Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning D.C. statehood and the filibuster.

You haven't forgotten about that little attempted coup from almost three weeks ago, have you? Well, as many observers have pointed out, if Washington, D.C. were a state, it'd have its own National Guard and wouldn't have had so much trouble repelling Y'all Qaeda from our Capitol. Republicans despise the idea of D.C. becoming a state, even though it has more residents than Vermont or Wyoming and almost as many as North Dakota or Alaska. Of course, Sen. Cotton (A-AK) thinks D.C. is entirely composed of lobbyists, which will surprise the hundreds of thousands of good citizens who've been living and working there all their lives, and Sen. Daines (R-MT) seems to think they're not "real people." Hate to pile on, but D.C. doesn't just suffer under "taxation without representation," as their license plates say -- they suffer under higher taxation than nearly half our states. Hence Free DC and Demand Progress help you tell your Reps and Senators to make Washington, D.C. our 51st state.

Meanwhile, Public Citizen helps you tell Democratic Senate Majority Leader Schumer to reject Minority Leader McConnell's demand that Democrats preserve the filibuster during this session. I've long been against getting rid of the filibuster, and I could just restate my case again now off the top of my head, but fuck it -- 14 years is a long time to watch Republicans nullify the popular will again and again by stamping their feet and refusing to help pass even the mildest reforms. More than one observer has said that it's be a meaningless pledge anyway, since Democrats could still change the rules mid-session, but Democrats are also exactly the kind of politicians to "take the pledge seriously" so they'll have an excuse for not getting anything done, and then when they get buried by QAnon candidates in the 2022 midterms, they'll blame the liberals again. So lets do our best to deprive them of this stratagem.

Action: concerning COVID relief, impeachment, voting rights, and gerrymandering.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass President Biden's COVID relief plan, which he's dubbed the "American Rescue Plan." You can edit the Coalition's sample email to say the following things: one, that the stimulus payment should be $2,000, not $1,400, because that's what Democrats promised and you need to keep your promises. Two, the plan should include massive tax hikes on corporate profits and millionaire income. Three, your Reps and Senators should pass the American Rescue Plan via budget reconciliation -- literally no one in America cares more about "working with Republicans" than doing good works, and Republicans didn't care about the deficit when they gave the rich yet another tax cut and dumped $500 billion in corporate welfare on bankster cronies in the CARES Act; now that we're spending money to help people get well and get back to work, why should we care what they say?

Meanwhile, now's as good a time as any to tell your Senators to convict Donald Trump on the impeachment charge the House will transmit today. Mitch McConnell, ever the dogged obstructor, got an extra two-week delay out of Democrats to consider this charge, and surely they hope they can count on people just not being as mad that our President instigated a riot for the express purpose of overturning the election he lost by seven million votes. But seriously, if we're going to call that "just politics," then maybe this particular democratic experiment has failed -- when you do something that disgusting an awful, you should pay for it, at the very least by being barred from running for any kind of elective office again. And don't let right-wingers gaslight you about "the left's obsession with Donald Trump." How strange that we can't just let sedition go! And how "law and order" of Republicans to insist that we do!

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. The For the People Act, as you know, would mandate campaign finance disclosure, same-day voter registration, and automatic voter registration, plus it would prohibit states from using those stupid junk-mail-looking "address verification forms" that they only ever seem to use to de-register folks of color. The bill would also mandate 15 days of early voting for federal elections and make states use independent commissions to redraw districts. Remember: if your friend or neighbor calls this a "Democrat power grab," he has no claim to "being independent" or "hating both sides." And he should, at least, wonder why Democrats would benefit from making voting easier. It couldn't be that Republicans benefit bigly from vote suppression, could it?

Finally, the Pennsylvania state legislature is still mulling HB 38, which would turn statewide judicial elections into regional ones, and thus elect judges from regions of the state -- as if judges represent districts the way legislators do. Judges represent the law, period. You may wonder why the legislature wants to do something so inside-baseball to judicial elections. The reason is simple: Democrats have five out of seven seats on the state Supreme Court, and Republicans don't like it, because that Supreme Court threw out the Republican gerrymander of the last decade (just so happens Democrats and Republicans now hold an equal number of Pennsylvania's U.S. House seats!) and also ruled that Rep. Kelly's lawsuit over the 2020 election was bunkum. So you could call HB 38 a "judicial gerrymandering" bill, or you could call it a sore loser bill. Either way, the ACLU helps you tell your PA House Reps to reject HB 38.

Around the table: "law and order" in its proper perspective, part 223.

One more time, from Carey Shenkman and Ahmed Mohamed at TruthOut: "After Capitol Breach, More Domestic Terrorism Laws Aren’t the Answer." The authors remind us that plenty of laws already exist, but typically our governments use these laws to crack down on Muslims and anti-racism protestors, not actual seditionists. And just as our brethren on the right (but not all of them!) applauded the USA PATRIOT Act after 9.11, we shouldn't applaud new laws that constrain our enemies after 1.6, because that always comes back to bite ya.

Surprise, surprise, among Donald Trump's last-minute pardon spree were "at least seven doctors of health care entrepreneurs" who committed massive Medicare and Medicaid fraud. One was a nursing home CEO who used part of the $1 billion he bilked from American taxpayers to buy a $360,000 watch (in case you were fixated on Joe Biden's Rolex!), and you could be forgiven for your skepticism that he really "has been devoted to prayer and repentance" or "is in declining health" at the ripe old age of 52. Law and order!

Uh oh: Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) told the Twitterverse that he met with the "Stop the Steal" seditionists on January 3, and that it was a "great meeting" and that they should "keep fighting." He deleted the twittering the day after their attempted Capitol coup, of course, and said a bunch of tepid things about the importance of law and order that I'm sure he'd have said much more passionately if the seditionists had been blacks or hippies. Plus, by way of excusing their actions, "it comes out of frustration." I'm plenty frustrated with our government, as you may have noticed, but I have attempted exactly zero coups.

Right Wing Watch runs down the various "prophecies" about that Trump second term that did not come to pass. Because he lost by seven million votes, I feel compelled to say with the Italics Hammer. I sure do hope our "liberal" media do a better job keeping these people out of mainstream discourse. I'm old enough to remember when folks who predicted an apocalypse that never arrived were actually ashamed to show their faces in public again.

Been thinking that maybe the whole QAnon conspiracy theory can fit any piece of data into it, and is thus utterly useless as a theory? Well, here are a few more examples of that -- and don't fixate on the folks who feel "betrayed" because their man didn't arrest all the Democrats, because they'll get over it in a couple of days and go right back to being batshit. Also, too, how stupid is it that we're saying the phrase "the best is yet to come" is "popular in QAnon circles"? "The best is yet to come" is one of the oldest phrases anyone knows! What's next, QAnon's appropriation of "yes" and "no"?

Finally, Julie Hollar at FAIR reminds us that "Media Allow Republicans to Use ‘Unity’ as Tool of Division." "Unity" is the new "bipartisanship" -- just as calls for "bipartisanship" actually mean "capitulating to Republicans," calls for "unity" mean "capitulating to Republicans." Ooh, and Joe Biden didn't put a Republican in his Cabinet! Next up in the New York Times: Quislings deserve affirmative action!

Biden won. Now what?

So the worst human being ever to be President is no longer President – and Joe Biden has replaced him. President Biden’s enjoying a bit of goodwill right now, but it’s early, and we must remember that he spent half a century capitulating to Republicans in the name of “bipartisanship.” I feared his election would be a nightmare scenario, a way for Our Glorious Elites to pretend to care about what the people think by getting rid of Mr. Trump but replacing him with a weakling. But, in truth, none of that matters – the best citizenship makes the politicians irrelevant, and we must aim to do that. In that spirit, I offer some advice.

Our ministry takes as sacred the fact that while voting is important, it’s also one day out of the year; what of the other 364 or 365 days? We need to communicate with our representatives about our concerns daily; Thieves in the Temple will help you do that, as it does now. But we also need to know what we’ll be up against. Donald Trump won’t go away quietly; he may not have his Twitterphone at present, but he’s got plenty of right-wing “news” outlets he can dominate, and our “liberal” media will cover whatever he does as if he’s not the outcast he should be. And you may be more sanguine about our media than you were in 2016, but make no mistake: under a President Biden, they’ll ramp up the horserace coverage, they’ll attack Social Security and Medicare, they’ll demand “bipartisanship” with actively evil Republicans, and they’ll air every far-right fever dream as if it’s a mainstream concern. Speaking of which, you’ve seen people embrace ever-stupider conspiracy theories online, and you’ve also seen emboldened Nazi wannabes stir up violence at otherwise peaceful protests; you’ve even seen Trump supporters actually try to take over our government. Now imagine all those clowns with millions of dollars of right-wing corporate and special interest group money behind them. I guarantee it’ll happen, and it’ll make the Tea Party look quaint.

And, last but certainly not least, you’ll also be up against a Democratic Party constantly yammering on about the art of the possible, and fearmongering you about all the seats Democrats will lose in 2022 if we actually speak our minds and hold them accountable – this, even though Democrats get routed in midterms precisely because they don’t do enough for the voters! And as I’ve said, future Republican Congressional majorities will be the worst we’ve ever seen. To think, that in 1994 and 2010, we said, “gosh, I’ve never seen Republicans worse than these clowns!” What will we say in 2022, if Democrats spend two years pretending their hands are tied? We’ll say, “gosh, I didn’t think people who actually called themselves fascists could win elections in America!” But when leaders don’t heed the will of the people – and this is a nasty habit Democratic politicians have! – that’s the kind of thing that happens.

So we need to do the same things we did (and which worked) in 2017: we need to flood our Congressfolks’ phone lines and we need to bird-dog the hell out of them, even though publicly confronting your elected leaders has a bad name right now, because of those assholes who tried to take over our Capitol. But for what will we fight? Will we fight, merely, to keep Republicans from setting more of our house on fire? No. We have to think bigger than that, and we have to change the conversation Our Glorious Elites would want us to have. I know that’s a big thing to ask of people, particularly people who have been waiting four years to simply draw a sigh of relief. But we’re Americans. We do big things. And here are some of the big things we have to do.

We have to get this pandemic under control. 12,000 Americans died from the swine flu pandemic of 2009 and 2010, so we already know that we can do a lot better than 12,000 deaths every couple of days. We need to do a lot more COVID-19 testing, tracing, and vaccination, and we also need to pass real pandemic relief for working families, not just “relief” that funnels taxpayer money to big bankster cronies. And you know what else? We all need to wear a damn mask when we go out! Right-wingers have had too many don’t-tread-on-me tantrums about this, and we need to stop coddling them. It just so happens that President Biden has proposed a new COVID relief bill that would do most of these things; now we just have to remind our Congressfolk that they work for us.

We have to secure voting rights. Voting is the beginning of our duty as citizens, not the end, but vote suppression did more than any other factor to bring us President Donald Trump in 2016, and we’ve had four years to watch what sophisticated vote suppression has wrought. The For the People Act and the Voting Rights Advancement Act would fix that. The For the People Act would (among other things) keep states from deregistering voters whenever they want, curtail the use of felony convictions to disenfranchise good Americans, and require states to use voter-verifiable paper ballots. The Voting Rights Advancement Act would make the Voting Rights Act whole again, at which point states and localities will find it a lot harder to, for example, deregister voters of color simply because they have the same name as someone from another state. I talk a lot about the cowardice of Democratic politicians, but fact is folks would vote even for a cowardly Democrat over an insane Republican – if they’re allowed to vote!

We need real campaign finance reform – that includes disclosure and limits on contributions. Passing the For the People Act would give us disclosure, but we would need to amend our Constitution to get the latter, thanks to our Supreme Court’s disastrous Citizens United v. FEC ruling. The pro-big corporate campaign spending crowd (it’s not a big crowd, but it does exist!) say we can’t limit campaign contributions because campaigns cost money. But why should that fact compel us to let folks with millions of dollars drown out the real free speech, and real grievances, of working families? Our First Amendment has to work for all of us. H.J.Res. 1, introduced in early January, would amend our Constitution so we can regulate campaign finance again.

We have to make taxes fair again. This President did what all the big “tax cutters” do – he cut taxes a little for you, but cut taxes a lot for his rich cronies, particularly for corporations. We can leave most income tax brackets where they are, but we need to tax income over a million dollars at 91%, and we need to tax corporate profits at 55% – because these are the tax rates that built the greatest middle class the world has ever seen. If you don’t tax the rich, they hoard their windfalls, but if you do tax them, they spend the money paying people to make things, and then we build great economies. We also need to tax investment income equally, so that working families don’t pay more taxes out of their paychecks than hedge fund managers do out of theirs. We need to cap the mortgage interest deduction, so that most homeowners can still get relief, but corporate raiders and slumlords can't game the system. We need to stop corporations “paying” their executives in stock options – income is income, after all, and should be counted as such. Finally, we need to stop cold any attempts to enact a national sales tax. The last thing working families need is a new tax that always hits working people harder than wealthy people. Congressfolk rarely introduce bills that would do these things – so we should tell them to do that!

We need to tackle household debt. The biggest drag on American freedom isn’t taxes or regulations or “political correctness.” It’s debt, whether it’s mortgage debt, credit card debt, or student loan debt. We need to cap revolving loans at 6%, installment loans at 4%, and student loans and mortgages at 2%. And if that winds up outlawing payday lenders, too bad! Forcing people into 300% death-spiral loans ain’t exactly “helping a brother out.” Once we cap loan rates, we need to forgive a lot of the debt people accrued before the caps go into effect; that would only be fair, after all. Don’t worry about the banksters; they’ll still be able to make money, they just won’t be able to buy as many legislators as they used to. More importantly, all the good Americans who will be able live without so damn much debt on their backs will be freer to do good works, as is our birthright. The Loan Shark Prevention Act, from the last Congress, would come closest to doing some of things I’ve outlined above.

We need to expand Medicare to include everyone. The second-biggest drag on our freedom is health care costs, especially now that increased hedge fund involvement in health care corporations just so happens to coincide with surprise medical bills being worse than ever. In the middle of a pandemic, no less! It seems invisible because we pay for it indirectly, through our employers and through our taxes, but we spend around $10,000 annually per person on health insurance in America; folks in Canada, which has a single-payer system, pay less than half of that, and folks in the United Kingdom, which has an entirely socialized health care system, pay a little more than a third of that. But we can expand Medicare to include everyone and cover everyone’s health care needs. How? By implementing Sen. Warren’s plan to tax big corporations almost all the money they already pay for private health insurance. We spend more than any other nation on health care, and still leave over 20 million Americans out in the cold; with Medicare-for-All capturing all that money, and with the drop in administrative costs that will result, we’ll be able to cover everyone’s needs. Medicare-for-All bills get introduced every year; this year, we need to tell them to include the funding mechanism.

We need to redefine “law and order,” so that when we say those words, people think “catching polluters and financial predators” rather than “shooting unarmed black folks in the street.” First, we need to stop using our police officers as the Swiss Army knives of our civilization. Police officers should be making arrests and serving warrants, not answering every conceivable request for assistance a citizen makes, and certainly not doing the job of social workers. Second, we need to stop treating drug addicts as criminals and start treating them as patients. Finally, our regulations need to punish polluters and financial predators with jail time, not fines they can simply deduct from their taxes, and not settlements in which no one admits doing anything wrong. If we do these things, we might lay claim to being a “law and order” nation again. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and the MORE Act, from the last Congress, would comprise a good start toward this end.

We need to invest in renewable energy. I don’t mean just with tax credits for solarizing your house – our government needs to get back into the utility business and create 100% renewable energy utilities that’ll compete with the private utilities that overcharge you and won’t change with the times. And we need to retrain coal workers to build out this renewable energy infrastructure, which will be a hell of a lot easier than retraining them to write software, as Democrats too often think we’re going to do. Right-wingers will call all that “socialism,” but I’ll call it “job creation.” You know what else I’ll call it? If I may paraphrase William Lloyd Garrison, I’ll call it “pulling a baby right out of the damn fire,” since our planet is on fire and renewable energy isn’t a “lifestyle choice” so much as a necessity. The Off Fossil Fuels for a Better Future (or OFF) Act, from the 115th Congress, remains a good model for achieving these ends.

We need to reclaim boundaries on media, including social media. Our media remain addicted to sensationalism and drama, and this addiction pushes us away from those values, like patience and temperance, that sustain us as a civilization. So we need to demand the right to purchase cable channels a la carte, so we’re not paying for media outlets (like cable news channels and reality channels) that make us sicker, more immoral, and more decadent. We also need to stop media consolidation, so that we don’t have so many cookie-cutter TV channels with so few owners to begin with. We need to restore net neutrality, so that we, not some corporate gatekeeper, determine where we want to go on the internet. We need to keep pressuring corporate advertisers, so that we can cut off bad media outlets’ other flow of money. And we need to treat social media websites less like “information services” (i.e., your ISP is an "information service") and more like the publishing houses they actually are. If Random House publishes an author who says something libelous, we hold them liable; if Facebook lets a user do the same thing, we flail around wondering what to do about it. Here’s what we do about it: we change the law so we can hold them accountable. Again, our Congressfolk don’t routinely address these matters through legislation, but we can tell them to do that!

That’s a long list (and not an all-inclusive one!), and a lot of folks would call it idealistic or naive. But folks have always said that about big changes. And, frankly, it’s not the attitude that abolished slavery, it’s not the attitude that got women the vote, it’s not the attitude that got us clean water and food safety, it’s not the attitude that created Social Security and Medicare, it’s not the attitude that enacted minimum wage and worker safety laws, and it’s not the attitude that passed the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. And you know what? It’s also not the attitude that stopped this right-wing Congress and right-wing President from repealing the Affordable Care Act in 2017. The people, alone, stopped that from happening, and we didn’t say it was idealistic or naive to do so.

Still, many of your Democratic Congressfolk, when pressed about solutions like the ones we've advanced here, will throw cold water on them and talk about how "politics is the art of the possible." But we don't fight for what's "possible" – we fight for what's right, and in doing so we widen the palette of the possible. And we do that by calling our reps, emailing our reps, writing our reps, demonstrating at their offices, and bird-dogging them at public events – and we never back down. Republicans never back down, after all, and Democrats seem to treat them a lot better than they treat us. And whenever Democrats fail us, never shrug and say “well, at least they’re better than the alternative.” If we do that, we’ll never get the better alternatives we deserve as Americans. But if we stay on them, they'll come around to our way of thinking, because their jobs will depend on it. So let's get to it.

Action: concerning voting rights and sore losers.

The Voting Rights Advancement Act would fill the hole in the Voting Rights Act gouged out by our Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder. The Voting Rights Act gave our Justice Department the ability to reject discriminatory voting law changes in several Southern states; our Supreme Court found that discriminatory against Southern states, many of which rushed to change voting rights laws after the ruling, but the Voting Rights Advancement Act would give our Justice Department the ability to reject discriminatory voting law changes in any state or locality that's demonstrated a hostility to voting rights, no matter where in the country they are. The only folks who would object to that are folks who want Republicans to suppress the vote and thus win elections -- Republicans won't win very many more fair elections, given how much they've thrown in with the folks who tried to destroy our country earlier this month. So go ahead and call your Reps and Senators and tell them to pass the VRAA.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: the state House plans to vote on HB 38, the "sore loser" bill, next week. Why do I call it the "sore loser" bill? Because the bill aims to gerrymander the state judiciary, which our legislature finds insufficiently Republican, due to Republicans not winning judiciary elections. And how would it accomplish that? By changing the state constitution so that judges "represent" regions of the state, even state Supreme Court judges who are the last court of appeals for all Pennsylvania residents. And then the Republican-dominated legislature would carve out judicial "districts" that would more reliably return Republicans to the state bench, just as they carved out judicial districts that reliably returned Republicans to U.S. House seats -- until 2018, when our state Supreme Court stepped in and remade those districts so they better-respected town and county lines and didn't resemble Rorschach blots. Fair Districts PA helps you tell your PA state legislators to reject the "sore loser" bill, HB 38.

Action: concerning COVID relief, accountability, and pollution.

So, Joe Biden gets inaugurated President today, and he's released a broad outline of a COVID-related stimulus plan, which has much to recommend it, and much that needs improvement. So go ahead and read all about it, and then use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) and call your Reps and Senators and tell them what you think. On the plus side: a $15/hour minimum wage, expanded tax credits for working families, 14 weeks of paid family leave for folks dealing with closed schools, $160 billion for expanded testing and vaccination, and $350 billion for states and localities (that's in addition to education funding). On the minus side: stimulus checks need to be $2,000, not $1,400; enhanced unemployment insurance needs to be $600 monthly, not $400; and money earmarked for small businesses had better not turn into corporate welfare this time. I don't know how they'll fund it, but go ahead and tell them to fund it by raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy (while keeping tax cuts for working folks, since those are the ones that'll expire soon!).

Meanwhile, you can tell your Senators (while you have them on the phone about the Biden stimulus plan) to convict Donald Trump on our House's impeachment charges and ensure he'll never able to run for any kind of elective office again. Mitch McConnell has said lately that his Republican colleagues' vote will be a "vote of conscience," but really they should convict on the strength of the case against him, and that crime did go down in broad daylight, after all. Now, quite a few Republican Senators may vote to acquit because (as some of their House colleagues told reporters last week) they're literally afraid Mr. Trump's followers will kill them and/or their families. Now, anyone who'd kill or threaten a Senator or their family members should be locked up, obviously, but if you want to be a legislator, you have to do the right thing, and doing the right thing takes guts. Your job title is "Senator," not "Senator except for impeachment votes against politicians with insane followers." You don't see Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez run for the hills after all the death threats and rape threats she gets, do you?

I really hope to wind down with coup-related action alerts soon, but here's one more: both Free Press and Daily Kos help you tell big corporations to stop donating to the 147 Congressfolk who voted to overturn the 2020 Presidential election results. This Gang of 147 didn't vote to overturn their own election results, you may have noticed! As it happens, Amazon, Facebook, Comcast, and Google all decided to "pause" their campaign contributions in the wake of the January 6 attempted coup, but we need a little bit more from them than that: we need them to stop contributing to them, and we need to wield the Big Stick of Bad PR against them, a stick which we know well will hurt. Do you worry that Republicans will just find someone worse, and big corporations will just give money to them? Then you turn the Big Stick of Bad PR on them again until they relent. Besides, Republicans are going to have a hard time recovering from the PR black eye they've deservedly gotten over this coup attempt. And ain't no Nelson Rockefellers coming to rescue them.

Finally, Data for Progress helps you tell soon-to-be-President Biden to issue an Executive Order mandating that our federal government buy more sustainable and made-in-America goods. He can do this without having to run to The One American Super-President Mitch McConnell or The One Great Hope for Moderation and Unity Joe Manchin, and most people will appreciate it. Government's going to buy American? About time! And only rageheads don't like the idea of sustainable production. Now, Data for Progress sells this initiative as a way to fight climate change, which it is (no, really, buying American means less energy expended to send goods across the globe), but frankly it's a good initiative for other reasons, too. For example, buying more American goods helps save American jobs, and buying more sustainable goods means less pollution. And our government's going to have its work cut out for it, as you know, so the more American jobs we save, and the less we pollute in getting America restarted, the better.

Action: concerning sedition and war on Yemen.

H.Res. 25 would command our House Ethics Committee to investigate any sitting Congressperson who might have aided and abetted the January 6 attempted coup. Just so happens that one of the coup's organizers -- one Ali Alexander, apparently a star of social media who will not otherwise be remembered in a hundred years -- now says he "schemed up putting maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting" with three U.S. House Reps: Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar of Arizona, and Mo Brooks of Alabama, while one witness has accused Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) of giving Capitol tours to rioters in the days before the attempted coup. "Investigating whether the coup was an inside job" sure does sound like a job for our Congressfolk! Hence Daily Kos helps you tell your House Reps to hold seditionists accountable by passing H.Res. 25. Don't brook any silliness about "unity" and "healing" and "looking forward" -- if no one pays for this, they'll just do it again and again.

Speaking of "looking forward," you may be exhausted enough from this Administration that you'll just be happy when they're gone, but fact is our President is on tape asking why Georgia's Secretary of State couldn't just find him 11,000-plus votes, and when you break the law, you should be punished. At least, that's what all his votaries say when black people break the law (and also when they don't!), but we've documented their blind spot pretty well over the years. Hence Daily Kos also helps you tell our government to investigate and charge our soon-to-be-ex-President for soliciting election fraud. Again, his votaries will tell you only "those people" commit election fraud, though the data tells us otherwise. Perhaps they'll also tell you he was "just joking," though "just joking" is how boys, not men, hide behind their wrongdoing, and if everyone was in on the joke, how come Georgia Republicans decided to tape the call? Soon they'll blame this on antifa, too.

In other news, Color of Change helps you tell the Chicago Police Board to fire Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7 President John Catanzara for his recent remarks supporting the January 6 seditionists. Just so happens the Board is already investigating Mr. Catanzara for various posts on Facebook, including one in which he said Muslims were "savages they all deserve a bullet" (sic), but last week he said he "get(s)" and "share(s)" the seditionists' "frustration," and he also suggested that "the worst crime here is trespassing," which is kind of like having it both ways. Pretty much anyone still not in thrall to this President (as Mr. Catanzaro apparently is) disagrees with all of those assessments, and really, more and more Americans are waking up to the fact that too many of our law enforcement officers will side with racists and seditionists when the heat is on. That means it's well past time to start rooting out the rot.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell President-elect Biden to reverse our government's recent labeling of the Yemeni Houthis a terrorist organization. Our current President seems desperate to screw up as much as possible on the way out the door -- I half-expect toilets removed and kitchen cabinets pulled down -- and so it goes with this designation, which could choke off humanitarian aid to some 20 million good Yemenis regardless of whatever the Houthis have done. One could interpret this designation as a sop to Saudi Arabia, which really doesn't need any more sugar than we already give them, and a way of putting pressure on Iran, which wouldn't be necessary without the stupid Iraq War and which in any case the nuclear deal was already doing until this President pulled out of it for no damn good reason. I know Mr. Biden will have a lot on his plate (though, really, he's not going to be doing it alone!), but stupid people should not get all the say about everything, and shouldn't get to cause people to die, either.

Action: concerning government spying and gerrymandering.

Assholes-with-guns took over our Capitol last week, aiming to nullify the will of the voters -- and you know what that means: it means more government spying legislation! After all, when has "anti-terror" legislation ever gone wrong? Besides always, I mean. Has the USA PATRIOT Act made us safer? Has the FISA Amendments Act made us safer? How about NSA data-vacuuming? And, more to the point, did any of those things prevent a bunch of Nazi wannabes from plotting a coup on social media in broad daylight? No, of course not -- our government is more preoccupied with abusing its powers against Black Lives Matter protestors. Never does a catastrophe happen without our government demanding more power to spy on innocent Americans. Hence Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any broad new government spying authority. The Capitol coup is not a clarion call for more spying powers and more of our tax dollars.

Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania state legislature is actually trying to gerrymander judicial seats! HB 38 aims to create "districts" that particular state judges (including state Supreme Court judges) would "represent." Why? Simple: because five of seven judges on our state Supreme Court are Democrats, who've made a lot of trouble for Republicans by un-gerrymandering U.S. House districts and slapping down frivolous election lawsuits, to name just two good works, so our legislators want to retaliate by creating more Rorschach-blot districts that'll reliably pump out Republican judges. HB 38's pretty damn convoluted (it'd ultimately put a Constitutional amendment before the voters), but the machinations aren't as important as the simple fact that this is a sore loser bill. Maybe Republicans should try winning some elections, amirite? Hence Common Cause helps you write a letter-to-the-editor of your local paper opposing HB 38. And remember: in your letter, make sure you call it a "sore loser" bill.

Action: concerning impeachment.

So our House has impeached our President, again; the first thing that comes to mind is only 10 Republicans? and the second is only twice? And now I think you should call Speaker Pelosi, at 202.225.4965 and tell her to transmit the impeachment charges to the Senate immediately -- and then call Senate Majority Leader McConnell, at 202.224.2541, and tell him to reconvene the Senate immediately so they can try the charges immediately. Then call your two Senators and tell them to convict and remove this President.

I know the reasons folks argue for delay, chief among them that the impeachment would more likely succeed once the two Georgia Senators get sworn in, that Joe Biden needs Cabinet appointees installed, and, well, that our current President left a hell of a mess and broke all the shovels. But the time to do justice is always now. And it doesn't seem to me all that difficult for Senators to do more than one thing at a time; being a Senator is actually supposed to be work, you know. And we all saw what happened; it shouldn't be that tough to conclude that a sitting President instigating a riot in order to overturn an election he lost fits the definition of "high crime" like a glove. And if he could pull that shit two weeks before his term ends, what can he pull in the handful of days remaining to him?

And, lastly, do not brook any silliness about the need for "healing" and "unity," particularly when it comes from folks like Ted Cruz, who spend all their time hurting and dividing good Americans.

Good luck, and God bless.

UPDATE. Sen. McConnell's phone number isn't working. How strange. Go to his Senate website and you can find other (though local to Kentucky) phone numbers.

Action: concerning voting rights and accountability.

H.R. 1, the For the People Act, is back, and you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're viewing it on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Reps' and Senators' phone numbers so you can call them and tell them to pass it. The For the People Act would (among many other things!) institute same-day and automatic voter registration nationally, prohibit states from using returned and non-forwardable mailings (or failure to vote in previous elections) to deregister voters, curtail (though not end) the practice of using felony convictions to disenfranchise good Americans, require states to use voter-verifiable paper ballots, require 15 days of early voting for all federal elections, let voters file affidavits in lieu of voter ID, make states use independent commissions to redraw their legislative districts, and require disclosure of campaign contributions over $10,000. So let's patiently review Republican objections to this bill -- nah, just kidding; their objections will be TEH SOSHULIZM!!!! and TEH POWER GRABZ!!!!!, just like they were last time. Republicans might try doing good works on behalf of their constituents if they're so afraid the For the People Act will take their power away.

Also, the House will vote on impeaching our soon-to-be-ex-President today, so while you have your Reps on the phone about H.R. 1, you might want to remind them to impeach him. Our President incited those morons who tried to take over our country last week, and he did it because he lost an election by seven million votes and because almost every single one of his 60-plus frivolous lawsuits died in court, many of these before right-wing judges. Inciting a riot is a crime, and inciting a riot to overturn an election you lost is about as precise a definition of "high crime" as I can imagine. Now, Republicans have been talking a lot about unity lately -- these are the same clowns who constantly hurt us and then constantly point to those other people as the reason we're hurt! They say we shouldn't impeach this President because we have to hold the country together. One more time: we do not "unify" with evil. Here's how "unity" works: sane people realize we have more in common with each other than we thought, and then we unify to keep stupid batshit whiners from destroying our civilization with another well-armed tantrum. And getting rid of the ringleader of the stupid batshit whiners is where we start.

Action: concerning voting rights in Georgia.

Now that Democrats have won the Presidential election and both Senate runoff elections in Georgia, Georgia Republican Governor Brian Kemp wants to add a photo ID requirement for absentee ballots, knowing full well that folks without said photo ID (or the money to get photo ID) will more likely be the seniors and folks of color who vote against his party. Signature matching for absentee ballots (and for regular ballots) works fine everywhere in America, but still, some unnamed whiny diaper-loaded right-wing brats have "concerns," and if we know anything about conservatism, it's all about giving juice boxes to folks with bruised egos after rejections they obviously deserved. Anyway, the logic of Mr. Kemp's position is nonexistent -- on one hand, the Georgia election ran great, but on the other hand, we need photo IDs for absentee ballots because fraud. (Mr. Kemp also says he's "reserving judgement" on a bunch of other proposed voting restrictions, which means he absolutely favors them but doesn't have the guts to say so because he knows it'll make him even more unpopular.)

So y'all know what that means! Gov. Kemp's phone number is 404.656.1776 (1776? Really? Look at me, I'm so much more patriotic than you!), while Senate Majority Leader Mike Dugan's number is 404.463.2478 and House Speaker David Ralston's number is 404.656.5020. In your call, you might say the following: "I oppose getting rid of signature matching for absentee ballots, which until today, apparently, everyone in Georgia said worked well in this past election. I also oppose proposals that would restrict at-will absentee balloting and eliminate ballot drop boxes. You should be aware that adopting these proposals, in the name of so-called 'reform,' would make you look exactly like the kind of sore losers right-wingers always say their opponents are, and I would think you'd want to avoid that look." Seriously, we have no need to be civil with these folks, since they only love democracy when it gives them the results they want.

I'm going to continue to minimize the commentary for a while, but I haven't been this angry about politics since Mr. Bush's first term; every day brings some fresh new humiliation from the people who only want to injure the country we love, and injure us. And it won't be over when Mr. Biden finally becomes President; his own nose for the "middle ground" between moderates and right-wing extremists is well-known, but I think we're going to face a lot more right-wing domestic terror attacks in the coming years, and politicians aren't known for their courage to begin with, so they'll legitimize the attacks (they'll say the "feelings" behind the attacks, but that's a meaningless distinction), a courtesy they only ever extend to white people. One thing is for sure: as far as legislation's concerned, Republicans get nothing. I don't care if they have 50 Senators; we treat them like they have zero, and we swamp their phone lines until they can't ignore us. I'm tired of stupid people getting all the say about everything -- much more tired than I was the last time I said it.

Action: concerning accountability.

Another day, another reminder to call your House Reps and tell them to impeach our soon-to-be-ex-President, and then call your Senators and tell them to convict him. I've already said that incitement to riot is a crime, and incitement to riot so you can overturn the election you lost and thus tell 81 million Americans they don't mean a damn is a "high crime." Some folks ask why do it, then, if he'll be out of office in less than 10 days. "He could pull something even worse in less than 10 days" is certainly one answer. Here's another one: convicting him of a high crime -- which doesn't necessarily have to happen before January 20 -- would mean he could never hold public office in America again. Now that sure is worth the effort! Otherwise, let's crystal-ball 2024: he runs, Republicans are powerless to stop him from winning the primary, and depending on how things are going, he could win the general election again. And then the repugnant becomes "cool" again. Let's avoid that.

Speaking of repugnant, why not also call Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) at 202.224.6154 and Ted Cruz (R-TX) at 202.224.5922 and tell them to resign immediately? I don't think you have any need to explain yourself -- you can just say, "resign. You know why." Maybe we could successfully jail either one for sedition, I don't know, though I sure wouldn't go destroying any emails or phone records if I were them! And maybe we can get the Senate to expel them on the "disorderly behavior" standard; censure sure as hell ain't worth a damn. But a crap-ton of phone calls to their offices demanding their resignation will bring shame upon them they can't ignore. They've already gotten some of that: two major Missouri newspapers have called for Mr. Hawley's resignation, and Mr. Cruz has been so shaken that he's now all kumbaya about "unity" and "healing." But they should resign in shame, and if they don't (and if we can't get them out another way), we should never mention them again without also calling them objectively anti-democracy. (Change.org also provides a petition calling for Mr. Cruz's resignation.)

Finally, speaking of resignations, Media Justice helps you demand that Mark Zuckerberg resign as Facebook's CEO. This dude did nothing to stop the spread of Nazism and propaganda on social media in America -- OK, actually, he did worse than nothing, by allowing Facebook algorithms to automatically help white nationalist assholes find each other and plan mayhem. Plus dig his offensive invocation of TEH FREEZ SPEECHEZ!!!! to defend his inaction. True, he's lately banned QAnon-types from Facebook, but (to quote an obscure philosopher) that's a little like closing the barn door after the horses have eaten your children. And, again for the back row, racist algorithms! To be honest, I'd be OK with Facebook allowing its users to post racist filth privately, i.e., by users only to friends, or certain groups of friends; let those friends check them, as they would in real life! But Facebook allows all manner of racist filth to be posted publicly, and in the absence of laws that would hold them accountable, we need to hold the boss accountable. Hey, it comes with being the boss.

UPDATE. And Change.org also provides a petition which helps you call for Sen. Hawley's resignation.

Action: shame, impeach, convict, remove.

I'd figured that yesterday would be annoying and irritating because a bunch of Republican Congressfolk staged a big drama about the Electoral Vote certification. But like most people I'm at a bit of a loss to imagine the machinations of the insane, so I was of course surprised that the day was much worse than that, even though, in retrospect, it shouldn't have been that surprising. At least Congress -- clearly embarrassed and perhaps even terrified by the rage many of them have spent their entire careers stoking -- didn't have the heart to drag the certification out longer than a calendar day. But we have important business to conduct. First, call your Reps and demand they impeach our soon-to-be-ex-President, then call your Senators and demand that they convict and remove him from office. Incitement to riot is a crime, after all, and I would think our Founders would agree that when you've incited a riot in an effort to overturn an election you lost, you've certainly committed a "high crime" as described by our Constitution. Second, Sum of Us helps you tell big corporations including Microsoft, Capitol One, and AT&T to stop bankrolling the Republican politicians who have stoked the rage that boiled over yesterday. If these clowns didn't get their money from big corporations, they'd have a lot more trouble winning elections, after all. And, really, what's the upside for corporations? Is that big corporate tax cut they got out of this President worth what happened yesterday?

I wish I'd done more to make our country the kind of country where this couldn't happen, but first and foremost I blame the people who burst into the Capitol building. They will very likely learn, one day, that they have wasted their precious lives, and I expect they won't learn it in time to do anything about it. I sincerely hope this thought gives me less pleasure as time goes on.

Light posting notice still in effect.

Posting here will resume on Monday, as I try to crank out as much of another book as I can.

I've been following the Republicans' latest electoral drama, of course, but I have little of consequence to say about it. Congressional Republicans are a bunch of diaper-loaded brats! How much more of the elephant dung do we need to see?

Action: concerning COVID relief and corruption.

You've no doubt heard by now that the "stimulus" bill Congress has agreed to pass includes the return of the 100% three-martini lunch tax break. These are truly irredeemable people "representing" us in Congress -- who looks at millions of jobs lost and millions of folks without health insurance and millions of folks about to get evicted and says hey, I know what'll fix this: let's max out the three-martini lunch tax break? Actually, we do know one person who says that: our soon-to-be-ex-President; it sure is nice to see him locking in on the important things as 300,000-plus Americans lay dead. I say call your Reps and Senators (using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page, or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) and tell them to reject this "stimulus" bill until the three-martini lunch tax break is removed like the cancer on our society it is. Don't worry that "people will get hurt." The only people who'll get hurt by such a rejection will be the Reps and Senators who'll have to stick around until they get this bill right -- which they could do, as I've said more than once over the last seven months, simply by passing the HEROES Act.

Meanwhile, you've no doubt also heard that almost half of the more than $1.25 billion raised by our soon-to-be-ex-President's re-election campaign somehow got diverted to a shell corporation run by our soon-to-be-ex-President's daughter-in-law and Vice President Pence's nephew. This diversion just so happened to help the campaign dodge campaign finance disclosure rules, which is a shame, since the few individuals who know where the money all went sure are tight-lipped about it. You'd be tempted to think this is the thing that finally weans his supporters from him, but of course you'd be wrong again, not that I'd blame you for hoping. No, nothing, not even him stealing their own damn money, will ever prompt our soon-to-be-ex-President's votaries to reject him; he makes them feel so good about the pain they inflict on others, after all. But Public Citizen helps you tell the campaign to reveal exactly where that money's going. They don't care, especially now, but when we confront people over their wrongdoing, we always win, at the very least by exposing their evil to the light.

I expect I'll be posting much less until the new year, and so I wish all my readers a happy, prosperous, and peaceful holiday season. I'm grateful to you for reading, but I'm more grateful to you for being the best Americans you can be; keep it up, because your country will need you more than ever in 2021.

UPDATE. I wrote this post before both Houses of Congress rammed through the stimulus bill mentioned in the first paragraph, but go ahead and call them and tell them to strike the offending provision anyway. It never hurts to let them know how you feel.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, Administration incompetence, and our "liberal" media.

You've heard, perhaps, that Congress is thisclose to passing a COVID relief deal -- and you've likely also heard that this "deal" will contain no money for states and localities and stimulus and unemployment relief amounting to half of what we got under the CARES Act, while bringing back all of the CARES Act's corporate welfare. Here's what we should do in response: call our Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act! Now that was a stimulus bill, and our House passed it seven months ago (remember that the next time you hear your right-wing uncle cry that TEH DIMOCRATZ AREZ HOLDINGZ UPZ TEH BILLZ!!!!), and the HEROES Act would fund states and localities, fund COVID testing and tracing, fund unemployment benefits at the level of the CARES Act, repeal the big hedge fund manager tax cut given out by the CARES Act, and give working Americans bigger stimulus checks than the CARES Act. Bigger than whatever this Congress tries to pass this week, too! So don't think you just have to take whatever Congress dishes out, and certainly don't act like you do.

Meanwhile, you've likely also heard that states are getting many, many fewer doses of the Pfizer vaccine than they thought they were getting, and our Administration, being the very embodiment of leadership and accountability, apologized for getting that wrong. Nah, I kid -- this Administration has not accounted for itself to the states, but our HHS Secretary has blamed Pfizer for the foul-up, which naturally they deny, saying they have millions of doses ready to go but have heard nothing from our Administration, whose nominal head seems to spend most of his time on Twitter savaging fellow Republicans and spreading even more lies about "voter fraud." This, as more Americans die from COVID each day than died from the 9/11 attacks, which were, as I recall, a Damascus moment for a whole generation of right-wingers! Hence Public Citizen helps you tell our Administration to get its act together and get folks the vaccines they need. Yeah, I know, this Administration doesn't ever seem to listen when we tell them to do their damn job, but they ignore us in the hope we'll go away. But after they're gone, we'll still be here.

Finally, you may have heard, from our "liberal" media, that Venezuela has fallen upon economic hard times -- but you may not have heard, from our "liberal" media, that one of the main reasons good Venezuelans have it so bad is that our government has imposed sanctions upon them for years! One of FAIR's recent email missives catches the New York Times doing this very thing earlier this month, describing how Venezuela's midterm elections went yet again for the United Socialist Party to which Messrs. Chavez and Maduro belong (again, after opposition parties boycotted the election; maybe our Republican party will start getting similar ideas in America?) and describing the "deep economic challenges" Venezuela faces without mentioning American sanctions as one of them. Make no mistake: just as our "liberal" media seemed sanguine toward Brazil's irredeemable asshole of a President because he'd be "good for business," they hate folks like Mr. Maduro because they won't turn over their economies to multinational corporations. The link above helps you encourage the Times to correct the record.

Action: concerning government spying and bird-killing.

Reps. Gabbard (D-HI) and Massie (R-KY) have introduced H.R. 8970, the Protect Our Civil Liberties Act, which would repeal both the USA PATRIOT Act and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, two laws which dishonor us and injure our civilization every day they're left on the books. H.R. 8970 would also ban retaliation against whistleblowers who expose government spying and ban the kind of "back doors" our government is always pressuring software developers to build into their privacy software. Getting a warrant from a judge was good enough for over 200 years, but then an incompetent Administration (George W. Bush's, this time) took over and failed dismally in its duty to protect good Americans from terrorist attacks; their attempts to "fix" their mistakes haven't just made us less safe, they've made us less free, and Osama bin Laden laughs at us from beyond the grave. So call your Reps and Senators and tell them to undo these injuries and pass this bill; they'll never see it coming.

Meanwhile, our soon-to-be-departed Administration has proposed gutting the long-standing Migratory Bird Treaty Act by letting corporations off the hook whenever they "incidentally" kill birds with their drilling and construction practices. If you've ever seen birds get electrocuted by high wires or trapped under fishing nets, you know this is a real thing, and if you question whether big corporations should really be punished for killing birds when they don't actually intend to kill birds, note well that involuntary manslaughter is a crime in America and that polluters who don't "intend" to befoul our air and water still face punishment. And, you know, this Administration wasn't very good at changing the rules when they had all the time in the world; what's the chance they'll be good at it now that they're rushing? Environmental Action helps you tell our Fish and Wildlife Service to reject its own proposal to let big corporations off the hook yet again for their unlawful damage to birds.

Around the table: Nothing Ever Ends, part 322.

British farmer Martin Crawford describes (in a short NatGeo video running less than three and a half minutes) how agroforestry could help save the world from starvation and drought brought on by climate change. "What we think of as normal in terms of food production is actually not normal at all," he says, and he ain't lying -- the way big ag corporations do it (one crop on one slab of land, lots of pesticides) suits them more than it suits human beings. Mr. Crawford's also written a book, Creating a Forest Garden: Working With Nature to Grow Edible Crops, though you'll have to hunt around for it a bit.

Former Health and Human Services advisor, if you can call him that, advocated creating "herd immunity" by infecting "Infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle aged with no conditions etc.," adding "(w)e want them infected," in case you missed it the first time. Admit it -- you thought this was A Modest Proposal for a minute, didn't you? Except I don't think Mr. Swift would have used the word "fastly" even as a wink to his audience. This Administration was quick to say this fellow's ramblings had no sway over their policies, although our soon-to-be-ex-President wouldn't STFU about "herd immunity" all freaking year.

Nathan Bernard at Mainer describes "How Sara Gideon Lost to (Susan) Collins the Day After She Entered the Race," but I bet you could replace Sara Gideon's name (and Susan Collins's name!) with their counterparts in Iowa, Kentucky, and North Carolina and have more or less the same article. Spoiler alert: Ms. Gideon lost by taking big Democrat money and taking big Democrat advice, resulting in a campaign that was "ugly, uninspiring, obscenely expensive, and out of touch with local concerns." And note well that Jared Golden got re-elected easily in a right-of-center House district "despite" supporting Medicare-for-All while Ms. Gideon lost by seven percentage points statewide after her six-figure consultant advisors all told her not to support it. (But read the whole thing, not least for the damning, and laugh-out-loud, testimony of one Alex Steed.)

What's the worst thing about Republicans' entirely manufactured outrage that Joe Biden's campaign manager referred to them all as "fuckers" in an interview? No, it's not that Republicans have spent four years excusing or pretending not to hear all of our soon-to-be-ex-President's cuss words, but that our "liberal" media will tell us this is the reason Mitch McConnell blocks everything Joe Biden tries to do, which would disregard 14 years of evidence telling us Mitch McConnell blocks everything any Democratic President (or House!) tries to do just because he can. Hey, they called us fuckers! I call them evil; I think that's worse.

Finally, when confronted with the news that our soon-to-be-ex-President's future neighbors in Florida don't want him there and would cite the terms of his own 1993 post-bankruptcy legal maneuvering to keep him out, I couldn't blame you for being quite amused at watching him get some of his own -- after all, hasn't he been clogging up the courts with far more frivolous lawsuits the last few weeks? Sadly, I bet this story ends with him getting some crony in the state legislature to help him out -- with a law aimed at "letting people live where they want" regardless of the legal agreements they've made, perhaps? If so, that sure would be conservative of them.

Action: concerning political appointees and poll worker safety.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell President-elect Biden to fire all of our soon-to-be-ex-President's right-wing appointees to federal positions, then Progress America still helps you do that. Too harsh? Not "bipartisan" enough? Not "helping America heal" enough? How can America heal if all the people in our government who live to destroy our government are still there? How can our Post Office get back on its feet if Louis DeJoy still runs it? How can Social Security serve seniors and disabled Americans if Andrew Saul gums up the works? How can our CFPB protect good Americans from financial predators if Kathy Kraninger won't even let our CFPB issue regulations? How can our IRS catch tax cheats if Charles Rettig acts so obviously like a Presidential crony? How can we root out government wrongdoing if our Inspectors General are all Presidential loyalists? If President Biden can't root out this evil in our government, we're going to have a long four or eight years, folks. But my Spider-sense tells me he won't even try unless he hears from us, in numbers that cannot be mistaken.

Meanwhile, early voting on the two Senate runoffs in Georgia began this week, and Georgia poll workers, naturally, face increasing online threats -- some find their addresses published online (for informational purposes only, and certainly not so anyone can beat them up or kill them wink-wink), while others find nooses with their names on them outside of their houses. Nobody serving our democracy should have to put up with that crap, so Color of Change helps you tell Facebook to ban poll worker harassment. Why Facebook? Because everyone's on Facebook, and bad actors use the info they get from Facebook to harass poll workers! And Facebook knows online harassment is a problem, otherwise they wouldn't protect politicians and journalists more than they protect regular folks. Facebook, of course, also lets its algorithms help Nazi wannabes find each other, which greatly increases the possibility that good Americans get beaten up merely for exercising their actual First Amendment rights. So, stop me if you've heard this before, but Facebook needs to do better by us.

Action: concerning various forms of racial and religious oppression.

H.R. 6210, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, passed the House by an impressive 406-3 margin; the bill would impose sanctions on China for its government's human rights violations in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (or XUAR), and would prevent that government from exporting goods made from Uyghur slavery to the United States. China's repression of nearly 2 million Uyghur Muslims into slavery camps is well-known by now, as is the complicity of American corporations (cough Amazon Apple cough) in that repression, and not coincidentally, the bill would also require big corporations to tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) if they've taken any sort of part in this noxiousness. 406-3 is a pretty nice margin, but not too many years ago, our Senate couldn't even pass a bill passed unanimously in the House (that would be the Email Privacy Act), so we shouldn't get complacent about this bill, either. Hence Rethink Trade helps you tell your Senators to pass the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act -- without the kind of poison-pill amendments some Senators used to sink the Email Privacy Act.

Meanwhile, Charleston (SC) Councilmember Harry Griffin held a rally with the so-called Proud Boys last week; the Proud Boys are a notorious group of Nazi wannabes, though of course they prefer the term "Western chauvinist" like they're post-modern or something. Our FBI, excuse me, even this FBI has designated the Proud Boys an "extremist hate group," and good Americans have captured their violent doings on camera, so there's little wiggle room for on-the-other-hand silliness when discussing them. (Yes, their current Chair is a person of color, and their founder married a person of color, but such phenomena, to be frank, aren't as uncommon as people think.) Anyway, Change.org helps you demand that Councilmember Griffin resign his job. Are we really going to demand his resignation over one mistake? Of course we are! Murderers commit "one mistake," and we don't blink at putting them in jail; we're not even putting Mr. Griffin in jail for associating with known racists, and a career in politics isn't a Constitutionally-protected right. Actually, it's the very definition of a privilege.

Finally, our soon-to-be-ex-President is rushing to do many favors for his corporate cronies before he leaves office, and one of these favors is a mining contract in the Oak Flat district of Arizona, which is also home to lands sacred to several Native American nations. Do you recall Arizona's two then-Republican Senators ensuring that the 2015 defense appropriations bill rolled back a prohibition on mining in those areas declared by none other than President Eisenhower? Do you recall that one of those Senators (Jeff Flake, far too well-congratulated for his opposition to our soon-to-be-ex-President) used to work for the corporation that would mine Oak Flat? Do you recall Apaches travelling 2,000 miles from Arizona to Washington, D.C. in 2016 to protest the taking of their sacred lands? And it's not just about not screwing Indians even further, or protecting actual religious freedom -- it's also about the pollution mining would unleash upon the region's land, air, and water. And for what? For more gilded plumbing in some mining executive's 19th vacation home? Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to save the Oak Flat region of Arizona.

Around the table: in which the "white supremacy" zombie shows less resilience than "voter fraud" zombies.

I'm not sure why this excellent article from Sonali Konatkar bears the title "How to Cure America's Vaccine Paranoia," since it doesn't really offer a cure, but it does describe pretty thoroughly how we got to be so paranoid about vaccines, and the root causes don't come exclusively from the right -- liberals hate big pharma, "liberal elites" "priz(e) natural remedies over chemical ones" even when doing that doesn't work, and "Black and brown communities" are wary due to "historical government-sanctioned medical abuse." There's hope in that Americans accept the idea of a COVID vaccine more than they did -- but then our soon-to-be-ex-President still has over a month to screw things up even more than he's already done.

From DJ Cashmere at Yes! magazine we learn about Shannon Foley Martinez, a former neo-Nazi who now helps white supremacists get out of the white supremacy gig. Chief insight, if you needed it, is that white supremacists typically have some kind of "unhealed trauma" in their past -- could be rape, could be abuse suffered at the hands of an adult. The article also reminds us how right-wing politicians threw a tantrum about the spectre of right-wing terrorism that helped delay any kind of federal law enforcement response to it for about a decade -- though I'm less willing to imagine that these politicians have any kind of "unhealed trauma" in their past, unless not creating drama counts as "trauma."

Wondering why Mitch McConnell has this jones for a "liability shield" for corporations that injure good Americans through their COVID-related negligence? Sarah Jones at New York magazine tries to explain. There's been no "wave" of COVID-related lawsuits, and they're actually hard to file (let alone win!) in the first place, but you know big corporate lobbyists, always looking for an opportunity to push their preferred policies on the populace, and this pandemic has been one big opportunity, and who loves big corporations more than Mitch McConnell, who has literally spent his entire career trying to make them more powerful? A lawsuit shield is not only unnecessary, but (in its potential deterrent effect) harmful to actual sufferers with actual grievances.

Yes, that was Rep.-elect Lauren Boebert wondering out loud why there were no Republican electors casting votes at Colorado's state capitol building on Monday when Colorado went for Mr. Biden by nine points, but no, she's not stupid -- she's hoping other people are either stupid or too rage-addled to think straight. Hey, it's worked for her so far. Democrats might reasonably counter her by running a candidate who looks like they might actually fight for their constituents, instead of a candidate who "fits the district" by "not supporting radical ideas," many of which, you'll have noticed by now, are popular ideas (and not particularly radical -- certainly nowhere near as radical as QAnon, which Ms. Boebert has both embraced and rather unconvincingly un-embraced).

The Cato Institute's Julian Sanchez finds our soon-to-be-ex-President "looking for fraud in all the wrong places," by which he means "voter fraud." Long story short: swing states have actually updated their voting machines -- and introduced paper trails -- while a lot of other (mostly red!) states still use electronic machines that don't create paper trails, and these are much more vulnerable to actual vote manipulation. "In other words," he writes, "voter anxiety about election security is being stoked in states that have behaved responsibly, while states that have been less responsive to expert advice get a free pass, because highlighting their shortcomings does nothing to advance a partisan narrative." (Also, paragraph 11 does the best job I've seen of debunking Dominion-related "vote switching" rubbish.)

Finally, speaking of stupid "voter fraud" tales, the Center for Media and Democracy spots the notorious American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC) at the heart of efforts by Pennsylvania state legislators to overturn election results there. So the next time some corporate ALEC member claims they only affiliate with ALEC because of economic issues and not all those controversial issues, you could respond but you support overthrowing a democratically-elected government. If you're feeling ornery, you could also respond you are objectively anti-democracy.

Action: concerning the minimum wage, car safety, and corporate donations.

Fight for $15 helps you demand that Congress enact a $15/hour minimum wage in the first 100 days of the Biden Administration. When they tell you that a $15/hour minimum wage causes unemployment or destroys the economy, demand proof. Demand the scientific studies that "prove" that higher minimum wages kill jobs or jack up prices (they almost all say the opposite!). No, it's not "common sense" that higher wages "kill jobs" or "jack up prices"; it's actually more common-sensical to say that higher incomes for lower-wage earners actually stimulate economies (low-wage earners pretty much have to spend their money, after all) or that higher minimum wages actually create jobs in local economies (since that money's more likely to be spent locally). If you do describe studies that refute their fears, don't be surprised if they talk over you like they're Sean Hannity or if they go on about $40/hour minimum wages no one has proposed or how they're not actually conservative like anyone gives a damn. Just declare the argument won and walk away. Right-wingers don't learn until we set boundaries.

Meanwhile, Consumer Reports helps you tell your Senators to pass good auto safety legislation. A number of good bills in our Senate would do that, and the House-passed H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act, includes automatic braking and blind-spot warning devices on automobiles among its multitudinous reforms, and, you know, it's not like safer cars is unpopular or something. You may be old enough to remember how much like pulling teeth it was to make cars put seat belts in! As a youth, I was in the front seat, unbelted, of a car that got into a fender-bender going no more than 10 MPH, and my head hit the windshield; that was all the instruction I needed to belt up every time I got in a car afterward, but a lot of folks have died before learning such a lesson, and why should we allow that? If we can cut car crashes in half now, then why wouldn't we do it? Because it'd "kill jobs"? People will be working jobs redesigning and rebuilding the safer cars, right? Too often right-wingers say it'll "kill jobs" when they actually mean "it'll cost executives money." Put that in the front of your mind, and you'll see things a lot more clearly.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell President-elect Biden to reject big corporate contributions toward his inauguration, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. This shouldn't be that tough a lift, given how thoroughly corporate inaugural contributions appear to have compromised our current President, and also given how scaled-down the Biden inauguration would have to be, given the pandemic, but if we say nothing and "trust" them to do the right thing, they'll take that as approval of doing the wrong thing. I'll admit it is a bit unnerving, I'll admit, to be reminded that Barack Obama rejected big corporate contributions to his 2009 inaugural, given how corporatist his Administration proved to be, but that only means we must apply pressure at all points in time. I know people are tired of fighting, more so now than in 2008, even, but I think we have to consider a bit more carefully whether our politicians are so terrible to us precisely because it leaves us too tired to fight them. I've thought about that a lot, and I'm pretty sure it's the truth. And I don't know about you, but contemplating that truth only makes me fight harder.

Around the table: in which we continue to chronicle the right's decades-long implosion.

Claire Kelloway at The Intercept, in a thorough report that repays re-reading, calls Tom Vilsack's apparent return as Agriculture Secretary "Everything That's Wrong With the Democratic Party." Even his one good work at the Obama USDA proves this thesis: his improved school lunch nutrition standards got relentlessly (and stupidly!) attacked by Republicans while approximately zero Democrats rushed to their defense, even though "keep our children away from junk food and thus obesity and diabetes" seems to me good politics as well as good policy. And, you know, they say Mr. Vilsack "gets" rural areas, but he's actually the kind of big ag corporatist who's been helping Democrats lose rural areas over the years, as evidenced by his being zero help in winning his home state of Iowa for Mr. Biden. Turns out rural folks' priorities differ from corporate ones, just like everywhere else on Earth.

This is an interesting result: our Supreme Court leaves in place a 10th Circuit ruling striking down that Kansas law requiring proof of citizenship before voting. Our Court has blessed bad vote suppression schemes before, but won't go out of its way to bless this one? You'll recall that this was the case Kansas's then-Secretary of State Kris Kobach lost at the District Court level so badly that the judge actually ordered him to take continuing education classes so he could argue cases less stupidly, and no judge really wants to be the first to say hey, the village idiot had a point!

I'd heard that a White House official (the director of the White House's security office, as it turns out) got COVID so bad he needed to have half his right leg amputated, which is absolutely awful, but I did not know that a friend started a GoFundMe page to help him pay his medical bills! Which makes it even worse! The GoFundMe page has raised $30,000 so far, though I can't tell if that'll cover his bills or not. In any case, it appears that our soon-to-be-gone Administration reserves the ONLYZ TEH BESTESTZ!!!!! treatment for our soon-to-be-ex-President and his closest cronies. Is it time for Medicare-for-All yet?

Doyle McManus at the Los Angeles Times says what we're all thinking: that in refusing to (in Mitch McConnell's 2016 phrase) "accept the results," our soon-to-be-ex-President has "concoct(ed) an animating cause for his post-presidency: a grievance-fueled campaign against Biden and the Democrats he accuses of stealing the election -- as well as against any Republicans who didn’t bend the rules the way he wanted." Thus he still rules the party, and if you're thinking these BS grievances over an obvious electoral loss will really animate the next generation of rage-fueled Republicans, consider that a) rage is a hell of a drug, b) Congressional Republicans will obstruct Mr. Biden the way they did Mr. Obama, and c) Democrats will largely capitulate to them, and we have learned that when all these things happen (cough 1994 2002 2010 2014 cough), any rage-fueled asshole can win an election.

Speaking of which, Texas GOP Chair Allen West responds to the controversy over his "secession" remarks the only way you'd expect -- by calling his critics "ignorant" and playing the Greg Brady Exact Words game. Did you see the word "secession"? I don't see the word "secession"! So how does he expect "law-abiding states" to "form a Union" without seceding from the one we've already got? He has no answer but to (again) resort to projection, calling the four states named in Texas's absurd lawsuit the "real perpetrators of secession," which also means, I suppose, that defying the will of Dear Leader automatically makes you a "secessionist." Long story short: waaaaaaah! And let's never speak of him again.

Finally, in a completely unexpected development, our Attorney General is leaving his post, to "spend more time with his family," we're told. But our soon-to-be-ex-President has lately screamed and yelled a lot about Mr. Barr, who said his office couldn't find significant voter fraud, and who also didn't disclose an actual investigation into Joe Biden's son Hunter (this lack of disclosure conforming with Justice Department rules). This latter item means that, in at least one respect, William Barr was a better public servant than James Comey. Of course, as usual, we're talking about the difference between a mound of dung the flies have found and a mound of dung they haven't found yet.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, COVID vaccines, and pollution.

You've been hearing for weeks now that our Congressfolk are "negotiating" a COVID stimulus bill, that some want to include stimulus checks and some don't, that some want to get it done before the end of 2020 and some don't, but, really, all they have to do to get good Americans the relief we deserve is pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act, so go ahead and call your Senators and tell them to do that. The HEROES Act would fund COVID testing and tracing, states and localities suffering from lost tax revenues, and our Post Office, plus it would repeal that notorious tax-cut-for-the-rich they snuck into the CARES Act and would cut working Americans another stimulus check (a bigger one than the CARES Act did). Really, if you want your Senators to pass the HEROES Act, best thing to do is to say the HEROES Act will cut us bigger checks than anything you're proposing now. And don't get caught up in thinking we have to do something now, because that's how they get you to settle for less than you deserve. You deserve the HEROES Act -- at the very least!

Meanwhile, Pfizer's new COVID vaccine stands to make them a crap-ton of money, but a big reason for that is it's damn expensive -- it sold 100 million doses (which would inoculate 50 million people) to our government at $20/dose, and maybe that doesn't sound like a lot, but let's see what it charges retail, and remember that in a lot of the world, folks don't make $20 a day, and they do have other things to buy besides a COVID vaccine. Like, you know, food and shelter. Astra-Zeneca, which is a bit behind Pfizer and Moderna in putting a decent COVID vaccine together, has already pledged to sell its vaccine in lower-income nations at a massive discount. You'd think Pfizer would do the same, having just raked in $2 billion from our government and more from others, but apparently not, hence Sum of Us helps you tell Pfizer to (guess what) put people over profits and supply their vaccine to lower-income countries for less money. It's really for all of us -- if richer nations get everyone vaccinated but poorer nations don't, then we haven't really beaten COVID, have we?

Finally, the big banks say they won't fund oil or gas drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, but our Office of the Comptroller of the Currency aims to put a stop to that: they've proposed a rule that would force banks to fund customers (like fossil fuel drilling corporations) solely on the basis of those customer's "individual risk," and not some "categorical exclusion," like, you know, whether the project will promote pollution. Some folks have called banks' refusal to fund fossil fuel drilling "discrimination," and others have even compared it to redlining. Compare, if you can, "refusing to fund a big fossil fuel project" with "not letting black folks move into your neighborhood." You can't. Our politicians love "free" markets right up to the point it stops working to their liking -- or, more precisely, their big donors' liking. And they also think good folks wielding the Big Stick of Bad PR is "terrorism." Hence Environmental Action helps you tell our Office of the Comptroller to reject this wrong-headed plan to force banks to fund fossil fuel projects.

Penny Rants for Sunday, December 13, 2020: special "everyone who sucked last year still sucks" edition!

From the "We Kinda Always Knew This, But It's Good to Have Confessions" file: a lengthy Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting investigation finds that Monsanto and BASF introduced their versions of dicamba knowing it would damage competitors' soybean crops, and they released these products because they wanted to eliminate their competitors. It gets better: Monsanto deliberately undertested their dicamba product (since they couldn't control dicamba's drift onto other farms), and when they did test it, they tested it under conditions that were nothing like what actual farmers face every day. BASF even told folks that their dicamba wouldn't necessarily be safe even by applying it strictly according to the label. In a sane and moral society, Monsanto and BASF would be so broken by lawsuits they'd go out of business. In this sick, immoral, and decadent society, however, Republicans claim these failures require more of the "free" market medicine that enabled them in the first place -- and Democrats remain so hypnotized by the "promise" of "technology" that they sit on their hands.

Another day, another reminder that a crap-ton of full-time workers at fast-food and retail corporations don't make enough money to stay off of federal assistance like food stamps and Medicaid, this time from a Government Accountability Office (or GAO) study. And here you thought if you work full-time, you should be able to provide for your family and guide your children to a better future -- let alone be able to provide for your family without having to rely on government assistance. Which you've already paid into with your taxes, so don't blame yourself or imagine you're some kind of leech; that's what they want you to think -- and right-wingers are so quick to say just get a better job like they're not busy trying to outsource all the good American jobs so that American executives can gild the plumbing on their 19th vacation homes. Oh, and here's the kicker: our GAO did this study before the pandemic hit; one can only imagine how much worse it is now, with over 14 million more uninsured and our U-1 unemployment rate still close to 7 percent (the more instructive U-6 rate, which counts part-timers who want to work full-time and unemployed folks who've given up, is 12 percent).

Ruth Marcus at the Washington Post lists every single Republican House Rep and state Attorney General who signed on to that ridiculous Texas lawsuit aiming to overturn our election, saying "they are laying the predicate for a contentious new phase of American democracy, if it can continue to be called that, in which election results -- after appropriate recounts and audits and certifications -- are no longer accepted. Instead, they merely open the door for a second phase of legal and political guerrilla warfare in which no tactic, no lie, no baseless claim is off-limits." Note well that these Republicans' loyalty to our soon-to-be-ex-President will most likely go unrewarded, not just because there'll always be a crazier right-winger to swordfight (just ask Scott Tipton!), but also because it only takes one deviation from Dear Leader's Holy Will to become a permanent outcast (just ask Bill Barr!). I did wonder -- because unlike these Republicans I do have the capacity for shame -- if we bore any blame for talking about Voter ID and Interstate Crosscheck, but no, we don't, not just because we always had evidence, but because we always said vote suppression happened before the vote.

Around the table: in which we confront another secessionist tantrum.

Our Supreme Court, citing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, unanimously rules that Muslims can sue FBI agents for monetary damages for placing them on a no-fly list as a way of coercing them into informing on other Muslims. I think the ruling is fairly narrow -- our Court didn't rule on whether folks could sue under the RFRA for injunctive relief, because our government took the original plaintiffs off the no-fly list about a year after they originally sued -- but it's still welcome. And remember what Paul Craig Roberts once said: if over a million people are on no-fly lists, why don't we have terrorist attacks every day?

More good news: after public pressure (and public likely includes you, if you read about it here), Bank of America has declared it won't fund efforts to drill in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR), despite our soon-to-be-ex-President's most fervent efforts. We're not, as they say, out of the woods yet -- the Office of the Comptroller has proposed a rule that might force banks to look at "individual client risk" rather than effect broad exclusionary policies, which would seem, ah, problematic -- but, again, this is a welcome development.

Given how many times I've said we should "get in our elected officials' grills" about pressing legislative matters, you may wonder if I approve of anti-mask protestors banging on the door of a Boise, ID health official's house as she was meeting to mull new COVID-related restrictions. The answer is no: folks should "get in their grills" in public, not in private; that could mean banging on the doors of their office, but not their home. Going to someone's house to intimidate them may seem "courageous," but it's actually cowardly -- if you're that sure you're right, you'll do it in front of everyone.

Surprise, surprise, Sen. David Perdue (R-GA), who'll face Georgia voters in a runoff race in less than a month, apparently sold his Washington, D.C. townhouse to a bankster lobbyist who had business before the Senate Banking Committee upon which Mr. Perdue sits. Their excuses are strained, as usual -- it was fair market price (although not everyone agrees about that, and another possibility would be no market price, if he didn't find another buyer), he didn't know the buyer (meaning he'd have been derelict in his duty on the Banking Committee!), and my personal favorite, the organization hasn't lobbied Mr. Perdue specifically, as if buying someone's house for $1.8 million isn't an act of lobbying itself! I'm old enough to remember when even the appearance of corruption ended careers, but in recent years I've seen too many people defy the rules and get away with it.

Finally, hot on the heels of our Supreme Court slapping down (by an apparent 7-2 margin) the Ken Paxton-led lawsuit attempting to overturn election results in four states, Texas GOP Chair Allen West suggests that maybe Texas should secede from our union. The last time Texas politicians threw a similar tantrum, in 2009, my reaction was more or less "don't let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya," and if I were playing *realpolitik* I might still say that, though we'd need to prepare for the fact (no, not the "possibility," the fact) that Texas would wage war on America sooner or later. But plenty of *good* people live in Texas, too -- after all, Mr. Trump only won it by 6 points, so Texas might only be one Stacey Abrams-calibre organizer away from flipping like Georgia did.

Action: concerning human rights in Iran, COVID vaccines, and media consolidation.

Iran released reknowned human rights lawyer/activist Nasrin Sotoudeh for three weeks due to her serious COVID-19 infection -- but now they've put her back in prison, even though she still has it and is still contagious! For a 38-year sentence, for the crimes of, let's see, "encouraging corruption and debauchery and providing the means," "propaganda against the system," "disrupting public order," and gosh let's stop, because we all know why she's really in prison: she's represented, among other folks Iran's government consider "undesirable," like women who won't wear a hijab in public, protestors against the obviously-stolen election of 2009, and folks facing a death sentence for they crimes committed while they were minors. In short: a snowflake government imprisons a fighter for justice on trumped-up charges. Hence Amnesty International helps you tell the government of Iran to drop charges against Ms. Sotoudeh and release her immediately. Time is short here -- and not just for her sake.

Meanwhile, we're going to have a hard time getting everyone a COVID vaccine (and not just because our current Administration decided not to get enough, amirite?), but we certainly don't need the World Trade Organization (or WTO) making it even harder. Some countries have proposed temporarily waiving WTO rules that give corporations monopoly protections for their putative intellectual property, but our Administration, naturally, opposes such a waiver. Big corporations make COVID vaccines with massive public investment, so we should get a say in this, and the families of the dead do not give one rat's hind quarter about intellectual property rights in the middle of a pandemic. And why should they? Our job on Earth is to help each other, not hide behind rules designed to help already-rich big pharma corporations maintain their unearned monopolies. Hence Rethink Trade helps you tell your House Reps to urge our outgoing President to reverse course on this matter and save a lot more lives.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) not to permanently waive media ownership restrictions in the New York market, then Free Press still helps you do that. I'm of the mind that no corporation should own any other corporation, let alone three media outlets in one market, but (guess who?) Fox owns WWOR, WNYW, and the New York Post, and if the FCC goes through with its plan, Fox gets to own them not on a "temporary" basis, but a permanent one, and I don't know about you, but I've sure had enough of Rupert Murdoch-created drama, even if his right-wing cable news channel is on the outs with our soon-to-be-ex-President and his votaries. Seriously, local news media is dying all over America, and media consolidation is the main reason why -- one corporate owner makes three or 10 or 300 news media outlets into cookie-cutter outlets, none of which reflect the diversity and uniqueness of the people they serve. As Americans, we deserve better -- and we must demand better.

Around the table: in which we confront yet another frivolous lawsuit.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton asks Supreme Court to block Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan from voting in the Electoral College, alleging that pandemic-related voting changes in these states violated federal law. I would expect our Supreme Court to ask why Texas didn't file this lawsuit at the time the laws were changed, but we must also remember that, well, Mr. Paxton has plenty of reasons to distract us right now. Gosh, I wonder why state Solicitor General/fellow Republican Kyle Hawkins isn't arguing this suit before our Court. Please note that by "I wonder why" I mean "because he knows it's a frivolous lawsuit and wants to have a career after 2020."

Upon hearing that South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem has argued that her state is doing quite well handling COVID using "cherry-picked numbers," I kind of expected her to do some sleight-of-hand like saying OUR CASEZ AREZ TEH DECLININGZ!!!! when they're actually still increasing but at a lower rate. But no: her cherry-picked numbers describe how other states, that locked down more than South Dakota did, are handling COVID -- and she doesn't even get those right! When you're justifying your own actions by criticizing others' actions, you're on pretty shaky ground, but sadly, so many Americans are so intimidated by numbers that I don't expect her to experience very much of the shame she deserves.

Right-wing cable news outlet Newsmax beats right-wing cable news outlet Fox News in the ratings -- in one demographic in one hour of one day, to be sure, but the journey of a thousand miles, et cetera. And CNN's average viewership has been higher than Fox's over the last month, but since all cable news networks suck, none of this is really anything to celebrate -- unless schadenfraude is your only pleasure in life, which I hope it's not! After all, Fox might spend some time trying to chase its viewers who are running away to Newsmax and OAN -- or it might position itself as the "sensible conservative" alternative without changing anything it does, which would, you guessed it, help move the center further right, just like they all do. Give us a la carte cable packaging and this would all matter a lot less.

Don't get too excited about Sen. Romney calling a mooted House attempt to challenge the Electoral College vote "madness." His entire comment essentially legitimizes the nearly five dozen frivolous lawsuits our soon-to-be-ex-President has filed, and he knows as well as anyone else that no matter what happens in Georgia, Republicans will be able to obstruct a Biden Administration a great deal, just as they've been doing whenever they lose the upper hand. Also, too, if "(r)ecounts are appropriate," I guess he also thinks demanding a second recount from Georgia, or only recounting Wisconsin counties with a lot of black folks, are also appropriate.

Finally, our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) and 40 U.S. states say Facebook has monopolized social media and should be broken up. I'm old enough to remember when quite a few social networks existed -- I enjoyed Tribe and Orkut an awful lot, and I sometimes wish I'd gotten more into MeetUp, LiveJournal and Flickr -- so breaking up Facebook wouldn't exactly "break the internet." It doesn't sound like they're going to break Facebook up very much, though -- merely taking Instagram and WhatsApp away from them wouldn't exactly destroy their monopoly. But Facebook pointing to the existence of TikTok and Parler as evidence they're not monopolists? That is to laugh.

Action: concerning the right to repair, pollution, and Arctic drilling.

You've seen COVID cases skyrocket lately, right? And you've heard that hospitals are starting to burst under the strain? And you remember the, ah, difficulties this Administration had in ensuring hospitals even had enough ventilators? One must wonder, then, why it should be so hard to fix a ventilator when it breaks down. And yet it is, as manufacturers put up roadblocks so that competent repair techs can't fix a machine (or, more precisely, so that the manufacturers' preferred techs can fix a machine). They hide behind "intellectual property" considerations, of course, but "intellectual property" doesn't mean a thing to a COVID patient who feels like she's breathing through a stirring straw; hence H.R. 7956/S. 4473, the Critical Medical Infrastructure Right-to-Repair Act, would remove a lot of these manufacturer-placed roadblocks so that good repair techs could fix critical machines. Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell your Senators to pass the Critical Medical Infrastructure Right-to-Repair Act.

Meanwhile, Wild Earth Guardians helps you tell President-elect Biden to undo all the damage our current Administration has done to the National Environmental Policy Act. What has this Administration done? Mainly, they've reduced public commenting on decision-making processes and prevented government agencies from taking climate change into account when issuing rules; I, for one, am deeply offended that our government would want less public input, not more, and I am also offended that some people are so sensitive to being told that we are polluting our planet to death that our government agencies would not be allowed to hurt their fee-fees. Our current Administration did these things not to "create jobs," or even to "streamline processes" -- they did them to make executives richer, and nothing else. It'd be nice to get a President in who doesn't suck up to bosses all the time -- but we should assume that Joe Biden will only be that President if we make him.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to leave a public comment opposing our current Administration's plan to lease the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR) to oil and gas drillers, then Environmental Action still helps you do that. Again, we confront a plan that doesn't create jobs or promote energy independence, but just gives oil and gas executives even more unearned money. Some folks would look at that italicized phrase and feel exactly zero shame -- you want to punish success, they'd say, and though of course we aim to punish greed and gluttony rather than success, the real question is this: why should we measure success exclusively by how much money you make? Why not measure success by, gosh, I don't know, how much good you do, for society and not yourself? Did you heal the sick, feed the hungry, clean the air and water? When we measure success by how many gold-plated plumbing fixtures you own, we don't just cast aside wilderness areas; we cast aside civilization.

Action: concerning lead in water, big inauguration donations, and war on Yemen.

A Virginia Tech-led study found that nearly 80 percent of homes across America have detectable levels of lead in their water, with 40% surpassing the American Academy of Pediatrics' recommended limit, and 15% with enough lead to cause brain damage in bottle-fed babies. This is five years after the problems suffered by Flint, MI residents made national news. And lead accumulates in your body, so any amount of lead can cause you serious harm regardless of your age. Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell your U.S. House Reps to pass legislation that would fund the replacement of lead service pipes, which still serve at least nine million homes in America, even though they've been outlawed since 1986. It takes time and money to replace these things, it turns out, but not necessarily 34 years, and the money we'd spend on replacing them would create jobs for a lot of good Americans. Funny how often doing the right thing creates jobs, while the schemes of the politicians don't. So let's get to it.

Meanwhile, President-elect Biden's inaugural committee plans to accept donations of up to a million bucks from corporations and about half that from individuals -- this, even though we hardly expect the usual inaugural spectacle in the face of a pandemic. Need I mention that our soon-to-be-ex-President faced quite a bit of scrutiny over the $100 million-plus in donations his inaugural committee received? People don't give money to an inaugural committee out of the goodness of their heart; they give it so that our President will give them something back. No donation needs arrive with a specific quid pro quo attached; everyone knows how this works, and it leads to corruption. Perhaps more importantly, any big donation, of any kind, tends to drown out the real grievances of real Americans who deserve a hearing just as much as any rich person does. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell our President-elect to reverse course and refuse to accept this absurdly large donations.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject our Administration's proposed $23 billion sale of weapons to the United Arab Emirates, then the Friends Committee on National Legislation still helps you do that. Why? Because the UAE will use them in its war on Yemen, that's why, and we've gone into why that's a terrible idea more times than I can count -- it commits America to an unconstitutional war, Yemen is already on the point of famine, and the Houthi rebels targeted by the Saudi/UAE coalition are some of the best fighters against al-Qaeda in the world. Odd how we don't protect those folks, and I'm sure the Turkish Kurds, however many of them remain, will agree. You'll no doubt have picked up that our Administration isn't selling these weapons to Saudi Arabia; why, it's almost like they know that's a toxic PR move or something. But, hey, we're not stupid -- we know who'd benefit from this proposed arms sale, and it sure ain't the good citizens of Yemen. And it also sure ain't us.

Around the table: in which we, once again, confront the uselessness of moderates.

In case you were thinking to yourself "well, at least this President's foreign policy has been different," note well that this Administration has dramatically expanded the drone strike program and killed more civilians than even his drone-happy predecessor, Barack Obama. This Administration has also been rather more secretive about whom they're killing. And when you actually kill more civilians over than the Taliban or ISIS do -- as we did over the first three months of 2019 -- you don't get to call yourself a peacemaker.

No, Virginia, that video your friends and family are talking about on Facebook does not show TEH SUITCASEZ FULLZ OF TEH ILLEGULZ VOTEZ!!!!! in Georgia. Rule number one of thinking for your damn self is you ask why this is a clip and not the full video! And per the state's Republican elected officials, Georgia always uses these "suitcases" to carry ballots already opened and prepared for counting, and of course the full surveillance video shows this actually happening, and also shows workers counting the votes. And no one has validated the claim (strangely not made in affidavits filed by the two Republican organizers everyone keeps talking about) that observers were told or "forced" to leave. But, hey, rage is a hell of a drug.

In a peripherally-related note, Factcheck.org also runs down our soon-to-be-ex-President's 46 minute-long rant in which he repeats the same election fraud accusations that haven't withstood the least amount of scrutiny in court or in the minds of folks who can think. Note well that "the most important speech I've ever made" wasn't about the pandemic that's killed nearly 290,000 good Americans but was about himself and his trials and tribulations. This is why so many of us think of him as a whiny, diaper-loaded brat! Now, when you read about the Wayne County (MI) lawsuit that got slapped down, you have to wonder if our soon-to-be-ex-President made sure to put inexperienced election observers in place precisely because they'd be less familiar with the process and would simply decide everything they saw was fraud. I sure wouldn't put it past him.

Pennsylvania Republicans plan to introduce a Constitutional amendment that would force state appeals court judges to run in particular districts, rather than statewide -- so they can gerrymander the courts just like they've gerrymandered their own legislature. All together now: waaaaaah! Why a state Supreme Court should represent a particular "district" of Pennsylvania will not be immediately clear to you -- until you realize that five of the seven Supreme Court judges were elected as Democrats, and four of them can't be turned out of office until 2025 or later. Think maybe our state legislature will try to run out the clock on Constitutionally-mandated redistricting until then?

Finally, Jesus Mary and Joseph what is wrong with Senate "moderates" that they're trying to put together a $900 billion COVID relief bill without additional stimulus checks for working families? They're only giving Republicans like Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri an opening to "fight" for stimulus checks; why, it's almost like that's the whole idea. If you're tempted to think Democrats are stupid because they didn't think of that first, well, actually, they kinda did, because they passed the HEROES Act (which has larger stimulus checks than the CARES Act did) back in May. Call your Senators and tell them to pass the HEROES Act, and maybe we won't have to appease "moderates" for a while.

Action: concerning COVID-19 relief, voting rights, and Social Security.

I've avoided passing along "please pass COVID relief now" action alerts, since settling for any COVID relief just about guarantees bad COVID relief -- like Mitch McConnell's "skinny"-ish "relief" proposal, which again includes three-martini lunch tax breaks and blanket immunity for corporations that let you get sick from COVID. And I wouldn't propose getting something done now so we can "go big" once Joe Biden takes over, either, because "going big" will be much harder if either Democratic candidate in the two Georgia Senate runoffs lose in January. But there's a simple solution to all the drama and chaos -- just call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act! The HEROES Act would fund COVID testing and tracing, fund states and localities (and a lot of the struggling ones are in red states now, right, Mr. McConnell?), and a bigger, better stimulus check for Americans who need it. So don't game out their "negotiations" -- just demand they negotiate with us.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: over 50 Republican state legislators have demanded that Pennsylvania's U.S. House Reps and Senators challenge that state's Electoral Votes later on this month. Why? Because (according to their complaint) Gov. Wolf and Secretary of State Boockvar "undermin(ed) the many protections provided under" the election reform law the state passed in 2019. But read their complaint and you will find that a) they don't say Messrs. Wolf or Boockvar broke the law; b) our state Supreme Court has already rejected at least one of their grievances; c) a government going above-and-beyond to resolve "deficient" ballots is quite a thing to complain about; and d) resolving these legislators' grievances the way they'd want would change only a few thousand votes, and last I looked conservatism was most pointedly not about applying extreme solutions to relatively small problems. So call your Reps and Senators and tell them to reject this desperate attempt to overturn the will of the people of the Commonwealth.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the incoming Biden Administration to reverse all of our soon-to-be-ex-President's attacks on our Social Security, then Social Security Works still helps you do that. You would specifically ask for the Biden Administration to a) fire all recent political appointees to the Social Security Administration and b) undo all of this Administration's rule changes and proposals that would take Social Security benefits away from us -- like making recipients re-establish their eligibility for Social Security Disability benefits every six months, which isn't "fighting corruption" but simple harassment. And don't put too much stock into stories about someone faking a disability to get benefits. Even before you verify such stories, you must ask: do individual stories mean we deny everyone the benefits they need to survive? As a civilized person -- hell, as a mature person! -- you would answer no, it does not.

Around the table: in which we, once again, contemplate Democratic cowardice and Republican malice.

Our House passes H.R. 3884, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act, by a 228-164 margin on Friday, so congratulations to you if you told your Reps to pass this bill. I feel compelled to point out that House Democratic leadership delayed a vote on this bill in October at least partly out of a fear that it would hurt their members' prospects for re-election -- and then Democrats lost 12 incumbents (so far!) anyway, which suggests yet again that maybe avoiding "tough" votes doesn't help Democrats on Election Day. Certainly they'd have done better running on their passage of a real COVID stimulus bill in May.

Vijay Prashad and Carlos Ron provide a better primer on recent Venezuelan politics than you're likely to get from our "liberal" media, which did openly aid and abet a coup against its democratically-elected leader in 2019, after all. Messrs. Prashad and Ron document the right-wing reaction against the popular will in Venezuela since its people elevated Mr. Chavez in 1998; said reaction includes broad swaths of right-wing politicians boycotting elections because they're "rigged," in case you wonder where our soon-to-be-ex-President got that idea (and in case you wonder how our right-wingers would react if someone like Bernie Sanders ever became our President).

You've heard how unlikely it is that a COVID vaccine will get to poorer nations? Well, Olivia Goldhill and Nicholas St. Fleur at STAT describe how, even within a privileged nation such as ours, some folks -- including professional athletes, politicians, banksters, and other wealthy folks -- have more privilege than others. A lot of it turns on the definition of "essential worker"; be ready when the folks who declare banksters "essential workers" say it's really for the bank tellers who meet people face-to-face every day. Also be ready for the numbnuts who wonder WHY DOEZ TEH SMOKURZ GETZ TEH VACCINEZ BEFOREZ MEZ!!!!!, as if smokers don't have bad lungs or fight addiction, and (more importantly) as if reducing the number of people who get COVID doesn't help everyone generally.

Ryan Grim at The Intercept gives us the good news that President-elect Biden "has chosen someone more progressive and less entrenched in Wall Street than the same official under Obama" for nearly every Cabinet position he's announced so far. And you can attribute that directly to the agitation of liberals! Some moderates no doubt say appointing more liberal folks to Cabinet positions just opens us up to Republican attacks, but I must respond: have your eyes been open these last few decades? Republicans attack everyone to their left as a Socialist Communist Nazi Kenyan Anti-Colonialist; the best counterattack is to do good works for the people, advertise those good works, and call the attacks what they are: desperate.

Ho hum, Idaho Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin accepted over $300,000 in CARES Act corporate welfare handouts -- and then three months later slammed folks who support "socialized medicine" and other "handouts" for "foster(ing) dependency." Presumably she thinks that in a "truly free market devoid of government lockdowns and other mandates," businesses could stay open, and if (even) more people died, I guess that'd just be the "genius" of the "free" market. But, ah, who pays her salary as Lieutenant Governor? The taxpayers of Idaho, that's who, meaning she's just as much a "socialist" as anyone else.

Finally, Isabelle Morrison at Yes! posits an alternative to the music streaming corporation Spotify, where artists earn less than half a penny for every song streamed: a musician co-op called Resonate, where artists make 45% of profits. The exploitation of popular musicians is, sadly, a very old story, as Charles Shaar Murray's bio of John Lee Hooker has lately reminded me, and the big artists' response to that exploitation (like Jay-Z's Tidal or, really, the Eagles' 2007 label-free album) really only work for other big artists. You want to make music on your own and get paid like you should? Count less on getting Jay-Z's attention and more on Resonate's "stream-to-own" model, which pays artists in nine plays what they'd need at least 150 plays to collect on Spotify.

Action: concerning vaccines, pollution, and "conversion therapy."

The Hero Action Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to make any COVID-19 vaccine free for all Americans. Not just because life is precious, but because the more people get immunized, the quicker we'll kill this disease, and the big pharma corporations shouldn't worry -- I'm sure this isn't the last time we'll need a COVID vaccine. But, you know, Pfizer took a few hundred million Euros to make its vaccine, and Moderna only spent American taxpayer money on theirs, so we should, in fact, get to say what happens with these vaccines. One might respond that these corporations only made those vaccines so they could make money -- and given how little interest big corporations have ever shown in an ebola vaccine, one might be right. But civilized people cannot reasonably put money at the core of every single public welfare decision. That's what our government has done for decades now, and we need to change that.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell Pennsylvania Gov. Wolf to reject the proposed Gibbstown, NJ natural gas export terminal. Mr. Wolf, as Governor, sits on the Delaware River Basin Commission (or DRBC) and has the authority to stop this project, which would receive liquefied natural gas transported over rail and truck from Wyalusing, PA and send it overseas, which sure is a strange way of promoting energy independence. Of course, it's also a bad way of promoting "a new energy future" -- a better way would be to go all-in on renewable energy sources, because even though (as Ralph Nader used to say) you can't own the sun, you can own the infrastructure that converts it into electricity. But shipping 3.5 million gallons of liquified gas every single day is an accident waiting to happen, and that accident will pollute our land, our air, and our clean water. So we know what we have to do.

Finally, Change.org provides two petitions which help you protect gay and/or transgender kids: one helps you tell Alabama legislators to reject HB 1, which would actually make it illegal to give health care services to transgender children, while the other helps you tell Pennsylvania legislators to pass HB 1293, which would ban "conversion therapy" there. It's pretty simple: the science tells us that "tough love" for transgender kids (which is what HB 1 supporters obviously prefer) only makes their anxiety, depression, and suicidal wishes much worse, and the science also tells us that "conversion therapy" (which HB 1293 would ban) isn't therapy, or even science. Hate to pile on, but Alabama does worse than most American states in providing mental health care to children to begin with, and "conversion therapy" includes such "therapies" as naked touching, re-enacting sexual abuse, and shock therapy, and why would civilized folks allow these things to happen?

Around the table: in which we contemplate foreign policy, elections, and our "liberal" media.

Patrick Cockburn at Counterpunch nominates our soon-to-be-ex-President's greenlighting of Turkey's genocide against the Kurds for the dishonor of his "Worst Crime." "Tragedy on this scale blurs in people’s minds," it's true, and certainly we would do well to remember that our soon-to-be-ex-President's foreign policy has been little different from that of his predecessors, despite all the promises he made. I also feel compelled to point out that the Kurds have fought al-Qaeda as well as the Houthi rebels in Yemen, who also, strangely, seem to be far down our government's list of favorite world peoples.

Former Obama acting Solicitor General argues, before our Supreme Court, against holding American corporations liable for depending on foreign child slavery to make their products, which sure does remind us how disappointing the Obama Presidency was, does it not? Though we can make too much of guessing how our Supreme Court Justices will vote based on how they respond to answers, none of them (not even Justice Barrett, the anti-judge) seemed to like his answers. Trouble is, they didn't like the plaintiff's answers, either. You'd hate to think justice could be so dependent on good lawyering.

So when I read about right-wingers having "very serious concerns" about elections after they watch poll workers actually count votes, I feel compelled to note that a) this is obviously the first time they've watched democracy in action and b) they all obviously think "their" candidate got ripped off and thus c) their rhetorical questions make them all sound five years old. And of course, if people complain a story makes them "look bad" without challenging any of the story's factual assertions, then you must consider the possibility that they're just whining.

You've been hearing all about how Republicans would hate the idea of Neera Tanden as OMB Administrator, but you may not have heard that a lot of liberals hate the idea, too. Ms. Tanden has, in the past, embraced Social Security benefit cuts and opposed a $15/hour minimum wage; her disdain for the Sanders campaign isn't particularly material to me, but is to a lot of other liberals. I am a little puzzled that so many "liberal" media outlets are missing out on this opportunity to highlight liberal opposition, since that would give them the opportunity to blame us for Democrats underperforming expectations again.

Barack Obama says the "defund the police" slogan alienates people who might otherwise be sympathetic. Six months ago I would have agreed with him! But then police killed George Floyd, and in the wake of massive public protests afterward even Mitt Romney said "black lives matter" out loud, and I was reminded, again, that two kinds of people get alienated by such "sloganeering": people who'll come around eventually, and people who can't be reached anyway.

Finally, Maria Bartiromo's exclusive-for-a-reason interview with our soon-to-be-ex-President, in which she cheered him on as he heaped absurdity upon absurdity, exemplifies what both liberals and conservatives hate about our media -- namely, that our media don't challenge the powerful. But the article's author seems, well, betrayed by this performance, and I can't imagine why -- remember that time Ms. Bartiromo asked Anthony Weiner why he wasn't on Medicare if Medicare was so great ("because I'm 45," he responded)? Yeah, that was 11 years ago.

Action: concerning good House bills, election ethics, and drilling on public lands.

Happy Wednesday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Remember: don't get discouraged, because that's how they want you to feel. Indeed, the only reason they have the power they do is because so many Americans are discouraged. But when we fight through our discouragement, and we act, we make good things happen.

Meanwhile, People for the American Way helps you tell our Senate Ethics Committee to investigate Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) for allegedly trying to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger to throw out legally-cast votes in that state. Joe Biden won Georgia by a slim margin, as you know, but Sen. Graham sure seems to have done his part to contribute to all the tall tales about "voter fraud." How did Jaime Harrison raise $100 million and still lose to Mr. Graham by 10 points, huh? Should we take that result as evidence of actual voter fraud in South Carolina? Of course not (we should take it as evidence that Mr. Harrison wasn't such a good candidate!), so let's not imagine that any result we don't like must be "fraud," certainly not without evidence, which Mr. Graham has not provided. Our soon-to-be-ex-President sure does turn everything he touches to dung, doesn't he? Mr. Graham, once upon a time, was the first Senator to condemn the abuses at Abu Ghraib, but now he sucks up to a man he derided not too long ago.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell President-elect Biden to keep his promise to ban fossil fuel drilling on public lands, then Wild Earth Guardians still helps you do that. Yes, Mr. Biden did promise to ban fracking and oil drilling on public lands, though not private lands; I suppose he could work around his promise by selling off as much public land as he can to oil and gas drilling corporations, but we'll deal with that if it comes to that. And certainly we should concentrate on renewable energy production, not fossil fuel production that pollutes our air and water. I would advocate that our government get back into the utility business by creating renewable energy utilities that can compete with the privately-held utilities that won't do what's necessary to fight pollution and climate change. Maybe Joe Biden doesn't want to do that; certainly Mitch McConnell doesn't want to do that. But when we make our will unmistakable, it doesn't matter what the politicians want. So let's get to it.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, fuel efficiency, and police in schools.

Today's as good a day as any to call your Senators and demand they pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act. Tolerate none of this "skinny" stimulus bill crap from Republicans! All they would do is funnel our money down the gullets of their corporate cronies like they did with the CARES Act. Yeah, you got $1,200 from that (didn't you?), but that doesn't balance out big corporations like Ruth's Chris Steak House disguising themselves as "small businesses" to feed at the taxpayer trough. What would America get along with a bigger stimulus check from the HEROES Act? Funding for COVID-19 testing and tracing, funding for enhanced unemployment benefits, funding for states and localities, and funding for our Post Office, among other good works. What would Republicans want? Bigger tax breaks for three-martini lunches and blanket immunity for corporations from lawsuits when they expose good Americans to COVID. I wish I were making that up. Their priorities really are horsedoodle -- which is why we get up in their grills with our priorities.

Meanwhile, perhaps after reviewing last month's election results, the General Motors corporation has withdrawn its support for our soon-to-be-ex-President's proposal that would weaken EPA fuel efficiency standards, so now the Sierra Club helps you tell big car manufacturing corporations Toyota and Fiat-Chrysler to abandon their support for weakened standards as well. Cleaner cars mean what, good Americans? They mean cleaner air, obviously, but they also mean lower gas bills, as cars go further on a gallon of gas. Weakening those standards might mean cheaper cars -- and it might not! -- but whatever you save on car-buying day you'll give up over the years as it belches out more filth into our air. But shouldn't we get a choice? I can already hear right-wingers say. Silly right-wingers! With weaker standards you won't have a choice -- big corporations tweak their fuel efficiency now and then, but if we really want to save our planet, we're have to make them do more.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7848/S. 4360, the Counselors Not Criminalization Act, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. Long story short, the bill would help get police officers out of schools and help get counselors, nurses, and social workers back in. You don't need to remember viral videos of cops bodyslamming students to support this bill -- you need only know that school districts that hire more counselors, nursers, and social workers see better attendance, higher grades, and fewer disciplinary incidents. Putting police officers in schools does not, in fact, "scare kids straight," as we would know if we took a minute to remember what we were like as students. World was our oyster back then, and nobody was going to tell us what to do! Seriously, I've said it before and I'll say it again: we must stop acting like "more cops" is the solution to every problem. Certainly "more people trained to deal with children" is the solution to problems children have.

Action: concerning voting rights, drug policy, and corporate power.

America's last journalist, Greg Palast, reports that the state of Georgia can now block voter registrations for folks who don't also have cars registered in the state. They claim they're just trying to prevent people from driving in from out of state and voting in Georgia, but we all know what they're really trying to do: they're trying to prevent seniors, students, and folks of color from voting, since those groups often vote Democrat. They're calling the rule change a "guidance" so that they don't actually break the law, and they may yet lose in court -- but if they do, it'll be after they deliver a big assist to the two Republicans running in January's Senate runoff races, which could well determine which party controls our Senate. Oh, and when Republicans control it, only bad things happen. You might want to call at least three of the five members of Georgia's state election board; here's where to find their phone numbers. (Click on the "State Election Board members" sidebar to bring up the relevant phone numbers.)

Meanwhile, our House plans a vote on H.R. 3884, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act; it's no good arguing that since Mob Boss Mitch would never hold a vote on it that it's no use telling our House Reps to pass it. In fact, it's not only "no good" arguing that, it's bad arguing that -- we're supposed to set the agenda, not him. And the MORE Act would do a lot of good -- it would legalize pot, which at this point would be about as harmful as legalizing booze which we tried once and almost certainly won't try again. The MORE Act would also help good Americans expunge pot convictions from their records and would fund the rebuilding of communities unfairly targeted by the "war on drugs." Our government has always intended the "war on drugs" to be a way of keeping folks of color (among others) down -- but don't take my word for it; take former White House counsel John Ehrlichman's word for it! And then let the ACLU help you tell your Congressfolk to help correct decades of mistakes by passing the MORE act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell President-elect Biden to avoid stacking his Administration with corporate cronies, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Remember: when we hear that Mr. Biden should want a cabinet "with diverse viewpoints," that phrase means "without liberals." And when we hear that we should just let Mr. Biden have his center-right cabinet lest we lose both Houses in the 2022 midterms, we should remember that these exact precise center-right moves actually cause Democrats to lose big in midterm elections. And we should also remember that telling Mr. Biden to keep the corporatists out of his cabinet isn't actually something only liberals say -- a lot of folks who voted for our soon-to-be-ex-President feel exactly the same about corporate power, and would like our leaders to do something about it. If Democrats want to appeal to them, then fighting corporate power might be the best way to do it. Not that they ever take my advice.

Around the table: in which we confront the horrible truth about our Supreme Court's idea of "religious" "freedom."

Laurence Tribe and Michael Dorf at USA Today put it best in re our Supreme Court's recent ruling on New York's COVID restrictions: "(f)or the Supreme Court’s new and extremely conservative majority, it seems, failure to sufficiently discriminate in favor of religion counts as discrimination against religion." This ruling -- which Chief Justice Roberts didn't join, at least partly because our Court had already ruled the other way in similar cases from California and Nevada -- signals that the five reactionary Supreme Court justices are ready to roll everything back, regardless of precedent, and certainly regardless of both law and order and the people's will. In other words, they're the judicial activists right-wingers have told us they've always feared. Odd how that happens.

Our soon-to-be-ex-President lost two more court cases in recent days: in one, a Third Circuit panel made up entirely of Republican-appointed judges, who wrote an opinion reading in part: "calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here." In the other, the Pennsylvania state Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit brought by Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA), who thinks he'll be Pennsylvania's next Governor or Senator, asking to throw out six million votes and let the reactionary state legislature pick the President. You'll notice, as the Court did, that he didn't bring this lawsuit alleging that Pennsylvania's mail-in balloting procedure was "unconstitutional" until over a year after the state legislature passed the law, which certainly opens Rep. Kelly up to charges of bad faith.

When I hear David Brooks talking about "The Rotting of the Republican Mind," I'm quick to point out that he's contributed to that rotting whether he believes it or not -- I mean, anyone who advocated for the invasion of Iraq, about as fact-free an argument as had been advanced up to that point, shares responsibility for that. But, to be frank, the "epistemological crisis" he describes is absolutely real, as I experience every time some Facebook friend advances some easily-refutable story about "voter fraud" and never stops advancing the story or admitting they're wrong even after being told repeatedly by friends and neighbors they're wrong, and I also agree that the internet isn't the cause and that the urban/rural divide is a real thing that urban smartypantses ain't helping. Of course, Mr. Brooks won't identify the real cause -- a Republican party that cares about nothing but power -- because, again, he'd have to implicate himself.

In a peripherally-related note, Congressional Republicans prepare to strut around about "deficits" now that their President lost re-election. They're so cocky now that they say talk about "getting back to our DNA" like they never abandoned it out of expedience (i.e., with the worst tax "reform" ever passed in America) nor re-embraced it out of expedience (i.e., now a Democrat's President). It'll get worse, of course, as our "liberal" media gets ready to treat their absurd arguments about the deficit with seriousness again. Democrats could neutralize this stratagem by simply answering every question about the deficit with "you didn't care about it when a Republican was President, so shut your yap," but I sure wouldn't lay money on that happening.

Uh oh: Sen. David Perdue (R-GA), still up for re-election in a Georgia runoff in January, has apparently lied at least once (per our Justice Department) that he hasn't acted on insider information while making stock trades. Add in his millions in donations from the bankster sector (how does he need that, being so rich?) and you have Lesson #334 in "Why You Don't Put Rich People in Office." Think Jon Ossoff will start running "so I wasn't lying after all!" ads? Nah -- that wouldn't be civil.

Finally, our soon-to-be-ex-President unfurls this flatugasm at a reporter: "You’re just a lightweight. Don’t talk to me that way. I’m the President of the United States. Don’t ever talk to the President that way." My answer to such remarks is always the same: try earning some damn respect.

Action: concerning hazard pay at Amazon, the Keystone XL pipeline, and war on Yemen.

Hard to believe, Harry, but Amazon hasn't been paying its workers hazard pay for months now. You may well be saying that warehouse work can't be that hazardous, but if you've ever actually done it, you know it's quite strenuous; now try doing it with eggheads constantly breathing down your neck to work harder and go faster. And, more to the point, try to imagine social distancing in a pandemic at possibly the busiest warehouse on Earth. Hazard pay is the least Amazon workers should be getting, especially since Amazon made over $6 billion in profits in the three months after cutting off hazard pay, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos's net worth increased by $66 billion between April and September. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell Mr. Bezos to reinstate hazard pay for his corporation's workers. It's not like he doesn't have the money, after all, and you may have noticed that COVID-19 cases have shot up lately.

Meanwhile, 350.org helps you tell President-elect Biden to stop Keystone XL cold dead on his first day in office. Yes, he'll have a lot to do his first day, but this isn't actually a heavy lift: TransCanada, the corporation with the notoriously bad pipe-safety record, began construction this year without even getting all its permits in order, so there's a fairly easy pretext for stopping construction right there. Of course, big oil drilling corporations are thinking they can elbow Mr. Biden into doing their bidding, but that's just the reason we need to speak out now: at least we can make him choose between doing the bidding of big campaign donors or executing the will of the American people as is his actual job. And no, "compromise" doesn't mean "letting the big oil corporations get their way." Keystone XL could contaminate the Ogallala Aquifer, provider of drinking water to millions of good Americans in our heartland, and there is no compromise where our clean water is concerned.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Congressfolk to reject our soon-to-be-ex-President's proposed $23 billion arms sale to the UAE so they can keep bombing the bejesus out of Yemen, then Win Without War still helps you do that. As with the multitudinous regulatory changes our soon-to-be-ex-President is trying to ram through before we drag him kicking and screaming from office, he's hoping to do one last favor for the warmongers in Saudi Arabia, which this surely is, even if the money's not going directly to them. (Saudi Arabia leads the coalition waging war on Yemen, with the UAE being the other major partner in that coalition.) Still, Sens. Menendez (D-NJ), Murphy (D-CT), and Paul (R-KY) have introduced "privileged" resolutions aiming to stop the sale -- meaning Super Great and Awesome Real American President Mitch McConnell can't stop a vote on them -- and if the odds favor us, we have the duty to make our will known.

Around the table: in which we tabulate a small amount of good news, and battle the bad news with intelligence and honor.

From Markos Moulitsas at Daily Kos, here's the best analysis of how our soon-to-be-ex-President got way more votes than pollsters suggested he would. Long story short: folks who don't trust our government because it's actively hurt them (i.e., by enabling the outsourcing of their jobs) and who also feel profoundly isolated in their daily lives not only turn out in big numbers for our soon-to-be-ex-President and only for him, but don't particularly turn out for polls, either. Some of these folks (remember incels? Gosh!) are, as Mr. Moulitsas says, "just assholes in general," but I still think Bernie Sanders could have turned a lot of the others out for him in 2020.

Good news, everybody: our Army Corps of Engineers has denied a permit for the proposed Pebble Mine project in Alaska's Bristol Bay, citing the Clean Water Act. This project is so unpopular that even Scott Pruitt's EPA wouldn't sign off on it, and our soon-to-be-ex-President's elder son twittered against it -- and yet still executives were caught on tape saying they planned an even bigger project than what they put on their permit! Our Glorious Elites can't be trusted to do the right thing -- which is why we make them do the right thing.

Bad news, everybody: our soon-to-be-ex-President is rushing to gut as many clean air/clean water/worker safety protections as he can before we drag him kicking and screaming from office. Also, Democrats likely won't have the numbers in our Senate to pass "resolutions of disapproval" like the ones Republicans passed incessantly in 2017. But still, good news, everybody: given his regulatory changes' track record in court, we might expect that a lot of these changes will die there anyway.

I imagined it would happen but not this quickly: our soon-to-be-ex-President's daughter actually bragged about the drop in carbon emissions this year, hoping you wouldn't notice that a little thing called the COVID-19 pandemic -- you've heard about that, right? -- caused the drop. If she's secretly hoping to trap people into admitting that making crap and controlling climate change are "mutually exclusive propositions," just remember that back in 2015, the IAE found that carbon emissions dropped as world economies expanded, so you already know she's lying.

So, are some of your more right-leaning pals threatening to leave Facebook and Twitter for Parler, which bills itself as a free speech-friendly social network? Well, Rebecca Heilweil at Vox describes how Parler obviously intends to be a "haven" for right-wing speech, but is already taking steps to moderate content, much of which is noxious. Calling yourself a "town square" rather than a "publishing house" doesn't mean you're not a publishing house, and Lawrence Rosenthal's assessment -- that right-wingers have been "creat(ing) an alternate universe" at least since talk radio -- is quite illuminating. So I couldn't blame you for thinking Parler just wants to be a safe space for whiners who can't handle criticism.

Finally, America's Last Journalist, Greg Palast, suggests that we thank Native Americans for Joe Biden's victory, since Native American votes may have delivered the electoral votes of Arizona, Wisconsin, and Nevada. I don't know if it's quite that cut-and-dried, but I'm pretty sure he's right that "(i)f you’re American Native, the chance your ballot will not be counted for some technical reason is approximately 1200% higher than if you’re White," and I do remember Mr. Bush winning New Mexico in 2004 as Native American voters apparently didn't vote for President in any significant number, which reminds me of the multitudinous folks who voted in Michigan but not for President in 2016, despite no other statewide race being on the ballot.

Action: concerning police brutality, media consolidation, and Arctic drilling.

A new Administration comes to power in January, so Grassroots Law helps you tell the Biden-Harris team to do everything they can to stop racist police brutality. Grassroots Law has a good list of demands, and these include reopening police brutality cases left unsolved, ending the 1033 program that sends military weapons to police departments, repeal the Muslim ban and family separation policies, and getting more public defenders and civil rights attorneys involved in our Justice Department's work. A Biden-Harris Administration can accomplish most of this through executive order, without running to Great and Bounteous Real American President Mitch McConnell (or his trusty sidekick, Saint Joe Manchin of the Golden Age of Bipartisanship) for permission. And though Biden-Harris ran on most of this stuff, you know they really don't want to do it if they don't have to. But that's why we make them have to.

Meanwhile, FCC Chair Ajit Pai, who isn't very long for his job, plans to waive media ownership rules so that Fox can gobble up even more properties in the lucrative New York City media market, where Fox already owns two TV stations and the New York Post. And our FCC will only take public comments on this plan until next Friday, December 4, which is what they all do when they know the public will hate what they do. Media consolidation is one of the few issues in America where liberals and conservatives actually agree (i.e., in that they all hate it), so naturally the nominally "conservative" Mr. Pai would do the exact opposite! There's a lesson in there, somewhere. Until they learn it, Free Press helps you tell our FCC not to give out any more corporate welfare handouts to Fox. Fox will probably tell you it just can't compete with Newsmax, OANN, etc. without more handouts, but if it can't compete with those clowns, it deserves to die.

Finally, just about every big banking corporation in America has declared that it won't fund any drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR) -- except for Bank of America. Sigh. Of course it's Bank of America! And it'll only take one well-funded (as far as we know!) bankster to ruin a stretch of public land the size of South Carolina. (No, really. Alaska is a really, really big place; people don't get how big it is.) And drilling for oil and gas in ANWR will not only ruin land home to the Gwich'in people and unique species of animals, it won't get us anywhere near as much oil as ANWR drilling proponents would like you to think. And once that oil's burned, and all that money gets spent, there really will be nothing left -- unless we fight to keep what's really important. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell Bank of America to abandon plans to fund Arctic drilling.

Around the table: in which we are reminded what we must do to "push Biden left."

Kevin A. Young at TruthOut instructs us that "To Push Biden Left, We Must Build Movements to Challenge His Corporate Backers." The article draws from Mr. Young's book, Levers of Power: How the 1% Rules and What the 99% Can Do About It; historical examples include the civil rights movement boycotting local businesses in the '60s (which prompted them to pressure politicians), while more recent examples include all the massive civil disobedience (and pressuring of investors) that have stopped a lot of fossil fuel projects cold. Conclusion: "the best way to get better electoral outcomes is, ironically, to build strong non-electoral movements." Certainly we'll do better better donating to union strike funds than to center-right Democratic candidates like Amy McGrath who'll just light your money on fire while losing big.

Hard to believe, Harry, but Amazon uses Pinkerton operatives to spy on their workers. Which proves, yet again, that giving corporations more money doesn't magically cause them to "create jobs," but it just gives them more money to light on fire desperately trying to keep their workers from organizing for better pay and better working conditions. (Also, too, Pinkerton? Like we're all in an episode of Deadwood or Boardwalk Empire!)

Isaac Chotiner at The New Yorker talks with Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy, who claims that our soon-to-be-ex-President's "voter fraud" lies are actually good for his channel. This Isaac Chotiner fellow is damn good at his job -- his interrogation of Mr. Ruddy is almost as good as his interrogation of that COVID "contrarian" from March. I can only add that Mr. Ruddy's claim that Newsmax gets "one million people per minute" is a pretty useless statistic if the million people who are watching Newsmax the next minute are, as I suspect, the same damn people. Why, I might even call it a scare number.

Can it possibly be true that our soon-to-be-ex-President really thinks his lawyers arguing so badly before numerous federal courts are "fools" who "are making him look bad"? I mean, that ship has long sailed, has it not? But when you realize that he thinks laws are for us "little people" and he also thinks any fecal argument can be polished into gold if you just inject more money and more red-faced yelling into it, you can sort of see how he can blame everyone but yourself. You may have more trouble seeing how people who call themselves conservative still give their devotion to a man who always chooses chaos over order.

Finally, Carl Bernstein, who helped take down Richard Nixon with his Watergate reporting at the Washington Post, says that no less than 21 Republican Senators have "repeatedly expressed extreme contempt for" our soon-to-be-ex-President, though only a few have expressed that "extreme contempt" publicly. Out of those 21 Senators, I see 12 up for re-election in 2022; I sincerely hope Democrats don't try to ratfuck those races by pointing out these Senators' infidelity to Dear Leader, because that wouldn't be very civil of them, now, would it? (Sadly, I fear I have just explained exactly why Democrats would never do such a thing.)

Action: concerning tax cheats, COVID vaccines, and Social Security.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell our President-elect and our Congressfolk to properly fund our IRS so we can, at long last, hold tax evaders accountable. Some folks will say you want to give more money to the IRS haw haw haw haw, but our government has underfunded our IRS over the last decade to the point that its officers admit they go after low-level tax cheats because they don't have the money to fight wealthy and corporate tax cheats, and while cheating on your taxes is never OK, going after big-money tax cheats means, well, more money, for the good services we expect, demand, and deserve from our government. Put more simply: big tax cheats take more money out of our mouths than the little ones do, and why should tax cheats be shielded from accountability simply because they can hire more lawyers to spin more convoluted tall tales?

Meanwhile, the HERO Action Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to make COVID-19 vaccines free to all Americans. Right-wingers will retort don't the companies that make the drugs deserve to make money? But one can answer that retort in at least four ways: a) these corporations often develop their drugs with taxpayer money, so we deserve more say over what happens afterward; b) only giving it to folks with money violates the rights of folks who don't have money; c) the more folks who get the vaccine, the more likely we'll defeat COVID-19, and d) people who die of COVID-19 because they can't afford a vaccine can't spend money on health care anymore. Plus, you know, e) don't put corporate profits ahead of people. (And since we don't just live in America but on Earth, Avaaz helps you tell all world governments to suspend patents on COVID-19 vaccines so everyone in the world can benefit from them.)

Finally, Social Security Works helps you tell President-elect Biden to undo our soon-to-be-ex-President's attempts to destroy Social Security, namely by rolling back his changes to Social Security Disability and by demanding the resignations of all of our soon-to-be-ex-President's appointees to the Social Security Administration. Yeah, I know, he's going to have a lot on his plate, but that doesn't mean we should lay off him, and getting rid of these injuries to our Social Security is his job. Moreover, exactly zero right-wingers will thank him for making SSDI and SSI recipients to re-prove their eligibility for these programs every six freaking months. That ain't "fighting fraud," it's just harassment -- they're hoping people forget to prove their eligibility! You want to fight fraud? Hire more (and better) investigators -- but don't hurt deserving Americans.

Action: concerning corporate power, law enforcement, and Israel/Palestine policy.

Dig this: Tyson Foods managers at its Waterloo (IA) plant not only "explicitly directed supervisors to ignore symptoms of COVID-19, telling them to show up to work even if they were exhibiting symptoms of the virus," but actually started a pool to bet on how many of their workers would get sick. That's as good a reason as any to remind President-elect Joe Biden that the American voters did give him a mandate this month -- that mandate being "don't run the country like that guy did! -- and thus Public Citizen helps you tell President-elect Biden not to hire big corporate types for key jobs in his Administration, including Agriculture Secretary and OSHA administrator. After all, if they're capable of betting on how many of their workers will get sick, they shouldn't be in charge of anything, let alone "building back better" from a pandemic and a crippled economy.

Meanwhile, H.R. 7848/S. 4360, the Counselors Not Criminalization in Schools Act, would end federal funding for putting police officers in schools, and would replace those police officers with folks actually trained to deal with mental health issues, since we typically don't train police officers to do that. And we shouldn't! Should we train coal miners to write code? No, we shouldn't; mining coal and writing code use entirely different skills sets, and, in a like manner, enforcing our laws and dealing with folks with mental health issues use entirely different skill sets. Some folks used to respond "cops just need more training" when they contemplate these issues -- I used to say the same thing! -- but we'd do much better deploying folks already trained to do the job. Hence Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to help out students and police by passing the Counselors Not Criminalization in Schools Act.

Finally, our Secretary of State plans to formally designate the Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions (or BDS) movement as anti-Semitic -- which also means they'll create a blacklist of groups who support BDS. How many times must I tell these pimps! Opposing Israel's actions against the Palestinian people, and working to change them, does not make you anti-Semitic! It's like these people have no idea what anti-Semitism is like -- nothing from this Administration about assholes threatening American Jews or defacing Jewish graveyards, but they sure have plenty to say about good folks who disagree that keeping your boot on Palestinian throats is either a humane policy or an effective one! And how else do you change behavior of foreign countries, particularly when your own government will never make such an effort? Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell our State Department to abandon this foolish effort to injure free speech.

Around the table: in which our soon-to-be-ex-President can't stop embarrassing himself.

No, our Army did not "seize" a server from a German corporation in Frankfurt that switched enough votes to "throw" the election. Forget that our Army has denied the story, or that the corporation in question is Spanish and doesn't have a server (or an office!) in Frankfurt and that 97% of American counties don't even use their product -- you should know it's all rubbish when the Congressdolt promoting the story says things like "I don't know the truth" and "(t)here are some that believe," let alone that he uses the passive voice ("there was a German tweet" -- Jesus Mary and Joseph he's not even confident enough in his own lies to say "a German tweeted"). But I guess when you see a big map of America on the TV showing our soon-to-be-ex-President "winning" California, you don't have to think anymore.

Ryan Grim at The Intercept reminds us that "Joe Biden Doesn’t Need the Senate to Boost the Economy and Tackle Climate Change." As President, Mr. Biden can a) wipe out $50,000 of student debt, which could free up some $400 per debtor per month to stimulate our economy; b) prevent corporations from designating their workers as "managers" willy-nilly, which would enable more of those workers to collect overtime pay; c) taking pot off Schedule I, which would stimulate a lot of pot-growing businesses around the nation; and d) use the Financial Stability Oversight Council (created by the Dodd-Frank bank reform bill) to stop investment in fossil fuels. And of course, how much of this he'll actually do isn't just up to him: it's also up to us.

I'm generally pleased to see our "liberal" media noting, as our soon-to-be-ex-President formally requests a recount in Georgia, that Georgia just did a damn recount. Perhaps he's thinking that since he cut into Mr. Biden's lead by 1,500 votes during the last recount, he'll win Georgia if he can just get them to do nine more recounts! It sure is a good thing he's laser-focused on his own election loss, rather than something like everyone and their grandmother getting COVID-19.

Don't trouble yourself over the "backlash" against Tucker Carlson's criticism of Sidney Powell's fever-dream "stolen election" narrative that has so far failed in nearly every one of over three dozen court cases. When right-wingers "fight," it's always drama, and bad drama at that. Tucker Carlson will be back in right-wingers' good graces even if OAN, for example, takes over from Fox News as "the" place for right-wingers to run and hide from facts and good arguments. (Also, too, when Rush Limbaugh's spokeshack asks about "the 'evidence' the election was fair," he's displaying an ignorance of how our legal system works -- the burden of proof is always on the folks who accuse unfairness, for reasons we're seeing play out in those aforementioned three dozen court cases -- and I'm sure this display is solely for show.)

Speaking of our Administration's repeated failures in court, District Judge Matthew Brann's dismissal of our soon-to-be-ex-President's complaint aiming to keep Pennsylvania from certifying election results reads rather like a father trying his damnedest to be extremely patient with a toddler having a tantrum. Dig the part where Judge Brann says he's not listening to another damn "amended" filing because it's just going to be the same damn filing! OK, I'm paraphrasing, but Judge Brann's opinion does read rather like Judge Jones's 2005 decision preventing the Dover school district from teaching "intelligent design" in science classes. Either one could have typed "how dare you waste my time with your frivolous lawsuit" over and over for 35 pages and you still would've gotten the jist.

Finally, when you hear our soon-to-be-ex-President whining on Twitter that Mr. Biden is trying to put together a Cabinet "so quickly" "when my investigators have found hundreds of thousands of fraudulent votes," you, again, have to wonder why his legal team hasn't shown evidence of "hundreds of thousands of fraudulent votes" to judges in, again, over three dozen lawsuits. And please understand that by "you have to wonder why" I mean "pimp ain't got no damn evidence, that's why."

Around the table: in which we try to see things a bit more clearly than our pundit class does.

Turns out that planned kidnapping of Michigan's Governor could have been even worse than we thought: militia members had a "Plan B" to take over Michigan's statehouse and execute politicians, as well as a Plan C to burn down the statehouse and kill everyone inside. And over what? Over being told to wear masks so you're less likely to infect other people with COVID-19! Adults, with guns, throwing tantrums worse than any ever thrown by a two-year-old! And yet our "liberal" media implores us to "understand" them, by which they clearly mean excuse their evil.

A few Senate Republicans say they'll back any Biden Cabinet appointments as long as they're "mainstream." They're lying! Recall that right-wingers call anyone to their left a "socialist" anymore, and consider that if we can imagine Mitch McConnell simply refusing to hold hearings on Cabinet appointments, then surely Sens. Collins, Murkowski, and Romney can as well, and I'm sure they're much more comfortable professing "alarm" at Mr. McConnell's shenanigans than actually forcing him to allow Mr. Biden to staff a functioning government. Our soon-to-be-ex-President will leave behind an Augean mess, and Mitch McConnell will bury all the shovels.

I wouldn't even note the news that U.S. trade deficits with other nations, including China, have risen rather dramatically over the last four years, except that our soon-to-be-ex-President has not only acted like he alone could turn around a cruise ship on a dime, but has also acted like he's already done so without even coming close to doing so. Of course I don't expect the math (which shows the trade deficit increasing at a faster rate than it did during Mr. Obama's second term, even!) to penetrate the rage-addled minds of his votaries.

About a week after William Barr's nomination to Attorney General in 2018, our Justice Department told federal investigators to take "no further action" against Caterpillar, a corporation Mr. Barr used to represent. It gets better: we were investigating Caterpillar for tax avoidance, to the tune of $2.3 billion -- in other words, we were investigating them for taking food out of our mouths, since that's what corporations do when they avoid paying their taxes. Presumably our Justice Department thinks it hasn't broken the law because it hasn't actually closed the investigation, but we've seen judges reject similar arguments.

I'm not sure why Joe Biden would consider D.C. Circuit Court Judge/could-have-been Supreme Court Justice Merrick Garland for Attorney General. I'm sure he'd do an excellent job, but such an appointment would also leave a seat open on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals that Mitch McConnell might not let him fill, and if this is Joe Biden's way of trolling Mitch McConnell, then he's got a lot to learn about trolling. Anyway, I hear Doug Jones is available, and I'm sure he'd do an excellent job, too.

Finally, when I hear that Kentucky Senate race loser-by-20-points Amy McGrath has started a Super PAC to help out in those two Georgia Senate runoffs, all I can say is: haven't you done enough? She lit almost $100 million on fire losing to Mitch McConnell by the second-largest margin of his seven Senate races! When will these fools learn that voters don't give one rat's hind-quarter how much money you can raise, but that they only care about what you will do once in office?

Action: concerning health care, debt, and corruption.

You've heard that Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine looks like it might be a winner? Well, Public Citizen reminds us of a few things -- chiefly, that it's not "Moderna's vaccine," since it received close to $2.5 billion in taxpayer money, i.e., our money. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell our President-elect to make this COVID-19 vaccine, if proven safe and effective, available to all Americans, and also to ramp up manufacturing so that vaccine "rationing" doesn't occur. After all, it ain't like COVID is going to pass you by if you don't have access to the vaccine, is it? I know some people will call such a move "socialism," but those people call everything "socialism," so I'm not concerned about that. And if we taxpayers provided a significant amount of funding for a vaccine, don't we get a significant amount of say in what happens afterward? And yes, I know we could say that about most drugs developed in America, where big pharma socialized the cost but privatizes the profit.

Meanwhile, did you know that debt collectors can now come after you on Facebook or Twitter? That's thanks to one of this Administration's worst alphabet agencies, our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB), which did decent work under Director Richard Cordray but not so much since a President who hates all regulations that might actually help people came to power. Hence our CFPB has loosened restrictions on how much debt collectors can harass you, plus our CFPB apparently doesn't care if these debt collectors harass good Americans who don't actually owe them anything! And, as I mentioned, now debt collectors can message you on your social media accounts. Hence Consumer Reports helps you tell our CFPB to rescind regulations allowing debt collectors to hound you more often. Remember: our CFPB doesn't even care if you really owe anyone anything -- they're happy to let debt collectors waste your valuable time even if they're dead wrong. You'd think an actual conservative would be up in arms about that.

Finally, you may have heard that South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham -- who once upon a time was the very first Senator to condemn the abuses at Abu Ghraib, I kid you not -- has continued his long slide into corruption by actually suggesting to Georgia's Secretary of State that maybe he should throw out some mail-in ballots. Mr. Graham has apparently talked to other state officials about similar matters, though his recollections of such conversations are, as they say, evolving. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell Sen. Graham to resign immediately. No, I don't expect him to have such a Damascus moment any time soon, particularly after just winning re-election by 10 points against a guy who raised over $100 million to run against him, but duty is duty, and what should we demand of him after hearing that he's tried to influence the outcome of a Presidential election in his preferred direction after all the votes have all been counted? Should we sit back and take it? Of course we shouldn't.

Around the table: in which liberals did not "almost lose" the election for the 443rd time.

Looks like I spoke too soon: the two Republican Wayne County (MI) officials who certified the vote totals have now changed their minds and want to "rescind" their votes. I should never have underestimated the right wing thirst for drama! And yes, when officials see the same "problems" in suburban districts as in urban ones but only want to certify the results in the suburban ones, that's drama, and it's not good drama, either. And they can sign all the affidavits they want, but they can't "rescind" their votes. Voting is like that.

When I hear that Joe Biden would rather not investigate our soon-to-be-ex-President's many alleged criminal acts, I sympathize to a point -- I do not wish the Biden Administration to be all about our soon-to-be-ex-President; I'd rather it be all about the American people. Still, when you smear feces all over our house, we should hold you accountable for it, through the Administration that replaces you. And I sure hope Mr. Biden isn't thinking of interfering with the state of New York's investigations into our soon-to-be-ex-President.

I was never a big "Green New Deal" fan -- it was a non-binding resolution, and I always preferred bills like the Off Fossil Fuels for a Better Future Act, which would actually do the things the Green New Deal resolution merely aspired to do -- but turns out 92 out of 93 House Green New Deal co-sponsors won re-election in 2020. That includes three out of four in competitive House districts, with the fourth currently leading his race by almost seven points with about 85% of the vote counted. Who thinks "let's create jobs building renewable energy infrastructure" is a loser? Only the long-time Democratic pols who are used to losing.

A Government Accountability Office (or GAO) report documents how big corporations like Walmart and Amazon pay their employees so little that they require public assistance like food stamps and Medicaid -- as in nearly six million Medicaid enrollees and nearly five million food stamp recipients who worked full time. And there's Sen. Bernie Sanders telling Walmart to "get off welfare," which Democratic politicians still can't see is winning messaging that resonates with broad sectors of the electorate.

Another day, another Republican (this time former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, he sure was a big help winning Ohio, wasn't he?) claiming that "the far-left...almost cost" Joe Biden the 2020 election. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez is exactly right in her response, of course (i.e., that the "far left" won Georgia -- Georgia! -- for Mr. Biden), and moderates lose elections not only because they don't excite people, but also because they don't fight for popular things like (hate to beat a dead horse) renewable energy and Medicare-for-All.

Finally, Rebecca Solnit reminds us that we can't "meet Nazis halfway." Yes, her feelings are pretty much my feelings, and I feel compelled to remind folks that you couldn't "meet halfway" with Tha Bush Mobb, either, once they said everyone who disagreed with their palpably stupid case for war with Iraq was a traitor and a weakling. And let's not try too hard to "understand" Nazi wannabes, either, as our "liberal" media outlets are inexplicably still trying to do -- hate doesn't require a whole lot of navel-gazing, and if Nazi wannabes have legitimate grievances, they sure ain't the grievances they're airing.

Action: concerning good House bills, bad bureaucrats, and bad pro-pollution bills.

Happy Thursday, good Americans! Now's as good a time as any to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Doesn't matter that they don't want to do it, or would rather confirm more right-wing judges -- all that matters is that we want them to do it, and if we speak out enough, they'll be afraid not to do it. Don't laugh; I've seen it happen.

Meanwhile, Roots Action helps you demand that our government abolish the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. If abolition seems a little extreme to you, I wouldn't blame you -- I'd vastly prefer to reform government agencies before abolishing them myself. But I don't blame the folks who get beaten up by ICE officers for wanting it abolished, either. And, ah, one other thing to consider: our soon-to-be-ex-President used ICE officers this year essentially as a brownshirt force to beat up protestors at otherwise peaceful protests this year, and anytime a President decides to use law enforcement for his own purposes, rather than the ones mandated by our laws and our Constitution, well, that's a tool we've got to take out of the toolbox right quick. Recall, also, that our Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, under which ICE operates, ain't been around that long -- our government created it out of anti-immigrant hysteria during Tha Bush Mobb years, so it ain't like we just don't know how to live without it.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: SB 619 would, and I can't believe anyone thinks this is a good idea, exclude from the Clean Stream Law's definition of pollution any "accidental discharge, spill or release that does not cause a violation of any of the numeric water quality criteria under 25 Pa. Code Chapter 93 (relating to water quality standards)." The kicker there, of course, is that Pennsylvania law doesn't define water quality standards for every conceivable pollutant, so SB 619 would essentially redefine pollution to exclude pollution. And SB 790 would do even more damage, by increasing pollution, lowering clean drinking water standards, and handing out big chunks of corporate welfare to big gas drillers. Always they hand out the welfare to those poor, poor big corporations, and never to the needy, so once again, we must remind our legislators that they work for us, not just their big donors. Hence the Center for Coalfield Justice helps you tell your PA state House reps and your PA state Senators to fight pollution by rejecting SB 619 and SB 790.