Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning banking regulation, health care, junk fees, and stock buybacks.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the TABS Act, reject any proposed cuts to Medicaid and CHIP, and pass the Junk Fees Prevention Act and the Stock Buyback Accountability Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Taking Account of Bureaucrats’ Spending (or TABS) Act, which would replace our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s independent funding mechanism – a mechanism good enough for other banking regulators – with the whim of Congressional funding. You’d think with all these bank failures, our Congressfolk would understand that we actually need a strong CFPB, but up is down in their world. I’m sure they’ll use this as a bargaining chip in debt limit “negotiations”; they might even succeed. But to hell with what they want, because they’re supposed to negotiate with us.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any proposed cuts to Medicaid or the Childrens’ Health Insurance Program (or CHIP). Again, to hell with what the deficit peacocks want! Medicaid and CHIP help a lot of good Americans, and they sure in hell ain’t breaking our budget’s back. Now, throwaway defense spending and low taxes on the rich? Those things are breaking our budget’s back. But Medicaid and CHIP are popular across the political spectrum, probably because even right-wingers have to use it! If you come to rely on something, you’ll hate the politicians who take it away, and you’ll punish them. Right, Sam Alito?

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Junk Fee Prevention Act, which would vastly reduce the harm junk fees – like ticket fees, airline fees, and “early termination” fees – cause good Americans. Who likes junk fees that far outstrip whatever expense a corporation incurs to fix a problem or make something convenient? Nobody but the people who collect those fees, that’s who! And they ain’t a majority of a damn thing in America! OK, they may be a majority of bad people, but let’s not deal civilization yet another body blow because a majority of bad people demanded it. I have a feeling our descendants would not want that to be our epitaph.

Finally, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stock Buyback Accountability Act, which would quadruple the stock buyback tax that only corporations will ever have to pay. Stock buybacks used to be illegal, and for good reason – not only do they concentrate corporate power in a few hands (and concentrated power in a few hands should concern all Americans regardless of ideological predisposition), but corporations tend to spend more on stock buybacks than on, you know, new equipment. Everyone needs to buy that every once in a while! And if they won’t do the right thing, then our government’s gotta step in on our behalf. This ain’t hard.

Around the table: come get your poll tax, Ron DeSantis!

I’ll admit I had trouble imagining why Republicans are suddenly so hot to repeal child labor laws at the state level, and I still have trouble reconciling their loudly-proclaimed “concern” over children’s education with their apparent desire to send them all to mills and mines 10 hours a day. I guess they’re just trying to suck up to their corporate donors at any cost, especially since quite a few of said donors have been caught violating child labor laws lately. More kids in the mines also helps break labor unions. Last I looked, though, I don’t think any normal people think child labor laws are too strict, or lament that they didn’t work more during their own childhoods.

Amanda Marcotte reminds us that Republican’s apparent inability to define what “woke” means “is a feature, not a bug,” because they can pretend it means anything at all at any time. We learn that Gov. DeSantis is particularly good, or should I say “good,” at mining this vein of vagueness, and I totally mention that because he’s trying to criminalize bloggers' criticism of him as we speak. In any case, I suggest we all go ahead and tell our right-wing friends, to the degree we still have them, that once they use the word “woke” in an argument, they’re conceding the point.

In a related note, Sen. Rick Scott (E-FL) claims that our military is too “woke,” and to support this thesis tells a story about a ship that had to stop “following a Chinese ship” so they could “train everybody on transgender.” One thousand U.S. dollars says this incident never happened, even if “a retired, I think, captain” really told him so – which I also doubt. (At present, the U.S. Navy can find no record of such an incident.) This is the same man who says that reducing Medicare costs amounts to “Medicare cuts” and that poor people should pay more in taxes so they have “skin in the game.” Only in the Fascist State of Florida could he keep winning elections.

Something I hadn’t considered about Dominion’s defamation lawsuit against Fox News: if Fox News loses – which possibility ain’t exactly far-fetched, given all those Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson texts and Rupert Murdoch’s own testimony – then shareholders will also be able to file suit against them, meaning Fox could lose a whole lot more than the $1.6 billion Dominion wants, or the $2.7 billion Smartmatic wants. I doubt its most-devoted viewers will abandon them, though. Rage is a hell of a drug, but rage mixed with nonsense is even more potent, particularly if they think it pisses off liberals.

Sandpoint, Idaho hospital says it’ll stop delivering babies in two months’ time mainly because of the “legal and political climate” there. You may recall that Idaho has one of them-there abortion bans where relatives may sue medical providers for performing abortions, such that obstetricians have been leaving the state in droves, with no replacements coming. See, when you’re evil to everyone around you, eventually everyone leaves you. Did these right-wingers really think we needed them so badly that we would put up with any and all abuse? I can only hope their loneliness makes them take stock of what they’ve done a bit.

Finally, might I say that I am beyond disgusted with all the “don’t indict Trump or you’ll make him win” talk? Here’s the worst example of that, from “OMFG why does anyone listen to” Mark Halperin. I won’t list every objection I have with this piece, since those objections would total approximately one per point made, but let’s just leave it at these two: he says it’s unfair that folks aren’t spending the same amount of time on Hunter Biden as they are on Donald Trump, which is rather like saying we should have celebrated the scoring prowess of Marty McSorley the way we did Wayne Gretzky, and he also exhorts us to keep Trump supporters’ feelings in mind if the Big Man gets indicted, to which I must say: fuck their feelings. Everyone has to grow up sooner or later, and that includes folks who wallow in masturbatory rage and the pundits who enable them.

Action: concerning free speech, endless wars, tax cuts for the rich, and Social Security.

Long story short: tell Florida legislators to reject an anti-free speech bill,and tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Iraq War AUMF, repeal the Trump tax cuts for the rich, and pass the Social Security Expansion Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Free Press helps you tell Florida state legislators to reject SB 1316, which would require any blogger who writes about Gov. DeSantis or state legislators register with the state or face heavy fines. Can you say "poll tax," boys and girls? And how do they justify such a thing? By saying all we want to know is who our enemies are? Here’s who your enemies are, Florida: everyone who thinks for themselves. And that’s most of us in America. I’m serious; no more than a quarter of Americans are mindless drones lapping up whatever right-wingers spew forth. They get a lot more media coverage than we do, but to quote a famous philosopher: they do not surround us; we surround them. So let’s remind everyone of that.

The American Friends Service Committee helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) that “authorized” the Iraq War. And while the 2002 AUMF, like the 2001 AUMF that enabled all kinds of madness in the “war on terror,” is worse than a wad of used toilet paper, every President since Bush the Lesser has used it to justify all manner of extra-legal military adventures – think Obama in Libya and Syria and Trump in Iran and Syria. We can’t bring back dead soldiers or dead Iraqis, or those whom ISIS has exterminated, but perhaps we can begin to earn their forgiveness by repealing the 2002 AUMF.

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Trump tax-cuts-for-the-rich, which would include the tax cuts in the top tax brackets and the massive cut in the corporate tax rate. Republicans are doing the helicopter dance about “deficits” and “debts,” but they all voted for the Trump tax cuts, which helped make trillion-dollar deficits in America the norm. So if they won’t force the rich to pay more in taxes now – you know, because DEFICITZ BADZ!!!!!! – then why should we listen to them about a damn thing? And if Democrats won’t have guts, we’ve got to have it for them.

Finally, Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security Expansion Act. When right-wingers play offense, what do we do? Play offense! Nobody roots for the team running the prevent defense at the end of the game! And taxing rich folks to pay for expanded Social Security benefits is actually quite popular, as you would imagine, given that most Americans, as I’ve said, are pretty smart. What are right-wingers going to do, pretend that taxing the rich is dumb? Taxing the rich, more than anything else, made ours the greatest middle class in history after World War II. So take no BS about this matter.

Around the table: why we need Hell, part 744.

I hope they’re right that “A Four Day Work Week is Closer Than You Think,” though I hasten to point out that most of the studies done on the matter get done outside the United States, and that those studies tend to concentrate on white-collar work (blue-collar work still exists, you know!). But I also hasten to point out that a four-day work week is also a job creation scheme, since (again, more so in blue-collar jobs) there’s still going to be the same amount of work to do. (In case you were wondering, workers made the same pay for fewer work days in these studies.)

Ho hum, our Fed Reserve Chair, having lately justified bailouts for Silicon Valley Bank because of the “systemic risk” its failure supposedly poses, approved a merger between SVB and Boston Private Bank and Trust by claiming the resulting behemoth posed no “significant risk” to our banking system. Of course now he’s promising a “thorough, transparent, and swift review” of the whole issue, but I presume the resulting review will only be swift. At least we have anti-monopolists at our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, for as long as Congress allows us to have that.

French President Macron tries to unilaterally raise that nation’s pension age from 62 to 64 – a matter the good citizens of France have been protesting in the streets for two months now – and as a result faces a no-confidence vote in Parliament. He thought he had a hostage situation ready to spring on them: don’t oppose my will, or you’ll get a Le Pen government! And it may work, but his actual duty – to adhere to the people’s very obvious will – remains undone.

From the “What an Understated Headline” file: ProPublica reports that “Wealthy Executives Make Millions Trading Competitors’ Stock With Remarkable Timing.” I can see why a major news organization would put it that way – the information comes from that leaked trove of IRS files ProPublica acquired in 2021, which won't alone prove to a judge and/or jury that the timing was more than “remarkable” – but we’re not schmucks, and we also realize that stronger laws against insider trading and executives serving on multiple corporate boards would help stop this, ah, remarkable phenomenon. So would not worshiping at the altar of the stock market the way we’ve done for the last 40-odd years.

The Iraq War turns 20 today, and Jon Schwarz at The Intercept asks, of the war’s architects, “Where Are They Now?” Short answer: doing quite well, just like they don’t deserve, even Judith Miller, who I guess is the Useful Idiot of this clown car since her water-carrying couldn’t keep her out of jail. You’ll also learn that Donald Rumsfeld’s last vacation home was once the home of Edward Covey, “notorious for breaking unruly slaves for other farmers,” and that Ms. Miller’s last piece for the New York Times had a hilarious title – hilarious, at least, until you remember how many people it helped kill, maim, or torture.

Finally, and this also risks being a ho-hum, right-wing “activist” who dressed up as Julius Caesar at school board meetings to make some kind of point about transgender kids actually had a long, long history of bad and criminal behavior. Much as I want to say he’s paid his debt to society and that arrests and accusations aren't convictions, I also want to say that his trajectory from armed-standoff-with-cops (for which he served 17 years in the big house) to incoherent transgender protestor suggests that he's spent most of his time on Earth lapping up whatever the right’s dealers of masturbatory rage serve up at the moment. In a civilized society, you have to pay your debts and you have to do better in the future.

Action: concerning banksters, anti-trans posturing, and abortion rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to strengthen banking regulations, reject the so-called Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, and pass the Ensuring Women’s Right to Reproductive Freedom Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to make our banking regulations stronger. Specifically, you’ll ask Congress to insist that banks with over $50 billion in assets follower stricter regulations; that’s what the Dodd-Frank Act did in 2010, but in 2018 Congress raised that limit to $250 billion – and one of the most ardent supporters of that change was none other than the CEO of the Silicon Valley Bank that recently failed! Why, it’s almost like that was the whole idea. We shouldn’t stop there – I eagerly await the “outlaw hedge funds” action alert – but we can certainly communicate our will on this particular matter right now, while the iron’s hot, as it were.

The National Women’s Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, which would merely prevent any transgender or intersex kids from participating in school sports. Too many politicians don’t want to solve real problems – like, hey, we fund boys’ sports way more than we fund girls’ sports, and too many kids get sexually abused by folks they trust – but they sure do have time to swing their balls in our faces about transgender folks. And for the umpteenth time, no boys are going to become girls just to excel in girls' sports that (at best!) they'll spend the rest of their life getting paid less to do! It's like they don't remember what being a hormone-addled teenager was like – or hope you don't.

Free and Fair Democracy helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ensuring Women’s Right to Reproductive Freedom Act. This bill would prohibit state law enforcement from preventing women from crossing state lines to get abortions where they’re legal, and would not only empower state Attorneys General to enforce such a law, but for private citizens to get civil relief under such a law. Maybe Marco Rubio will call such a thing a boon for trial lawyers! Which would be a clever way of saying nothing about abortion, I suppose. Anyway, why do we need so many trial lawyers? Because we have so many powerful wrongdoers!

Action: concerning taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise capital gains taxes on the rich, pass a Billionaire’s Minimum Income Tax, raise Medicare taxes on income over $400,000, and pass the Stock Buyback Accountability Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy breaks down all the tax provisions President Biden has proposed in his budget, and they’re pretty good – the worst I can say about them is they don’t go far enough, but that’s still a lot better than, say, the positively poisonous “FAIR” Tax. One especially worthy item in the Biden budget is the proposal that would tax capital gains as income for folks making over $1 million annually. That would protect small homeowners while going after rich tax cheats, and if you can do both at once, it’s a good idea. You can call your Congressfolk and tell them to enact that, or to pass the Biden budget as a whole (which Americans for Tax Fairness also helps you do); either action would do us all good.

Care2 helps you tell Congress to pass President Biden’s proposal for a Billionaire’s Minimum Income Tax. I’ve suggested that his proposal would resemble Sen. Warren’s, which imposed a very small wealth tax on large estates, but actually our President’s proposal would impose a minimum 25% tax on households worth over $100 million, and would include unrealized assets (i.e., stocks and properties those households haven’t sold yet) in that calculation. And by demanding such a tax during a time of debt-limit hostage-taking, we’ll tell our Representatives that we won’t stand for more austerity drama. Personal to pedants stuck on the “$100 million” figure: you’re not one of them, either, so maybe don’t defend them?

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to support President Biden’s proposal to raise Medicare taxes on income over $400,000. Currently rich folks pay 3.8 percent in Medicare taxes on their income, but President Biden would raise that to 5 percent, again, only on income over $400,000, which, again, almost certainly ain’t you or I. In fact, that number represents only one out of every 50 taxpayers – go to most parties and you won’t see literally anyone there who’d pay more money (and again, only on that part of their income over $400,000) in Medicare taxes. And it would help keep Medicare solvent, so let’s do it.

Finally, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stock Buyback Accountability Act. Stock buybacks used to be illegal, because they concentrated corporate power in a few hands, rather than dispersing it among a multitude of shareholders, and if you’ve watched corporations ruin America over the last few decades, you know that “corporation” and “concentrated power” are two terms you should never read in the same sentence. This bill would quadruple the tax on stock buybacks, which would help discourage stock buybacks and thus help break this concentration. So let’s help do that.

Around the table: banksters never stop bankstering, and other horrible truths.

Surprise, surprise, months after cops shoot an activist at a Cop City protest in Georgia, an autopsy reveals that said activist had their hands up when they shot them, which revelation also just so happens to contradict official police testimony about the matter. C’mon, even NPR’s reporting it! Nice to see the very first sentence refers to the activist being “shot and killed by Georgia State Patrol,” though – and maybe I’m just being a jerk about this – that sentence also uses the passive voice. For an active voice example, see the first sentence of this paragraph.

Also surprise, surprise, former Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) – he of the Dodd/Frank financial service reform legislation of 2010 – has lately been trying to ease the banking regulations he worked to pass on behalf of the recently-shuttered Signature Bank. Wait, let me guess: they were my boss, so of course I pushed for lighter regulation!. I would retort that you should never let your source of income capture your values like that. And yeah, that’s hard, but so is anything worth doing.

Amanda Marcotte at Salon instructs us that the recent collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank reminds us that “Tech Billionaires Are Just as Bad as Wall Street Bros.” “Beyond the thin veneer of social liberalism,” she writes, “Silicon Valley libertarians have the same ugly views about the economy that old school Republicans have: the government has no role in regulating business but the taxpayers should be on the hook for bailing out rich people from their own mistakes.” But Ms. Marcotte thinks we might actually be getting over our culture-wide man-crush on tech bros, and I sure hope she’s right. In a sane, moral, and decent society, she would be right.

When I hear that an ivermectin “influencer” suddenly died, likely because of the side effects of taking ivermectin for a decade, I remind myself that one must temper any glee one might have at a jerk getting his final comeuppance, not merely because it isn’t particularly kind, but also because this fellow still has legions of followers, and he’s helped them give ivermectin to children. But we should also temper our glee because when ivermectin abusers rail against “our failed western medicine which only cares about profits and not the cure,” they’re not entirely wrong.

When I hear that Nazi wannabes yelled and screamed and said “sieg heil” at a drag story event for kids, I have to say that I just don’t understand how some people can be so evil. And when I hear these morons claim that drag queens “groom” kids merely by existing, I remember that I watched a lot of Monty Python’s Flying Circus growing up, and it didn’t make me want to dress in women’s clothes any more than it made me want to blow up penguins on top of TV sets.

Finally, Novo Nordisk announces it’ll slash prices of several of its insulin products, and though we’ve got much further to go before we make health care affordable again, never let anyone tell you the Big Stick of Bad PR doesn’t work, or that giving Medicare the power to negotiate drugs doesn’t work. Certainly don't let people tell you that “government doesn’t work.” Obviously it does, if we make it.

Action: concerning the freedom to work, immigration, law and order, and saving our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell our FTC to outlaw noncompete clauses, tell the Biden Administration not to bring back Trump-era immigration policies, tell our Justice Department to disclose data about deaths in police custody, and tell our Postal Service to reject the DeJoy privatization plan. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to ban noncompete clauses in employment contracts. “The freedom to change jobs is core to economic liberty and to a competitive, thriving economy.” Who said that, some object of “free” marketeer hero worship? No, it was our own FTC Chair, Lina Khan, and though that does bode well for our efforts, you know that corporations – also somehow the object of “free” marketeer hero worship – will be flooding our FTC with their comments about how they can’t lose trade secrets when they lose employees, even though we already have other laws to deal with that. So we’ve got to show up.

Amnesty International helps you tell the Biden Administration not to bring back the notorious asylum ban and family separation plans. Everyone hated the Trump Administration for doing these things, so why would President Biden bring them back, inflicting cruel and needless hardship on folks who thought they were getting away from all that? Because he’s “moving to the center,” I suppose, though the “center” doesn’t comprise an “average” between right-wing cruelty and left-wing compassion. And anyway, no right-winger will ever support him for it, or acknowledge he did it. Really, there’s no upside here, for President Biden or anyone else. But he’ll do it, unless we get in his grill about it.

The Project on Government Oversight helps you tell our Department of Justice to disclose how many good Americans die in police custody. Because the law demands it, that’s why! I don’t care if the police unions don’t like it! If they don’t like it, they can stop killing people in custody! One wonders why anyone dies in custody – I mean, isn’t law enforcement in control at that point? Too often the answer is because cops thought they deserved it, which isn’t very law-and-order of them, nor of us. And to those who think we should just put up with it because crime, I can only say: go live in a real police state.

Finally, Save the Post Office helps you tell our USPS to fire Postmaster DeJoy and reject his 10-year plan to cut services, slash jobs, close Post Offices, and raise prices. Because a plan to cripple our USPS in this manner is also a plan to privatize our USPS! And we should fear that even more with our Postal Service, since our Constitution literally mandates that we keep the mail moving, and right-wingers would love for big corporations to gouge us at the same time they’re “fulfilling” that mandate. It’s all fun and games until a diabetic doesn’t get their insulin because they didn’t sign up for spam emails from some private mail carrier. You know late capitalism, so you know that’ll happen.

Action: concerning voting rights, defense spending, health care, and food stamps.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect voting rights, cut defense spending, lower prescription drug prices, and strengthen the food stamps program. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The bill would authorize our Justice Department to pre-clear any voting rights changes from any state or locality with a history of vote suppression – and not just certain Southern states, as the original Voting Rights Act mandated (and which mandate our Supreme Court struck down in 2013). Granted, most of the states and localities suppressing the vote the hardest are still in the South, but this bill would restore the teeth our Supreme Court knocked out of the Voting Rights Act. And we all need that bill to have some more bite again.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the People Over Pentagon Act. We spend as much money on defense as the next eight countries on that list combined, and how did that do for us in Iraq and Afghanistan? I’ll tell you how well it did: it proved the old conservative saw that you can’t just throw money at a problem! But, as any liberal will tell you, you can improve good Americans’ lives by spending tax money wisely, and ensuring that defense contractor CEOs can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home while depriving good Americans of, say, paid family/medical leave or health care funding definitely isn’t wise. But they’ll keep doing it, until we make them stop.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower prescription drug prices for all Americans. I guess with Eli Lilly’s announcement that it’ll cap insulin prices, our Congressfolk will say it proves that “only private sector action creates lasting change.” But, ah, insulin is just one drug, other big pharma corporations haven’t capped insulin costs, and without our FTC’s announcement of action against the Pharmacy Benefit Managers (or PBMs) that jack up prices as much as or more than big pharma greed, Eli Lilly might not have capped those costs, either. Of course I mention that FTC action because it proves government can help create lasting change in America – but only if we demand it.

Finally, Moms Rising also helps you tell your Congressfolk to strengthen the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, otherwise known as food stamps. Because weakening it is a stupid idea! Yes, I, too, have heard stories about folks getting food stamps when they’re not supposed to, but that’s a separate issue from ensuring everyone who needs them can get them. No, really, fraud is always a separate issue. You’re supposed to stamp out fraud and bring fraudsters to justice! That’s the law-and-order position! But you’re not supposed to let the mere presence of fraud make you throw up your hands and stop doing the right thing. That’s what bad people want, and why should they get all the say about everything?

Around the table: pushing back against bankster horror.

Biden Administration announces that the Deposit Insurance Fund, and not taxpayers, will make depositors whole after the Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank failed; DIF funds come from fees assessed to banks, not taxes per se. I did not know the DIF currently had $100 billion in it! So feel free to push back against know-nothing right-wingers who declare it “just another bailout,” and also feel free to ask if any of them did a damn thing in 2008. I mean, many right-wingers did, but many also did not!

Ho hum, Silicon Valley Bank employed two former aides to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to lobby our government for weakened banking regulations, such as the kind that permitted Silicon Valley Bank to fail last week. Yes, the 2018 legislation weakening Dodd-Frank reforms (which were themselves not so vigorous to begin with) was a bipartisan mess, but few lobbied for it harder than Rep. McCarthy did. Presumably he will feel the appropriate amount of shame and make amends for his mistakes. I kid, of course.

Norfolk Southern sure is having a bad winter, as another train derailed in Alabama as its CEO testified before a group of angry Senators, the second such derailment since the East Palestine derailment, though neither of those, thankfully, carried toxic and/or carcinogenic chemicals. But heartened as I am to see Sen. Vance (R-OH) actually argue for something that might make a difference, I sure hope this event doesn’t become another in a long list of times our Senators grilled a CEO hard before letting him do whatever he wanted.

Pew Research Center poll finds that a staggering 83% of Black folks think our economic system either “needs major changes” or “needs to be completely rebuilt,” and I’m sure right-wingers will use this data to assert that “Black folks can’t govern themselves.” But given most Americans’ experience with capitalism, particularly lately, that argument won’t convince anyone outside the Batshit Insane Quarter (hereafter referred to as the BIQ) of the electorate, and likely not all of them, either.

Jason W. Osborne at The Conversation notes that the seemingly-exponential growth of legalized gambling “may pose a threat to college athletes,” and if you’ve ever heard (name of sport) is rigged! in your work locker room, you already know there’ll be more and more threats against athletes perceived to have cost gamblers money. And it’ll get worse, as gambling replaces work as the main money-maker in our economy for too many Americans – not that I could blame them much, since we’ve all watched financial predation replace work as the main money-maker in our economy over the last few decades.

Finally, I guess I feel a little sorry for Tennessee’s Lieutenant Governor after he got caught slapping heart-emojis on photos of a particular half-naked gay man on social media, though I must also note that his “evolving” views on LGBTQ+ issues have done nothing about the onslaught of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in Tennessee. But his spokeshack’s suggestion that he was just connecting with a constituent demands mockery! We shouldn’t have to send butt-grams to get our elected officials’ attention, after all.

Action: concerning abortion, education, internet freedom, and school meals.

Long story short: tell Walgreens to dispense abortion medication to all Americans, tell Florida legislators to reject efforts to ban anti-racist education from college classes, tell President Biden to fill the last FCC seat with a good public servant, and tell our USDA to enact the most vigorous school meal nutrition standards possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Both UltraViolet and More Perfect Union help you tell Walgreens to stop refusing to dispense abortion medication even in states where it’s still legal. As you know, Walgreens said last week it wouldn’t dispense mifepristone in 20 states, which happened to be the 20 states whose Attorneys General sent a letter to Walgreens threatening to sue them over same. Of course, abortion is still legal in some of those states, and our FDA gave its blessing to nationwide distribution of mifepristone last year. Well, I know something even better than 20 state Attorneys General applying pressure: the American people applying pressure. So let’s get to that.

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell Florida lawmakers to reject any legislation that would abolish Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (or DEI) programs at universities. Florida colleges have begun to dismantle their DEI programs on their own, and fascists love it when people are fascist to themselves before the brownshirts come to beat them up. And that’s why we have to step up here, too. There are more important things than the drama of right-wing “hurt feelings," and one of them, as I know from lived experience, is the knowledge and wisdom that these programs contain.

Free Press helps you tell President Biden to fill the fifth seat on our Federal Communications Commission post-haste with a public interest-minded nominee. Sadly, that nominee won’t be Gigi Sohn, who withdrew from consideration after a brutal two-year-plus attack from big telecom corporations and their nefarious allies, but while I presume Ms. Sohn was the best person for the job – never mind what Kyrsten Sinema thinks! – I don’t presume she’s the only person for the job. And our FCC needs all five Commissioners, not just to bring back network neutrality, but also to spend recently-authorized infrastructure money fairly. So let’s remind our President of his job here.

Daily Kos helps you tell our Department of Agriculture to enact the strongest school meal nutrition standards possible. Better school meal standards was virtually Tom Vilsack’s only accomplishment as Mr. Obama’s USDA Secretary, but I’m happy to report that since Mr. Vilsack has been fully on board with President Biden’s anti-monopoly program, which means he can actually triple his good works in just a few short years, by improving those school nutrition standards even more. Republicans will hate it, but then they’re objectively pro-childhood obesity and pro-childhood diabetes anyway, so why listen to them? Seriously, they really do suck.

UPDATE. I totally forgot to write that individual introductory paragraph today, and I apologize for that. I've corrected that mistake now.

Penny rants for March 13, 2023.

Good news in the battle against monopoly power: not only has our DOJ (and three state Attorneys General) sued to stop the proposed JetBlue/Spirit merger, but Transportation Secretary Buttigieg announced his department would also move against the merger, and, as you may recall, Transportation can stop a merger without even going to court to do it. So American corporatists are saying et tu, Pete Buttigieg? as we speak. I don’t think the Biden Administration’s picking low-hanging fruit here, either, because Spirit is actually a good airline trying to get market share the old-fashioned way: by offering good service at lower prices. Certainly don’t get too upset that JetBlue’s stock prices fell, because America has to stop worshiping at the altar of the stock market. The stock market is not the be-all-end-all of our economy, it measures speculation more than anything else, and Our Glorious Elites have conditioned us to treat it like a big game decades before DraftKings brought sports gambling to every cellphone.

Cops arrest protestors for “domestic terrorism” at the infamous Cop City site in an Atlanta forest, and how good is their case against them? This good: “The probable cause stated in the warrants against the activists is extremely weak. Police cited arrestees having mud on their shoes – in a forest. The warrants alleged they had written a legal support phone number on their arms, as is common during mass protests. And, in a few cases, police alleged protesters were holding shields – hardly proof of illegal activity – which a number of defendants even deny.” And thus we learn that their aim is not to send protestors to jail, but to make them fight their charges, because the more they have to fight their charges, the less they can fight the cops. I always said they’d come after us with “terrorism” charges, and I was right. But please, right-wingers, tell us again how you support our police! And ask yourself if you’d support them if they treated you this way. And if you respond “they would never treat me this way,” ask yourself if there really should be one law for you and another for people you disagree with.

NPR reports on medical tourism in Mexico, with a shallow attachment to a ZOMG TEH CRIME WAVEZ!!!!! news hook (at least one of the four South Carolina residents abducted in Mexico earlier in March went there for a tummy tuck) and some rather incomplete information. Yes one would imagine follow-up care would be difficult if you get an operation in a foreign country, but the article cites CDC advisories about infections in countries that aren’t Mexico I wonder why, and anyway what are Mexico’s nosocomial infection rates vis a vis the U.S.? The article does not tell us, and we did just learn more about how bad some American hospitals can be. You remember, cockroaches in the operating room? OK, they were Florida hospitals, but Florida is still a part of America at the present time. Anyway, why do we have medical tourism again? Oh, right: because our health insurance industry does its damnedest not to pay for your medical needs. It’s not because getting a tooth pulled in Mexico City is on anyone’s bucket list, that’s for sure.

Action: concerning child labor, health care, immigration, and product safety.

Long story short: tell Iowa state legislators to reject a bill that would loosen child labor laws, and tell your Congressfolk to defend Medicaid and CHIP and pass the DREAM Act and the Sunshine in Product Safety Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Care2 helps you tell Iowa state legislators to reject Senate File 167, which would loosen child labor laws so that corporations could put 14-17-year-olds to work in such carefree childhood vocations as demolition, mining, and meatpacking. Perhaps even worse, the bill would let corporations off the hook in civil suits for any kids they neglected, sickened, injured, or killed at the workplace! Because trial lawyers bad! No: putting kids to work in dangerous occupations is bad, though maybe it’s not as snappy a bumper sticker slogan. Look, either children are the future, or they’re just another workforce for fat-cat bosses to use and discard. They ain’t both. And if we have any say about it, they ain’t the latter.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to defend both Medicaid and the Childrens’ Health Insurance Program (or CHIP) from Congressional debt-limit hostage-takers. Maybe they won’t get Social Security and Medicare cuts and then again maybe they will, but we need to put them on notice about Medicaid and CHIP as well. Medicaid is less popular than Social Security and Medicare, because of the absurd perception that it only helps lazy people, but it’s no less important than any of the other programs they’ve taken so much flak about cutting. And Republicans already let CHIP expire once, so they don’t care about kids, and why should they keep getting away with that?

The Progressive Reform Network helps you tell your Congressfolk pass the DREAM Act, which, as you no doubt remember, would help immigrant children whose legal standing in America has lapsed, but who’ve met certain standards of service and education, to remain in America (and keep contributing to American culture) rather than get deported back to the countries they’ve never known. Because that’s cruel! And to those who reflexively respond AMURKIA FIRSTZ!!!! to everything because they can’t argue their way out of a paper bag: the DREAM Act would help, at most, some 1.9 million folks out of the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently in America, so this is not so damn much to ask.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Sunshine in Product Safety Act, which would let our Consumer Product Safety Commission (or CPSC) warn the American public about dangerous products without having to get permission from the corporation that manufactured the dangerous product first. Yes, you read that right! Currently we can’t spread the word about dangerous products lest we hurt some corporation’s fee-fees! That’s because Congress amended the Consumer Product Safety Act to give corporations an effective veto over product safety announcements in 1981. Still we deal with the bitter fruits of the Reagan Revolution. This is why we fight.

Penny rants for March 10, 2023: special "our 'liberal' media still sucks!" edition!

So Speaker McCarthy (E-CA) gave all this January 6 footage to Tucker Carlson, and Mr. Carlson concocted a January 6 narrative so phony that even Republican Senators have slammed it. Sen. Romney (R-UT) even sounds like a media theorist attacking him: “The American people saw what happened on Jan. 6. They’ve seen the people that got injured. They saw the damage to the building. You can’t hide the truth by selectively picking a few minutes out of tapes and saying this is what went on. It’s so absurd. It’s nonsense.” Sadly, we have to wait until paragraph 18 to get this analysis, which we should have gotten in paragraph one. Yeah, I know, Sen. Tillis calling Mr. Carlson’s January 6 gaslighting “bullshit” is a good sound bite, but Mr. Romney’s analysis is something everyone needs to know. And with Republican Senators (and our “liberal” media) now desperate to change the subject, we’re even less likely to know it.

In an absolutely related note, FAIR instructs us that “Scary Headlines Hype Dangers Rarely Faced by Tourists in Mexico.” 32 million tourists visit Mexico annually, and even Portland, OR currently has a higher murder rate than Mexico City, but let’s hype up a handful of drug-related murders and extend that to an entire country just so we can compare it to Iraq! Yes, isolated incidents never seem isolated if they happen to you, but people think crime is bad because “you see it on the news all the time,” when those half-dozen clips of violent crime you see on the news every day (some of which get repeated for days on end, right, Tucker Carlson?) would never stack up next to all the clips you could see of people getting through their day without any violence at all – clips you don’t see because they’re not titillating enough. It’s well past time we said to our media: enough of the drama!

In case you forgot about the tire fire Twitter’s become under Elon Musk, note that Mr. Musk just told his managers to nominate their best employee – and then fired them and replaced them with those employees, who are, of course, making less money. If you’re wondering why folks don’t just up and leave Twitter, remember that more than a few of them would also have to leave the country if they did, and remember that they’re also making less money. Some “free” marketeers still yell (yes, shouty-caps is yelling!) that this “fire-and-promote strategy” is just life in the private sector, but “(y)ou now have good devs (i.e., developers) managing, and not doing dev. That means you have less effective dev. You need good administrators to do the administration so the good devs can do dev.” Managers and workers use entirely different skill sets, but then so much wisdom dies at the “free” market altar. I hope all the fired managers on Twitter find more exciting and ennobling work elsewhere.

Action: concerning taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called “FAIR” Tax, any extension of the Trump tax-cuts-for-the-rich, and any attempt to repeal the additional IRS funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, and tell your Congressfolk to pass a Billionaire’s Mininum Income Tax. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to pass the so-called “FAIR” Tax, which would replace our income, corporate, payroll, and Estate taxes with a single 30% sales tax, which would be like immediate 30% inflation. And given all our talk about Social Security lately, we should note that, in addition to the 893 other reasons we should reject the “FAIR” Tax, it’ll eventually cause Social Security to fail. You remember the “FAIR” Tax would replace the payroll tax, which funds Social Security, and with ITEP telling us the rate would have to be more like 60% to raise the same money, well, you see where that’s going. Kill this beast before it kills us.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to make the Trump tax cuts permanent. The “FAIR” Tax, in addition to all its other evils, would represent a massive tax cut for the rich, and so do the Trump tax cuts, where that 2.6-point cut at the top end represents hundreds of thousands of dollars for many, many undeserving rich. But I have good news for you: the Trump tax cuts didn’t keep Democrats from taking our House back in 2018, so don’t get spooked by any “they’re coming for your tax cuts” BS. Did you even notice you got a tax cut? It’s entirely possible you didn’t. You sure didn’t get a couple hundred grand like some folks did!

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any efforts to repeal the additional IRS funding provided by the Inflation Reduction Act. No, our IRS isn’t coming for your money! At least, not more than it was when it was underfunded and understaffed and only went after the folks who filled out their Earned Income Tax Credit or Child Tax Credit wrong. Now our IRS has the money to go after rich folks, and I have more good news for you: Republicans’ fearmongering over IRS funding didn’t exactly deliver the sturm und drang electoral showing they were counting on in 2022. So don’t believe their hype here, either.

Finally, Americans for Tax Fairness also helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a Billionaire’s Minimum Income Tax, one that’ll actually get at the massive amounts of wealth billionaires hoard and never pay taxes on because they don’t actually sell off those assets. Don’t believe anyone who tells you billionaires deserve to keep what they got! These clowns trip over their own penis in public every day! And not for nothing, but even if our Supreme Court eventually strikes it down – and since it’s something that’d actually help people, they’re no doubt masturbating over that opportunity as we speak – that’ll be just another nail in the coffin of their reputation.

Action: concerning drug prices, pollution, law and order, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell other big pharma corporations to lower insulin prices, tell our EPA to enact the strongest soot standards possible, tell President Biden to fire DHS Inspector General Cuffari, and tell our USPS to reject the DeJoy plan to privatize our Post Office. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Public Citizen helps you tell big pharma corporations Novo Nordisk and Sanofi to lower their insulin prices in more or less the manner Eli Lilly has lately done. I hate relying on corporate good will to do the right thing, because they’ve been awash in money so long they have no idea what right and wrong is anymore, but I’m not above using the leverage that presents itself, either. The Big Stick of PR has clearly already worked on Eli Lilly – with a vital assist from our FTC’s announcement that they’ll crack down on the Pharmacy Benefit Managers that jack up drug prices as much as big pharma greed does. And we can make it work on other big pharma corporations, too.

Both the Environmental Defense Fund and Penn PIRG help you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous soot standards possible. Power plants create a lot of soot, as you may know, and those fine particulates can really mess with your breathing – and worse, considering that soot carries a lot of toxins and carcinogens in them. You may remember addressing this matter a decade ago; you may even wonder why we’re addressing it again. One answer is because we don’t always get everything we need the first time we fight for something; another answer is because 10 years is a long time to learn a lot more about how pollutants hurt us. And we’re past worrying about how executives will cope, right?

The Project on Government Oversight helps you tell President Biden to fire Department of Homeland Security (or DHS) Inspector General Joseph Cuffari already. Mr. Cuffari has become notorious for keeping knowledge of DHS wrongdoing away from Congress – and thus from us, since Congressfolk represent us – and he also interfered with our Congress’s investigation of the January 6 attempted coup, by failing to inform Congress that the Secret Service had deleted certain texts sent on that day, and even preventing his own office from recovering those texts. So, yeah, if a guy interferes with our right to know just to preserve his power and/or prestige, his ass needs to go.

Finally, Save the Post Office helps you tell our U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors to end Postmaster General DeJoy’s plan to privatize our Postal Service. Because that’s what a plan to slash jobs, cut services, and raise prices obviously is! People like Louis DeJoy live to screw things up and then claim “the private sector can do better,” which is like spreading feces all over your walls to justify hiring a cleaning service. But privatizing the delivery of life-saving medicines won’t result in better service or lower prices, because everything they privatize ultimately becomes more expensive – and less accountable to us, since it’s “theirs” now. So let’s keep our Postal Service ours.

Action: concerning Social Security, refugees, banksters, and the minimum wage.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security Expansion Act and the Afghan Adjustment Act, reject the TABS Act, and raise the minimum wage. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Both Civic Shout and Social Security Works help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security Expansion Act, which would ensure that income over $250,000 gets taxed into the system for the first time. Yes, currently Social Security doesn’t tax income over $160,200 annually, meaning that only working people pay into the system; the fat-cat class is exempt! I suppose right-wingers would argue that since they don’t need Social Security they shouldn’t have to pay into it, but that’s exactly the sort of everyone-for-themselves masturbation that’s gotten this country into the trouble it’s in. Rich folks need to pay more into Social Security, for the good of all Americans.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act, which would help some 78,000 Afghan refugees living in America to get legal immigrant status. I can already hear the right-wingers saying when are we going to provide for our own people? As if a great nation has to choose! And, you know, as if giving legal status to a refugee really injures someone else. I didn’t ask for Tha Bush Mobb to invade Afghanistan, nor did I ask the Obama and Trump Administrations to stay there, so I also didn’t ask for tens of thousands of Afghan refugees. But I’m not an evil bastard, either, so I’ll still demand we take care of them, because that’s what great nations – and great civilizations – do.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called Taking Account of Bureaucrats’ Spending (or TABS) Act, which would repeal our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB)’s independent funding mechanism, and instead subject it to the whim of Congressional funding. Other banking regulators have independent funding mechanisms, so why not our CFPB? Because banksters hate our CFPB, and Republicans live to suck up to their bankster overlords, that’s why. This may all be moot, since our Supreme Court obviously has the long knives out for our CFPB. But we should still tell our Reps how we really feel about their drama.

Finally, the Progressive Reform Network helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise the minimum wage to $15/hour or more, since $15/hour has been a calling card for so long that inflation’s outrun it a bit. Don’t brook any right-wingers telling you good luck getting that through this Congress ha ha ha snort. Congress passed a minimum wage hike in 2007 why? Because they wanted to? Because Democrats had impregnable majorities in either House? No, because we demanded it. And don’t brook any where’s it going to stop? hysteria from right-wingers, either. That’s a loser’s argument. It’s going to stop when we get justice. Which is what they’re really afraid of.

Around the table: where there's no safe space for fascists, corporatists, and whiners.

Terrorists have apparently poisoned at least 50 girls’ schools in Iran over the last six months, sickening at least 400 girls, and I hope the attackers get the justice they deserve, even if they come from Iran’s fundamentalist government, as some folks suppose. And can you blame them for supposing? In the meantime, the mere notion of farther-right activists in Iran who oppose educating girls gives that government some quite-undeserved breathing space – look, they say, something to distinguish us from the Taliban! Of course, distinguishing between flavors of fascism for purposes other than scholarship is offensive, more suited to the likes of Richard Spencer than to civilized people.

At least one legal expert thinks Fox News might really be in the soup after Rupert Murdoch’s recent admission that he knew Fox peddled a lot of election-denialism crap though he didn’t believe it – and that they might even be in the soup for more than the $1.6 billion Dominion’s asking in their now-famous defamation lawsuit. Fox can throw all the fecal matter against the wall they want – “our executives didn’t specifically order it,” “ZOMG TEH FIRSTZ AMENDMENTZ WILLZ DIEZ!!!!!” – but few would lament Fox News finally getting some of the karmic blowback it’s long deserved. Its votaries, of course, will just slog on, their persecution complex intensified, and if we’re very lucky, they won’t blow up any voting machines.

Ho hum, former Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) has rejoined the bankster industry from whence he came in 2010. After spending a dozen years defending the notorious “carried interest loophole” (which allows hedge fund managers to pay a lower tax rate than just about everyone you know) from widespread public opposition, he has joined, dig this, a hedge fund corporate board, which is a step up from becoming a lobbyist, lately the more common landing spot for ex-Senators. At least this won’t be the job Kyrsten Sinema gets in 2025, since Mr. Toomey’s a considerably more accomplished shiller than she is. Yes, I know she’d be upset to hear that.

I shouldn’t be spending any damn time on this matter, but no we have not recently “concluded” that COVID came from a lab accident. Rather, another federal agency has issued a “low confidence” report asserting that COVID more likely came from a lab accident than from exposure from an animal; the very phrase “low confidence” should not inspire your confidence, but some folks either don’t read or only read what they want to read. Note well, also, that the Energy Department’s “low confidence” report didn’t prompt any of the four other agencies that have reported about the matter to change their conclusions. Personal to those already typing “BUT TEH DEEPZ STATEZ!!!!!” in response: when you’re in a hole, stop digging.

Good for Dr. Rebecca Gomperts, who runs an online service that gets abortion medication to those who need it. She operates from the Netherlands, which, as you might imagine, makes it a bit more difficult for right-wing drama kings in American state legislatures to get at them, and I wouldn’t hold out hope for a Republican President, either, since he’s going to be an incompetent drama king, too. Yes, even if their name’s not Trump! Anyway, this is all very simple: if you’re against abortion, don’t get one. I wish more pro-life folks followed that advice, instead of telling their doctor they’re going to hell for giving them the abortion they asked for.

Eli Lilly announced it would cap out-of-pocket insulin costs at $35/month, and though I, too, am happy to say this proves that shame works, Matt Stoller reminds us that our FTC also had a lot to do with Eli Lilly’s new cap, by declaring in June that it would start going after the Pharmacy Benefit Managers (or PBMs) that probably do even more to jack up drug prices than even big pharma does. (Basically, PBMs demand bribes in order to make drugs available to health insurance corporations, and the bribes are really big now.) Remember this the next time your right-wing uncle tells you that government doesn’t work. It does – if we make it work.

Finally, when I hear that Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene (E-GA) has literally demanded a “safe space” where right-wingers don’t have to listen to liberals anymore, I’m reminded that this isn’t a new tack at all: Nazi wannabes were demanding the exact same thing, using the exact same words, as long ago as 2016, and of course at the same time as they slammed liberals for demanding actual safe spaces for people who actually suffer from actual discrimination, and not just the shame and shunning of the community for bad behavior. These right-wingers probably think they’re satirists, too, but then a lot of awful people hide behind “satire.”

Action: concerning sexism, slave labor, monopolies, and product safety.

Long story short: tell Florida state legislators to reject legislation that would ban women’s studies courses, tell Volkswagen to get Uyghur slave labor out of its supply chain, tell our Transportation Department to stop the proposed JetBlue/Spirit merger, and tell our FTC to ensure that corporations only slap the “recyclable” label on actually recyclable products. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Care2 helps you tell Florida state legislators to reject HB 999, which would essentially ban all gender and women’s studies courses from state colleges. Because waaaaah! Really, is there another reason? My younger self had his share of faults, but he did me a solid by buying the text to a collegiate women’s studies class, so I could read it when I had time, and I have to tell you that when I read it, I didn’t cry like a diaper-loaded brat about all the harm men have done to women over the millennia, nor did I blame everyone but myself for my feelings. And what I learned, I’ll use to make our civilization better. Jesus Mary and Joseph the weaklings in charge of things in America disgust me. And this is why we fight.

Eko helps you tell Volkswagen to stop making money off Uyghur forced labor in China. The Uyghurs, you may recall, are Muslims whom the Chinese round up and send to concentration camps like they’re an aspiring Nazi Germany or something. You know, I think I may have accidentally mentioned something that the German corporation Volkswagen might not want brought up – like that Volkswagen was a Nazi project to begin with! Not a terribly successful one before the war, but how times change! China tortures over a million Uyghurs, but they couldn’t do it without Volkswagen’s help, which is why we’re busting out the Big Stick of Bad PR.

More Perfect Union helps you tell Transportation Secretary Buttigieg to stop the proposed Jet Blue/Spirit airline merger. Our laws already grant the Transportation Secretary the authority to apply a “public interest” standard to block mergers, and Mr. Buttigieg wouldn’t even have to put his case before a judge if he did, and surely airline consolidation doesn’t serve the public interest! More Perfect Union also points out that Spirit currently runs nonstop flights out of Detroit while JetBlue doesn’t; think JetBlue will keep those nonstops if they buy Spirit? I kid, of course. But Mr. Buttigieg might want to think about that before he runs for statewide office in Michigan.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) that we should only see “recyclable” labels on products that can actually be recycled. I’d say that sounds like common sense, but it actually sounds simpler than common sense. You’ve likely challenged our EPA to force corporations to stop putting the “widely-recyclable” label on products you can’t actually recycle widely, but this matter concerns corporations lying to consumers, so we can also make it an FTC matter. Don’t let anyone tell you this isn’t a big deal, because if you can’t recycle it, you have to incinerate it, and incineration pollutes our air and water with deadly toxins. So, yeah, we gotta do that right.

Readings for March 6, 2023.

Matt Stoller reminds us that Transportation Secretary Buttigieg actually has a lot of authority to fight mergers like the proposed Jet Blue/Spirit merger. Furthermore, Mr. Buttigieg can, by law, apply a “public interest” standard to mergers (versus the “may substantially lessen competition” standard the Clayton Act sets), which gives him a leg up over our Justice Department; while two more airlines merging in an already low-competition industry sure does seem like it would “substantially lessen competition,” our DOJ would have to get a federal judge to agree – which is, ah, real hit-and-miss even with Democrat-appointed judges – whereas Mr. Buttigieg wouldn’t even have to go to court. In a world where our FCC Chair kept a hedge fund from buying a cable corporation without even having a working majority – and read that, because that’s a great story! – Mr. Buttigieg is rapidly running out of excuses, not to mention time to recover in the public eye before he runs for President or Senate or whatever.

Constance Grady at Vox explains how “Brad Pitt was the only winner of the Aniston-Jolie tabloid battle.” How did he win? Mainly, it seems, by having a penis! Tabloid writers wrote about Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie largely in terms of their motherhood, or lack thereof – Ms. Aniston tried to have a baby with Mr. Pitt but couldn’t, and when she didn’t reveal her infertility issues at the time (maybe because they weren’t any of our damn business!), the tabloids said she “put career over family.” Ms. Jolie, meanwhile, adopted a child early in the 2000s, but even after mothering six children with Mr. Pitt, she found herself back where she started after splitting from him, even facing accusations of having a “white savior complex.” Mr. Pitt, meanwhile, gets kudos as a dad for merely expressing pride in his children, and tabloid writers transcribe word from “sources close to (him)” like Moses handed it down from Mt. Sinai. Ladies and gentlemen, your "liberal" media at work!

ProPublica tells you how you can file your taxes for free with limited interference from some corporation. As you may recall, our IRS must by law offer a “free filing” option for folks with relatively simple returns, but they let their “partner” big tax-prep corporations obscure that option (both in Google searches and on their own websites) so they could still make you pay. Nice work if you can get it! But ProPublica broke that story (as it related to TurboTax) two years ago, and our FTC has since taken action against TurboTax owner Intuit, so now things are a bit easier. Two key points: you have to make less than $73,000 annually to take advantage of this service (though some of our IRS’s corporate partners have more stringent requirements), and you have to start guided tax prep at irs.gov, not at a corporation’s website. It’s not ideal – ideal would be more like our IRS filling out the forms for you for free, since they already have all your info from your employer. But it is better.

Action: concerning voting rights, taxes, and paid family/medical leave.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, reject the “FAIR” Tax, pass the Billionaire’s Minimum Income Tax, and pass legislation creating a paid family/medical leave system. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. This bill would let our government stop states and localities with a history of vote suppression from changing their laws so they can suppress votes even more – which, you may recall, our government could do until our Supreme Court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder. Our Court said it unfairly targeted Southern states, but the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act would explicitly state that our Justice Department could scrutinize any state or locality that suppresses votes. Nobody should vote against this bill, but we still need to get in our Congressfolks’ grills about it.

Both Moms Rising and Daily Kos help tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to pass the so-called “FAIR” Tax, which would replace all income, corporate, payroll, and Estate taxes with a single, 30% sales tax. That would be like 30% inflation on everything you buy! Care to imagine how big your rent or mortgage would be? And when you remember that payroll taxes fund Social Security and Medicare, you might think paying 30% more for a gallon of milk would be a bad way to fund that. We need to get back to taxing the rich and corporations, not least so they can’t control us anymore, but the “FAIR” Tax only takes us in the opposite direction, toward more misery and chaos. If we speak out, we can kill it in its crib.

Speaking of taxing the rich, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Billionaire’s Minimum Income Tax, which would ensure that the richest Americans pay at least 20% of their wealth every year, and if that seems like a lot, remember that they’re billionaires and they’ll still have a lot left over. You’ve gotten by on a lot less than a billionaire, I guarantee you that, but while the pandemic might have cost you your job, billionaires somehow only got richer! As I’ve said, we need to limit the amount of damage billionaires do to our civilization, and the Billionaire’s Minimum Income Tax will help us start to do that again. But not if we don’t fight for it.

Finally, Care2 helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation granting paid family/medical leave for all Americans. Because only six other countries on Earth don’t have it! Those other countries, by the way, are the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Palau, Nauru, Tonga, and Papua New Guinea – yes, even Russia offers paid family/medical leave! We could get this done through budget reconciliation, but we won’t have a chance at that unless we communicate our will to our Reps and Senators in numbers they can’t deny. Don’t let folks tell you it would “cost too much.” You know what costs too much? Workers coming in sick or worried about their sick loved ones because they can’t get a day off!

Action: concerning Social Security, taxes, representation, and conversion "therapy."

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security, reject any Trump tax cut extension, make our House of Representatives larger, and ban conversion “therapy.” Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security Expansion Act, which would tax income over $250,000 into the system for the first time, and would not only expand benefits by over $2,000 annually, but would start counting inflation the way it actually affects seniors, who can’t just switch to cheaper drugs or cheaper health care the way younger folks can (and who, ah, don’t buy a whole lot of fancy clothes or iPhones or TVs, either). Used to be half of America’s seniors lived in poverty; now 10% do, thanks to Social Security. That’s why right-wingers hate it. But they don’t get all the say about everything.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to extend the Trump tax “reform.” The income tax bracket cuts of that “reform” expire at the end of 2025, but while you may have saved, say, $1,500 annually from that tax “reform,” rich folks have saved several hundreds of thousands of dollars more, so when we say the Trump tax “reform” mainly benefited the rich, we’re not lying. Or being “jealous” – Jesus Mary and Joseph if money mattered that much to me I’d have more of it than a hundred Donald Trumps. Anyway, the rich need to pay more, and most Americans agree, so we should reject any extension of their unearned tax cuts.

The Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to make our House of Representatives larger. This won’t “grow bureaucracy,” because when our House legislated about the matter, over 110 years ago, America had about one-quarter the population it has now, so yeah, more House Reps would actually serve good Americans better. And you’ve seen the size of some of these districts, right? I don’t just mean huge single-district states like Wyoming and the Dakotas, either – try imagining the task of visiting all of Arizona’s 2nd district, which at over 20,000 square miles is larger than nine states and D.C. So yeah, we actually do need more House Reps.

Finally, Cedar Key Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Therapeutic Fraud Prevention Act, which would, for once and for all, outlaw “conversion therapy,” the horrific snake-oil method by which folks purport to turn gay folks straight. “Conversion therapy” “works” through such “methods” as having gay folks re-enact childhood sexual abuse while not wearing any clothes, which our Surgeon General derided as unscientific two decades ago. So it’s actually not so great that 20 American states have banned the practice since then; something like that should be banned everywhere. The Therapeutic Fraud Prevention Act would do that – but only if we speak out about it.

Action: concerning junk fees, immigration, and taxes.

Long story short: tell our CFPB to end credit card junk fees, tell President Biden to abandon the Trump-era asylum ban, tell our IRS to actually crack down on rich tax evaders, and tell our government to make tax filing free. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to outlaw credit card junk fees. Your credit card corporations doesn’t need to charge you $35 and $50 and $100 late fees when $8 will actually cover their costs! They only need to cover their costs! They don’t need to profit from your misfortune! Profiting from your misfortune is evil! Let me know if I’m not being absolutely clear here. And make no mistake, the banksters will still make money if we cap their credit card fees – it just won’t be as easy for them to make enough money to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home, that’s all. And that’s not a hardship for a healthy civilization.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to scuttle his plans to revive the Trump-era asylum ban. This supposedly “conservative” notion – that we should default on the side of assuming that potential asylees don’t have a case, or that we should require them to seek asylum in a neighboring country, never mind how dangerous that country is! – actually increases immigration-related bureaucracy, as I’m sure Donald Trump intended. Naturally the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the Trump ban; maybe Mr. Biden thinks our Supreme Court will overrule them. Better to evaluate asylum claims carefully, like civilized people would.

Daily Kos also helps you tell our IRS to actually crack down on wealthy tax-evaders, as intended by the Inflation Reduction Act. We need our IRS to prove that it can actually work the way we intended it to work. Anyone can screw up and then claim TEH GUBMINTZ DOESN’TZ WORKZ!!!!! – right, George W. Bush? – but getting our IRS to catch a couple of rich tax cheats will help defeat the right-wing zombie lie that more IRS funding means more poor people get harassed. If you’ve been awake these last few years, you know our IRS was so under-funded it could only go after the poor! That's why we must make our IRS do the right thing.

Finally, in a peripherally-related note, Daily Kos also helps you tell our government that tax preparation should be easy and free, and not corporate welfare for big tax-prep corporations. Think about it: your employer has already given our IRS all the info it needs to fill out a tax form, and you very likely don’t invest in the kind of convoluted schemes designed to evade our laws, so why do you need to get someone to help you fill out your taxes? Because our IRS made a deal with corporations that they wouldn’t create a free tax-filing option if those corporations did – and then they made those free options almost impossible for you to find! And we deserve better than that.

Readings for March 1, 2023.

The MIT Technology Review tells us “Everything You Need to Know About the Wild World of Heat Pumps”. “Everything” may include the news that they work better at severely cold temperatures than you’ve heard. And if you’re wondering how you squeeze heat out of 25-degree air, well, long story short: the refrigerant starts out in liquid form, but has a very low boiling point (-15 degrees), so heating it even a little in a heat exchanger (and heating it with 25-degree air is surely heating it a little!) turns it into a gas; then putting that gas through a compressor it makes it considerably hotter, until its temperature reaches 100 degrees, and then it dumps off heat into your house via another heat exchanger, and in doing so turns back into a liquid, and the cycle begins again. And don’t let your right-wing uncle pooh-pooh it because it runs on electricity and thus equals fossil fuels, because that’s really only true in West Virginia (which gets some 97% of its electricity from coal), and you shouldn’t let the perfect murder the good.

Sonali Kohatkar at Znet instructs us that “Tipping Is Not a Reward – It’s an Insult,” and when you consider that tipped employees’ federal minimum wage is much lower than the standard ($2.13/hour, versus $7.25/hour), and that more than two-thirds of tipped workers are women, and that tipped workers are more likely to suffer in poverty than non-tipped workers, you’ll find it hard to disagree. When you find that other cultures think tipping is actually “rude” or “petty,” and you may find it even harder to disagree. And remember that tipping not only allows bosses to pay their workers less, but forces customers to evaluate their workers, when that’s surely a boss’s job. A male customer might decide not to tip a female worker who doesn’t respond positively to their come-on, which does not speak particularly well of tipping as an employee-evaluation tool. (No use responding that a boss could treat a female worker the same, because there are actually laws against that, and there are no laws against bad tipping.) It sure is amazing how much of what’s “just the way things are” in America don’t actually have to be.

Speaking of which: Steven Greenhouse at The Guardian explains how Amazon, Starbucks, and Trader Joe’s have been able to avoid actual unionization at their stores, despite workers winning all those union elections. Long story short: because our laws don’t punish corporations for engaging in delaying tactics or other forms of union-busting. Naturally, the PRO Act would have fixed that, by giving corporations 120 days to negotiate a contract with a union representing their workers and forcing those negotiations into arbitration if they don’t meet that goal. Of course, even though the PRO Act passed our House, our Senate didn’t bring it up, since Republicans would have filibustered it as a unit. They still should have brought it up, and forced Republicans to go on the record as favoring endless delaying tactics after a successful union vote, a tactic of which I’m pretty sure even a lot of regular Republican voters wouldn’t approve.

Action: concerning child labor, insulin prices, Medicare funding, and climate change.

Long story short: tell your state Governor to protect child labor laws, and tell your Congressfolk to cap insulin prices for all Americans, fund Medicare better, and reject any effort to roll back investment rules that protect pensions from climate change. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your state Governor to stop any efforts by your state legislature to gut child labor laws. You’ve heard of young kids enduring slave-labor conditions to make chocolate? Consider that our government has caught several big corporations breaking child labor laws in America – and consider, also, that right-wing state legislators are trying to loosen child labor laws in several states. I’m sure they’ll say it’s about kids getting $10 from grandpa for reformatting their hard drive, but that’s a load of horsedoodle – this is about exploiting 14-year-olds in dangerous construction jobs so you can pay them less. The children are our future – unless they’re just another workforce.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to cap the price of insulin at $35/month for all Americans. Currently folks on Medicare get that cap – Democrats could only get that cap through reconciliation last year, since it concerns government spending – but all Americans deserve it, and don’t tolerate any nonsense about how “price controls are bad.” You say “price controls” to Americans suffering 6% inflation and they’ll likely say that sounds like a great idea! And certainly don’t tolerate any nonsense about how “folks just have to eat better” – not in a nation that subsidizes sugar like we do, and not in a world where kids are born with diabetes.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Assuring Medicare’s Promise Act, which would ensure that certain taxes mainly paid by rich folks (including the Net Investment Income Tax and the Self-Employment Contribution Act) actually find their way to the Medicare Trust Fund. The bill wouldn’t actually raise taxes on anyone, and though I’m certainly game to do that to ensure Medicare is always there for us, the bill certainly deserves our support. More than the right-wing fools who whine about TEH LOSTZ JOBZ!!!! every single time someone tries to do the right thing in America, that’s for sure.

Finally, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell Congress to reject Republican efforts to roll back a Department of Labor rule requiring big corporations to keep our retirement savings safe from climate change risks. If that sounds a little inside baseball to you – which Republicans are counting on! – consider that if climate change makes our planet unlivable, you won’t have a pension! Our laws mandate that our government protects investors – which you are, if you have a pension plan – and putting the “rights” of polluters above the rights of all Americans sure is some real short-term thinking. Naturally Republicans, being “conservatives,” are all about the short term. No reason we need to be, though.

Around the table: plumbing the misery of right-wing politics.

East Palestine, OH residents file class action lawsuit against Norfolk Southern over the now-infamous February 3 derailed train accident, the damage from which has already killed over 40,000 animals. Our EPA has already announced they’ll compel Norfolk to pay cleanup expenses, but the class action suit asks for punitive damages, plus a fund for monitoring residents’ health. Now watch the same right-wingers who’ve been trying to outlaw class action suits for years argue that we shouldn’t regulate railroads because people can just sue them when they do wrong.

Good news comes from Minnesota, where the state legislature has passed a bill (that Gov. Walz will almost certainly sign) restoring voting rights to convicted felons who are still on parole or probation. Personally I don’t think anyone should lose their voting rights – no, not even murderers or child molesters – but this bill certainly represents progress, especially for the 50,000 good Minnesotans who’ve done their time in prison. Folks who want to swing their balls about crime should just navigate away from this page. I would feel tainted by their readership.

From the “OMFG Not This Rubbish Again” file: Factcheck.org finds “limited” evidence linking acetaminophen and autism, and when you read the article you may well find “limited” to be an overstatement, not least because the authors writing about the “link” caution you against interpreting them too broadly. Anyway, “I’m anxious about modern medicine because COVID” plus “I heard vaccines cause autism” (which, I feel compelled to note again, is a lie buttressed by fabricated data) does not equal “Tylenol causes autism.” It might, however, equal “stop getting all your information from ads on social media.”

South Carolina Republicans have proposed a bill that would subject anyone getting an abortion to murder charges, and that charge could ultimately lead to a death sentence. So don’t have a miscarriage in South Carolina! Remember when they said they wouldn’t charge women with murder for having an abortion if they could make abortion illegal again? That, too, was a lie! Even if this is all just Republican-created drama, it’s still odious. Do we really want one political party in America to care only about drama?

Surprise, surprise, a large majority of Americans oppose the so-called “FAIR” Tax – 53% when pollsters describe it in broad terms, and 64% when pollsters remind them that milk, diapers, and eggs will all go up 30% in price and rich folks will benefit the most from it. I suppose right-wingers will claim people oppose the “FAIR” Tax because people fear big change, but more likely people oppose it because if it looks like dung and it smells like dung, you don’t need to put in your mouth because right-wingers say it’s meatloaf.

Finally, I’ve updated the Thieves in the Temple stylebook to retire a phrase I’ve used a lot over the last few years: “irredeemable asshole.” The second word of that formulation remains in my stylebook, for better or worse, but not as part of that phrase, for while many, many folks are well beyond my capacity to help their redemption – and that’s as it should be – I apologize for repeatedly asserting that such folks are beyond anyone’s capacity to do same. I’ll be more mindful of that in the future.

Action: concerning railway safety, abortion rights, antibiotic abuse, and school lunch nutrition.

Long story short: tell the Biden Administration to improve railway safety and protect abortion rights, tell Walmart to get antibiotic abuse out of its meat supply chain, and tell the Biden Administration to improve school lunch nutrition standards. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Both Food and Water Watch and Demand Progress help you tell the Biden Administration to a) reinstate the braking rule the Trump Administration repealed and b) make hazardous transport restrictions stronger so that trains carrying five cars of flammable carcinogens don’t pollute the air and water of good Americans. Like how Transportation Secretary Buttigieg pretended b) simply didn’t exist while saying his hands were tied on a), which itself wasn’t even true? So much for those Presidential ambitions! Seriously, though, he’s got to start doing a better job, not for the sake of his own career, but for the sake of the American people, who deserve better than to live in fear of trains spewing filth.

Civic Shout helps you tell President Biden to take all lawful executive action that he can take to protect abortion rights from right-wing state legislatures. President Biden did issue an Executive Order back in August, but it didn’t do a lot – it didn’t protect a woman’s right to get legal and effective abortion medication across state lines, it didn’t guarantee that Medicaid would fund a woman’s trip across state lines to get an abortion, and it didn’t lock down the privacy of folks’ personal data when they get abortions. It made moves in all of these directions, but our Administration needs to do more, lest more poor women die because right-wing legislators like making their balls swing.

Penn PIRG helps you tell Walmart to get the antibiotic abuse out of its meat supply chain. You know why: overusing antibiotics on nominally healthy farm animals – to make them meatier, and to help them endure their squalid living conditions – makes antibiotics less effective when actually sick people or animals need them, and thus makes more superbugs. Didn’t we just close down a country over a superbug? Anyway, Walmart is now the biggest grocer in America, controlling over a quarter of the market, and they’ve also made no commitment to getting antibiotics out of their food chain. Hence we bust out the Big Stick of Bad PR. Hey, it’s worked before, and it can work again.

Finally, Moms Rising helps you tell the Biden Administration to adopt the most vigorous school lunch nutrition standards possible, which will only help the many poor kids who might not get a good breakfast or lunch except at school. Then get ready for the right-wing rubbish about “apples getting thrown away” and “districts unable to keep up with the standards,” which are just code for “we want more Pepsi machines in schools so we don’t have to fund them with taxes.” I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Republicans are objectively anti-children’s health, objectively pro-childhood obesity, and objectively pro-childhood diabetes – which last item also makes them objectively pro-high health care costs.

Readings for February 26, 2023.

Lee Fang at The Intercept describes how “Years Before East Palestine Disaster, Congressional Allies of the Rail Industry Intervened to Block Safety Regulations,” and boy you will not be pleased with anything he reports. Sen. Thune’s successful efforts to block ECP braking systems are so odious they make Sen. Manchin look good in opposition, and then former President Trump – who made sure his visit to East Palestine last week was all about him like he does with all human suffering – scuttled the rule mandating them. You’ll be even happier to learn that the railroad industry liked ECP, until the North Dakota fracking boom made it more expensive, though I’d bet President Obama’s embrace of the system also soured them on it, since Mr. Obama was The Hated One. Then came the frivolous corporate lawsuits, and now, years later, the accident that will threaten the health of good Ohioans for many years.

However: David Sirota at The Lever reminds us that it wasn’t just Donald Trump who helped caused this train wreck, but Barack Obama. While the Obama Administration did create the ECP braking rule that the Trump Administration repealed, the Obama Administration also narrowed the definition of a “high-hazard flammable train,” so that the Norfolk train that derailed would have been exempt from the braking rule anyway! That’s even though that train had five cars full of flammable carcinogens that will pollute the air and water of good Ohioans for years to come. Hey, maybe this is how Republicans have been winning Ohio lately – by taking advantage of weak Democrats who cave to corporate power (in this case, the chemical industry)? And our current President was the Vice President during the Obama Administration, so don’t expect change unless we make that his only option. Which we will be working on shortly!

From the “Articles That Completely Waste Our Time” file: The Hill reports that Rihanna’s Super Bowl halftime show generated a little over 100 FCC complaints, though of course that wasn’t the headline – the headline was that it generated more complaints than Sam Smith’s presumably ersatz Satanic mass during the Grammys. But you have to wait until paragraph 13 to learn that it didn’t get that many more complaints (102-87) than Mr. Smith did, and you have to wait until paragraph 11 to learn that these numbers pale next to the 540,000 complaints Janet Jackson’s 2004 Super Bowl halftime show got. You also have to wait until paragraph 18 to learn that Rihanna’s show had almost 10 times the audience the Grammys did! So, there’s no story here, except that some Americans love yelling about crotch-grabbing and devil worship, and the article sure gives those complaints a lot of space! This kind of “reporting” cripples our ability to think, and I don’t care that it’s “just celebrity reporting,” because it’s bad celebrity reporting, and all of bad celebrity reporting’s nefarious methods have surely infected hard news.

Action: concerning voting rights, warrantless spying, and Supreme Court ethics.

Long story short: tell Texas state legislators to reject yet another vote suppression scheme, and tell your Congressfolk to stop spying on us without a warrant, end warrantless collection of private money transfer data, and pass the Supreme Court Ethics Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first: Cedar Key Progress helps you tell Texas state legislators to reject HB 2390, which would outlaw polling places on college campuses. A normal person who’s not well-acquainted with politics might well say: well, that seems like a total waste of time! But, sadly, too many of us who are familiar with politics figure that Republicans are just trying to suppress Democratic votes and throw up our hands, thinking it’s just “partisanship” and “both sides do it.” But “partisanship” and “both sides do it” are never good reasons to enable evil. And have liberals proposed closing polling places in rural areas and suburbs? No, we have not.

The ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is the section that enables our government to collect all sorts of private information about us without a warrant. I use the italics hammer on that phrase to dissuade folks who think "our government has to do something to fight terrorism!" If our government wants to fight terrorism, they can get warrants – there’s a big gulf between wanting to terrorize people and actually terrorizing them, after all, and real terrorists will out themselves enough before then to justify a warrant. Our government doesn’t need to spy on the rest of us, though.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to end warrantless collection of private money transfer data. So every time you use Western Union or MoneyGram, an Arizona-based non-profit collects the data, and then allows federal, state, and local law enforcement (including FBI and DEA personnel) to access that data. Warrants, schmarrants! If you’re old-fashioned, like me, you don’t want police to gobble up money transfer data without a warrant – even if it catches drug traffickers! – because then they’ll start gobbling up your PayPal and Venmo transactions, and then maybe you’ll get carted off to detention somewhere. If freedoms aren’t for everyone, they’re not freedoms.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Supreme Court Ethics Act, which would, at long last, subject our Supreme Court Justices to the same ethics standards to which every other federal judge must submit. You need not find Justice Thomas’s actions in re the January 6 attempted coup suspicious to support this bill, nor need you find accusations of leaking against Justice Alito or accusations of influence-peddling at the Supreme Court Historical Society convincing. You need only remember that our duty, as Americans, isn’t to trust our leaders to be ethical, but to make them be ethical.

Action: concerning voting rights, endless war, racism, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, repeal the Iraq AUMF, and pass the Justice for Black Farmers Act, and tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn to our FCC already. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Do you remember how our Supreme Court said the Voting Rights Act unfairly targeted Southern states for additional federal scrutiny – but also said Congress could fix the bill by ensuring that any state or municipality could face that same scrutiny? This bill does that! And right-wingers will whine that “it’s not needed” (which, like, duh) or “the South has changed” (also duh, in addition to being literally irrelevant to the bill). But they’re walnuts in the batter of eternity. We, on the other hand, are eternity, as long as we do good works.

Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to finally and for once and for all repeal the Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) that authorized our adventure in Iraq. Come March 20, that mistake will be 20 years old, and at least three U.S. Presidents have used the Iraq AUMF to justify other stupid military adventures. Plus, you know Our Glorious Elites would love to party like it’s 1980 and wage war on Iran – Barack Obama actually solved this problem, but then Donald Trump pissed all over it, and now Joe Biden can’t (or won’t) fix it. That just makes it that much more urgent that we get this war-making tool out of the hands of this President and all future Presidents.

The Union for Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Justice for Black Farmers Act. Anyone who whines that we gotta do even more for Blacks? clearly doesn’t understand just how deeply we’ve injured Black Americans at virtually every opportunity, and so it goes with Black farmers trying to get land. If you know anything about redlining, if you know anything about how our government systematically shut Black folks out of every program meant to help good Americans, you won’t be surprised to find that Black farmers also face a long history of discrimination. And you won’t hesitate to help them, either. Unless you’re a troll, I guess.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn to our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) already. President Biden has now nominated Ms. Sohn three times to help do the very important job of keeping big telecom corporations from telling you where you can go and what you can do on the internet; he’s been admirably steadfast about this matter, and his steadfastness should find its reward here, not merely because doing the right thing should always find its reward, but also because the utter nonentities who oppose her are walnuts in the batter of eternity who shouldn’t get all the say about a damn thing in America.

Around the table: featuring bad people and their bad ideas occasionally even coming to bad ends.

It should be good news for Dominion’s defamation lawsuit against Fox News that several Fox News “personalities” talked about what a crock Donald Trump’s claims of a stolen election were even as they were repeating those lies on the air. But, as Amanda Marcotte notes, Fox viewers aren’t mad – they think they’re in on the con, because once Our Glorious Elites use people like a wet dishrag, what can they do but imagine that they and their thought-leaders are the heroes of ever-crazier stories? Fox News spokeshacks, naturally, say that media reports are taking Messrs. Carlson and Hannity out of context, leading us to wonder, as usual, what conceivable “context” could redeem their dreck.

Count me as opposing rewriting Roald Dahl’s childrens’ books for a “new era.” Of course there’s no natural relationship between being a bad person and a great artist, but making the Oompa-Loompas gender-neutral is no way to deal with that truth head-on, and as Mikhail Iossel has pointed out, you don’t go changing books like this, because we need to study the past as it happened – we need to study people as they lived and thought, regardless of how we feel now about how they lived and thought. I’d have much been happier with new books on similar topics written by a Dahl obsessive. It’s not like that’s unprecedented or anything.

So Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (E-GA) thinks we should have a “national divorce” where blue states and red states live completely apart from each other? Of course, the logistics of such a divorce are prohibitive, and I say this as someone who still dreams of ejecting Florida from our union. How does she propose relocating liberals and right-wingers out of their respective states to friendlier ones – for example, liberals from Texas to Massachusetts, and right-wingers vice versa? How does she propose dividing up states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin? I kid, of course – like she’s thought of anything but the drama!

What is the lesson from James O’Keefe’s ejection from Project Veritas, ostensibly because he stole money but maybe also because he treated everyone there like crap? That right-wingers constantly cannibalize each other in a never-ending drama? Or that activists who get unearned notoriety eventually corrupt themselves out of a job? I’ve got a different lesson: our “liberal” media should stop pretending people like James O’Keefe are “serious people” with “serious points to make,” and start treating drama as drama.

I’ll admit I didn’t expect Rep. George Santos (E-NY) to say all his lies weren’t really about “tricking the people” but about getting “accepted by the party here locally.” Essentially he blames Republicans for demanding the sort of drama he’s delivered. I guess you could say it’s a real chicken-egg problem. Still, having his amount of privilege – and he may be gay and Latine, but he’s also a man and a Republican – he should be able to avoid this level of moral corruption, let alone all the other kinds he may be guilty of.

Finally, Alaska House Rep/Oath Keeper/election denialist, upon being confronted with a study asserting that every instance of fatal child abuse costs society $1.5 million, suggests that maybe fatal child abuse actually saves society money, since “that child is not going to need any of those government services that they might otherwise be entitled to receive and need based on growing up in this type of environment.” Turns out we call that “devil’s advocate” for a reason! Kid gets beaten to death and so never gets to change the world for the better, but someone’s got to bright-side it! Ever heard of David Eastman? Me neither. Now let’s never speak of him again.

Action: concerning noncompete agreements, junk fees, and monopolies.

Long story short: tell our FTC to ban noncompete agreements, tell our CFPB to outlaw credit card junk fees, tell our CFPB to break up Wells Fargo, tell our FTC to stop the proposed Kroger/Albertsons merger, and tell our government to ensure prisoners also enjoy the benefits of any junk fee bans. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to ban noncompete clauses in employment contracts. These clauses keep folks from working for any sort of competitor even after they leave a job, but Jesus Mary and Joseph shouldn’t people get to decide that on their own, without having some corporations do it for them? Noncompetes supposedly prevent employees from betraying their old employers’ trade secrets, but guess what? There are already laws against that! And here you thought conservatism was all about shedding unnecessary laws! Turns out that’s a liberal’s job, as usual – and if we speak out, our FTC, which seems already inclined to do our will, might actually do our will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to outlaw credit card junk fees. Our CFPB does actually seem inclined to take action on the matter – their proposed rule would limit credit card late fees to $8, which would cover a bank’s actual costs, rather than whatever phantasmagorial costs they insist require $30 and $50 late fees. But you also know that banksters will be submitting their comments full of bad arguments and half-truths, so we’ve got to be there with the actual truth. And then, perhaps, this particular income-redistribution-upward scheme can die the death it richly deserves. It’s not so damn much to ask.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to break up bankster corporations Wells Fargo, while Inequality Media helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to stop the proposed Kroger-Albertsons merger. The first alert helps you tell our government to break up a corporation that’s already doing us harm – Wells Fargo has been illegally assessing junk fees and opening accounts folks don’t want for many years now – while the latter action alert helps you stop a corporation from becoming so big it’ll do us harm. A Kroger-Albertsons merger would create the second-biggest grocery corporation in America, which means lost jobs and fewer choices, so let’s not have that.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our government that any program reducing or eliminating junk fees must apply to folks in prison as well. Because they’re otherwise in no position to fight back! I know a lot of people will hear this and say well if they don’t like it they shouldn’t have done the crime, but that’s glib and asinine. Being civilized requires that we avoid cruelty, after all. And when someone injures our civilization, and we demand restitution for that injury, should we keep heaping on additional forms of “restitution” just to look tough? No, we should not. So let’s do our duty as civilized people.

Around the table: cost-cutting your way to prosperity! And other fictions.

Ho hum, Disney plans to lay off 7,000 workers – right as they’re facing union workers agitating for better pay and working conditions. The layoff continues the fiction that “cutting costs” makes your operation more “efficient” and that “efficiency” should “earn” you higher stock prices. Funny how big corporations always treat labor as a “cost,” rather than, you know, as the one thing that keeps them from spiraling into oblivion. But these are, as you know, the fictions big corporations have foisted on us for the last 40 years, and the result is a hollowed-out economy that no longer rewards work. And remember this when you cheer on Disney for “fighting” Ron DeSantis; their “fight” is just as much drama to them as it is to him.

Speaking of the fiction of “cost-cutting” your way to prosperity: doctors at a Florida HCA hospital allege that they face “unsanitary” instruments, roaches in operating rooms, an overloaded Emergency Room, and “anesthesiology errors that resulted in patients waking up while in surgery,” and how’d you like to be that patient? You’ll never guess the rest of the story: management has done nothing about these concerns though they’ve known about them for over a year, and the hospital’s parent corporation is, sigh, “highly profitable” and “its stock is an investor favorite.” Used to be we didn’t expect hospitals to be big money-makers because, you know, they have a purpose higher than mammon, but when you put mammon-worshipers in charge of everything, civilizations crumble and people suffer.

Amazon deforestation fell dramatically in Brazil during the month of January, as Lula’s administration has pledged to end the rainforest destruction that his predecessor, the irredeemable asshole Jair Bolsonaro, foisted on the world. Lula still has an uphill battle, as said asshole predecessor gutted environmental enforcement during his reign of error, and I would also imagine that enforcement is a lot more hazardous than it is here – in Brazil, I would think you’d have a lot more rage-filled developers shooting at you. Nonetheless, I hope we’re able to observe further progress in the years to come.

The Sentencing Project describes why it’s not necessarily good news that the prison population has gone down 25% since 2009. For one thing, that’s 25% over a dozen years, plus a big chunk of that drop came in 2020, as prisons let a lot of folks out so they wouldn’t die of COVID. And considering that we still put more folks in prison than any other country, and that incarceration went up 600 percent between 1980 and 2009, clearly we’ve got a lot of work to do. Decriminalizing pot and moving to a treatment model for drug addiction would sure go a long way toward erasing this stain on our nation.

Ho hum, our “liberal” media still resorts to the same tired tropes when covering Bernie Sanders, in particular his “scowl.” Read the whole thing – if you can name a sin of shallowness, our “liberal” media commits it in covering Mr. Sanders. That reminds me of all the times I had to correct Trump supporters about Bernie’s “yelling” by reminding them that their guy was the Yeller-in-Chief, and of course the problem is broader than that: our “liberal” media lets conservatives throw tantrums they’d put their own kids in time-out for, while reporting on the mildest objections of liberals as evidence of our utter lack of civilization. Maybe liberals should smile more!

Finally, the Indian government has damn near taken over control of the internet there – and big tech corporations (except to some degree Twitter, though I don’t imagine that courage continuing under their new management) have enabled them. I don’t want to hear that big tech corporations should put up with the abuse of “emergency powers” so they can sell ads to the 800 million Indians who use the internet, because the best of us don’t let money dictate every damn decision we make. Also, they said powerful corporations could be a bulwark against a government that abuses its power, and clearly they were wrong. And on purpose, I’m pretty sure.

Action: concerning taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called “FAIR” Tax, pass the No Tax Breaks for Outsourcing Act, institute a windfall tax on big corporations, and pass the Billionaire Minimum Income Tax Act and the Stock Buyback Accountability Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called “FAIR” Tax. Having trouble imagining the damage a 30% sales tax would do to your bank account? How about adding 30% not just to your grocery bill, but to your rent or your mortgage, too? And if you’re thinking maybe Republicans will smarten up and nominate someone sane to be our next President, recall that Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, and Tim Scott have all supported the FAIR Tax. Indeed, Donald Trump has supported it rather more tepidly than any of these! Supporting 30% inflation should seriously end all their campaigns, but it won’t, unless we speak out in numbers no one can deny.

The Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy has written about the No Tax Breaks for Outsourcing Act, which would prevent big corporations from reporting profits amounting to ten times the entire economic output of a nation (as they’ve done with the Cayman Islands). The Trump tax “reform” lets corporations pay a lower rate on offshore profits – which means corporations pretend they make money elsewhere so they can pay less taxes on it! If they paid more of their fair share, we’d have better roads and bridges, and we’d also have better public services, like Medicare and paid family/medical leave. So you may want to call your Congressfolk and tell them to pass this bill.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a windfall profits tax on big corporations. Again: when you see high inflation and record profits at the same time, you don’t need an economics degree to know you’re getting screwed. Actually, an economics degree might be a positive impediment to knowing you’re getting screwed, but I digress. We need to let big corporations know that their greed has consequences; our government has done a pretty crap job of that for the last 40 years, but certainly not for lack of effort on our part. And the fact is, we’re right and they’re wrong, and just as being wrong should have consequences, being right should have rewards.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Billionaire Minimum Income Tax Act and the Stock Buyback Accountability Act. The former bill would tax a billionaire’s actual wealth and not just the small part they realize from selling their assets every so often, while the latter bill would increase the tax on stock buybacks from one percent to four percent, so that big corporations do less buying back of their own stock and more investing in the actual work they do. Both would start us back on the path to actual fair taxation in America, so we should get in our Congressfolk’s grills about them.

Readings for February 20, 2023.

Luke Goldstein at The American Prospect describes “How Noncompete Agreements Hamstrung America’s Pandemic Response.” Long story short: noncompete agreements prevented physicians from going where they were most needed during the pandemic, even to pick up extra hours or volunteer. Of course, noncompetes also prevented health care workers from leaving chronically-understaffed workplaces for nearby better ones, which also didn’t help us when a pandemic hit. The lengths to which some corporations will go to enforce noncompete agreements is yet another argument that such agreements shouldn’t exist – and also, possibly, that their executives should spend eternity encircled by fire.

Kari Lydersen at In These Times makes “The Case for Nationalizing the Railroads.” It’s actually a pretty simple case: wherever private corporations fuck shit up, our government should step in, on our behalf and using our taxpayer funds, to fix it. You could make the same case for most of our health care system. And I wouldn’t make too much of the “folly” of giving more power to the “most pro-labor President America’s ever had,” because a) it wouldn’t be his power, but ours and b) private corporations’ mammon-worship has led to workers who can’t get a damn day off and trains that fly off their tracks and hurt and kill people and obviously these two things are intimately related. No, even this Department of Transportation couldn’t do worse than private corporations have already done.

However: the good folks at The Lever remind us that although Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg acts like he can’t do anything about trains derailing and polluting our air and water, actually, he can. Nice how Mr. Buttigieg says the Trump Administration’s repeal of a train-braking rule – a rule his department can bring back, even though it takes time – ties his hands, but he doesn’t mention (for example) that he already has authority under our laws to widen the definition of “high-hazard flammable train” so trains carrying five tankers full of a flammable carcinogen can meet that definition and get more stringent regulation. Our Glorious Elites apparently want the next Democratic President to be someone who can be routinely outclassed by the likes of Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance – though we can’t discount the possibility that the current Democratic President may have given him this job to prevent that from happening.

Robert Reich laments “The Death of Shame,” and though I’ve been doing that for close to two decades now, Our Glorious Elites sure do seem to have even less capacity for feeling shame than they did when I launched this ministry. It doesn’t help that our last President yelled evil, noxious crap at the top of his lungs for years on end, but he wouldn’t have gotten away with it if he didn’t have about a quarter of the electorate cheering him on. In my more generous moments, I locate their evil in actual pain – namely, the pain of Our Glorious Elites slowly and systematically stealing the social contract they worked for and counted on, a contract President Biden has (perhaps too slowly) started to reconstruct. In the meantime, though, they act as shamefully as the politicians who egg them on.

Action: concerning immigration, food stamps, college for all, and Social Security.

Long story short: tell Texas state legislators to reject an anti-immigrant bill, and tell your Congressfolk to reject efforts to cut food stamps and pass the College for All Act and the Social Security Expansion Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first: Free and Fair Democracy helps you tell Texas state legislators to reject the notorious SB 147, which would prevent immigrants from owning homes in that state. Always they say we gotta do something about foreigners owning American land, but this bill doesn’t even target Chinese corporations! No, it targets regular folks, who are just trying to make a go of it like the rest of us. SB 147’s sponsor, no doubt reveling in all the attention, says she’ll amend the bill to exempt immigrants who’ve actually gone through the system (including dual citizens). I’ve got another way to protect those good people: strangle this damn bill, and any like it, in its crib.

Republicans want to cut food stamps again, so you may want to call your Reps and Senators and tell them NFW. With apologies to Bill Maher, I propose a new rule: you don’t get to complain about high inflation and then cut food stamps! That may be even worse than complaining about inflation and then rejecting the Child Tax Credit expansion that put hundreds of dollars in working families’ bank accounts every month in 2021. Food stamps may have a bad name thanks to right-wing propaganda, but any of us might need them someday, and it’s cruel to take away something that helps working families deal with still-too-high prices. So we need to get in their grills about this right away.

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the College for All Act. Don’t think of this as being about TEH FREE STUFFZ FORZ TEH YOUNGZ PEEPULZ!!!!! Think of it as being about restoring the reality of 60 years ago, when state colleges were generally free for state residents; that’s just one thing that helped build the greatest middle class in world history. Of course, right-wingers said the last thing you want is an educated working class, and so Our Glorious Elites have spent the last few decades making higher ed unaffordable. But we need to fix that, so we can, dare I say, make America educated again.

Finally, Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security Expansion Act, which would at long last tax millionaire income into the system and expand benefits for everyone. Our Glorious Elites pretend that cutting Social Security is the “bold” move, but you don’t cut a program that everyone likes and that works well because of large budget deficits caused largely by Republican tax cuts for the rich – you expand that program! Cutting Social Security because blah blah get mandatory spending under control bullshit bullshit – isn’t “bold” so much as it’s stupid. And we have a duty, as Americans, not to tolerate stupidity.

Around the table: the best people running as Republicans! And other follies.

Ho hum, George Santos actually thinks he’s going to run for a second term and thinks they-got-me-like-Jesus is the argument that’ll earn him victory, but what George Santos doesn’t get is that, no matter how much you act like him, acting like Donald Trump works only for Donald Trump. Ain’t nobody running through a wall for George Santos just because he’s dramatic like Donald Trump. On the other hand, given his fundraising activities, he clearly gets at least one thing exactly as well as Donald Trump: that grift is the only thing that really matters.

Also ho hum, Rep. Andy Ogles (E-TN), last seen arrogantly ignoring federal disclosure laws, has also said an awful lot of different things in his various résumés, such as how he’s an “economist” when he appears to have received no extensive training in the subject. But in the post-January 6 era, people like George Santos and Andy Ogles are the only folks left Republicans can run! No “sane” “moderates” are coming to the rescue! (Also, I wouldn’t tout my “expertise” in a damn thing based on a connection with Arthur Laffer. That man is the OG of BS.)

At least one California startup is recycling used batteries from electric cars for solar power storage, which will certainly help keep them out of landfills for at least a few more years. And this is exactly the kind of entrepreneurship that results from Big Gubmint stewardship! If states weren’t investing in renewable power grids, this market might not exist, and we’d be putting more toxic crap into our planet. I know more than a few right-wingers will howl HAHAHAHA TEH ELEKTRIX AREN’TZ SO RENEWABLEZ ARE THEYZ!!!!!!, but surely we know better than to let the perfect murder the good.

Heather Digby Parton at Salon reminds us that Donald Trump has been ramping up the “ghastly homicidal rhetoric” about crime lately – why, he’s even talking of bringing back the guillotine and televising executions! – but ball-swinging about crime sure didn’t work for Republicans in 2022, or else they’d have a comfortable margin in our House and any margin in our Senate, plus they’d have done a lot better in Pennsylvania and Michigan. Of course, if the economy’s in the toilet by mid-2024 – and Our Glorious Elites, furious at our President’s ramped-up efforts at trust-busting, will do their damnedest to bring that about! – I guess anything could work, not that we’d ever really know.

From The Intercept we learn that Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (N-AZ) started a consulting firm with a fellow Democratic state Rep who later became a payday loan industry lobbyist. Why, it’s almost like she’s twirling a mustache – or brandishing a Fuck Off ring! Everyone involved wants us to believe the firm has never done anything in 15-plus years, but it sure seems like there’s no unpopular bankster Kyrsten Sinema won’t kowtow to. I wonder if her veterans advisory board told her that payday lenders trap our veterans in a cycle of debt. And I wonder if she then told them to stay in their lane.

Finally, let’s have a little more good news today! A group of formerly-incarcerated folks have convinced the city of Atlanta to recognize them as a protected class, which could shield them from the kind of discrimination that former prisoners face every damn day when they get out of prison. I’m sure some “well-meaning” right-winger stands ready to say that our Constitution doesn’t allow just anyone to be protected from discrimination, but fact is Our Glorious Elites come up with new ways to discriminate all the time, and if our Constitution can’t prevent bad people from discriminating against good Americans, then what’s it for?

Action: concerning education, cruelty to animals, and Arctic drilling.

Long story short: tell the College Board to stop caving to right-wingers over its AP African-American Studies course, tell your Congressfolk to ban glue traps, and tell our government to reject the Willow drilling plan in the Arctic Ocean. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell the College Board to stop caving to right-wingers over the AP African-American Studies course. The Florida Board of Education rejected it, and then Gov. DeSantis (E-FL) said it was worthless, and how did the College Board respond? By removing “controversial” elements and adding more right-wing Black content to the curriculum! They said educators were weak, and they were right! Not that I mind teaching people about Thomas Sowell; at least it’ll innoculate students against folks like Thomas Sowell in real life. But we’ve got to stop treating right-wing whining as if it’s “serious discourse.”

Care2 helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation outlawing glue traps. We think of glue traps as a “humane” way to get rid of mice, but it’s not – it causes the pest to starve to death, at the very least, and can even cause it to suffocate (if its mouth gets in the glue, presumably); a more humane way of getting rid of mice would be to get a cat or two, and usually cats don’t even have to kill mice, but merely deter them. You know, we don’t know a whole lot about death – we think about it a lot, and we tell ourselves stories about it so we feel better about it, but we imagine things like glue traps aren’t cruel merely because all the animals’ suffering happens out of our sight. But “out of sight” doesn’t mean “doesn’t suffer.”

Finally, Food and Water Watch helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management to reject the Willow drilling plan in the Arctic ocean. By now you know the drill: cleaning up spills in the Arctic is many times harder than cleaning them up in temperate climes (and corporations don’t want to clean up their messes there, either!). Also, we know so little about the ecosystems up there that we really ought to avoid screwing it up – though we do know enough about the salmon industry in Alaska (one of the world’s biggest) that we know we’ll screw it up if we’re not careful. And it’s never a matter of “if” a big oil corporation will spill a lot of oil into our oceans – it’s always a matter of when. So, yeah, let’s not do this stupid thing, either.

Action: concerning taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject to so-called “FAIR” tax, institute a billionaire’s income tax, and tax excessive corporate profits. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to ram the so-called “FAIR” Tax down our throats. Democrats should be running a thousand attack ads saying instead of making the rich and corporations pay their fair share of taxes, Republicans want to make you pay 30% inflation on everything you buy! They could also say 60% inflation, since the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy says we’ll need to institute that big a tax to make up for all the lost income, corporate, and estate taxes – all of which the “FAIR” Tax would repeal. Still, you could say all that to your House Rep. It’s all true.

Americans for Tax Fairness also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a billionaire’s minimum income tax. Which would not be a “100% tax” or whatever BS Donald Trump said that time, but a 2% tax on billionaire wealth. Really, this is the least they should do! We should be taxing the hell out of income over a million dollars so we don’t have obnoxious billionaires to begin with! And with fewer billionaires, we’ll have more millionaires, and we sure as hell will have more successful small businesses. All these things help a civilization! So we ought to fight for them, by first making the rich pay more of their fair share.

Finally, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to tax excessive corporate profits. When you have the highest inflation in 40 years and record corporate profits at the same time, you don’t need to be a Fulbright Scholar to see the connection. And a windfall corporate profits tax would allow us to impose a surcharge on all this corporate price-gouging, simply by measuring current profits against average profits for the last five years (or, possibly, by simply assessing a 4% surcharge on corporate profits, since inflation’s generally been around 2% and is now over 6%). However we do it, we’ve got to show CEOs that greed has consequences.

Action: concerning Social Security and Medicare, campaign finance reform, and stupid Congressional investigations.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject efforts to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits, overturn the Citizens United decision, and end frivolous investigations. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Today’s as good a day as any to call your Reps and Senators and tell them not to cut Medicare or Social Security benefits. (I say “benefits” because people like Rick Scott pretend that cutting costs, as Medicare drug price negotiation would do, is the same as cutting benefits.) Don’t believe the hype that “Republicans don’t want to cut Social Security and Medicare,” because of course they do, and remember: they don’t need 218 votes to cut Social Security and Medicare, they only need five votes, since that’s the number of Republicans who can prevent a bill from getting to the 218 votes it'd need to pass our House. But if we communicate our will in force, we can prevent this catastrophe.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to overturn our Supreme Court’s notorious Citizens United decision now. How much money did campaigns spend during the 2022 elections? Nearly $17 billion! Can you think of better things to do with $17 billion than run stupid ads trying to get clowns elected to offices they don’t deserve? Yes, you can – and so can the CEOs spending the money, if they’d abandon their stock market über alles paradigm and return to helping us create an economy that’s a little more grounded in reality. Actually restricting the ability of the rich to spend billions of dollars so frivolously will help us get to that economy.

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop conducting stupid “investigations.” Folks may say that since the people elected Reps who somehow think our government has “weaponized” against “conservatives,” that those Reps have the right to conduct investigations as they please, but that’d only be true in a nation where your will only counts on Election Day. Does your will only count on Election Day? No, it counts every day, and our Congressfolk are supposed to do our will every day, so you can tell your Congressfolk what to do every day. And if that results in less self-pitying whining from right-wingers, all the better.

Action: concerning junk fees, tax cheats, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to fight junk fees, reject efforts to repeal IRS funding, and confirm Gigi Sohn to our FCC. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation outlawing “junk fees.” You are no doubt acquainted with the “service fees” that come with event tickets and airline tickets, or the “early termination fees” you get slammed with when you change phone or internet providers. Well, guess what? Nobody likes them, except for the corporate executives who dream them up and the politicians who lap up their money, and we shouldn’t let them have all the say about everything. The Biden Administration has moved against credit card late fees and bankster junk fees, but our Congressfolk ought to have the good sense to get aboard. The American people want it, after all.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Senators to reject the House bill that would defund our IRS. You’ve heard me say Republicans only hate the parts of our government that actually help good Americans? Here’s a perfect example! Republicans spent years defunding the police at our IRS so they couldn’t go after rich tax cheats – and thus our IRS only went after poor tax cheats, which is, oddly enough, what Republicans warned would happen if we funded our IRS like we give a damn about law and order. Republicans sure do have a disconnect with reality. So let’s stop enabling them.

Finally, Restore the Fourth helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn to our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) already. Ignore the obnoxious corporate propaganda that has prevented her confirmation! Ms. Sohn has fought for an open internet for three decades, and she helped create both the Open Internet Order that codified net neutrality in our laws and the Broadband Consumer Privacy Rules that protected consumer privacy on our internet. Of course, the Trump FCC repealed the Open Internet Order and the Republican Congress repealed the privacy rules in 2017, but Ms. Sohn has done good works her whole life, and would keep doing so as FCC Commissioner.

Action: concerning workers' rights, separating families, and cruelty to animals.

Long story short: tell Amazon to negotiate with organized workers already, tell your Congressfolk to outlaw separating families over unpaid foster care bills, and tell our government to outlaw cruel hunting practices. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell Amazon to negotiate with its labor union already. When evil can’t prevent something from happening, what do they do? They stall, in this case by simply refusing to meet with the union that the workers have already approved to get them better pay, benefits, and working conditions. This is like when Republican Presidents simply delay writing legally-mandated clean air and clean water regulations, because they can’t win the argument on the merits, and they can't simply disregard our laws. And Amazon may think they're Too Big to Fail, but they can’t disregard our laws, either. Particularly if we all let them know we’re watching them.

Care2 helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation ensuring that states can’t take children away from families over unpaid foster bills. This mainly affects families who become homeless and put their kids in foster care, but that could be any of us but for the grace of God, and anyway why aren’t our taxes paying for temporary foster care? Ask the politicians who’ve been slashing taxes at the behest of their corporate and wealthy masters. I’m sure state and local officials will say well, we need money, too! But great civilizations don’t split up families to collect debts. And great civilizations certainly don’t treat people as a commodity – especially children, who can’t even legally consent to much of what happens to them.

Finally, the Humane Society helps you tell our National Park Service to outlaw cruel hunting practices in Alaska. This is a no-brainer, seriously, and what do right-wingers say in response? That we should “trust hunters” to do what’s right? If you don’t know it’s wrong to kill mother bears in their dens while their cubs watch so you can hang a trophy on your wall, then we shouldn’t “trust” you any more than we “trust” our elected officials to do the right thing. We all have a duty to maintain and strengthen our civilization, and identifying a group of “tough guys” you want to pander to (and if they’re so tough, why do they need pandering?) doesn’t excuse them from that sacred duty.

Action: concerning price-gouging, D.C. statehood, and abortion rights.

Long story short: tell our government to stop COVID vaccine price-gouging, and tell our Congressfolk to enact legislation making Washington, D.C. a state and repealing the notorious Hyde Amendment. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell our Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) to stop big pharma’s attempts to price-gouge us on COVID-19 vaccines. I almost typed “their” vaccines in that sentence, but that would have been a mistake, since they developed those vaccines with massive infusions of taxpayer money, i.e., our money. And that alone should give our HHS Department the authority to stop price-gouging on our behalf! Republicans will say they don’t have that right, but we all know by now that Republicans only hate the parts of Big Gubmint that actually help good Americans. So ignore them.

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation granting statehood to Washington, D.C. Currently they don’t have it, even though they have more citizens than Vermont or Wyoming, and not having statehood causes problems – like when right-wing crybabies want to overthrow our government and D.C. has to wait for Virginia to call out their National Guard to help beat that attempted coup back. It causes other problems, like when right-wing politicians at the federal level make decisions for D.C. they shouldn’t be able to make. Don’t brook any whining about D.C. statehood meaning “two more Democratic Senators”! If Republicans want Senators that bad, they can win arguments.

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Equal Access to Abortion Coverage in Health Insurance (or EACH) Act, which would repeal the Hyde Amendment (that prevents federal funding of abortion in public health insurance programs like Medicaid) and keep our government from interfering with private health insurance corporations that cover the cost of abortions. With 58% of Americans approving of Medicaid covering abortions and disapproving of the Hyde Amendment, our Congressfolk should understand that they need to adhere to the will of the people here, as elsewhere. It is their damn job, after all.

Action: concerning debt limit drama, factory farms, and OAN.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to end debt limit hostage-taking and pass the Farm System Reform Act, and tell Roku to boot OAN from its streaming TV lineup. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to “end the debt limit game of blackmail” and actually reform the whole system. And not in the way Sen. Hawley (E-MO) would – by simply exempting Social Security and Medicare from the debt limit, which won’t end right-wing hostage-taking – but by either passing the Protect Our CREDIT Act (which would force Congress to disapprove of a Presidential debt limit-lifting by a two-thirds vote) or simply repealing the debt limit altogether. I prefer the latter solution, and that’s what I’ll tell my Congressfolk to do. So a clean debt limit now, repeal it in the future, and enough of the damn drama already.

Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Farm System Reform Act, which would ban the construction of new factory farms and phase out existing ones by 2040. Don’t be the fool who says but then chicken will cost a million dollars, because big corporations raise prices whenever they feel like it; indeed, we’ve received a Master’s-level education in this truism over the last two years. And factory farms cause or enable a host of other evils, be that antibiotic abuse, animal abuse, or a complete refusal to rotate crops or try new varieties of crops. The worst evil, of course, is the evil factory farms do to the small farmer who’s trying to do the right thing and make a living.

Finally, UltraViolet helps you tell Roku to drop One America News Network (or OAN, or OANN) from its free channel lineup. You may hesitate before this task. We asked big cable corporations to drop OAN, but those were big cable corporations charging us an arm and a leg for their product; if you’re not paying for Roku, then what’s the harm? Here’s the harm: inclusion in a free channel lineup like Roku or Pluto TV gives a channel legitimacy, and invites corporate advertisers to place their wares before their viewers, which entrenches that unearned legitimacy. Anyway, who says we can’t tell Roku what to do? People who believe in private property über alles, and those people should not get all the say about everything.

Action: concerning taxes, Social Security, and Medicare.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the FAIR Tax, lift the Social Security payroll tax cap, and end Medicare privatization. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called FAIR Tax, which would replace income and corporate taxes with a single, national 30% sales tax. Remember when inflation was 9% not that long ago? Now think of the FAIR Tax as 30% inflation. Better yet, think of it as 60% inflation, since the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy says the tax would have to be that big to make up for all the lost income and corporate tax revenue. Hate to pile on, but rich people who don’t spend as much of their money as you do will make out like bandits. So let’s put yet another stupid idea in the ground.

Demand Progress helps youtell your Congressfolk to lift the payroll tax cap on Social Security, so that Social Security can tax income above $162,000 annually. And Jesus Mary and Joseph no more bullshit about Social Security being an “entitlement” or how it’s “running out of money,” particularly when we can alleviate any future money problems by taxing more of rich folks’ income into the system. With even Joe Manchin making pleasing noises about the concept, we should note that this could be done though budget reconciliation – if not with this House of Clowns, then with a Democratic House starting in 2025. They’ll have to hold onto the Senate, too, but everything worth doing in life is hard.

Finally, People’s Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to end Medicare privatization. OK, the way they put it is “tell Congress to stop Medicare profiteers,” but “profiteer” is a good enough word for private health insurance corporations that work through so-called Medicare Advantage, particularly since we’ve heard so many news reports lately of Medicare Advantage not paying for services. Indeed, not only does Medicare “Advantage” kick a lot of sick seniors off their health care plans, but a lot of folks switch back to traditional Medicare in their last year of life. They say “older and wiser” for a reason, apparently! But us younger folk can sure do a better job taking care of our elders.

Readings for February 8, 2023.

Thank God for the good folks at Popular Information, who remind us that we should ignore anything we hear from the Koch network about their intention to “break with Donald Trump.” “What is not mentioned in any of these stories (about the Koch break) is that, for years, (Charles) Koch has repeatedly announced he was reorienting his political strategy away from far-right Republicans, including Trump – with no discernible change in his actual political activity. After each media-assisted rebrand, Koch quietly resumed business as usual. The reality is that few individuals have spent more money to legitimize Trump and his allies than Charles Koch.” Plus there's data! When I first heard about the "break," I believe my initial reaction was (checking my notes) “drama drama drama drama drama drama drama drama drama,” since that’s how we should regard any disagreement among Republicans, but it’s always nice to have data behind it.

Neall Pogue at The Conversation describes “How evangelicals moved from supporting environmental stewardship to climate skepticism.” I suspect they were sincere, but I also suspect that evangelicals of the ‘60s and ‘70s used environmentalism to do battle against (then-) infrastructure-obsessed liberals, but this view persisted into the ‘90s; Mr. Pogue doesn’t say so, but I also presume that Republicans catered to the religious right’s racial and sexual prejudices to the point where they could sway them on environmental issues, too. Thus Jerry Falwell started calling us “tree-huggers” in 1992, and I was thinking I can’t be too mad, resorting to ridicule as often as I do. But of course there’s no good reason to hate “tree-huggers” more than, say, the corporate welfare queens who are Republicans’ real constituency. And if tree-huggers make you feel guilty, just remember that folks who don’t have work or food also don’t have the luxury of guilt.

ProPublica tells us the story of the man whose health insurance corporation wouldn’t cover his ulcerative collitis – and his struggle to expose that corporation’s inner workings. Trigger warning: by the end of this article, you might think that Victoria Kavanaugh, Dave Opperman, Vikas Pabby, and Nady Cates are four of the worst human beings who ever lived, though if they lived in a universe that actually rewarded good works and not just love of money, they’d be much better versions of themselves than they seem to be here. You may also feel more than a little disgust at how right-wing news outlets can trumpet their “Universal Health Care Horror Stories” with impunity while stories like Christopher McNaughton’s story – or, for that matter, Nataline Sarkysian’s – don’t seem to impress our “liberal” media the way they used to. You can safely blame that on love of money, too.

Action: concerning monopolies, data privacy, and recycling.

Long story short: tell our government to fight various forms of monopoly behavior, tell our government to protect good Americans’ data privacy, and tell our EPA to revamp the “widely-recyclable” label so that it describes plastics that can actually be recycled. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

In anticipation of President Biden’s State of the Union address tonight, in which we expect he’ll talk at length about the importance of fighting monopoly power in America, let’s do all the monopoly-fighting in one paragraph today: Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to ban non-compete agreements so Americans have more freedom to work where they like, plus they also help you tell our Department of Justice to break up the LiveNation/Ticketmaster monopoly so good Americans can go to concerts without paying an arm and a leg again. Meanwhile, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our FTC to crack down on “junk fees” banksters like to charge, plus they also help you tell our federal government to break up repeat-offender corporation Wells Fargo. Also, Inequality Media helps you tell our FTC to stop the proposed Kroger/Albertsons merger so good Americans have more choices among our nation’s supermarkets. It may take a few more minutes today, but a few more minutes today may mean a lifetime of more freedom later, and that’s worth it.

Free Press helps you tell our government to protect good Americans’ online privacy a lot better than they currently do. Free Press cites the recent T-Mobile customer information hack (the second in two years, apparently!) as a news hook, but let’s be frank: in 2017, our government repealed pretty good FCC regulations that protected American’s online privacy, because the economy Big Gubmint light touch campaign donations. Our government hurt us that day; you may have noticed that I’m pretty unforgiving when our government hurts us. But, you know, if they want forgiveness, they can always do the right thing. I am capable of forgiving and forgetting; if it doesn’t seem that way, that might be our government’s fault more than mine.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to make sure that plastic corporations that make non-recyclable plastic can’t use the “widely-recyclable” label on their products. Sounds an awful lot like common sense, right? But then we know our government’s tenuous relationship with the concept – common sense tends to fly right out the window whenever it conflicts with some corporation’s “right” to more unearned goodies, and so it goes here, where we recycle less than 3% of all polypropylene plastic, for example, but are willing to stamp far too much of it with the “widely-recyclable” label. That induces good Americans (especially good American waste workers) to waste a lot of time with stuff that’s in the wrong bin. Let’s not have that.

Readings for February 7, 2023.

James Steinhof at TruthOut tells us that “Buzzfeed’s AI-Produced Content Experiment is a Glimpse Into a Bleak Future.” Once Buzzfeed outsourced some of its more clickbaity works to AI – which doesn’t get sick, doesn’t have families, and doesn’t need to go on vacation to recharge from stress – its stock prices went up, though, really, fuck the stock market that we’ve made into a god. Other corporations will see the promise of “reduced labor costs” – you love having your work described as a “cost,” don’t you? – and hope for a similar goosing of their stock prices. Any teacher can tell that a ChatGPT-produced essay is BS, but our boldest and brightest entrepreneurs will pretend there’s no difference between writing produced by real people and writing produced by a machine that’s guessing at what being a human is like. The question is why we, as civilized people, would tolerate such a thing.

David Sirota at The Lever notes that a private hedge fund industry rag has said, and I quote, that “private equity returns are a major threat to pension plans' ability to pay retirees in 2023.” So there’s the danger to pensions we’ve been hearing about for the last couple of decades! I kid, of course – banksters have been using pension-related hysteria to justify gobbling up public pensions themselves, even though they don’t do any better than other investment firms, though they do charge more on commission. I guess the truly enterprising right-winger would blame the Fed’s interest rate hikes for all of that, since one of the (highly awesome and entertaining!) side effects of those rate hikes has been all the money that hedge funds have lost over the last year or so. But I doubt we’ll see that, not when there are transgender athletes and anti-racist books and litter boxes to whine about.

Finally, the incomparable Matt Stoller explains why a judge ruling against our FTC in its suit against Meta for buying a virtual reality competitor might be a “pyrrhic victory” for Meta. Long story short: “what we have learned is that the judge ruled against the FTC on the facts, but not on the underlying legal theory,” meaning that the Judge did agree that “acquisitions of nascent companies can hurt competition and that companies not currently in a marketplace can still have influence over the marketplace,” but ruled that our FTC simply didn’t make that case well enough. Courts have spent the last 40 years trampling on such theories in antitrust law, even though there’s plenty of precedent for them, so that’s actually a big deal. Folks, this is why we always try to do the right thing – even when we fail, we set an example (or even a precedent!) for those who follow us.

Action: concerning campaign finance, price-gouging, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass a Constitutional amendment overruling Citizens United and prevent big oil corporation price-gouging, and tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn to our FCC already . Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Constitutional amendment to overturn our Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling now. That ruling called laws restricting campaign finance “unconstitutional,” even though virtually everyone in America, conservative or liberal, supports such restrictions, and anyway money isn’t “speech” any more than a corporation’s a person. And though its proponents argue that redressing one’s grievances against a government costs money these days, having more money shouldn’t give you “more rights.” (I wish that were the worst argument against campaign finance reform; this post I wrote almost nine years ago lists some of those.)

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would penalize big oil corporations for price-gouging. Whenever you see high price hikes coupled with high profits, you’re free to say “look, I’m not a schmuck.” Oh, sure, they said it was the war in Ukraine, but, again, we’re not schmucks. And we don’t live in a “free” market, either – we live in a corporation-dominated market, where corporations make decisions based on what delivers the most money to their executives and shareholders, not on, you know, what’s good for people. Or even what’s good for the corporation long-term! And that’s why our government has to step in on our behalf.

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn to our Federal Communications Commission already. Look, I don’t care that big telecom corporations hate her, and I don’t care that one police union in Chicago hates her; I care that she helped create our FCC’s short-lived net neutrality order from 2016. Every normal person who’s ever thought about net neutrality – the principle that you, not some corporation, should decide how fast and in what order internet documents gets to your computer – likes it; it doesn’t matter whether they’re liberal or conservative, and when liberals and conservatives stand together against the corporations, we deserve to win. Getting Gigi Sohn on our FCC will help us get that win.

Around the table: the evil, it burns!

Ho hum, January 6 rioters who express remorse for their actions change their tune after sentencing. Why, it’s like they were never sorry in the first place! It’s true that “there’s not much the legal system can do for an adjudicated defendant” (unless their “remorse” got them shorter sentences!), but there’s something we can do: stop inviting these people to our dinners, our cookouts, and our parties no matter how much “fun” they are. Because if we don’t go this far, they’ll never learn shame or accountability. Plus we’ll probably have to fight them in the streets later.

FactCheck.org, being cautious as usual, tells us it’s too soon to attribute last month’s storms in California exclusively to climate change, this after talking to actual climate scientists who, how about that, talk cautiously like scientists tend to do. Despite the headline (and the findings), some right-wingers will still say but why didn’t they ask the guy with no expertise and no credentials in climate science I saw on YouTube who just so happens to agree with me? I mean, they won’t put it quite like that. Or maybe they will, since they do seem to have even less shame than they did before.

Confronted with the question of why both state and national Republicans are “doubling down on abortion bans” even after Roe’s overturning clearly contributed to the absence of a “red wave” last November, I’m tempted to say it’s because Republicans are so used to their actions having no consequences at the ballot box. But yeah, Amanda Marcotte is right that it’s mainly right-wing sexism. Too many right-wingers need to divide the world into people they want to fuck and people they don’t, but that’s no reason to give them all the say about everything.

When I hear that Vladimir Putin has invoked the Battle of Stalingrad – and the battle against Nazism – to justify his invasion of Ukraine, I’m tempted to say really? But then I remember that America has no shortage of folks who wish they’d fought World War II, and who thus make every stupid war they want to fight another World War II, like they did with Afghanistan and Iraq; it’s all drama, bad drama at that, and we deserve better than drama. So do good Russians, and not just because they gave the world Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Nabokov.

Big oil corporations induce right-wing media bubbleheads to blame recent whale deaths on, you guessed it, offshore wind power. Amazing how often “populists” like Tucker Carlson do big corporations’ bidding. Even more amazing that Jesse Watters can say New Jersey’s hardly-even-begun wind power project is “probably” killing whales while the Fox News chyrons say things like (caps in original) “WIND SURVEYING IS KILLING OUR WHALES.” Note well that these whale deaths have been going on for at least six years, and New York and New Jersey ports have been unusually congested lately for reasons you can easily imagine, but as Ronald Reagan once said, facts are stupid things.

Finally, how about our “liberal” media reporting our economy adding over half a million jobs in a single month as bad news? You and I can think of half a million people who don’t give a rat’s ass about stock prices going down, and anyway why did they go down? Because of the fiction Our Glorious Elites have forced down our throats for the last 40 years, the fiction that cutting jobs leads to “efficiency” and thus "more wealth." More wealth for them, certainly! But you know what creates real wealth? When our economy gives everyone, including actual entrepreneurs, a chance to wow the world. Why would Our Glorious Elites fear such a thing?