstruction of a congressional investigation, five counts of making false statements to Congress, and tampering with a witness." You'll hear people say that everything that's been going on with Russia is so complex, as a way of saying there's really nothing there, but, ah, it is easier to catch people who commit crimes more straightforwardly, is it not? And do we really think criminals haven't figured that out? Certainly our President has -- the more feces he dramatically flings against the wall, the more likely we are to throw up our hands and walk away.

I can't help but read that our President plans to deploy heavily-armed border patrol agents in so-called "sanctuary cities" and think that I guess this is how he gets his Reichstag Fire. Let us recall why they call them "sanctuary cities" -- not because they actively shield undocumented immigrants, but merely because they will not co-operate with federal immigration authorities without a court order. All these law-and-order types should be able to respect that, but in my experience, the only thing "law-and-order" types really respect is unquenchable rage.

Widely-respected medical journal Lancet says Medicare-for-All health insurance will save Americans $450 billion annually, and that figure might actually be a little low -- taking the cost estimate from the right-wing Mercatus Institute ($32 trillion over 10 years) and the Center for Medicare Services' projected 10-year cost ($47 trillion), I'd say the Lancet figure might be less than a third of the actual figure. Still, it's good PR, as is their finding that struggling hospitals will also benefit from all the stability Medicare-for-All would bring. That's struggling rural hospitals as well as urban ones, of course. Maybe someone should take that message to Middle America?

Joe Biden says Bernie Sanders should "take accountability" for his supporters' egregious actions, and here you have the reason why Democrats constantly lose: they're always blaming the wrong people. Shouldn't Mr. Sanders's supporters take accountability for their own actions? Aren't threats criminal acts subject to punishment by our government? I'm on record as saying you can't bring our President into criminal proceedings against white nationalists just because he's made racists feel good about themselves again, so I don't feel any differently about this. When Mr. Biden talks about "accountability" like this, of course, you can tell he's made a career out of capitulating to the other side. (Sadly, Elizabeth Warren piled on about this matter later -- also to NBC -- and even said "we are all responsible for what our supporters do," which, ah, no.)

Don't look now, but a member of Barack Obama's braintrust has written a very good article suggesting that Democrats shouldn't look to 2016 for lessons so much as 2012, for three main reasons: one, Mitt Romney basically made that election about Mr. Obama rather than himself; two, Mr. Obama completely reframed the economic issues of the time that made Mr. Romney's attacks on him moot; and three, Mr. Romney seemed to lock himself into the right-wing news bubble. I wonder if the third matters as much as the first two, especially given that we have an incumbent President who amplifies the worst aspects of that bubble, but this largely is a trenchant analysis -- particularly given that the eventual Democratic nominee will run against a man who's desperate to make everything about him, and that most of the possible Democratic nominees won't talk enough about the folks this economy has left behind.

Finally, now that Bernie Sanders is kind of the front runner for the Democratic nomination, we confront the notion that the "liberal" media will try to take him down by comparing him to Great Losers from the Past. Chris Hedges's trenchant analysis says that Our Glorious Elites "will do to Sanders what they did to George McGovern" if he becomes the nominee, and I know they will try, but I also know that George McGovern shot himself in the foot plenty in 1972 after he got the nomination, starting with taking Sen. Eagleton as his running mate and then ditching him not even three weeks later (after saying he was behind him "1,000 percent," no less). Meanwhile, Jonathan Freedland at The Guardian speculates that Mr. Sanders could be the next Jeremy Corbyn, but Labour didn't lose the recent national election because they were "too liberal" -- they lost because they weren't pro-Brexit enough! And for no other reason! Plebescites have consequences, after all, and Labour pursued "constructive ambiguity" about Brexit while Boris Johnson pretended to be Super Awesome Pro-Brexit Man, so it's no surprise who won. Ambiguity may be the special sauce of literature, but it's poison to political campaigns. The most analogous situation in America is trade, and guess what? Mr. Sanders is just as anti-"free" trade as our President, if not more so, and all the other remaining candidates save Ms. Warren are as wishy-washy about trade as Mr. Corbyn was about Brexit. I trust the pattern, and the lesson, are unmistakable.

Action: concerning campaign finance, animal safety, and paid family leave.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass a Constitutional amendment that would allow our government to regulate campaign finances again, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. H.J.Res. 48, the "Democracy for All" amendment, would end the fiction of corporate "personhood," explicitly stating that "(t)he rights protected by the Constitution of the United States are the rights of natural persons only. Artificial entities, such as corporations, limited liability companies, and other entities, established by the laws of any State, the United States, or any foreign state shall have no rights under this Constitution and are subject to regulation by the People, through Federal, State, or local law." The amendment also authorizes state, federal, and local governments to regulate campaign finance, so that "all citizens, regardless of their economic status, have access to the political process, and that no person gains, as a result of that person’s money, substantially more access or ability to influence in any way the election of any candidate for public office or any ballot measure." So there we are.

Meanwhile, you've heard our President's bloviating about "piles of dead birds" at the foot of windmills? Then you will be interested to hear that our Administration has basically decided not to prosecute violations of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, by allowing oil, electric, and fishing corporations to simply claim they didn't "intend" to kill any of the birds they routinely kill! Law and order! Remember how Antonin Scalia would get heated about attempts to discern the "intent" of a law? I'd like to think he'd be just as hoppin' about this Administration's attempts to simply assign a benign intent to violations of the law. And anyway, if an oil corporation doesn't cover its waste pit though its executives know birds will drown in it, then what do they intend? They intend to harm, and they intend to break the law -- no finger-shaking about how they "only intend to save money," lest that become the "religious conscience" of the new decade. If we wanna be all law and order, we actually have to be all law and order. Hence Environmental Action helps you tell our Administration to scuttle its plan to let bird-killers off the hook.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1185/S. 463, the Family and Medical Insurance Leave (or FAMILY) Act, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. Brook no silliness from anyone about HOW WILL WE PAYZ FOR TEH THINGZ!!!!, because the cost to the worker making $50,000 annually for this program would be $8.33/month -- about the price of four Junior Bacon Cheeseburgers at Wendy's, or about a buck and a half less than the price of Boz Scaggs's Silk Degrees album on iTunes. Seriously, it's not a lot of money for a lot of peace of mind. And everyone won't be using family leave at once! Because that's not how insurance works! Insurance is when people pool together their resources to help any one of them, or any few of them, through a tough time. We've forgotten this because our culture drills this everyone-for-themselves ethos into us, to the point where fools call things like the Affordable Care Act "socialism" and never face the scorn and ridicule they deserve. But we need to get back to what works in America, and what works in America is Americans helping each other out.

Action: concerning good House bills and bad government policy.

Happy Monday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; and H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act. This week we add H.J.Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment, and (sorry this got by me!) H.R. 397, the Rehabilitation for Multiemployer Pensions Act (a.k.a. the Butch Lewis Act), which would help save at-risk pension funds and thus the workers who depend on them. I know the Senate's on Mitch McConnell Time (i.e., "never"), but we're on Do the Right Thing Time, which is always now, so let's get to it.

Meanwhile, we managed to (mostly) beat back a Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing proposal to use "risk assessment tools" when sentencing criminals, and if you thought about it (or saw Minority Report!), you'd see that you can't just use the past to predict the future like that, and you'd also see that taking data like "past encounters with law enforcement" into account when sentencing would hurt folks of color and poor folks the most, since our justice system seems to accuse and imprison a disproportionate number of these. Now our Commission wants to use a risk assessment tool just for domestic violence cases, which, again, sounds good, particularly when you consider how difficult it seems to be to get domestic abusers convicted, but you can easily imagine a Commission saying well, it worked so well there (whether it does or not!), so now let's expand it to all the other areas! And they're trying to slip this proposal by us a bit, which never recommends a proposal. Hence the ACLU helps you tell the Commission to scrap their latest "risk assessment tool" proposal. Because if our laws don't protect all of us, we're all in danger.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Administration not to enact regulatory changes that would essentially gut the National Environmental Protection Act, then the Union of Concerned Scientists still helps you do that. The NEPA mandates that our government tell the public about proposed drilling, mining, and logging projects on public lands, and also requires our government to conduct analyses of the impact of these projects on clean air, clean water, and climate. The NEPA also requires our government to take public comments on these matters. Now guess which three things our Administration wants to "streamline" as far out of existence as possible? Always when they say they're "streamlining" they're really streamlining us out of our own democracy, and not so that they can "create jobs" or "relieve" corporations of "unnecessary burdens," but so they can make their cronies richer. They don't care about you, and they don't care about me -- they only care about other bosses, and their "right" to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. But we care about each other, and we care about our country, so we can fight them and, ultimately, beat them.

Around the table: more of the soft white underbelly of the events of the day.

Senate passes, by 55-45, resolution aiming to restrain our President from making war on Iran. The House will pass it, possibly more quickly than the Senate did, and then our President will veto it, and 55 Senators ain't enough to override a veto, and yes I think a few of the eight Republicans who joined all 47 Democrats in voting in favor of the resolution did so because they know it'll ultimately die. Still, when the politicians do our will -- and our will is most certainly to avoid another quagmire in the Middle East, as well as reassert Congress's Constitutional war-making authority -- this is a good thing, and something we can build on. As an aside, Sen. Lee's statement favoring the resolution -- "(w)e don’t send a message of weakness when we stand up for the rule of law. That’s a message of strength" -- is well-spoken, and also the kind of thing we can build on.

Ho hum, our President says his budget doesn't cut Social Security, but his Treasury Secretary admitted that it does. Well, he said it would cut increases in future benefits, which in his mind isn't a cut, and I suppose inflation doesn't exist in his mind, either. Please don't let the trolls in your life squeal BUT TEH OBUMMURZ WANTEDZ TO DOEZ TEH SAMEZ!!!!, since we fought it when he proposed it, too. Trolls aren't simple-minded; they just want you to think they are, and make yourself simple-minded when you argue with them.

Right-wing gadfly in Tennessee state legislature introduces a bill that would declare CNN and the Washington Post "fake news," which proves, once again, that there's no bigger whiner in America than a right-winger. It's not enough to simply say "you call it 'fake news' because you can't win an argument against it on the merits" -- we should acknowledge that websites that pretend to be mainstream news websites and websites that call themselves "news and satire" websites are, in fact, fake news. But if an editorial at a newspaper hurts your fee-fees, it's not "fake news."

We are making too much of former Administration DHS Secretary/Chief of Staff John Kelly's assertion that folks who watch Fox News "because it's reinforcing what you believe" aren't "informed citizen(s)," because even though Fox News is an even more naked propaganda outfit than it used to be, the other cable news channels are also pretty terrible, and trying to stay informed by watching cable news is like trying to get all your protein from ice cream. Sure, you'll get some, but you'll also get fat and diabetic a lot faster than you would from, say, chicken or yogurt. Thieves in the Temple can be either one for you. Hell, we can be steak, too.

Dave Lindorff at Counterpunch says the red-baiting of Bernie Sanders is "already becoming laughable" -- particularly in the recent utterance of Chris Matthews, one of this millennium's worst cable news blowhards. But you need not even read through Mr. Lindorff's defense of socialism, really, or even consider the popularity of Medicare and Social Security -- all you need do is realize that you paid taxes for the road you drove to the store yesterday, and that you paid taxes for the schooling your kids get, and that you paid taxes for the clean air you breathe and the clean water you drink, to realize that you are a socialist.

Finally, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is spending a lot of money on ads trying to convince us that he really "gets" racism -- I heard one of them at least three times yesterday at work -- but in 2008 he actually said "the end of redlining" caused the 2008 financial crash. First, banksters like the ones Mr. Bloomberg enabled with his trading software, caused the crash. Second, redlining ain't about poverty, it's about race. Third, redlining ended? I guess he doesn't talk to many real estate agents.

Action: concerning government spying, financial predators, and unsafe baby products.

H.R. 5675/S. 3242, the Safeguarding Americans’ Private Records Act (or SAPRA), would roll back many of the worst offenses of the notorious USA PATRIOT Act. It would, for example, end NSA hoovering of your private data, prohibit warrantless collection of your browsing and search histories and your geo-location data, and would sunset the National Security Letters program which the FBI has used to get information without a court order. Note very well words like "warrantless" and "court order" in the previous sentence; passing SAPRA would not "hamstring our ability to fight terror," but would merely make law enforcement follow our laws and our Constitution in fighting terror. Hate to pile on, but if we stopped treating people entirely like commodities, we'd have a lot less terrorism. Sure, we'll always have some nutjobs, but let's not create more of them with tax cuts for the rich and corporate tax cuts and mass incarceration, shall we? The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our privacy rights by passing SAPRA.

Meanwhile, H.R. 5050/S. 2833, the Veterans and Consumers Fair Credit Act (or VFCA), would extend the protections our soldiers and veterans enjoy from predatory lenders to all Americans. The bill would cap annual interest rates at 36%, so payday lenders couldn't trap good Americans in a death spiral of debt with loans that wind up having 400% interest rates. Banksters will no doubt complain that we just won't allow them to make money anymore, but nobody puts a gun to your head and makes you become a payday lender! I suspect folks become payday lenders because they see it's easy money. Besides which, lenders can still make money if the don't gouge their customers; we know this because veterans already enjoy the protections of the bill, and some states have passed similar protections, and is our economy in the toilet? No, it is not -- in fact, banksters continue to do quite well a dozen years after crashing our economy. Hence US PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect all Americans from predatory lenders by passing the VFCA.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Consumer Product Safety Commission (or CPSC) to ban the inclined baby sleepers that have led to over six dozen baby deaths, then Consumer Reports still helps you do that. The CPSC will take public comments on the matter until the end of February, though I have some difficulty imagining what pro-inclined sleeper comments you could write. I guess it would be priceless to learn that some stooge of the inclined baby sleeper lobby commented that banning inclined baby sleepers would be "the nanny state at work"! I suppose they'll say a ban is too extreme, that our CPSC should give them time to work out the kinks, as it were, but I would have a couple of things to say about that. One, the corporations making the sleepers knew for years that their sleepers were killers but did nothing about it. Two, if it were your baby, you wouldn't want it to happen to anyone else's baby. Three, there are other ways to put a baby to sleep -- ways that will not result in the baby's death, no less!

Action: concerning surprise medical bills, data privacy, and paid family leave.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation outlawing surprise medical bills. Plenty of folks get them, and they don't get them because "they don't take care of themselves" or because "they don't read the fine print" or because they've screwed up in some other way; they get them because our privatized health insurance system loves exploiting holes in provider networks to deprive you of money. Do folks "deserve" to get billed in the thousands of dollars because their surgeon was in-network but his anesthesiologist wasn't? Or because their hospitals subcontract to out-of-network air ambulance providers? Or because they get life-or-death service (please attend closely the words "life-or-death") at an out-of-network hospital? No, they do not. That is not the "free" market at work, nor is it the work of "makers" as opposed to "takers" and "looters" -- I'm fairly confident, in fact, that were Zombie Ayn Rand to visit us today, she would tell us that the corporations that issue these surprise medical bills are the "looters." If not the "takers"!

Meanwhile, you won't be surprised to learn that our government doesn't regulate location tracking very well, to the point where Google still tracks the location of people who've turned off all the location tracking functions on their phones and computers, so Daily Kos helps you tell our Congressfolk to protect our digital private data a whole lot better than they've been doing. Remember: Congressfolk have done little about this issue not because it's a "hard issue to understand." "Protect my privacy" ain't that damn deep -- it only becomes "deep" when Congressfolk take campaign money from corporations that want to sell your private data, and it only becomes "deep" when law enforcement wants to get location data without going through the trouble of getting a warrant for the information. Certainly don't believe that corporations know this issue better than politicians, because that's a little like saying we should let the fox, not the farmer, run the henhouse.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass meaningful paid family leave legislation, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. By "meaningful legislation" we most certainly do not mean "legislation that would steal from your future Social Security benefits to pay for family medical leave now," like right-wingers would have us do. No, meaningful paid family leave legislation would more closely resemble H.R. 1185/S. 463, the Family and Medical Insurance Leave (or FAMILY) Act. The FAMILY Act would create a national paid family leave program, and when your Tea Party uncle asks HOW WILLZ YOU PAYZ FOR TEH THINGZ HA HA HA SNORT STUPIDZ LIBRULZ!!!!!, you can respond that the FAMILY Act would pay for itself with an 0.4% payroll tax -- that's four-tenths of one percent, not "four percent" or "40 percent," "liberal" media! -- and the employer would pay half, meaning someone making $50,000 annually would pay $8.33 monthly. That's not even five cups of coffee at Wawa monthly, and for peace of mind? What an easy choice.

Action: concerning disaster aid, pregnant workers, and "religious" "conscience."

Daily Kos helps you tell our Department of Housing and Urban Development (or HUD) to disburse Congressionally-appropriated hurricane funds to Puerto Rico. Yes, once again, we have to tell our President to obey the law -- if Congress says spend money on X, the President has to do it, no matter how thin-skinned he is when Puerto Rican government officials criticize him. Seriously, must drama guide every decision a President makes? And I know, he's gotten away with his refusal to disburse money to the Ukraine until it investigated one of his political opponents, but right is right and duty is duty. And you can't discount the possibility that our President wants Puerto Rico to continue to suffer so that banksters can come in and steal all of the island's money, again. In fact, we really should assume that's the endgame! But that doesn't mean we put up with it -- after all, it could happen to any of us, particularly if we don't deliver our electoral votes to this President in 2020.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2694, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. No this bill will not be a "boon to trial lawyers" or "impose undue burdens on small businesses" -- and anyway, right-wingers who would complain that way love trial lawyers when they're working for them, and love using small businesses as a human shield against any effort to make big corporations do the right thing. And, seriously, forcing big corporations to make reasonable accommodations to their pregnant workers isn't a "burden." Forcing big corporations not to discount a pregnant worker's job application merely because they're pregnant isn't a "burden." And forcing big corporations not to retaliate against workers for getting pregnant isn't a "burden." For right-wingers, burdens only ever seem to exist on big corporations that already pay a lower rate in taxes than people do and already get more welfare handouts than we'll ever see. But they don't get all the say around here.

Finally, if you're sick and tired of our Administration going out of their way to allow big corporations to discriminate against gay and transgender folks out of "religious" "conscience," then Daily Kos helps you tell Congress to pass legislation that would nullify all of this Administration's human rights rollbacks. Our Administration may think our Supreme Court now allows anyone who claims to have a "religious" "conscience" to discriminate against anyone they want, but, actually, it doesn't -- the notorious Hobby Lobby ruling actually only allows closely-held corporations (i.e., corporations with only a few shareholders, who might be family members) to exercise such "conscience." Granted, our Court may just be waiting for the case that would allow them to expand that exemption so that everyone gets to pretend they're discriminating because Supply Side Jesus said to. Still, let's not let our Administration pretend it's open season on everyone's rights.

Around the table: more lies exposed, more skepticism explained.

Nathan J. Robinson calls Michael Bloomberg "a Republican plutocrat" trying to "buy the Democratic nomination," and it's completely true: he is basically Republican-not-even-lite and he is trying to buy the nomination, as he has already bought (literally!) so many of his endorsements. He uses his money to obliterate dissent, he thinks banksters are an "industry" and not parasites, he thinks the income gap between rich and poor is a good thing, he uses the police to terrorize protestors, black folks, and Muslims -- basically, he's our President if our President was pro-choice and actually believed climate change was happening. And this is, apparently, who Democratic poobahs think voters will run through a wall for. (Don't quit before the end, because the last five paragraphs explain very well why we shouldn't let Presidential elections be a battle between billionaires.)

Next time you hear about "Obama's anemic job growth" failing to compare to our Great and Noble True American President's Greatest Economy Ever, you can respond that the economy has created fewer jobs over the last three years than it did during the last three years of the Obama Administration. And when folks protest that it's hard to create jobs when we're almost at what our government calls "full employment," remind them that, frankly, we're not at full employment if the U6 unemployment rate (which includes folks who work part-time who'd rather work full-time and folks who've simply given up looking for work) still stands at 6.9%. (As an aside, attend the list of things our President can't take credit but which he's taken credit for anyway in paragraphs 9 and 11. It's upsetting -- and the right campaign ad could obliterate him for it, if it's willing to have a little fun.)

I hate to say it, but I'm skeptical that enacting Medicare-for-All health insurance would result in pay hikes, even though a lot of the research says so. If we pay for it the way Sen. Warren would -- to tax employers the amount they've been spending on private health insurance for the last several years -- then the answer would definitely be no, and that's the best funding proposal I've seen. But then, I never wanted a raise from Medicare-for-All, and I do know that, under Medicare-for-All, health care costs would go down -- even the right-wing Mercatus Center says so! -- and health care costs are up there with household debt as the biggest drags on a household's freedom. All I ask for is a fighting chance, after all, and Medicare-for-All helps give us that fighting chance.

I might agree that our President's trade dramas will "cost the average American family $1,277 this year," thus wiping out their gains from the 2017 tax "reform," but I hesitate because the CBO locates those costs mainly in higher prices for household items, when, frankly, cheap crap from China isn't an unqualified good, certainly not if the Chinese workers making the cheap crap continue to get paid in dung pellets. Not that our President cares whether his trade deals improve things for those Chinese workers -- or, even, for American workers! -- but we, as Americans, need to stop counting on "low prices" without counting the cost of low prices.

Finally, a Monmouth University poll finds that while only 42% of registered voters want our President get re-elected, an astounding 66% think he's either "probably" or "definitely" going to get re-elected. Again I weep at the voters' apparent inability to understand that if they believe a fellow doesn't deserve re-election, they have the power to keep him from getting re-elected. Voters have this disconnect in part because our "liberal" media trains everyone to treat politics like a horserace, and also in part because our civilization prizes drama over substance, but voters also have this disconnect because they're constantly worrying about what "other" people will think, rather than trying to persuade other people to come around to their way of thinking. Persuasion: it's the world's oldest profession.

Action: concerning campaign finance, FGM, and clean water.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Rep to pass a Constitutional amendment allowing our government to regulate campaign finance again, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Our Supreme Court's disastrous Citizens United v. FEC ruling in 2010 has opened the floodgates of corporate campaign spending, even though good Americans get more and more disgusted with all the money blown on campaigns, too often for politicians who shouldn't be elected dog-catcher. Proponents of campaign finance spending tell us that it takes money to get heard, etc., but that statement does not justify allowing people or corporations to spend virtually any amount of money to "get heard." In fact, we can reasonably suppose that when a few people or corporations drop hundreds of millions on a campaign, they actually prevent other good Americans from being heard. So let's bring back campaign finance reform in America.

Meanwhile, Washington is one of 15 American states that somehow do not ban female genital mutilation (or FGM), so a Change.org petition helps you tell Washington state legislators to ban FGM. Some religious sects claim our First Amendment protects FGM, though reasonable people would conclude differently -- if your rights end when they trample on other people's rights, then reasonably your "right" to mutilate a young girls' genitals would end with her right, you know, to not be fucking traumatized for life. Congress banned FGM at the federal level over 20 years ago, but a Michigan federal District Court judge overturned the ban, saying that FGM is a "local criminal activity" and that "Federalism concerns deprive Congress of the power to enact this statute." That should warn you against imbibing too much Federalism! And our Justice Department won't appeal the ruling, so whom does that leave? That leaves us! You know, like always.

Finally, our EPA has proposed a new Lead and Copper Rule, but won't mandate the replacement of lead-lined service line pipes, which does kind of defeat the purpose of a new Lead and Copper Rule, doesn't it? Unless our EPA's "purpose" is actually to pretend to protect our clean water while utterly failing to do so! Hence Environment America helps you tell our EPA to make sure we get all the lead pipes out of our water infrastructure within a decade. Our EPA is only taking comments until tomorrow, though, so get cracking. At least six million homes in America still get water from lead-lined service lines, meaning at least six million homes remain at risk for lead contamination and all the neurological problems it brings, especially for children. Cities like Madison, WI and Lansing, MI have replaced all of their lead service lines, so it's not like replacing their lines would be a "burden." You know what would be a burden? The increased health care costs from lead poisoning, which we all must bear.

Action: concerning good House bills, government spying, and conservation.

Happy Monday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; and H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act. This week we add H.R. 2474, the PRO Act, which would protect workers' right to organize and which the House passed late last week. Just because the Senate runs on Mitch McConnell time -- which we know from experience is never -- doesn't mean we can't demand (among other things!) better voting rights protections, better health care protections, higher wages for workers, and real internet freedom. So let's get to it.

Meanwhile, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban corporate welfare from localities for Amazon Ring. Law enforcement would like to link up all the Ring doorbells in your neighborhood to form their very own surveillance network; they say it'll just help them watch The Bad Guys, but you know it'll help them watch you, too, and Ring is also, guess what, fairly hackable technology! And if your neighborhood decides to buy up a bunch of Ring doorbells, who pays for that? That's right, you do, with your taxes. Like Amazon needs another damn handout from the taxpayer! They already pay virtually nothing in taxes on all their billions in profits, so funneling our taxpayer money to them so police can spy on us just adds insult to injury. Also, as I've said, the police won't be the only ones spying on you -- Amazon will be spying on you (just ask Alexa, amirite?), and anyone who can hack into a Ring doorbell will be spying on you, too. And again, you'll be paying for all of that! The "free market" my ass.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to protect roadless areas from the pro-pollution urges of this Administration, then the Alaska Wilderness League still helps you do that. Specifically, you'd ask your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2491/S. 1311, the Roadless Area Conservation Act, which would mandate that our government "shall not allow road construction, road reconstruction, or logging in an inventoried roadless area where those activities are prohibited by the Roadless Rule." That's right, we have to pass a law to tell this Administration to follow the law, a task that's going to be even harder now, amirite? Our Administration wants to open up the Tongass National Forest in Alaska to loggers, and they can only do that by weakening the Roadless Rule preventing development. Naturally, the Tongass is home to thousand-year-old trees, and cutting them down for logging corporation profits would, I hope, strike you as not terribly conservative. There's a reason "conservative" and "conservation" have the same root, after all.

Around the table: in which we contemplate many forms of insanity.

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) says his Republican counterparts in the Senate acquitted our President of the impeachment charges because they're afraid of losing their jobs. That's right, they're more afraid of getting a bad nickname from our President or getting attacked by his flunkies on Fox News and talk radio than they are of the people's will turning them out of office. Part of the reason they're more afraid of our President and/or his flunkies is that they know they're more likely to run against some weak let's-all-get-along Democrat than someone much better like Sherrod Brown. But all that means is we have to work harder to make them afraid of us.

And on cue: our President fires two government officials who testified against him during his impeachment trial -- Gordon Sondland, lately Ambassador to the EU, and Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, late of our National Security Council. They're casting Mr. Vindman's dismissal, in particular, as part of a broader "reorganization" of the NSC, but we're not schmucks. And I guess right-wingers will respond to Mr. Sondland's firing by saying he wanted to leave anyway, but that sure seems like a slim reed. That's all they'll get supporting this President: ever-slimmer reeds to hold onto. And the economy is going to be one of those ever-slimmer reeds sooner or later.

David Dayen at The American Prospect draws a straight line from the "Bullshit Economy" -- the one we've been complaining about for years, the one that never rewards hard work but only rewards speculation and who-you-know -- to the Iowa electoral disaster, where Democrats used an app to get caucus results faster in a state that doesn't have a problem getting its caucus results in a timely manner. In other words, Shadow is a solution in search of a problem, not unlike a lot of tech corporation "disruption." Plus, they didn't test the app properly or train anyone on how to use it properly. (He also suggests that we don't necessarily need to think this whole thing was a "conspiracy," but before that he did mention Mr. Buttigieg's ties to the corporation that made the app.)

Ho hum, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration finds that tax-prep corporations charged at least 14 million Americans for tax returns they could have had done for free. The IG found pretty much what we expected from ProPublica's reporting last year: that the corporations who "offer" free tax-filing make it hard for you to actually use the service, and our IRS doesn't oversee the whole effort very well. The good news? Our government has largely removed legal barriers to free tax-prep. The bad news? Our IRS hardly has any money to enforce the law, since successive Congresses have gutted IRS funding in a decade-long tantrum.

I try to avoid personal attacks, but before we take James Carville's advice to avoid "mile-high fantasies" like, you know, policies that would actually make America a more perfect union for a long time and not just until the next maniac becomes President, we should consider his two great successes in political campaigns: helping a Democrat win the Pennsylvania gubernatorial election in a Democrat wave year by poking fun at his Republican opponent's decades-old dabbling in transcendental meditation, and helping a Democrat win the 1992 Presidential election when the economy was in the toilet. Neither of these, frankly, were heavy lifts. And we should also consider what happened after he realized his vision of "majoritarian politics" in 1992: the voters rejected it in 1994 by giving Republicans control of both House and Senate for the first time in 40 years, and returned an insane Republican to the Presidency in 2000. The voters acted similarly in 2010 and 2016 after a similar "majoritarian" candidate won election in 2008. What's the definition of insanity again?

Finally, in a peripherally-related note, Jonathan Chait says that Sen. Bernie Sanders, now widely-regarded as the front-runner for the Democratic Presidential nomination despite the establishment's recent efforts to deprive him of that standing, brings a "historically unique set of liabilities" to his effort. And then Mr. Chait lists them all, one by one! I kid, of course -- he literally lists zero of these liabilities, unless he thinks "the kind of intense organization Sanders has mastered" is a liability. And you know which candidate actually had a "historically unique suite of liabilities"? The guy who won in 2016 and is running for re-election in 2020! If our President has done one good thing for America, he's reminded us that anything is possible.

Action: concerning public water, discrimination, and facial recognition.

At last, Michigan's government may be ready to rein in Nestlé's mad drive to siphon off public water at pennies a gallon in order to sell bottled water at dollars a pint, as three bills -- HB 5290, HB 5291, and HB 5292 -- would, respectively, bring the state's water under the public trust, ban the sale of bottled water outside of the Great Lakes area, and expand two state agencies' ability to protect public water. I guess right-wingers will squeal about bans and burdensome regulations, but let's read over the first phrase of the first sentence again: is there really nothing wrong with taking the state's public water at pennies a gallon and then selling it as bottled water at dollars a pint? Right-wingers would call that "capitalism," as if any conceivable money-making scheme is moral simply because it makes someone some money. But I would call it "stealing," and assert that ensuring everyone can have access to clean water is actually moral. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell Michigan state legislators to protect their state's public water.

Meanwhile, our Administration wants to expand "religious" exemptions under Title IX far beyond what common sense would require. Currently Title IX -- which states that "(n)o person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance" -- carves out limited exceptions for religious schools, but our Administration would of course allow anyone to claim any sort of exception based merely on their own "religious" "conscience." And when I tell them the kind of world my "religious" "conscience" would entitle me to have -- I've spoken about that matter at some length -- I bet they'd rush to tell me "well, that's different," or "your conscience is worse than my conscience!" At which point reasonable people would agree that Title IX should stay the way it is. So the National Women's Law Center helps you tell our Department of Education to scuttle its own pro-discrimination proposal to essentially gut Title IX.

Finally, you know facial recognition is evil technology, not just because it's one more tool that unscrupulous governmental and corporate actors use to snoop on good Americans, but also because it's bad at its stated purpose, all too frequently mixing black people up even more than your Tea Party uncle does. But tech corporations keep trying to find new markets for their lousy wares, and now they're eyeing schools. Can you say "school-to-prison pipeline," boys and girls? You would think that the debacle at the Iowa Democratic Presidential Caucus this past week would give bad "technological solutions" a permanent black eye, but then politicians of both parties love bad technology, and the big campaign donation money that inevitably comes with it. On the other hand, those of us who love freedom can tell our Congressfolk to prohibit schools from using facial recognition technology, as Demand Progress helps us do. Hey, we're never going to get them to do the right thing if we don't tell them to do the right thing.

Action: concerning redistricting, labor, and immigration.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: a pair of bills -- HB 22/SB 1022 and HB 23/1023 -- would create a five-member redistricting commission to draw Congressional and state legislative districts every 10 years. Why? Because the state legislature has historically drawn these districts to their advantage, not the people's! And when they abuse their power, we must take the power back from them. Putting redistricting power in the hands of a five-member committee (two Democrats, two Republicans, and a fifth member agreed upon by the other four) would improve matters greatly; the PA Supreme Court didn't throw out the 2010 Congressional map until 2018, so we can't just count on them to fix whatever abomination the legislature spews forth in 2020. So you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to find your PA state legislator's phone number, and then call them and tell them to pass these bills. (If they say they're a co-sponsor -- which many are, since they can tell which way the wind blows -- thank them.)

Meanwhile, H.R. 2474/S. 1306, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act, would strengthen your right to have a union in America. And if the word "union" triggers you, for some reason, ask yourself if corporations should just reclassify workers as "independent contractors" whenever they like so they don't have to pay benefits. You don't like that? Well, the PRO Act would stop them from doing that. And do you like it when your employer reclassifies you as a "supervisor" even though you don't get to tell people what to do or make the big decisions? Well, the PRO Act would stop them from doing that, too. So, again, use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to find your House Reps' numbers so you can call them to tell them to pass the PRO Act. You know, we spend too much time in America lionizing the boss at the expense of the worker, when frankly it's the worker, not the boss, who really makes this economy go, and we need to start protecting the worker again. Passing the PRO Act would be a start.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2214/S. 1123, the NO BAN Act, then Win Without War still helps you do that. You no doubt know that our President issued his original Muslim Ban three years ago, and this past week he marked that anniversary by adding six more nations to the ban -- one of those nations being Myanmar, whose military actively oppresses its Rohingya Muslim population, burning down their villages, bombing their houses, and raping their children. If you're thinking well, those are exactly the people I don't want coming here and doing the same to us!, then you have failed to learn one of the biggest lessons of the "war on terror," which is that folks running from terror don't commit terror; the middle-class folks who watch the terror perpetrated upon their poorer brethren commit the terror. The NO BAN Act would roll back all of this President's Muslin bans and prevent future Presidents from issuing similar bans on the basis of religion; we need to deprive terror of oxygen, and the NO BAN Act will help us do that.

Action: concerning impeachment, Medicaid, and pollution.

The Senate votes today on the two impeachment charges against our President, so now's the time to call your Senators and tell them to convict and remove him from office. (You can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to find your Senators' phone numbers; you may want to check out their websites, too, in case you can't reach their Washington numbers. I've programmed all of my Senators' phone numbers into my phone.) Republicans have been admitting for months that our President did wrong, but they're also saying it doesn't rise to the level of an impeachable offense. While I don't presume that this is the most impeachable offense he's committed, nor do I presume this is the worst thing he's done in office, just picture how Republicans would have reacted if President Obama had refused to release Ukraine aid money Congress had already mandated he spend unless the Ukranian government concocted some sort of investigation into Mitt Romney. They'd have howled like banshees! Their commitment to the rule of law may be entirely situational, but that doesn't mean ours has to be, nor does it mean we must remain silent.

Meanwhile, you may know that our President has decided to let states accept federal Medicaid funding in block grants, and you may also know that this has been a long-desired goal of the far right in America. Why? Because the far right hates Medicaid, of course -- it helps poor working folk get health insurance and therefore health care, so the right hates it as it hates all government programs that actually help people. And turning Medicaid funding into block grants would give states "flexibility" in how they spend it -- meaning they might not even spend it on health care! This block grants scheme would also limit funding to states, meaning that if folks need more health care than the block grant would fund, those folks would be SOL. Luckily, this block grant program is an option for states, not a mandate -- though it sure won't be an option for poor working folk! We expect a lot of states would leap to accept this "option," but we, the residents of those states, have a say about that. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell states to stop our government's attempt to destroy Medicaid by refusing the "option" to accept Medicaid funding as a block grant.

Finally, as part of its mad drive to destroy all regulations that actually help good Americans, our Administration has proposed to "streamline and clarify" the process by which our government enforces the National Environmental Policy Act, and you can guess what that means -- it means "streamlining and clarifying" science and public input out of the process, by reducing public commenting on decision-making processes that might cost some corporate executive some money, and by preventing government agencies from taking climate change into their decisions. Every time this Administration changes a regulation they make it worse, and the only thing that's stopped them from doing far more damage so far? Us, that's what. No, really, us -- when the courts strike down an Administration regulatory proposal, they often cite the numerous public comments this Administration routinely ignores in pushing that proposal, and believe it or not, clean air and clean water actually remain fairly popular with the American people. Hence both WildEarth Guardians and the Union of Concerned Scientists help you tell this Administration to scuttle yet another plan to ruin clean air and clean water regulation.

UPDATE. Senate acquits our President by 48-52 on the abuse of power charge (Sen. Romney of Utah being the only Republican to vote with all 47 Democrats) and 47-53 on the obstruction of Congress charge. Sen. Collins voted to acquit, saying our President had "learned a lesson" from the experience; I shudder to think the "lesson" he's learned is that he can do even more of whatever he likes. But we'll keep instructing him otherwise, as is our duty as citizens.

Around the table: in which we introduce, and then banish, a new character.

Looks like the government of China is reacting to the ongoing coronavirus outbreak by, sigh, arresting folks for criticizing government responses to the outbreak. The charge, of course, is "false information without verification," which sure does sound like something a snowflake government would concoct to arrest its critics. Thank God that doesn't happen here! Er, except that our President wants to change the libel laws and calls everything he doesn't like "fake news."

Who leads all Presidential candidates in fund-raising among soldiers? Why, Bernie Sanders, of course! What, you were expecting our President? I said it before and I'll say it again: our President doesn't get support from the military so much as he gets support from people who constantly preen about their own love for the military, and these are not the same thing. But, gosh, many of our soldiers seem to like a guy who has actually worked against all the stupid wars these soldiers have to fight. There's a lesson in there, somewhere.

Two Cato Institute analysts remind us that maybe selling weapons to the countries on our President's Muslim ban isn't such a hot idea. You won't be heartened to learn that more American weapons get stolen during this Administration than previous ones, but the real question for our Administration is: if you think these countries are so dangerous, why are you selling them guns and bombs? Particularly since these countries will most likely use these guns and bombs on their own people and thus drive more of them to try to leave? Then again, I guess that question answers itself -- you can't expect to keep a "war on terror" going if you actually try to solve the problems that cause or exacerbate terrorism.

Montana state legislator says the Constitution gives him permission to jail or shoot socialists, then points out exactly where in our Constitution ha ha I kid of course he didn't. Seriously, though, a little over a year ago he introduced a bill which would have mandated the state of Montana to buy a flailing power plant, which would have made him what, class? That's right, a socialist! This Rodney Garcia represents Montana's 52nd legislative district, but hopefully not for much longer; how about, in the meantime, we never speak of him again?

Finally, the Iowa caucus meltdown demonstrates, to me at least, everything wrong with the Democratic Party -- the next time some Democratic politico tells a group of coal miners they should Learn to Code, they can retort well, I guess we couldn't do worse than Shadow! But you may recall that we didn't know the name of the real winner of the Republican Iowa caucus in 2012 for several weeks, and given that Ron Paul had a legit shot at winning that caucus, I can't help but wonder if the Democrats screwed this up on purpose to deprive Sen. Sanders (who had been leading in late polls, and who was leading the popular vote, albeit narrowly, in the first set of returns released yesterday) of any possible bounce. I know, these are Democrats we're talking about, but how often over the years have we seen malice pretend to be mere incompetence?

Action: concerning endless war-making, predatory lenders, and climate change.

As the Afghanistan War enters its 19th (!) year, it's well past time for Congress to investigate the sheer folly of this effort, hence Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate the Afghanistan Papers, which describe how our government has been lying and BSing its way through this war for almost two decades. The Washington Post, as you may recall, obtained the "Afghanistan Papers" through a Freedom of Information Act (or FOIA) request, and published them in early December; the papers expose government officials declaring the war unwinnable in virtually every conceivable sense but plugging on with the disaster anyway, apparently adhering to the belief that the only thing worse than doing wrong is admitting you're wrong. You may wonder why we're bothering to get Congress in on this. Why, because it's their job -- as it has been all these years! -- and we must always tell them to do their job. And saying we-can't-win-but-let's-lie-about-it-rather-than-change-it is one thing in a memo you don't intend to ever see the light of day, but it's another thing entirely under oath, before the people's representatives. At least, it should be -- and we should make it be.

Meanwhile, banks used to evade state interest rate caps by "partnering" with out-of-state banks that don't face interest rate caps, but our Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (or FDIC) cracked down on them during Tha Bush Mobb years, of all times. But guess what? Times are changing back! With an Administration determined to destroy every regulation that might help good Americans suffer a little less, at least two banks -- FinWise (of Utah) and Republic Bank (of Kentucky) -- have restarted the notorious "rent-a-bank" scheme that lets them offer loans with interest as high as 160% to good Americans facing emergencies, thus assuring that they'll be trapped in a pit of debt for years to come. Nice work if you can get it! But, as I've said, this is already illegal, so the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell our FDIC to crack down on banks gaming the system to trap vulnerable folks in usurious loans. No use telling me "this isn't the job of government," not unless you want me to call you objectively pro-financial predator. We should be using terms like these a lot more; maybe they'll help bring shame back to our civilization.

Finally, if you've been attending the wildfires in Australia, you know climate change ain't no "Chinese hoax," as our President put it long ago, and you know we have a lot of work to do to counter its effects -- mainly, move from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Legislation supporting renewable energy is one way to do that, but it's not the only way -- another way is to get private corporations to divest from fossil fuels. We've told banks to divest from fossil fuels, and they've started to get the message, but we also have to get state pension funds out of fossil fuels, so Daily Kos helps you tell your state governors and legislators to get state pension funds to divest from fossil fuel corporations. Our opponents will tell us that we would be "hurting pensioners" if we did that, but you recognize that as a rhetorical hostage crisis by now, and besides, pension funds are kind of in the driver's seat here -- corporations want their business, after all! Maybe state pension funds should act like they're in charge, then?

Action: concerning Senate intransigence, unconstitutional war-making, and freedom of the press.

It's Monday morning, and you know what that means: it's time to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; and H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act. You may be tiring of telling your Senators to pass these bills, but the more they hear from us, the more embarrassed they'll be -- and the more they'll swing our way, as is their damn job. They need to hear from us that we want bills that protect voting rights, working families, public lands, disadvantaged minorities, and internet freedom. And they need to suffer the consequences of standing against these things -- you know, like losing their jobs.

Meanwhile, our President has declared that the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF), which authorized war with Iraq, also authorizes war with Iran! And that's reason enough to let Demand Progress help you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 AUMF -- because all this open-ended authority for the Executive branch to wage war isn't a good thing, and certainly isn't how our Founders envisioned our government running. They envisioned Congress declaring war, after all, and the fact that Congress has largely abdicated that duty since the end of World War II doesn't change that fact, and certainly doesn't change what's right or what works. I wish I could say that our current President's claim was the most absurd claim I've heard from a recent President over his authority to bomb wherever he likes, but sadly, it's not -- President Obama's claim that various AUMFs gave him authority to strike in Libya and Syria were, frankly, more strained, and if our current President's votaries weren't so good at letting their pride erase their memory, they'd see that their Personal Lord and Savior is wrong, too. I'm not going to lay money on that happening any time soon, but I'd be happy to be wrong about that.

Finally, Roots Action helps you tell the Brazilian government to drop cybercrime charges against journalist Glenn Greenwald. Mr. Greenwald's website, The Intercept, published articles last year exposing the infamous Brazilian "corruption" probe -- one which happened to put a lot of liberal politicians in jail, and just so happened to put the current President's opponent in jail while the campaign was going on! -- as an utter sham, and for that, the Brazilian government has arrested him. I like to believe folks are deeper than they seem, so I wish there were more to it than that, but there's not -- journalists who actually practice journalism, and expose the folly and venality of Our Glorious Elites, are more likely to wind up in jail than banksters who foreclose on grandmothers overdue by 27 cents on their mortgage. Of course, Brazil has laws, too, so they can't just put a journalist in jail for publishing leaked or hacked info; they have to insinuate that Mr. Greenwald somehow aided the hackers. But I'll believe the journalist who exposed government misdeeds over the government embarrassed by those misdeeds any day. It's not like we have a lot of journalists left, after all.

Around the table: more venality exposed, more stupidity pimp-slapped.

Alan MacLeod at FAIR reminds us that "It’s Media -- Not Bernie Sanders -- That Have an Antisemitism Problem." And the evidence? Some of his supporters criticized Israel, and the candidate hasn't done the proper obeisance to Mr. Netanyahu by renouncing them. Actual anti-Semitism happens all the time -- from people our President calls "very fine people," no less! -- but what good are facts when you can mainline rage? Seriously, they're really going to try this! They're really going to insinuate that the Jewish candidate is TEH REAL ANTI-SEMITEZ!!!! -- and they're going to do it as they're hurling anti-Semitic slurs at the Jewish candidate! And our "liberal" media wonder why they're so hated.

Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals strikes down two Arizona voting laws -- one banning out-of-precinct voting and the other restricting early absentee ballot collection -- asserting that their "unmistakeabl(e)" intent is racist. Perhaps that sounds a little odd to you, but consider that the state of Arizona loves moving around polling places on a monthly basis, and has closed nearly 70 percent of its polling places in Maricopa County which just-so-happens to be home to a lot of folks of color. Also, guess who files most of the absentee ballots in Arizona? Think the state already doesn't know that? Proponents of these laws bellow about TEH VOTER FRAUDZ!!!!, but guess how much evidence they product to prove it's happening? And do they even hide their racism very well anymore? With all of this, our Supreme Court and its younger-fresher-right-wingers might still take an appeal of the Ninth's decision and say TEH NOTHINGZ TO SEEZ HEREZ!!!!

Amazon is high-fiving itself for paying federal income taxes in 2019, but note well that their effective tax rate went from zero all the way up to 1.2 percent, rather below the 35% tax rate we used to have, and even well below the 21% tax rate we now have. And, er, rather below the 55% rate we had in the 1950s, and which we should bring back. And if Amazon says how will we ever ship packages same-day if we have to pay 55%?, we can just remind them that paying to ship packages same-day is an expense, and only profits get taxed. And you can say something similar when they say how will we ever create jobs? or how will we ever fight climate change? Corporations don't do the right thing freely -- they do it when we force them to do it. (Also, too, Amazon claims to "collect" sales taxes, but it doesn't pay them -- you do. God, they really think we're all stupid.)

It's a long read, but you'll want to attend this article from Michael Kwet at The Intercept arguing that "smart" camera networks may be as ominous a development as facial recognition technology. You know CCTVs, motion sensors, smart phones, and Ring doorbells? Now imagine all of them connected to a police-sponsored network. The apt dystopian thinker (which should be all of us) can easily imagine not being connected to that network comprising probable cause to the enterprising prosecutor. Now imagine artificial intelligence (or AI) being used for things like "behavior recognition" -- given that it can't reasonably tell behaviors like fighting and dancing apart, it's likely no better at its reason for being than facial recognition is, but that doesn't mean governments won't pretend it's TEH BEST SCIENCEZ EVAHZ!!!! in order to get convictions and repress free speech.

Let's not go overboard talking about a "GOP divide" in Georgia now that Rep. Doug Collins intends to primary incumbent Sen. Kelly Loeffler, herself recently appointed by Gov. Kemp to replace the ailing former Sen. Isakson. Concentrate, rather, on Rep. Collins saying "I’ve still got a lot of work left to do to help this president," as if helping our President is his sole job or, indeed, as if we should care what work he still has to do, since he's merely a humble servant of his district. Note well, also, that when he says "to keep defending this president and working for the people of Georgia," he literally puts the people second, just like they all do. Why, he's as good at the drama as his Personal Lord and Savior, our President.

Finally, Hillary Clinton slams Bernie Sanders for the crime of not doing enough to ensure that "a lot of people highly identified with his campaign" did not "urg(e) people to vote third party" or "urg(e) people not to vote." So she doesn't say he, specifically, did something wrong -- which would be tough, since he did at least three dozen rallies on her behalf in 2016! -- nor does she say people who worked for his campaign did something wrong, but merely "people highly identified with his campaign" (hate to pile on, but "identified" by whom?) did something wrong, and that backtracking tells you all you need to know about why she lost. You know what else tells you all you need to know about why she lost? The way she blithely assumes that Mr. Sanders can just control these "people highly identified with his campaign." Our Glorious Elites assume they can just control everyone -- which makes sense, I suppose, because no one would go along with their programs otherwise.

Action: concerning impeachment, pollution, and the Equal Rights Amendment.

So they've had the trial, and they've complained about hearing "nothing new" even though they've done their damnedest to keep out evidence and witnesses, and what have we learned? That the Senate should convict our President of the charges for which he's been impeached and remove him from office. Don't take my word for it, though: take the word of conservative former New Jersey Superior Court Judge and Fox News contributor Andrew Napolitano, who argues that Congress needs not wait for an actual crime to remove our President from office, but needs only wait for "behavior that is so destructive of the constitutional order that it is the moral equivalent of statutory crimes" -- plus he has committed actual crimes. Need I mention that as a conservative and as a Fox News contributor, Mr. Napolitano has at least two very good reasons to say exactly the opposite of what he's saying? Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to get your Senators' phone numbers so you can tell them to convict and remove.

Meanwhile, our EPA has proposed a chemical safety rule that would, color me surprised, more than triple the cancer risk for good Americans living near chemical manufacturing plants. Naturally our EPA would be ignoring its own findings in heightening our cancer risk, particularly in the case of ethylene oxide (or ETO), where EPA has apparently gone on a fishing expedition in order to go fishing for a state that has dramatically underestimated said cancer risk -- in this case, Texas. Hate to pile on, but big chemical corporations too often situate their plants near communities of color -- whose people have enough to worry about without having to worry about whether their air is even more likely to kill them -- and so folks of color will bear the brunt of our EPA's foolishness, as usual. Remember: our President doesn't do these things for we-the-people; he does them for other bosses, because other bosses are the only people who really matter to him. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell our EPA to scuttle its own plan to expose good Americans to even more cancer-causing chemicals.

Finally, with Virginia's state legislature becoming the 38th to pass the Equal Rights Amendent, the National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.J.Res. 79, which would eliminate the 1982 expiration date Congress imposed on the Equal Rights Amendment. Constitutional amendments don't usually have expiration dates, as you know -- the 27th Amendment to the Constitution saw literally over 200 years elapse between its proposal and its ratification -- but the ERA did, presumably so that some Congressfolk could say they voted for equal rights while they also injured the fight for equal rights. I suggested last week that our younger-fresher-right-wingers on the Supreme Court might stand in the way of the ERA becoming the law of the land on such a basis of "legislative intent," but now I think they would have an even weaker case than I had originally supposed -- after all, laws get amended all the time, and if you're a legislator, you vote on the bill in front of you, not the bill as it might or might not be expressed in law down the line. We could have equal rights in America, as we all deserve, so let's get to it.

Action: concerning pollution, TV sensationalism, and Presidential tax returns.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell our EPA to reject its own attempt to loosen coal ash regulations, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. You'll want to get moving, though, because the deadline for public comments is tomorrow, January 31. Our EPA wants to allow coal corporations to put off closing unlined coal ash ponds, even though the state of Illinois alone has 90 leaking coal ash ponds, and even though coal ash a) contains lead, arsenic, and carcinogens and b) will leak into local water tables. (Since, you know, they're unlined.) Again our Administration pretends that a corporation's "right" to save a little bit of money (or, more precisely, a corporation's "right" to deliver a little more money to executives so they can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home) is more important than our actual right not to drink poisoned water. They care only about bosses redistributing more income upward to themselves, but money doesn't last forever. Clean water does -- if we take care of it.

Meanwhile, after TMZ leaked the news of Kobe Bryant's death in a helicopter crash before his wife, Vanessa, and their three surviving children could find out about his death from local authorities, a Change.org petition helps you tell Fox to cancel TMZ. I think everyone would agree that, no matter how famous they are, folks should get tragic news from their local authorities before they get it from the TV, let alone TMZ, which has been a notorious purveyor of uncivilized sensationalism for almost 15 years now. To be perfectly frank, I'd favor oblivion for them even if they had managed to display a moment's sensitivity on what I would imagine would be the worst day of Vanessa Bryant's life. And please don't entertain the notion that they're "better" at journalism because they got the "scoop" first -- do "scoops" about celebrities serve a purpose in our civilization other than titillation and arousal? If they don't, then they're not journalism, period, end of.

Finally, H.R. 273, the Presidential Tax Transparency Act of 2019, would require all major party Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates, as well as the President and Vice President themselves, to disclose 10 years of tax returns. This has been a big deal, as our current President was the first major party candidate not to disclose his tax returns since Richard Nixon, and several investigations into his conduct have tried to get his tax returns in order to see exactly how compromised he is; he says the issue is closed since he won, but of course that's not how democracy works: the issue is closed when we say it's closed, not him. So Americans for Tax Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to hold Presidential candidates accountable by passing the Presidential Tax Transparency Act. (Don't confuse H.R. 273 with H.R. 162, also titled the Presidential Tax Transparency Act, which would require only the President and Vice President to disclose their tax returns.)

Action: concerning xenophobia, pollution, and high drug prices.

The third anniversary of our President's notorious Muslim Ban passed this week, and our President -- never one to admit that he's ever done anything wrong! -- has said he'll expand the ban, so this is as good a time as any to let the Friends Committee on National Legislation help you tell your House Reps to pass two bills that would restrain our President's xenophobia with regard to immigrants and refugees. The bills in question are H.R. 2214/S. 1123, the NO BAN Act, and H.R. 2146/S. 1088, the GRACE Act; the former bill would roll back the Muslim ban and make it harder to enact future religion-based bans, while the latter would increase the minimum number of refugees we can admit every year. I would caution against pointing to the lack of 9.11-style attacks since our President enacted his Muslim ban, since we had many, many years without such an attack while having much, much less restrictive immigration policies. I would also remind you that our President's election saw a spike in hate crimes against Jews and Muslims and that we do still seem to suffer an awful lot of mass shootings. I mean, white people also commit terrorism.

Meanwhile, it ain't just the Great Barrier Reef that's under siege from pollution -- America's only living coral barrier reef, the Florida Reef, also struggles with pollution despite its continuing designation as a marine sanctuary. And now the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (or NOAA) is mulling whether to offer new protections for the Florida Reef, so Environmental Action helps you tell our NOAA to implement the strongest protections possible for the Florida Reef. The threats to the Reef have, after all, changed over the years -- the Reef didn't face rising sea levels, farm runoff, and plastic pollution 40 years ago the way it does now -- and thus our regulations need to meet those changes. Interesting that our NOAA is actually considering strengthening environmental protections, considering that this Administration has consistently demonstrated a hatred of such protections. Probably our President wants something to argue about with TEH LIBRULZ!!!! whenever we complain about his record, and probably he wants to win Florida again. But I would take these risks to save the Florida Reef.

Finally, Change.org helps you tell the Connecticut state legislature to cap the cost of insulin copayments. Why Connecticut? Presumably because the petition's author lives there, but also because several states have already moved to cap the cost of insulin, and though our House of Representatives has moved to do the same at the federal level, our Senate will do its damnedest to do nothing about it, this even though one out of every four diabetics wind up rationing their insulin due to its exorbitant cost, and a diabetic who rations their insulin is likely to wind up dead. I'd prefer to contextualize the rising cost of insulin a bit differently, though -- the cost went up 100% (that is, it doubled) between 2012 and 2016, and what was inflation, generally, during that time? 4.5%. And how much did health care costs go up generally during that time? 15%. 100%, you'll notice, is considerably larger than both of these numbers, and no producer of insulin has ever justified such a cost hike. So gosh, maybe governments can hold those costs down without ludicrous insinuations of "socialism"?

Action: concerning farmworker safety, conservation funding, and rampant racism.

In their insane drive to gut all regulations that actually help people, our Administration now wants to change the Agricultural Worker Protection Standard so that farmworkers get exposed to more toxic pesticides! Because worker health is a "burden" to some bossman, somewhere. Our Administration would no doubt argue that you only need to protect farmworkers on the literal farm in which they work, but, ah, they have heard of pesticides drifting onto other lands, have they not? Of course they have; they're just pretending it doesn't happen, even though deep-red Arkansas has limited the use of Monsanto's dicamba herbicide after it drifted onto other farms, damaged crops, and injured farmworkers. Someone should tell this Administration that it's not "common sense" if it's wrong. Oh, wait: we can do that! The Sierra Club helps you tell our EPA's Office of Pesticide Programs to actually protect farmworkers by rejecting its own proposed rollbacks of the Agricultural Worker Protection Standard.

Pennsylvania's Environmental Stewardship Fund, also known as the "Growing Greener" fund, has done the same thing the Land and Water Conservation Fund has done at the national level -- it's helped preserve and rebuild some of the state's greenest areas over the last two decades, like the trails of the Wissahickon Creek and the Phipps Conservatory, not to mention close to 80,000 of family farmlands. The fund also helps clean up abandoned mines and upgrade sewer systems, and these are all good things. Preserving land is a good thing! Keeping our water clean is a good thing! But Growing Greener seems to face a funding shortfall every year -- as government programs that do good things always seem to do! -- so Penn Environment helps you tell your Pennsylvania state legislator to ramp up funding for the Growing Greener fund in 2020. Seriously, taxpayer money should not be a bottomless trough upon which corporate cronies gorge themselves -- it should deliver the services taxpayers expect and deserve. And Growing Greener is one of those services.

Finally, Color of Change helps you tell Twitter's head of Legal Policy Team, Vijaya Gadde, to ban white nationalists from that platform. No cries of WHAT ABOUT TEH FREE SPEECHEZ!!!!!, please, because getting banned from Twitter is not the same as being put in jail by your government; our First Amendment protects us from the latter, not the former. And profoundly awful people get to spew their white supremacist rubbish and the only reaction from Twitter is well gosh how do you ever balance free speech rights and racism? And what is racism anyway? Is white nationalism really racist per se? As I've suggested, the First Amendment already tells us how to achieve that "balance." And Dean Baker has told us how to achieve that balance more than once, too -- by treating platforms like Facebook and Twitter as publishing houses, which our laws already can hold liable for the speech they decide to publicize. See? We really are a resourceful people, we Americans -- and our tradition of freedom is one of our greatest resources.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence, Social Security, and public water.

Happy Monday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and ask them to pass the following bills: H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; and H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act. Bills that protect voting rights, health care, clean water, worker wages, and public lands (among other good things!) shouldn't have so much trouble passing in the Senate. And the more we demand they pass those bills, the more likely it'll be that they pass. Hey, it's not like Our Glorious Elites or their media enablers want them to pass! So it's up to us.

Meanwhile, our Administration wants to cut Social Security disability insurance, and will take comments on their proposal until January 31, so both Social Security Works and Moms Rising help you tell our Administration to scuttle their proposal. President Reagan tried cutting SSDI benefits for hundreds of thousands of people in the '80s, and helped cause over 20,000 deaths; he ultimately reversed course after public pressure, but that sure didn't help those 20,000-plus dead folk, did it? Our current President no doubt will yell and scream about making sure the people who actually deserve it get what they need, but everyone thinks of "those people" as "undeserving," and when we do that we're generally unaware that other people look at us exactly the same way! And our President's votaries seem to have more serious trouble realizing that these Social Security disability cuts could very easily affect them. And, really, folks who try to convince me SSDI is rife with fraud and abuse love to cite individual stories, but, as Neal Gabler has said, three incidents of chicken pox don't constitute an epidemic.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Suwannee River Water Management District to keep notorious water-bottling corporation Nestlé from pumping out over a million gallons a day from the Ginnie Springs along the Santa Fe River, then Environmental Action still helps you do that. We could go on about the cypress trees and underwater caves and species of turtles at Ginnie Springs, but let's keep it simple: why are we letting private corporations take public water for pennies a gallon so they can sell it for dollars a pint? That's rock-stupid, and it's not the "genius" of the "free market," either, since it requires governmental capitulation in order to work. Clean water is one of the great achievements of the last 150 years, and it does not belong to some corporation like Nestlé; it is our achievement, as a civilization. And it is kind of amusing that the corporate drive to undermine this achievement needs public water to work. Ultimately, though, it also needs public acquiescence to work, and we don't have to give them that.

Around the table: more myths exploded, more bad people exposed.

From Good Jobs First comes the "Putting Pension Costs in Context" report, which instructs us that corporate welfare handouts outstrip state worker pension obligations in five out of five states studied -- and in the cases of Arizona and Oklahoma, corporate welfare handouts more than double pension obligations. So, yeah, remember that when the politicians ask where the money's coming from to meet "pension shortfalls" that are 40 years in the future and never take into account everyone's interest in growing an economy. Good Jobs First will release results from more states soon; I bet the findings won't be that much different.

Julie Hollar at FAIR instructs us that our "liberal" media love pretending that Bernie Sanders is like our President -- "Because, for Them, Sanders is the Bigger Threat." The idea that Mr. Sanders is "like" our President is so absurd it really deserves no further comment, but Ms. Hollar tabulates all the differences, and you'll be better for having read about them. Next from the Washington Post: Goofus and Gallant are exactly alike.

"Clinton Says Sanders Achieved Nothing," writes Mike Ludwig at TruthOut. "My Community Clinic Shows She's Wrong." Of course he leads with a broader argument about Mr. Sanders's achievements, which include passing more amendments than any other House member from 1992 to 2006. Also, too, what has Hillary Clinton achieved, exactly, besides party-wide Democratic capitulation to Republicans on issues and messaging? Still, Mr. Sanders got $11 billion in funding for community clinics in poorer areas attached to what bill again? The Affordable Care Act -- which means he's not the my-way-or-the-highway jerk people say he is, either.

Administration Treasury Secretary/man who wears glasses so people don't punch him in the face Steven Mnuchin says climate change activist Greta Thunberg should go "stud(y) economics" before having the temerity to tell the rest of us to stop burning the planet down. And my immediate reaction was: the freaking Foreclosure King said that? Any moron, and I mean any moron, can start out with a pile of money and turn it into a much bigger pile of money by foreclosing on grandmothers who owe 27 cents on their mortgage; you don't need to "study economics" to do that. Jesus Mary and Joseph the proud ignorance of these clowns -- it's like Tha Bush Mobb never left office.

Finally, former House Speaker John Boehner says his party isn't the Republican Party anymore, but our President's party, but who cares what he thinks? Mr. Boehner spent his entire Speakership moving the party further right than ever before, and the fact that he made it look like he was "forced" to do that only testifies to his cunning, so he certainly has no standing to call Ted Cruz "Lucifer in the Flesh."

Action: concerning war with Iran, school lunch nutrition standards, and health care privacy.

Word on the street is that the House may vote next week on two excellent ideas: defunding any future Presidential attempt to wage war on Iran, and repealing the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF). The whole point of breaking off from King George III was most decidedly not to defer to a President who makes King George III look like the very model of sanity, so Win Without War helps you tell your House Reps to restrain our President's attempts to start war with Iran. In a related note, the Project on Government Oversight informs us that over 50 members of Congress and/or their spouses own, on average, somewhere between $45,000 and $110,000 each in defense corporation stock, and you can smell the conflict of interest there, right? As in what incentive do our Congressfolk have to stop us from fighting stupid wars if they stand to make money from them. So the Project on Government Oversight helps you tell your Congressfolk to divest from "all investments tied to their Congressional responsibilities." They'll say that's hard, but so's anything worth doing, so don't brook any whining from your Congressfolk.

Meanwhile, our Department of Agriculture has announced that they intend to roll back literally the only achievement of the Obama USDA -- the nutritional standards that replace junk food with more fruits and vegetables in school lunches. House Republicans have been trying to gut these standards for years, armed with dramatic anecdotes about kids throwing out apples, because what else can you do when you are objectively pro-childhood obesity? Am I being too harsh? On these clowns? Our USDA's maneuvering has nothing to do with "reducing burdensome regulations" and everything to do with catering to big food manufacturing corporations who want our kids hooked on their burgers and fries. It might also have to do with a President who really thinks fast food is the best food -- or, more broadly, a President who thinks long-term thinking is for losers. So Change.org helps you tell our USDA to protect kids' health by reversing course on its school lunch rollbacks.

In other news, you know that the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (or HIPAA) protects your private info when you go to the doctor or to a hospital, but what about the information you're giving to health-tracking apps on your phone? The corporations that collect that info can do whatever they like with that data, including selling it, and I don't think you signed up for that! And if you're not particularly worried about your heart-rate-while-jogging getting sold to someone who might try to sell you new running shoes, consider that apps tracking menstrual cycles actually reveal a lot more information that you would think -- like, how often you have sex, how often you have sex without using birth control, even how many miscarriages you have. And then imagine some data broker compiling that info on you into a profile that could affect your ability to get insurance (or get it at a good price)! Smells like dystopia, doesn't it? So Consumer Reports helps you tell health-tracking app corporations to protect your privacy.

Action: concerning privatization, pollution, child care, and equal rights.

You may have heard that the Internet Society (or ISOC) plans to sell the Public Interest Registry (or PIR) -- a database containing the names of all .org domains -- to Ethos Capital, a hedge fund management corporation. That should send off alarms, but the results could be even worse than a hedge fund deliberately mismanaging a database in order to extract its value, or even making prices for .org domains go up-up-up: as Mitch Stoltz of the Electronic Frontier Foundation writes in this very useful primer, selling something of public utility to a private corporation raises a buttload of questions. For example, would authoritarian regimes (ahem!) pay off Ethos to help shut down pesky .orgs that detail those regimes' crimes? Would Ethos cut back on domain name management such that some .orgs that provide lifesaving services can't do it anymore? Luckily, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (or ICANN) has to approve the sale, hence Save .ORG helps you tell ICANN to reject the proposed sale of .org names to a private corporation.

Meanwhile, our EPA wants to weaken rules that prevent power plants from polluting toxic filth into our clean water, because our Administration hates good regulations with a passion bordering on madness. If our EPA gets its way, we'll have more mercury, more lead, and more arsenic in our water, not to mention more dead animals and higher water bills for good Americans -- all so we can hand out more corporate welfare to the dying coal industry. Seriously, the coal industry is dying -- even Murray Energy declared bankruptcy filed for bankruptcy shortly before Halloween -- and it's dying partly because gas is considerably cheaper and partly because renewable energy is starting to achieve cost parity with coal. As Paul O'Neill might say, it's the genius of civilization. But all this Administration cares about is enriching the few remaining coal executives, and they're willing to be objectively pro-pollution in order to achieve this goal. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell our EPA to protect our clean water by scuttling its plans to weaken its own regulations.

In other news, it ain't just health care costs and college costs that have skyrocketed over the years -- it's child care costs, too, with a Freddie Mac study finding those costs going up almost 50% over the last quarter-century, and that means a lot in a world where single parents have to juggle working and parenting and two-parent households typically have two paychecks. You may even know someone who gives over their entire paycheck to child care! But H.R. 1364/S. 568, the Child Care for Working Families Act, would (among other good works!) mandate that child care could never cost more than 7% of a family's income, and would also ensure that poor working families can get good child care. Because they're people, too! And also because when we invest in child care, we invest in our future. That's as true when we invest in the poor, because (regardless of what many right-wingers still think) talent crosses lines of race and class. Hence Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to give working families the help they need by passing the Child Care for Working Families Act.

Finally, as you may have heard, the Virginia state legislature passed the Equal Rights Amendment, making it the 38th state to have done so. Of course, the original ERA had an expiration date that has long passed, but H.J.Res. 79 would eliminate that date, which means the Equal Rights Amendment could become the law of the land, as it has always deserved to be. Yes, I know, a few of those original 38 states repealed their passage of the ERA, but playing such games of take-backsies may not even pass Constitutional muster, so People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to support equal rights in America by passing H.J.Res. 79. And yes, I can also imagine our Supreme Court (particularly now that it has two younger fresher right-wingers on it!) saying that passing H.J.Res. 79 with anything less than a two-thirds majority would trample on the will of the Congress that passed it, since some Congressfolk surely wouldn't have voted for the ERA without the expiration date. But one might reasonably wonder why we would be more anxious to scrutinize such matters when women's rights are at stake.

Around the table: concerning health care policy, Presidential folly, and the Best Death Ever.

Second-largest physicians group in America calls for Medicare-for-All health insurance. And even though the American College of Physicians ain't the American Medical Association, their endorsement should give pause to right-wingers who might start bellowing WHY WON'T THEYZ LISTENZ TO TEH DOCTURZ!!!!!! You know, now that their Personal Lord and Savior has called our generals "dopes and babies" and rendered their criticisms of Barack Obama for "not listening to the generals" null and void? I kid, of course -- nothing gives right-wingers any pause. Sadly, it's one of the main reasons they win.

And here's the other reason right-wingers win: because right-wing Democrats like Hillary Clinton can't stay out of the spotlight. "Nobody likes him" may be the single most absurd thing she's ever said about anyone, let alone Bernie Sanders -- and we can't discount the possibility that she's jealous of all the big crowds he's drawn at his rallies over the years, or the formidable amount of money he's raised without having to cater to rich donors -- but it may indeed be her attempt to put yet another wedge between the liberals and the moderates in the Democratic party, so they come crawling to her later. You know, I criticize our current President a lot, but I praise him for this: he's given us the opportunity to break the wheel that churns out malicious Republicans and weak Democrats, and running to Hillary Clinton to save us would not be the best use of that opportunity.

Facing a crisis of its own making over its unsafe 737 MAX plane, Boeing looks to borrow at least $10 billion. And I suppose if they can't get a bank loan they'll come to the taxpayer, and our President will of course acquiesce, since he's so "tough" on corporations. And if he should give Boeing whatever it wants because of the jobs that'll otherwise go away, will he ask Boeing why it's spending $4 billion trying to buy another aircraft manufacturing corporation? I kid, of course -- no Glorious Elite will ever ask that of another Glorious Elite.

Once upon a time it would have meant something that our President called someone "one of our great geniuses" and compared him to Thomas Edison, but both our President and the "genius" in question, Elon Musk, are such assholes it doesn't mean very much anymore. Note well that our President praised him for creating a rocket that lands! Without wings! Our Glorious Elites always seem to grade each other on a curve. No truth to the rumor that our President then added "and he does good at self-driving cars, too. Why, they've only killed two people, and I heard they were not very nice people who said very bad things about me."

Finally, singer-songwriter David Olney dies onstage in the middle of performing a song at the 30A Songwriters Festival in Florida last Saturday night. He didn't "collapse" as some reports said; he actually seemed to nod off in the middle of a song, immediately after pausing and saying "I'm sorry" to his audience. I have no knowledge of his canon, but I have to say that dying mid-song is so the way to go. R.I.P.

Action: concerning war with Iran, peaceful protest, product safety, and shareholder power.

We've heard rather little about war with Iran this week -- but that doesn't mean we won't! Particularly since our President killed Gen. Soleimani in the middle of an impeachment, and that impeachment ain't going away just yet. Hence Win Without War helps you call your Senators and tell them to reject war with Iran. To think, if Jimmy Carter had simply bombed the crap out of Iran in 1980 he might have won a second term! But if our President is thinking the same thing, he's forgetting that 40 years have passed, and several wars-fought-under-false-pretenses have passed, and thus we're all a little skittish about fighting another one of those. And if you're thinking that maybe killing Gen. Soleimani really did prevent a war, note well that the whole "he was going to hit four U.S. embassies" rationale is, well, based on fairly flimsy evidence-if-we-can-call-it-that, with at least one Administration official saying people were wondering if our President had made it all up. And that's why we restrain Presidential power, as our Constitution commands us to do.

Meanwhile, the International Olympic Committee (or IOC) has lately banned political protests during the Games; protest might include kneeling, raising of fists, or wearing of armbands or signs. You may recall that track stars John Carlos and Tommie Smith raised their fists in support of the civil rights movement while getting medals in 1968; yes, "The Star-Spangled Banner" was playing, and if you think Messrs. Carlos and Smith "disrespected our country" in doing so, I'd say you were a bit sensitive. Surely your love of country can survive your being told you're not doing quite enough to fight racism, can't it? Hence Color of Change helps you tell the IOC to rescind its ban on political protest during the Olympics. Would I thus allow a white athlete to make one of those obnoxious white-power symbols during our national anthem? Of course I would! And let's see how many pals he'd have afterward, both among his fellow athletes and his corporate sponsors! Probably less of both than Colin Kaepernick, whose True to 7 shoe is doing quite well as we speak even though NFL teams with far worse quarterbacks won't sign him.

In other news, H.R. 5565, the Safety Hazard Recall Efficiency Information Act, or SHARE Information Act, would amend the Consumer Product Safety Act so that corporations couldn't mark information about their product defects "confidential"; yes, our laws actually allow them to do that, even though a lot of good Americans might benefit from information about, oh, just to pick an example out of thin air, the dangers presented by inclined baby sleepers linked to at least three dozen infant deaths over the last decade. The bill would also stiffen penalties for violating the Consumer Product Safety Act; what a shame that right-wingers never call that "law and order," though it's a perfectly valid application of the phrase. You can meet those right-wingers who complain that the SHARE Information Act would impose "more bureaucracy" on poor beleaguered corporations with the words "law and order" -- or the words "dead babies," if you like. But first, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to promote product safety by passing the SHARE Information Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to reject its own rule that would curtail shareholder power at big corporations, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. The SEC would require shareholders to own ten times more stock before you could even introduce a shareholder resolution; as usual, one must ask what is the SEC afraid of? They must be afraid of Boeing not being able to build unsafe airplanes like the 737 MAX -- because shareholder resolutions did try to call attention to Boeing executive coziness with federal regulators, and under the new rules, you sure would see a lot fewer of those. Boeing has taken a lot of PR hits, and deservedly so, over its problems with the 737 MAX, but making it harder for shareholders to prevent their corporations from making grave errors like the 737 MAX sure seems like the wrong lesson to learn. Of course our President seems to live for learning the wrong lessons. That doesn't mean we can't teach him the right ones.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence, Social Security, government oppression, and pregnant workers.

Happy Tuesday! It's time to call your Senators and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; and H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act. This week we add H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act, which passed the House last week and would restrict the use of cancer-linked chemicals you can't get out of your drinking water. But the other bills are good, too -- they would (among other things!) protect voting rights, protect health care, give workers a raise, and make real internet freedom the law of the land again. So let's get cracking.

Meanwhile, our Administration has proposed rule changes that would strip Social Security benefits from hundreds of thousands of Americans with disabilities, but I should be fair and note that Republicans have been trying to destroy that part of Social Security dealing with disability and survivor benefits for years now, this even though our former Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, paid for his college education with Social Security survivor benefits. He must figure he's one of the deserving ones! But then that's how they do it -- they tell you that you of course deserve benefits, but those other people don't. And then they tell a few stories about people cheating to get benefits -- true stories or not, what's the difference? -- and count on you not to remember that millions of Americans get these benefits and if they were all cheating, surely we'd be hearing that, and not isolated anecdotes. Hence Social Security Works helps you tell our Administration to scuttle its cruel plan to deprive good Americans of the Social Security disability benefits they deserve.

In other news, Google gets a lot of flak, and deservedly so, for failing to stand up to the totalitarian tendencies of the Chinese government, but Apple also deserves a lot of flak for capitulating to Chinese government demands to remove hundreds of apps and block hundreds of virtual private networks (or VPNs), even though these apps and VPNs help good Chinese citizens avoid getting censored or detained for their human rights activities. Apple will tell us that they can't get business in China unless they follow the Chinese government's rules, but is the business worth getting if you have to sell your soul to do it? Apple will also tell us that shutting the Chinese out of products they want because of their evil government is cruel, but a) Chinese citizens can do, and are doing, something about that government and b) Apple isn't a hostage here! Apple made nearly $63 billion in profits in just one quarter last year, so they've got some weight to throw around. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell Apple to stop coddling the Chinese government and stand up for human rights.

Finally, H.R. 2694, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, got through the House Education and Labor Committee with no trouble and now faces a full vote in the House, so the National Women's Law Center helps you tell your House Reps to support pregnant women at the workplace by passing the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act would force employers to make reasonable accommodations for their pregnant workers and would prevent employers from punishing workers for getting pregnant, whether by refusing to hiring them, forcing them to go on leave, or impose unnecessary conditions on their employment. If your Tea Party uncle exclaims in response ZOMG HOW CANZ ANYONEZ RUNZ TEH BUSINESSEZ!!!!!!, just recite the previous sentence to them again, filled, as it is, with words like "reasonable" and "unnecessary" that pre-empt such complaints. Remind him, also, that bosses should already be doing the things the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act would require them to do -- and that when bosses won't do the right thing, the law has to make them do it.

Penny Rants for Tuesday, January 21, 2020: of economic "prosperity" and Presidential immaturity.

Joseph Stiglitz reminds us that our current economy is not a "good" economy, regardless of any propaganda from our President or our media -- and also says we should be looking at indices other than Gross National Product or the Dow Jones Industrial Average to determine our economy's health. "Neither tells us what’s happening to ordinary citizens’ living standards or anything about sustainability," he says, and thus he offers life expectancy, disposable income, percentage of citizens with health insurance, and "deaths of despair" (i.e., deaths from suicide, alcoholism, and drug ODs) as better indicators of our economic health. We'd need more kinds of data to measure the effects of climate change on the economy, of course, though measuring property damage due to extreme weather events is a good start. (And if you're still wondering how to counter our Administration's constant bellowing about TEH LOWEST BLACK UNEMPLOYMENT RATEZ EVERZ!!!!!, consider that black wages still lag well behind white wages.)

Jonathan Chait reminds us that our President has long desired to weaken the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, even once saying, out loud, that "(i)t’s just so unfair that American companies aren’t allowed to pay bribes to get business overseas." His economic advisor, Larry Kudlow, says the Administration is still "looking at" changing the law, though it's hard to imagine the House going along with that, having just impeached our President after he essentially tried to bribe a foreign leader with the prospect of getting more business overseas in mind. When you hear statements like we need to bribe people more -- and when you contemplate, frankly, everything else he's ever done -- you'll find it easy to conclude, as Mr. Chait does, that our President "actually approves of corruption." But, sadly, our President's votaries also approve of corruption, and not just because our President is Their Bastard -- it's also because they think they're a lot smarter than everyone else when they're just a lot more cynical than everyone else.

In the wake of reports that our President apparently called our highest-ranking military officers "a bunch of dopes and babies" to their faces, I feel compelled to remind you, again, that nothing will split the insane 25% of the electorate away from our President -- they'll insist that our President loves the soldiers so much that of course he hates their leaders, and I suppose that's what passes for class solidarity among that lot. They'll also point out that our President loves winning wars, and it's true that we don't dominate the world despite spending more on defense than the next eight big-spending nations combined, although, well, there may be another lesson in there. And naturally they'll also scrub their memories of all those times they slammed Barack Obama for "not listening to the generals enough," since being a votary of our President means (just as being a Bush Mobb votary meant) never having to admit you've ever been wrong about anything, ever.

Action: concerning war on Iran, actually rehabilitating prisoners, and sane energy policy.

As you know, the House passed a War Powers resolution last week aimed at keeping our President from launching any more military attacks on Iran -- and now word on the street is that it has the votes to pass in the Senate as well. But don't get complacent! The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you call your Senators and tell them to restrain our President's war-happy ways. Yes, our President can veto this resolution, but let's make him do that! And let's not get caught up in exactly how many Republicans will vote the right way this time, not after Sen. Tillis (R-NC) made all that noise about voting for the resolution of disapproval aiming to overturn our President's "national emergency" declaration and then voted against it. Let's also not get caught up in which Republicans (cough Rand Paul cough!) will vote for this resolution precisely because our President will veto it. The whole point of America is not to sit around the TV and game out outcomes like this is Draft Kings or something -- the whole point of America is that citizens must act.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell American county sheriffs to stop eliminating in-person visits between prisoners and their families. Sheriffs like to tell you we don't have the staff (and here you thought privatization would have solved that!) and we're afraid they'll pass drugs to each other (actual translation: we'll find out how many of our staff are peddling drugs) and, perhaps most importantly, we've got this fancy new video service that lets prisoners essentially Face-Time their loved ones at exorbitant expense! When big telecom corporations offer monetary incentives to use their service, you're right to suspect all their excuses, and when you recall that real live contact from family helps prisoners stay out of jail once their sentence is over a lot more than "video conferencing" does, you'll suspect all their excuses even more. I must say when private prisons claim they just can't have real live family visits, they're not exactly conjuring up the Genius of the Free Market. Where's their can-do spirit?

Finally, you no doubt know by now that Australia is on freaking fire -- so much so that normally recalcitrant koala bears will come gulp down any bottled water you bring to them! -- and yet they're still trying to build coal mines there, most notably in central Queensland, where German chemical corporation Siemens plans to provide rail signaling equipment for the proposed Adani coal mine. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell Siemens to end its involvement in the Adani coal project. Here you would add your voice to the voices of climate activists in Germany who've been striking every Friday for months; they've been wielding the Big Stick of Bad PR effectively enough that Siemens's CEO has sounded a bit rueful about his involvement in the Adani project -- but he could be jiving us, you know. And yet, if he really is counting on another coal project to get him his 19th vacation home, he should remember that cheap gas is killing coal, and the falling cost of renewables sure ain't helping, either. We can help him get with the times by telling him to abandon coal mining in a burning country.

Action: concerning religious freedom, health care, and pollution.

Avaaz helps you tell big pension fund corporations to divest from China's long-term effort to oppress its Muslim Uyghur population. What do the big pension funds have to do with the Uyghurs? They invest in big tech corporations that provide China with surveillance tools including (sigh) facial recognition software and DNA testing. And what do the Chinese do to the Uyghurs? Oh, you know, imprison them in internment camps, ahem, re-education camps, and inflict torture, rape, forced sterilization, and forced labor, among other things, all as part of a "people's war on terror," a phrase I hope dies a horrible and humiliating death one day. Investing in anything China does is dicey enough -- China's government is really the worst of capitalism and the worst of Communism rolled up into one monstrous entity -- but investing in detainment of citizens for religious reasons should make pension funds run away in horror. And they will, if enough of us speak out -- and if we can help cut off this money-flow, China will have a tougher time keeping them going, and we will save lives.

Meanwhile, H.R. 4996, the Helping Medicaid Offer Maternity Services (or Helping MOMS) Act, would give states the option to offer one year of post-birth Medicaid coverage to both mother and child; the bill has 11 Democratic House sponsors and 8 Republican ones, which might make it actually bipartisan! Of course Medicare-for-All would make this problem moot, but this bill will still do a lot of folks a lot of good, and if a few Republicans get re-elected because they're able to tout their support for expanding health care coverage for poor mothers and children -- and doing so effectively, too, since most health complications relating to pregnancy occur within the first 100 days after childbirth -- that's not too high a price to pay for progress. Of course, a state could just say no and say 60 days of coverage (which current law mandates) is just fine, and if state-level politicians want to run on denying health care to poor mothers and children, I say let 'em. So Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand health care to poor mothers and children by passing the Helping MOMS Act.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: the state Assembly still plans to take up the notorious SB 790, which would commit all manner of foul deeds against our clean air and clean water, even though we've told them many times to reject the bill, so Penn Environment helps you tell your state Assemblyfolks to protect our air and water by rejecting SB 790. SB 790 would, among other nefarious acts, prevent localities from protecting themselves from gas and oil drillers (now there's small-government conservatism for you!), let oil and gas corporations replace any water they pollute with unsafe drinking water, weaken state standards for reporting oil and gas spills, and allow the state to spray drilling wastewater on state roads to keep dust down. They're not trying to help corporations pollute because of "burdensome regulations" -- they're trying to help them pollute because they care more about big donors than their bosses, i.e., you. That only means we have to remind them, again and again and again if we have to.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence, Mississippi prisons, and impeachment.

Happy Monday! Today you can call your Senators and ask them to pass the following bills: H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; and H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act. These bills have all passed the House, and would (among other things!) protect voting rights, fight discrimination, raise the minimum wage, protect immigrants, protect our public lands, reinstate real internet freedom, and help good Americans get better health care -- but Mob Boss Mitch won't let any of them come to a vote, because (and I quote) "I get to decide what we vote on." He's wrong -- we tell our Senators what they want, and if we tell them enough times, they do it.

Meanwhile, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell our Department of Justice to investigate prison conditions in Mississippi. It's so bad in Mississippi prisons that it's even made the news! Our "liberal" media, of course, would rather talk about celebrities than about brown drinking water and no air conditioning in prisons, but human beings are suffering and dying, and no it doesn't matter that they're criminals! Jesus Mary and Joseph rights are for all people, and mercy is for all people, and a civilization that treats its prisoners well is a strong one, and a civilization that treats them badly is a weak one. Yes, that is the opposite of what the "tough on crime" crowd has been telling you all these years, but they were always weaklings, preying on our various insecurities. Hate to pile on, but no "rehabilitation" will happen if you can't breathe or eat healthy food or drink clean water. And folks who would call that "prisoners living the high life" really need to start with the man in the mirror.

Finally, Moms Rising helps you tell your Senators to conduct a fair impeachment trial. That would include documents and witnesses, of course, and you'll never guess what then-Rep./now-Sen. Lindsey Graham said back in 1999, when he was anxious to remove a Democratic President: "in every trial that there's ever been in the Senate, regarding impeachment, witnesses were called," and not calling them against President Clinton would have "basically chang(ed) impeachment." But wait, there's more! "You can have three days of lawyers talking to each other on both sides...but when you have a witness who was there, who was engaged in it, who was in the middle of it telling you about what they were doing and why, that's a totally different case, and it's the difference between getting the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." Maybe he'll explain this flip-flop -- or, after the manner of his new Personal Lord and Savior, he'll say you're an idiot for noticing it.

Action: concerning Social Security and PFAS chemicals.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 860/S. 269, the Social Security 2100 Act, then Social Security Works still helps you do that. The Social Security 2100 Act would increase benefits, shield more Social Security income from taxation, and start taxing income above $400,000 into the system. If you want, though, you could tell your Congressfolk to improve the bill -- there's no reason income above $137,700 and below $400,000 should be untaxed, and there's no reason we should tax anyone's Social Security income at all. You might also mention (there's a "comments" section for this at the above link) that you oppose bills like the so-called TRUST Act, which would let Congressfolk fast-track Social Security cuts "behind closed doors" (in Sen. Ernst's words, which I sincerely hope she regrets after Election Day). We might as well demand the most, or else we'll have to live with the least.

Meanwhile, H.R. 535/S. 618, the PFAS Action Act, would require our EPA to designate all PFAS substances as hazardous; this shouldn't be a tough lift for our EPA, not just because a) PFAS chemicals hardly degrade over time and b) scientists have linked them to cancer, immunity disorders, birth defects, and liver problems, but because our EPA has long acknowledged the need for action on PFAS chemicals -- in fact, they announced a plan to deal with PFAS chemicals just last year, a plan widely derided as too-little-too-late, but it's not like they're going around calling PFAS chemicals "safe." You know, like our President goes around calling climate change a "Chinese hoax" and wind power "dirty"! So Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our health by passing the PFAS Action Act. If it's in everything (and it is), and it doesn't break down naturally, then it's in our water, too -- at least, it is in 43 states, that's 43 of 50 -- and if we don't have clean water, we don't have health care, period.

Around the table: with more horrible truths about American politics.

The incomparable Nathan Robinson at Current Affairs advises us on "How to Avoid Swallowing War Propaganda." I hope by now it'll all be reminder more than revelation, but reminders sure ain't useless, and I'm glad we're getting this particular reminder before we get too engrossed in yet another Middle East quagmire. I can't resist highlighting the part where Ben Shapiro says TEH OBAMA DRONED TEH TERRURIZTZ TOO!!!! and Mr. Robinson reminds us that such statements "prove() exactly nothing about whether (our President)’s actions were legitimate." Always they talk about what great debaters they are, and then they resort to personal attacks when they're on their heels, which means they're not great debaters.

The incomparable Dean Baker tells us -- because apparently our "liberal" media, at least, needs telling! -- that maybe "College Presidents Aren’t Who We Should Consult About Free Higher Education," since, you know, they all stand to lose money from taxpayer-funded higher ed. They may not have been (as Mr. Baker says) the worst people to ask about it, though -- I bet the worst people to ask about it would be the Vice-Presidents and Deans and Vice-Deans who don't do any useful work and whose mere existence is a major driver of the high cost of education.

Ho hum, another provocative act against a foreign power by our government, another litany of TV and radio "pundits" who all work for defense contractors without proper disclosure of their conflicts of interest. You can contact NPR's public editor about Mr. Keane's appearance on Morning Edition without disclosing his past defense contractor employment here, but as for the rest of them, this is yet another reason we need, and deserve, a la carte cable packaging -- we may not watch this rubbish, but we still pay for it if we have cable, which most of us do. (Don't believe the excuse that disclosure would scare "knowledgeable people" off of television and there'd be dead air all the time -- I mean, this is America we're talking about, full of folks who actually have something to say and hungry to get it heard.)

At last, someone (namely Noah Feldman at Bloomberg) shows skepticism that John Bolton's statement expressing willingness to testify at our President's impeachment trial means a damn thing. Why is saying you'll testify if subpoenaed some gift to America? And if Senate Republicans don't even want witnesses, why would they subpoena him? And have no Congressional Democrats considered the possibility that the Mustache of Evil is running a con game on them? And why can't Democratic politicians stop hoping for some Great Republican Savior? (Also, too, as Mr. Feldman points out, Mr. Bolton's reasoning is not exactly cogent.)

HuffPost/YouGov poll finds that while a mere 43% of Americans supported our President's decision to kill Gen. Soleimani, 30% of Americans "strongly supported" the decision, and this finding, for once, does not map that well onto my long-held belief that 25% of the electorate is bat-guano insane -- and suggests that maybe poking Iran more will get our President more votes on Election Day. It is all about the margins with this guy, after all. I suppose it's possible the poll came out too quickly after the assassination to tell us very much of anything, but I guess time will tell, or at least suggest.

Action: concerning war with Iran, child labor, and endangered species.

Now that Iran has apparently taken its "fierce revenge" on two American bases in Iraq -- an attack our Administration knew about beforehand because this has all been one big drama, people! -- House Democrats will bring a War Powers resolution to a vote today, a resolution that would restrict our President from taking future military action against Iran without the Congressional approval our Constitution demands. Hence both the Friends Committee on National Legislation and Win Without War help you tell your Congressfolk to support a War Powers resolution that would restrain our President. Also, if you want to take to the streets today to protest war with Iran, then No War With Iran! helps you find a demonstration near you. Don't believe the hype that we shouldn't "hamstring our President" from "protecting Americans," because "protecting Americans" is nowhere near as important to this President as pretending to be tough before the cameras, and also because if any President demands hamstringing, it's this one. And if any President demands it, then all Presidents must get it.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell the CEOs of chocolate-producing corporations Mars, Hershey, and Nestlé to stop using child labor to make their candy bars. Some two million kids in West Africa (you have to go where the cocoa grows, after all) work on growing and harvesting cocoa, which involves using heavy instruments and spraying pesticides; some of them are as young as 10 years old, and they might make very little money or they might make no money. Once again we must ask ourselves: is this the world we would have made? A world where we force kids to do hard labor to make candy bars? I know someone is going to pipe up with well you don't want your candy bars to cost ten dollars each, do you? I would advise that person to do three things: 1) slap themselves, 2) contemplate how little effect the $20 fast-food worker wage in Denmark has on the price of a Big Mac there, and 3) slap themselves again, because "cheap goods" does not excuse evil.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4348/S. 2491, the PAW and FIN Act, then Environmental Action still helps you do that. The PAW and FIN Act would (and this is becoming a sad refrain!) roll back Administration rules that make it easier for polluters to kill off endangered and/or threatened animal species. For example, our Administration would force our policymakers to consider the "economic costs" of listing a species as threatened, and by "economic costs" you know they mean the cost to some executive or other who now won't be able to gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home? They sure don't mean "jobs"; why, they don't even say jobs! Big thinkers in the Administration don't consider that money always goes away, but a species we protect from extinction can live forever. This focus on short-term executive pay rather than the things that last -- why, it's like this Administration isn't conservative at all.

Action: concerning voting rights, health care, discrimination, internet freedom, and a host of other issues.

Happy New Year, good peoples! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; and H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act. All you need do in your phone call is tell your Senators to pass these bills -- you need not explain your will, you only need deliver it, and in my experience Congressional staffers don't make a habit of challenging your will; it's their job to pass your will to your Senators. Nonetheless, I'll explain in some detail why we should pass these bills, since (also in my experience) we feel better when we call if we have more to say than we have to.

H.R. 1, the For the People Act, would allow national automatic voter registration, require disclosure of large campaign contributions, create a public campaign financing system, make Election Day a national holiday, and mandate that states use nonpartisan commissions to draw up districts -- all things we've been fighting for in other bills over the years. Automatic voter registration, in particular, would automatically register a lot of folks when they move, since they'll have to change their driver's license (if they have one) when they move, and that will help counter state efforts to de-register people they "suspect" have moved. Not too many Americans actually favor "more big money campaign ads" or "more secret corporate involvement in political campaigns" -- most Americans, in fact, will tell you these things are evil. It often seems like the only people who don't think they're evil, in fact, are the ones who rely on secret corporate campaign donations to survive at the polls. But why should they get all the say about everything? Is that the world we would have made?

H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Act, isn't perfect, but our agitation for a better bill prompted some members of Congress to demand (and get) improvements; H.R. 3, as passed by the House, would allow Medicare to negotiate prices and upwards of 25 brand-name drugs that don't have any competition from generic drugs. H.R. 3 would also cap such drug prices at either the average drug price of six other developed nations or (if that info isn't available, i.e., because a drug is only available in America) 85% of the current American drug prices. If the Senate wants to amend the bill so that it lets Medicare negotiate for all drugs on the market, well, I won't complain -- indeed, bills from Sens. Sanders (I-VT) and Warren (D-MA) would be considerably more comprehensive than H.R. 3. But I don't let the perfect murder the good, either, so H.R. 3 deserves your support. Remember that when Senators say the "free market" should be allowed to work its will, it's OK to remind them that the market's "will" is apparently for good Americans to die because they can't afford insulin for their diabetes or an EpiPen for anaphylactic shock.

H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act, would plug the hole our Supreme Court blew in the Voting Rights Act in its Shelby County v. Holder ruling. Our Court said that singling out Southern states for pre-clearance of state-level voting law changes was unfair to them, but our Court also said that a different pre-clearance formula that didn't single out Southern states would likely pass their muster. Hence H.R. 4 would subject any state or locality with a demonstrated history of voting rights violations to federal pre-clearance, which would only "single out" Southern states if they're the ones doing the most vote suppression! Sadly, vote suppression is a national sport now, reaching as far north as Wisconsin (where folks of color somehow get targeted by de-registration efforts far more than white folks) and Michigan (where Interstate Crosscheck may have delivered that state's electoral votes to our President in 2016). Luckily, the Voting Rights Advancement Act would give us the tools to stop it.

H.R. 5, the Equality Act, would amend the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act (among other laws) to extend civil rights protections to gay and transgender folk -- who can still get fired, denied housing, and denied credit just because of who they are and whom they love. You may be pleased to know that a lot of folks who don't like gays and don't have gay friends aren't necessarily in favor of firing them, denying them housing, and denying them credit just because they're gay or transgender! And that includes some of our President's most devoted supporters! Really, it's only the proverbial loudest wagons of our political discourse who insist that gay and transgender folk should remain second-class citizens forever; most Americans really are live-and-let-live types who don't want to get too involved with regulating other folks' genitals and what they do with them. Our laws should honor our best natures as Americans, and the Equality Act would do that, by giving gay and transgender folks the same tools to redress grievances that other historically-aggrieved classes have.

H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act, would reverse our President's executive order revoking the DACA (or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program which allows immigrants brought here as children (and therefore against their will) can continue to stay here if they contribute to American society. Seems like a fairly uncontroversial idea, right? Not for our President or his most nativist votaries, who would happily send immigrants back to countries they don't recognize, as long as it gives them an opportunity to stay enraged at something. Rage is a hell of a drug, as I'm sure you've figured out by now -- you can never get enough of it, and thus the worst of Our Glorious Elites move the rage-addled around from one manufactured outrage to another. Raging against childhood arrivals by saying THEY'RE TEH ILLEGULZ AND TEH ILLEGULZ MUST TEH GOEZ!!!! is not actually very "law and order" of them -- childhood arrivals, as I've said, had literally no choice in coming to America, and removing them just so you can indulge in rage is cruel. It'll bite you in the ass, too, but that won't help any of these immigrants in the meantime.

H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act would give women more tools to fight pay discrimination. H.R. 7 would outlaw clauses in employment contracts that prevent workers from talking about their pay, and would prevent retaliation against employees who do talk about their pay -- and these are important, since talking about your pay is usually how you find out you're being shafted. The bill would still allow employers to pay men and women differently based on bona fide factors like, you know, skill levels and qualifications, but would restrict employers' ability to manufacture a "bona fide factor" after the fact. And the bill would also stiffen penalties for discriminating against women workers. It's hard to actually argue against these things, since no one wants to be called "objectively pro-paycheck discrimination," so its opponents yell about "trial lawyers" -- how hysterically lazy! -- and "what about when men are more qualified than women?", which, hey, re-read the third sentence of this paragraph if that's you or someone you know. When someone yells something like that about a bill, you're right to question whether they've read it or understood it.

H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act, would raise our minimum wage from $7.25/hour to $15/hour gradually over the next six years -- yeah, I made sure to put those last six words there, for all the haters who say IT'S TOO TEH FASTZ!!!!! -- and would increase that minimum wage every year thereafter in accordance with the rise in the median hourly wage. The bill would also hike the minimum wages for tipped workers and disabled workers gradually and close the gap between these and the regular minimum wage. The arguments against this bill might give a lot of people pause, but they fall apart upon closer (or, indeed, any) analysis. Fast food workers make $20/hour in Denmark, but that hasn't resulted in $20 Big Macs there -- Big Macs cost around $5.50 there, which ain't that much more than they cost here. And that CBO study that said a higher minimum wage would kill half a million jobs? Actually, that study said job losses could range from zero to a million jobs lost, that range represents jobs lost over 10 years, and the economy already needs to make a million jobs roughly every seven months just to keep up with population growth, so let's not go in for hysteria.

H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act, would roll back an Administration guidance issued in October of 2018 which actually weakened the Affordable Care Act's guarantee that health insurance corporations couldn't deny you health insurance (and therefore health care) because of your pre-existing health conditions. The Administration's guidance allows sub-standard health insurance programs to operate legally in the United States, even if they discriminate against folks with pre-existing conditions, a nefarious practice the Affordable Care Act would have ended (even if the ACA has dozens of other flaws which we have already discussed at length). The Administration's guidance was never about delivering "really great health care" to Americans; it's about letting health insurance corporations flout the law, and of course it's also about taking a crap over a Barack Obama legislative achievement because Mr. Obama made fun of the President that one time. Really, I'm pretty sure that's what it was -- and if it's not, it's likely something about as petty, and Americans deserve better than to be held hostage to a President's pettiness.

H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, would keep oil and gas drilling corporations out of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR) by repealing that part of the 2017 tax "reform" that authorized oil and gas drilling in the Arctic. H.R. 1146 would also impose inspection fees on corporations that drill offshore so that our government can actually fund these inspections. You know all the good reasons we shouldn't drill in the Arctic: because there's not that much oil to be drilled there, because it would threaten Alaska's salmon industry, because it would threaten local indigenous populations and wildlife, and because cleaning up a spill in the frigid Arctic is many times harder than cleaning up one in a more temperate region. What's the reason we would drill up there (aside from getting Sen. Murkowski of Alaska to vote on a tax "reform" bill she might have voted against)? Oh, you know, to make some crony oil or gas CEO rich. That's really all of it -- they'll say it's "jobs," but what of the actual jobs in the salmon industry that'll go away after the next oil spill?

H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act, would permanently withdraw over a million acres of Grand Canyon-area land from any drilling or mining considerations. It's a bit stunning that we would even consider drilling around the Grand Canyon -- I mean, you've been to the Grand Canyon, right? -- but uranium mining corporations have had a jones to do that for decades, and our President of course has a jones to give them whatever they want, since public lands exist merely for exploitation in his mind. This, even though uranium mining would inevitably pollute the Colorado River upon which citizens of five American states depend for clean water! The bill would also protect any additional land in the Grand Canyon area that our government acquires after the bill becomes law. So, to sum: we could preserve a national treasure and protect the drinking water used by tens of millions of Americans -- orwe could make a few corporate CEOs even richer. It's not much of a choice, really, though Our Glorious Elites do keep choosing wrong.

H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act, would reverse the FCC's 2017 net neutrality repeal and reinstate the FCC's 2015 Open Internet Order, which originally encoded the principle of net neutrality in law. All the bills I've listed have earned a lot of popular support, but none more so than the Save the Internet Act -- which makes this Administration's (and Mr. McConnell's) flouting of the popular will all the more offensive. Net neutrality guarantees that internet service-providing corporations deliver all files to your computer at the same speed and with the same priority, which does not amount to TEH BIG GUMMINT CONTROLZ TEH INTERNETZ!!!!, but our government preventing big corporations from controlling the internet, so that you can determine where you want to go and what you want to see on the internet, rather than having big corporations force you to watch Miley Cyrus twerking videos before visiting your favorite weblogs (ahem!). Yeah, they haven't tried that yet, but they will; they're not stupid enough to make your freedoms disappear all at once. And this is about your freedom, which will always be more important than some corporation's "freedom" to make more money doing less work.

H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act, would force corporations to disclose their "beneficial owners" -- that is, the folks who create the corporations and, presumably, benefit financially from their existence -- and that would force banksters, terrorists, tax-evaders, sex traffickers, drug money launderers, and big campaign donors (who all use shell corporations to hide their wrongdoing) out into the light, and if they can't stand the light, well, that's the price of operating too long in the dark. According to a Global Financial Integrity study from 2014, America is the second-easiest nation on Earth to start an anonymous corporation -- behind only Kenya, where there just ain't as much money. Right-wingers will tell you that forcing such transparency would be Big Gummint spying on people -- and where are they when our government actually spies on us? Being outraged at football players kneeling, probably! -- but they would have to explain why revealing the beneficiaries of corporate crime should be guarded by the law.

H.R. 2722, the Securing America's Federal Elections (or SAFE) Act, would mandate voter-verified paper ballots for federal elections, which is a big deal, since (as we saw in Mississippi earlier this year) a lot of electronic voting machines don't let you vote for the candidate for whom you want to vote! H.R. 2722 would also fund state efforts to update their voting systems, which you know some states "forget" to do in their black and brown neighborhoods. And H.R. 2722 would prohibit states and localities from connecting their voting machines to our internet, and that's also a big deal! After all, any fool can see that connecting voting machines to the internet is a profoundly stupid idea. I would say connecting your thermostat or your house lights to the internet is also a profoundly stupid idea, but as bad having your house hacked would be, having our democracy hacked would be even worse. Hacking our democracy has been in the news a lot the past few years, after all -- and not as much as it should have been in the years before that! A lot of times the most advanced technology is not at all the best technology.

Finally (cue cheers from convention crowd!), H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act, incorporates most of the TRUE Fees Act, which would not only force big telecom corporations to reveal all the fees they like to hide in your cable or cellphone bill, but would force them to give you formal notice of these fees and would give you the right to cancel your contract with these big telecoms if you don't like the fees they give you. H.R. 5035 would not outlaw forced arbitration agreements in big telecom contracts, as the actual TRUE Fees Act would have done, and that's a backward step, but, as I've said, I don't let the perfect murder the good, and H.R. 5035 is good, because it will keep big telecom corporations from giving you surprises in your cable and cellphone bills. And we will one day bring about comprehensive arbitration reform, because just as the only people standing in the way of fee transparency are the big telecoms that no one likes, the only people standing in our way or arbitration reform are the corporate flunkies whom no one likes. Yeah, weakling politicians "like" them, I suppose, but all I want is a fighting chance.

If you've been reading with an open mind, you probably see that all of these bills would do good things that would improve our laws and our civilization -- and if you attend the ludicrous arguments opposing them, some of which I've touched on above, you'll likely be more convinced of that, not less. Most ludicrous, perhaps, is the reflexive smearing of many or all of these bills as "socialism." You know that words mean things, and you may also suspect that a lot of folks throw the word "socialism" at anything they don't like and hope it sticks because they can't win the argument on the merits. Nonetheless, ask yourself: is securing the vote, and protecting the vote, "socialism" -- or is it merely common sense? Is preventing cruelty to gay, transgender, and immigrant folk "socialism," or is it common sense? Are protecting internet freedom, lowering drug prices, and protecting good Americans with pre-existing health conditions "socialism," or are they merely common sense? I think all of these things are common sense, and I hope that knowledge will steel your spine as you talk to your Senators today.

Good luck, and God bless.

Action: concerning war with Iran.

You've no doubt heard by now that our President ordered the assassination of Iranian Gen. Soleimani over the weekend, which has left many of us wondering if we're going to be involved in World War III just a few days into a new decade. But let's take wondering out of the equation by telling our Reps and Senators to prevent war with Iran -- you know, like they should have done in the defense authorization bill last month but were too chicken to do. Only Congress has the Constitutional power to declare war, after all, even if they've spent the last 60-plus years deferring to our Presidents in exactly the manner our Founders aimed to prevent. Demand Progress, Win Without War, and the Friends Committee on National Legislation all help you write your Congressfolk telling them to stop the march to war with Iran, but I advise you to call your Reps and Senators, too, because we need to clog up their phone lines, or they'll just pretend they didn't hear us.

Folks on the right will tell you that if you oppose our President's unconstitutional action, you don't know anything about the situation, but we're not schmucks and we don't need to taste dung just to make sure it's not really meatloaf. The House impeaches a President, then he goes after a Middle Eastern bogeyman -- gosh, where have we heard this tale before? But those of us who may be more charitably-inclined also may observe plenty of other signs this is all typical Presidential drama -- that our President just couldn't help but drop broad hints about the attack to fellow elites at Mar-a-Lago, that our Administration has absurdly tried to link Mr. Soleimani to the 9.11 attacks, that the Fredo Corleone aspirant who also happens to be our President's middle child actually told Twitter last week that his dad was about to "open a big ol' can of whoop ass," and that virtually every right-winger in America who has spent the last several days lecturing us about Gen. Soleimani never mentioned him before.

Of course, yelling about your supposed "ignorance" in failing to support our President's vanity military attack will only be the beginning -- next they'll tell us we're "weak," and that we're "objectively pro-Iran," and that we're "traitors." We're none of those things, of course -- we're Americans who love our country and hate what Our Glorious Elites constantly do to it. Seriously, they use America like toilet paper and then call you a "traitor" when you point that out. So let's make sure we let our Reps and Senators know how we feel, by using one of the action tools in the first paragraph above, or calling them, or both.

Around the table: concerning swordfighting, immaturity, "moderates," and the things that are more important than all of them.

Mike Ludwig at TruthOut suspects that the dominant story of 2019 won't be our President's impeachment, but movements of resistance around the world. And in a just history, that would be true! Our President loves to make everything about himself, but popular uprisings in Hong Kong, Chile, and Haiti -- not to mention Oakland and Hawaii! -- aren't so much about him but the rampant rot in Our Glorious Elites that he merely epitomizes. Bad leaders die, but civilizations live on -- if we keep them.

Ex-Republican slams right-wing gun worship, calling it "conservative virtue-signaling." Having guns is one thing, enjoying guns another, but throwing folks who don't fight every conceivable gun-control proposal to the death out of Conservative Nation is another thing entirely. "Virtue signaling" is too long and obscure a phrase, though -- I call it "swordfighting," and yes, when I say "sword," I kinda mean "penis."

Apparently our Administration went to great lengths back in 2017 to discover which employee of our office of the ambassador to the European Union liked a Chelsea Clinton tweet that responded to something bad our President said about Ms. Clinton. We'll never know for sure if our President knew about all of that, but that of course he knew about all of that, acting as he does like a diaper-loaded brat every time someone criticizes him (or answers his obnoxiousness without backing down). Of course he does it for "his people," who have so thoroughly internalized his "battles" as their own.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) gets it right, for once, in criticizing both sides for demanding a particular conclusion to our President's impeachment trial in the Senate. Yes, it is bad that Mr. McConnell seems to think our President should have so much of a say in how he gets tried in the Senate, but Ms. Warren shouldn't be declaring him guilty, either, given that she'll be one of 100 jurors. So am I ready to say "moderates" have some utility after all? I kid, of course -- even a blind squirrel stumbles over a nut every once in a while.

And on cue, Joe Biden says he'd be "open" to running with a Republican on a "unity" ticket, which as usual will unify right and center-right and guess who that leaves out? Seriously, he must never talk to regular Americans anymore -- no one but a Beltway insider would be impressed with such a pronouncement, and more Americans would run through a wall for that obnoxious turd of a President than for a politician promising another round of let's-all-get-along-with-the-people-who-constantly-set-our-house-on-fire.

Finally, Lauren Gambino at The Guardian wonders whether any of the Democratic Presidential candidates will "excite voters." I've said this before and I'm sure I'll say it again, but trying to game out Who Can Beat the Beast is a fool's game -- it makes the election All About Him, which is how he wants it, and not about us, which is the way all elections should be. And hearing people try to play 13-dimensional chess while apparently forgetting that they all have votes is a persistent annoyance. And, seriously, letting freaking John Delaney's campaign strategist have the last word?

Penny Rants for Saturday, December 28, 2019: lies, damned lies, and "winning" arguments with liberals.

Our President has put up a website called "Snowflake Victory" -- hope or fear, I can't tell! -- which purports to tell you how to win arguments with your liberal relatives over the holidays. But clearly he's not trying to win arguments with liberals, who will not be won over by all the childishness, cherry-picking, baiting-and-switching, scare numbers, and outright lies -- he's looking to convert less politically-aligned folks who might be overhearing. After all, everyone agrees that it's possible to "have a strong economy and a clean environment at the same time," but not everyone knows that it's more possible when a) your predecessor's clean air and clean water regulations are starting to have a positive effect right as you take office and b) federal courts strike down most of your attempts to roll back those very same regulations! And I do find it highly amusing to see these folks talk about "winning arguments with facts and reason," when they're the first ones who tell you facts and reason don't matter after you confront them with actual facts and reason. It's almost as amusing as hearing the "Fuck Your Feelings" crowd constantly whine about their own feelings.

From the "Wrong Headline" file: an Economist/YouGov poll finds, according to Newsweek, that "Almost 50% of Americans Say Donald Trump Will Go Down in History as (a) 'Poor' or 'Below Average' President,", but add up the 40% who said "poor" and the 9% who said "below average" and that still leaves a majority (51%) of Americans who don't agree. Eight percent said history would regard him as "average" (I bet that verdict would really stick in his craw!) and nine percent had no discernible opinion, leaving 12 percent who voted "above average" and 22 percent who voted "outstanding," that last figure mapping quite well onto my long-expressed suspicion that a quarter of our electorate is insane. These figures won't predict the 2020 election very well, of course -- people who think he's "average" or have no opinion of the man certainly don't seem likely to vote against him because he got impeached, do they? They're more likely to get "sick of all the partisan bickering" and stay home, especially after our President runs the most negative campaign in American history regardless of how "spotless" his do-nothing, please-everyone opponent supposedly is.

Light posting notice of death and doom and horror and terror and probably fury also.

So it looks like I won't post anything new until after the New Year, when we'll start (of course!) with the ever-longer list of good House-passed bills the Senate won't touch.

In the meantime, this blog does have a Facebook page (it's right here), and if I find any good memes over the next two weeks, I'll share them with you there.

We've done a lot of good work in 2019, but we've got a lot more to do in 2020, and I hope you will keep coming to this site and keep using the action alerts here to tell your Congressfolk (and state legislators, and corporate leaders, and maybe even our President) to do the right thing. Thank you for all your efforts -- even during the bleakest times, these efforts help us move forward, even if we don't see that right away.

Action: concerning payday lenders, pollution, and food safety.

CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to crack down on payday lenders. Part of the crackdown you would ask for would be a 15% cap on interest rates, and that would be a major reform -- and not even one that's "never been tried," either! After all, our soldiers already get this protection from the law, and they surely do deserve it (and are especially vulnerable to payday lenders), but so do we all. Of course, our Administration, flush in campaign contributions from payday lenders, has glommed on to this extremely unpopular sector of the economy just like they glommed on to the extremely small and entirely corporate anti-net neutrality crowd. Sometimes it's like they're trying to screw everything up, and sadly our "liberal" media won't ask our President a simple question: why does he think payday lenders need more welfare handouts from our government? Maybe they're afraid the answer will be rock stupid, but that's all the more reason we need to hear it. In the meantime, let's communicate our superior wisdom to our Congressfolk.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: despite the enduring unpopularity of pollution, and the enduring popularity of clean water, Pennsylvania legislators are actually trying to pass SB 790, even though it would let oil and gas corporations replace water they've ruined with unsafe water, even though it would let the state pre-empt local and municipal ordinances aimed at protecting clean water (now there's some small-government conservatism for you!), and even though it would let municipalities spray drilling wastewater on roads to keep dust down (that's a zombie that never seems to die no matter how many headshots it gets!). These corporate welfare proponents like to say it's a choice between creating jobs and creating no jobs, but you know what we call that, right? A manufactured hostage situation ("put up with corporate welfare handouts, or you'll all be out of work!"), and as Americans we should never tolerate that. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your PA state assemblyfolk to protect us from pollution by rejecting SB 790.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation giving our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) the power to investigate food poisoning outbreaks -- you know, like the fifth E.coli outbreak in Romaine lettuce of the past two years -- then Penn PIRG still helps you do that. The bill in question would be S. 2958, the Expanded Food Safety Investigation Act, which would, in its own words, give our FDA the "authority to conduct microbial sampling on concentrated animal feeding operations as necessary to facilitate a foodborne illness outbreak investigation, determine the root cause of an outbreak of foodborne illness, or address other public health needs." You might better know the "concentrated animal feeding operation," or CAFO, as a factory farm, and you likely know that factory farms are justifiably prime suspects in food poisoning outbreaks. And small farmers don't run factory farms, so don't let anyone tell you this bill is "anti-small farmer" without asking them if they're pro-food poisoning.

Action: concerning impeachment, government spying, and discrimination.

The full House votes on impeaching our President today or tomorrow, so call your House Reps and tell them to vote yea to send formal impeachment charges to the Senate. The charges are abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, and Senate Republicans are eager to receive these charges so they can carefully and thoroughly refute them! I kid, of course -- Messrs. McConnell and Graham have both said they want to get this over with as soon as possible, truth and duty be damned. But don't be swayed by them -- if Republicans ever had a case in defense of our President, we'd have heard it by now, instead of endless whining about "process" and "politics." Don't be swayed by the long odds of ever getting a conviction, either. And certainly don't be swayed by reports suggesting that our President is really sweating the indignity of getting impeached. How likely is it that he's ever sweated any indignity? No, the man loves drama, and he loves playing the victim, too, so a short Senate trial ending in "vindication" won't necessarily be a boon to him.

Meanwhile, the Democratic House, in a fit of year-end budgetary capitulation that you'd think they'd know how to prevent by now, extended the notorious Section 215 of the notorious USA PATRIOT Act through March, so CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to curtail government spying by repealing Section 215. I've been promoting the "even our NSA says it doesn't need Section 215" line for a while now, and it is significant that even our big spying agency doesn't want that particular spying power, but we also must remember that a) we have a President who openly tries to use our government to spy on his political enemies, like we should care about his problems or something, and b) we also have a President who loves calling people traitors and encouraging his votaries to call for the deportation of some of his political enemies, and surely we don't think a man like that deserves the power to collect email and phone data without a warrant. And certainly not in the name of "national security"! I keep saying he is not America, and maybe he'll never hear it, but mainly I say it so you do.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Administration to scuttle its own proposal to allow "religious" organizations to take part in government grants and still discriminate against people in violation of the law, then the ACLU still helps you do that. The ACLU sure does give some good examples of what might happen if our Administration gets its way: "Meals on Wheels and other HHS-funded community meal programs designed to support older adults could refuse to deliver food to older Americans who are LGBTQ. Federally funded foster care agencies could refuse to place children with families because of the prospective families' sexual orientation or religion, regardless of the children's needs. Head Start grant recipients and other federally funded childcare facilities could refuse to serve children with same-sex parents. They could also refuse to provide services to transgender youth." Ain't none of that ish cool, so let's make sure our Administration knows that -- because even if they defy us, we might help them lose in court.

Action: concerning online privacy, flavored e-cigarettes, and shareholder power.

You recall that Congress went to great lengths in 2017 to repeal FCC regulations that would have protected your online privacy? Well, S. 2968, the Consumer Online Privacy Rights Act, would help make up for that notorious act, and if you read it online, you'll be able to imagine right-wing heads exploding at some of the bill's subtitles. A "Right to Data Security"? A "Right to Delete"? A "Right to Controls"? Gosh, they'll say, don't rights come with responsibilities? It would be strange for them to say that, since the big telecom corporations actually act irresponsibly, by selling your data willy-nilly, failing to be transparent about it, losing your data to hackers, and not letting you just say no to their sale of your data. But the Consumer Online Privacy Rights Act would help fix a lot of that -- yes, I'd make the big telecoms ask you to "opt in" to data sales, rather than force consumers to "opt out" of them, but this bill will do a lot of good. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect your private data by passing the Consumer Online Privacy Rights Act.

Meanwhile, you recall that our President announced he was going to ban flavored e-cigarettes, so he could help prevent children from becoming addicted to them? Well, the tobacco lobby got to him, and he backed down. So courageous! So resolute! So masculine! Of course, his votaries probably figure he already did the deed just because he said so, but those of us in what Karl Rove once derisively called the "reality-based community" remember what really happened, and we're all about helping people do the right thing, so Penn PIRG helps you tell our President to restart his effort to ban flavored e-cigarettes. But wait! you might be saying, you also advocate for the legalization of marijuana? Isn't that hypocritical? Well, no -- the key word in all of the above is children. The law doesn't allow children to drink beer or smoke regular cigarettes, so why would we allow them to smoke highly-addictive e-cigarettes? And why would we allow the existence of cigarettes specially flavored to draw children into that habit? Civilized people wouldn't.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to reject its own proposal to take power away from shareholders, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. The SEC's proposal, as you may recall, would require you to own ten times more in shares before you could even introduce a shareholder resolution, and if you're the kind of person who flinches at the idea of buying into a democratic process, no doubt you also flinch at the SEC's proposal. But in an era where our government has largely abdicated its responsibility to govern on the people's behalf, shareholder resolutions are too often that one tool that might induce a corporation to change its behavior, whether that means getting a corporation to adopt more climate-friendly practices or stop discriminatory hiring practices. So naturally the Crony-in-Chief's SEC wants to put a stop to all of that! This Administration hates progress, of any kind, with a passion bordering on insanity. But they don't get all the say in America. We do.

Around the table: why our media ignores the Afghanistan papers, and other hard truths.

Alex Shephard at The New Republic wonders "Why the Media Is Ignoring the Afghanistan Papers." Short answer: "everyone is to blame, which means no one has much of an interest in keeping the story alive." Somewhat longer answer: our media's thirst for partisan conflict makes coverage of "bipartisan failure" harder. Also, too, our President spews forth so much drama that "more complex stories, like the situation in Afghanistan, are often buried in favor of the political equivalent of sports sideline reporting." Mr. Shephard may be too nice to spell it out, but I also think we've become so cynical, all of us, that when we hear evidence that our government knew it was bollocksing up Afghanistan, we're proud of saying "and you're surprised?" As Americans, we deserve a better government than that, meaning we deserve actual surprise at such things.

This is really good news: the ACLU of Kansas has managed to shut down that state's notorious Interstate Crosscheck program, meaning it won't operate in the 2020 elections. That doesn't mean the ACLU has killed it dead, since it used a rather arcane argument to do so (that Interstate Crosscheck didn't keep voter data secure, of all things), and a lot of states still have previous Interstate Crosscheck databases and might use them to purge more voters. And the notorious Kris Kobach might create new purge lists himself -- though he's also running for Senate in 2020, and running a vote suppression operation while running for Senate might actually make him lose. Yes, even to a Democrat! Hell, he did it a year ago.

Ho hum, the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy studies corporate tax avoidance during the first year after the 2017 tax "reform" that dramatically cut the corporate tax rate, and finds over 350 Fortune 500 corporations paying, on average, a little over half the new 21% rate. That tax "reform" cut the tax rate (from 35% to 21%) without closing corporate tax loopholes, but that shouldn't surprise us when our nominally "liberal" politicians' position is "cut the tax rate, but close the loopholes." An actual liberal position would be "tax the corporations harder and stop giving them welfare handouts." And then you might have actual compromise in America again. Maybe even actual bipartisanship!

Scientists point to another driver of climate change: inefficient energy grids. These energy losses -- caused by (among other things) bad wiring, poor and/or corrupt management, or natural disasters -- emit almost as much carbon as heavy trucks do, which is saying something. Getting energy corporations to upgrade their infrastructure, of course, is like pulling teeth -- they always want a welfare handout or six just to do the thing they should already be doing, the thing we would simply make them do if our lawmakers didn't all have spines of jelly.

Finally, Republicans are jumping up and down about New Jersey House Rep. Jeff Van Drew's announcement that he'll switch to the Republican party shortly, but the part of America not responding to that news with "Jeff Van Who?" is probably responding "he was a Democrat?" And how precious he is, complaining that impeachment isn't "bipartisan" enough -- has he been awake the last couple of decades? I suspect he'll lose the 2020 Republican primary in New Jersey's 2nd -- he may not even come in second! -- and then a year or two later he'll imagine the Democrats are desperate enough to take him back, and he'll be wrong, all of which will make him (as Mario Cuomo might say) just another walnut in the batter of eternity.

Action: concerning voting rights, health care, and pollution (among other issues).

Happy Monday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. And this week we add H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act -- a better bill now, thanks in large part to your pressure -- and H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act, which would shine a light on those big telecom fees and taxes you find in your cable and cellphone bills. These are all good bills, advancing (among other causes) voting rights, consumer protections, and better health care policy, and your Senators have no excuse for rejecting them. No, TEH CREEPINGZ SOSHULIZMZ!!!!! is not an excuse.

Color of Change helps you tell Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards (D) to reject attempts by Formosa Plastics to build a giant petrochemical plant in an almost-50% black community. Why? Because Formosa's plants tend to pollute more than virtually every other plant in America. Because this particular Formosa plant would emit ethylene oxide, which a 2016 EPA study found causes cancer even with "limited" exposure. Because big corporations have this nasty habit of plopping down their dirtiest plants in neighborhoods of color. Because the area where they'd build is already well-known as "Cancer Alley." Because Formosa has already paid Texas residents $50 million for illegally dumping pollutants in their communities. And because Gov. Bel Edwards -- fresh off a re-election more improbable than his first election in 2015 -- has demonstrated a willingness in the past to reward big polluting corporations even whey they don't follow the law. Hey, he doesn't have to run again, so maybe he should try not enabling big polluting corporations, particularly when they practice environmental racism.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to reject its own proposal to weaken coal ash storage regulations, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. Our President's votaries like to think he's "gotten rid of burdensome regulations," though we know he really hasn't -- courts keep striking his regulatory changes down, because you can't just do whatever you feel like doing when you run a government! But the next time your War on Terror/Tea Party deficit hawk/Regulation Nation/Blue Lives Matter/anti-immigration-but-not-a-white-supremacist-I-swear uncle says our President has "gotten rid of burdensome regulations," feel free to ask if allowing big coal corporations to avoid closing their unlined coal-ash ponds that leak into our water tables is more "burdensome" to big coal corporations than water pollution is to, you know, the rest of us. I know the good citizens of Roane County, TN and Eden, NC -- to name the scenes of two infamous coal ash pond spills -- would tell you which is more of a burden.

Around the table: important lessons from the week, including yet another lesson from our President in How Not to Be.

Bad news: as we feared, and despite our best efforts, the House passed a defense authorization bill without any of the amendments limiting our involvement in the war on Yemen, preventing unilateral war with Iran, or stopping defense spending on our President's vanity border wall. The bill would grant federal employees parental leave, and it would curtail our military's use of PFAS chemicals, but the bill also doesn't go far enough in keeping them out of our drinking water, and doesn't even have an amendment (which had actual bipartisan support) helping military families on food stamps. In the words of one antiwar activist, Democrats got "completely rolled" on this bill. The good news is that we don't trust them to do the right thing; we trust ourselves to do the right thing, and if we don't get the results we deserve, we work harder.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (E-KY) tells Fox News (sic) that he and our President's counsel will be in "total coordination" during his impeachment trial. As Rep. Jeffries keenly points out, imagine a jury saying it will be in "total coordination" with a defendant during a criminal case and you'll understand how utterly corrupt that statement is. In past years, a politician would never have said this out loud, and yet the fact that Mr. McConnell said it on Fox News (which, ah, has a rather selective viewership) rather than, say, your local nightly newscast (which will more likely attract a broader cross-section of your community) hints at how corrupt our politicians might yet become.

I would caution against viewing the Conservative Party's resounding victory in this week's British elections as a 2020 harbinger, except that the Tories, at least, could convincingly identify themselves with one side or the other in the Brexit debate, while Labour seemed to be try to have it both ways -- and, how about that, our Republican incumbent will most assuredly campaign against "free" trade in 2020, while most of his possible Democratic challengers will most assuredly try to have it both ways. As for the sheer size of the loss, I suppose it's possible Labour just threw it, in the belief that the Tories will likely bollocks up Brexit again either by exiting wrong or just failing to exit, but we all know by now the dangers of assuming a nominally liberal party is playing 13-dimensional chess. (However, for those who think the elections are a resounding rebuke of "socialism": how well, exactly, did those center-right Labour leaders do in 2010 and 2015?)

Our "liberal" media is still trying to puff up the Pete Buttigieg candidacy, hastening, even, to (in Joshua Cho's words) "portray() a lack of voter support as an obstacle to their preferred centrists’ ascent, rather than evidence of a problem with the centrists for not supporting a progressive political agenda representative of most voters." In other words, Pete Buttigieg could be President, if not for those pesky voters! But I don't think Bernie Sanders would get "liberal" media plaudits for flip-flopping on Medicare for All, as Mr. Buttigieg has done, because the rules for moderates and right-wingers are always different for actual liberals. And the sooner we realize that, the sooner we'll fight the way we need to, and the sooner we'll win.

Hate to pile on the Buttigieg Boom -- OK, I don't -- but former health care executive Wendell Potter tells us that Mr. Buttigieg's work at McKinsey entailed, in part (and in Mr. Buttigieg's words), "performing analytical work...identifying savings in administration and overhead costs," which Mr. Potter suggests is code for "laying off workers, offshoring, and hiking rates." I guess Mr. Potter would know, and since I take the Parable of the Prodigal Son seriously, I also think he's courageous for saying so. You'll want to remember that if Mr. Buttigieg were the nominee, our President would never shut up about "why Pete Buttigieg wants to keep his work at McKinsey so secret," as if he himself hasn't spent the last couple of years trying to keep everyone away from his tax returns, but that hypocrisy won't elect Mr. Buttigieg, since he has nothing to offer voters except elite fever dreams about his "electability." I'd call all that ironic, but I demand more from irony than yet another stomach ache.

Finally, I try to avoid discussing the Drama-King-in-Chief as often as possible, but him telling Time's new Person of the Year, Greta Thunberg, that she has "anger management" issues is beyond disgusting. The man who shouts at everyone all the time doesn't get to lecture anyone about "anger management" -- particularly not, you know, folks angry that the adults are going to make their planet uninhabitable. This may be a cue to our "liberal" media that it shouldn't assume that if the President says it, it must be news -- and that if this President says it, it's more likely a lesson for America in How Not to Be.

Action: concerning social media, corruption, and shareholder power.

In the wake of the news that Facebook has resisted pulling obviously untruthful political ads from our President, the news that CEO Mark Zuckerberg has met with far right-wingers (including our President!) on several occasions recently, and, of course, our collective memory of how much obnoxious and just-plain-wrong stuff has been spread around on Facebook over the years, Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate Facebook's role in the right-wing propaganda effort. Because what if it isn't mere incompetence and "unintended consequences"? What if it isn't jes' folks connecting with each other and "being the media"? What if it's malice? What if Mr. Zuckerberg is just another billionaire who thinks his perceived superiority preordained his success, and the rest of us are just trash who should've worked harder? Most of Our Glorious Elites feel that way, as you know, and the ones who ascend to that level may feel that way more acutely than those who were born there. But letting them have all the say about everything, well, that's not democracy, is it?

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell Republican Senators to return any campaign contributions arranged by our President, and reject any future contributions from him as well. Regardless of how you may feel about the "overuse" or the "process" or the "political nature" of impeachment, how can you fail to see our President suddenly arranging campaign contributions for Republican Senators up for re-election in 2020 as anything but bribery? Time was Republican Senators would have rejected such contributions for fear of merely appearing corrupt, but not now -- as too many of Our Glorious Elites still yammer on about the "damage to our values" allegedly caused by abortion and gay marriage and transgender folk in our public restrooms, they continue to inflict real and lasting damage to our values by supposing that "everyone does it" or "everyone would do it" whenever we shine a light on fairly obvious corruption. But "everyone does it" is not the same as saying "it's right," is it? The folks who decry situational ethics the most too often practice it the most. And they don't get all the say around here.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to reject its proposal to weaken shareholder power, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. As always, you have to ask: what are big corporations afraid of? That those who invest their hard-earned money will tell them to run things differently than they're inclined to do? That shareholders will make them treat gays better, treat workers better, prepare for climate change better? That shareholders will demonstrate further that money isn't the only reason to make a decision about how to run a corporation? Or are executives afraid of anyone other than themselves making those decisions? I mean, I like to think the best of people, I really do, but big corporate executives make that so, so difficult. It's like they only value shareholders for the money they bring in! Myself, I prefer democracies to set-ups you have to buy into, but our SEC exists pretty much to protect shareholders from corporate tyranny, so let's remind them not to enable the tyrants.

Action: concerning Social Security, public housing, and our Post Office.

S. 2733, the so-called TRUST Act, would of course create a fast-track process to cut Social Security "behind closed doors," as Sen. Ernst might put it. Because how else can you cut Social Security? The politicians pretend Social Security is going to go belly-up any minute -- I'm old enough to remember when they said it would go belly-up in 2016! -- when actually it'll pay out full benefits until 2037 and we could put it on sounder footing (with expanded benefits!) if we merely taxed income above $132,000 into the system. But that's just impossible, says the "bipartisan" "consensus" among our elected officials, which has little to do with reality as ordinary Americans experience it, and sadly the TRUST Act has four co-sponsors among the Democratic caucus. They keep using that word "bipartisan", but I do not think it means what they think it means. So Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject secret Social Security cuts by rejecting the TRUST Act. (Those four Senators are Messrs. Manchin, Sinema, Angus King, and Doug Jones, if you're looking to do more.)

Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the infamous Faircloth Amendment, which has stymied the building of public housing for the last two decades. The Faircloth Amendment represents yet another capitulation by nominal Democrat Bill Clinton to the far right; we said Republican moderates were useless the other day, but that's no less true of Democratic ones. And guess what's happened in the meantime? A major housing bubble burst, throwing millions of good Americans out of their homes, and several major American cities (and minor ones -- hello, Berkeley, California, where the $400,000 listings are all empty lots) have become too expensive for folks to live in. Oh, and America has 50 million more people now, and they can't live in tents. Republicans used to say that when the "free" market failed us, government had to step in; now they say "oh, the free market failed you? Well, tough toodles for yoodles!" But we don't need to take that.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors to reject any Postmaster General appointee who aims to privatize the service, then Progress America still helps you do that. Too many right-wingers say PRIVATIZE TEH POST OFFICEZ!!!! as if it will cure all of America's ails; these folks seem unaware (do I mean "unaware"? Perhaps I do!) that our Post Office has taken exactly zero dollars in taxpayer money for operating expenses since 1982 -- or that our Constitution literally mandates the creation and Congressional oversight of a national post office. But, if anything, we should bring our Post Office more under the American people's control. If we did that, we could more easily reinstitute the postal banking service that was a regular feature of our Post Offices until the late 1960s, and that would better serve urban and rural folks banksters don't bother to serve -- certainly it would serve them better than check-cashing joints! But if we privatize our Post Office, that won't ever happen -- and good Americans won't get the services they pay for and deserve.