Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning immigration and the minimum wage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning humane treatment of prisoners and unconstitutional war.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning banksters, immigration, and privacy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning immigration, Honduras, and equal pay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning voting rights, pollution, and taxes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning trademarks, national forests, and bad leadership.

Big construction equipment corporation Caterpillar has actually asked the U.S. Trademark Office to remove trademark registrations that have the word "cat" in them, particularly that of Cat and Cloud Coffee of Santa Cruz, CA! Where do we begin with this? With the implication that anyone would ever confuse the maker of asphalt pavers and backhoe loaders with a freaking coffeeshop? With the notion that any apparel sold by a coffee shop could possibly be confused with any apparel sold by Caterpillar? Folks, this is what happens when we, as a civilization, decide that corporations should police themselves because they know their businesses best -- instead of innovating new products and processes, as a heavily-regulated civilization would force them to do, they just look for ever-more convoluted ways to make money without working, like frivolous patent requests. Hence Change.org helps you tell Caterpillar to stop bullying small businesses and stop acting like the world's biggest trademark troll.

Meanwhile, our Administration is totally hot to open up Alaska's Tongass National Forest to logging corporations -- thousand year-old ecosystems apparently being a profound insult to our Administration's ongoing program of inculcating short-term thinking into every governmental decision process -- but H.R. 2491, the Roadless Area Conservation Act, would revoke the U.S. Department of Agriculture's power to grant exemptions to the famous "Roadless Rule," which, as you may know, keeps roads and the associated development out of national forests. Of course big corporations would like to have roads in national forests, because that would make it a lot easier to extract the natural resources from national forests -- and, ah, to ruin national forests with their pollution, though big corporations will never admit they've ruined a forest even after they cut the last tree down. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect national forests and (as Penn Environment says) "keep wild areas wild" by passing the Roadless Area Conservation Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject our Administration's nomination of Barry Myers to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (or NOAA), then a consortium of good government groups (including CREDO and People for the American Way) still helps you do that. Mr. Myers used to own AccuWeather (more on that in a minute!), and as its owner constantly banged his saucepan to privatize our National Weather Service, and now our President wants to put him in charge of the National Weather Service? Also, when Mr. Myers divested from AccuWeather, he sold his ownership stock at cut-rate prices to family members; does that seem on the up-and-up to you? And the numerous sexual harassment claims filed by AccuWeather employees during Mr. Myers's tenure there -- claims that resulted in a six-figure fine assessed by our government -- also call Mr. Myers's leadership abilities into question generally. NOAA administrator is a leadership position, after all.

Action: concerning war with Iran, the Equal Rights Amendment, and hidden ticket fees.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to stop our Administration from starting a war with Iran, then Greyroots Action still helps you do that. We have good reasons for not going to war with Iran -- like, that we'll utterly fail at "regime change" like we always do, and that we'll help create more terrorists from the ranks of regular Iranians who watch what we do. Also, we already had the nuclear weapons problem under control until our Administration pulled out of it; why should we reward their stupidity and venality with the war they want? Don't believe the hype that our President is furious with Messrs. Bolton and Pompeo for wanting to "push us into a war." Nobody put a gun to his head and made him hire those guys, particularly when he already had people in those jobs! He put them in those jobs either because he really wants to go to war with Iran or because he wants to look like the guy who prevented with Iran; either way, it's drama, and it's not even good drama. So let's not reward drama anymore.

Meanwhile, a consortium of good government groups (including People for the American Way and Progress America) helps you tell Virginia state legislators to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (or ERA). What's that, you say? The expiration date for ERA ratification was 1982? Tell that to the Nevada and Illinois state legislatures, who ratified the ERA in 2017 and 2018, respectively, meaning that 37 of the required 38 states have ratified it. And tell that to the good citizens who have been petitioning their Congressfolk to repeal the 1982 expiration date, expiration dates not being particularly common in Constitutional amendments in the first place. While you're at it, tell that to the women who've been waiting for justice all their lives. If Virginia ratifies the ERA, only one more state has to do it, and then Congress has to repeal the expiration date, and voila! The ERA becomes the law of the land. But none of that will happen if we don't speak out.

Finally, Consumer Reports helps you tell Ticketmaster to stop springing hidden fees upon ticketbuyers. You look at ticket prices and they're already too damn high because bands don't have to put the effort into touring that they used to -- not that very many older bands will tell you they really enjoyed being on the road! -- but then Ticketmaster heaps on an average of 27 percent of tickets' face value in stuff like service charges, processing charges, and convenience charges! And lately Ticketmaster has announced that it won't give its customers honest, up-front pricing, unless our government tells them to. Didn't they take Corporate Propaganda 101? You're supposed to promise to do better in order to forestall government action, and then when you utterly fail to deliver on that promise, you say "well what are you going to do? Not see Thom Yorke? Hahahahaha!" But, actually, they're not the only game in town anymore, so maybe they'd do well to get ahead of the curve here.

Action: concerning war on Iran and Senate intransigence.

You see how late last week our President prepared a military strike on Iran, only to call it off at the last minute because he suddenly decided it wasn't "proportionate" to take 150 lives over an unmanned spy drone shot down over the Strait of Hormuz? So Presidential, right? Ah, no -- I don't have documentary evidence that he concocted the whole scheme to make himself look better, but I'm also not a schmuck, and our Founders didn't create a Constitution expressly designed to reign in executive powers so we could give our President the benefit of the doubt. So our task is the same today as it was yesterday -- to stop yet another stupid war with another nation that's not just going to roll over while we try occupying it for the next 20 years. So now's the time to call your Congressfolk and tell them to use their power stop the march to war with Iran. Tools for finding your Congressfolk's phone numbers are, as always, in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or on the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone).

While you've got your Senators on the phone, you can also tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; and H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act. Mob Boss Mitch says the Senate won't vote on these bills because and I quote "I get to decide what we vote on," but pressure your Senators enough and they'll cave, because the only thing they really fear is the voters turning them out of office. Yes, I wish we could turn bad politicians out of office more easily, but H.R. 1 would make that task easier by protecting our voting rights. The Equality Act would extend civil rights protections to gay and transgender folks, the Paycheck Fairness Act would help folks get equal pay for equal work, and the Save the Internet Act would restore our internet freedom. Don't let folks say supporting the President against Iran is more important -- our opponents can't win arguments, so all they do is create drama. But, as free people, we don't let drama dictate what we do.

Around the table: concerning matters of law and order, taxation, and drama.

Our government continues to justify its "right" to detain folks -- even American citizens! -- indefinitely without charge. Our Supreme Court has lately refused to hear an appeal from one Moath al-Alwi, one of the first 20 men Tha Bush Mobb brought to Guantánamo Bay, meaning he's been there for 17 years, without being charged with a damn thing. Open-ended detainment is bad enough when it's folks who can't pay bail for public drunkenness, but 17 years! Without a charge! That disgraces us, and injures our democracy. If we're the greatest nation on Earth, we shouldn't pull the kind of tricks dictators pull.

Speaking of things that disgrace us and injure our democracy, our Administration tells our Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that our laws don't actually require them to provide detained immigrant children with such things as soap or toothbrushes, even though our laws actually do require them to keep detainees in "safe and sanitary" conditions. It may be true that our laws do not always spell out how you must act like a human being, but that's often because we should all know how to do that by now. May God have mercy on the immortal souls of those who serve, such as they do, in our government.

I'm glad to see others saying, as Steve Wamhoff from the Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy does, that "Calling Progressive Tax Proposals 'Extreme' Are Taunts Meant to Distract." And what do they distract you from? Why, their popularity among good Americans, of course! Whenever folks like Mob Boss Mitch call Sen. Warren's wealth tax proposal "extreme," they're actually calling over 60 percent of Americans "extreme"! How are majorities "extreme" again?

Ho hum, a hedge fund manager and his wife have contributed more than $3 million to the anti-vaccine movement over the last few years. In particular, they enable yet another snake-oil salesman to tell reporters that kids "should be allowed to have the measles if they want the measles." After all, who doesn't want the measles? Hedge fund managers! They're so useful!

Upon hearing that our President's new pro-coal climate change plan could "hurt the same workers he claims to be helping" -- mainly by depriving them of the renewable energy jobs that will get them out of a dying industry -- you may be reminded that people like our President only need you for your pain, and they need it so badly they'll create more and more of it. And then they'll tell you your pain is all black people's fault! I'd call it clever, if I didn't insist that cleverness, you know, not be evil.

I'm pleased to see that more than half of Americans say our President has "changed the tone and nature of political discussion for the worse," but I'm annoyed that 54% of Americans find themselves "at least sometimes entertained" by his antics, which are considerably less entertaining than a boy belching loudly over and over again. If we can persuade those people to feel ashamed at being "entertained" by an obnoxious jerk who lives only to create drama, we'll have a chance at building a sane, moral, and reasonable society again.

Finally, speaking of drama, Fox and Friends created quite the drama for our President after he didn't bomb Iran last week, with one talking head repeatedly intoning that he-must-have-a-secret-plan and another saying the Middle East will look at his "non-action" as "weakness." And then Steve Doocy, the man who gives effeminacy a bad name, got to act like the adult in the room! The sad thing is that goading this President works -- recall that he'd all but conceded defeat over vanity border wall funding late last December, and then shut down part of our government for over a month after Ann Coulter gave him an earful -- which means, as usual, that drama only foments more drama. We should want more from our government, and from our civilization, than drama.

Action: concerning forced arbitration, children's privacy, and prisoner rehabilitation.

Years ago, JP Morgan Chase decided to stop using forced arbitration clauses in its customer contracts, after a considerable amount of public agitation -- but now, thinking, perhaps, that no one's watching them anymore, they plan to put forced arbitration clauses back in for their credit card customers. But we are watching them, so Public Citizen helps you tell JP Morgan Chase to withdraw their attempt to force customers into arbitration. Those customers deserve a day in a real court, just like everyone else in America, not some fake "court" either paid for or selected by the corporation, one that in practice rarely rules in a customer's favor. If you've fallen prey to the propaganda that ZOMG YOU CAN MAKEZ TEH MORE MONEZ IN TEH ARBITRASHUNZ!!!!!, then please read the last 10 words of the previous sentence over again. You don't get some big-sounding "average" award if you lose! And then you won't have money or justice.

Meanwhile, Facebook is not widely-known for defending your private information very well, but they do even worse for the kids who use its service, because sex traffickers will use Facebook to get to them and lure them into a life of exploitation too horrible to contemplate. Hence the international human rights organization Love146 has started a petition on Change.org which helps you tell Facebook to change its default privacy settings for children so that sexual predators have a much tougher time getting to them. In signing, you'll advocate for two changes in Facebook's default settings -- that friend lists be private, and that children only receive direct messages from people they've marked as "close friends" -- and an "only my friends" setting for the question "who can see me on other people's friend lists?" Sexual predators often get to kids through their friends, so these proposals will help keep them safe. To, you know, be kids.

Finally, you know how big telecom corporations force prisoners and their families to pay onerous phone rates? Well, S. 1764, the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, would empower our FCC to determine and regulate "just and reasonable rates" for "any audio or video communications service" a prison provides, "regardless of the technology used," and thus help more prisoners talk to their families, which the data tells us means fewer prisoners going back to jail. This FCC, chaired by Ajit Pai, may think all that's bunk -- Mr. Pai, as you may recall, justified FCC inaction by suggesting that prisoners could just use burner phones stuffed into dead cats thrown over prison walls. Lucky for him, he doesn't have to sell that to the late Ms. Wright-Reed, who campaigned against usurious prison phone rates after realizing she could either pay for medicine or pay to talk to her incarcerated grandson, but not both. Hence Free Press helps you tell your Senators to support prisoner rehabilitation by passing the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act.

Around the table: containing horrible truths about "demonization" and "socialism."

ThinkProgress describes how the "Moral Budget" proposed by the Poor People's Campaign could raise $9 trillion over the next decade. A 5.5% surtax on income over $1 million, a 70% top tax bracket on income over $10 million, treating capital gains like the income it most assuredly is, lowering the Estate Tax threshold and closing other inheritance-based loopholes, taxing wealth over $50 million -- I'd make a lot of these proposals harsher to wealth, but they're certainly on the right track. Mr. Pyke also reminds us that decades of stupid, venal leadership by Our Glorious Elites has led us to the point where far-right racists are gaining traction all over the planet, almost like that was the whole idea.

Sen. McConnell (E-KY) dismisses statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico as "full-bore socialism" And then discoursed at length about the subtle difference between liberal socialism and libertarian socialism! I kid, of course: he says it's "socialism" because it'd supposedly result in four more Democrats for the Senate -- it's like the thought of persuading people to vote for you has never occurred to him! -- and, coupled with inchoate proposals to expand our Supreme Court, which certainly aren't on the table for Democrats as long as this President is in office, well, I guess that's supposed to be "socialism." Calling everything "socialism" is what you do when you can't win the argument on the merits! Also, too, if you've ever breathed the air, drank the water, used a library, driven a road, or called a cop, then guess what? You're a socialist.

From the "I Shouldn't Waste Any Time on This But" file: let us properly contextualize the news that Fox News talking head Tucker Carlson has advised our President against making war upon Iran -- as drama, and bad drama, at that. Right-wingers constantly pretend they have massive differences with each other, and they do it to confuse us, but they also do it to pretend there simply aren't any other policy choices other than the ones they're fighting about in public -- you know, like, say, staying in the nuclear treaty that was actually keeping Iran from developing nuclear weapons, but which this President couldn't abide, because our last President put it together.

Joe Biden tells big donors he doesn't "want to demonize anybody who's made money." Well, given that they've redistributed most of the world's income upward to themselves, divorced the concept of wealth from the concept of hard work, ground most small- and medium-sized businesses under their shoe, bought themselves enough politicians and media outlets to cripple the people's ability to redress grievances as guaranteed by our First Amendment, set fire to laws and programs that actually help us little people, and are very likely going to make our planet uninhabitable in the near future, I'd say mere "demonization" is too good for them.

Finally, in a related note, I don't particularly want Mr. Biden to apologize for saying it is-so possible for us all to get along because, hey, he had to work with segregationists like James Eastland and Herman Talmadge when he got into the Senate, because it often seems to me that apologies prolong drama more than resolve it. But let's remember that Joe Biden's way of "getting along" with his opponents and "getting things done" with his opponents has always meant capitulation to his opponents. He was a fierce opponent of desegregation busing in the early '70s, after all -- he even wrote Mr. Eastland a nice letter thanking him for his support. Folks who support Mr. Biden because he "can win" aren't just misunderstanding the lessons of 2016, they're getting democracy wrong: you're not supposed to be "on the winning side," you're supposed to be the winning side.

Action: concerning corporate transparency, nuclear power, racist enabling, and big tech monopolies.

H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act, would (as its title suggests) force corporations to disclose their "beneficial owners" -- the folks who create the corporations and, presumably, benefit financially from their existence. Believe it or not, we don't do this in America, so skewed toward corporate power have our laws always been. And forcing corporations to disclose their owners will have real benefits: we'll better be able to stop the banksters, terrorists, tax-evaders, sex traffickers, drug money launderers, and big campaign donors who use shell corporations to hide their wrongdoing. Don't believe any don't-tread-on-me tantrums from the right -- corporations aren't people, and don't have the same rights as people, and corporation owners don't have a "right" to hide criminal behavior, either. Hence CREDO helps you tell your House Reps to crack down on corporate misbehavior by passing the Corporate Transparency Act.

Meanwhile, Environmental Action helps you tell the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems to scuttle its plan to build new and inadequately-tested nuclear reactors near the Grand Teton National Park and invest in renewable energy instead. I know, nuclear power plants, every one a potential Chernobyl or Fukushima, near public lands -- terrible idea, right? And you don't even need to see every nuclear power plant as a potential terrorist target, either, or as an almost-certain money-loser that the taxpayer will need to bail out, though both of these are true as well. Really, all you need know is that the price of solar and wind production has come down so far in the last 20 years that now homeowners can reasonably expect to be able to pay to solarize their houses with home equity loans. That has come about with very little corporate or utility help; think of what their help could do to push renewables across the finish line in America.

In other news, with the rise of white supremacist groups selling their disgusting wares online, Sum of Us helps you tell big payment-processing corporations like MasterCard, VISA, and PayPal to stop letting white supremacist groups use their services. What's that, you say? Isn't that denying white supremacists their right to have their views heard, as well as their right to make money as they see fit? Well, no, because neither of these rights actually exist -- white supremacists do have the right to believe whatever obnoxious and emotionally-cripped shit they want in the privacy of their heart, and they have the right not to be put in jail by our government for those beliefs, but they do not have a "right" to sell those beliefs on bumper stickers and T-shirts, nor do they have a "right" to make money however they like -- I mean, if that were true, we could never put a burglar or a bankster in jail. So trouble not your heart, if racists have to get real jobs. Work builds character, after all.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell investment management corporation Vanguard to support a shareholder resolution aimed at breaking up Google. You don't need to know about Google's inability to protect your privacy or their illegal tracking of your location or their complicity in Chinese government censorship or accusations of wage theft and sexual harassment against them to want Google broken up. All you need to know is that when we look for information online, we say we're going to "google" it, for Google has so much power over our lives that its name has become a verb. And any corporation that has that much power deserves to be broken up -- even if we can credibly say that Google has done a lot of good. You know what other corporation did a lot of good? Netscape. Seriously, they had the best browser/email application in the world in the late 1990s. But I don't mourn their oblivion -- and I would mourn if they'd wound up monopolizing the internet.

Action: concerning government spying, health care, and paycheck fairness.

You've heard that even our National Security Agency would rather not have the authority to Hoover up good Americans' phone data without a warrant, as Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act allows? Well, Reps. Amash (R-MI) and Lofgren (D-CA) would at the very least restrict our government's use of Section 702, by prohibiting spying without an actual investigative target (i.e., an actual suspect!), by prohibiting spying on folks outside the U.S. just to collect data on someone inside the U.S., and by prohibiting spying that our government knows is entirely domestic in nature. And Reps. Amash and Lofgren will offer this legislation as an amendment to a must-pass appropriations bill, one that'll fund most of the government for the next fiscal year, so it's got a good shot at becoming law. Hence Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect good Americans' privacy by passing the Amash/Lofgren anti-spying amendment.

Meanwhile, our Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) has proposed a rule rolling back yet more Obama-era health insurance protections preventing discrimination against gay/transgender/queer folk as well as women. Now, I think the 2018 elections proved that taking away people's health care so unpopular that it causes politicians to lose elections, so what's our Administration's game here? Same as it always is -- to suggest that protections for "those people" aren't as important as yours! And a lot of Americans, who fancy themselves to be hard hats and not hippies, still fall for that even though they're not particularly mean to folks who aren't like them in their daily lives! And once you go down this road, as a citizen, you find it harder and harder to admit you were wrong. So get it right the first time, and let the ACLU help you tell our HHS to scuttle its plan to deny protections against discrimination to vulnerable people in America.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. The Paycheck Fairness Act would give women more tools to find out they're making less than men for doing the same work, mainly by making it legal for workers to discuss their pay with their co-workers, which is usually how they find out they're getting shafted (and which, perhaps not coincidentally, their bosses try to prevent them from doing). Moms Rising also reminds us that this past June 10 was the 56th Anniversary of the Equal Pay Act's passage, and yet women still make less than a dollar for every dollar a man makes, even when you adjust the data for comparable skills and experience. Right-wingers will tell you that just proves that laws that try to help people just don't work! They're wrong, of course -- the battle for justice doesn't end with a single law, and we must re-earn justice every day of our lives.

Around the table: when oh when will we finally be sick of the drama?

We shouldn't be wasting any time on this, but it's so obvious that the 2001 AUMF does not give this Administration the power to wage war on Iran that virtually every Democrat running for President feels secure enough to say so. Our Administration argues, such as they do, that the AUMF authorizes an attack on Iran because a) Iran supposedly attacked two oil tankers in the Middle East like they've been doing for decades and b) according to Secretary of State Pompeo, Iran and al-Qaeda have "very real" ties. Like how he says "very real" like he's afraid you won't believe him if he just says "real"? Naturally, even our intelligence community has found zero evidence that al-Qaeda had any involvement in the oil tanker attacks. This Administration is just as much a foreign-policy clown car as Tha Bush Mobb was, and unlike Tha Bush Mobb, this Administration won't have 9.11 to help us feel sorry for them.

Our President's hour-long interview on ABC Sunday night comes in third in its timeslot, with fewer than four million viewers. Fun fact: Celebrity Family Feud, which held that timeslot the previous week, got over six million viewers. Of course our President will tell everyone he outdrew 60 Minutes, which also isn't true (he outdrew 60 Minutes in certain demographics, and not overall), but when has that ever stopped him? I sure hope this is a sign that the American people are sick of this guy. I even hope (though some would call me an optimist, or worse) that we're also sick of the bad drama he epitomizes.

Sen. "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell (E-KY) actually goes on Fox and Friends to wonder aloud why Jon Stewart was all "bent out of shape" about Congress's failure to extend the 9.11 Victim Compensation Fund. Again, mob bosses prefer someone else to do this kind of messaging, even though Mr. Stewart criticized Mr. McConnell by name. But "many things in Congress happen at the last minute" is not exactly confident messaging. And, ah, is Mr. McConnell sure he wants to pick a fight with Jon Stewart? Jon Stewart did as much as any of us to preserve this Republic during Tha Bush Mobb years, so that's a hornet's nest I wouldn't poke.

Our Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) agency did not tabulate deaths-in-custody for a full calendar year, and has been tabulating them differently for about a year since then. Plus, at least one internal memo says that "preventable harm and death to detainees has occurred," and an NBC News investigation found that two dozen folks died in ICE custody since our President's inauguration. If you're thinking 24 isn't very high a number, please do three things: 1) slap yourself, 2) ask yourself why the greatest country on Earth should tolerate any deaths in custody, and 3) recall that everyone is someone's mother, father, sister, brother, partner, or friend.

Finally, while we're talking about ICE, our President announces that ICE will begin deporting "millions" of undocumented immigrants next week, though later on an Administration hack said the effort would mostly be about the one million or so immigrants who have already received final deportation orders. No matter -- our President said it, so his votaries consider it already done, and next time they get angry about TEH ILLEGULZ!!!!!, they'll just put this "great work" of our President out of their mind. I used to think it had to be hard to reconcile such contradictions, but it seems that about a quarter of the electorate does so merely by yelling slogans in your face.

Action: concerning Medicare drug prices, abortion, product safety, and defense spending.

We've spent a lot of time trying to get Mob Boss Mitch to hold Senate votes on good bills passed by the House, but sadly, it's also like pulling teeth to get Democratic House leadership to consider some good bills. Case in point: H.R. 1046, the Medicare Negotiation and Competitive Licensing Act of 2019, which would, as its title suggests, finally let Medicare negotiate its drug prices on behalf of our seniors -- and would empower our government to manufacture its own generics if big pharma corporations refuse to negotiate in good faith. Why would Democratic leadership not want a vote on that? Could it be because Democratic leadership is far better at raising money from big corporations -- including big pharma corporations -- than they are at legislating? It's a question worth asking! Or, more precisely, it's a question worth making moot by demanding that Democratic House leaders allow a vote on the Medicare Negotiation and Competitive Licensing Act, which Social Security Works helps you do.

CREDO helps you tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 29975, the Women's Health Protection Act. The Women's Health Protection Act would prevent states from passing legislation outlawing (or putting onerous restrictions upon) abortion; you may have noticed that states have been doing a lot of these things lately. Would you respond that we should let the smallest government make the most decisions about the most people's health and welfare? I am, after all, neither immune to nor automatically disdainful of such arguments! But you're better off taking that argument up with our Constitution, because our Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision specifically says we cannot leave the legality of abortion up to the states. Given the current composition of our Court, that argument may not hold much longer. But I'll still oppose outlawing a procedure when only half of Americans (i.e., women) could ever serve time for it -- I mean, the only fair thing to do would be imprison men for the ill-considered sex that also contributed to the abortion, and I know no man in America would support that.

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would ban unsafe baby sleepers, like the Fisher-Price Rock 'n Play, and other unsafe baby products. An April Consumer Reports investigation revealed that sleepers like these have helped kill over three dozen babies, and you can't just pretend you're Brit Hume and say that's not so big a number, because every baby is the apple of someone's eye. And our Consumer Product Safety Commission knew, for several years, that the Rock 'n Play had helped kill babies, but took no action until the aforementioned investigation revealed more deaths than our CPSC had said. Consumer Reports will also help you call for a ban on crib bumper pads that help cause suffocation and strangulation, and tougher safety standards for dressers so they don't tip over on babies, since that also leads to over two dozen deaths annually. Again, if these numbers don't seem so impressive, just imagine it's your baby. That should do it.

In the wake of the news that our government is actually making a defense contractor pay for overcharging our government -- not a big-name defense contractor, nor a huge amount of money ($16 million) in the context of a $700 million-plus annual defense budget, but it's still a good work -- a consortium of good government groups (including Public Citizen, Roots Action, and Win Without War) helps you demand a $200 billion annual cut in defense spending. I often hesitate to put a number out there that looks arbitrary, but you don't even have to know that we already spend more on defense than the next seven countries combined to know that we can afford it -- you only need know that we routinely throw billions of dollars at weapons that clearly don't work. Which is to say they don't actually help defend us -- at "enriching corporate CEOs" and "funneling corporate welfare to big corporations," I guess these weapons do work. Call me old-fashioned, but I think defense spending ought to defend.

Action: concerning unconstitutional war-making, discrimination, and working families.

After last week's alleged attack on oil tankers in the Middle East -- a drama where all the actors involved can't even agree upon what really happened -- our Administration is even hotter for war with Iran. Fortunately, it's not their call to make -- it's our call to make, through our representatives in Congress. Hence both CREDO and the Friends Committee on National Legislation help you tell your Congressfolk to stop the march to war with Iran. Do not believe the hype from your elected officials about "tying the President's hands." How many times must I tell these pimps! Our Constitution demands that we "tie the President's hands" in war-making! It's a feature, not a bug! Our Constitution reserves war-declaration power for Congress, and reserves war-conducting power for our President, but having the power to conduct a war is not the same as having the power to start a war. That's the way our Founders wanted it, and that's the way it should be.

Meanwhile, the Tennessee Holler has reported that Coffee County (TN) District Attorney Craig Northcott has declared that he doesn't prosecute gay or transgender domestic violence cases. His his reasoning? "The reason there’s extra punishment on domestic assaults is to recognize and protect the sanctity of marriage," he says (so I guess he doesn't prosecute domestic violence in unmarried hetero couples either!), and since "there’s no marriage to protect," (because of course he doesn't "recognize" our Supreme Court's ruling legalizing gay marriage) "I don’t prosecute them as domestics." He can believe whatever he likes -- I, too, often think our Supreme Court is wrong! -- but his job is to enforce the law, which says gay marriages are marriages. And no, "religious" "conscience" plus "prosecutorial discretion" does not equal "I can do whatever I want." Hence the Tennessee Equality Project helps you tell Mr. Northcott to resign, now that he has professed his lack of devotion to law and order.

In a directly-related note, 18 Million Rising helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. The Equality Act would ensure that federal law grants the same protections under the Civil Rights Act to gay and transgender folk that other long-oppressed minorities (like women and folks of color) can get. If it bothers you that women and folks of color would no longer get more protections than gay and transgender folk, you really need to reacquaint yourself with the whole concept of fighting the real enemy. And if you subscribe to the notion that, say, the Equality Act will enable men to join the WNBA -- I wish I were kidding about this! -- then contemplate more closely how well someone who tried that would be received in any of his social circles. You might also want to contemplate more closely whether the slight possibility of such an occurrence is really worth continuing to let landlords refuse to rent to gay folks or employers refuse to hire gay folks or knuckle-dragging state legislators continuing to torment transgender folks.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2694, the Pregnant Workers' Fairness Act, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. The Pregnant Workers' Fairness Act would ensure that employers make "reasonable accommodations" for workers who become pregnant -- which would include giving them sit-down work wherever possible and being lenient on bathroom breaks since anyone who's ever been pregnant would tell you they always have to go to the bathroom. It would not, of course, include letting them spend their entire shift in the bathroom, since that would be an unreasonable accommodation; I put that there for those who have so little faith in our justice system that they fear "small businesses" getting swamped with "frivolous lawsuits." And the bill would also prevent employers from firing workers (or otherwise retaliating against them) just because they get pregnant. I mean, all that would be quite anti-family, don't you think?

UPDATE. One Taylor Swift, of Nashville, TN -- perhaps you've heard of her! -- also has a petition (on Change.org) which helps you voice your support for H.R. 5, the Equality Act. It has close to 300,000 signers as of Tuesday, June 18, 2019 at noon EST, so leveraging some star power to help this thing get passed would be worth your effort even if you've already called and written your Senators. Taylor Swift's a good egg.

Around the table: tabulating weak arguments easily swatted down if we but have the will.

My initial reaction to the news that our government had blurry, heavily-edited video of Iranian patrol boats in the vicinity of two oil tankers several hours after they suffered attacks was to call it drama -- why would we suddenly go to war with Iran now over something they've been doing for decades? Because our President, or John Bolton, wants a notch on their belt? It was just icing on the cake to hear later that the owner of one of the attacked tankers disputed our government's account of events. I said years ago that President Obama's competence in the service of empire was nothing to celebrate, but this President's inability to run a convincing false flag operation might be.

Michael Corcoran at TruthOut describes the current state of health insurance industry propaganda against Medicare-for-All. ZOMG 150 MILLYUNZ WILL LOSEZ THEIR PRIVATE INSURANZ!!!!! is not a talking point only John Delaney had been using -- and though it's true support wavers for Medicare-for-All once the pollster says psst you'll lose your private health insurance, that's a damn slim reed to hold onto, since "you can keep your hospital and doctor" if they have to take Medicare-for-All health insurance, as they will. And private health insurance plans are only popular when folks don't have to use them. This is a big country, so not everyone's going to have a problem with their health insurance at once, hence polls suggesting private health insurance is "popular" are intensely misleading. Also, too, when Third Way-types say we shouldn't do it because it's "ripe for attack," you should recognize such argument as cowardly. And stupid -- after all, haven't Republicans demonstrated they'll attack anything Democrats propose, no matter how weak?

JP Morgan/Chase CEO Jamie Dimon tells a business roundtable that "(s)ocialism means that the government owns and controls companies" and that government would use them for "political purposes, for jobs and votes." After we remind everyone that some people cry "socialism" at whatever they don't like because they can't win the argument on the merits, we have to remind folks that government corruption is easier to fight than corporate corruption because you have a voice in your government, and we also need to remind folks that restraining the power of the rich to run roughshod over the rest of us (which is what Mr. Dimon's really afraid of losing here!) is the best way to promote freedom for everyone else. People like Mr. Dimon complain about government "own(ing) and control(ling) (corporations)" because they want to do all the owning and controlling. And corporate CEOs need to ask themselves if they really want banksters like Mr. Dimon controlling them.

Ho hum, one of the House architects of the 2017 tax "reform" now says it's "way too early to tell" whether deficits will be worse over the next decade, even though deficit-neutrality was one of Republicans' big selling points and even though deficits are significantly worse now. He adds, "I don’t think anything could have been worse for the deficit than to stick with the old economy and stick with the tax code that was so outdated," although, as I'm now going to say with the Italics Hammer, deficits are worse now. No truth to the rumor that he then added BUT WE ALREADYZ PASSEDZ TEH BILLZ ANDZ OURZ DONURZ GOTZ ALL TEH GOODIEZ SUCKERZ!!!!!

Finally, our President invokes "executive privilege" to keep our House from accessing documents concerning its rulemaking on the census citizenship question. First thought: case is being litigated by our Supreme Court as we speak, so maybe he can. Second thought: House has oversight duties, particularly if they're going to create law on the matter (and Congress has introduced legislation addressing the citizenship question), so maybe he can't. Third thought: our Supreme Court can take care of itself without Executive branch help. Fourth thought: "executive privilege" can't be the answer to everything any more than "national emergency" can be the answer to everything.

Action: concerning debt in Puerto Rico, cruel immigration policy, and drilling in ANWR.

You recall that Hurricane Maria slammed Puerto Rico so hard that Congress needed to pass more disaster relief legislation to help it out, right? And you also recall that Puerto Rico was deeply in debt to begin with, and Congressional legislation passed under President Obama basically enabled banksters to keep scavenging the Puerto Rico economy? Crap like this wouldn't happen if Puerto Rico were a state, let me tell you! But H.R. 2526/S. 1312, the U.S. Territorial Relief Act of 2019, would wipe out Puerto Rico's debt and compensate debt-holders up to $15 billion -- even the hedge funds that swooped in like vultures, though they'd have to waive manager's fees, and I bet some of them find that so offensive they won't take the compensation. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to help out struggling U.S. territories wipe out their debt. And if you think that's "rewarding bad behavior," just slap yourself. Why should I bang my head against a wall?

Meanwhile, People for the American Way helps you tell our Administration to stop abusing immigrant children. I know it's hard to keep up with this ongoing humanitarian crisis our Administration has forced upon us, but long story short, our Administration still separates families at the border, still sets up these families (including their children) for human rights abuses, and no longer even provides legal services or recreational activities for these children, which sure will stop right-wingers from going on the TV and telling us that forced detention is like summer camp, right? I kid, of course -- right-wingers don't let the truth stop them! And though I know this Administration does not give one rat's hind quarter what you and I think -- not just about their inhumanity, not just about the political calculation that's gone into it, but also their who-are-you-to-tell-us-what-to-do attitude -- our duty to tell them what we think remains.

Finally, H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, would prevent our government from handing out oil and gas drilling leases in the Coastal Plain of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR) -- which sure is timely, since our Administration has apparently already told oil executives that leases in this area "will happen in 2019." Previous attempts to lease ANWR have failed, even in Republican-dominated governments, and H.R. 1146 currently has 180 co-sponsors, but let's not get complacent -- no, not even because we have the better argument (drilling in ANWR won't release all that much oil, but it will adversely affect caribou and Native American populations), because H.R. 1146 will only become law if we demand it, at every step of the legislative process. Hence the Alaska Wilderness League helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge by passing the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act.

Action: concerning pollution, robocalls, pensions, and antibiotic abuse.

Word on the street is our House would pass spending bills that would dramatically increase our EPA's overall budget, increase National Park Service funding, increase clean energy research and clean water infrastructure investment, and double research on dangerous (and ubiquitous) PFAS chemicals, among other things. Who would oppose these things? Only a Scrooge McSmallgovernment, that's who, and it's well past time we painted the objectively pro-pollution crowd into a corner. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your House Reps to support strong anti-pollution provisions in upcoming spending bills. And there won't be any "I decide what we vote on" from Mob Boss Mitch in the Senate, either, because the Senate has to pass funding bills, too, and shutting down our government isn't actually very popular, even if punishing those responsible for shutdown dramas has proven difficult.

Meanwhile, our Senate has passed a bill that would help good Americans stop robocalls from coming to their houses and cellphones! S. 151, the TRACED Act, would (among other things) force big telecom corporations to use call authentication technologies and mandate the FCC to write rules allowing customers to challenge calls' authenticity. That's a hell of a lot better than what the FCC would do, which is suggest to corporations that they should authenticate calls voluntarily. As if corporations ever do the right thing without being dragged kicking and screaming into it! Now it's our House's turn to consider the bill, so Consumer Reports helps you demand that our House pass the most vigorous anti-robocall reforms possible. I mean, robocalls are so unpopular that our Senate took the initiative and actually churned out a decent bill, so there's no reason our House can't do even better.

In other news, H.R. 1994, the Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement (or SECURE) Act of 2019, almost unanimously passed the House last week -- but that doesn't mean it's a giant ball of happy! The SECURE Act would (among its provisions) protect corporations from being sued if they select certain annuities for their 401(k) plans and then the annuities go belly-up, taking all the money with them. Why Congress would give welfare handouts like this may puzzle you, until you learn that House Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal (D-MA) has taken campaign contributions from at least nine insurance corporations or trade groups. So CREDO helps you tell your Senators to reject the SECURE Act's pro-retirement scam provisions and expand Social Security instead. See what we did there? We stopped talking about what they want us to talk about and started talking about what we want instead. We have to do that every day if we want to take America back from those who worship mammon.

Finally, fast food corporation McDonald's has lately committed to getting antibiotic abuse out of its beef supply chain, a far more important development than its previous commitment to getting it out of its chicken supply chain, and we have our pressure to thank for that development. Now Consumer Reports helps you tell another fast food corporation, Wendy's, to get the antibiotic abuse out of its beef. We use four out of every five antibiotics in feed animals, not sick people or sick animals, and we do it to fatten those animals up and help them survive the factory farm experience, neither of which is a particularly good reason to bring back the world where the next cut might kill you. (The Sierra Club also helps you tell our FDA to regulate antibiotic abuse on family farms more vigorously than they do now; we might do better with Wendy's than with our FDA, but duty is duty.)

Action: concerning campaign finance reform, violence against women, and evil media.

Our Supreme Court's Citizens United v. FEC ruling -- which used the ancient and nefarious doctrine of corporate "personhood" to expand big corporate campaign financing -- remains a blot on our culture. But H.J.Res. 2 would amend our Constitution to allow Congress to "regulate and set reasonable limits on the raising and spending of money by candidates and others to influence elections," which would include "prohibiting" "artificial entities created by law" "from spending money to influence elections." Big corporate campaign spending is popular with approximately no one -- except the big corporations who buy votes this way! Yes, that's an accurate way of putting it: money isn't speech, it's property, and everyone but a pedant sees that big corporate campaign spending results in corrupt corporate lackeys in office. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to slow the flow of big corporate money into political campaigns.

It's not just the American Dream and Promise Act, the For the People Act, the Equality Act, and the Save the Internet Act that aren't getting the proper attention from our Senate -- it's also H.R. 1585, the Violence Against Women Act Reauthorization Act, passed by our House back in April but still sitting on the Senate's general calendar two months later. I suppose that's an improvement over the aforementioned bills, but your Senators could still use your counsel; hence Amnesty International helps you tell your Senators to pass the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act. Are they refusing to pass it because it would give tribal courts more power to go after sexual violence, child abuse, sex trafficking, and the like? I sure hope not, because that would mark them as pedants -- and also as hostage-takers, since the bill would also help federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement entities communicate with each other about these issues.

CREDO helps you tell advertisers to drop the Fox News program The Ingraham Angle. CREDO cites Laura Ingraham's recent defense of evil white supremacist/anti-Semite Paul Nehlen as the immediate news hook (a simple graphic causes so much trouble these days!), but a better reason to tell advertisers to abandon her is everything she's ever done -- she's been an ambulance chaser for far-right causes for three decades now, and she doesn't obsess over nationalism and xenophobia these days because she's really given all that a lot of thought, but because she thinks that's where the money is. Let's prove her wrong. And while we're talking about it, Media Matters helps you tell advertisers to drop Fox News generally, since they're all pretty terrible. If you want to call your Congressfolk and demand that they pass a law letting you choose your cable channels a la carte so you don't have to pay for this rubbish, well, tools to find your Congressfolks' phone numbers are in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone).

Around the table: from the high cost of home ownership to corruption and censorship.

Sam Pizzigati at the Our Future blog foresees "A Nation Where Only The Rich Have Homes." Dystopia has landed in the Bay Area, where millionaires rant about homeless folks parked in RVs along the waterfront and GoFundMe campaigns have actually emerged to fund lawsuits fighting affordable housing. Why, it's like these folks have never heard of irony! If we taxed the rich a lot harder than we do, we wouldn't have any of these problems -- not homelessness, which is almost entirely a post-Kemp/Roth phenomenon in America, and not whining about homeless people getting a "better view" of the beach.

Barbara G. Ellis at TruthOut reports that well over half of rural voters also want Medicare-for-All health insurance -- and reminds us that rural folk "have horrifying mishaps the urban/suburban public are unlikely ever to experience," plus "the problem of long-distance travel to reach a medical facility." She also gives some good advice about how to talk to rural voters about Medicare-for-All -- or, to be more precise, how to listen to rural voters' health care stories. Strange that a "liberal" media that seems to love horror stories about health care doesn't typically run stories about folks getting mangled by tractors or crushed by jacks. Maybe they can't hear such stories because they have all that money in their ears.

Ho hum, YouTube doesn't abide by its own rules regarding harassment, mainly because of money from advertising. Using algorithms instead of human beings to "demonetize" websites that deserve it is undoubtedly part of the problem, though that doesn't fully explain why the history teacher making instructional videos about the fall of the Third Reich always seems to get shafted while the guy actually spouting racist rubbish gets off -- but who, exactly, would want to advertise with right-wing trolls who do little other than call their opponents foul names? It can't be all about the eyeballs, since anyone can get attention by merely being an asshole. Thus a Drop Fox-style campaign against YouTube seems long overdue.

Annoyed by all the drama our President has been fomenting about whatever agreement he has or doesn't have with Mexico over tariffs and immigration? Dean Baker comes to the rescue, as usual, by explaining how tariffs work. Long story short: consumers don't necessarily bear all the burden of tariffs, and tariffs can be an effective negotiating ploy, but in the hands of this President, tariffs will almost certainly become just another tool with which he enriches himself and his cronies. Also, too, assessing tariffs against Mexico makes no economic sense when you've been negotiating a trade deal with Mexico! Sadly, as I've said, it does make political sense.

I'm not sure this report about Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao greasing the skids for projects in the home state of her husband, Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell will have the negative effect against Mr. McConnell's 2020 re-election effort that I'd like it to have. I mean, yes, it is textbook corruption, but will Kentucky voters feel that way about it, particularly after Mr. McConnell shows ads touting his role in "the revitalization of Owensboro"? Statistics showing Kentucky ranking only 25th in Department of Transportation money since the beginning of 2017 aren't convincing, of course, once you see that email from February of 2017 regarding "Ky-specific issue(s)." And by "Ky," they didn't mean the jelly.

Finally, China's "Great Firewall" of internet censorship now blocks both the Washington Post and The Guardian in addition to most other major English-language papers of record. Most news reports speculate that China is doing all this censoring because it doesn't want its citizens to read about the 30th anniversary of the Tianenmen Square massacre, in which the Chinese government literally ran over protestors with tanks; I guess that could explain the timing, but with tyrants you still have to wonder. It couldn't also be that the Post and the Guardian have been highly-critical of our President, could it? I mean, tyrants do seem to attract each other.

Action: concerning internet freedom, war in Yemen, immigration, and the minimum wage.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1644/S. 682, the Save the Internet Act, then Free Press still helps you do that. H.R. 1644/S. 682 would "save the internet" by reinstating the 2015 Open Internet order that forced big telecom corporations to deliver all network traffic to its destination at the same speed, without discrimination. The FCC repealed that order in 2017, and I told you then that you wouldn't necessarily notice any change to your internet right away, because the big telecoms aren't so stupid as to take away all your freedoms at once. But they most assuredly have been working to do that -- Verizon's throttling of Santa Clara County firefighters in the middle of a wildfire is perhaps the most famous example, but researchers have also found Sprint throttling Skype and several big telecoms throttling Netflix and YouTube. That's how it begins; let's make sure this is also where it ends.

Meanwhile, one of the architects of our Administration's "national emergency" declaration enabling it to bypass Congress and the will of the people and sell arms to the Saudi/UAE coalition currently waging war on Yemen -- a former defense contractor lobbyist named Charles Faulkner -- has lately left his State Department job in a black cloud, and now some Congressfolk want to have a hearing on the whole matter this week. As well they should -- the Saudi/UAE bombing of Yemen serves no purpose but to put Yemeni citizens on the brink of famine and bring shame upon anyone who helps it, and of course this latest "national emergency" drama testifies to the ineptitude and cowardice of our President, who got 46% of the popular vote and naturally acts like he has absolute power. Hence Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban arms sales to the Saudi/UAE coalition. Doing whatever Saudi Arabia wants because TEH IRANZ!!!!! is no way to run a foreign policy.

In other news, American Dream and Promise Act has passed our House, meaning it goes to our Senate, where it may never get a vote. That would be a shame, because the American Dream and Promise Act would fix what our President broke when he issued an Executive order (one since stayed by our courts) ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (or DACA) program for those folks brought to America as children who now know no other home as adults. The American Dream and Promise Act would once again extend protection from deportation for these folks as long as they meet certain criteria, like continued settlement in our country, two years in our military, and continued enrollment in college. You might think, gosh, this is how a conservative would conduct immigration policy; pass judgment on the "conservatism" of today's Republicans as you like, but in the meantime, People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to pass the American Dream and Promise Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 582/S. 150, the Raise the Wage Act, then the National Women's Law Center still helps you do that. The bill would raise our minimum wage from $7.25/hour to $15/hour, and would ultimately bring the minimum wages for tipped and disabled workers into parity with everyone else's; anyone who says I JUST CAN'TZ RUNZ TEH BIZNIZZIZ!!! after that can first be pointed to the fact that the $15/hour minimum wage would be phased in over five years and second be told they just don't have very much of that can-do American spirit, do they? People in some parts of America already have a $15/hour minimum wage, and it hasn't exactly destroyed their economies -- when folks make more money, they have more money to spend, and thus pump more money into the economy. Of course, CEOs who think all economies should revolve around them find that intolerable, but they don't get all the say around here.

Action: concerning poverty, corruption, monopolies, and privatization.

Our Office of Management and Budget (or OMB) would like to calculate poverty using the "Chained CPI" measurement, which would essentially redefine inflation downward and thus redefine poverty upward. You may remember Chained CPI from the Social Security debates of the past decade -- Chained CPI portrays inflation as lower than it really is, by assuming that once an item's price rises a certain amount, consumers will simply switch to a cheaper item. Already sounds like a scam, doesn't it? And just as the last Administration mooted using Chained CPI to calculate Social Security benefits -- which doesn't work, because seniors have a lot of fixed costs and can't just "switch to what's cheaper" whenever they like -- this Administration wants to use it to claim that not so many folks are struggling, which means fewer of those who are actually struggling will get federal benefits like Medicaid. Hence the Coalition on Human Needs (among other good government groups) helps you tell our OMB to reject its plan to take health care away from more good Americans.

Meanwhile, S. 1393, the Ban Conflicted Trading Act, would (as its title suggests) make it against the law for Congressfolk to trade stocks. If that sounds extreme to you, consider how often Congressfolk ever do the people's will versus how often they seem to do some big corporation's will, and then recall that corporations trade stock and people don't. Americans are getting a constant reminder from our President of how much they hate corruption, and they generally figure that Congressfolk will do what pleases them before they'll do what's right, but really, why should we put up with that? And folks who say we can "trust" Congressfolk to trade stock and do the right thing are ignoring the evidence of their own eyes -- and they're making about as bad an argument as saying cable news guests can take money from big corporations and still pontificate "objectively" about matters that concern their paymasters. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to restore some faith in our democracy by passing the Ban Conflicted Trading Act.

In other news, our FCC has given its blessing to the proposed T-Mobile/Sprint merger -- even though we all know this merger, like all other big corporate mergers, will reduce competition, raise prices, concentrate economic power in fewer hands, and cause a lot of people to lose their jobs -- but our Department of Justice can still step in and stop the merger, so Free Press reminds you that you can still call our DoJ, at 202.804.1389, and tell them to block the proposed merger. Our DoJ -- led, such as it is, by William Barr, who is, among so many other things, a man who believes corporations know best about everything -- probably won't want to block the merger, but again: it doesn't matter what they want, it matters what we want. One day, we will live in an America where all Americans really believe that, and communicate their will to their representatives in government until they cry uncle. Until then, we just have to keep reminding folks that we really do have the power -- if we use it.

Finally, our President, who has repeatedly assured us that he will pick the "best people" to work in our government, somehow thinks Barry Myers should lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA runs, among other things, the National Weather Service, which has done such a great job over the years that Jim Freaking DeMint defended it while in the Senate. And, ah, what did Mr. Myers do for a living until recently? Why, run AccuWeather, a private weather forecaster which has long salivated at the prospect of either crippling or buying out the National Weather Service! Putting Mr. Myers in charge of the NOAA is real fox-in-charge-of-the-henhouse territory; that's a cliché, I suppose, but this Administration is so terrible you can cut them down with little more than cliches. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Senators to reject Mr. Myers's nomination to the NOAA. Don't believe the hype that since Mr. Myers has answered the conflict-of-interest charge by resigning from Accuweather, because he sold his stock to his own family at a very large discount; what does that look like to you?

Around the table: from centrist Democrats to empowered farmworkers.

Keith A. Spencer at Salon says "There Is Hard Data That Shows a Centrist Democrat Would Be a Losing Candidate." See? It's not just a feeling I have based on 100 million Americans sitting out the 2016 election! Seriously, Thomas Piketty (of Capital in the 21st Century fame) looked at 70 years of post-election data from America, France, and the U.K., and found guess what? That poorer working families used to always vote for liberal candidates, but now they don't, because generally there ain't one to vote for -- and while some of these voters now vote for faux-populist right-wingers like our President or Ms. LePen, many others simply don't vote at all. A solution presents itself! Anyway, it's nice to see Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Joe Biden portrayed as centrists.

West Virginia Supreme Court rules unanimously that gas drilling corporations can't drill on one person's property to reach reserves on adjoining properties without "express" permission from the owner. In a sane and moral society, conservatives would celebrate this ruling as a victory for private property, but in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, I suspect that any "conservatives" who weigh in on this matter will squeal about TEH JUDISHUL OVERREACHEZ!!!!!, since "conservatism," in these times, only ever seems to mean "whatever makes rich people more money."

Is it "news" that our "liberal" media always talks about American aggression as a "response" to vague or nonexistent "threats" from Iran? Perhaps not, but it's still good to be reminded -- as it is also good to be reminded that when someone says some nation or other is a "threat," you have every right to ask "based on what evidence?" "Because Iran humiliated us in 1979 and 1980" is not evidence, nor is a quotation taken out of context, nor is an attack on Saudi Arabian oil infrastructure that even our own intelligence forces won't say came from Iran.

Ho hum, our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau proposes gutting its own payday lending rule, and then payday lending bigwigs spend $1 million celebrating the proposal at one of our President's resorts. And that's why you don't put a "successful businessman" in office! As we learned, no doubt, when our President said he wasn't about to "hate" the Saudis because they spend so much money at his hotels. I expect we'll get further reminders of this kind of corruption as time goes on.

Finally, New York's farmworkers might get landmark labor legislation if the Farmworkers Fair Labor Practices Act passes that state's legislature and gets the Governor's signature. A state Supreme Court decision extended collective bargaining rights to farmworkers -- who, as you know, do not enjoy the protections of federal law in this area, which leads me to wonder if our national Supreme Court will forget its putative aversion to meddling in state affairs -- but the FLPA would go further, giving them, among other things, one day off weekly (!) and overtime pay. That latter item is very important, as farms often make their workers put in 13-hour days. When farmworkers get to organize for better working conditions, a lot of our work as citizens will become a lot easier, and don't believe the farm corporations' whining that it'll be "too expensive." They should learn to count the cost of bad actions.

Action: concerning patents and pollution.

Remember a few years ago, when our Supreme Court ruled that you couldn't patent human genes because, well, you didn't make them? Congress may undo that good work with legislation that would nullify the ruling and allow big corporations to patent human genes again, so Breast Cancer Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep big corporations from patenting our genes. Some Congressfolk will claim that this legislation doesn't do that, but all you need do to refute them is attend the discussion in paragraphs 8 through 11 of this article. Trigger warning: a lawyer claims the ruling has caused "a dead stop in research in the United States on isolated natural products." You'll recognize that as a hostage crisis -- give me monopoly power over human genes, or the science gets it! You'll also recognize it as absurd, since we're more likely to do good work about "isolated natural products" if many entities can research them, rather than one corporation valuing money more than science.

Meanwhile, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned our EPA's 2015 coal ash rule last year, ruling that it did not adequately protect good Americans from the water pollution caused by coal ash leaking into groundwater -- as mandated to do by the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which grants our EPA rule-making power in this matter. Yes, I totally put that last clause in there to forestall complaints about BIG GUMMINT!!!! But even though the coal ash rule dates from the Obama Administration, now this Administration must fix it -- again, as mandated by our laws and our courts -- and you can probably guess their enthusiasm for that task. Still: it doesn't matter what they want; it matters what we want -- if we speak out loudly enough. Hence Environmental Action helps you tell our EPA to comply with our courts and write a strong coal ash rule. That would be the law and order thing to do, after all.

Finally, H.R. 2156, the RECLAIM Act, would help states clean up air and water polluted by abandoned coal mines Reclaiming abandoned coal mines -- which put a lot of filth into our air and water, particularly in Pennsylvania and Kentucky, from which (perhaps not coincidentally!) many of H.R. 2156's sponsors hail -- would not only make our air and water cleaner, but would create jobs for workers abandoned by a dying coal industry. And H.R. 2156 actually has almost a dozen Republican co-sponsors and just passed out of the House National Resources Committee by a 26-10 vote; with Senate Majority Leader Mitch "I decide what we vote on" McConnell also hailing from Kentucky, maybe H.R. 2156 can pass both houses of Congress! But we've still got to stay on our Congressfolk, so Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to cut pollution and help out depressed areas of our country by passing the RECLAIM Act.

Action: concerning pollution and racism.

Our Administration plans to open up public lands near wildlife refuges and wilderness areas in California to oil and gas drilling. One wonders if this is their revenge on California for being a liberal paradise, but there's a bigger issue here: California is still woefully short on water, even a year after a seven-year drought finally ended, and supports an agriculture sector that produces about two-thirds of America's fruits annually. And California farmers responded to the drought by irrigating their crops with fracking wastewater, which testifies to that water shortage and suggests that, well, maybe gas drilling isn't the best use of our water tables to begin with. Hence Food and Water Watch helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management (or BLM) to reject its own plan to open up relatively untrammeled California lands to drilling. Remember: they'd rather ignore us, but if they do, we can stop them in court.

Meanwhile, Free Press helps you tell our FBI to stop trying to hide the onslaught of white supremacist violence in its official data. How are they doing this? By lumping all sorts of phenomena into one category, called "racially-motivated violent extremism," which would allow our FBI to lump white supremacists who shoot people with black protestors who get shot at by police. And that also means that the new category would also allow inattentive evil media outlets to run rampant with bogus statistics "mistakenly" attributed to black protestors! Well, as they say, a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can get its pants on, but our government should not enable lies to get around so quickly. And the problem isn't black protestors getting loud with people who don't listen; the problem is white racists shooting black and brown people dead. And our FBI needs to confront that, just as we all do.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to end our President's Muslim ban by passing H.R. 2214/S. 1123, the NO BAN Act, then People for the American Way (among others) still helps you do that. The NO BAN Act would repeal all three of our President's Muslim bans, would prevent future Presidents from issuing similar travel bans, and would strengthen the Immigration and Nationality Act by explicitly preventing discrimination on the basis of religious belief. Would it be too much to ask of our government to make decisions on who can travel to and from our country on a rational basis? Would it be too much to ask of our President not to stoke rage and hatred on our fellow citizens with his Executive Orders? I'm an eternal optimist, so my answer to both of these questions would be "no, it would not be too much to ask." But that's only true if we demand that it be true.

Penny Rants for Wednesday, June 5, 2019: Pete Buttigieg shows John Hickenlooper and John Delaney how it's done!

Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper gets booed at the California Democrats' state convention after declaring that "socialism is not the answer" to the problems of defeating our President in 2020 and "achiev(ing) big progressive goals." What does he mean by "socialism"? Well, he says that"(m)assive government expansions may not be strictly speaking socialism, but trust me: Republicans will make it seem like socialism." And he volunteers this strategy as a way of confounding Republican efforts to define Democrats! Enabling Republicans who call everything "socialism" is no way to fight them; hell, it's no way to fight. Still, it might be worse for him to offer "focusing on kitchen table programs that will actually improve people's quality of life" as an alternative -- as if "socialist" programs couldn't possibly do that! But here's what's worst: he insists we either take a center-right tack or the President gets re-elected, which is what, class? That's right, a manufactured hostage crisis -- don't communicate your will to your politicians, or your country gets it!

For all that, Mr. Hickenlooper fared better than former Rep. John Delaney of Maryland, who got booed at the same event for a full minute after telling the assembled that Medicare-for-All "sounds good, but it’s actually not good policy, nor is it good politics." It routinely gets majority support in poll after poll and it's "not good politics"? His objection to Medicare-for-All as policy seems to be that it'll "kick() 115 million Americans off their health care" -- though it would give them cheaper, better health care, not "no health care." And naturally he took the criticism with the confidence and professionalism befitting a man who ought to be a frontrunner, right? Well, no -- first he said that "(i)ntolerance to alternative points of view is not what the Democratic Party should be about," which begs the retort that you cant 't President if you call criticism "intolerance." And then he said "(m)ost Republicans favor doing nothing and eliminating the ACA. What’s your choice?" Well, my choice is not to be part of your damn manufactured hostage crisis! You can't keep putting out a menu of wet oatmeal and a bowl of dung and expect people to say how great your restaurant is.

And these putatively "sane," "sensible" "moderates" could learn a lot from South Bend, IN Mayor Pete Buttigieg about how to hide your centrism from the masses -- he told the California delegates that "the riskiest thing we could do is try to play it safe" in 2020, which is a stroke of genius even if, like me, you don't believe he really means it. The flesh is willing with statements like "(our President) wins if we look too much like Washington" and "when (our President) inundates the imagination with a horror show of taunts and tweets, let’s change the channel," and certainly I'd be glad if someone with a megaphone actually took on the noble project of "breaking the Republican monopoly" on words like "freedom" and "security." But the flesh has also seen this game before -- "new thinking, bold action, and a focus on the future" will remind you of, well, virtually every Democratic Presidential candidate who's either lost or disappointed you, and he opened with that. And what is this "new thinking"? We don't learn, which leads me to think that eight years of a President Pete Buttigieg will be eight more years of we-tried-but-Republicans-wouldn't-let-us.

Action: concerning war in Yemen, discrimination, and pollution.

Our President, as you know, has declared yet another of his "national emergencies" so he can sell weapons to the Saudi/UAE coalition that's currently raining down bombs on impoverished Yemenis. What's the "emergency"? Saudi Arabia needs weapons to defend itself from Iran, or something. Iran is now the excuse for everything, apparently. "Where's my tax cut? Iran took it!" (Maybe I shouldn't give our President any ideas.) Since our President has declared an "emergency," Congress can't stop him from selling arms using the Arms Control Act -- but we can tell Congress to simply ban arms sales to the Saudi/UAE war effort with new legislation, which Win Without War helps you do. I've said it before and I'll say it again: a President who needs to declare "emergencies" so he can accomplish unpopular legislative aims isn't a guy who "gets things done;" he's a weak man and a bad leader.

Meanwhile, H.R. 1756, the Preventing Credit Score Discrimination in Auto Insurance Act, would, as its title implies, would prevent car insurance corporations from setting insurance rates based on your credit score, and would prevent credit reporting agencies from furnishing car insurance corporations with that information. And here you thought your auto insurance corporation might raise or lower your rates based on your driving history! But now car insurance corporations charge folks more if they have low credit scores, which sure does seem like a recipe for car insurance corporations not getting paid, but it does trap lower-income folks in a cycle of debt. Too much of our economy seems predicated on punching people in the face when they're down; if you hate that as much as I do, then let CREDO help you tell your Congressfolk to fight financial predators by passing the Preventing Credit Score Discrimination in Auto Insurance Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our EPA to ban glyphosate, Just Label It still helps you do that -- but do it quickly, as the EPA's public commenting period on the matter ends tomorrow. Glyphosate was in the news after several juries found Monsanto liable for billions of dollars in damages when folks who routinely used RoundUp (Monsanto's brand-name version of glyphosate) got cancer, and we dump around 250 million gallons of the stuff on our crops annually in America. Note well, also, that Monsanto's genetic engineering projects tend to center around making their crops more resistant to RoundUp, rather than, say, increasing crop yields so farmers can produce more food. Upon hearing that many farmers are already moving away from spraying glyphosate on their crops before harvest, you have to wonder what the EPA's hesitance to ban it would be. And by "you have to wonder," I mean "because corporate welfare."

Action: concerning good legislation, bad corporate behavior, and war with Iran.

Congress reconvenes today, so today's a good day to use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a cellphone) to find your Senators' phone numbers so you can call them and tell them to pass tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act, H.R. 5, the Equality Act, and H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act. And if you want to tell Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to hold votes on all these bills, you can find his phone numbers at the bottom of this page. Why do we keep telling the Senate to pass bills they don't want to pass? Partly because they're all good bills that would (respectively) better secure our voting rights, expand civil rights protections to gays and transgender folk, and restore our internet freedom. But we also keep doing it because it gives us a way to hold our Senators to account, and because communicating your will over and over again is the only way to get things done.

Meanwhile, Peruvian indigenous farmer Máxima Acuña de Chaupe has, for several years now, fought the world's largest gold mining corporation, Newmont Mining, which wants to build an open-pit gold mine on land she owns, and has been sending thugs to her house to beat her up and bust up her house in an attempt to convince her to move. If you know someone who would respond "well she should just move somewhere else and farm there," remind them, gently or otherwise, that people farm everywhere, and a lot of folks farm because they wouldn't otherwise eat. Remind them, also, that no big corporation has a "right" to harass people off their land, and remind them that Newmont mines gold. Gold! Like we're all in Deadwood or something! Anyway, Sum of Us helps you tell Newmont to stop taking people's land by beating up its owners; Sum of Us will deliver your signature to Newmont's annual meeting tomorrow.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to pass H.R. 2354/S. 1039 and thus prevent our President from marching us off to war with Iran, then both CREDO and the Friends Committee on National Legislation still help you do that. Don't believe the hype that our President really doesn't want war with Iran, because warmongers always say "I don't want to fight a war" so that when they start a war, you're more likely to believe them when they say "I had no choice." Of course nobody put a gun to our President's head and made him replace his NSA chief with a man who's seemingly spent a lifetime trying to start a war with Iran, and nobody put a gun to his head and made him withdraw from an Iran nuclear deal that was accomplishing its goal, either. Certainly don't believe the hype that he hired John Bolton so he could "keep his enemies closer." You know a better way to neutralize your enemies? Don't put them in power in the first place.

Penny Rants for Sunday, June 2, 2019: confronting drama and the difficulties of vision.

I think my fellow liberals are reaching a bit in alleging that Robert Mueller's contention late last week that "if we had confidence that the President clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said that" is a "message to Congress" that they should, or must, impeach our President. Mr. Mueller also said that "(i)t would be unfair to potentially accuse somebody of a crime when there can be no court resolution of an actual charge" (referring to the Justice Department opinion that sitting Presidents can't be charged with crimes), saying that's why "we concluded that we would not reach a determination -- one way or the other -- about whether the President committed a crime." I'm tempted to say we need to spend less time trying to get our President out of office and more time proving he's unfit for that office, but even that isn't really the point -- we need to put our vision of a better America forward, and we need to keep putting that vision forward until it drowns out the drama upon which our President thrives. And it should go without saying that "we should work in a bipartisan manner with the people who are trying to destroy us" is not such a vision.

Sen. Sanders reiterates that taxes will go up to pay for Medicare-for-All, and naturally right-wingers respond with hysteria. The only flaw I'd find with this article is that it forgets to mention that the $32 trillion cost of Medicare-for-All over 10 years compares favorably with the $49 trillion projected cost over the next decade on the system we've got; possibly Mr. Corcoran figures it's piling on to spell that out, since he had already pointed out that TEH AVURAJ CANADIAN FAMILY SPENDS TEH $12,000 ANNYULLY IN TEH TAXEZ!!!! is not only flat-out wrong, but that the average American spends almost that much annually in taxes and premiums. And it's no use arguing that "the employer pays the premiums," because that could money could just as easily be part of your salary. Mr. Sanders might be thinking far ahead here: if he comes out and says he'll force corporations to count what they're spending on health insurance as worker salary and then extract that money as a payroll tax, the right will lie about it anyway, but if he calls it a tax at the beginning, and then explains how it'll result in lower health care costs without actually cutting into your paycheck, he might better fight those lies.

I try to avoid calling housing and health care "human rights" -- even though most of us, liberal and conservative, really have long assumed that they are -- but Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) makes the best case I've yet seen for calling housing a "human right" -- by saying that "our access and our guarantee to having a home comes before someone else’s privilege to earn a profit." If you're going to call something a "right," calling its main obstacle "privilege" is a damn good way to do it. Where it trips up a bit is "someone else's privilege to earn a profit" -- I might have said "some corporation's privilege to earn a profit," and not least because a corporation isn't a person and shouldn't have the rights of personhood that our Supreme Court has been granting it for close to 150 years. I would say you, as a person, have a right to earn a profit -- which is certainly not to say you have a "right" to gild the plumbing in your 19th vacation home, since your rights don't get to trample other people's rights, but you have a right to save money, both for future projects and as a bulwark against catastrophe. But I would not say a corporation has a "right" to make a profit. Hell, I wouldn't say it has a "right" to exist.

All the news programs seems to be talking about our President's announcement that he'll hit Mexico with tariffs until they fix the undocumented immigration problem, but all those folks who are cluck-clucking at his "stupidity" don't get what he's doing: he's linking the two issues that galvanize his base (trade and immigration) and using the one issue that attracts more independent-minded voters to him (trade) to bait them into aligning with him on the other (immigration). So when all the smartypantses on their TV say "tariffs don't work" and "you don't solve one problem by attacking the other," I can't be mad at anyone who gets mad at them -- TV is full of smartypantses, after all. And when my fellow liberals complain that "even the Republicans are against it," we'll have to remind them that that's part of the drama. This is why I say that, absent a complete collapse of the economy which I don't want to see and don't think tariffs against China and Mexico will bring about, that our President has a very good chance at winning re-election -- unless, of course, a courageous, straight-talking Democrat who changes the subject to the real causes of our problems wins the nomination, a phenomenon I haven't yet seen in my lifetime.

Around the table: featuring upwards of three government officials acting badly.

Uh oh: Federal Aviation Administration inspectors say their bosses pressure them to overlook airline safety issues. Lest you think this corruption unique to our current Administration, attend testimony that our FAA started treating airlines with kid gloves in 2015, replacing the regulatory model you'd come to expect from a government agency with a "mutual cooperation" model. Don't believe the FAA's hype that one death in 10 years justifies their "mutual cooperation" model, not if a) said model is only five years old and b) we all know it takes time for serious rot to set in -- just as big telecoms aren't censoring all your favorite websites just because the FCC repealed net neutrality, airlines aren't going to discard all their safety standards right away, either.

George Goehl asks "Who Is Blocking Medicare for All?" And answers: centrist Democrats and big health care corporations, both of whom would be endangered if Medicare-for-All comes to pass. Upon hearing that a consortium of hospitals, health insurers, and big pharma corporations spent $143 million last year to fearmonger about Medicare-for-All, I thought maybe there'd be better uses for that money. You know, like providing health care to actual human beings. I mean, that would really be the best way for big private health care providers to keep customers around. Or is that a quaint philosophy?

Ho hum, drama-addicted, six-figure-making HUD official possibly violates Hatch Act by tweeting something political from her government account, then says she "honestly (doesn't) care" whether she broke the law or not. Not caring about breaking the law would mean a lot more if the law in question was obviously unjust and oppressive, rather than a minor inconvenience easily avoided with a laughably small amount of restraint. She doesn't seem like the kind of person who values restraint, though -- she just jeopardized her career with a not-funny taunt of Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, for heaven's sake. In other words, she's the real snowflake, not those who'd criticize her. Funny how often it turns out like that.

In a peripherally-related note, minor-league baseball club apologizes for airing a purported Memorial Day tribute video that sandwiched a photo of Rep. Ocasio-Cortez between photos of Kim Jong Un and Fidel Castro while intoning about "enemies of freedom." I'll admit, though, that when I read "(w)e’re embarrassed we allowed this video to play without seeing it in its entirety first," I thought they meant to say "we're so sorry we did this thing we'd like you to think was a complete accident but was actually on purpose so we'd get free publicity." Anyway, skip the Fresno Grizzlies next time you're in town, and I say this as someone who has enjoyed plenty of minor league baseball games.

Finally, from the "Somehow Not 'The Onion'" file: our Department of Energy calls natural gas "freedom gas" and "molecules of U.S. freedom" in a press release. If you had been wondering exactly what kind of stamp Rick Perry would leave on the Department of Energy, now you know. (In a related note, a few weeks ago I dreamed that Rick Perry switched back to the Democratic Party for no particular reason. Of course Joe Biden promptly made him his running mate!)

Action: concerning government spying, electric cars, and pollution.

Even though our National Security Agency has (in what must be an unprecedented act!) declared that it doesn't need the power to spy on everyone's phone lines, our Congressfolk have shown an unwillingness to repeal the law that gives the NSA this power. Admittedly, that kind of cowardice is not unprecedented as far as our Congressfolk are concerned, but that's why we're here -- to lend the steel in their spines when they don't have it. They don't have it a lot, but we've got a lot! Hence Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, which gives the NSA its "authority" to hoover up all your phone data without so much as a warrant. Don't believe the hype that we "need" to spy on everyone's phone to be safe, particularly with even our NSA saying the opposite. Folks say you shouldn't give up liberty for security, but the truth is you can't even have security without liberty.

Meanwhile, apparently because Republicans cannot let our government do anything that benefits its owners, the American people, S. 343, the so-called Fairness for Every Driver Act, would not only repeal tax credits for electric cars, but would impose a fee on good folks who drive them! The "fairness" in the bill, apparently, refers to electric car-drivers paying less money in gas taxes (which help maintain highways) and thus gas-guzzling car drivers paying more, but S. 343 wouldn't bring about "fairness" but mere symmetry, and would penalize folks who have gone out of their way to pollute less. Boy, is that not a good look! And gosh, is there just no other way to fund highway maintenance and construction -- like, say, by raising taxes on corporations and the rich who don't pay their fair share of taxes in the first place? Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to promote clean energy by rejecting S. 343.

Finally, our EPA hasn't banned the pesticide chlorpyrifos, although scientists have linked chlorpyrifos to developmental difficulties in children, and although a federal court told our EPA just last year to ban chlorpyrifos as its own scientists recommended. Naturally our EPA is appealing that court's decision -- I wouldn't go counting on our Supreme Court to help them out if I were them -- and hence comes S. 921, the Protect Children, Farmers, and Farmworkers from Nerve Agent Pesticides Act, which would ban chlorpyrifos for good. Yes, chlorpyrifos is essentially a nerve gas, and though it does far more damage in the short run to bugs than it does to people (as you'd expect), what's the difference if you ingest many, many times more than a bug ever does over the course of your lifetime? Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight pollution and support families' health by passing S. 921 and banning chlorpyrifos forever.

Action: concerning disaster relief, abortion, and voting rights.

Our Senate finally passed a $19.1 billion disaster relief package for Puerto Rico, which is still suffering from the effects of Hurricane Maria -- but when our House tried to pass it on a voice vote, which must be unanimous, one House Rep, Charles "Chip" Roy of Texas's 21st district, said no, due to "concerns" about "securing the border," which is now apparently a reason to block any legislation. (Kentucky's incorrigible Thomas Massey thwarted a second attempt yesterday.) Anyway, all is not lost: small pro forma sessions will continue this week, and then all of Congress returns on Monday, at which point they can pass the bill with a simple majority. Hence you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to find your Reps' phone numbers and call them to tell them to pass disaster relief legislation. You may want to call their home district office numbers, since that's where most of them are.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell six big corporations to stop donating to the politicians who've enacted all these abortion bans across America. These big corporations will likely tell you that they gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to these politicians because of their "pro-business" views, not because of their hatred of women, but if the end result is near-total abortion bans in six states, then they're merely enabling woman-haters. And too many of these corporations have been positioning themselves as "pro-woman" lately, so it's well past time for them to walk the walk. Roe v. Wade is still the law of the land, and clear majorities now support legal abortion and Roe v. Wade, and what's the best way to fight abortion anyway? Birth control -- which right-wing politicians now also believe to be an unconscionable evil. But though these politicians remain stubbornly immune to the Big Stick of Bad PR, corporations are. So let's wield it.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to end the nefarious practice of keeping felons from voting, then Common Cause still helps you do that. My beliefs are pretty straightforward: prisoners should have the right to vote, not just once they've paid their debt to society and earned back their freedom, but also while they're behind bars. Giving prisoners the vote would curtail another nefarious vote suppression practice: the practice of packing non-voting prisoners into a district so that they can't vote but still count as residents of that district! If that reminds you of the Constitution's nefarious three-fifths rule during the years slavery was legal, well, you're not alone. And if prisoners could vote, the state would have less incentive to imprison the people it wants to silence -- an urge that, sadly, usually expresses itself as racial profiling. So let's stand up to all of that.

Action: concerning "national emergencies," unconstitutional war, abortion, and taxes.

Dig this: our President has used the Arms Control Act of 1976 to declare yet another "national emergency" so he can sell weapons to Saudi Arabia and the UAE without Congress's approval. If you're wondering what possible "emergency" could exist to justify such a sale -- presumably we don't need Saudi Arabia to protect us from invasion! -- you're not alone. Of course the "emergency" is Iran, though it's more likely kids on Yemeni school buses will feel the blunt end of the weapons sales. But if everything's an emergency, then nothing is an emergency -- and if a President faces so many "emergencies," it kinds reflects badly on him. You can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to find phone numbers for your Reps and Senators, so you can call them and tell them to stand in our President's way on this matter.

In a related matter, CREDO still helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2354/S. 1039, the Prevention of Unconstitutional War with Iran Act. So far, our Administration's efforts to go to war with Iran have included lousy intelligence and boasting from elected leaders that a war with Iran would be easy; remind you of anything? I suppose a war with Iran would have important differences -- per John Bolton, we'd be sending 120,000 troops there, which is even fewer than we sent to Iraq in order to subdue a nation with less than half the population of Iran. Also, evacuating non-essential personnel from the Baghdad embassy is a dramatic touch I don't recall Mr. Bush contemplating. You know what else is different, though? Americans have seen this play already and have more vivid memories of their disgust with how the Iraq war turned out than they do of 9.11, which is almost old enough to vote now. Our duty now is to remind America of that disgust.

Meanwhile, H.R. 2975/S. 1645, the Women's Health Protection Act, would prevent states from enacting medically unnecessary abortion bans that block women's access to health care. We don't "leave it up to the states" here, because our Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision explicitly prohibits leaving this matter up to the states. And that makes sense -- if our Constitution protects a right to abort a pregnancy, why would women need to get an ultrasound in one state and not another? Why would abortion be legal only up to six weeks into a pregnancy in one state and 24 weeks in another? Politicians could make all of this moot by putting a Constitutional amendment before us; wonder why they don't. And by "wonder why they don't" I mean "because they'd rather keep voters enraged than actually do something." The National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect women's health everywhere by passing the Women's Health Protection Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to let our IRS offer free online tax-filing, then Penn PIRG still helps you do that. You know that our government has an, er, arrangement with certain tax-filing corporations in which our IRS doesn't offer free tax-filing services online as long as these tax-filing corporations do -- and you may also know that these corporations do their damnedest to hide these free tax-filing services online so that you can't actually take advantage of them. But you may not know that TurboTax also diverts our soldiers from the free tax-filing services they're entitled to receive by offering "military discounts" that force them to pay for tax filing! That's a damn dirty trick, so go ahead and refer your Senators to the ProPublica article to which we've linked in the previous sentence. If they don't know about it, they need to know about it.

Around the table: confronting the drama of our times, again.

In more ordinary times we'd be pleased as punch to find Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) producing a policy paper excoriating corporations for their short-term obsession with shareholder value at the expense of research, development, and "long-term corporate capabilities," but these are not more ordinary times, and this is Marco Rubio we're talking about here, so not only is he short on actual solutions that might ameliorate the problem, he of course won't admit that public investment has ameliorated the problem fairly decisively in the past. Should I give him credit for slamming "outsourcing investment decisions to financial markets" as any good anti-bankster would? Nah -- not when the only alternative he'll entertain is corporations making all the important decisions, when corporations making all the important decisions is how we got here in the first place.

It may be premature to announce, as Colorado Gov. Jared Polis has done, that "the days of insulin price-gouging are over" in Colorado with the passage of a bill capping out-of-pocket insulin costs at $100 a month, but $100/month is a lot more manageable than $600 to $900 a month, which is the kind of thing that leads diabetics to ration their insulin, a strategy that might not be significantly safer than Russian roulette. So if insulin-producing corporations demand more money from health insurance corporations to make up the shortfall, will those health insurance corporations then pass that cost on to their customers? If they want to be even more popular, perhaps!

I don't think it's good news that our President might not really "mean it" when he calls the media "the enemy of the people," since his votaries, who live vicariously through their President's tantrums, do mean it. I also don't think that we should feel very sorry for media outlets like CNN, which has never really had an adversarial relationship with the Our Glorious Elites, no matter how much acting out they might do. If they really wanted to cultivate an adversarial relationship with our President, they'd go after, say, his attempts to gut clean air and clean water regulations, rather than the drama he creates to distract us.

Regarding that video manipulated to make Rep. Pelosi sound "drunk": I guess it's good that our "liberal" media did a better job debunking it than they did with all those more obviously-manipulated videos coming out of Project Veritas in 2009 and 2010, and I guess it's good that you might need someone to "interpret" the altered audio for you ("she sounds drunk, get it?"), but I fear it won't be long before more radical alterations of video become more common and less detectable. Still, if Ms. Pelosi were less of a corporatist and more of a populist, the release of an obviously-altered video aiming to make her look bad wouldn't have made a difference. I mean, this President is a fake populist, and that seems to insulate him from actual facts that actually make him look bad.

Finally, at the risk of seeming very late to the party, I enjoyed the Game of Thrones finale more than most folks seemed to do. And more than I expected to: the finale overcame, as well as could be done, the fatal flaw of the show's final season -- namely, that it frogmarched Dany into madness rather than (at least!) letting her go mad at her speed. We can all easily tabulate other wrong notes (Tyrion's nomination of Bran for King, for example, had at least one Hallmark card moment), but the thing I'll always remember about the finale is a group of survivors coming to grips with their complicity in creating the decadent society that almost destroyed them and everyone they knew and loved. I was even surprised to consider that all those pornographic scenes from the show's early years might have had an actual narrative purpose! Given Bronn's eagerness to spend state money rebuilding the brothels that made the show infamous, I don't know how it'll turn out for Westeros. But I hope we do at least as well when the most decadent human being ever to hold high office in Amerca -- a man whose continued presence in that office indicts us all -- goes before the voters next year.

Action: concerning endless war and endless corporate mergers.

With the war in Afghanistan now almost old enough to vote, Win Without War helps you tell your House Reps to co-sponsor H.R. 1274, which would repeal the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) which all future Presidents have misused to start military conflicts wherever they like. And unlike past bills purporting to repeal the AUMF -- you may recall last year's S.J.Res. 59, which would have repealed the 2001 AUMF but also expanded Presidential power to start war without Congressional authorization -- this bill would simply repeal the 2001 AUMF 240 days after its enactment, which surely would give our Executive branch enough time to wind down its "war on terror"-related activities, including the ongoing war in Afghanistan. Don't brook any foolishness about this bill "putting our troops in harm's way." You know what puts our troops in harm's way? Fighting stupid wars, that's what. So how about we maybe do less of that?

Meanwhile, in a related note, our Pentagon has requested $750 billion in this year's Administration budget, so a large coalition of good-government groups (including Roots Action, Public Citizen, and Social Security Works) helps you tell our government to cut at least $200 billion of defense spending annually. We already spend more on defense than the next seven nations combined; an actual conservative might say we must ask how much more money we must throw at a problem. In any case, you might want to comment (in the petition's comment box) on what you'd rather spend the money on. Plenty of options (i.e., better public education funding, higher Social Security benefits, actual infrastructure rebuilding) leap to mind, but you might also want to address the notion that "defense spending gives us innovative products," because more National Institute of Health and/or National Institute of Science spending would achieve the same end, for less money.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our FTC to block the proposed Bristol-Myers Squibb/Celgene merger, then CREDO still helps you do that. I am pleased to be reminded that both Bristol-Myers Squibb and Celgene just so happen to produce cancer-fighting drugs; since cancer is probably going to be the biggest health care problem we face over the remainder of this century, how do we think this merger would out for good Americans? With prohibitively expensive cancer treatments, that's how. This merger would be the biggest of all big pharma mergers, and you know what mergers bring, generally: less competition, fewer jobs, higher prices -- and even more profits for an already gluttonous pharmaceutical industry, who then use those profits not so much to research better drugs (they get corporate welfare for that already!) as for advertising and buying even more favorable laws from Congress. So let's put a stop to that.