Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning Medicare, insurrection, and abortion.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to strengthen Medicare instead of funding Medicare “Advantage” and investigate Sen. Ron Johnson’s role in efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and tell our FDA to make the abortion drug mifepristone widely available. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to end the Medicare “Advantage” program once and for all. Medicare “Advantage” siphons off Medicare funding to private health insurers, which are more costly and tend to deny care at the most inopportune times, so what’s the “advantage”? It offers vision, dental, and hearing care, which Medicare doesn’t. Well, here’s a better idea: have our Medicare offer vision, dental, and hearing – at a lower cost than some private health insurance corporation trying to insure its executives all have gas in their yachts. Your big campaign donation-sucking Congressfolk won’t like your logic, but keep bringing it to them.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate Sen. Ron Johnson’s role in trying to overturn the 2020 election results. He’s gotten himself in the soup lately with the news that his staffers tried to hand a slate of “alternate” (i.e., fake) electors to Vice President Pence. He denied knowing anything about that at first, but then he said, now that he’d had time to think about it, he did know about it and got the list of fake electors from Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA) – who, of course, promptly said he hadn’t spoken to Sen. Johnson in at least a decade. Which doesn’t preclude the possibility that Mr. Kelly's office provided Sen. Johnson with the lists! But let’s find out, and then punish the wrongdoers.

Finally, Change.org helps you tell our FDA to lift restrictions on the abortion drug mifepristone, which our FDA declared safe during the first trimester of a pregnancy over 20 years ago, but still lists in its most restricted category – along with fentanyl, among others! – and that’s a move that must have been an effort to pander to the pro-life industry. But mifepristone is much safer than that – in fact, medical studies have long found it to be even safer than Tylenol, a drug nobody thinks twice about taking. Widely-available mifepristone may be the only way for women in red states to get abortions now, so we should help them get it, lest Republicans succeed in turning all of them into mere breeders.

Action: concerning the Espionage Act, marriage equality, and drug prices.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reform the Espionage Act, protect marriage equality, and lower prescription drug prices. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to reform the Espionage Act so that our government can’t use it to silence journalists and whistleblowers. You know, like they’re trying to do to Julian Assange for the crime of exposing American wrongdoing during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. That embarrassed a lot of American elites, but embarrassing American elites ain’t no reason to use anti-spying legislation to silence journalists. And silencing whistleblowers? Who expose corruption at great personal cost? Anyone who says they love America should be ashamed of doing such a thing. Allow me to believe that shaming still works in America.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to codify marriage equality in our laws before our Supreme Court uses its dastardly “deeply-rooted rights” notion to reverse Obergefell v. Hodges. Because you know they’re just itching to do it – why, Justice Thomas said they should do it in his concurring opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization which overturned Roe v. Wade. Hence we need our Congressfolk to act. It’ll take a while for a case to reach our Court that could outlaw gay marriage, but don’t let that make you complacent. Whenever our Court takes our rights away, it always seems like it’s too soon.

Finally, Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower drug prices already. Feel free to tell them exactly how in the space for comments – like, by letting Medicare negotiate drug prices, or capping insulin prices, or fining big pharma corporations when they raise prices faster than inflation. People like all of these ideas, and would it kill our Congressfolk to do some things that people actually like, and actually want them to do? As Drug Prices Are Too High suggests, it might even help them in the midterms this November.

Action: concerning financial predators, sexual discrimination, and Medicare overcharges.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Veterans and Consumers Fair Credit Act, and tell the Biden Administration to enact the most vigorous Title IX protections possible and rebate Medicare premium overcharges directly to seniors. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5974/S. 2508, the Veterans and Consumers Fair Credit Act. Our laws currently cap loan interest rates at 36% for veterans, meaning veterans don’t have to put up with 300% death-spiral payday loans, and we were able to get that for veterans because, hey, nobody wants to be seen voting against veterans! Now we should extend that cap to everyone, because, really, we all deserve protection from financial predators. And again, I’d make that cap lower! And you can tell your Congressfolk that if you want, without worrying about those poor, poor banks. But I’d pass this bill, too.

The National Women’s Law Center helps you tell the Biden Administration to enact the strongest Title IX revisions possible. Title IX, as you know, governs discrimination on the basis of sex in public schools, and the Trump Administration, as you may recall, gutted certain Title IX protections concerning sexual assault, because, you know, “(i)t’s a very scary and difficult time for young men today.” Even more difficult for the young women they rape, he somehow forgot to add. The Biden proposals would fix those, and they would also extend Title IX protections to transgender students, which, I mean, the word “sex” has a pretty plain meaning that even Justice Gorsuch gets.

Finally, Social Security Works helps you tell the Biden Administration to fix inflated Medicare premiums already. How did those premiums get inflated again? By Medicare’s decision to insure an expensive (and not very good) Alzheimer’s drug; the American people spoke out against that, and Medicare changed course, covering the drug only for patients in clinical trials. But the inflated premiums still remain! Our Administration ought to be rebating our seniors the money they should never have had to pay. They’ll talk about the importance of making sure taxpayer money doesn’t get stolen, but our government already knows whom they’ve overcharged, so that’s bunkum. Never tolerate bunkum from your government.

Penny Rants for June 29, 2022: good news for Democrats! Which is bad news *to* Democratic politicians.

For some reason, Kerry Eleveld’s report about the fall of Roe “disrupting” the Republicans-will-crush-it-in-November narrative starts off with reports about Democratic and Republican enthusiasm in the wake of Roe’s fall, when the big story, it seems to me, is that the generic ballot polls have been trending hard in the Democrats’ direction. NPR’s generic ballot poll, which was 47-44 for Republicans in April, is now 48-41 for Democrats; that’s a 10-point swing, basically, in two months. (A Politico/Morning Consult poll found a three-point swing toward Democrats in one week, albeit the week our Supreme Court overturned Roe.) Republicans had better hope gas stays at $5/gallon! Seriously, as I’ve said, people really hate politicians who take away things they count on, just like they did in 2017-18 when Republicans tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Nobody stopped them but the people. That’s how it’ll have to happen again.

Virginia Republican House candidate Yesli Vega – like most of today's Republicans, desperately trying to appear more anti-abortion than anyone who's ever lived – suggests that it’s a lot harder to get pregnant from rape than from consensual sex, “maybe because there's so much going on in the body” and/or “(b)ecause it's not something that's happening organically,” or because “the male” is doing it more “quickly.” Even worse than all that, though? She suggests that it must not happen all that often merely because she only saw it happen once in her decade-plus as a police officer, like she’s the center of all human experience or something. Admittedly, she may be a little harder to trap into a humiliating loss than Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin was, precisely because she’s clearly more prone to word salad, but it’s a long campaign, so I suspect she’ll give us other opportunities. Bonus: if Abigail Spanberger actually loses to her, she’ll have to confront the fact that the problem was never “defund the police” or “socialism” but her.

Finally, when I hear that Sen. Joe Manchin (D?-WV) not only won’t say he’ll support President Biden in 2024, which, like, who cares, but won't say whether he'd run for President as a third-party candidate, I feel compelled to first take a deep breath and then ask: what sane person thinks Joe Manchin is the answer to anyone’s problems? Our chattering class always whines that there are just no moderates anymore whenever a moderate is President, but Joe Manchin and the 50 Senate Republicans stopped us from raising taxes on the rich. Joe Manchin and the 50 Senate Republicans took monthly $250 and $300 checks away from working families. Joe Manchin and the 50 Senate Republicans prevented American workers from getting four weeks of paid sick leave. And Joe Manchin and the 50 Senate Republicans kept child-care prices astronomically high for American families while pissing and moaning about inflation. And were he so dense as to run for President, that’s the ad I’d run over and over and over again until he slinks away into the oblivion he has most certainly earned.

Action: concerning the right to repair, Social Security, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell your Pennsylvania state legislators to pass a right to repair bill, tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security, and tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn to our FCC. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Penn PIRG helps you tell your PA state legislators to pass SB 998, a “right to repair” law which would force corporations that make “electronics and appliances that contain embedded software” to make “information and parts” available to “consumers and independent repair shops.” (All quoted passages are per SB 998’s memorandum.) The bill would also force corporations to “fully disclose any contract provision standing in the way of full repair and reuse,” and while I’d prefer to just make corporations stop “standing in the way of full repair and reuse” – which is a monopolistic practice, after all – this bill will improve matters and deserves to pass.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security benefits by $200/month, and raise the payroll tax ceiling so income over $250,000 can be taxed into the system to pay for it. With bankster Blake Masters actually running on privatizing Social Security in the Arizona Senate race, and with Sen. Lindsey Graham putting privatization on the table like anyone should run to him for advice, you know it’s just a matter of time before our “liberal” media start crying about Social Security running out of money like it never does. Better to get ahead of the drama by demanding more benefits and specifying how you’d (very easily) pay for them.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as our fifth FCC Commissioner. Of course we don’t expect Ms. Sohn, as one of the architects of net neutrality, to get any Republican votes – only Republican voters like net neutrality, not Republican politicians! But a few recalcitrant Democrats are saying they just don’t know whether to vote for her. I don’t know why this is such a hard decision for anyone to make. She had me at “one of the architects of net neutrality.” Apparently she had Joe Biden there, too, because he’s nominated her twice. So our Senators need to do their damn job.

Penny Rants for June 28, 2022: you gotta read past the headline, and other concrete cold facts.

A lot of times you read a scary headline and expect the article’s text to explain it away, but the AP headline “More Than 1 Million Voters Switch to GOP in Warning for Dems” requires even more qualification than the article’s text gives. And that assumes that the research backing that finding (which relies at least in part on “statistical modeling”) is even valid! Only in paragraph 9 do we learn that while 1 million voters “switched” to the GOP, 630,000 others “switched” to the Democrats, which already makes the scare number smaller. And I keep putting “switch” in quotation marks for a reason: in the article’s one anecdote (I know, only one!), a Colorado man complains about vaccine mandates to explain his switch from Libertarian to Republican. You can thus easily imagine (more easily than the AP, apparently!) that many folks “switched” from independent or unaffiliated to Republican, and that most of them were probably already voting Republican. And finally, at the risk of piling on, this information pre-dates our Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, and as I’ve said, people hate politicians who take away things they’ve come to rely on, as we saw during the Affordable Care Act debate in 2017.

You may appreciate the long and complex discourse here about a First Circuit Court panel splitting evenly over whether a warrantless telephone pole surveillance camera – which, in the case before the panel, took over eight months of video footage of a suspect’s front yard – violates our Fourth Amendment Constitutional rights. Or you may, like me, make up your mind at “warrantless.” Whenever law enforcement won’t get warrants, you have to wonder why, and you also have to wonder why the three judges who didn’t find eight months of pole cameras unconstitutional didn’t wonder why. And one judge’s notion that our government won’t abuse telephone pole camera surveillance because the polls are so expensive? That is to laugh. You can justify any expense once you tell yourself the world will end if you don’t, and law enforcement routinely gets exactly that apocalyptic about drug dealers. If only they felt that way about banksters or polluters! And if they did, I’d still make them get their damn warrants.

Finally, I don’t know what Ron Johnson means to accomplish by suddenly saying yeah, now that you mention it, he knew all about lists of “alternate electors” his office tried to give to Mike Pence and oh yeah, he got those lists from Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA). People don’t just feel sorry for guys who can’t get their story straight about an attempted coup. (Rep. Kelly, for his part, denies the story, but that’s just drama.) I guess Mr. Johnson just figures he’ll run another feel-good ad everyone likes (maybe this one, though he’s dropped it pretty early in the cycle) and get re-elected no matter what he says or does, and given how well Democrats have run against him in the past, I can see why he placed that bet. Though he’s not running against Russ Feingold this time. If Ron Johnson is the man who gives the “Citizen Legislator” a bad name, Russ Feingold is the master of tying one hand behind your back in a campaign.

Action: concerning women's health and women's rights.

Long story short: tell your Senators to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act, tell Google to delete the location data of women who seek or get abortions, and tell Senate Majority Leader Schumer to schedule a vote on a bill that would help ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women’s Health Protection Act. Sam Alito wants the people to vote on this? Then let our Senators vote on a bill that would actually protect the right to abortion all over America, plus it would get rid of the hurdles (ultrasound bills, waiting periods, etc.) that states put in front of women to harass them. Well, worse than harass – you know how much trouble you have getting a day off from your boss? Now try getting two or three or four to jump through all these hoops. Our Senators don’t want to pass this bill. So we gotta blow up their phones and make them shake in their boots.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell Google to stop collecting abortion seekers’ location data, and also delete it from their servers. Even looking up an organization that helps people get abortions can get you in trouble these days, thanks to Google’s thirst for data they can turn into unearned money, as well as law enforcement’s constant quest for ways to get data that don’t involve going before a judge and getting a warrant. And really, we-the-people should have a lot more control over our data than we do; thanks again, Republicans! But, in this reality, we must pressure Google to do more than just try to get milk this catastrophe for good PR like other corporations do.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell Senate Majority Leader Schumer to schedule a vote on H.J.Res. 17/S.J.Res. 1, which would remove the expiration date from the original legislation passing the Equal Rights Amendment, and thus make it part of our Constitution. 38 state legislatures have passed the ERA, after all – a few of them very recently, well after the original legislation’s expiration date which no other Constitutional amendment had! Thus our Senators should be able to pass this bill, remove the expiration date, and finally make the ERA the law of our land. But Sen. Schumer has to call for a vote first. Let's blow up his damn phone about this, too.

Around the table: the plain truth about evil.

When I hear that a truck-driving prick in Iowa went well out of his way to hit pro-choice protestors, injuring one, and then got released without charge after questioning by police, I feel compelled to ask how police would have responded to a liberal aiming his car at pro-life protestors. Because I think they would have moved heaven and earth to detain and charge that liberal. I hope I’m wrong, and I also hope my supposition forever remains a thought experiment.

Ho hum, the New York Times runs an article about trans health care that talks only to doctors and not to actual trans people. And it also gives far too much voice to those poor, beleaguered “reasonable” people who think “both sides” are too “extreme,” when only one side passes bathroom laws and examining-children's-genitals laws. And Jesus Mary and Joseph the number of kids who yearn to join an oppressed group so badly they mistakenly think they’re one of them is a grain of sand next to the mountain of kids who say nothing about their trans nature because they’re afraid of being bullied or killed. Sometimes I wish we weren’t so hard-wired for stories.

Whoever runs against Ron DeSantis for Florida Governor had damn well better run ads about his administration’s successful efforts to reduce care at nursing homes. Seriously, the phrase Ron DeSantis will kill your grandma would not be untoward! But Democrats would rather keep pretending they’re impotent as a fund-raising tactic. Of course, going for the throat wins races, and it even raises campaign funds, but most importantly, it stops evil. All we have to do is stand up to evil, and evil will fold. You know why? Because evil is a fucking coward, that’s why.

When I hear corporate executives say they’ll pay for their employees to get abortions, I think they're just trying to get the good PR they can't earn any other way. I'd be happy to be wrong, but when Amazon said it, I said it might be a way to fire employees who don’t get their paperwork exactly right, but it could even be worse – do you really want your boss to know you’ve had an abortion, when a new, more hostile boss could come in at any moment and make your life hell whether it’s legal to do that or not?

Department of Education agrees to cancel $6 billion in student loan debts of 200,000 folks who had sued the department alleging that their institutions of higher learning had misled them. This comes on the heels of our DOE’s decision to cancel all student loan debt for students who had attended the now-defunct-and-for-good-reason Corinthian Colleges – you remember, the for-profit college chain Marco Rubio called a “constituent” as if nobody Corinthian screwed over could have been his constituent? I can say little more, except that this is why we fight!

Finally, Arizona Republican Senate candidate/Trump endorsee Blake Masters has said we need to privatize Social Security, and the comment exists on video. Again, Sen. Kelly would be guilty of political malpractice if he didn’t run ten thousand ads about this. And between this and the fact that Mr. Masters has a face even a mother would punch, can the good citizens of Arizona please declare this guy’s chances of getting elected nil?

Action: concerning Social Security, payday loans, and campaign finance.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security and cap interest rates for all Americans, and tell big corporations to stop donating to Republican insurrectionists. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security benefits by $200/month and pay for it by raising the payroll tax ceiling, so income over $250,000 can be taxed into the system. With Rep. Larson (D-CT) strangely uninterested in moving his Social Security 2100 Act through his own committee, Sens. Sanders (I-VT) and Warren (D-MA) and Rep. DeFazio (D-OR) have advanced this proposal, and though it leaves a donut hole of income between $147,000 and $250,000, this proposal will improve Social Security’s finances and let our seniors (which will one day include, ahem, all of us) enjoy a more dignified and secure retirement. It’d sure be better than privatizing it! As our stock market proves every time it takes a tumble.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5974/S. 2508, the Veterans and Consumers Fair Credit Act, which would cap all consumer credit at 36%, because our laws cap consumer credit at 36% for our veterans. You see, getting the cap in there for veterans, was always a way of getting a cap on our law books (who would refuse help to vulnerable veterans, after all?), so that one day we could all get a cap, so no one has to suffer the 300% death spiral payday loan ever again. Now I’d make that cap a lot lower! And if I did, banksters could still make money, just not buy-their-own-Congressperson money. But passing this bill will get a cap for everyone, and that’s better than what we’ve got.

Finally, the Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell big corporations such as FedEx and Visa to stop shoveling big campaign donations to any Republican who votes against certifying the 2020 election. Because voting against certifying that election because of all of Donald Trump’s “stop the steal” rubbish makes those 147 Republican politicians the lowest of the low, and they don’t deserve any money, let alone the cush job they have obstructing things the American people tell them to do. Any of these “patriots” voting for Medicare drug price negotiation, for example? No, none of them are. And corporations shouldn’t give them money, particularly after saying they wouldn’t.

Penny Rants for June 24, 2022: special "the main cause of inflation is corporate greed" edition!

Matt Stoller instructs us, in a piece provocatively titled “On Inflation: It’s the Monopoly Profits, Stupid,” that more economists are (finally!) coming around to the notion that we’re not in a “wage-price spiral” but a “profits-inflation spiral.” I mean, you and I just looked at rising corporate profits and rising prices and figured that out, but it’s still good to get some data behind it, not just from Josh Bivens at EPI (who said a few months back that price-gouging caused a little over half of our current inflation), but also at least two Federal Reserve banks and Mike Konczal and Niko Lusiani at the Roosevelt Institute. Also too, “the most financialized sectors of the economy are the ones most adept at exploiting pricing power during the pandemic,” likely due to “cheap money from the Fed sloshing around Wall Street.” In other words, banksters ruin everything. And don’t forget how many CEOs brag about their ability to raise prices!

It’s easy to laugh at Sen. Ron Johnson (E-WI) having an absurd amount of trouble explaining away why staffers in his office tried to hand former Vice President Pence an “alternate slate of electors” right before January 6, and indeed I don’t know how yelling “IT WAS ALL STAFF TO STAFF!” even sounded good in his head, but remember that this guy has won two Senatorial elections, albeit not with more than 51% of the vote, and with our “liberal” media doing its damnedest to create a Republican wave, Mr. Johnson is, once again, one really inspired TV ad away from winning an election, and maybe this time he won’t even risk getting peed on by his grandkid while changing his diaper. Still, even if he serves as long as William Proxmire God forbid, his underlings will get tired of him throwing them under the bus. I’d prefer not to wait for that to happen, though. Two terms is at least two terms too many for the man who gives the “Citizen Legislator” a bad name.

Finally, I don’t know if our Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade today – Friday’s a good day to do something like that, since our “liberal” media reporters will be trying to get out of town already – but if they do, I think two things will happen. One, right-wing politicians will not celebrate! Sounds counterintuitive, to say the least, but how can you celebrate victories when you’re constantly ginning up outrage among your votaries over what they’ve lost? Besides, right-wingers are hunting bigger game – making birth control illegal and domestic abuse legal in the short term, taking away a woman’s freedom to do anything but submit to a man’s whims in the long term. Two, if you remember how Obamacare suddenly went from Democratic liability to Democratic weapon in 2017 and 2018, you know that people really, really hate suddenly losing something they rely upon. Of course right-wing politicians will always be able to get abortions for their daughters and mistresses, but regular folks will not take well to having legal abortions taken away – and they won’t take well to the Republicans who took them away.

Action: concerning health care, big tech monopolies, and Presidential power.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to cut health insurance prices, pass anti-monopoly legislation, and restrain Presidential power. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend health care subsidies so that at least nine million Americans will be able to afford health insurance. The American Rescue Plan Act enacted these subsidies, but they expire later this year, hence the urgency. You’ve seen health care premiums continue to go up faster than even current inflation rates? Then you see the need, and what will right-wingers say in response? That we’re “broke,” as they refuse to tax the billionaires and corporations who’ve gained trillions of dollars in unearned income these last two years? That people who need health insurance should “just get another job”? “Just getting another job” is no solution in an economy that serves unearned wealth above all.

Both Consumer Reports and Antitrust Summer help you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation reining in big tech monopolies. The bills in question – H.R. 3816/S. 2992, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, and H.R. 7030/S. 2710, the Open App Markets Act – would attack tech monopolies at the margins, for sure (which may be why these bills have relatively strong Republican support), but we haven’t even been attacking at the margins for the last 40 years. Even Donald Trump’s policy of attacking monopolies that offended him personally was better than what we’ve been doing. But these bills would keep big internet corporations from discriminating against competing products on their platforms, which is certainly better than Trumpian drama.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to restrain Presidential emergency powers. Apparently some Congressfolk plan to do by amending the defense appropriations bill, which isn’t a bad idea, since that bill is all about, you know, national defense, and the American people need defending from bad Presidents who declare “national emergencies” to build their little vanity border walls and such. Think of that power in the hands of someone who’s good at being a fascist! They could shut down our internet, seize homes and public buildings, or commandeer planes and trains, and ain’t none of that going to come to any good. This is a law and order issue, good Americans!

Penny rants for June 23, 2022: special "right-wingers still suck" edition!

Texas's state police head testifies, at a state House committee meeting, that enough police were at the Uvalde school quickly enough, and were armed enough, to stop the massacre, and though the officers' failure to check an unlocked door sure doesn't make them look good, we should suspect a narrative that places all the blame on one guy, in this case Uvalde school district police chief Pete Arredondo. But admittedly I'd also suspect a narrative that places all the blame on "lack of training," tired as I am of trying to make police into the Swiss Army knives of our civilization. What narrative would I not suspect? The one that finally admits that "more cops" isn't the answer to every conceivable problem, that "freedom" doesn't mean more and bigger guns for everyone so much as the freedom not to get mass-murdered, and that we can in fact keep semi-automatic guns off the streets without touching handguns or rifles. Can we get used to a world where we don't reflexively trust police? Of course we can! We're Americans, after all.

So now Trumpholes are putting up fake wanted posters on social media supposedly depicting folks who helped "steal" the vote for Joe Biden, and probably the only thing saving these Trumpholes from multiple defamation lawsuits is that potential plaintiffs don't know they're out there like that. Of course social media corporations suck at their job – by which I mean they’re failing to enforce their own standards for using their sites! – but dig this response from True the Vote's founder about "voter fraud": "I do think that when 80%+ of America is concerned about election integrity, something must be done to address the situation." We can easily guess that 80% figure doesn't describe what she wants you to think it describes, but why would "80% of America concerned about election integrity" mean the "something" that "must be done" should be "we should randomly accuse people of election fraud"? Hell, why does it mean "we should make it harder to vote"? This is what right-wingers do: identify "problems" and then tell you their solutions are the only solutions.

Finally, I haven’t been watching the January 6 hearings with any regularity, because I don’t need to be told who the assholes are, and how much of my rage do I really want to relive? But I will note the testimony of Shaye Moss and her mother, “Lady Ruby” Freeman, two Georgia election workers targeted by Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani as “election stealers.” But most news reports haven’t foregrounded the fact that Trump supporters forced their way into Ms. Moss’s grandmother’s house and yelled that they were making a “citizen’s arrest” on the pair. Get ready for a lot more of that garbage as Republicans lose more elections. That only makes me angry, though – hearing that Ms. Freeman felt guilty over maybe being the “cause” of her family’s stress made me sad. I wish more Americans understood who really causes their pain, and I wish more bad people felt guilty about causing that pain. I don’t even mean Messrs. Trump and Giuliani, because they're irredeemable; I mean the would-be “citizen” cops, who may not be.

Light posting notice.

You've noticed posting has been light the last couple of days? Not unprecedented, right? Sadly, this time it's going to stay that way for a few more days, at least, until I can resolve some computer-related issues.

In the meantime, thank you for reading, and thank you, also, for being the best citizens you can be.

Action: concerning mass murder, education, monopolies, nukes, corruption, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to invest in counselors-not-cops in schools, pass the College for All Act, the American Innovation Choice Online Act, and the Open App Markets Act, reject funding for certain nuclear weapons programs, pass the Judicial Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act, and confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell our state, local, and federal governments that we need to invest in counselors and service workers in our schools — and not cops. The right-wing solution to every problem is “more cops,” but we live in a world where more teachers have foiled mass murderers in schools than cops have. And we just witnessed a mass shooting where police arrived but didn’t engage the shooter! And that’s not a good argument to put more cops in schools. I hope America has learned its lesson about making cops do every damn thing, but if not, I’ll keep teaching it.

Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2730/S. 1288, the College for All Act, which would eliminate tuition and fees at for all students at two-year community colleges, and for all working- and middle-class students at four-year public universities. (The bill would also eliminate tuition and fees for some students at private, historically Black universities.) This would be the way to do “free college”: by giving the most help to working families, who are most of the folks attending community colleges and public universities. If you’re an upper-class dude who wants to go to Harvard, you still can — and if you need financial help, this bill will do that better, too.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3816/S. 2992, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, and H.R. 7030/S. 2710, the Open App Markets Act. The former bill would cover online platforms with more than 50,000,000 active monthly American users, and would prevent them from discriminating against competing products on their platforms and selling your private data willy-nilly; the latter bill would prevent app stores from discriminating against competing products or forcing app makers to use certain payment systems as a condition of using the market. Big tech corporations hate these bills, but what offends them doesn’t necessarily offend regular people, so let’s not let that stop us.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject more funding for the SLCM-N and B83 nuclear weapons. How useless are these weapons? So useless that President Biden, no great friend of reduced defense spending over the last half-century, has requested that our Congress not fund these weapons! The SLCM-N is a nuclear, sea-launched cruise missile, but our Navy already has conventional cruise missiles on its subs; would you like to be the one who launched the wrong missile? The B83, meanwhile, has the biggest yield of any nuclear weapon, but how well does “high-yield” do against IED-wielding terrorists? And remember: the first one to drop the bomb always loses.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7706/S. 4177, the Judicial Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act, which would make our Supreme Court Justices follow the same Code of Conduct as all other federal judges and prevent federal judges from holding any investments except those in “non-conflicted” funds (i.e., funds diversified enough that a judge or Justice would gain little or nothing by ruling a certain way in a certain case). We talk about the first item in the context of Justice Thomas’s wife running around trying to overturn the election on January 6, but the second item is also important, corruption being evil and all.

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner already. Our Senate let that nomination twist in the wind so long that President Biden had to renominate her, but they’re still letting that nomination twist; why, it’s like they want to make sure net neutrality never comes back but they don’t want the blame for it! Voters love that sort of courage. And Senators from West Virginia (you know who) and Arizona (Mark Kelly this time!) say they just haven’t evaluated the nomination enough. They can’t do in 18 months what I did in 10 seconds? Ms. Sohn is one of the architects of net neutrality; that should be enough.

Action: concerning Medicare, COVID, workers, guns, pollution, and cruelty.

Long story short: tell our President to fix inflated Medicare premiums and use his Executive powers to fight the COVID pandemic, tell Delta’s CEO to do better by Delta flight attendants, tell Facebook to enforce its gun sale ban, tell our EPA to reject the proposed Pebble Mine project, and tell North Carolina to protect bears from being hunted at bear sanctuaries. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Social Security Works helps you tell President Biden to fix inflated Medicare premiums by rebating overcharges back to seniors. You may recall the issue: Medicare raised its premiums by 15%, the biggest hike in history, largely due to their decision to cover a very unproven and very expensive Alzheimer’s drug; now that Medicare has (under popular pressure, probably including yours) reversed course and will only cover the drug when used in clinical trials, the price hike ain’t necessary. So they should give the money back! They’re claiming it’s too hard, but how hard it is to issue rebate checks? They have no damn excuse and we shouldn’t tolerate it.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell President Biden to use the powers Congress has already granted him to keep fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. Yes, Congress should have already approved another COVID package, but our President sure ain’t helpless — he can use the Defense Production Act to manufacture more Paxlovid, for example, or he can use "march-in" rights to break through the corporate stranglehold on vaccine patents so that more folks worldwide can get the vaccine (more folks worldwide getting vaccinated, of course, means less COVID for us in the future). And those aren’t the only things he can do! He’ll do nothing, of course, if we don’t get on him about it.

More Perfect Union helps you tell Delta’s CEO that you support Delta flight attendants’ efforts to unionize. They’re the only flight attendants who haven’t unionized yet — which may well be why Delta flight attendants have to put up with staffing cuts and forced overtime and illegal shifts and their bosses changing their schedule without notice, sometimes after you’ve already flown a thousand miles and were kinda counting on getting home to pick up your kids from day care. Naturally Delta has responded to the workers’ wishes not by trying to fix the problems, but by trying to stop them from forming a union. If Delta won’t learn, we’ll have to learn ‘em.

Free Press helps you tell Facebook to actually enforce its rules banning gun sales on Facebook pages. Hey, it’s their rule! And currently you have to break that rule 10 times before they even look in your direction, and by then, the kid who could’ve cured cancer might be dead in a bloody heap in his biology class. Facebook also lets folks post “calls to arms” on its site, because free speech I guess, even though demanding that everyone actually take up weapons for your cause isn’t necessarily First Amendment-protected speech. Telling everyone to tell Facebook to actually enforce its own rules and stop actively making the world a worse place? I’m pretty sure that’s First Amendment-protected. And necessary!

Environmental Action helps you tell our EPA to protect Alaska’s Bristol Bay from the notorious Pebble Mine project. Yes, it still walks, despite all the head shots we’ve given it! And not just us, either — even Scott Pruitt’s EPA was none too eager to rubber-stamp copper mining in the Bristol Bay, home to (among other things) the last great wild salmon fishery employing tens of thousands of good Alaskans. And plenty of potential financiers have pulled their support from Pebble Mine as well. And when all that happens, some too-rich dude will stillsay no one likes it, so I’ll make a killing off it! Sadly, that won’t be the only killing going on if our EPA lets this project proceed.

Finally, Change.org helps you tell North Carolina legislators to ban killing bears in bear sanctuaries. Yes, our world is so sick, immoral, and decadent that we have to tell legislators to do that, lest some too-rich dude come along and threaten sanctuary workers’ jobs if they don’t let him bag a trophy. Thinking maybe this was a workaround for a population-control issue at sanctuaries? If so, you were giving the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission too much credit! The Commission said it was about letting hunters hunt more, and also about bear-human conflicts later resolved by (get this) bear-proofing food lockers! Like I said, sick, immoral, and decadent — unless we fight.

Around the table: how to defeat evil, part 355.

Durango, CO mobile home residents band together to fight off a bankster corporation trying to buy the land out from under them — and win. Problem: if you own a mobile home, you may not own the land underneath it, so banksters are buying up those lands in order to extract usurious rents from folks whose homes (despite the name “mobile”) are actually very hard to move. A big help came in the form of a recently-passed Colorado state law mandating that corporations that own trailer park land and want to sell it have to give the mobile home owners a chance to buy it. Other entities (the Colorado Coalition of Manufactured Home Owners, Resident Owned Communities USA, the Elevation Community Land Trust) also help these folks keep their homes where they are.

Congress has flubbed an opportunity to address shipping monopolies in its ocean shipping reform bill, as our House has decided to accept a weaker Senate version of the bill in order to get something done. The Senate bill would still do a considerable amount of good, but I nonetheless feel compelled to ask: is this how Amy Klobuchar casts herself as a “maverick”? There was a good amount of mavericky buzz around her Presidential candidacy for a few weeks in 2020, after all. But like Kyrsten Sinema, she appears not to have learned that a real maverick bucks the elites and supports the people, not the other way around.

Far too many people are asking how something like D.A. Chesa Boudin’s recall could happen in a place as liberal as San Francisco. The article makes some good points — for example, that right-wing big money donors retain a lot of power in California even if they don’t actually win very many elections — but maybe San Francisco just isn’t that liberal! Only libertarian-or-worse tech bros can even afford to live there now! Seriously, though, if Democratic politicians really want to reform our criminal justice system so that it’s not all punish-punish-punish all the time, they need to brand Republican politicians (but not regular Americans!) as hysterical when they whine about crime, and they need to brand their own solutions as “common sense." It’d also help if they’d remind everyone that crime might be up in 2021 over 2020 because in 2020 we were all afraid we were going to die if we even went outside.

Ho hum, Chicago Housing Authority leases out land intended for low-income housing to billionaire soccer owner instead because of course they did. People don’t still argue that sports practice facilities and training offices stimulate our economy, do they? Because helping people find a place to live actually stimulates economies! People who have places to live tend to put down roots and spend money locally; billionaire soccer team owners, on the other hand, hoard their assets and live off of low-interest loans, neither one of which gives you the bang for your buck that helping people find a place to live does. Right-wingers will call that “liberal math,” but I’ll call it common sense. I’ll also call it common sense that if you say you’re going to make apartments livable again, you ought to do it, rather than just sit on it or give it to some big-box retailer.

Chris Brooks at In These Times describes “How Amazon and Starbucks Workers Are Upending the Organizing Rules.” What the labor establishment used to do in a painstaking, incremental manner — and boy has “painstaking and incremental” looked like stagnation for many years, amirite? — today’s young organizers are doing a lot more quickly, and though Mr. Brooks doesn’t discuss it, I can’t help but think the pandemic helped that along, not just by reminding us that life is short, but by giving workers space to look at what they put up with just to have a nickel and a nail to rub together. When they write the history of the 20th and 21st centuries, they'll say unions went dormant in the '80s not just because Ronald Reagan was willing to bury them, but because the unions themselves got ossified, and only new blood could revive them.

Finally, is calling Generation X the “Trumpiest” generation, as Politico does with flimsy anecdotes and even flimsier evidence, the stupidest thing ever said? OK, your average Republican politician says The Stupidest Thing Evah pretty much daily, but how does anyone forget that Generation X’s parents are really the Trumpiest generation? Of course, expanding the definition of “Generation X” so that it also includes the last 10 years of Baby Boomers sure does help you if you’re out to say “Gen X is TEH TRUMPIESTZ!!!!” It also helps to exclude non-whites from your definition of “Generation X.” Seriously, this couldn’t have all just been lazy argument, could it? I’m more likely to suspect malice than mere stupidity these days — and I’m also more likely to describe “just say something provocative” as malice.

Action: concerning taxes, health care, pollution, and pregnant workers.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich, help more Americans get health insurance, fund conservation and energy efficiency efforts, and pass the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Senators to strengthen and pass the Millionaire’s Surtax from last year’s Build Back Better Act. The Millionaire’s Surtax would tax income above $10 million at an additional 5% (making an effective tax rate of 42% on that income) and tax income above $25 million at an additional 8% (making an effective tax rate of 45%). But some of our Senators want to lower those rates, when they should be levying such surtaxes on income above $1 million. It is a "Millionaire’s Surtax," after all! Most Americans want higher taxes on the rich, so our Senators should do our will, not the will of their biggest donors, who do not outnumber us.

Americans for Tax Fairness also helps you tell your Senators to keep expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies so that three million more Americans can continue to have health insurance. Our House already passed legislation to keep these subsidies going, so all our Senate has to do is pass that very same bill, easy-peasy. They need not attach poison-pill amendments or complain about the cost or say "just get a job" or say "I just can’t get there"; they need only pass the bill. It’s not like constituents who need the subsidies are "lazy." It’s more like the health insurers charging whatever they like just because they can are lazy! There. I said it, and I'm glad.

NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby, helps you tell your Congressfolk to close the Medicaid coverage gap, where two million Americans make too much to get Medicaid but not enough to get Affordable Care Act subsidies, and so don’t have health insurance. Sounds pretty absurd, right? Like the Medicare "donut hole" and the Social Security payroll tax ceiling, the gap exists because Congressfolk negotiated to win votes on the bills that created these programs, and given that exactly zero Republicans voted for the Affordable Care Act, this gap should seem even more absurd. Close the gap, and two million more Americans don’t have to lie awake at night wondering if they can make ends meet.

Stand.Earth helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 425/S. 1639, which would help fund conservation and energy efficiency programs. President Biden has lately invoked the Defense Production Act not just for baby formula but also for renewable energy products like tariff-addled solar panels; right-wingers will squeal TEH BLACK HELICOPTURZ!!!!!, but President Biden has done the right thing with lawful authority already granted to him by our Congressfolk. Now they just have to reauthorize a program that (among other things) helps buildings get more renewable-friendly, which also makes them less pollution-friendly and saves money. Who could be against all of that? Besides a hysterical right-winger, I mean.

Finally, the National Women’s Law Center helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1065/S. 1486, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which would force workplace bosses to make reasonable accommodations for pregnant workers, like more sit-down work and more bathroom breaks. Anyone who’s ever had an enlarged prostate should be able to understand how a woman carrying something considerably larger in her abdomen needs to pee more, and a boss who "just can’t find" sit-down work for a pregnant employee probably isn't trying hard enough. With great power comes great responsibility, right? And to right-wingers telling hysterical stories about what pregnant workers will be able to "get away with," you need only say this: read the bill.

Around the table: more thoughts about how bad people kill good ideas.

Researchers in Liberia find that offering a small amount of cash and eight weeks of behavioral therapy to folks at risk of committing crimes actually reduces crime, and now that experiment is coming to Chicago. Although the Chicago program offers job training in place of cash, this is still exactly the kind of thing right-wingers will easily lie about — as opposed to all the things they labor absurdly to lie about now, of course — because we can all imagine a lot of Americans saying well-where’s-mine, as well as what’s-next-giving-them-drugs? and of course so-we’re-giving-crooks-therapy-now? Here’s the thing, though: you can always respond "well, more cops and more guns sure ain’t doing the job, so how about we try something that works?"

When I hear that some 44% of Republicans think mass shootings are just the price of freedom in America, I find that maps pretty well onto my supposition that about a quarter of the American electorate is batshit crazy. These Republicans are just doing what their thought leaders tell them, but it’s still a sad statement, and dare I say an un-American one. I mean, what kind of can-do American just gives up at the thought of mass murders of children? Also, the 56% who don’t believe mass shootings are "just the price of freedom" will still almost certainly vote for insane Republicans just because they're not Democrats, and then guess what? Nothing will get done.

Ever wonder why you don’t remember your own birth or all the milestones (first words, learning to walk) your parents never shut up about? Vanessa LoBue at The Conversation explores the nature of infant memories. Long story short: babies do form memories from the start — they recognize their mother almost right away and remember more faces as the months go on — but they don’t form (or can’t retrieve) autobiographical memories, or stories about themselves, until they’re 2 or 3, possibly because they don’t use language until about that time, or possibly because the hippocampus isn’t fully developed yet.

Again we hear that Social Security will pay all of its planned benefits through 2035, and again our "liberal" media covers this as a catastrophic event, with no apparent memory of the time they said Social Security would be tapped out in 2016, for example. I say "apparent" memory because I actually doubt they really don’t remember; I think they just gin up hysteria about Social Security because it grabs eyeballs and makes them money. I’ll give our "liberal" media some credit for admitting that raising the payroll cap is a way of strengthening Social Security (though I’ll give liberal blogger Atrios more credit for that!), but all these sky-is-falling predictions about pension plans never take into account that the economy grows most of the time.

Starbucks closes an Ithaca, NY store that had unionized, leading the newly-unemployed workers to call for a boycott. I've wondered why Starbucks hadn’t done this already — remember how quickly Walmart closed the Quebec store that unionized in 2007? — but with over 100 stores unionizing, I think Starbucks actually might have acted too late. And anyway, the bigger story here is that the workers at this Ithaca Starbucks went on strike in April after discovering a clogged, maggot-ridden grease trap one morning that management wouldn’t do anything about when informed. Now management is "doing something" by closing the store! That’s not very can-do of them, though, is it? After all, maggots and grease aren’t forever.

Finally, Dan Pfeiffer confronts the question "Why Do Democrats Suck at Messaging?" If you’re like me, though, you already know the answer: as with the song "Why Hip Hop Sucks in ’96," it's the money — as in "big campaign donors pay people to suck at messaging and keep Republicans in office which keeps campaign donations coming, rinse, repeat." Thus the sight of Dan Pfeiffer talking to people with money about this question is truly absurd — I mean, he’s a smart dude, so I don’t get why he doesn’t get how he comes off there. He makes a few good points, but if you don’t start with how big campaign donors infect both parties, you’re not going to get anywhere.

Action: concerning pollution, labor, corruption, conservation, and education.

Long story short: tell our EPA to enact vigorous cross-state pollution rules, tell Dollar General bosses to treat their workers fairly, tell New York’s Governor to keep the Manhattan D.A.’s moribund Trump investigation going, and tell our government to protect the Castner Mountain Range and move more vigorously against predatory for-profit colleges. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Penn Environment helps you tell our EPA to enact the most vigorous cross-state air pollution rule possible. I did not know they call this rule the "Good Neighbor Plan"! That’s actually pretty good messaging — which means, of course, that Democratic politicians just about never describe it that way! Nothing prevents us from describing it that way, of course — of describing states that limit the pollution that travels with the wind to other states as "good neighbors." And the politicians who would fight that rule, and doom kids in downwind states to higher levels of asthma and cancer? OK, I’d call them a lot of things, but "bad neighbors" would do.

More Perfect Union helps you tell Dollar General bosses to start paying their workers fairly and ensure they have safe workplaces. It’s not so damn much to ask! Especially since Dollar General’s CEO makes 934 times what the average Dollar General worker makes! And to those who'd say but what will happen to the low prices we all love at Dollar General? I would respond refer, again, to the CEO making 934 times what the average worker makes! Too many working folks worry about other working folks making "too much" money at their favorite shopping spots. They gotta fight the real enemy.

Daily Kos helps you tell New York Governor Hochul to transfer the now-dormant Manhattan D.A. office’s investigation into the Trump Organization either to the state Attorney General’s office or to another District Attorney within New York state. If the Trump axis pressured Alvin Bragg into abandoning the investigation, then the people need another weapon to hold the powerful accountable. Besides, state courts have already established that she has the legal authority to do it, so she ought to do it. It might help bring law and order back to our great nation.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell President Biden to designate the Castner Mountain Range around the El Paso area as a National Monument. The Castner Range has been a pretty good flood control tool over the years — what’s that? You haven’t heard of much flooding in that area? Well, now you know why! — and its proximity to the Franklin Mountains State Park means we’ll be able to protect a much larger area from pollution. And not for nothing, but the Castner Range is home to numerous sites of archaeological and religious significance to Native American folks; a big part of being conservative, it would seem to me, is conserving areas of historical importance, not rubber-stamping any and all development.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell the Biden Administration to move vigorously against predatory for-profits colleges. The Biden Administration has lately forgiven a few billion dollars in outstanding federally-banked loans used at Corinthian Colleges, and that’s a big deal, but there are other predatory for-profit colleges using federal loans to bilk college students, so our Administration has more work to do. Our government’s record on this hasn’t been good for over a decade now: the Obama Administration enabled too much of this crap, and the Trump Administration enabled far more of it; now we need justice.

Action: concerning baby formula, child care, gas prices, big ag, and "forever chemicals."

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to break up baby formula monopolies, help working families better afford child care, tax big oil windfall profits, break up monopolistic big ag practices, and keep "forever chemicals" off our farmlands. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Public Citizen helps you tell Congress to pass legislation ensuring we never get this short on baby formula again. Right-wingers tell us we're here because we have too many regulations gumming up the works, but that's ridiculous -- we're short on baby formula because four big corporations control the entire market, and a food safety issue at one of them has emptied our shelves. Thus we tell our Congressfolk to break up corporate monopolies; after all, as our President says, capitalism without competition is exploitation, and the only "efficiency" we really "gain" from monopolies is the efficient redistribution of income upward from workers to executives. I'd rather have babies not starve myself.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation expanding preschool and helping working families afford child care. It is a bit breathtaking that legislation about child care specifically has floated around for years, but now our President has embraced it, and the only reasons it hasn't passed, basically, are a) the opposition of Republicans and b) the Joe Manchin Drama Machine. But child care costs have plagued families for decades -- like health care, corporations charge what they want because they can! -- and families need relief now. Expanding preschool can also help deliver that relief; after all, if kids are in preschool, they're not in some private child care service. See? Big Gummint helps sometimes.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a big oil corporation windfall tax. As I've said, anyone who can't see the link between record profits and record-high gas prices by now simply doesn't want to see it. And folks (including Democratic politicians!) who claim that taxing unearned profits of oil corporations will "decrease the supply of oil" are all but saying not only that oil corporations have all the power, but that they should have all the power. It's rhetorical hostage-taking: don't make oil corporations pay their share of taxes, or the gas supply gets it! And if you're pro-freedom, you don't take that from anyone.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4421/S. 2332, the Farm System Reform Act, which would ban new factory farms, split up existing factory farms into smaller operations, and end the stranglehold middlemen have over meat production and sales. Yeah, this is a theme with us -- bigger is badder -- and it's a theme because bigness infects every part of our economy, and most Americans, be they liberal or conservative, oppose concentrated power. Right-wingers give lip service to small businesses, but they aim to give all of our power to large corporations. Because that keeps the big campaign donations coming! But we outnumber them, so we must overpower them.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep PFAS chemicals off our farmlands. You can find PFAS chemicals -- which scientists link to certain cancers, birth defects, and immune system issues -- in firefighting foam, fast-food packaging, waterproof jackets, and non-stick saucepans, but you can also find them in agricultural wastewater treatments, meaning you can also find them in our food, water, feed animals, and agricultural workers. They call PFAS chemicals "forever chemicals" because our bodies can't break them down; they should call them everywhere chemicals too! Odd how the more "efficient" they make our food-producing apparatus, the less healthy it becomes.

Action: concerning Medicare, mass murder, the war on Yemen, discrimination, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell President Biden to rebate seniors for wrongly-inflated Medicare premiums, and tell your Congressfolk to address gun violence and end the War on Yemen, and tell your Senators to pass the Equality Act and confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. Social Security Works helps you tell our Biden Administration to give seniors rebates on their inflated Medicare premiums. What happened? Our Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (or CMS) hiked Medicare premiums this year, in anticipation of being forced to cover a bad and expensive Alzheimer's drug -- but then massive popular pressure forced our Administration to cover that drug only for clinical trials, meaning those premium hikes don't need to be there. Hence, our Administration should rebate those premium hikes to actual senior citizens using Medicare. Really, it's pretty simple math, both morally and politically, so let's make sure they do it.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to do something effective about gun violence. There will be room, at the end of Moms Rising's long missive, for you to say Congress should a) amend the National Firearms Act so that it covers semi-automatic weapons as well as automatic weapons and b) require gun owners to register guns, get shooting licenses, and buy liability insurance, just like we all have to do with cars. And what a burden that is upon us, I tell you! Seriously, the only "burden" is on those gun corporations that manufacture weapons of mass murder, and we must of course weigh their imaginary "burden" against our actual burden of possibly being shot dead by some rage-addled man at any moment.

Both Daily Kos and the Center for Rights and Dissent help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.J.Res. 87, the War Powers Act resolution aiming to end our involvement in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. It's well past time for Congress to assert their war-declaring powers and put an end to this madness. One sentence from a Roots Action missive about this matter really hits home for me: "If Yemenis were treated with the value accorded Ukrainians by U.S. media, this war would have ended long ago." Yes, it would have -- millions of Yemeni children have either died from or suffered from malnutrition. So let's get our government to -- finally! -- do the right thing.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. Ohio has lately passed a law allowing school officials to inspect children's genitals to make sure they're not trans athletes -- this, from the state that sent Jim Jordan to Congress. But the Equality Act would put a stop to such insanity, by adding "sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity)" as one of the classes of folks you can't discriminate against in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 -- which would also prevent banks, landlords, and employers from discriminating against gay and trans folks. If our Senators won't stop injustice, what good are they?

Finally, More Perfect Union helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner. Our Senators worked so hard to obstruct her nomination that it expired at the end of 2021; President Biden dutifully renominated her, and our putative Democratic majority finally worked through all the obstructions to clear her for a vote back in March, but here we are, three months later, waiting for our Senate to put a real internet freedom warrior on our FCC like we deserve. And their excuses for inaction are getting even lamer -- oh, the Fraternal Order of Police doesn't like her? Please. West Virginia and Arizona residents will want to target their Senators especially -- and we should contact our President, too.

Around the table: featuring some of the usual suspects -- monopolists, corporate welfare kings, weak Democrats.

Actual epidemiologist David Martinez, who's worked on both COVID vaccines and COVID treatments, informs us that future COVID vaccines will have to adapt to (and predict) new COVID variants. Flu shots do this now, and they don't always predict ascendant variants perfectly because, as they say, the future is the hardest thing to predict. But better to go with what we know works, and to improve on what works, than to trust the "truth" of social media "influencers" looking for eyeballs, or right-wing media "personalities" who gin up rage for ratings.

Matt Stoller discusses how banksters are "gobbling up" baby formula manufacturing corporations like that won't make our problems even worse. Along the way he presents even more evidence of monopolists saying I want higher prices out loud. And yet folks still blame higher wages and/or more government spending for inflation, and I don't think they're "not getting it," I think they don't want to get it. But let them be complicit with this massive income-redistribution-upward scheme -- we can shame and shun them once they're out in the open, and then God'll sort 'em out at the Pearly Gates.

Ho hum, Atlantic City casinos plead pandemic-related poverty to get corporate welfare, and good citizens suffer, since cities run on tax dollars, after all, and if big corporations pay less, regular Americans pay more. And the crushing irony? The casinos actually did what any self-respecting corporation would do -- invest more heavily in online gambling after predicting that its on-site gambling would plummet due to COVID -- and still demanded, and got, the PILOT tax break! I guess right-wingers will tell us next that they "earned" the tax cut by doing the right thing! Tell that to the good citizens of Atlantic City who have one real grocery store in the casinos' shadow and whose kids have the highest level of lead exposure in the Garden State.

The National Rifle Association planned to hold a massive fundraiser at a farm owned by a nominal Democrat running for Senate in Missouri. Said candidate, Trudy Busch Valentine (yeah, of those Busches), apparently convinced the farm's board to cancel the event, but only after the Intercept published its article, and ain't no scrubbing 15 years of her family funneling money to the NRA. Actual Democrat Lucas Kunce should run ads about this, in addition to all the legitimate issues (monopolies, financial predators) he can run winning ads about. Only the furthest right folks in America still approve of the NRA, after all, and there ain't enough of them to win elections on their own; all we need to beat them is a Democrat who stands for something other than "winning," which is all a lot of losing Democrats (like Ms. Valentine) stand for.

The Biden Administration will forgive any remaining federally-backed debt owed due to attendance at the notorious Corinthian Colleges, the for-profit college chain which went defunct in 2015 after a raft of corruption-related allegations. Forgiveness, here, includes both the end of future loan payments and a rebate for past loan payments on still-outstanding loans, and this money will go mostly to folks who went to Corinthian for vocational training, exactly the folks who too often get left out of the student loan debt conversation. Now cue some crying from Marco Rubio, who called Corinthian Colleges a "constituent" back in the day, a label he has never affixed to any good Floridians who got the shaft from Corinthian.

Finally, yes, Virginia, Republicans have actually advanced a climate change "plan" that consists almost entirely of corporate welfare to the fossil fuel industry. "Streamlining permitting" mostly means "skipping reviews that would catch and prevent pollution," and the Republican plan doesn't actually set any goals for reducing emissions -- after all, why would you ever want to measure your progress? -- so you'd be right to wonder if Republicans simply concocted the worst plan they could think of, just so they could gin up rage about it. Shouldn't work, right? People hate pollution, after all! Still, Republicans have created a new constituency out of book banning this year, so I can't say they'll fail here.

Around the table: tabulating even more drama from right and center-right!

National Republicans appear to be putting one of Steve Bannon's plans into action, by training an "army" of poll workers and linking them up with local Republican D.A.s. In the short term, I expect this plan could work pretty well in places like Michigan -- though it'd work better if their gubernatorial candidates could get enough signatures to qualify for the ballot, amirite? -- but it won't work as well in places like Hawaii. I'm pretty sure 2022, which Republicans figure will go their way wherever they like though voters could prove them wrong, is just a dry run for a much bigger operation in 2024, when the party's biggest dick runs for President again.

Political Wire's Taegan Goddard, writing about why he has a membership model for his website, describes pretty well why the advertising model doesn't really work for our internet anymore. If you still think the world is all publications going out and getting advertisers so they don't have to charge customers, note well that the internet advertising model involves very little active involvement from publishers; too many middlemen control the process, hence you're bound to see an ad you can't stand. Like so much of modern life -- Amazon, social media, Bluetooth-enabled appliances, pharmacy benefit managers -- internet advertising cartels may make things easier, but they don't make them better. And they don't even make things easier for you, unless you're a CEO who hates doing real work.

Kentucky Democratic Senate candidate Charles Booker runs a campaign ad with a noose around his neck. I wish it were 42 seconds shorter, of course, and at first I thought attacking Rand Paul for holding up anti-lynching legislation might be a mistake, since Mr. Paul eventually co-sponsored a similar anti-lynching bill that became law and will be more than happy to tell us that repeatedly. But what if that issue's a feint? After all, Mr. Paul will still happily tell you that Medicare-for-All is slavery, and his problems with the Civil Rights Act were the first thing anyone learned about him! And those charges will stick while he thinks he's brushing the other one aside. At least, I hope it works that way. And folks won't just remember the noose around Mr. Booker's neck; they'll remember him removing it at ad's end. All in all, pretty good, but, at the risk of sounding like Gordon Lish, make it 30 seconds -- or 15.

I'm pleased to see that professional athletes (and their bosses) have doubled down on their support for gun control legislation even though (because?) professional whiners like Sen. Marco Rubio (E-FL) didn't like it. (Want me to evaluate Mr. Rubio's complaints about China's treatment of Uyghurs and the NBA's complicity therein? Nah, screw that -- every time Marco Rubio seems sympathetic or smart, it's a feint, meaning to draw you into some offensive drama you'd otherwise never let yourself get bogged down in.) Watch out for Philadelphia Union soccer player Alejandro Bedoya, who says "(i)t ain’t freedom that we have to now look over our backs all the time." I'd like him to become a political consultant at career's end; America suffers too much from all the numbnuts who do that now.

When I hear, for the 443rd time, that Joe Manchin really, really wants to do something about prescription drug prices by the end of the year, I am compelled to note that it's a bit rich to hear the guy most responsible for Democrats Not Doing Enough suggesting that Democrats didn't do enough. Also, he better not forget to check with America's Other One True Great and Awesome Real American President, Kyrsten Sinema, who vetoed Medicare drug price negotiation and higher tax brackets on the rich and on corporations in 2021. My advice to Democrats, not that they'd ever take it, would be to cut through the Manchinema drama, produce a bill that addresses all their "concerns," and make everyone vote on it immediately. And if certain people vote it down because "it would strangle innovation" or "it's not bipartisan enough" or "it didn't go through the committee process," then let their words hang them. We don't need more Democrats as much as we need better Democrats.

Finally, buried in this horserace account entitled "Biden battles CEOs in inflation blame game" -- everything's a "game" when losing causes someone else to suffer, right, Politico? -- we get this shameful whinefest from an unnamed "CEO of one of the country's largest banks": "They said everything was going to be different under Biden and they would be more engaged with us, and they weren’t." And all I can say is: having all the power ain't enough? We shouldn't ask banksters for advice about anything, since they've amply demonstrated over the years that they don't care about anyone but themselves; really, we should be breaking their sorry asses up into much smaller and less harmful banks, which work I hope our FTC will begin soon.

Action: concerning banksters, law and order, pollution, immigration, and our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell our FDIC to stop predatory lenders, tell President Biden to do more for police reform, tell our EPA to curb cross-state pollution, tell our government to protect DACA recipients, and tell our USPS Board of Governors to fire Postmaster General DeJoy. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our FDIC to stop predatory lenders from laundering their three-digit interest loans through banks our FDIC supervises. These banksters also work through furniture stores, pet stores, car mechanics, and the like, offering loans for love seats and pets and car repairs and the like that don't charge interest if they're paid off in 90 days -- but charge up to 225% interest if they're not, which they generally won't be, since folks don't have much in savings anymore, and just try to turn such a loan down when they've got your car in the shop! Scheming sure is easier than working, but there's no reason we should allow this kind of scheming, particularly through federally-insured banks.

Roots Action helps you tell President Biden to go much further than his police reform Executive order does. The order bans military vehicles for police departments -- unless those departments say they'll use them only for disasters and the like. A police department that says they need a tank for disasters won't use it on protestors? Yeah sure. We're hearing these days that police "need" even more military equipment so they can deal with school shooters, but I think their inaction during the Uvalde mass murder has pretty much exposed that argument's bald spot for everyone to see. Those cops didn't act like your TV heroes, after all, and more weapons ain't gonna change that.

The Climate Reality Project helps you tell our EPA to finalize the most vigorous cross-state pollution rule possible. Cross-state pollution (particularly with nitrous oxide) is a real thing; air pollution doesn't just say whoa hold up when it gets to a state line, after all, nor can downwind states simply build barriers to keep upwind states' pollution out. You can already hear right-wingers whine how are those poor, poor power plants supposed to control what crosses state lines? Here's a response: same way you control your urge to say racist crap: just don't do it. Far too often I sound like the real conservative when I talk to right-wingers. Why, it's like they're not really conservative at all!

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell our government to permanently protect recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (or DACA) program. The DACA program helps immigrants who arrive here as minors stay here, as long as they meet fairly strict standards (military service, college attendance, no felonies). After all, forcing them to go back to nations that don't know them, to make them pay for decisions they had nothing to do with, is cruel. And though our Supreme Court protected DACA recipients last time they ruled on the matter, don't think they'll do it again. They've been killing precedents like kitchen ants lately.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell our USPS Board of Governors to fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. Our Senate has finally -- finally! -- confirmed the last two Biden nominees to the USPS Board of Governors, so they ain't got no excuse now: Louis DeJoy has got to go. He tried to sabotage voting-by-mail, he had investments with a (now-former) USPS Board member, he had his hands in the corporation that just so happened to make COVID tests for our USPS, and he's implemented a higher-cost, worse-service plan that no executive in his right mind would have implemented anywhere 50 years ago. And note well that "worse service" could well mean "you don't get your life-saving meds when you need them."

Action: concerning guns, climate change, taxes, child care, and drug prices.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to do something about mass-killing machines already, fight climate change, bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion, cap child care costs for working families, tax corporations at a minimum of 15%, and lower prescription drug prices. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Today's as good a day as any other to call your Congressfolk and tell them to a) amend the National Firearms Act of 1934 to include semi-automatic guns as well as automatic ones and b) require gun owners to register their guns, get shooting licenses, and buy liability insurance. Thom Hartmann describes this plan in more detail here. Don't believe any right-wing hype that this program would "kill our freedoms," because item a) already exists and keeps automatic weapons off our streets and item b) is what we already do for automobiles. And this plan wouldn't infringe on your right to own a handgun or a hunting rifle! (If you turn your hunting rifle into a semi, see item a).)

The Green New Deal Network helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight climate change now. You may have heard lately that our One True Great and Real American President Joe Manchin has started talking about a climate package with Senate Majority Leader Schumer again, but forget about that, at least until they actually produce a package that may or may not improve on what we've already got. Best thing right now is simply to communicate your will that Congress do something about climate change before we're all the proverbial frogs in the proverbial pot of boiling water. In the end, their dramas don't matter; our will matters, and lasting change comes when we express our will in numbers they can't deny.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion and cap child care costs at 7% of a family's incomes. The original Build Back Better Act would have done both of these things, and neither one is on the table in the Manchin/Schumer discussions, but that only means we have to keep telling them we want these things. Millions of kids went right back into poverty when the CTC expansion ended -- and inflation didn't go down, you'll notice! -- and child care has become so absurdly expensive it now rivals health care expenses as the thing corporations will charge whatever they want for because you have to have it. That ain't America, folks.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to tax corporate profits at a minimum of 15% and stop letting them pretend they're making money overseas when they're making it here. This, too, relates to whatever discussions Messrs. Manchin and Schumer are having, and the 15% minimum tax appears to be the only thing Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D?-AZ) would agree to do regarding corporate taxes. I said "appears," of course, because she doesn't "negotiate through the press." And here you thought accounting for herself to her constituents via our press was part of her job! That's because we're not galaxy brains like she is. Anyway, corporations need to pay more in taxes and we need to tell our Congressfolk that until they do it.

Finally, both Public Citizen and Drug Prices Are Too High help you tell your Congressfolk to lower prescription drug prices. Public Citizen's email tool specifically mentions Medicare drug-price negotiation, while Drug Prices Are Too High's petition suggests that maybe supporting lower drug prices would help them in the midterms! And it should -- Medicare drug price negotiation foe Kurt Schrader lost his primary last week, and another Medicare drug price negotiation foe, Kathleen Rice, decided not to run for re-election; such fates should befall any politician who opposes the clear will of at least 80% of Americans. Including Kyrsten Sinema, up in 2024.

Around the table: on "solutions" and drama.

When you hear that police prioritized keeping themselves safe over confronting the Uvalde shooter as he murdered 21 kids, you may be tempted to think that makes sense, that your first duty to yourself is to keep yourself safe. But you must also remember that right-wingers dismiss any criticism of police shooting unarmed Black folks by saying hey, they put their lives on the line everyday! Plus we watch too many cop shows; fictional characters put their lives on the line 22 times a year with nary a scratch, and that, too, gives everyone the wrong idea.

Surprise, surprise, "YouTube’s Biggest Info Channels Carry Corporate News, Not Alternative Views," and could that be because Google owns it? It's a question worth asking! Corporations aren't necessarily early adopters of new technology, but they eventually come to dominate new technology because of their power, which sure argues against untrammeled corporate power as well as anything else. Should we be comforted that 81 of YouTube's 100 most-subscribed news channels come from the Global South (with more than half of them coming from India)? No, we should not -- big is big, and no matter what language it speaks, really it speaks the language of money.

Study finds that more than one out of every five Republican state legislators belongs to some far-right Facebook group. Some of these legislators defend themselves by saying the groups are made up of jes' folks -- certainly not by folks radicalized by right-wing politicians! -- but hopefully it's not news by now that right-wing groups go out of their way to find (and foreground) "normal"-looking people among their numbers. Hopefully it's not also news by now that right-wing politicians and media outlets manufacture a lot of the "wants" and "needs" jes' folks have. They also whine well, what about the far-left websites? Hopefully it's not news by now that far-left websites don't get the big social media welfare that far-right websites do, and besides, "well what about" equals "I can't win the argument on the merits."

Recall my joy that Jamie McLeod-Skinner unseated Kurt Schrader in the Oregon 5th Democratic House primary? Well, it works both ways, as a bankster-backed group has poured $1 million into defeating Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), declaring its aim to "elect solutions-oriented Democrats." Anytime you hear someone utter a phrase like "solution-oriented Democrats," understand that the only "solution" they'll tolerate is the one that lets big corporations make more money, no matter how much that hurts people. Also, hedge fund managers are speculators and who therefore shouldn't get all the say about everything, or even very much of a say about anything. The good news: Rep. Tlaib looks ready to win this fight.

The Center for Media and Democracy looks at the "Right-Wing Families" who "Bankroll (the) Most Extreme GOP Candidates Nationwide. See the Uhleins give money to folks like Rep. Paul Gosar (E-AZ), a man abandoned even by his own family, and see the Toppers indulge their love of racists and insurrectionists or do I repeat myself? I mention this in case you were thinking there's a significant difference between the "corporate wing" of the Republican Party and the "extremist wing." I'd say there's no difference -- the Republican Party has only one wing, the drama wing. And frankly it's a bit of an aerodynamic miracle that it's still airborne.

Finally, my fellow liberals have done plenty of chortling at Donald Trump's rally for Liz Cheney's opponent in the upcoming Wyoming House Republican primary, but I noticed that Mr. Trump continually attacked Ms. Cheney for being a war-monger -- her dad was Vice President during the Iraq War, after all -- which reminds us, I would hope, that Mr. Trump is nowhere near as stupid as folks think. But if Mr. Trump's anti-war argument resonates with large numbers of Wyoming Republicans, just remember that 20 years ago they were all calling you traitor for opposing the Iraq war, and if pressed about that matter now they'd almost certainly deny it. We all deserve, at the very least, that folks remember where they stood when it mattered.

Action: concerning free speech, voting rights, oil, corporate NDAs, and OAN.

Long story short: tell Russia to stop oppressing protestors, tell PA state legislators to stop wasting taxpayer money "investigating" the 2020 election, tell California to stop buying Amazon rainforest oil, tell state governments to stop allowing NDAs between legislators and corporations, and tell Verizon to drop OAN like a hot potato. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Amnesty International helps you tell the Russian government to stop oppressing anti-war protestors. Russia has arrested some 15,000 of them, and this is Vladimir Putin's Russia, not Anton Chekhov's Russia, so "arrest" might well equal "never see the outside world again." Russia has charged some of these protestors with "disseminating false information" and "discrediting" Russian soldiers, which are just the kinds of "charges" snowflake governments come up with when they can't win arguments on the merits. Do we expect Russia to wilt under our express will? No, we do not -- me, I expect them to laugh at us. But do we consider it our duty as human beings to express our will anyway? Yes, we do.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Common Cause helps you tell your state legislators to stop wasting taxpayer money (i.e., your money) on their sham election "review." They've spent nearly half a mil on this, and guess what they've found? Nothing, of course, in over a year and a half, and they've just extended the "review" for another six months, because that'll make the difference. But no matter how much they look, they ain't gonna find what ain't there. Of course, they don't expect to -- they're merely creating drama. Think maybe good Pennsylvania taxpayers might be sick of their legislature using their money to create more drama? Reader, I think so.

Stand.Earth helps you tell the state of California to stop buying oil from the Amazon rainforest. For a whole lot of reasons! Oil drilling in the Amazon threatens the world's greatest climate change fighter -- they don't call the Amazon rainforest the "lungs of the Earth" for nothing! -- plus it also threatens the numerous Indigenous folks who live there and who spend far too much of their time fighting developers. Don't believe the hype that "gas costs too much in California so we need to get it anywhere we can." That's how evil gets you -- by exploiting you when you're not at your best. They'd do much better expanding public transportation -- yes, even in California! -- so they can be stronger the next time evil strikes.

More Perfect Union helps you tell state governments to stop allowing big corporations to force state legislators to sign non-disclosure agreements. I've been talking about this issue perhaps too abstractly, though I still find the theoretical problem -- of forcing state legislators not to talk about issue with their bosses, their constituents! -- to be rather comical. Fact is, Amazon (the big corporation, this time) has been forcing non-disclosure agreements on politicians in places they've tried to build warehouses. What could Amazon be trying to hide? Tax breaks they don't deserve, their awful record with COVID-19, their general hatred of unionized workers? Whatever it is, folks deserve to know.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell Verizon to stop carrying the notorious One America News Network. DirecTV dumped them this past April, now it's everyone else's turn! How do you know OAN deserves oblivion? Because they sued Rachel Maddow for defamation after she called them "literally paid Russian propaganda" -- and lost. Meanwhile they're the defendant in at least one other defamation suit concerning the lies they spread about the 2020 election that Donald Trump lost by seven million votes. No, it's no "victory" for "free speech" if they still get to spew filth; nothing in our Constitution guarantees a paid platform for your free speech, only protection from your government oppressing you for your speech.

Around the table: mostly about guns.

"To End Mass Shootings," Henry Giroux writes at TruthOut, "We Need to Change the Deeper Structure of Life in the U.S." The Buffalo and Uvalde shootings "represent the end points of a culture awash in guns and violence, a society that nourishes and rewards the gun industries, and values the accumulation of profits over human needs." Thus we must pursue solutions well beyond the number/kinds of guns we can get in America. And valuing "the accumulation of profits over human needs" is not "just human nature," or we wouldn't have lived in a considerably different America between roughly 1932 and 1980.

Folks are wondering why police didn't rush into the building during the Uvalde, TX school shooting, and what we find out in time might be worse than what we know right now. But here's what I know for sure: right-wingers have been selling "more cops" as the solution to virtually every law-and-order issue for decades, but "more cops" didn't save the lives of 19 kids in Uvalde, so we can surely understand the anger of parents whose children bled out before any police officers made a difference that day. How about we end the myth of the "good guy with a gun," then? And how about the next couple dozen cop-show producers give us some help with that?

Guess what? The right wing's notion of controlling school shootings by "arming teachers" is also a terrible idea! Among the problems: people shoot their guns accidentally all the time, students could get their hands on the guns, even the best shooters hit their targets less than once in five tries, police might mistake a teacher shooting at a school shooter for the school shooter, and anyway if police aren't going to lay their lives on the line why should we expect teachers to do it? Also too, we demand "more training" of folks (here teachers, elsewhere cops) in all kinds of things that aren't directly related to their field as if folks' minds are really all that flexible. It's getting to the point where I'm starting to think "more training" really means "I don't want to work to solve real problems."

Jonathan Chait at New York magazine describes "The Conservative Playbook for Deflecting Anger After Mass Shootings," and though I wouldn't call it a "conservative" playbook -- a right-wing playbook, a reactionary playbook, an asshole's playbook -- it is pretty much a masterclass in evil argument! Call your opponents "political" when your own worldview is political, say that because a policy doesn't do everything nobody should ever do anything, and then go find "causes" of mass shootings that your opponents won't fight, like "critical race theory" as Sen. Johnson did the other day. Of course, bad arguments keep winning because Democrats won't fight for good arguments.

And on cue: Sen. Bill Cassidy (E-LA) suggests we ought to keep AR-15s around because some people use them to kill feral pigs. Many questions would ensue, chief among them is an AR-15 really the only way to kill a feral pig? Even so, his objection would be moot under Thom Hartmann's proposal, the one I've supported for a couple of years now -- the AR-15 wouldn't be illegal under the Hartmann plan, but you'd have to jump through more administrative hoops to get one, which presumably someone who needed it to kill feral pigs could do. If they need it.

Finally, after a week of ballot-counting issues, Jamie McLeod-Skinner has bested Rep. Kurt Schrader in the Oregon 5th House district Democratic primary by a pretty damn decisive 13-point margin. Finally politicians are paying the price for defying the will of the people -- in Mr. Schrader's case, for opposing Medicare drug price negotiation. You know what would be even better? If Republicans started paying the price for opposing the will of the people! Of course, you need fewer Democrats like Kurt Schrader, and more Democrats like Jamie McLeod-Skinner, to be able to do that, and the party establishment tends to enable the former and destroy the latter.

Action: concerning murder, data privacy, renters' rights, corruption, and cash bail.

Long story short: tell Brazil to stop allowing the murder of Indigenous folks, tell Google not to build a data center in Saudi Arabia, tell corporate landlords to stop preying on renters, tell our Justice Department to investigate connections between Jared Kushner and Saudi Arabia, and tell governments to end cash bail. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Avaaz helps you tell Brazil to stop allowing corporate developers to rape and murder the indigenous Yanomami people who live in the Amazon rain forest. Hard to believe I had to write that sentence, but I did. The alleged rape and murder of a 12 year-old Yanomami girl and the three-year-old who went missing after getting thrown into a river are probably the stories you've heard, but this all takes place against a backdrop of a Brazilian government who do not care who they hurt as long as they're able to extract as much "wealth" from the Amazon rainforest as possible. That's why we brandish the Big Stick of Bad PR. And, good Brazilians, I wish you well in your efforts to remove this evil government from office later on this year.

Sum of Us helps you tell Google not to build a data center in Saudi Arabia. They must think they're such cosmopolitans! If you're tempted to think well, Google shouldn't have all that personal data anyway, so who cares where they put it, I wouldn't entirely blame you, but ask yourself: have you ever criticized Saudi Arabia's years-long refusal to let women drive? Or their habit of using bone saws to murder journalists? Hell, ever criticize Donald Trump, who once said he wasn't about to go up against a nation whose citizens gave him so much money? I trust you are beginning to see the problem. And again, talk to Republicans about why we don't have good internet privacy protections. (Spoiler alert: they destroyed them.)

Renters Rising helps you tell corporate landlords to stop preying on renters. Specifically, you'll ask for the following: just cause (versus at-will) eviction protections; a 3% cap on rent increases; meet health and safety standards for habitable properties; have a good grievance procedure in place for tenants; and recognize tenants' unions. That all sounds quite reasonable to me! What would the objections be? That landlords just can't make money anymore? Of course they can! They just won't be able to make money without doing their job, which, sadly, is a goal many weak people have these days. Maybe their bankster bosses taught them! Anyway, renters deserve justice too, and what a shame I have to say it.

Win Without War helps you tell our Justice Department to investigate $2 billion in Saudi investments in Jared Kushner's funds, which could be payback for services rendered -- or a pre-payment on services to come, if we're so brain-dead as to elect Mr. Trump President in 2024. Maybe a Trump fatigue operates here, one that might lead you to say what more do I have to do, but that's what people like Donald Trump count on; it's why they spend every day doing as much damage to our civilization as possible, so you get tired of fighting them. Luckily we have a Justice Department that's supposed to get justice on our behalf -- but they won't do it unless we demand it.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell state, local, and federal governments to end cash bail. Mainly because it's an unconstitutional way of putting people in prison before they've had a fair trial, but also because cash bail doesn't work, or else reducing cash bail would result in higher crime rates everywhere it's tried, which, naturally, it hasn't. Don't let the hysterics at Fox News bamboozle you into thinking otherwise with the same footage of the same crimes repeated over and over again. And don't believe the folks who say how can cops do their job? Police officers had better be able to do their job without violating our Constitution.

Around the table: useful idiots, everywhere!

Lots of good ways to think about our current predicament in Ben Debney's article "Culture Wars Defend the Minority of the Opulent From the Majority." The other day I suggested cultural warriors were "useful idiots" for corporate power, but Mr. Debney reminds us that the culture war is also very much like a protection racket -- "at a price, they offered protection against evils that they themselves would otherwise inflict, or at least allow to be inflicted." We find this to be literally true in the latest child-molestation scandal involving Southern Baptists! And maybe I don't say this enough, but the cultural warriors are all whiny little diaper-loaded brats! Their real problem with America isn't that they have "no voice in the public square," but that theirs isn't the only voice in the public square.

It's a damn shame that there are enough mass school shootings that scholars can study them and detect patterns in them, but from James Densley and Jillian Peterson at The Conversation we can learn a few things about these shootings. Like, either boys or 18-year-old men carry them out, they generally don't intend to live past the shooting, they generally leave warnings about what they're about to do, and most of them have a connection to the school at which they kill people. Also, it's not so much about "fame and notoriety" as it is about anger. I found getting along with other kids pretty tough when I was that age, which certainly wasn't all their fault, and I imagine it's only gotten worse for the teenagers who've come after me.

Our Supreme Court essentially sentences two likely-innocent men to death in ruling that inmates convicted in state courts can't appeal to federal courts if they had bad counsel. Why should a state get to abridge a citizen's Constitutionally-granted (and therefore federal) rights? Beats me. Oh, wait, I know: so that the Court's far-right wing, now numbering six of nine, can claim a broad "state's right" to ignore our Constitution whenever convenient, at which point it'll be bye-bye to a lot of things we've fought and died for. And dig Justice Thomas's whining about having to deal with "serial relitigation of final convictions"! Or, as your right-wing uncle would say, how many trials do we have to give a guy? The civilized person's answer: as many as it takes until justice is done. That is what great nations do, isn't it?

Henry Kissinger says that defeating Russia would have "disastrous" consequences. Like? Oh, you know, "upheavals and tensions that will not be easily overcome," and remember that Russia's been around for hundreds of years! Citing these as reasons not to hand Russia a decisive defeat sure sounds like an argument against ever doing the right thing if it injures any nation that happens to have endured for centuries. If our country gets taken over by fascists and starts bombing the crap out of Central and South America, I guess he'll argue against our "humiliation" or "defeat" for the same reason. Personally, I think the civilized people should make these decisions.

Finally, Sen. Sinema (D?-AZ) says that "D.C. solutions" to our mass murder epidemic aren't "realistic" (while Arizona's other Senator, whose wife nearly got killed by a mass shooter, has a more humane response). First off, new rule: no one who works in government gets to suggest that government just doesn't work, as the phrase "D.C. solutions" surely does, not just because they might be the reason government doesn't work, but also because they're biting the hand that feeds them and we are that hand, since we're the taxpayers who pay her salary. Second, her vaunted "message discipline" is starting to sound merely like the absence of empathy, which might make her the Sam Alito of the Democratic caucus.

Action: concerning mass murders, reconciliation, "forever chemicals," law and order, and antibiotics.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop mass murders, pass a Build Back Better-style reconciliation bill, and pass the PFAS Firefighter Protection Act, the EQUAL Act, and the PASTEUR Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

On the occasion of yet another mass school shooting, I present Thom Hartmann's two-pronged solution to the mass shooting issue: make it as hard to get semi-automatics as it is to get automatics, and regulate guns the same way we regulate cars. You may want to call your Congressfolk with some version of this plan. Right-wingers will say they don't want to get their guns registered because TEH FREEDUMZ!!!!!, but ignore them. Liberals will say there wouldn't be enough background checks, but ignore them, too, because the registration process does that job. As for fewer semis meaning less "freedom," remember that mass murder isn't a "freedom."

The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a reconciliation bill that attacks climate change, raises taxes on the rich and on corporations, and extends the Child Tax Credit expansion. Yeah, the Build Back Better Act failed last year, because Joe Manchin finally said "I just can't get there," but if we turn out in force to demand the things BBB would have done, we'll increase the possibility of him "getting there." And don't believe the Manchinean hype that the Child Tax Credit expansion drove inflation. First off, you'd think it would have come down by now, since the CTC expansion expired almost five months ago. Second, we all know there's a relationship between high prices and high corporate profits.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7597/S. 4076, the PFAS Firefighter Protection Act, which would keep PFAS chemicals out of firefighting foam. They don't call PFAS chemicals "forever chemicals" for nothing -- they leach into our drinking water and then our bodies and they don't break down, and firefighting foam is one of the main sources of PFAS chemicals. And if we really care so much about our first responders, then why do we expose them to chemicals that could give them cancer, thyroid problems, or reproductive issues? Don't believe the hype that PFAS-laden firefighting foam is the only or best option; at this writing at least 100 PFAS-free foams exist, and it seems unlikely they all suck.

The ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1693/S. 79, the EQUAL Act, which would equalize sentences for crack and powder cocaine and allow resentencing of past crack-related offenses. Over a decade ago, Congress reduced the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine from 100 to 1 to 18 to 1, and I guess that was progress, but we should go all the way to 1 to 1. Now some Democrats are afraid of doing anything daring about crime before the midterms, a strategy that very recent experience has taught us completely assures defeat at the polls. A lot of times you have to wonder if that's the idea. If so, history will treat them badly -- if any historians remain!

Finally, speaking of apocalyptic settings, the Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3932/S. 2076, the PASTEUR Act, which will fund research and development of new antibiotics. As you know, seven out of every 10 antibiotics don't go to sick people or animals, but to nominally healthy feed animals, ostensibly so as to make them meatier. But thanks to antibiotic abuse, we face a future of superbugs that can't be killed by antibiotics; you don't want to live to see folks sit around the campfire and say sure, the next cut can kill you now, but at least we had cheap chicken for a while! One way to ensure we don't is to keep researching, and finding, new and better antibiotics. So maybe do that instead of more corporate tax cuts?

Action: concerning law and order, drug prices, windfall profits, big ag monopolies, and the Shenandoah.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the 4th Amendment is Not for Sale Act, lower drug prices, pass a windfall profits tax on big oil corporations, and pass the Food and Agribusiness Merger Moratorium and Antitrust Review Act and the Shenandoah Mountain Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. This bill would prevent third-party data-gobblers from selling your personal data to law enforcement; our laws presently only prevent ISPs from selling that info, so we gotta close that loophole. The news hook right now is data-gobblers selling data on everyone who visited a Planned Parenthood for any reason -- and you can see why folks would be a little scared about that -- but fact is data brokers shouldn't be selling your personal data to law enforcement, and law enforcement shouldn't be able to get that data without a warrant. I know, warrants, how quaint.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk, for the umpteenth time, to lower prescription drug prices so good Americans don't go broke buying life-saving drugs. I don't know how many more times I have to talk about diabetics rationing their insulin before they get the picture, but duty is duty and they will get the picture. And how about that: lowering prices as an inflation-fighting tool, since that's literally what it is. Right-wingers call that "price controls" like that's a dirtier phrase than price-gouging. I suspect most Americans would say you want to control prices? What are you waiting for? My EpiPen shouldn't cost $600!

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a windfall profits tax on big oil corporations. Gas prices go through the roof, and big oil corporations make record profits -- c'mon, we're not schmucks. I'm old enough to remember when big corporations took the hit in profits rather than pass costs on to their customers, but we're a sick, immoral, and decadent society now, so corporations make us pay. And yeah, I've noticed the smaller gas stations have the lower prices! But let's not have small businesses carry an entire civilization on their backs, OK? Big oil corporations won't do the right thing until we make them.

Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7827/S. 4245, the Food and Agribusiness Merger Moratorium and Antitrust Review Act, which would set some limits on mergers in the agricultural sector. I'm old enough to remember when "big corporate farms eating up small farms" seemed to be the plot of every Hollywood movie! And it's so, so much worse now! Small farmers confront large monopoly power at almost every turn, and again, we should not ask the small farmer to shoulder responsibility for an entire civilization. Curbing mergers in big ag right now will at least give the small farmer some breathing room. And that's all the small farmer ever asks for.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 3911, the Shenandoah Mountain Act, which would permanently protect some 90,000 acres of the renowned Shenandoah Mountain area. This, again, is simple: we can protect one of the last undeveloped areas of the southern Appalachians, so good Americans and their children and their children's children can enjoy it -- or we can churn it up for energy that will disappear almost as soon as it's unearthed and mines and pipelines that'll spill filth into our drinking water. And no, we shouldn't churn up the area just to "create jobs." Preserving areas also creates jobs, for those who work to preserve it and those who help others enjoy it.

Around the table: in which we confront horrible truths about security, renewables, and campaigns.

Salon asks Brennan Center scholar Elizabeth Goitein "(w)hat would have been the worst-case outcome on Jan. 6." The answer? A military coup. And yet many Presidential emergency powers, granted through law by Congress, could also have wreaked havoc -- the Insurrection Act of course, but also the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which lets Presidents freeze bank accounts of Americans suspected of collaborating with a foreign power, and the Communications Act, which may allow our President to flip a kill-switch on our internet. And that's before we get to the emergency powers Presidents claim to have in the rarely-seen-I-wonder-why Presidential Emergency Action Documents.

In a related note, Branko Marketic at Jacobin tells us why we should be wary a domestic anti-terrorism bill like the one our House passed last week. Long story short: the bill isn't as repugnant as something Republicans would push and have pushed, but that's not a high bar to clear, and one could easily imagine its mechanisms being turned against liberals, as, indeed, all the other mechanisms of "national security" already have been. The Biden Administration still harasses anti-racism activists far too much, and a future Trump Administration (until the man dies, no sense imagining it'll be some other Republican) will do considerably worse.

When one hears that "Supply Chain Failures Prove Growing Need for Localized Economies," particularly with regard to food, one is right to ask: how do we help recreate local economies? The article suggests more than a few ways to do that -- from supporting mutual aid groups and farmers' markets all the way up to fighting "free" trade deals and supporting seed banks. We should also note that our FTC's proposed merger guidelines (which could also undo mergers) could be a good ally in this fight -- if we can keep corporations from getting absurdly huge, we can also keep them from throwing our lives into chaos at will.

This Harper's-style list about corporate involvement in spreading the "Great Replacement" theory should disabuse any notions we might have that corporations are somehow too "woke." Many corporations find racists to be useful idiots, since they distract folks from what the corporations are doing. It's like they're saying yeah, you did catch me polluting your water table, but before you shoot me, have you ever considered how Black and Brown folks get all the goodies and you can't get anything? And the reason you "can't get anything" is corporate power! And too many folks remember the good times, without remembering that reining in corporate power and taxing the rich were how we got the good times.

Arguing against renewable energy because of the extractive/exploitative effects of lithium mining sure is better than merely saying ha ha you're using coal to power your electric car! or passing around pictures of supposed "electric car graveyards" on Facebook, but it's no reason to throw up our hands and say we're just going to have to use oil and gas and coal forever, either. And it's also no reason to say every advance in technology exploits someone, as if the Indigenous folks who live near the salt lakes that provide around seven-eighths of all extracted lithium simply don't matter, or don't know better. The can-do thinker, of course, would be thinking past lithium in the first place.

Finally, Democrats are starting to see some of their early redistricting victories/non-losses get reversed in court. "(C)ollapsing across the map" is overly dramatic, but that's not the real issue: the real issue is that no Democrat should lose to any of these insane Republicans, and like the baseball manager who's already complaining about injuries three weeks into the season, Democratic politicians seem to be psyching themselves into doing just that. I sure hope I don't find out that it's always been about locking in the big campaign donations! After all, if you win, you have to do things, but if you lose, you can keep fundraising off the knuckle-dragger you just enabled to victory.

Action: concerning pollution, law and order, corporate taxes, non-disclosure agreements, and Fox News.

Long story short: tell our EPA to strengthen cross-state pollution rules, tell the city of San Francisco to investigate Jaxon Sales's death, tell Amazon shareholders to prod their corporation to pay more taxes, tell state legislatures to ban non-disclosure agreements between legislators and corporations, and tell your cable corporations to de-platform Fox News. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Climate Reality Project helps you tell our EPA to update our cross-state pollution rule. As you might suspect, big power plants' pollution doesn't obey state lines, but frequently travels to other, downwind states; our EPA could protect those downwind states better than they do, but first they need to hear from us that they need to do it. And not for nothing, but "downwind" often means, in practice, "toward Black and Brown neighborhoods." Cue right-wingers yelling now pollution is racist? Pollution doesn't have a will of its own, of course, but polluters do. Like how right-wingers disappear polluters from the conversation? Why, it's like that's the whole idea!

Change.org helps you tell the city of San Francisco investigate the mysterious death of Jaxon Sales in 2020. Mr. Sales apparently went on a blind date only to die in another man's bed with the notorious date-rape drug GHB in his system, yet city officials told his family they wouldn't investigate because gays use GHB. You know who else uses GHB? Rapists! Seems to me an investigation isn't too much to ask! And when you confront the city's other odd decisions, you might think they're protecting the man in whose bed Mr. Sales died. An investigation might help us not to think that.

Both Public Citizen and Americans for Tax Fairness help you tell Amazon shareholders to support a resolution calling for Amazon to pay its fair share of taxes. After all, if Amazon doesn't pay for police, firefighters, and libraries, then the rest of us have to pay more! And remember: shareholder resolutions don't have to win; they only have to demonstrate that a not-insignificant number of shareholders disagree with something the corporation is doing and that if the corporation doesn't change, they might take their money elsewhere. Certainly a shareholder resolution is a more peaceful way of resolving our differences than whatever the "Dark MAGA" crowd might employ.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell state legislatures to ban non-disclosure agreements (or NDAs) between legislators and corporations. To whom are state legislators supposed to account for their works? To their constituents! And non-disclosure agreements prevent that! They say they need non-disclosure agreements to ensure that people can speak candidly, but people speak candidly all the time! Anyone in politics who says they "feel" otherwise is full of shit! Corporations just don't want their unpopular (or unlawful!) "advice" to become public knowledge! And ask folks who signed NDAs with Donald Trump or Elon Musk how they feel about that decision now.

Finally, Inequality Media helps you tell big cable corporations to dump Fox News from their platforms. The Buffalo shooter's manifesto had a certain from-Fox's-lips-to-the-shooter's-ears quality to it, and though I wouldn't put Tucker Carlson in jail for those murders, I don't think corporations should compel us all to pay to keep Fox News on our cable platforms. Without Fox, folks would have to work harder for their masturbatory rage. Like it should be! (And remember: no one has a First Amendment "right" to a cable platform; one only has a First Amendment right not to get thrown in jail for their speech.)

Around the table: featuring people who fought for things!

Thomas Alter II at In These Times writes about "The Radical Immigrant Farmers Who Helped Defeat the Robber Barons." And by the end you might be saying oh, so that's why so many right-wingers seem to be so anti-immigrant these days! You might also be reminded that a lot of what we take for granted these days -- or, at least, what we took for granted half a century ago -- came about only because folks smeared as "radical" and "socialist" held their ground and fought for a better life. These farmers fought slavery in Texas, too; I don't know how many of my contemporary Americans would have fought slavery if they'd lived in Texas in 1848. But I do know how many of them are doing nothing about fascism in America today.

Speaking of which, Russian anti-war activists, facing jail time for the nefarious offense of opposing Mr. Putin's little adventure in Ukraine, have had to get a little more creative in spreading the word. We're not as close to an era where a One True Great and Awesome American President can just put people in jail for opposing his wars, but we are much closer to an era where a One True Great and Awesome American President can incite his votaries to smash heads of anti-war protestors. So if you see a lot of Paladin memes on Facebook during that time, that might be a good way for American anti-war protestors to find each other. Facebook's algorithms sure won't do it, because that only works for racists.

It's not a big surprise that pro-choicers overstate the case somewhat that abortions since Roe v. Wade are safer -- one would imagine technology has improved over the last 50 years! -- but right-wingers no doubt cite this very fact (though not likely from Snopes!) as if winning a point in an argument is exactly the same as winning the entire argument. It's a form of personal attack -- ha ha, you're incorrect on a technical point, therefore I win the whole game just for pointing it out! Let's see any of those clowns inflict their morality on their daughters when they get pregnant. They'll all be saying "it's her choice" at that very moment. And I'm not inclined to see that as a strength, but as a weakness -- I mean, if your values don't challenge you, they're not very good values.

Can we really know if "your practice of Buddhism through listening to podcasts or use of meditation apps is 'authentic'"? Not to put too fine a point on it, but yes, if you don't sit in awe of podcasts and apps as this completely unprecedented technology, or as a direct conduit to magic learning. Anyway, long story short: "If digital Buddhist practice approaches the good life as eudaimonic -- as leading to human flourishing based on the pursuit of a deeper meaning -- it can be judged to be authentic. An inauthentic practice is one that just furthers hedonism by merely peddling bliss and relaxation."

Rep. Madison Cawthorn (E-NC) lost the Republican primary for his own House seat last week -- after a series of scandalous behaviors came to light somehow, and please understand that by "somehow" I mean "by the will of other state Republicans" -- and, well, he's not taking it too well: "I am on a mission now to expose those who say and promise one thing yet legislate and work towards another, self-profiteering, globalist goal...It’s time for the rise of the new right, it’s time for Dark MAGA to truly take command." What does "dark MAGA" mean? Does it mean MAGA but actually shooting people? Seriously, the right needs to reinvent itself as a "new" right every few years because it has nothing nourishing to offer Americans; how many more of these must we sit through?

Finally, a Utah hunting guide faces jail time for baiting a bear out for Donald Trump, Jr. to shoot -- and he baited him out with "a pile of grain, oil and pastries"! I sure do hope "pastries" is what everyone remembers about this incident. Here's what else I hope folks remember: pretend-hunting -- hunting that isn't for subsistence, or even for training for the possibility of having to hunt for subsistence -- is uncivilized enough. But cheating at it is even worse! How lousy a shot is Trump the Younger?

Action: concerning voting rights, Medicare-for-All, corruption, Social Security, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to secure voting rights, enact a Medicare-for-All health insurance system, ban Congressional stock ownership, reject Andrew Biggs's nomination to our Social Security Advisory Board, and confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to protect our right to vote in America. Yeah, they've already refused to pass voting rights reform legislation several times -- or, more precisely, refused to get rid of the filibuster so they can pass it without Republican votes -- but that only means we keep telling them and telling them and telling them until they have no choice but to do our will. Best also to let them know that their love of the filibuster is horseshit. How do we know? Because they had a chance to enact a compromise -- force Senators to actually talk through their filibuster like in the old days -- and they wouldn't do that, either.

National Nurses United helps you tell your Senators to enact a Medicare-for-All health insurance system. Last week I described how Medicare for All would save good Americans money, but I should also describe how the privatized health insurance system costs us money: by putting up bureaucratic roadblocks to care that end up being rationalizations to deny care -- you think anyone in a single-payer country knows what a referral is? -- and also, of course, by jacking up the cost of medicine like (most famously) EpiPen and insulin. These are life-saving drugs, so big corporations can charge whatever they want, and you just have to pay it! Wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to do that?

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6678/S. 3631, the Ban on Congressional Stock Ownership Act, which would prevent members of Congress from owning stocks. Back in February, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (E-GA), who has on occasion tried to cast herself as someone who's against all these stupid wars we fight, bought somewhere up to $15,000 of Lockheed Martin stock a mere two days before Russia invaded Ukraine, and I would think folks naive if they thought she did that blindly. And she's far from the worst offender in Congress! Now, this bill has actual bipartisan support, but isn't moving very quickly; couldn't be that they're hoping we don't know anything about it, could it? Too late!

Civic Shout helps you tell your Senators to reject the nomination of one Andrew Biggs to our Social Security Advisory Board. Why? Easy: no one who wants to privatize Social Security should serve on the board of Social Security. Why, putting him on the Social Security Advisory Board would be like putting insurrectionists on the January 6 Committee! You know, for "balance." Just as there is no possible "balance" between freedom and fascism, there is no possible "balance" between Social Security and those who'd privatize it. Every time the stock market dips from now on, just ask a Republican: aren't you glad we didn't privatize Social Security like you wanted to do?

Finally, More Perfect Union helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner already. How do we know she'd do a good job? You know, besides the fact that she worked on our FCC's net neutrality order from 2016? Because the Fraternal Order of Police (who asked them? Big money did!) has campaigned against Ms. Sohn for her support of end-to-end encryption; they're afraid end-to-end encryption will keep them from doing their jobs. Jesus Mary and Joseph all they need to do is get warrants! Encryption won't save criminals from warrants; it could save us from government spying, though. Seems to me we'd want more anti-spying people in our government.

Around the table: in which someone actually proposes saddling all elections with an Electoral College.

This FactCheck article does a pretty good job summarizing our recent baby formula issues. I'm reminded that when you hear "should immigrant babies get formula before American babies?" that a better question would be: so babies don't deserve formula merely because they're immigrants? And if the answer is "well, not before our babies do," then ask why the Greatest Nation on Earth should have to choose. Marcus Aurelius would shake his head at all of that.

Colorado Republican gubernatorial candidate wants to bring the Electoral College to Colorado statewide elections! Why a man would think "doing away with the popular vote for statewide elected officials" is a winning message is a bit of a mystery. If he were to somehow succeed in this nefarious plan, I can't say for sure our Supreme Court would strike it down, even though precedent commands it. Perhaps Sam Alito would say one-person-one-vote isn't a deeply-rooted enough right.

An anti-price-gouging bill aimed at oil corporations -- not the Windfall Profits Tax Act, but not a bad bill -- barely passed the House, with four House Democrats joining all Republicans in voting against it. Naturally Democrat anti-bill arguments were all hostage-taking: if we fight price-gouging, what will we do when we need more oil later? Why, you could argue against almost anything that way! If we put this CEO in jail for butchering his secretary and drinking her blood and eating the flesh from her bones, what'll we do when we need his leadership later? Of course, a truly great nation wouldn't need to answer that, because a truly great nation would train its people up into greatness. Clearly we've failed there with folks like Rep. Kathleen Rice, last heard helping to scuttle efforts to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices.

Hamilton Nolan at In These Times tells us that the Amazon Labor Union victory in Staten Island, NY, requires organizers to recognize that "all of the time unions spend arguing with one another over who has the right to organize which workers, in which industry, at which company is one gargantuan waste of time." You'd think unions would already have thought of that, being on the ropes for the last 40-odd years as the share of union workers in the economy has dwindles from around 33% to around 10%, but then being on the ropes against an economy that seems to grow more diabolical by the day may make you inclined to cling to what you've been doing and tell yourself you just need to do it harder. Still, as Mr. Nolan says, "(b)uilding multi-union coalitions requires unions to recognize the futility of arguing over jurisdiction, and instead do the opposite: combine forces and organize without freaking out over who gets to put their label on the end product."

When I read David Brooks telling us that liberals need to stop looking down on right-wingers and pretending that only they have a monopoly on understanding right and wrong, I am tempted to replace the word "liberal" with the word "right-winger" everywhere in that op-ed and guess what? It works about as well that way; liberals certainly have no monopoly on believing their way is the only way. David Brooks apparently didn't hear any right-wingers calling Iraq war opponents traitors 20 years ago, let alone right-wingers constantly calling liberals weak since time immemorial, and that's the kind of blind spot that'll never help you ingratiate yourself with your new Democrat friends. (And those of us who do not imagine a wall between what Mr. Brooks calls the "moral freedom" ethos and the "you are not your own" ethos won't be persuaded, or even enriched, by the last 36 paragraphs. We certainly won't be convinced that the conservative worldview's "existential()...crisis" is a recent phenomenon. That carcass has been stinking up the joint for years.)

Finally, a right-winger actually tells Congress, under oath, that "places like Washington, D.C." use fetuses to power street lamps. As with right-wing efforts to call everyone who doesn't beat up a gay person a "groomer," I think legal remedies already exist to redress such absurdities. Never mind that she actually said that under oath; anyone can pretend they thought what they said was true as far as they "knew." No, someone with standing to sue needs to sue her -- someone with decision-making power in the D.C. utility grid, perhaps? And no, her saying "places like Washington, D.C." won't give her wiggle room; everyone knows what she meant. Playing whack-a-mole with these lies won't save us, but getting the liars to pay in a court of law might.

Action: concerning climate change, corruption, pollution, mine reclamation, and peaceful protests.

Long story short: tell Home Depot to stop using the Canadian boreal forest for its products, tell our government to investigate FDA corruption in re our baby formula shortage, tell our Army Corps of Engineers to examine pollution from pipelines more vigorously, tell President Biden to nominate a Director of the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, and tell the Washington Post to stop calling for the removal of peaceful protestors outside Supreme Court Justices' houses. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Environmental Action helps you tell Home Depot to stop sourcing its wood products from the Canadian boreal forest. Our reasoning is the same for our world's largest intact forest as it would be with the Amazon rainforest or the Tongass National Forest: old trees are our best weapon against climate change; they don't call them "the lungs of the planet" for nothing. Thus turning them into cabinets or toilet paper is, in this context, rather short-sighted. And if we can prompt the world's largest hardware store into abandoning logging in the forest, we'll likely get others to follow. If not, the Big Stick of Bad PR is always ready for deployment.

Progress America helps you tell our government to investigate our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) for its role in our current baby formula shortage. And I don't care what corruption at our FDA this uncovers! If you don't want to get shamed and shunned by your civilization, then don't hurt people. Chances are that investigators will find that the revolving door between industry and our FDA doesn't help us deal with food safety crises, and they might also find that our FDA has given established baby formula-manufacturing corporations too much of a free pass on safety inspections. That'd be a shame to learn that, but knowledge is power.

The Climate Reality Project helps you tell our Army Corps of Engineers to close the loopholes that big oil and gas drilling corporations use to evade scrutiny about the pollution their proposed pipelines cause. Specifically, we'll call for less "fast-tracking" of pipelines. We should be "fast-tracking" solar and wind projects, if we must "fast-track" anything at all! Yet big oil and gas drilling corporations constantly assert that their pipelines are "too urgent" to ensure they don't spew filth into our water tables. But no one will be sitting around a campfire in a hundred years saying we can't drink the water now, but at least CEOs made good money for a while!

The Sierra Club helps you tell President Biden to nominate a Director of the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement. We should blame our Senate for dragging their feet on confirming Mr. Biden's nominees, but this one's on our President, because he hasn't even put a name forward. The long name gives you the idea that this is some bureaucratic rando, but with all the coal mines closing up around America, reclaiming and repurposing that land becomes a lot more important, and someone's got to run things at the department that would do that work. And, ah, this is the kind of thing that actually helps potential Trump voters in Appalachia. So how about we do it?

Finally, FAIR helps you tell the Washington Post to stop calling for the repression of peaceful protesting outside of Supreme Court Justice's homes. They actually suggested these protestors were totalitarians! By suggesting that they were "(e)rasing any distinction between the public square and private life"! Key word there, of course, is any -- protesting outside of the private homes of public figures who have, very publicly, made known their opposition to the popular will does not erase literally "any" distinctions between public and private spheres. And, ah, who exactly "harassed" or "intimidated" these Justices? If anything, protestors have been too polite.

Around the table: in which we describe yet more foolish behavior.

Malia Jones at The Conversation advises that we stop obsessing about "risk assessment" in re COVID and return to risk reduction: "wearing masks, getting vaccinated and boosted, avoiding indoor crowds and improving ventilation." The last item often requires legislation (for public buildings) and/or shaming and shunning (for private buildings), but you have a lot more control over the first three items. Remember: you're better off trusting an actual epidemiologist on these matters than a social media "influencer."

Study reverses memory loss in aging mice by "washing" their brains in cerebrospinal fluid. The fluid apparently washes out waste products, bathes brain tissue in proteins, and boosts growth of myelin, the sheathing material that protects neurons. Needless to say no one's done this in humans yet, but if it works anywhere near as well as it did in mice, it could be a game-changer in treating dementia and similar conditions. I wish the researchers (from at least four nations!) the best in continuing their work. If only spinal fluid could wash out the memory of watching all those pricks on Fox News!

Find yourself cringing a bit that Spain has outlawed harassment of women who try to get abortions at clinics? The key word in that formulation is harassment -- you don't need to be that creative, of course, to exercise your right to free speech without actually harassing an individual. But I would have struck the words "annoying" or "offensive" from the list of proscribed behaviors -- let shame, not the law, handle that stuff; outlawing "intimidating or coercive acts" is justice enough. It'll all be moot in the United States, of course, once our Supreme Court rules there's no right to an abortion anymore.

When I hear that Elon Musk says he'll be voting entirely for Republicans this year because Democrats are "too much captured by the unions" which is to laugh, I can't help but think I might be using that information as a reason not to vote for Republicans! But in truth, we've got enough evil to which we can tie Republicans (book banning, immaturity about masks and vaccines, fear about confronting their own racism, and of course, January 6), and also Elon Musk just isn't as unpopular as other titans of industry such as Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg. At least, not yet.

Gov. Ron DeSantis (E-FL) has signed a bill that actually makes protesting in front of a private home illegal. How typical -- if someone, somewhere, is being an asshole, Ron DeSantis gets insanely jealous and tries to be an even bigger one. And where sane people see peaceful protestors, Mr. DeSantis sees only "angry mobs," which sure is rich coming from a man who obviously aspires to be a one-man angry mob. I'd say our Supreme Court would smack this down with a quickness, citing the precedent about protesting at abortion workers' homes, of course, though given how many good Americans have protested their houses lately, I'd just as soon expect the opposite -- which sure would be ironic, coming from a gang of jurists who've spent their lives devaluing other folks' lived experiences.

Finally, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says he opposes NATO membership for Finland and Sweden, and though I prefer not to resort to ad hominem arguments, if Mr. Erdogan's against it, that's a pretty good reason to be for it. And dig his reasoning! Finland and Sweden haven't "taken a clear stance against terror organizations"? I think everyone's taken a "clear stance" against "terror organizations," though we may disagree that the Kurdistan Workers’ Party actually is a "terror organization." Anyway, yammering on about "terror organizations" is what dictators do. We know Mr. Erdogan's a dictator not just by what he does, and not just by how easily he wins re-election these days, but by the fact that our former President has such a hard-on for him.

Action: concerning Iran, gas prices, drug addiction, our Supreme Court, and our past mistreatment of Native Americans.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to support the Iran nuclear deal, lower gas prices, and pass the MAT Act, the Judiciary Act, and the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Peace Action helps you tell your House Reps to support re-entry into the Iran nuclear deal. Congressfolk on both sides have shown a disquieting unwillingness to re-enter that deal, and for what? To appease Trumpholes? To "put distance" between them and President Biden? To gain imaginary and irrelevant leverage over Iran's Republican Guard? Gosh, how about doing the right thing for the right reason for once? The Iran nuclear deal was keeping Iran from developing nuclear weapons, but because Donald Trump decided to shit all over anything Barack Obama did that actually helped Americans, he took it away from us. And now Congress wants to make it harder to get it back? Tell them no.

Change.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to "protect Americans and keep gas prices low," because sometimes you gotta be simple and direct. And also sometimes because your Congressfolk are thick-headed because they only talk to each other and Beltway consultants! Recall Katie Porter telling us that her Democratic colleagues didn't talk about inflation because they didn't see anything about it in polling? The stupid is strong with some of our Reps and Senators! Anyway, if you want to deliver a more specific message -- like "pass H.R. 7061/S. 3802, the Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act, which would tax excessive oil corporation profits at 95%," you can add that to your signature.

People's Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1384/S. 445, the Mainstreaming Addiction Treatment (or MAT) Act. All this locking people up for using and abusing drugs, tell me: has that worked? No, it has not, by the evidence that far too many Americans are still addicted to drugs. The MAT Act would remove certain bureaucratic obstacles to prescribing certain narcotic drugs that treat addiction. "Removing certain bureaucratic obstacles" may be the argument that seems to have attracted a stunning 46 House Republican co-sponsors! But only three in the Senate, meaning the Mitch McConnell Obstruction Machine may yet roll over it. Unless we speak out in numbers they can't deny, of course.

Stand Up America helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2584, the Judiciary Act, which would increase the number of Supreme Court Justices from 9 to 13. I've been saying we need four more Justices to keep up with 13 federal Appeals Courts, but recent events have made the necessity of getting better Justices up there more urgent to me. And I'm sure it's even more urgent for the women and gays and transgender folks who would be directly affected by Sam Alito's made-up "deeply-rooted" doctrine. I'm able to imagine such a thing because I possess the quality of empathy, a quality today's Supreme Court Justices seem to suppress. Surely Joe Biden can find four more Justices who get what it's like to be human.

Finally, the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5444/S. 2908, the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act. Federal boarding schools aimed to "civilize" the Native American, but they separated families and abused students, which ain't exactly civilized behavior. Some folks will refer to this bill as an "apology tour" or "cancel culture" or whatnot, but admitting you've done wrong, and then righting that wrong, is about as American as America can be. Note well that the Quakers put out this action alert and the Quakers admit their own past wrongdoing in running more than two dozen boarding schools! That's how you do it.

Around the table: in which we identify the *real* extremists.

Surprise, surprise, an Anti-Defamation League study of 450 murders committed by domestic extremists in America (like the Buffalo murders earlier this week) concludes that right-wingers commit about 75% of them. (By their tabulation, Muslim extremists commit 20% and left-wing extremists commit a mere 4%.) "(T)he American political right has a violence problem that has no equivalent on the left," the article says, but that only means right-wingers will simply redefine "murder" until it includes things like not inviting right-wingers to your barbecues or shaming your right-wing father-in-law for watching Tucker Carlson. I've even heard right-wingers call such things "a kind of death"! You know what's "a kind of death"? Death.

Researchers at Brown University and Microsoft AI Health inform us that if every American adult had gotten vaccinated, we could have saved well over 300,000 lives. Against over 1 million dead, that's a sizable amount. An earlier Kaiser study put that number at 234,000 -- by not counting folks who'd died while vaccinated-but-not-boosted -- and I put more persuasive power in that figure, since not getting boosted was more likely not a matter of ideology. Still, that's more than one out of every five deaths. And the other side's argument is all waaaaaaah personal choice you can't tell me what to do stop the steal!

When I hear that "Online data could be used against people seeking abortions if Roe v. Wade falls" -- a perfectly explicable outcome, since most folks turn to the internet for information about reproductive health care! -- I am reminded that the FCC passed pretty good data privacy rules in 2016, but Congressional Republicans nullified them in 2017 with a quickness, because if it's an instance of government helping you, then Republicans must shit on it. Also too, law enforcement can search your cellphones without even getting a warrant because legislators either don't understand technology or go out of their way not to understand it because big campaign donors don't want them to.

Ho hum, Mississippi, the state that aims to end Roe v. Wade via its 15-week anti-abortion law, also just so happens to be the worst state in the Deep South for providing health insurance coverage to low-income women. Medicaid recipients get only 60 days' worth of post-partum care in Mississippi (though the Affordable Care Act allows expansion of that care to one year), though at least one study found that over 80% of post-partum health care costs come after 60 dats. Why, it's like that was the whole idea! I'd look for big corporations to pressure to pull out of Mississippi, but there ain't hardly any there to begin with; Republicans really are going to run that state into the ground, which will hurt all the good folks who live there.

Buried deep in this excellent Steven Rosenfeld piece about Pennsylvania's Republican nominee for Governor, Doug Mastriano is a description of the first Josh Shapiro attack ad against him, and it's like the ad's makers rolled up as much Democrat weakness as humanly possible into one ad, which you don't even know is an anti-Mastriano ad until the end! Look, here's how to attack Doug Mastriano: call him weak for refusing to accept the 2020 election results and doing his damnedest to overturn them. Republicans love wearing Democrat epithets, from "deplorable" all the way to "ultra-MAGA," as badges of honor; let's see Mr. Mastriano work that alchemy with the word "weak." I'd say I hope it makes him melt down in public, except that public melt-downs aren't the career-enders they used to be. Just ask our former screamer-in-chief, Donald Trump.

Finally, maybe the Buffalo shooter could evade any plagiarism charges Tucker Carlson might level against him, but the part of their collaborative work I can't stand is this anti-diversity argument from Mr. Carlson: "Can you think, for example, of other institutions such as, I don’t know, marriage or military units in which the less people have in common, the more cohesive they are?" Ahem: civilization is not a marriage or a military unit; these two institutions are parts of civilization, and insisting that the whole of civilization be exactly like any of its parts is small-minded. Even 15 years ago I thought Tucker Carlson was doing the best he could as a conservative; now I think he was just fronting, and his current fascist-worship was the endgame all along.

Action: concerning law and order, food safety, abortion rights, cluster bombs, and social media.

Long story short: tell governments to end cash bail, tell our FDA to limit lead in fruit juice, tell your state legislators not to restrict abortion rights, tell President Biden to join the Convention on Cluster Munitions, and tell your pension fund to support shareholder resolutions that would rein in Facebook's bad behavior. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Daily Kos helps you tell our state, local, and federal governments to end cash bail. Don't listen to the loud voices saying how can cops do their job without cash bail? If you can't do your job without holding people indefinitely without trial, then you need to find a new job. Our Constitution guarantees your right to a "speedy trial," not a "trial whenever we get around to it so we can reassure the weak we're doing something about crime." Certainly you have a right to a speedy trial even if you don't have a crapload of money! And if a poll tax is unconstitutional, why isn't cash bail?

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to put a stricter limit on lead in fruit juice. Our FDA has proposed lowering the current limit on lead in fruit juice from 50 parts per billion to 10 ppb for apple juice and 20 for other juices, but manufacturers are perfectly capable of meeting a more stringent 1 ppb limit -- even if they say it'll "cost them money"! -- and that lower limit sure would be a whole lot better for folks who drink it. Especially kids! They'd have a lot less brain damage, cancer, and diabetes, that's for sure, and thus a longer life, with more potential for doing big things. That is what America's about, after all.

With the impending reversal of Roe v. Wade, Roots Action helps you tell your state legislators not to restrict the right to abortion. I've been loathe to criticize pro-lifers in the past -- though not pro-life politicians, particularly the ones who make their mistresses get abortions! -- but I suspect a lot of pro-lifers simply don't understand that (for example) a woman who tries to carry her fetus to term, but has to abort it because it'll kill her if she doesn't, isn't a "murderer." When it happens to them, perhaps they'll get it, but I wouldn't wish that on anyone, and if I can get it -- having absolutely no chance at ever getting pregnant myself -- then why can't they?

Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to join the world cluster bomb ban, particularly now that Russia and Ukraine are using cluster bombs on each other. Over 100 nations have banned cluster bombs by signing onto the Convention on Cluster Munitions, but of course we're not one of them. Seems to me that if you're a law-and-order adherent, you'd oppose cluster bombs. Why? Because they kill people long after the war is over, which is neither lawful nor orderly. Let's not become so decadent a civilization that we beat our chests about how lawful we are but then let unexploded bombs kill people 50 years after we've all forgotten we were ever enemies.

Finally, Sum of Us helps you tell your pension fund to vote in favor of shareholder resolutions that would curb Facebook's ability to injure our civilization, i.e., with their algorithms that help white supremacists find each other easily. Now, because Mark Zuckerberg gives him and his cronies 10 votes for every vote everyone else casts, the resolutions won't win. But they rarely do! Even a resolution that gets 25% demonstrates that shareholders might be willing to take their money elsewhere, and executives tend to poop their pants at that thought. Maybe I should put the image of Mark Zuckerberg pooping his pants in folks' heads more often.

Around the table: tabulating even more right-wing drama!

House January 6 panel subpoenas five Republican House Reps, including wannabe-Speaker Kevin McCarthy. At the risk of going out on a limb, I expect he'll defy the subpoena, because that's what hard guys do! Laws aren't for him; laws are for Those People! All that will endear him with Trump votaries, who hold these two beliefs as irrefutable truth. (As an aside, if justice seems to be moving a little slowly, recall that Joe Lieberman had subpoena power during the Enron hearings but didn't use it.)

Guess what else is causing our current baby formula shortage? Big corporations dissuading our FDA from conducting more regular/more stringent inspections, that's what! Because waaaaaaaah it'll cost us money, though Abbott Nutrition (the corporation with all the contaminated baby food!) spent $5 billion last year just on stock buybacks. Remember: when you give corporations more money, they don't do the right thing. When do they do the right thing? When we make them do the right thing, through vigorous safety inspection and regulation.

Is it nice to know that Tucker Carlson's recent drama about a purported "masculinity crisis" is older than dirt? I'm not sure anymore. Anyway, long before the bow-tied Hungry Man heir, Bernarr Macfadden trained Italian fasicsts and told us they were more vigorous than Americans, which sure turned out to be a laugh once World War II started and Germany had to bail them out, and even President Eisenhower's Council on Youth Fitness came about because we were afraid the Communists were more manly, though today's "Communists" are somehow 97-pound weaklings and unstoppable killers all at once. And if you're tempted to think the guy who went on an all-milk diet seems harmless by comparison, recall that we have just had a two-year education in how health fads can be most emphatically not-harmless.

Republican Governors Youngkin of Virginia and Hogan of Maryland tell our Justice Department to crack down on protests at Supreme Court Justices' houses, but I bet you just can't guess why they can't do that: because our Supreme Court long ago decided that going to the homes of Planned Parenthood workers was also First Amendment-protected free speech! Of course Messrs. Youngkin and Hogan know that; they're just stirring up drama, like all right-wingers do. "(P)reserve the integrity of our American judicial system" my ass -- Sam Alito just made up a rule aiming to scuttle 70 years of American jurisprudence.

Ho hum, Michael Grabell at ProPublica describes "The Plot to Keep Meatpacking Plants Open During COVID-19." Long story short: "the callousness of meatpacking executives and the level of industry influence over the Trump administration were far greater than previously known." Emblematic of that callousness, Tyson implemented mask-wearing and social-distancing on the chicken lines very quickly -- in China, not in the United States! Result: by July of 2020 you could tie over 6% of all COVID-19 cases to meatpacking plants, and then a few months later these meatpacking corporations were all desperate for schools to reopen, and you know why. I hope their 300% profit hikes get them into heaven, because I'm not sure anything else will.

Finally, Arizona Attorney General/Senate candidate Mark Brnovich's 2020 election lies are so brazen anymore that even Arizona Republicans have slammed him for it. I won't call this drama per se, since everyone can see the extensive documentary evidence of Mr. Brnovich's two-facedness on this issue, but I don't want to give Arizona Republicans too much credit, either, for without that evidence they might have more easily brushed off his evil works. See, thanks to January 6, I can hardly give Republicans the benefit of the doubt anymore. And I don't think that's my failing! Sooner or later, America has to get back to blaming the real villains.

Action: concerning baby formula, Medicare for All, paid leave, drug prices, and price-gouging.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to fix the baby formula crisis, expand Medicare to include all Americans, pass paid family/sick leave, lower drug prices and expand home health care, and pass a windfall profits tax on oil and gas corporations. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. You've heard of the national baby formula shortage, which is a matter of life and death for a lot of babies? Matt Stoller explains why it's happening -- short answer: monopolies -- and prescribes solutions, which you may call your Congressfolk about. These solutions include: temporarily allowing baby formula imports, particularly from nations with good (or better) food safety regulations; restructuring food stamp markets so they don't create baby formula monopolies; and breaking up our FDA so that one agency doesn't regulate both food and drugs. We may not get the change we need right away, but if we keep at it, it will. And if we do nothing, we'll get nothing.

National Nurses United helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare to include all Americans. Medicare for All will cover more folks for less money, end of story. Don't believe me? Believe the right-wing Mercatus Center, which tabulated the cost of Medicare for All at $32 trillion over 10 years -- or some $17 trillion less than the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid's forecast of all health care spending over the next decade. How do you pay for it, then? Simple: assess an employer-side payroll tax (meaning workers don't pay it!) amounting to what big corporations already pay for the private health insurance that rejects your claims for no good reason and doesn't cover everyone.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact paid family and sick leave for all Americans. Since right-wingers constantly squeal WHEREZ WILLZ YOUZ FINDZ TEH MONEYZ!!!!!, I'll note that Sen. Gillibrand's original bill would have funded it with a 0.4% payroll tax (half paid by the employer, half by the worker), which, for someone making $50,000 annually, would amount to a little over $8 a month. $8! So everyone can take time off to take care of their kids, or their parents, or their grandparents, or themselves when they need to. And I'd fund it by bringing back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income and the 55% tax on corporate profits, which wouldn't be "socialism" so much as "what we did in the 1950s."

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower prescription drug prices and expand at-home health care services. Most people want these things, so why can't Congress do it? Because Republicans won't do it! And also because Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema won't do it, because they think they're so much smarter than everyone else! In 2 1/2 years if not sooner, these fools will be shown the error of their ways; wouldn't it be nice if a massive popular outcry helped them see the error of their ways sooner? That goes for your Republican Reps and Senators, too. If enough of us speak out, then doing nothing will actually get them fired for once.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a windfall profits tax on big oil corporations. Because sky-high prices shouldn't lead to sky-high profits! I'm old enough to remember when corporations didn't raise prices solely because of increased costs. Why? Partly because shame still meant something back then, and also partly because we had fewer monopolies then, so we had a higher chance of finding a corporation that wouldn't rob you merely because it had the opportunity. Now they just gouge us because they can. If we pass a windfall profits tax on them, then they can't.

Around the table: special "Pennsylvania primary drama" edition!

So Donald Trump endorsed state Sen./January 6 attendee Doug Mastriano for Pennsylvania's Republican nomination for Governor mere days before the Tuesday primary, and one feels compelled to ask: what took him so long? Mr. Trump sure does like to get behind a winner, and Mr. Mastriano has had a pretty hefty lead in most polls for a few weeks now; that probably explains it. State Republicans say he can't win, but surely they understand things better than that! Republican wave or no, Mr. Mastriano has a decent shot against state Attorney General/presumptive Democratic nominee Josh Shapiro, particularly if Mr. Shapiro does the Democrat thing and act like he's got it in the bag.

Meanwhile, does the Trump camp seriously expect us to believe, in re Kathy Barnette's late surge in the PA Republican Senate nomination race, that "no one saw this coming"? I saw this coming, and I get paid by the hour! Of course, I mistakenly thought Jeff Bartos would benefit from "not being one of the two rich out-of-state guys in the race," but apparently his role in this drama has only been to take front-runners out, first Sean Parnell (he leaked the news of Mr. Parnell's divorce proceedings, you may recall), and then Messrs. Oz and McCormick (if I saw the ad he ran on that topic once I saw it a hundred times). Still, anyone could have seen this coming, particularly students of Deb Fischer's 2012 Senate campaign in Nebraska.

Much has been said about Ms. Barnette's loose tongue on Twitter since she's become a thing, but I take particular exception to her claim that "homosexuals LEAD with their sexual preference" (shouty caps in original). No, Ms. Barnette, you "lead with their sexual preference" by only talking about gays in terms of sex, which is but one aspect of anyone's life. I don't know how many more ways I can put this. Fun fact: Ms. Barnette lost in Pennsylvania's 4th House district in 2020 by 19 points -- and not only wouldn't concede defeat, but launched at least one frivolous lawsuit to stop it from happening!

And yet Republican efforts to stop Ms. Barnette's candidacy reek of desperation, as would any last-minute effort to stop a candidate whose surge you didn't see until it was far too late. I can't get away from that "Crazy Kathy Barnette" ad on TV (and if she were a man, think they'd call her "crazy"?). The ad not only takes alleged "praise" for Barack Obama and Black Lives Matter way, way out of context, but repeats phrases like "white racism" and "structural racism" with a sneer, as if that alone makes them "crazy" things to say! I could never vote for Ms. Barnette in the general election, but I hope she beats her opponents' asses beet-red in the primary, because the "Crazy" ad is exactly the kind of thing that should bring shame and shunning upon anyone who creates it.

Finally, the New York Times wonders why Rep. Conor Lamb, despite "Ha(ving) All the Makings of a Front-Runner," is not actually the front-runner in the race for the Pennsylvania Democratic Senate nomination. I wouldn't blame you if you shot out because liberals are sick of this shit, that's why, but at least the Times did cite that (not in those precise words) as one of the two reasons, the other being the Lamb campaign's own "missteps." What were these "missteps"? Taking front-running status for granted, trying to appear "above the fray," calling yourself the "most electable" candidate -- in short, all of the things Democratic consultants always tell their candidates to do! If folks like John Fetterman and Lucas Kunce and Gary Chambers and Charles Booker can win their Senate elections this year, maybe folks will stop listening to the defeatist pablum of Democratic consultants. Why, folks might even realize that they're the reason Democrats went from (in Paul Begala's words) "the party of the factory floor to the party of the faculty lounge."

Action: concerning inflation, pollution, corruption, law and order, and immigration.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ending Corporate Greed Act, the Green New Deal for Public Schools Act, the Bipartisan Ban on Congressional Stock Ownership Act, and the People's Response Act, and tell your Congressfolk to end the Title 42 program. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7443/S. 3933, the Ending Corporate Greed Act, which would tax excess corporate profits at 95%. Want to do something about inflation, Democrats? This is it! Let Republicans explain how no corporate profit can really be "excess"! Let Republicans pretend record-high corporate profits have nothing to do with high prices! Most Americans are smarter than that -- yeah, supply chain issues have also contributed to inflation, but mainly it's corporate greed. Of course, this'll only work if Democrats bang that saucepan. And they'll only bang that saucepan if we bang that saucepan first, as loud as we can.

Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4442, the Green New Deal for Public Schools Act. The original Green New Deal was always a simple "sense of Congress" resolution, but this bill would actually remake our public schools into energy-saving, climate-helping, job-creating buildings, and it would, according to scientists, accomplish the equivalent of taking 17 million jobs off the road. Republicans will whine about the price tag -- $140 billion annually for the next decade. Can you think of anything Republicans have done lately that cost that much or more and did no good? Oh, right, the 2017 tax "reform." So drink a big glass of STFU, Republicans.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6678/S. 3631, the Bipartisan Ban on Congressional Stock Ownership Act, which would pretty much do what it says it'll do -- prevent members of Congress and their spouses from owning any stocks, bonds, derivatives, and the like. Because owning them clouds your judgment when you have to make decisions about them! Which is obvious to anyone who thinks about it! The list of exceptions in Sec. 2(c) -- T-bills, public pension funds, other investments that don't present a conflict of interest -- could be pared down a bit; a lot of public pension funds are in the death-grip of hedge funds these days. But this still represents progress.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4194, the People's Response Act, which would fund alternative public safety responses -- alternative to policing, that is. Some folks would call that "defunding the police," but I suspect they're the same people who call everything "socialism" and "Communism"; this bill wouldn't "defund the police," but would fund approaches like mental health workers and youth programs that would work better than throwing everyone in jail all the time. It'd take a lot of pressure off our police, too; I say that if you want to "support the police," you stop asking them to do every conceivable thing like our brains are that flexible.

Finally, the Progressive Reform Network helps you tell your Congressfolk to end the xenophobic Title 42 program. A lot of Congressfolk -- including, even, some Democrats I actually like! -- are acting like the end of Title 42 would be the end of the world, but that's rubbish. Title 42 expels would-be immigrants without their lawfully-mandated legal hearings for "health reasons," but has it kept COVID numbers down in the U.S.? Obviously not! Right-wingers who refused to mask and refused to get vaccines powered the COVID pandemic quite well enough on their own, thank you very much! So this is no time for any politician to strut like a peacock about being "tough" on immigration.

Around the table: in which Democrats maybe get a clue, or maybe they don't.

Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA), who deserves re-election as much as or more than any other Congressperson, tells us Democrats are having trouble realizing just how bad inflation affects working families. One of her colleagues told her "we're not seeing it in the polls," apparently completely unaware of how that would sound to anyone who doesn't breathe Beltway air. You don't find out what you need to know through polls! You find out through talking to your constituents. Who are also your bosses. (And Ms. Porter aims her anger at CEOs, which more Democrats should try. Bosses aren't that popular, as you know -- except with other bosses and the politicians who eat out of their hands.)

That being said, the latest inflation figures actually comprise better news, perhaps better than our "liberal" media would like. CNBC's headline talks of "inflation barrel(ling) ahead," but the year-to-year rate actually dropped from 8.6% to 8.3%, while the month-to-month rate dropped rather more sharply, from 1.2% in March to 0.3% in April; if inflation grew at the April rate for a year, the yearly rate would be 3.6%, while at the March rate, it'd be 14.4%. That's a big deal, and only Beltway insiders care that it "fell short of forecasts." Regular Americans don't buy bacon with forecasts.

How do "liberal" media outlets "manufacture opinion" on the Title 42 immigration issue, according to David W. Moore at FAIR? By inducing as many folks as possible to actually answer the question -- despite the fact that very few Americans pay very close attention to it -- first by omitting a "don't know" or "unsure" or "no opinion" option, and then by giving respondents rather incomplete information about the issue. Fox News's poll, for example, suggested to respondents that Title 42 was entirely a health care issue; did they note that would-be immigrants actually have a right to a hearing before being deported, which Title 42 denies? Of course not -- just as they didn't note that right-wingers kept this pandemic going quite well on their own, without help from "caravans" and the like.

Alex Pareene talks with Tom Scocca about automobile dependence, apparently an acute problem in New York City, where I have never considered driving anywhere to be a good idea. Our governments' devotion to public transit has been wanting for, oh, just spit-balling here, for a little over 40 years, which maps easily onto Mr. Pareene's discussion about "how quickly and easily you become a sociopath, even a borderline eugenicist, behind the wheel." It's a great discussion, one that almost offhandedly births a great idea: stop calling them "accidents" and start calling them "automobile violence."

I actually had to remind myself that Steve Bannon's threat against Mark Esper for the horrible crime of telling everyone how terrible Donald Trump's last year in office truly was is drama, just like it is whenever right-wingers attack each other. I guess we'll know it's drama when Mr. Esper utterly fails to sue Mr. Bannon, since terroristic threats -- even deliberately vague ones -- do not enjoy First Amendment protection. (No, it really is a threat! The only way "(w)hen we come to power...You are going to be held accountable for this, bro" is not a threat is if Mr. Bannon had said, right beforehand, "ignore everything I'm about to say.")

Finally, the Democrats' new line of attack against Republicans -- calling them "ultra-MAGA" -- shouldn't give us much hope that they, or we, will survive the midterms. Instead of letting Republicans "lean into" their own branding, how about you call them weak? I mean, whining about masks and refusing to get vaccinated is weak. Having big book-burning rallies is weak. And trying to overthrow the government when your candidate loses by seven million votes is weak. I want Democrats to call Republicans weaklings, and then I want to see Republicans try to "lean into" that.

Around the table: in which we contemplate various legal matters.

Elon Musk says he'd reverse the Twitter ban on Donald Trump, calling the ban "a morally bad decision, to be clear, and foolish in the extreme," and if I can think of an even clumsier way of putting that I'll let you know. His point is that the ban didn't silence Mr. Trump, though, actually, it kinda did -- not totally, but we don't let the perfect murder the good, do we? And none of Mr. Musk's nattering on about "free speech" changes the fact that Twitter is a publishing house -- whether he likes it or not, whether our laws recognize it as such or not -- and no belief in "free speech" requires that Twitter publish Donald Trump's ramblings any more than it requires that Random House publish mine.

Normally we turn to Patrick Cockburn for incisive analysis of foreign policy, but here he writes about "Mistakes I Made in Response to My Son's Mental Illness." Mr. Cockburn quit his job in order to "devote all efforts to helping Henry recover," not realizing that "I could not do much more than I was already doing and being jobless simply added to the strains on the family." He also didn't realize his son wasn't taking his meds for several years, which matters because "few therapies help until a person is stable on medication." The good news: coming together as a family or community helps "frequently a lot more than (people) think." And Henry has "done far better than most" in his predicament.

Folks are whining way too much about protestors holding vigils outside Brett Kavanaugh's house and the like; while I object to directly petitioning courts to rule the way I want them to; I certainly don't object to good folks taking to the street. Not too many months ago right-wingers waxed rhapsodic about a bunch of obnoxious truckers honking their horns all day and night because they didn't want to wear masks or get vaccines. (Naturally Susan Collins called the cops after someone wrote a chalk message outside of her house. Those poor, oppressed politicians! Sure, it's brightly-colored sidewalk chalk today, but what about tomorrow?)

Mob Boss Mitch suggests that Republicans will pursue a federal abortion ban if our Supreme Court overturns Roe as expected, and we say "suggests," of course, because he's trying to say it without actually saying it. And for good reason -- polling has lately told us that Democrats are doing better on the generic Congressional ballot, and do even better than that once voters figure out whicn one's the pro-choice candidate. In the meantime, Mitch ain't fooling anyone -- there's a reason he is literally the most unpopular Senator in America. Sadly, there is also a reason Democrats haven't given him the humiliating retirement he deserves. More than one reason, actually.

So why does Tucker Carlson say Disney's "behavior" "sounds like the behavior of a sex offender"? Easy -- because he knows actually coming out and calling them a sex offender might erase his family fortune in a lawsuit. The guy with the ZZ Top beard who calls you a "groomer" may not be so careful. Seriously, "grooming" is actually a thing, and if someone accuses you of "grooming" because you're not a complete asshole to gay and trans kids, get their name and sue them for slander. Right-wingers would call that a "frivolous lawsuit," even after you win it, so ain't nothing you can do about that. (What behavior was Mr. Carlson talking about, anyway? Your guess is as good as mine!)

Finally, speaking of the relationship between truth and lawsuits, One America News airs a 30-second statement stating, in part, that "Georgia officials have concluded that there was no widespread voter fraud by election workers who counted ballots at the State Farm Arena in November 2020" -- including, of course, the two workers who filed defamation lawsuits against the network. A settlement between the two parties forced that statement, and though the plaintiffs had the right idea there, I would have demanded a stronger statement -- "Georgia officials have concluded" gives OAN too much wiggle room -- and I'd make them read that statement on-air once every three or four hours every day for the rest of their lives. Hey, I've had enough.

Action: concerning taxes, abortion, discrimination, and ethics.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expand the Child Tax Credit, protect abortion rights, pass the Equality Act, and strengthen ethics provisions for our Supreme Court Justices. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk not to pass a massive research and development tax break for corporations without first bringing back the expanded Child Tax Credit. You can also say expand the CTC and reject that slab of corporate welfare in the first place! But really, this is simple: working families should pay fewer taxes, because it's harder for them to make ends meet, while corporations flush in record profits should not get any tax breaks. They can write off their research and development already, because it's an expense; why are we letting them deduct that twice? And where's Joe Manchin's concern about inflation whenever the topic of corporate welfare comes up?

Both MoveOn and Change.org help you tell your Congressfolk to protect abortion rights in America. Abortion is health care -- for the woman whose fetus has no brain or organs, for the woman raped by her brother, for the woman who will die if she gives birth, for the woman terrorized by her partner over her pregnancy, and yes, also for the woman who knows she can't raise a child now because she has no money (not everyone can just go work for a hedge fund, after all!) or because she knows she won't raise that child right. And we've lately learned that between 60 and 66% of Americans (depending on the poll) think abortion should be legal in most circumstances, so I think the people have spoken here; now we must remind our representatives to listen.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. By the reasoning, if you can call it that, of Justice Alito's draft opinion, they'll overturn Obergefell v. Hodges at the first opportunity, so we need to codify equal rights for gays and transgender folks in our laws -- otherwise right-wing governments will continue to use the specter of gay and transgender folks to induce rage in our weakest Americans. Plus banks and landlords will be able to deny services to gay and transgender folks just because of who they are. That's what'll continue to be if we don't pass the Equality Act, and that reality should offend all of us.

Finally, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation holding our Supreme Court Justices to the same ethical standards to which we already hold all other federal judges. It's tempting to blame Sam Alito for all of this -- since his draft ruling that would overturn Roe v. Wade has convinced just about everyone who can still be convinced that our Supreme Court is just another political body -- but actually it's Clarence Thomas who didn't recuse himself from a decision involving his wife's involvement in the January 6 attempted coup. Remember: your job, as a citizen, isn't to "trust your government"; it's to make your government worthy of your trust.

Around the table: in which the right-wing dramasphere remains aflame.

Greg Palast absolutely skewers Dinesh D'Souza's new film, 2000 Mules, which aims to "prove" that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election he lost by seven million votes. Long story short: Mr. D'Souza says he has a crap-ton of evidence of election fraud but, strangely, doesn't present it -- I'm old enough to remember when we all considered that a tell! -- and even the geolocation data "proving" Black men visited vote drop-off boxes 20 times each actually is only "accurate" within 93 feet! The argument gets much, much worse from there, as you would expect if you were even distantly acquainted with Mr. D'Souza's work. But for some Americans, the only "truth" is their own unquenchable rage, and they're clearly Mr. D'Souza's intended audience here.

Another day, another FAIR article reminding us that our "liberal" media talks to far too many right-wing rageheads about transgender issues and not enough to, well, transgender folks themselves. Yikes, pimps, talk to trans kids! They know more about themselves than you do! And certainly more than folks who present themselves as "influencers" but just want to hook you on another rage drug. (As evidenced by the fact that Breitbart "covered" the Texas "child abuse" directive more than most other media outlets. They're probably spinning it as "we got more trans sources than the Washington Post!" They're hoping you don't know how to read a chart.)

New York and California bills would create workers' councils so that workers' viewpoints can be heard a bit better. California's proposed Fast Food Sector Council would also include franchisees, who are also pretty put-upon by their bosses. I don't have nearly as many problems at work as fast-food employees -- they work, after all, in an industry that "literally cannot comply with wage, hour, safety and health law and still make a profit" -- but for the last decade or so, my bosses have all seemed to understand not one part of the work I do, so I heartily applaud such a move. And I bet when you think about it, you do, too.

Uh oh: the Staten Island, NY District Attorney actually used asset forfeiture cash to buy facial recognition software. Why, that's two fists of evil, right there -- it's like selling arms to the Iranians in order to get the money to arm the Contras. Even better, Staten Island has stopped using it, because it, you know, sucks, which you or I could have told them for nothing. Also too, they used asset forfeiture cash so they wouldn't have to use tax money, because politicians have been selling us a no-tax fantasy the last 40 years or so. Ideally, taxes pay for things we all may need at some point or other. Ideally, they do not pay for facial recognition software that can't tell Black folks apart any better than your right-wing uncle can.

Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-OR), justifiably facing a primary challenge from his left, runs ads touting his support for overturning our Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling -- without mentioning that he's directed close to $400,000 of Super PAC money to his own campaign. There's the world I want and the world I live in, I can already hear him intoning, but don't you love how these center-right politicians run left once they get a primary challenge? His vote late last year for the Build Back Better Act -- after he vowed to vote against it! -- I would similarly not attribute not to a Damascus moment on his part.

Finally, right-wing media outlets have reported that Justice Alito has removed himself to an "undisclosed location" after his draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade leaked -- based on a single source who said it on Fox News but now can't remember "whether I saw in on Twitter or somebody told me." And for that the right-wing dramasphere blew up yesterday. Don't cry any tears for poor Ilya Shapiro; I'm sure this all went down exactly the way he wanted it to. It may take him years to figure out how thoroughly Our Glorious Elites have used him.