Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning good House bills, clean water, and anti-Semitism.

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! 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. Yeah, our Senate just put another right-wing stooge on our Supreme Court, which is demoralizing, but we have to be like Nick Foles and just bounce back up -- and when our Senators see us do that, they'll fear us the way they should.

Meanwhile, our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) contemplates updating our Lead and Copper Rule (authorized by the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1991), which limits pipe corrosion as well as the amount of lead and copper at the tap -- and with this EPA, you know which way they want to "update" the rule! That's right, they want to update it so that it allows more lead in your drinking water, even though lead causes brain damage in everyone who ingests it, which (not to give our EPA any ideas!) is why we don't allow lead in gas emissions anymore. Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell our EPA to make the Lead and Copper Rule stronger, not weaker. Like, for example, let's get the lead out of the service lines that connect houses to water mains, since that's usually the biggest source of lead water contamination, and those lead service lines still serve over nine million homes and businesses. And some of those customers are child care centers, so, like, let's do that now. It would create jobs for people who refit the lines, after all. Even though right-wingers will call that "socialism" as they drive roads, call cops, and use libraries.

Finally, Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell our government to stop calling organizations "anti-Semitic" merely because they advocate for Palestinian rights. Why? Well, partly because it's not true, and partly because the resulting PR hit from being called "anti-Semitic" can be very damaging (just ask Jeremy Corbyn!), but also because calling organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International "anti-Semitic" is a profound insult to all those who suffered and died -- and who continue to suffer and die -- from real anti-Semitism. And it is a bit rich to watch this Administration pretend to be concerned about anti-Semitism after openly cultivating supporters from the ranks of America's Nazi wannabes. We are, all of us, friends of Israel, and we are, all of us, fully aware that being a friend doesn't mean blindly supporting whatever our friends do, but calling them out when they do wrong, so that they (and we!) can be better friends. But too many folks call people who don't agree with them "anti-Semitic." We should stop listening to such people, since they act like they don't understand that civilization is actually pretty hard work.

Around the table: in which we find reasons for hope amidst the ruins of our civilization.

From the Heated newsletter comes this relevant bit of research: our "liberal" media tend to accept, without question, our President's framing of climate change stories as how much doing something about it will "hurt industry." And the good news? You don't even have to retort about how much it'll hurt the planet, because it turns out climate change will also be a drag on our economy, to the tune of (per a Brookings Institution study) between 6.7% and 14.3% of GDP annually once it starts running away with our world. Once again, we find a Mack truck-sized opening for the "sensible," "moderate," "fiscally-responsible" Democrat to say that doing nothing about climate change will hurt our economy. Of course, as long as centrist Democrats act like only government spending is "fiscally-irresponsible," they'll pass up all those good opportunities, and eventually get voted out of office.

The latest from Akela Lacy and Ryan Grim at The Intercept describes the many factors that could still deliver Pennsylvania to our President on Election Day despite what polls say -- and also describes the community organizers who plan to fight those factors when establishment Democrats won't. And this is how it should be -- people fighting on their own, without waiting for Democrats to step up! But I'd like to see their good works continue after the election, regardless of the outcome -- too many good Americans declared victory after Barack Obama's election, as if voting were the end of their duty, not the beginning. (Do attend the emphatically bipartisan corruption inherent in the NIZ plan for Allentown, which helps explain why the Democratic party isn't ready to fight for voters in the first place.)

Ho hum, our President insists, incorrectly of course, that the spike in COVID cases is all about how much testing we're doing. Naturally infection rates (up 51% since October 1) are going up much faster than testing rates (up 13% since October 1), but, as a famous philosopher once said, facts are stupid things. Incompetence not actually being difficult, I would ask whether the infection spikes we're seeing might actually be part of some Administration plan to suppress the vote on Election Day -- except that such a plan would backfire if (as we suspect) Democratic voters are outstripping Republican ones in early voting.

Where does one begin with our President's suggestion that media coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic "(s)hould be an election law violation"? With the note that he's whining, once again, about things he doesn't (and shouldn't) have control over? Or with the realization that the folks who would enforce these election laws are the same ones he's driving out of our government? Either way, it's Chapter 183 of This Guy's Completely Unfit for Any Kind of Office. (And "COVID COVID COVID" could easily be this famous plaint from classic TV. And he may even intend that!)

Folks who cover politics for a living might want to consider that if Joe Biden confuses our President with George W. Bush, as he seems to do in this clip, maybe he's doing it on purpose! Seriously, if we imagine our President letting Democrats impeach him so he could keep the Ukraine (and therefore Hunter Biden) in the news, why couldn't we imagine Joe Biden "accidentally" invoking George W. Bush so that you'll be reminded that the last Republican President was also a complete failure? Of course, many folks who used to support Mr. Bush now tell themselves they never really liked him that much, so I can't say how effective that stratagem would be.

Finally, when we hear that our President plans to fire our FBI Director, CIA Director, and Secretary of Defense if he wins re-election, we must wonder what Tea Party/QAnon retreads or right-wing media "personalities" remain out there to replace them. We always feel like Republicans can't get any worse than this, and then they always do, even when our President isn't the kind of person who "likes someone on TV" and automatically calls that a job qualification. Maybe Lou Dobbs -- lately calling for Lindsey Graham's defeat at the polls because he's not loyal enough! -- can fill a few of these roles. Like the President he adores, he probably thinks it'd be easy.

Action: concerning our Supreme Court, the HEROES Act, and worker safety.

Our Senate votes on Amy Coney Barrett's nomination to our Supreme Court today, so if you haven't called your Senators already, now's the time. Our "liberal" media says her ascension is a foregone conclusion -- particularly now that Sen. Murkowski (R-AK) says she'll vote for Ms. Barrett when her nomination actually comes up -- but reading sheep entrails before we act is not how we practice democracy. We practice democracy by communicate our will so loudly they can't deny us, after which the sheep entrail-reading crowd will follow us. Now, I've been saying that Judge Barrett seems like the kind of judge who thinks we'd actually be better off with computers doing all the judging, but of course that's only part of the story: when workers try to get their bosses to do right by them, and when women and folks of color try to get our government to stop pissing on them, I'm sure we'll find her ability to interpret our laws so that they favor the powerful completely unimpaired. And that's why we must tell our Senators to reject her, regardless of what we think "will happen." We have to make things happen.

While you have your Senators on the phone, go ahead and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act, which would, as we know, provide much better pandemic relief than any of the ideas our Senate or our President have floated. When they say Nancy Pelosi doesn't "negotiate in good faith," do they mean she should have asked our Senate and our Administration for permission before passing a pandemic relief bill? Because the only people our House Reps should be "asking for permission" is their constituents, i.e., us. And if Mob Boss Mitch went to good Kentuckians and asked them what they wanted in a COVID-19 pandemic relief bill, they sure as hell didn't say "let's give corporations blanket immunity against lawsuits whenever they hurt good Americans," but Mob Boss Mitch sure fought like hell for that. And did Sen. Scott's constituents in South Carolina demand enhanced tax breaks for three-martini lunches? Because he put his name on that particular slab of absurdity. It's about time our Senators actually listened to us, but we have to make them listen first, and we can't do that if we keep our mouths shut.

Finally, you may know that our farm workers generally don't have basic workplace protections, including protection against working ten-hour days in hundred-degree heat. So along comes H.R. 3668, the Asunción Valdivia Heat Illness and Fatality Prevention Act, named for a farm worker who did die of heatstroke after working a ten-hour shift in hundred-degree heat. H.R. 3668 would mandate that our Department of Labor create a heat exposure workplace standard (under the authority of the Occupational Safety and Health Act), and that standard wouldn't just protect farm workers, but any worker, whether they work indoors or out, who encounters excessive heat at their job. Hence the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect workers from heat exposure by passing the Asunción Valdivia Heat Illness and Fatality Prevention Act. If you're still inclined to reject this bill because you think it'll only protect "those people" work on farms, I would recommend reading about folks who aren't like you, because they you might learn that the person who looks different than you also comes from a land with engineers, healers, and poets.

Around the table: in which we indulge in several necessary reminders, and celebrate the hard work of Bolivians.

Do we need another reminder that after presiding over a sixfold increase in our federal budget deficit (from around half a billion annually to over $3 trillion this year), that Republicans will never STFU about the deficit if Democrats sweep back into power? Why, yes, we do! After all, everyone watched Tha Bush Mobb hand $700 billion over to the banksters but we still had a Tea Party movement all about TEH DEFICITZ!!!! Their real objection to federal spending has to do with spending it on people -- Republicans were OK with the CARES Act squandering half a trillion-plus on corporate welfare and with another three-quarters of a trillion on defense spending, but not with the HEROES Act.

Do we need yet another reminder that "Panic Over 'Cancel Culture' Is Another Example of Right-Wing Projection"? Why, yes, we do! It's not just that our First Amendment protects you from your government and not your job, or even that the right can't win arguments on the merits -- it's also that right-wingers have been doing "cancel culture" themselves for-freaking-ever, if you recall, for example, the numerous battles right-wingers have fought over history textbooks in Texas the last few decades. I do wonder how many folks see some whiny brat on YouTube complaining that they're always getting censored and then say "wait, how am I even seeing you?"

Do we need another reminder that paying our farmworkers better would not result in significantly higher food prices? Why, yes, we do! The EPI analysis says a 40% pay hike would mean 4% in higher prices for fruits and vegetables, which would mean an extra $25 per year in the average household (and, not insignificantly, would mean that farmworkers could afford a better life and contribute more to our economy). This maps on to similar findings about fast food workers and their pay, of course. (As an aside, it shouldn't be that hard, in these times, to ensure farmers and farmworkers get a bigger slice of revenues -- seems to me the biggest obstacle would be all the lobbies of the big ag middlemen.)

From Marco Guzman at ITEP we learn that Arizona, Illinois, and California all have important tax matters on the ballot this year. When I hear that Arizona voters might raise taxes on the rich, Illinois voters might scrap their flat income tax in favor of a progressive one, and California voters might actually tax commercial property based on its (surely absurdly-inflated) value rather than its purchase price, I wonder why more candidates for the U.S. House and Senate aren't supporting these proposals, since they surely affect those who'd vote for them. Hell, Arkansas passed a statewide minimum wage hike the same year Sen. Pryor lost re-election by almost 20 points; think there might have been a lesson in there, somewhere?

Nearly a year after the military forced out Bolivian President Evo Morales right after winning another election, Bolivian voters went back to the polls and promptly put his party back in power. Turns out that when you stage a coup against a popular (and popularly-elected President) and then kill a few dozen of his supporters, people fight back -- by taking to the streets, in a nation where doing that might well get you killed. How about we emulate their example in a week and a half and deliver a similar message to Republicans across the land? You know, before they fulfill their wish to be as bad as the folks who put good Bolivians under their boot for a year.

Finally, a Colorado trailer park landlord sends a letter to his tenants telling them that a Joe Biden victory would ensure that the price of everything will go up -- including their rent, which he says would "most likely" double. "(W)e are not telling you how to vote," he swears, which I hope inspires mirth to anyone who reads it. It'd be nice if people could remember how "taxes, utilities, gasoline, groceries, new permits, fees, and regulations" most emphatically did not shoot up under the Obama Administration. It'd also be nice if people knew "a lot" was two words, not one.

Action: concerning our Supreme Court, pollution, and unconstitutional war-making.

The Amy Coney Barrett nomination goes before the full Senate very soon, so use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to call your Senators and tell them to reject the Barrett nomination. We could belabor Republican hypocrisy in refusing to consider Merrick Garland's nomination in 2016 and then ramming through Ms. Barrett's nomination now, but the best argument against her is her own record. In her three years on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, she has not only demonstrated a pattern of ruling for corporations and against workers, but she has also demonstrated a pattern of refusing to even interpret laws, and that refusal too often manifests as a complete lack of compassion for those times our laws fail our people. Frankly, she acts like we should just put legal matters to justice machines and be done with it. Of course we also know that (in her life before federal court) she stated her opposition to Roe v. Wade publicly more than once and she belongs to a far-right religious group that teaches women to be subservient to their husbands. That might have suited our Court in 1830, but not now.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: our Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) has proposed hiking fines for air polluters in our Commonwealth, which they haven't done in 15 years, but naturally pro-pollution state lawmakers want to put a stop to that -- it's like they don't breathe the air themselves! -- so Penn Environment helps you tell your PA state legislator to reject House Concurrent Regulatory Review Resolution 3, which would cut DEP funding dramatically. Pennsylvania legislators have long had a starve-the-best mentality with regard to punishing polluters (silly legislators, not understanding that the polluters are the beast!), and the result is a DEP that can't do its job the way our laws require. And the hike in air polluter fines would allow our DEP to continue to crack down on polluters. Don't let our legislators fool you: they understand perfectly well that revenues pay for services; they'd just prefer not to perform these services, so that big polluting corporate executives can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. But surely they shouldn't get all the say about everything.

Finally, the notorious 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force, the one they used to attack Iraq, is still on the books in America, but the negotiation of the annual defense appropriation bill presents another opportunity to repeal it, so Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to restore some semblance of the rule of law in America by repealing the 2002 AUMF. The war with Iraq has been over for many, many years -- George W. Bush told us so! -- but future Presidents, of both parties, invoked the 2002 AUMF for all kinds of unconstitutional adventures, from President Obama's adventure in Syria in 2015 to our current President's ordering of Gen. Soleimani's assassination earlier this year. Yeah, Mr. Obama didn't even go to Congress before bombing Syria, and our current President clearly forgot that Congress never declared war on Iran, which would be the only legal basis for killing Mr. Soleimani. And yes, Congress has spent the last 80 years essentially ceding its Constitutional war-making power to the President -- but why do we have to take that?

Action: concerning our Supreme Court, COVID-19 vaccines, and police brutality.

The Senate Judiciary Committee plans to vote on the Amy Coney Barrett Supreme Court nomination today, so you can find contact information for those members right here, on Judiciary's website; just hover over the member's name, and you can navigate to their website, which will have their phone numbers. Be prepared to call more than one number for each Senator; Senatorial staffers haven't liked answering their phones for a few years now. There are many reasons to oppose the Barrett nomination, but today you'll want to address Ms. Barrett's almost pathological refusal to answer questions put to her by the committee. Not just the standard of-course-I-can't-rule-on-that-until-I-see-it sort of refusals, either -- she refused to commit to Supreme Court precedents as settled law, which even previous Republican nominees made a point of doing, and she wouldn't even say that a President who loses an election should transfer power peacefully, which you'd also think is pretty much a layup for a Supreme Court nominee. And if you think conservatism is about preserving traditions, you'd have to conclude that a nominee who won't even say that is no kind of conservative.

Meanwhile, our President has been in the habit of suggesting we're going to have a COVID-19 vaccine ready just in time for Election Day, as if literally no one could possibly see his own self-interest in that, but the corporation supposedly furthest along in developing one (Pfizer) has already said there's no chance of that happening, and of course you know that rushing a vaccine is a really stupid idea, not just because it might be full of poison, but also because if it doesn't work, people will less readily trust the one that does work. With that in mind, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to prevent our President from releasing a bad vaccine before the election just to improve his chances. If you stand ready to accuse me of having a political motivation, then please carefully re-read every single word I've written in this paragraph. Nothing would please me more than to have a good COVID-19 vaccine ready before Election Day, even if it gets this turd of a President re-elected. But passing off a bad one as a good one would be evil.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reform the notorious 1033 program which lets local police departments get masses of surplus military weapons, then the Project on Government Oversight still helps you do that. Why do police need bazookas? Not to make arrests, that's for sure! No, police "need" bazookas so they can put down peaceful protestors who oppose their executions of black folks without even charging them with a crime. And studies inform us that police kill more civilians they get massive amounts of military weapons, which would, I hope, make sense to you. I've said for a while now that we need to stop using police officers as the Swiss Army knives of our civilization, that we need to stop making them respond to every conceivable request for assistance a citizen can make, and if we can do that, we certainly won't need to keep supplying them with rocket launchers and the like. If you're still of the mind that all of that is insufficiently "supportive" of our police, please just navigate away from this blog, because only God can give you the instruction you need, and I don't take God's tasks on my shoulders.

Around the table: from the "black tax" to Mr. Biden's "dimensia."

MIT study finds that black homeowners pay over $13,000 more on their mortgages than their white counterparts, amounting to a "black tax" on those homeowners. Why? Because of "risk-based pricing," which saddles black homeowners (who have lower credit scores and smaller down payments, for reasons I trust I don't have to enumerate) with higher interest rates and higher incidence of mortgage insurance. If you're still saying well, no duh, one of the study's authors will remind you that risk-based pricing has only been around for two decades, and if we can insist on preexisting condition protections in health insurance, we can do it here, too.

Speaking of health care, Facebook and Google ads constantly advertise for a certain named-after-our-President health care product that does not exist, but is merely a bait-and-switch for suspect health insurance plans. Facebook and Google have no shortage of excuses for letting the ads go up, but really, stamping out inaccurate ads is their job. Remember when it was conservative to protect consumers from misleading ads? I guess it's not "conservative" anymore to hire the people who would properly scrutinize the ads, though one might reasonably call that job creation.

You've no doubt seen all the photos of long voting lines in black neighborhoods, but you know vote suppression is even worse than that, as this article about a Tennessee poll worker who turned away voters with Black Lives Matter slogans on their T-shirts demonstrates. Of course I don't buy that this poll worker was merely confused about the law against expressing a preference for a candidate on a T-shirt, and I would say it's a good thing that his bosses didn't buy it, either, but his actions still managed to suppress some votes from "those people," so we can't discount the possibility that his bosses are saying job well done! to him when no one's looking.

Ho hum, right-wing "patriot" who used to yell RESPECTZ OURZ LAWZ!!!! at supposedly criminal immigrants now faces a felony identity theft charge, after allegedly using her former father-in-law's reward points to get herself a room at a California music festival, which suggests she's not even particularly good at identity theft. Also, she threw a tantrum when arrested, and now blames a "jealous" ex-husband, which isn't exactly a way to deny the charge. Ladies and gentlemen, your law-and-order right-wingers!

We tend to imagine that he's some kind of evil genius, but Mitch McConnell telling the White House not to pass any COVID-19 stimulus legislation because it'll interfere with getting Amy Coney Barrett on our Supreme Court sure looks like an unforced error of the first kind, which should remind you how you ought to feel about "evil geniuses" (i.e., they're so not geniuses -- if they were, they'd do something else with their lives!). Now the question is: will Amy McGrath run ads about this? Or would she find that too "uncivil"?

Finally, I was today years old when I remembered that criticizing some billboard operator's apparent inability to spell "dementia" (as "dimensia") when accusing Joe Biden of having it is not "elitist"! Yeah, I've ignored misspellings in emails and comments because I don't like giving my opponents an opening, but you know what? Evil people pretend anything is an opening anyway, and really, if you want to say things in public, you ought to observe basic rules of spelling, grammar, and syntax. And if being told that feels like a violation of your free speech rights, well, fuck your feelings.

Action: concerning voting rights, pollution, and "independent contractors."

Hip Hop Caucus helps you tell your Congressfolk to outlaw felony disenfranchisement. Felony disenfranchisement is, sadly, a story almost as old as America, and governments have always sought to take the vote away from the very same people those governments target with law enforcement. No, really, it's that simple: our governments go out of their way to fill our prisons with as many folks of color as they can, and then they try to take the vote away from them when they get out. (In the early 19th century, felony disenfranchisement also targeted white folks our government didn't find white enough.) Now 48 out of 50 states don't let prisoners vote at all -- while letting governments stash prisoners in largely red areas precisely to enhance the power of those red area voters! -- and now over six million Americans can't vote even though they've paid their debt to society as determined by our legal system, the one that's already treating folks of color unfairly to begin with. And if states won't do right by their citizens, our federal government has to step in.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: SB 619, which barely passed the state Senate a year ago, will suddenly get a House committee vote this week, and SB 619 is a noxious piece of crud that would virtually cripple our state's ability to keep pollution out of our rivers and streams. SB 619 would narrow our state clean water law's definition of "pollution" to exclude most kinds of pollution, plus it would let corporations determine if they should report their spills to our Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP), which is like letting burglars off the hook if they decide to keep quiet about their burglaries, and would prevent our DEP from requiring that said corporations clean up their spill or prevent future, similar spills, which I guess means our legislators think it's all right that kids don't clean up their messes. Which don't harm good Pennsylvanians as much as water pollution does! Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your state House Reps to protect our clean water by rejecting SB 619. Don't brook any foolishness about how SB 619 "creates jobs" -- if we're all dead from poisoned drinking water, ain't no jobs gonna help us.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Department of Labor to reject its own proposal to let more employers reclassify workers as "independent contractors" so they can avoid their obligations under the law to treat those workers fairly, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Among these many, many obligations corporations wouldn't have to meet if this Administration gets its way? They wouldn't have to pay workers a minimum wage, they wouldn't have to pay workers overtime when they work more than 40 hours a week or 8 hours a day -- and they wouldn't have to collect Social Security and Medicare taxes for their workers! Yes, that's right, this proposal is yet another way our Administration attacks Social Security and Medicare, and if corporations are afraid of taking advantage of our President's notorious payroll tax "holiday," they'll be far less afraid of calling their workers "independent contractors," and our Administration will kill Social Security and Medicare that way. So let's stop that, shall we?

Action: concerning good House bills, internet privacy, and methane emissions.

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! 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. Yeah, our Senate only wants to put another right-wing stooge on our Supreme Court, and we'll get to that, but we still must remind them of their duty to do right by us.

Meanwhile, if you're wary of how much personal data big tech corporations like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple collect from you, and you should be wary, then Consumer Reports helps you tell your legislators and regulators to do a much better job protecting our personal data. You'll recall that our FCC actually issued pretty good regulations that protected consumer privacy on the internet, but the last Congress couldn't crap all over that effort fast enough, moving quickly to repeal those regulations via the notorious "resolution of disapproval" process. The Consumer Reports petition asks that consumers get more control over their personal data, that corporations be more transparent about their use of that data, and that corporations don't get monopoly control over our internet. Our FCC may not be able to issue new regulations about the matter (yet another unfortunate aspect of the "resolution of disapproval" process), but nothing prevents our Congressfolk from passing bills about the matter. Well, nothing but their own cowardice or avarice, but what else is new?

Finally, our EPA just rolled back Obama-era regulations preventing big oil and gas drilling corporations from leaking methane into the air, and this rollback offends on so many levels -- it causes more pollution, it makes climate change worse, it wastes usable energy, and it deprives good Americans of royalties when it occurs on public lands. But, hey, some bossman somewhere gets to gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home, so it's another round of "screw the people" for this Administration. And you know how right-wingers always say they'll just pass the costs of regulations on to the little guy? Well, the "little guy" winds up bearing the costs of methane emissions in all the ways described in the first sentence -- we lose royalties, we pay more for health care because of pollution, and we eventually don't get a livable planet to inhabit because methane emissions pack a much, much higher climate change punch than even coal emissions. That never makes it into the right's "cost-benefit analysis"; as I've said, they only care about the "cost" or "benefit" to executive paychecks. Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to do whatever it takes to roll back yet another Administration rollback.

Around the table: from corporate welfare to right-wing drama.

Remember that big LED manufacturing plant Foxconn was supposed to build in Wisconsin after securing $3 billion in corporate welfare? Well, three years later, there's no factory and no jobs, and it sure doesn't seem likely there ever will be. The folks who did work there for a time expressed confusion (and worse!) about exactly what they were doing there; the answer, of course, is that they were all props for a big corporation to suck out billions in taxpayer money. Thus another reminder that former Gov. Scott Walker was always about the corporate welfare and nothing else.

We learn "Why These Voters Rejected Hillary Clinton but Are Backing Joe Biden": because he has a penis! I mean, voters who made those choices won't say that, and I wouldn't even posit that they're so sexist they'd notice it in other people, but yeah, pretty much -- ZOMG TEH 20 YEARZ OFZ TEH ATTACKZ!!!! I don't buy, because Republicans act like all their opponents are the anti-Christ anymore. I've heard some of our President's ads attacking Hillary Clinton, and all I can say is you just can't get her name out your mouth, can you?

Our President is going on a regulation-killing spree just in case he loses in November. A lot of these regulatory rollbacks will die in court, like most of his other ones, since he's doing them even faster than usual, but you can't necessarily tell when that'll be (or which ones). And if Democrats sweep back into power in the Senate and the White House, will they use the "resolution of disapproval" process to repeal these regulatory abuses -- or will they prize "civility" over fighting for the American people? We know what the pattern's been.

Upon learning that Steve Bannon told an Australian newspaper that if our President loses in 2020, he'll be back in 2024, my immediate response is well, no shit, Sherlock. But I wouldn't retort to this statement with sure, he will, if he's not in jail! People like our President generally don't wind up in jail, not even when they punch a cop. (As an aside, Mr. Bannon is sure working this our-President-can't-lose angle pretty vigorously, which may explain why no one asked his opinion about anything before 2016.)

Finally, when we hear that the writer of that "smoking gun" New York Post article about Hunter Biden's laptop didn't want his byline on it and also that Fox News passed on the story first apparently because they didn't quite believe it, we must remember that the Rupert Murdoch-owned News Corporation owns both the Post and Fox News, so more likely Mr. Murdoch or someone else high-up decided which news organ would take the hit, so as to perpetuate the absurd notion that Republicans disagree with each other a lot about important stuff. Remember, folks: it's not just drama, it's bad drama.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, voting rights, and pollution.

You've heard that Senate Republicans want to pass a half-trillion dollar "skinny" COVID-19 relief bill this week? Well, who cares what they want? They should be doing what we want! So let's call them and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act. Our House passed the HEROES Act five months ago, and that bill would (among other good works) fund COVID-19 testing and tracing, fund struggling states and localities, fund enhanced unemployment benefits, and issue another round of stimulus checks to good Americans. The Senate Republican bill, of course, would fund rather less-enhanced unemployment benefits and refill the so-called Paycheck Protection Program, which should call the Corporate Welfare Slush Fund given how little it's helped small businesses (its reason for being!) and how much it's helped certain entities pretend they employ people only to spend our money on things like yachts, strippers, and Gucci jewelry. Seriously, Senators, it's well past time to stop pretending to do right by working families and actually do right by working families.

Meanwhile, a private security corporation named Atlas Aegis is actually trying to get military veterans to "guard" Minnesota polling places, which I must presume means they want to "guard" voting booths from voters and their democracy cooties. Of course, even though the consent decree keeping the political parties from "monitoring" polling places expired before the 2018 elections, our state governments, working on their citizens' behalf, still get more say about what you can do at a polling place than any group of wannabe Proud Boys. Minnesota's Attorney General, to his credit, has already told Atlas Aegis to cut out this scheme, but wouldn't it be better if we all said something about it? After all, a politician's statement, no matter how agreeable, really means nothing without the people's backing. Hence Win Without War helps you tell your state government to enforce its laws and keep private security forces away from our polling places. After all, if folks wear official-looking (and military-looking) uniforms around our polling places, some voters will be confused -- and intimidated. And that's evil.

In other news, we're having a lot of trouble getting our Senate to pass, well, any good legislation, but in particular our Senate has not taken up H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act, which would limit our exposure to the toxic "forever chemical" PFAS, which is, like, everywhere. So it might be time to go pressure some private corporations to rely less on PFAS chemicals. Would that the Big Stick of Bad PR affected our elected officials the way it affects big corporations! Anyway, Penn PIRG helps you tell big fast food chain corporation McDonald's to stop using PFAS chemicals in their packaging. Because when folks throw away a million Big Mac containers a day, that's a lot of PFAS that can leech into our water, or get into our air if it's incinerated. Don't suffer the fools who complain that Big Macs will cost 80 bazillion dollars if we make them use better packaging, or that the already-suffering McDonald's workers will suffer more. Making your workers suffer, after all, is a choice. And where's that American can-do spirit that says McDonald's can find a way to use food packaging that doesn't pollute our air and water?

Finally, as many big banks divest from fossil fuel development projects, TD Bank still shovels billions of dollars into them, including the notoriously foul tar sands pipelines. But we were just talking about the Big Stick of Bad PR, right? So Sum of Us helps you tell TD Bank to stop investing in polluting fossil fuel projects. It's really well past time for the big banks to fund renewable energy projects, and don't suffer the fool who says that stuff doesn't make any money or that stuff isn't reliable, and not just because our taxpayer money subsidizes fossil fuel development. Think about it: if you were going to design an energy source from scratch, why would you design one that churns the ground and pumps filth into our air and water? You would design systems that cause the least amount of trouble, wouldn't you? And when you consider that renewable energy sources cause far less pollution and earth-churning than fossil fuels, wouldn't they seem more reliable? The only reason fossil fuels are "reliable" is we've chosen to do things that way. Why can't we choose better once we learn better?

Around our table: from surprise medical bills to an "October surprise" falling flat.

Why do good Americans keep getting slammed with surprise medical bills, although preventing them is apparently a bipartisan wish? According to this New York Times account of a woman billed over $50,000 to get airlifted to a hospital that could properly treat her life-threatening COVID-19, the answer is banksters had a tantrum over being told to stop screwing people over. Anyway, read the whole story, even though it'll piss you off, because the details are important -- big corporations know where all the loopholes in the law are, and how can we close them if we don't know where they are?

Joshua Cho at FAIR finds that our "liberal" media "Worr(y) About a Fracking Ban's 'Risk' to Democrats -- Not Fracking's Threat to Planet." Just what you need from our "liberal" media: more horserace coverage, and stupid horserace coverage at that -- polling tells us that regular Americans simply wouldn't run through a wall to keep hydrofracturing. If they were, Heidi Heidtkamp would still be the junior Senator from North Dakota, and John Hickenlooper would be having a lot less trouble burying Cory Gardner in Colorado's Senate race this year.

Tina Nguyen at Politico warns us that some Republicans are starting to court QAnon conspiracy nuts. This may be our next Tea Party, folks -- and if Democrats get all the power back and spend two years pretending their hands are tied as they have a habit of doing, then we'll see a crap-ton of QAnon Reps take back the House for Republicans in 2022. The good news? All Democrats need do to stop this unconscionable stupidity is do the job the people elect them to do. If it seems like they're not taking that advice, I'll be happy to repeat it until they do.

Folks who think Hunter Biden's alleged corruption should kill Joe Biden's Presidential campaign really should get a load of the checkered career of Eric Branstad, son of six-term (!) Iowa Governor and until lately Ambassador to China Terry Branstad, because his story also has nepotism, substance abuse, and making a crap-ton of money under suspicious circumstances. And to those who'd say that's not a good analogy because Eric Branstad isn't the son of our President, I would first direct them to better contemplate the palpable corruption of our President's daughter and son-in-law, and second direct them to stop being pedants.

Ho hum, our President asserts that Joe Biden must be "corrupt as hell" to "live() in these beautiful houses all over the place" on a politician's salary. Set aside that two houses ain't exactly "houses all over the place" -- again, our President is like a man covered in shit complaining about everyone else's body odor. Also, too, the they-didn't-send-their-best-wishes-when-I-got-sick complaint had sure better sound like whining to everyone with listening skills by now.

Finally, numerous analysts have, in recent days, cast reasonable doubt on the New York Post's "smoking gun" story alleging Hunter Biden's corruption. It sure doesn't help that the Delaware computer repair-store owner can't get his damn story straight. And in the words of one former U.S. Attorney, "(w)hat are the chances that an anonymous person abandons a laptop that contains evidence about the very same conspiracy theory" our President's cronies have been flogging all this time? Call it drama, call it junk news, just don't call it a reason to re-elect our President.

Action: concerning water shutoffs, corruption, and the census.

As our President and our Senate Majority Leader fiddle on a new COVID-19 relief package, folks now face water shutoffs all over America -- you know, because they haven't been working, and it's hard enough to pay the bills when you are working? -- so Food and Water Action helps you tell our Centers for Disease Control (or CDC) to issue a nationwide moratorium on water shutoffs. How does our CDC have the authority to issue this moratorium? Well, the short answer is "because the law allows it" -- specifically, the Public Health Service Act. The long answer is that our CDC can issue such a moratorium if public health demands it, and just so happens it does, since we can't actually expect people to wash their hands repeatedly for 20 seconds at a time if they don't have, you know, access to clean water. Furthermore, folks who don't have access to clean water are more likely to get COVID-19 than folks who do -- but as long as we have folks who don't have access to clean water, then the folks who do are also more likely to get it. And, yeah, we don't expect this Congress to do their job, so our CDC must do theirs.

Meanwhile, given the litany of news reports about our President's taxes lately -- ranging from the revelation that he paid $750 in taxes in 2017 and 2018 to $21 million in "highly unusual payments" which may have broken our few remaining campaign finance laws -- Americans for Tax Fairness helps you demand that our IRS and our FEC investigate our President's tax maneuverings. Our President may have borrowed multi-million dollar sums, funneled it through a shell corporation, and then not only donated it to his 2016 campaign, but wrote it off as a business expense! He calls such maneuverings "smart," but the rest of us call them corrupt. No one expects, at this late stage, any of his multitudinous votaries to renounce him -- that would involve admitting you're wrong, a task the best of us have trouble with. But our IRS and our FEC belong to us and work for us, and regardless of how many Presidential appointees they have, or how many career employees our President has driven away, they still have legally-mandated jobs to do.

Finally, now that our Supreme Court has said our Administration can end the 2020 census early and thus leave many good Americans uncounted, Public Citizen helps you tell our Administration to keep working at the census until everyone's counted. Because, as Public Citizen's latest email missive instructs us, "public outcry may be our best hope for compelling" our Administration to count everyone; yeah, I know, they've never demonstrated that they care very much about what we think, but duty is duty. Everyone knows the COVID-19 pandemic has made conducting our census harder than ever -- so much of our census depends on door-knocking, after all -- but we also know that our President wants to use that as an excuse not to count undocumented immigrants, even though they are people who live here and who thus must be counted so federal dollars can be budgeted appropriately. I mean, do people really think that starving areas with undocumented immigrants will induce them to leave? No, it'll make things harder for everyone, which I'm sure is our Administration's aim. Remember: they only need you for your pain.

Action: concerning the Electoral College, "stalkerware," and nuclear waste storage.

Feel like abolishing the Electoral College? I bet you do! And not just because two of the last five Presidential election winners actually lost the popular vote, but because, by the evidence, the Electoral College has plainly failed, twice in the last two decades, to do what our Founders intended -- to keep someone completely unfit for office out of office. You'll no doubt hear from folks who say they think the states should have more of a say in politics, but I say you got two Senators. Wyoming gets two Senators, and California gets two Senators, though California has 50 times the population, so why isn't that enough? And you've no doubt heard of all the machinations that could happen if someone doesn't feel like leaving office -- that they could, for example, get sympathetic legislatures to simply declare the results invalid and appoint their own electors, for example. I'll admit this is feeling a lot less like a contested election than it did six months ago, or even one month ago, but let's make this right anyway. Change.org helps you tell Congress to abolish the Electoral College.

Meanwhile, with so much schooling now taking place remotely, thanks to this pandemic and our government's incompetence in handling it, a lot of schools have hastily resorted to test-taking apps that, well, have a lot of problems, like flagging kids for cheating if they look around or talk to themselves, or if the app's facial recognition software misidentifies them. And these apps are surprisingly hungry for your private information -- they want access to all data on your computer and listen in on all your communications. No wonder they call it "stalkerware"! And, hate to pile on, but who gets the shaft from facial recognition software the most? Folks of color, that's who! Yeah, we all know it's tough enough to teach 30 kids in the same room with you, let alone 30 kids from all over town at the same time, but "first, do no harm" ain't just for the Hippocratic Oath, and you can't help but wonder which app developing corporations saw a way into hoovering up all kinds of personal data you wouldn't otherwise let them touch. Hence Fight for the Future helps you tell schools and colleges to ban "stalkerware."

Finally, our Nuclear Regulatory Commission (or NRC) wants to "temporarily" dump radioactive nuclear waste in West Texas, a plan so unpopular that even Texas's far-right Governor opposes it. Possibly he just wants it dumped in some blue state's backyard, but dumping ain't even half the problem -- transporting it from all over the country could expose virtually everyone who lives near ports and train tracks, trains and ships being susceptible to leaks, accidents, and sabotage. Not to pile on, but the area our NRC wants to use is a heavily-Latino neighborhood, and don't folks of color get the shaft enough already? Hence Public Citizen helps you tell our NRC to scuttle its proposal to allow "temporary" nuclear waste storage in West Texas. "Temporary" nuclear waste storage, by the way, is already illegal; chances are this scheme, if our NRC goes through with it, will be struck down in court, but you might not find much comfort in that if you've already had your water table poisoned by an accident in the meantime.

Around the table: in which we confront rather relentless Republican hypocrisy.

Right-wing, pro-President group pays travel expenses for folks to attend a Presidential rally at the White House, including a "peaceful protest() for law and order." Thus once again we confront the fact that the right constantly accuses liberals of being "professional protestors" when the right hires actual professional protestors. And they kind of need them, too -- our President has never been all that popular, getting only 46% of the popular vote in 2016 and rarely cresting that in his approval ratings since then. And folks are sick of "law and order" meaning only "filling jails with black folks."

COVID-19 cases in rural areas jump 16% in one week, representing the biggest weekly increase since the start of the pandemic. Remember right-wingers bellowing that "red states manage the pandemic so much better than New York and New Jersey" back in the spring? Of course that was mostly about the relative lack of population density in "red states," which those governments had very little to do with. So what do you suppose they say now, particularly when New York and New Jersey are doing rather better than North Dakota and Iowa? I kid, of course -- they say some iteration of TEH FAKE NEWZ!!!!!, because what else can you say when you've been wrong about everything?

Back in 2016, the same Republicans who are now trying to ram through Judge Barrett's Supreme Court nomination argued just as vehemently for leaving Justice Scalia's seat open for another four or eight years if Hillary Clinton won the election. And thus we are reminded that Republicans don't care about norms or laws, or better arguments, or even more persuasive arguments -- they only care about bullying their way to more power, and at least a quarter of our electorate likes them that way. We can only hope the rest of the electorate have had it up to here with all that.

Right-wing trolls get nearly all the facts about a Denver shooting wrong, and then won't retract their numerous idiotic statements. You could say expecting them to admit they were wrong is like expecting a mound of dung in the middle of the sidewalk to magically transform into meatloaf -- or you could say expecting them to admit they were wrong is merely expecting human beings to act civilized, and surely even the most cynical among us wouldn't fault folks for expecting civilized behavior from nominally civilized people. I kid, of course -- cynical people are no better than right-wing trolls.

I've long said our President is unfit for office, but that doesn't mean I agree that U.S. Trade Rep Robert Lighthizer, easily the best of our President's Cabinet appointees, has done a bad job, and neither does this ProPublica article, not really. Sometimes, when you hear that "we've lost all this expertise," you have to ask expertise at what? And with trade, it sure does seem like we've only "lost expertise" at putting corporations before people. I don't know that our President has addressed our trade deficits with any particular skill, but the USMCA is a marked improvement over NAFTA, not least because it drastically curtails the use of "investor-state dispute settlement" systems that outsource our jobs and nullify our laws.

Finally, no, the New York Post did not find a "smoking gun" on a computer with data belonging to Hunter Biden. While the "smoking gun" email quoted in the article suggests (and doesn't state) that a Ukrainian businessman met with Joe Biden while he was Vice President, it's a long, long way from there to the right's long and winding tale of Vice Presidential corruption, and of course the 12-minute video that "appears" to have sex and crack on it is irrelevant even if it exists. And anyway, Presidential votaries who yell about "the privilege of being a Biden" are like a shit-covered man who comes into your living room and complains about your body odor.

Action: concerning taxing the rich, public health research, and the right to repair.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure the rich pay their fair share of taxes, by enacting a wealth tax and fully funding our IRS. You'll note several news hooks there: billionaires are making a killing (so to speak) during this pandemic while over 60 million Americans have filed for unemployment at some point over the last seven months, while the New York Times reported that our President paid literally $750 in taxes in 2017 and 2018. But there's one other news hook you might have missed: Congress has been defunding our IRS for the last decade, to the point where our IRS admits it goes after poorer tax cheat suspects because they don't have the money to fight rich ones in court. That's a despicable state of affairs, beloved only by those who hate all taxes and who have no apparent idea how many of the services they enjoy only exist because of taxes. Congress literally takes food out of our mouths by defunding the IRS, because if you can't stamp out tax avoidance by the rich, someone's still got to pay for roads and bridges and libraries and cops.

Meanwhile, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 8178/S. 4533, the Anti-Racism in Public Health Act. The bill would establish a "National Center for Anti-Racism and Health" within our Centers for Disease Control (or CDC) and would also mandate that our CDC researches how structural racism (including police brutality) impacts public health. You may find all of that less useful than bills that would actually punish police brutality, curtail redlining, or deliver aid to minority neighborhoods ravaged by COVID-19, but conducting research on these matters is also important, not least because our government really hasn't done that research with this much vigor before. Folks say they always put the landfill next to the black neighborhood, but such arguments need to rise above anecdotes and get backing from scientific research. And we also haven't really confronted police brutality as a public health issue yet. If we did these things, we'd do good works, so this bill merits our support.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Apple to respect our right-to-repair with its products, then Penn PIRG still helps you do that. Apple has long been notorious for making their products almost impossible to upgrade and repair on your own, but Apple has also done its share of greenwashing, and has pledged to be completely carbon-neutral in 10 years. If it doesn't make its products easier to reuse, though, how can it do that? If our landfills are overflowing with "obsolete" hardware, how are we going to kick climate change's ass? The U.S. PIRG Education Fund has lately informed us that if we could all get another year out of our cellphones, the climate change impact would be like taking over 600,000 cars off the road! Granted, we have almost 275 million cars on the road right now, but now imagine what getting another year out of your desktops and laptops and iPads would be like. If we had more power to repair and upgrade our own stuff, we would do a lot of good. After all, people still like saving money. Some folks still even pride themselves on their thrift.

Action: concerning good House bills, working families, and spy drones.

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! 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. Our Senators have all kinds of dumb ideas about what's important to good Americans, so we've got to be there to remind them of what's really important to us. And we keep reminding them until they get it. Even if it takes a very, very long time.

Meanwhile, our Department of Labor, apparently confused about its mission and legal mandate, plans to let corporations classify more of their workers as "independent contractors," and you know what that means: it means they won't have to pay minimum wage, obey child labor laws, or pay overtime when workers work more than 40 hours in a week. They always say they do it for "jobs," or for the cleaning worker in Detroit or the Grubhub driver in Pittsburgh or home health aide in Columbus, but that's a load of rubbish: they always do it for their rich cronies who whine about having to pay people in more than dung pellets. And, you know, the whole purpose of overtime is to stop corporations from trying to get by on too few workers (who are no doubt overworked!), so certainly we shouldn't give corporations yet another way out of their responsibility to their workers and to the American people. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell our Department of Labor to scuttle its own proposal that would injure working families further.

Finally, Amazon clearly hasn't had enough of spying on you -- Alexa listens to your private conversations, and Ring enables bad police work, but now Amazon wants to foist upon us the Ring Always Home Cam, a drone that not only flies around your house but spies around your house. Think there might be some domestic abusers who'd use that on their partners? Or homeowners who'd use it on their AirBnB patrons? At this point we're far past if-you've-done-nothing-wrong-you-have-nothing-to-fear. And of course Amazon won't rule out letting the police capture all that drone video; you'd like to think they'd have to get a warrant first, but as you know our politicians haven't been real steadfast about our Fourth Amendment lately. Luckily Amazon has to get permission from our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to sell the drone, and they might find that difficult, since the drone doesn't satisfy FCC privacy protections as mandated by law. Hence Fight for the Future helps you tell our FCC to reject Amazon's proposed sale of its flying spy drones.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, gerrymandering, public water, and public lands.

It's Monday, so it's time to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act. I know, negotiations over a new COVID-19 stimulus bill are supposedly on again (though by the time you read this, they may be off again!), but there's no damn need to "negotiate" a good stimulus bill, because the HEROES Act is already a good stimulus bill, and our House passed it five months ago. Republicans didn't want it, of course, because it didn't include three martini lunch tax breaks and blanket immunity for corporations that injure people during the pandemic. Now some analysts have detected weakness in our President's recent vacillating, and if that's true, now's the time to strike, and tell our Senators to pass a bill that funds COVID-19 testing and tracing, funds enhanced unemployment benefits, funds our Post Office, and cuts another stimulus check for working families. (And if our President's merely playing us, guess what? Now is still the time to strike, because now is always the time to strike.)

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: Fair Districts PA helps you demand that your state Senators vote on SB 1242, the Legislative and Congressional Redistricting Act (or LACRA), which would make redistricting fairer in Pennsylvania. No, it wouldn't establish an independent commission to handle redistricting, but it would prevent redistricting plans from favoring particular candidates or parties and keep newly-redrawn districts from ignoring town and county boundaries, and it would do these things redistricting of both state legislative districts and U.S. House districts. You'll also want to contact Rep. Everett and House Speaker Cutler and demand they hold a vote on HB 2638, the House version of LACRA. The legislature will adjourn in less than two weeks, and it sure looks like they're trying to run out the clock. They may want to consider whether Democrats might reclaim both state Houses after Election Day. Stranger things have happened, after all. Hell, stranger things will have likely happened between the time I've written this sentence and the time you read it.

In other news, the notorious Nestlé is at it again, this time trying to keep paying a pittance to suck up public water from Ruby Mountain Springs in Chaffee County (CO), to the tune of 65 million gallons annually. But county officials will actually hold a public meeting about the matter in less than two weeks, and the good citizens of Chaffee County need to know we've got their back, hence Sum of Us helps you tell Chaffee County officials to keep public water for the public and reject Nestlé's application to keep sucking them dry. Colorado, like much of the West, suffers from increasing drought, which means they can't just keep giving water away to private corporations who then bottle it and resell it at an absurd profit. That ain't "job creation," that's getting played. The good news? Our efforts in other parts of the country to stem the tide of public water giveaways, while they haven't always worked, have called attention to the problem, and have taught people who've forgotten that public water is our water. So let's keep fighting.

Finally, our Administration has lately advanced a final rule proposal that would allow logging in Alaska's Tongass National Forest, so the Sierra Club helps you tell our Administration, one more time, to reject logging in the Tongass. Getting logging corporations into an area that would cut down thousand year-old trees represents some kind of totem to this Administration -- if we can get loggers in here, they think, we can get them in anywhere -- but that kind of short-term thinking will obliterate this country and its good example to the world. We preserve thousand year-old trees because we experience awe at history and nature; this President apparently only experiences awe when he sees a plunging neckline. Also, but the Sierra Club's latest email missive says logging in the Tongass "turn(s) a climate solution into a climate problem," and they're absolutely right -- the more trees we have, the more carbon we capture. And that's just one thing trees do. And how long does money last, anyway?

Around the table: in which politics continues to bring out the worst in some people.

Scientists from Georgetown University and the University of Warwick find the cost of climate change is actually considerably higher than previously thought. Models accounting for average rising temperatures count the cost in the many trillions of dollars over the next few centuries, but a model accounting for fluctuations in temperatures adds to that cost. I will say that even spending $50 trillion over the next 200 years is not something our politicians should be afraid to do, and not just because the alternative may well be annihilation.

Peter Montague at TruthOut reminds us that our President is "trying to scare (us) with the socialism boogeyman." People call you a "socialist" when they can't win the argument on the merits, but they also must hide from themselves all the socialism they take part in. Socialism isn't merely about shopping at Ace Hardware instead of Home Depot or dumping your bankster for a credit union -- when you drive a road, put out the trash, call the fire department, or head out to the local park, you're practicing socialism yourself.

Taliban leader says he hopes our President wins re-election so that he'll withdraw American troops from Afghanistan, though that's an aim we can accomplish without this particular President's involvement. Remember when right-wingers read Osama bin Laden's remarks right before the 2004 election as an "endorsement" of John Kerry even though the plain text said they weren't? Right now all those idiots are either silent or sounding like even bigger idiots trying to explain how "we hope he will win the election" somehow means the opposite of what it says.

Speaking of right-wing idiots, QAnon-supporting U.S. House candidate Marjorie Greene gave her own campaign nearly half a million bucks after getting a loan through the CARES Act's notorious Paycheck Protection Program (or PPP). And though of course she's not the only one -- Darrell Issa, who used to be the richest man in Congress, got a PPP loan himself! -- she is the only one whose nominal Democratic opponent dropped out of the race a few months ago because he decided to move out of the district, an administrative failure that makes you wonder how Democrats ever win races at all.

Commerce Township (MI) employee needs 13 stitches on his fingers after trying to remove a yard sign supporting our President with razor blades on its edges. The sign was too close to the road, thus violating a town ordinance, The homeowner said she had several yard signs "stolen" (did she put the others too close to the road, too?) but of course knew nothing about the razor blades! That just means it can get worse: one day soon a Presidential votary will happily confess that he electrified his yard sign, and not too long from now someone will confess to something similar after it harms a child or a pet.

Finally, Barron County (MI) sheriff says the recent kidnapping plot against Gov. Whitmer could well have been an attempt at a citizen's arrest. For what crime? For "treason," per the would-be kidnappers, but more likely for making them wear face masks or being a Democrat or not making them feel like they're the only people in the world who mean a damn. We have to stop coddling these diaper-loaded brats even if they're armed and even if some of our police officers seem awfully sympathetic to them. Shame still works in America, if we have the guts to do it.

Action: concerning endangered species and immigration.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell our U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to reject its own proposal to make it harder to classify areas as "critical habitats," then Penn Environment still helps you do that. What would this proposal do? Why, undermine the Endangered Species Act, of course -- if there aren't a whole lot of "critical habitats" available, where will we help endangered species recover? I'd call that clever, if I didn't insist that cleverness be, you know, not evil. Reducing critical habitats also increases the amount of land subject to development, which has been this President's unfortunate mania from day one -- and not to stimulate the economy, nor to create jobs, but simply to deliver yet more unearned money into other bosses' wallets. We have long known that this President would eradicate history just to make himself and his cronies richer, so we must stand taller and stronger for a civilization that does not sacrifice itself to mammon. And if that makes us look more conservative than he, I'm not inclined to complain.

Meanwhile, you know our Supreme Court ruled in June that our Administration unlawfully ended the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (or DACA) program, which you would think would mean our Administration would be continuing the program, right? Of course not! They think rules and laws are for "losers," after all. Hence the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell our Administration to start doing its job and start processing DACA applications again. They're not just being big babies, they're also being cruel: folks who came here as children had literally no say in coming here, and they wouldn't recognize the countries to which we'd deport them back. And DACA doesn't even extend the protections of the law to all such immigrants, nor does it offer a path to citizenship. Which proves, maybe, that appeasing racists is a stupid idea. They sure better hope a real liberal never gets elected President.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell big hotel chain corporations like Hilton, Choice, and Best Western to stop letting our Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) use their hotels as de facto concentration camps, then the Daily Kos Liberation League still helps you do that. Well, actually ICE subcontracts this nefarious duty to a contractor called MVM, but that's hair-splitting -- fact is, these big hotel corporations not only enable this Administration's abominable immigration policies (including family separation), but they make money off it, and you really should be making as little money from evil as possible in this world, lest you get a shock when you show up at the Pearly Gates. This Administration thinks very little about the long term, of course, but we don't ever have to be like them. We can choose to be civilized people, and we can use the Big Stick of Bad PR to help big corporations be civilized, too.

Action: concerning masks, whistleblowers, and government lies.

Change.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a national mask mandate. Because wearing a damn mask outside helps slow the spread of COVID-19! And no, right-wingers, it's not about your "freedom," unless by "freedom" you mean "freedom to infect others with a deadly disease." And certainly it's not like Nazis forcing Jews to wear the Star of David! (I mean, we're not all Jews, and if we were, making us wear masks to set us off from other people would be pointless. Right-wingers need to work on their damn similes.) We've coddled these don't-tread-on-me tantrum-throwers for too long, and I, for one, am willing to bring the force of law upon them. Everyone who's thought about the matter knows that masks do what the scientists say they do, and everyone who disagrees merely wishes it weren't true, and they'll latch on to whatever snake oil salesman doesn't sound completely off their rocker. Y'all will let me know if my true feelings aren't coming across here, right? I wouldn't want to be accused of holding back.

Meanwhile, H.R. 4816/S. 2529, the Whistleblower Programs Improvement Act, would (as its title suggests) expand whistleblower protections, which currently only extend to those who blow the whistle on wrongdoing directly to our SEC or CFTC; the bill would extend those protections to those who assist in whistleblower investigations. I can't imagine what objections folks would have to that, unless they're of the DESTROYZ ALLZ REGULASHUNZ!!!! variety, or the FRIVULUZ LAWSUITZ!!!! variety. And, as you know, our government has spent hundreds of billions of dollars in COVID-19 relief lately, which means hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money (i.e., our money) that could be stolen. Some right-wingers use that as an excuse to say all government programs are awful, but I say you need to have the courage to do right, and that includes punishing those who would subvert your efforts. So the National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect taxpayers by passing the Whistleblower Programs Improvement Act.

Finally, our Department of Homeland Security (or DHS) has lately proposed reclassifying complaint records as "temporary," which would give our National Archives and Records Administration (or NARA) the power to destroy any records of those complaints within four years of their filing! Our government destroying records of complaints against it -- why, who could find that suspicious? It's almost like they've got something to hide, like, you know, family separation, forced hysterectomies, wrongful deportation, or murder or sexual abuse at concentration camps! Seriously, if you want to be the greatest nation on Earth, you'd better be able to admit and overcome your mistakes, and you'd better be able to repent for your evil works; otherwise, you're not the greatest nation on Earth, but just another country doomed to get lost in the sands of time, and we'd all like to be remembered for the good we did on Earth, right? So Open the Government helps you tell our DHS to scuttle its proposal to censor complaints about its nefarious works.

Around the table: in which we consider various law-and-order matters in a different manner than our allegedly law-and-order President would.

A ProPublica/Maine Monitor investigation describes the sad state of Maine's public defender program, upon which poor folks depend to get justice. Long story short: the state's program had always been private, which as you know usually makes it more expensive, and then never funded it properly, resulting in (among other evils) the worst lawyers, some with criminal convictions, representing the state's poorest residents. I bet this happens in every state once QAnon candidates start winning -- which they will, if Democrats retake power in Washington and then come up with excuses not to use it, as is their habit.

Contra our President's hysteria, Goldman Sachs analysts tell investors a Democratic victory at the polls this November "would likely prompts us to upgrade our forecasts." Well, they did quite well during the Obama years, so I guess they would know. Seriously, our President is clever enough to hang this around Joe Biden's neck, banksters still being extremely unpopular in America, but, ah, we have reason to doubt that he's vigorous enough to do that at present.

Walker Bragman and David Sirota at Jacobin evaluate Judge Barrett's record at the Seventh Circuit, and find it as wanting as Nathan Robinson did. (She opined correctly in Kanter v. Barr, actually, but even a blind squirrel finds a nut.) Given a slavish devotion to non-interpretation of even obviously unjust laws that would make Neil Gorsuch blush, you have to wonder what Judge Barrett thinks judges are even for.

Dean Baker suggests that our President is "throwing away" our shot at a vaccine by refusing to cooperate with other nations on that task. And, you know, also by valuing a corporation's potential "intellectual property" over sick people getting better. You should suspect the good heart of anyone who consistently puts things over people. No, they're not "smart" if they do that; they're evil if they do that.

Facebook kicks all QAnon and Q-related accounts off its platform, which means, in the short term, that Q-believers will slink off to other platforms, nursing their unearned sense of martyrdom, and await the shit-ton of right-wing money coming their way if Democrats annihilate Republicans this November. Still, Facebook did a good work here, particularly if other platforms take the suggestion and conclude that our First Amendment protects people from our government, not from social media platforms.

Finally, our President breaks off all negotiations with Congress over a COVID-19 relief bill, saying there won't be another one until "after I win." He contradicted himself on Twitter shortly thereafter, but we know folks by their deeds, not their words. And when he says Speaker Pelosi (who shepherded the HEROES Act through the House almost five months ago) isn't "negotiating in good faith," he really means she's not capitulating to all his demands. Just like the rest of them.

Penny Rants for Wednesday, October 7, 2020: in which we confront various Presidential dramas.

Rachel Bade and Paul Kane at the Washington Post find that "the GOP’s predicted Supreme Court bump" from the Barrett nomination "has yet to materialize," either in polling or in campaign donations. But newsflash: there was no Supreme Court bounce in 2018, either! Maybe that's because the Kavanaugh hearings resolved too early in October to be much of a Surprise, whereas the Barrett hearings won't even start until next week, and maybe our President's plan all along was to draw out the Barrett hearings until after the election, so that it'd be fresh in right-wing voters' minds. But how many more votes can Republicans harvest from this stratagem? Seriously, the crowd that lives for right-wing judicial confirmations got into bed with this President a long time ago. And though they might complain about our President's obnoxiousness, they're quite happy there.

Walter Shapiro says that "crippling fear of a primary challenge" from a Presidential votary simply doesn't explain Republican cowardice in the face of our ongoing pandemic, adding that "(i)t is hard to imagine a 2022 primary challenge against Republicans solely for wearing a mask on an airplane or staying home when they feared they would test positive for the coronavirus." Oh, but I think Republicans will absolutely face primary challenges in 2022 for wearing a mask, not being Q-friendly enough, for actually protecting bans on pre-existing conditions, or a dozen other things I can't even imagine because I'm not a soulless prick. After all, once you've abandoned principle, science, logic, even common sense, where can you go? Only deeper and deeper into fantasy, and big corporate money will be there to enable those fantasies, just as it was for the Tea Party. And you know how that story'll end -- unless we act.

Don't make too much of reports that the elder Presidential scion thinks his dad is "acting crazy" and doesn't want to be the only one to tell him, or that the Presidential family is "divided" over our President's most recent "erratic" behavior, because what is that, class? Drama, that's what, and, as usual, not particularly good drama. For decades (not just the last four years!) Republicans have pretended to have "real differences" over policy, or process, or optics, but they don't -- they play out these dramas just to distract you from acting more decisively against their evil. Thus folks who say even Don Jr. thinks his old man's bananas, even if they don't mean to, give you permission to think you don't have to do anything about this sick, immoral, and decadent society. Every day the sun rises, we have to do something about that, and when we soak in drama, we make that task much harder.

Upon hearing that our President left Walter Reed Medical Center with the twittered advice that you should not let COVID-19 "dominate your life," you might well respond that the 200,000-plus folks he's let die from COVID would have something to say about that if they could. But then, "(d)on't let it dominate your life" ain't for those people, nor even for the American people: it's for his votaries, and no one else. Dismiss all reasonable warnings, don't worry about how your friends and neighbors feel, even tear off your mask and wander around indoors if you're infected -- those are the stand-by orders he just gave his votaries, and again, you can't dismiss the possibility that he plans to keep the pandemic going because he can only operate in a climate of chaos. I used to say George W. Bush screwed things up so that you'd cleave to him harder; this President is only the next logical step in that stratagem.

Action: concerning good House bills, sanctions on Iran, and Chad Wolf.

Happy Wednesday, good Americans! 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. Why do we keep doing this? Because we need to establish our will, as we communicate it to our Senators -- and thus also establish how badly they're doing at adhering to our will, which is their sole job, and a job they're doing much worse than our House is. And the more we do it, the closer we get to fulfilling the promise democracy.

Meanwhile, Win Without War helps you tell Treasury Secretary Mnuchin and Secretary of State Pompeo to reject any more sanctions on Iran. We could go on at length about the damage more sanctions would do to good Iranians, who will certainly bear the brunt of sanctions more than their rulers, but all we need say is, well, calling this Administration's policy toward Iran piss-poor would be a grievous insult to piss. The Obama Administration helped craft a successful agreement that kept nuclear weapons out of Iran's hands, but this Administration withdrew from that agreement, apparently as part of a plan to create international chaos that could only be resolved by war with Iran, which is so 1980, you know. You could argue, I suppose, that Mr. Bush's Iraq policy only strengthened Iran in the region, thus tying our current President's hands, but just as two wrongs don't make a right, two stupids don't make a smart. So let's not remain hostage to bad foreign policy, because that would be un-American.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject the nomination of Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf to the permanent Homeland Security Secretary position, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. They'd have plenty of reasons to reject the nomination, including Mr. Wolf's ardent support for family separation and illegal detainment of protestors, as well as his refusal to accept new DACA applications even though our Supreme Court told him to do it. But now that we're less than a month away from Election Day, our Senators would probably just prefer to wait this whole thing out and see how things go, given that voting for Mr. Wolf would be tough to defend to the voters who are about to decide your immediate future. It's funny that none of them have said confirming Mr. Wolf is essential given "the grave threats we face," since you know that's what they would have said in Tha Bush Mobb years. Still, we must remind them that cowardice is evil, and the time to do the right thing is always now.

Action: concerning nuclear waste and corporate investment in police departments.

Our Nuclear Regulatory Commission (or NRC) wants to reclassify some kinds of radioactive nuclear waste so that big corporations can dump it in landfills! Which means it'll eventually wind up in our drinking water and in our crops -- and in our air, if landfills incinerate the stuff! If any of your friends tell you changing this rule will "create jobs," go ahead and ask them how. "By giving executives more money to create jobs" is not an acceptable answer, since we all know by now that when we give executives more money they hoard it, not spend it -- which means they certainly don't spend it on creating jobs! This regulatory effort will kill jobs, in fact -- the disposal operations to which nuclear power corporations currently send their waste do hire people to do jobs, after all. So, in sum: it'll kill jobs, and you won't be able to breathe the air or drink the water or eat the food, but some executive somewhere will be able to gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home! Unless we all send public comments to our NRC opposing their rule change, which Food and Water Watch helps you do.

Meanwhile, on the heels of Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron's charging one already-fired police officer with one charge in the killing of Breonna Taylor, Daily Kos helps you tell big corporations UPS, Ford, and Humana to divest from the Louisville police department. The Louisville police department should be able to do its work on behalf of the good citizens of Louisville with tax money anyway, and the fact that police and jails already eat up almost half of Louisville's budget suggests that we ought to give them less of that work. Seriously, if we followed a treatment model for drug addicts rather than a punitive one, we'd be spending considerably less tax money, wouldn't need corporate money, and Breonna Taylor would be alive today. (The police who killed her were ostensibly conducting a drug investigation, after all.) And there ain't nothing corporations fear like the Big Stick of Bad PR. I wish they feared the law more than that, to be honest, but we're gonna use the tools available to us even as we work on getting better tools.

Around the table: in which we confront many different kinds of corruption, again.

Greg Palast, America's Last Journalist, reminds us that "Wisconsin 'Movers' Didn't Move." You know, just like millionaires didn't "move" out of states with high income tax rates in 2009! (The Great Recession, then underway, turned a lot of millionaires into thousandaires.) Wisconsin is one of those states that pretends you've moved if you haven't returned a junk mail-looking piece of crap to "verify" your address, and then they de-register you from voting and don't tell you! And they send a disproportionate number of these junk mail-looking pieces of crap to voters of color! The good news? Wisconsin allows same-day voter registration, and I think a lot of these voters of color are pissed.

Ho hum, bankster corporation buys hospital chain and its managers make a mint while their hospitals can't even buy basic supplies. They did it by loading up the hospital chain with debt (i.e., by buying up other hospitals), to the point where ambulances can't put gas on the company card and nurses don't have IV fluid on the floor because someone hasn't paid their bills. Meanwhile, Prospect's CEO has made over $125 million over the last few years. Nice work if you can get it! And Prospect Medical Holding's hospitals serve guess who? Mainly low-income working families. Right-wingers, please tell me again how expanding Medicare to include everyone is some unconscionable evil.

It begins: big corporate-funded PACs are funneling money to very far-right QAnon candidates. Expect this funding to increase dramatically (a word I'm using on purpose!) if Joe Biden manages to win this election and Democrats take our Senate while holding our House, because then a do-nothing Biden Administration will make fertile ground for a Republican takeover of Congress led by folks who make stupid Tea Partiers seem like Mensa members. (And no, I'm not impressed that Marjorie Greene opposes "never-ending wars in the Middle East" -- she's either lying or just another blind squirrel who's tripped over a nut.)

Our President has supposedly told his braintrust, such as it is, that he wants to ditch FBI Director Christopher Wray if he wins re-election. So, a far right-wing President wants to oust his somewhat less right-wing FBI director because he doesn't drag his knuckles on the ground enough. Would I be a more or less spiritually-advanced person if I laughed at the thought of our President's votaries squealing how dare Christopher Wray say antifa isn't a terrorist organization?

Finally, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, already facing a five-year-old securities fraud charge, now faces accusations of "improper influence, abuse of office, bribery and other potential crimes." Mr. Paxton is also the asshole who (among so, so many evil works!) constantly squealed about TEH VOTERZ FRAUDZ!!!! in 2018 as he was prosecuting a total of 33 defendants. Yeah, come back when you've got convictions, dude. If you're not in jail yourself by then!

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, social media, and birth control.

Once again we will call our Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act. Doesn't matter that they're not in session right now; doesn't matter that they all think they have more important things to do (like ram a right-wing Supreme Court Justice down our throats before we notice it); doesn't matter that Nancy Pelosi was just trying to pass a slimmed-down HEROES Act in order to "get something done." The HEROES Act is still the best COVID-19 relief bill either House of Congress has passed, and the race ain't even close. The CARES Act gave out over half a trillion dollars in corporate welfare, but the HEROES Act would actually fund COVID testing and tracing, enhanced unemployment benefits, relief for strapped states and municipalities, and relief for a strapped Postal Service (among other good works). Doesn't matter that Ms. Pelosi was negotiating with Treasury Secretary Mnuchin, either -- they should only be negotiating with us. And the more we communicate our will, the more they'll finally get that. Really, they can't see the Mitch McConnell Way as anything but desperate. And where's he been in these negotiations, anyway?

Meanwhile, Facebook has been giving itself high-fives for "cracking down" on noxious Nazi-wannabe content at its platform, but, yeah, that's a crock, and you don't even have to know that Facebook got over 400 warnings about the Nazi wannabe groups organizing their "response" to Kenosha protests (that "response" included the Kyle Rittenhouse shootings) to know that. Whistleblowers have complained to our SEC that Facebook still helps Nazi wannabe groups by using algorithms to auto-generate pages that promote white supremacy; imagine if Random House "auto-generated" hundreds of different Turner Diaries rip-offs and you begin to see the problem. I make the publishing house analogy, again, because our laws should treat Facebook as a publishing house -- albeit one that can publish private utterances that must be exempt from social platform scrutiny -- and people still complain this is a "free speech" issue. But how can it be a free speech issue if some algorithm does the "speaking"? Hence the National Whistleblower Center helps you tell our government to hold Facebook accountable for lying about its "crackdowns."

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1692/S. 758, the EACH Woman Act, which would (finally!) allow federal funding of abortions. Our Supreme Court may soon be so constituted as to strike down Roe v. Wade at the first opportunity, and while no one ever wants to see a fetus aborted, the alternative -- a society that uses women as breeders -- is far worse. No, really, those are our two choices: a society that legalizes abortion, or a society where women can be controlled through pregnancy, this latter option a stated preference of many right-wingers; the former is the lesser evil, and we can mitigate that evil more easily than if (as with Prohibition) we make it illegal and more well-off folks still break the law with impunity. We mitigate the evil with safe and affordable birth control -- which, naturally, our right-wingers also vehemently oppose. But birth control is a civilized option, unless, I guess, you think the 40 million or so sperm from every ejaculation that don't ovulate also deserve more chances.

Penny Rants for Sunday, October 4, 2020: examining our latest Presidential drama.

You know all about Uber and Lyft, those "disruptive" and "innovative" corporations that redistribute the income of unionized taxi drivers upward to undeserving executives by helping good citizens use their own cars as a taxi service? Now ProPublica introduces you to Arise, the corporation that farms out customer service reps who work from home to other big corporations -- customer service reps who must pay thousands of dollars in "startup costs" because of course they're not employees but "independent contractors." But worse, even, than that, or all the corporate outsourcing this encourages, or the less-than-minimum-wage pay you'd get as an Arise "service partner," or the draconian rules about how long your service calls can be or how many refunds you can facilitate, is the former Arise CEO who refers to "lunch, breaks, and training" as wastage. You know, wastage, as in "every moment spent not pleasuring the executive is wasted time." Stupid workers, always needing to work on a full belly and blow off some steam every once in a while! Well, you know what they say: one person's hard-earned rights are another person's wastage. OK, people don't seriously say that, at least not in public, because if they did, they'd out themselves as evil.

Now that our President has COVID-19, Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden says he'll pause attack ads for a while, and (Rep. Omar's understandable criticism aside) that's not just a nice thing to do, it's a politically smart thing to do. Why, it might encourage Mr. Biden to say what he's for rather than merely what he's against (i.e., him losing and our President not losing). And would it be smart to extend that moratorium all the way to Election Day, though our President won't respond in kind? Especially because he won't respond in kind! The Sunday afternoon before Election Day, I watched the Eagles-Giants game and saw three hours of attack ads from both sides, and I knew right then that millions of folks wouldn't vote in two days, and who benefits when good Americans don't vote? Evil Republicans, that's who. So let our President wave his arms like a maniac about crime and protestors and foreigners in all his TV ads, and let Mr. Biden talk about creating jobs by building renewable energy infrastructure and keeping military weapons away from police officers. I know who wins that argument, even if our "liberal" media pundits don't, or pretend they don't.

Buried in paragraph six of this Gabriel Sherman report on how our President's illness has rattled his campaign is an unnamed Presidential ally saying "(i)t's weird that all these Republicans are getting it" and intoning unctuously that "when something major happens thirty days before an election, it usually has to do with the election," a lesson I bet he noted well back in 2016 when James Comey dropped that bomb on Hillary Clinton, amirite? I enjoy a good conspiracy theory as much as the next guy, but I don't enjoy bad ones at all, and I certainly don't enjoy people drunk with power suddenly pretending to be powerless. And anyway, why are "all these Republicans are getting it"? Because they're walking around without masks on and hobnobbing with sick people! Such tough guys, they are, pissing away all their unearned privilege and exposing their cowardice in the process. A real tough guy wears a mask, after all, because he cares about what happens to other people. (As an aside, I wish Sen. Grassley would get off his ass and get tested, not so much because he's about the only Republican left in the Senate who's worth a damn as because he's 87 damn years old.)

Finally, while we're still on the subject, I'll note that I don't wish COVID-19 on anybody, even someone as despicable as our President, and I want him to fight through and get better for his own sake -- while there's life, there's hope, they say, and if our President can use this adversity to transcend his own malignant narcissism, I'll be the first to applaud! But I'll still, ah, wait for the data on that transformation; after all, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson had all those kind things to say about the NHS while it kept him alive, but we all still think he'll gut the NHS first chance he gets. We've seen worse, after all. And not for nothing, but our President will have access to a standard of health care ordinary Americans don't -- they tested him for COVID every day while they did their damnedest to test as few of us regular folks as they could! -- though I guess it's a species of justice that at Walter Reed he'll be getting the socialized medicine he always yells about. And you know what? I don't judge anyone for wishing the man dead. The fuck-your-feelings crowd never seemed to care about such niceties before. And maybe our President should have earned some damn goodwill, instead of using us all like toilet paper these past few years.

Around the table: in which we confront many different kinds of corruption.

From Ella Fassler at TruthOut we learn that "Progressive Groups Are Mobilizing to De-Escalate Far Right Violence at the Polls." Yes, I do think we should go to the polls on Election Day fully expecting caravans of Confederate flag-waving morons to roll through and hurt innocent Americans, but one could do worse than give one of the organizations in the first paragraph a call and see what help you might be able to give. Also, remember that these right-wing caravans are full of the real cowards and may well buckle at the sight of our strength.

Speaking of which, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issues order reducing the number of mail-in ballot drop-off points to one per county, in a state with a lot of huge counties. Imagine thinking maybe the mail won't deliver your ballot on time this year I wonder why and now having to drive hundreds of miles to drop it off, and you see the problem with Gov. Abbott's order. He issued the order yesterday and it takes effect today, like he's afraid Texas's electoral votes might really go to Joe Biden or something; by the time you read this, a federal judge may have issued an injunction staying the order, and definitely thousands more voters will, in the words of one local official, resolve to "crawl through broken glass to vote these cheaters out of office."

On the occasion of the New York Times's latest exposé of our President's tax shenanigans, Matthew Gardner at ITEP reminds us that Congress has been starving our IRS of funding to the point that it now investigates poor people as much as it does rich folks, even though common sense tells us that most of the tax fraud happens at upper incomes. This unfortunate state of affairs also explains how an audit of a 2009 tax return -- one which sure looks like it would rather easily uncover fraud -- can still be unresolved after over a decade. It should be easy to justify more funding for our IRS. You want to catch people taking food out of your mouth? is pretty much how I'd begin and end.

In a peripherally-related note, Jared Kushner's corporation appears to have secured unusually favorable terms on $850 million in Freddie Mac-backed loans -- and the taxpayer (i.e., you and I) might be on the hook for all that if Mr. Kushner et al default on the loan. Dig the Freddie Mac spokeshack claiming that they pay their bills on time, without mentioning that the first 10 years of the loan are interest-only, meaning a huge chunk of principal will be due at the end of that time -- and I wonder who'll pay for that! Time was people would avoid even the appearance of corruption, but no longer, it seems.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), the man who gives empty suits a bad name, becomes the latest politician to pretend to care about how awful the other night's debate was. Jesus Mary and Joseph how does a fucking teabagger have the gall to talk about how "we’re all talking at each other and over each other, but not to each other"? And, actually, we're not all doing it -- some of us don't talk to the other side, because we actually did try our damnedest to listen to and understand the other side, but you can only take being told you're a traitor and you hate America and you're with the terrorists so many times before you understand that the other side is sick, immoral, and decadent. Losers like Marco Rubio only whine about how "nobody gets along any more" when nobody wants to get along with them.

Around the table: in which our government pretends to fear the "star chamber of public opinion."

Surprise, surprise, this most recent pandemic-inspired recession has hit poorer working families and folks of color harder than anyone else. Know why our President hasn't bragged about TEH LOWESTZ BLACKZ UNEMPLOYMENTZ EVAHZ!!!! lately? Because black folks ain't getting work again nearly as fast as whites are! Last hired, first fired, amirite? And why did the 1990, 2001, and 2008 recessions hit rich and poor more equally? Probably because the rich just don't care anymore.

Fresh off a shout-out from their President on Tuesday night, Portland police arrest a so-called "Proud Boy" on 12 charges, six of them felonies. If "Proud Boys" are so inclusive, then why do they just so happen to fight protestors against racist police brutality? It can't solely be because they just want the attention. There are a lot of ways to get attention.

Internal DHS documents advise federal law enforcement to tell media that Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse was just trying to help out small businesses when he shot three protestors dead. They also directed officials to say the Patriot Prayer group IZ NOTZ TEH RACISTZ!!!!! And seriously, "the star chamber of public opinion"? As if! These clowns spend all their time laughing at us, so they don't get to pretend to be afraid of us.

Unlike much of the rest of the world that can think for itself, our President thinks he won that first debate "big" (should I count it as restraint that he didn't say "bigly"?) and offers as evidence an unnamed "compilation of polls etc." I presume by "etc." he meant "my own opinion which is of course superior to all others, especially those that don't agree with mine." I mean, I don't know how else to read it.

Ho hum, alleged moderate/votary of "bipartisanship" Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) says of the first Presidential debate that "(t)here was fault on both sides," which will come as a surprise to any sentient life that actually watched it. And then she said "on both sides" again in the very next sentence, which does speak to a certain sense of desperation. Well, when your sorry act is exposed after so many years, I guess desperation is natural.

Finally, what is there to say about the recent New York Times expose of our President's debt and tax shenanigans that we haven't already said? I mean, yes, it's always good to have more data, but between the 2018 Times report exposing his utter dependence on his father's fortune and earlier reports that he received almost $900 million in tax breaks just from the city of New York alone over 40 years, well, gosh, I can't imagine how he'd ever win an election. Except for, you know, the persistent weakness of his Democratic opponents.

Penny Rants for Wednesday, September 30, 2020: unlikely hope in chaotic times.

So, wondering if this country has "collapsed," maybe? Indi Samarajiva at Medium, who lived through the tail end of Sri Lanka's 26-year-long civil war, says we have. "This is what Americans don't understand. They're waiting to get personally punched in the face while ash falls from the sky. That's not how it happens...Nobody comes on TV and says 'things are officially bad.'" Mr. Samarajiva's average day, as a twenty-something of some privilege in Sri Lanka, went a lot like this: "we used to go out, worry about money, fall in love — life went on. We’d pop the trunk for a bomb check. Turn off our lights for the air raids. I’m not saying that we were untouched...I know people who were beaten, arrested, and went into exile. But...(i)t was mostly food and parties and normal stuff for a dumb twentysomething." Privileged Americans may not yet draw their curtains whenever a pickup truck rolls by, but I find hope in all of this -- not in the sense that "life goes on" even as America dies (talk to George Floyd or Breonna Taylor or the over 200,000 dead from COVID-19 about that!), but that this is how death is supposed to look, and, as Mr. Samarajiva says, "(y)ou can get out of it, but you have to understand where you are to even turn around." After all, Sri Lanka ain't doing too badly these days. They did just crush COVID.

Chris Taylor at Mashable advises us as to how we might stop worrying about our President "Stealing the Election." He says all of our President's flatugasma about maybe not conceding the election until he wins or maybe just throwing out mail-in ballots comprises what Teri Kanefield calls "The Strongman Con" -- if folks think our President really has the power and the will to steal an election, they'll be more likely to throw up their hands and give up and not vote, and so help him win an actual victory. But whatever his will, his "power," here, is far from absolute -- our military might resist walking him out of office but it'll also resist helping him suppress the vote, and state laws govern elections more closely and authoritatively than federal ones do. The reminder that Benito Mussolini marched on Rome with one-tenth of the number of troops he told everyone he had is particularly apt here, as is the reminder that all of our President's foaming at the mouth about "caravans" did not protect Republican House majorities in 2018. Mr. Taylor's prescription for action is a good one: "help() millions of Americans to vote in numbers too big to lie about." I do wish he'd said our President could file "frivolous" lawsuits instead of "spurious" ones in paragraph 13, but that may just be me.

Action: concerning redistricting, clean water, and saner drug policy.

First, some good news for Pennsylvania residents: SB 1242, the Legislative and Congressional Redistricting Act (or LACRA), passed out of the Senate State Government Committee last week, and while Pennsylvania's state legislators have managed to get rid of the independent citizens' commission that characterized the previous redistricting bills we've championed here, LACRA still accomplishes a lot of what those bills would have done: Sec. 504, for example, would prevent redistricting plans from favoring particular incumbents, candidates, or political parties, while Sec. 703 (a) would make it substantially harder for any redrawn districts to divide towns and counties up in the Rorschach blot-districts that blighted our state for so long. Sadly, the House version of LACRA, HB 2638, hasn't even received a committee vote yet. Hence Fair Districts PA helps you tell Senate Majority Leader Corman to schedule a full Senate vote on LACRA, tell House State Government Committee Chair Everett to hold a committee vote on HB 2638, and tell House Speaker Cutler to hold a full House vote on HB 2638. Each of those links contains the officials' phone numbers, so feel free to call them, too.

Meanwhile, the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund lead pipe replacement. Getting rid of the lead service pipes that still plague over nine million American homes would do a lot of good things -- like getting the lead out of our drinking water so that children don't suffer brain damage, or like creating jobs for the workers who would change out those lead pipes, or like making it easier to accomplish all the other necessary infrastructure improvements we'll need to make over the next few years. I know, I know, doing it with tax money is "communism" or something, except, of course, that it's not -- it's good Americans chipping in for a better future for all of us. The pipes will pay for themselves in time, not just from reduced health care costs associated with lead in our drinking water, but also in the healthier, more accomplished human beings we'll have doing great things in America once they're no longer saddled with brain damage through no fault of their own. And not for nothing, but folks in low-income areas deserve clean water just as much as the rest of us. If we didn't believe that, how could we look ourselves in the mirror?

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3884, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act, then the Daily Kos Liberation League still helps you do that. Our House was all set to vote on this bill -- which would essentially legalize pot and fund help for communities ravaged by war-on-drugs policing -- and then decided not to vote on it. Why? Because they were afraid that Republicans would go all nyah-nyah on them for passing that instead of, say, a COVID-19 relief bill. Republicans will go all nyah-nyah on you for anything, of course -- because what else can you do when you can't win arguments on the merits? -- and the House did pass a COVID-19 relief bill over four months ago, so there comes a time when you have to, you know, adult up. And if House Democrats won't do it, we will have to do it for them, by reminding them that the time to do the right thing is always now and the MORE Act is actually rather popular. So, yeah, let's do that.

Around the table: in which certain Florida politicians show their true colors.

Florida Gov. DeSantis proposes disgusting anti-protest bill which would make it a felony to participate (either via on-the-ground protesting or donating to protests) in any demonstration where any property damage or road blocking happens -- but would give you a pass if you hit protestors with your car. The bill gets much, much worse from there, but remember that he didn't propose the bill because it'll ever become law -- he proposed it because being a prick is what passes for persuasion among too many right-wingers these days. But then, when you've done almost as bad a job managing the pandemic as our President has, what opportunities for persuasion remain open to you?

Speaking of evil Florida politicians, Sen. Rick Scott has introduced a bill that would force states to count all votes within 24 hours of Election Day's end -- and wouldn't let them start counting already-received votes until the morning of Election Day. This bill, somehow called the Help America Vote Act of 2020, also has no chance of becoming law -- even this Supreme Court would say it's too close to an election to screw with established election procedures like this -- but again, as one Twitter commenter said, "(i)t's just wild that they're introducing a bill like this in the light of day." Which is the whole point of the exercise -- after all, how else can prick-swingers find each other?

Surprise, surprise, Presidential votaries have planned a crap-ton of violence ahead of Portland (OR) rallies this summer. And they still hide their threats behind weasel words! "(P)eople will get shot, stabbed, and beat," one says, hoping you won't realize exactly who does all the shooting, stabbing, and beating in that formulation, and they also think "justice on our DA" somehow disguises the precise nature of the "justice" they propose. When you confront apparent stupidity on that scale -- which is, like, a daily occurrence these days! -- you might think they wanted their noxious utterings leaked. And though I think the pick-up truck is about to become a symbol of American racism, I think immortality will nonetheless elude them.

Hard to believe, Harry, but American states that tax the rich do rather better than states that don't -- they have less unemployment, faster wage growth, and faster GDP growth. And this must be why "free" marketeers insist that raising taxes on the rich will lead to TEH DISASTURZ!!!!! After all, if you don't have the facts on your side, you almost have to resort to hysteria if you even want to be heard. The right have been teaching a master class in this subject for many years. And it's not a "fever" that'll "pass" -- it won't change until these right-wingers experience shame again.

ProPublica reminds us that a COVID-19 vaccine coming out before the election would be a "miracle." Read the whole thing, so that you have it in mind that science is actually hard and doing it wrong hurts people the next time our President says a vaccine is coming before the election -- or, more likely, whines about "bureaucrats" keeping a vaccine from coming before the election. Maybe our President could have, you know, dealt with COVID-19 in February and March and he wouldn't be up against a deadline now?

Finally, Nathan J. Robinson at Current Affairs delivers the goods yet again, explaining at considerable length why Amy Coney Barrett shouldn't be on our Supreme Court. Many detailed examples of her jurisprudence on immigration, criminal justice, and workers' rights later, we see that Ms. Barrett does indeed demonstrate "a bias toward the powerful and against the powerless," and maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I think a "bias toward the powerful" runs pretty much counter to the whole idea of democracy. (As a bonus, he demolishes arguments based on respecting Ms. Barrett's "intellect": "the moment we discuss the actual results of the rulings, 'intellect' begins to seem a ridiculous criterion on its own.")

Action: concerning corruption, pollution, and privatization.

By now you've likely heard that Congress gave our Department of Defense $1 billion to make personal protective equipment (or PPE) to help battle COVID-19 -- and Defense instead spent most of it plugging perceived holes in its budget wholly unrelated to COVID-19. They've apparently spent (among other expenditures) $22 million on propellers from Rolls-Royce and over $13 million making drones, a press release trumpeting the saving of "14 jobs." That's almost a million dollars a job! Could it be that our Administration is trying to prove that government can't do anything right? I kid, of course -- they're absolutely trying to "prove" that, while simultaneously asserting that only this President can "fix" it! But corruption is still corruption, hence Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate our Pentagon's use or misuse of these funds. And remember: every dollar misspent means fewer masks and gowns for hospital workers working directly with COVID-19 patients.

Meanwhile, our Administration wants to roll back protections against toxic wastewater from coal plants, even though they pump out all kinds of toxins -- including mercury, lead, and arsenic, all linked to cancer, heart disease, diabetes and developmental problems in kids. Clean Air Act regulations restricted emissions from coal smokestacks, so coal corporations started putting the pollution into wastewater and dumped it into our rivers and streams! Then the Obama Administration issued regulations addressing coal wastewater, but now this Administration wants to roll them back. They're probably ready to tell us that this whole story just proves that ALL TEH REGULASHUNZ AREZ TEH USELESSEZ!!!!! -- that "corporations will just find another way to pollute," or something. But what kind of message does that send to our children? "Don't do the right thing, ever, because wrongdoers will find a way to confound you?" U.S. PIRG helps you tell our EPA to reject its own plan to roll back toxic wastewater emissions from coal plants.

Finally, corporations are trying to privatize Pennsylvania's public water systems, but HB 2746 and HB 2597 would require that any proposed sale of our public water to private corporations go before the voters first. And what would private corporations have to fear? If they really can run it better than our government, they shouldn't have any trouble proving it to the voters! Of course they can't, since we all know water privatization means higher prices, worse service, and lost jobs, and that's only in the short run -- in the long run, water privatization means that the people who drink the water lose all control over its maintenance. Our government, after all, is accountable to us, and that remains true even after they fail us; private corporations are only accountable to their shareholders, and executives try their damnedest to avoid even that responsibility. Hence Food and Water Action helps you tell your PA state legislators to ensure that we get to vote on whether we sell our water systems.

I'll be taking care of a health issue over the next few days, so posting may be light. Before that happens, I feel compelled to mention that I've received numerous action alerts exhorting us to prevent Republicans from voting on a new Supreme Court justice before Inauguration Day 2021, but I haven't passed any of them along, because I wanted the Senate to vote on Merrick Garland in 2016 and I am not a powermad hypocrite like Mitch McConnell. I know some folks will say I speak from a position of privilege, that I am not one of the folks who stand to lose the most from replacing the last Justice Ginsberg with a reactionary (i.e., folks of color and gay and transgender folks), and thus I have the "luxury" of following the rules. But I say that following the rules isn't actually a luxury even if so many Americans (most of them rich!) act like it is, and I also say that if we say one thing in 2016 because it suits us and then say the opposite in 2020 because it suits us then we become the folks we most hate. And I also say that putting a sympathetic Supreme Court Justice on the court is not the only way to fight for justice; yes, a 6-3 right-wing majority on the Court will suck, but we have dealt with worse as a nation and succeeded. In any case, if I find our President's eventual nominee wanting, I will advocate for our Senators to reject her, and if we do that, and we make our Senators afraid for their jobs, they will comply. It's the only thing that really works in such instances; everything else is a shortcut.

Around the table: in which we shake our damn heads at yet more whining from the right.

Grand jury in Louisville, KY charges one officer in Breonna Taylor shooting, and only with wanton endangerment (and not even endangerment of Ms. Taylor!); protests immediately follow, during which two officers get shot and almost 50 other folks get arrested. If said police officer had been convicted merely of wanton endangerment after being charged with murder and manslaughter I might be a tiny bit less upset, since conviction is (and should be) difficult, but note well how many ordinary folks get a dozen charges thrown at them so they'll throw up their hands and plead guilty to one or two. The USA Today report, by the way, gives no clue about who shot the two officers.

Upon the occasion of Santa Cruz's banning of "predictive policing," Matthew Guariglia at the Electronic Frontier Foundation reminds us that "Technology Can't Predict Crime." This should be fairly clear, once you consider that when police over-arrest black folks to begin with, they feed the "predictive policing" system with bad data. You'll no doubt hear politicians saying "but if it agrees with what we've seen in the past, it must be right!" But that's not how inductive reasoning works, and even if it did, you still have to ensure that we're not seeing what we've "seen" because we have hundreds of beams in our eyes.

Ho hum, top scientist on Administration effort to find a COVID-19 vaccine wouldn't divest himself of $10 million in shares in his former corporation which just so happens to be among those corporations racing to finish a vaccine. He sold $12 million in shares in another corporation trying to develop a vaccine, but that's a little like King Solomon actually splitting the baby in half, and his whining about anyone possibly thinking his ethical compass is anything but perfect doesn't recommend him, either. I'm old enough to remember when people would avoid even the appearance of corruption.

Natasha Lennard at The Intercept reminds us that in the newly-designated "anarchist jurisdiction" of New York City, "Cops Crush Every Tiny Protest." Did you also think of FBI officers cracking down on Occupy encampments back in the day when you read that? Also, too, denying federal funding to cities, as our President would do, is also a way of defunding the police! Of course he thought of that beforehand -- the only thing that man ever aims to do is make problems worse so he can make himself seem more indispensable. And I said exactly the same thing about George W. Bush back in the day.

Former Reagan Administration Chief of Staff/Secretary of State James Baker will apparently for our President in November, his biographers saying that Mr. Baker feels that the "myriad ethical scandals surrounding" our President were "worth it to get conservative judges, tax cuts and deregulation." Most of our President's deregulatory efforts have died in court, and these aren't "conservative" judges so much as reactionary ones, but whatever. Odd, though, that Mr. Baker does not appear to have considered stacking anything else, like our President's repeated racist remarks and his repeated stated desire to become a dictator, against "tax cuts" and the like. Why, it makes you wonder if it's ever worth it to look to a "respected" member of the right!

Finally, we learn about truck convoys in support of our President driving through the streets of America. Of course I immediately thought of all those Confederate flag-laden Hummers plowing through Portland, and of course my immediate reaction to "I'm tired of people putting down our President" is waaaaaaah! Interesting that the article does eventually slip the word "caravan" in to describe these convoys. I think I'm going to be calling them "caravans" for the rest of the year.

Around the table: in which we shake our damn heads at yet more Presidential drama.

Presidential votaries hinder early voting in Fairfax, VA. Whether or not plaintiffs will be able to hang these folks on Virginia state law (which prohibits political advocacy within 40 feet of a polling place), that doesn't change the fact that confident people don't have to chant and wave flags in front of a polling place. Also, these I'm-not-touching-you games don't do well at persuading others to vote for their candidate. And though we know relentless negative TV advertising depresses turnout, making someone throw up their hands and go home once they've already trekked out to the polling place may be another thing entirely.

Federal agents abduct two Native American protestors at a holy site in the path of our Administration's vanity border wall construction, and hold them without access to a lawyer for almost 24 hours; their detainment (at a private prison over two hours away) includes at least two strip-searches and being "chained at the feet and waists." You know, in case you thought this was only happening to police brutality protestors. Anyone else think the private prison's claim that they couldn't tell the two activists were women is utter horsedoodle -- or worse, was a show they put on for the Administration and/or its votaries?

Shane Burley at TruthOut finds catches T-shirts disappearing from retail site Teespring while far-right groups actually committing violence on the ground still selling their wares. Freedom: it's best when it's completely conditional! And Teespring spokeshacks flat-out lied about it, too, first alleging "copyright violations," then when confronted with evidence to the contrary, admitted it was all about the word "antifa." Using a corporate website to hawk your wares is always fraught with danger, particularly when the corporate types live in fear of offending right-wingers, but don't give a damn about those of us who are actually offended by the noise of Nazi wannabes. So go ahead and boycott their sorry asses. It's not like the internet is a tiny place.

Upon hearing that our President has led his votaries to believe he's actually received a Nobel Peace Prize when he's only been nominated, I feel compelled to note, again, that none of his votaries will verify his assertion; they'll just take it at face value because they want it to be true. And maybe if he gets re-elected, and doesn't actually win it (which sure seems likely!), his votaries will whine about how they "took" it from him! (Also, too, over 200 individuals and 100 groups were nominated this year, so I can't even say it's "an honor to be nominated," as they say about the Oscars.)

While it may not be precisely true that 7th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Amy Coney Barrett -- reportedly at or near the top of our President's short list to replace the late Justice Ginsberg on our Supreme Court -- belongs to an organization that inspired Margaret Atwood's famous novel The Handmaid's Tale (now a Hulu TV series starting Elizabeth Moss), one Facebook meme of Ms. Barrett in a handmaid's headdress might be weapons-grade PR against her. Our President loves to create drama, of course, so he might pick Ms. Barrett precisely because of the uproar it'd create, where a choice like 11th Circuit Judge Barbara Lagoa would more likely fly under the radar.

Finally, speaking of drama, our Justice Department designates three U.S. cities -- New York, Seattle, and Portland (OR) -- as "anarchist jurisdictions," meaning our Administration could deprive them of federal funding. Or try to, anyway -- the only leg our President has to stand on here is a memo he wrote, which, last I looked, isn't law, no matter what he thinks. More likely he just likes using the word "anarchist" as often as he can, to make people think ZOMG TEH CITIEZ AREZ TEH LAWLESSEZ!!!!! Again, our President never talks about "law and order" as it would relate to polluters and banksters.

Action: concerning good House bills, consumer protection, and product safety.

Happy Tuesday, 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. Don't believe the hype that our Senators have a lot on their plates right now! If they'd have passed these bills earlier, they'd have less to do now. Besides, you don't get to make excuses when you don't do your job, so why should they?

Meanwhile, you probably have some experience with price-gouging during this pandemic, so along comes H.R. 6450/S. 3853, the Price Gouging Prevention Act, which would (as its title suggests) prevent sellers from using an emergency to jack up prices more than 10 percent over the average price over the previous 120 days. If you're concerned about the rights of the accused, note well that Sec. 3 (b) (2) gives sellers the opportunity to rebut any presumptions of price gouging by providing "clear and convincing evidence that the increase in price of the consumer good involved is directly attributable to additional costs paid by the seller in procuring, acquiring, or providing the consumer during the emergency period." Seems fair, though "free" market votaries won't think so. And I'm old enough to remember when they would, though whether they were just fronting then or have simply devolved into morons now is a question historians will have to answer. The bill would also empower our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to enforce its provisions and would not preempt stronger state laws against price gouging. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect us from financial predators by passing the Price Gouging Prevention Act.

Finally, Johnson & Johnson has announced that it'll stop selling talcum-based baby powder in most of North America, supposedly because demand has declined, but one must wonder if the many thousand complaints consumers made about asbestos in their talcum powder (apparently it's hard to find talcum in nature without tripping over asbestos) had more to do with it. And, sadly, despite their declaration, talcum-based baby powder remains on your local shelves, because J&J didn't issue a recall, which would kinda be the next step. If you're worried about J&J being able to sell down its stock of baby powder already on the shelves, consider more carefully whether we should expose our babies to cancer and mesothelioma, two common health problems scientists associate with asbestos. Really, the right answer is never "take care of corporations first," and the right answer is always "take care of people first." Gosh, when I was a youth, I thought moral questions would be thornier than this. They're not, so U.S. PIRG helps you tell J&J to put people first by recalling its remaining stocks of talcum-based baby powder.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, cruelty to immigrants, and Social Security.

You've heard that Democrats and Republicans are "negotiating" another COVID-19 stimulus bill? And you've heard Republicans say Democrats are "blocking" their efforts in some way or other? Don't believe the hype! Our House passed H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act, over four months ago already, and that bill's a good enough COVID-19 stimulus bill -- it would fund states and localities, it would fund COVID-19 testing and tracing, it would repeal hedge fund manager tax cuts, it would extend enhanced unemployment benefits, and it would issue another round of stimulus checks, among other things. So why haven't our Senators passed it? Oh, you know, because it doesn't give big corporations blanket immunity from COVID-19-related lawsuits, it doesn't expand three-martini lunch tax breaks, and it doesn't give Congress the power to gut Social Security without debate. I wish it were more complicated than that, but it's not, such is the intellectual vapidity of our opposition these days. So call your Senators and tell them to pass the HEROES Act. After all, why do they negotiate with each other like they're more important than we are?

Meanwhile, you've also no doubt heard by now that at least one OB/GYN at an ICE concentration camp in Georgia did so many hysterectomies there that one whistleblower called him "the uterus collector," but outrage doesn't mean much if it doesn't translate into results, hence Daily Kos helps you tell your House Reps to demand an investigation into alleged mass hysterectomies of immigrant detainees. Surely you won't have to convey the moral reasons for such an investigation -- though if you want to tell your Reps that great nations always treat immigrants with the dignity and compassion they deserve, go ahead! What could it hurt? -- but even the political calculations should not dissuade your House Reps from investigating this matter. Most people oppose cruelty, after all, and the pro-cruelty crowd (not that they'd ever describe themselves as such!) don't win elections without a lot of help from outside factors. Besides, all that hysteria about TEH CARAVANZ!!!! didn't exactly help Republicans keep their House majority in 2018, did it?

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass a "resolution of disapproval" that would block our President's Executive Order delaying the collection of the payroll taxes that fund Social Security, then Social Security Works still helps you do that. Make no mistake, this payroll tax "holiday" is no holiday for working families, and not just because so many of their employers aren't taking advantage of the "holiday," nor because working families will owe all that money when the "holiday" expires -- this "holiday" is absolutely a way to cut Social Security's funding to the bone, and our President has said this out loud. Yeah, he's also said he'd like to fund Social Security a different way, but what way will that be? It won't be by taxing his rich cronies, that's for sure! Don't believe any hype from Presidential votaries that blocking the payroll tax "holiday" would be "like a tax hike." It's literally not a tax hike to keep collecting the taxes everyone already knows they have to pay.

Around the table: in which we confront yet another (admittedly narrow) path to re-election for our President.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passes at the age of 87. I'm not sure I'd describe her as a "cautious" or "moderate" judge (though The Guardian ain't the only ones doing so), not just because judges aren't firebrands by temperament or job description, but also because she fought sexism and discrimination wherever she saw it long before it was popular, founding the ACLU's Women's Rights Project over 30 years before becoming the dean of our Supreme Court's liberal wing. May her memory be a blessing.

America's Last Journalist, Greg Palast, warns that our President could "win" re-election -- in the event of massive violent right-wing "protests" that prevent states from counting all the votes -- by invoking the 12th Amendment and throwing the election to the House. The House would vote for President by state under the 12th Amendment, and since Republicans hold majorities in 26 states even though Democrats have a 40-seat majority overall, our President would win. Mr. Palast's solution? Massive in-person day-of-election voting no matter how many Proud Boys show up, so as to make the results unmistakeable.

House Democrats have apparently decided to delay a vote on the MORE Act, a bill that would essentially legalize pot, until after the election -- supposedly to concentrate on a COVID-19 relief bill, even though they passed one of those (and a good one) in May and you have to wonder why haven't shouted that from the rooftops nearly enough, let alone slam Mob Boss Mitch for trying to pass a really crappy relief bill instead. This delay is cowardice, and stupid cowardice at that, since polls tell us pot legalization is actually popular. Democrats: so smart, they're stupid.

Upon learning that our Administration has threatened to defund Connecticut schools for participating in a trans-friendly athletic conference, I wonder how they would expect to win a lawsuit against such a thing, since such funding deprivation would affect all Connecticut students, but then I remember that a) his votaries think merely making the threat is "doing something" and b) folks can't sue them for every criminal act they perpetrate. About a) they're likely correct; about b) they're likely wrong, though all the bad judges they're putting in our federal courts might eventually change that.

In a peripherally-related note, our President says a COVID-19 vaccine will go out "immediately" to the public not because he really thinks that, but so people will say he "did something." A lot of his votaries won't even notice if they don't see a vaccine three days before Election Day -- which, given that it does actually take time to ensure a potential vaccine doesn't actually just shoot poison, seems far more likely than not. No matter, though -- if a vaccine doesn't come out "quickly enough," our President will just whine about how this is just more evidence that everyone's out to get him, which, strangely, doesn't seem offend all the "tough guys" who love him.

Finally, our President relates an MSNBC anchor getting shot by police at a protest thusly: "He got hit in the knee with a canister of tear gas and he went down. He was down. 'My knee, my knee.' Nobody cared, these guys didn’t care, they moved him aside. And they just walked right through...It was the most beautiful thing. No, because after we take all that crap for weeks and weeks, and you finally see men get up there and go right through them, wasn’t it really a beautiful sight? It’s called law and order." Ugh, first off: other people's suffering is not "beautiful"! Second, what "crap" did you take? Protesting police brutality hurts your fee-fees? Third, what a childish notion of "law and order" this is, one that merely worships raw power, and one our President would never, ever imagine includes putting polluters or banksters in jail.

Action: concerning corporate welfare, concentration camps, and saner drug policy.

You remember those accountability features Congress built into the CARES Act? Yeah, there weren't enough of them, I know, but our Administration seems determined even to ignore the ones that exist, as our Office of Management and Budget (or OMB) has apparently told federal agencies disbursing COVID-19-related relief funds to simply ignore reporting requirements -- including the one that would tell us whether this use of taxpayer funding actually saves any jobs! I keep saying the same thing because they keep doing the same thing -- this Administration doesn't hate "bureaucracy"; they only hate that part of the bureaucracy that actually help good Americans, hence their utter disgust for anti-pollution regulations, and their utter disgust for laws that would hold them accountable to their bosses, the American people. Who are the ones who fund their little corporate welfare slush fund, I feel compelled to note with the italics hammer. Hence the Project on Government Oversight helps you tell our OMB to rescind its guidance that hides how well our government uses our money during this pandemic.

Meanwhile, giant investment corporation BlackRock has (and stop me if you've heard this one before!) talked a good game about being "socially responsible" in their investments, which would be gratifying, especially coming from a corporation that manages close to $6 trillion in assets (as of 2018) -- except that they still invest directly in Palantir, the notorious data management corporation that helps our Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) run its even more notorious concentration camps. So investing in family separation, terroristic raids, putting kids in cages -- it all sure makes the phrase "socially responsible" sound hollow! The more charitable among you might tell me it takes time to root out all the evil in your portfolio once you've resolved to do it, but that's why we point it out to these big corporations, right? Hence the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell BlackRock to pull its investments out of the concentration camp business by divesting from Palantir. I mean, evil can find plenty of money on its own, I would think.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 3884, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment & Expungement (or MORE) Act, then Drug Policy Alliance still helps you do that. The MORE Act would not only legalize marijuana (by removing it from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act), but would invest in the communities of color at which our government has targeted its half-century-long "war on drugs." No, "targeted" does not overstate the case -- but you don't have to believe me about that; you can believe former Nixon Administration counsel John Ehrlichman, who said, out loud, that the "war on drugs" had rather little to do with illicit drugs taking away good Americans' freedoms and rather more to do with targeting civil rights and anti-war protestors. And yes, drugs do take away your freedoms, if you abuse them, and no, not every street drug should be legal, but putting pot on the level of something truly destructive like heroin smacks of the mistakes of the Prohibition Era. And surely we don't want to go down that road.

Around the table: in which we confront historical demons both recent and ancient.

Good Jobs First report finds that South Carolina lost over $400 million in property taxes last year due to all the tax abatements they handed out to corporations. Always remember: tax breaks for them are, essentially, tax hikes for us, since governments still have a job to do (whether they like it or not!) and now have less money to do it. Also, too, as Paul O'Neill instructed us many years ago, corporate welfare handouts have little-if-any influence over where a corporation decides to locate or build, as we saw when public outcry over handouts for Amazon didn't actually prevent Amazon from building a new office in New York City.

I alluded to this the other day, but America unfortunately has a long history of sterilizing criminals, which is particularly upsetting when you realize we also have a long history of criminalizing dissent and otherness. Right-wingers will still try to turn this knowledge to their advantage by implying that we're making much ado about "nothing new," but saying something isn't "new" enough for your taste (or "and you're surprised?") is generally a way of avoiding saying it's wrong, and they really have no good reason to be afraid of saying so. Do they?

Jeet Heer at The Nation reminds us "Biden Republicans Are a Political Illusion." Precisely because they actually like everything about this Administration except the obnoxiousness of our President -- and they can forget his obnoxiousness once a hundred or so Federalist Society-approved judges get lifetime appointments to federal courts. Of course, if you've wondered who listens to George Will or Max Boot or James Comey anymore, or if you remember those pro-Hillary ads Republicans cut in 2016, you are not surprised by this finding.

When I'm confronted with our President saying out loud that trees "just explode" from being so dry for so long, I think, yeah, I know what he meant. But note well that whenever a Democratic Presidential nominee misspeaks one-twentieth as much as this, Republicans act like it's the end of the damn world. Why, in 2012 they made a convention slogan ("we built that"?) by wrenching an Obama utterance completely out of its context! Someone needs to remind them that hysteria isn't very becoming of conservatism. Or, more precisely, we need to keep reminding everyone else that hysteria isn't very becoming of conservatism.

In a peripherally-related note, Oregon state Senator who twice joined a Senate walkout to deny a quorum for climate change legislation watched his own home burn down due to recent wildfires -- but actually blames the anti-pollution crowd! Setting aside the tantrums too many politicians throw when anyone mentions climate change, Sen. Girod can't articulate his point very well, either, which suggests that "forest management" is just a phrase he heard that he thinks will shut people up. He'd do better to try to persuade folks -- unless, of course, he's one of these politicians who thinks persuading people is beneath him.

Finally, I know digging out the worst thing Bill Barr has said this week is a three-shovel job, but I'll try anyway: about his own Justice Department, he unfurled this truly awesome dung nugget: "(n)ame one successful organization or institution where the lowest level employees’ decisions are deemed sacrosanct, there aren’t. There aren’t any letting the most junior members set the agenda. It might be a good philosophy for a Montessori preschool, but it is no way to run a federal agency." Clearly he regards anyone other than him having a say about anything as an existential threat -- and, uh, can anyone think of a "successful organization or institution" that works pretty well when it's run from the bottom up? That's right, American democracy.

Action: concerning paycheck fairness and the right to repair.

H.R. 2694, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, may get a full House vote this week, and it would, at long last, force employers to make the same accommodations for their pregnant workers that they already make for their disabled ones. And if you're quick to yell THE PREGNANCIEZ IZ NOT TEH DISABILITIEZ!!!!!, please do three things: 1) slap yourself, 2) imagine yourself walking around with 30 extra pounds and a constant urge to pee, and 3) consider that employers wouldn't have to make these accommodations forever because the pregnancy will end. The bill would also prevent employers from retaliating against workers for requesting reasonable accommodations, denying employment to pregnant workers merely because they know they'll have to make those accommodations, or force employees to accept unnecessary accommodations when they can make reasonable ones. The key word, as you may have noticed, is "reasonable," so keep that in mind when right-wingers start with their imaginary horror stories about what'll happen if we treat pregnant workers with fairness and dignity. Moms Rising helps you tell your House Reps to pass the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: Penn PIRG helps you tell your state legislators to pass "right-to repair" legislation. Why? Because we generated nearly 60 million tons of e-waste (or waste from computers and computerized gadgets) just last year, which would represent the weight of over 160 Empire State Buildings. And why do we generate so much waste? Because we're drawn to the new and the now, sure, but also because big corporations like Apple and Microsoft make it prohibitively difficult for you to repair your own products, and not just by refusing to give third-party repair shops access to parts and manuals -- I'm old enough to remember installing a faster processor and more RAM in my Apple laptop from the '90s; just a few years later I didn't even find screws on the outside of my iBook. And if we could do that easily again, we could make our computers and phones last longer! Not to pile on, but all this e-waste also means we have a crap-ton more toxic chemicals like mercury polluting our air, land, and water, and it seems to me we shouldn't tolerate that, either.

Around the table: and now for another exciting episode of "irony or hypocrisy?"

Numerous whistleblowers allege "jarring medical neglect" ICE concentration camp, including an "inordinate rate" of hysterectomies and a refusal to test detainees for COVID-19. You'll recall, of course, that Nazi concentration camps were also notorious for forced hysterectomies, although, hey, that's happened plenty in America, too (remember Carrie Buck?). Sadly, too many Americans will hear of forced hysterectomies and think "good, don't let them reproduce" and "thank God our President is doing something." Remember that they also think of themselves as good people, perhaps even good people "driven" to do evil.

ProPublica finds no shortage of people who "Know How to Prevent Megafires," and wonders "Why Won't Anybody Listen?" I was all ready to guess it had to do with our leaders' refusal to solve problems and pretend that the persistence of problems makes them indispensable, but apparently not -- folks have an understandable-yet-tragic resistance to setting controlled fires, though controlled fires would reduce the amount of "fuel load" and thus reduce the number and intensity of the wildfires we're seeing all across the West Coast now. So maybe our President had a point when he blamed forest mismanagement -- not that you'd necessarily hear it over his refusal to admit climate change also plays a role.

I guess it's good that HHS spokeshack Michael Caputo apologized to his staff for saying he was fighting the "deep state" by trying to bully the CDC into issuing information more favorable to our President, but he also made a lot of excuses for his behavior. I mean, I would wish him well in resolving his health issues, and of course I don't condone any death threats made against anyone, but real leaders don't mention their personal problems; they just apologize for their wrongdoing and either resign or do better. Of course, every time our President sees a bad leader, he thinks that's my kind of guy!

Scientific American makes first Presidential endorsement in its 175-year history and, OK, it's Joe Biden. Their case first highlights our President's multitudinous failures and then lists Mr. Biden's proposals, which admittedly sound better than they did, say, a year ago. Just remember that a lot of the folks who say of Scientific American that THEYZ SHOULDZ STAYZ OUTZ OFZ TEH POLITICZ!!!!! are permanent students of YouTube University who of course wouldn't dream of "staying out of the science."

Former Administration economic "advisor" Gary Cohn says he's "not sure" if he'll vote for the President who used to employ him. Dig how he says "I actually vote on issues," as if all of us "little people" don't, and as if "keeping ignorant assholes out of office" isn't an issue. And just like the rest of them who pretend to make such a big show of their independence, you know which way he's really going. Hint: Joe Biden has pledged to roll back those tax-cuts-for-the-rich Mr. Cohn worked so hard to pass.

Finally, one of our papers of record publishes this slab of hot-and-steaming by one Danielle Pletka, who says she "Never Considered" voting for our President last time around, but she "May Be Forced to Vote for Him This Year." She argues that the far left controls Joe Biden, an argument not exactly buttressed by his record, and I'm sure her argument's resemblance to any argument our President has made is sheer coincidence. Worse than that, of course, is paragraph 9's casual equation of "execrable gun-toting racists" with the AOC/Warren wing of the Democratic party -- and by saying she might be "forced" to vote for our President, she has thus expressed a preference for the execrable.

Action: concerning good House bills, bad methane regulations, and bad corporate acquisitions.

Happy Tuesday, 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. Do I "keep saying the same thing"? Yes, I do, if what I keep saying is the right thing. Let our Senators listen to anyone but their big donors for once, and then I'll count the colors in my garden. Until then, it's hammertime.

Meanwhile, our Administration has formally weakened methane emission regulations, by repealing requirements that oil and gas corporations install the technology that would detect and repair methane leaks. Ugh, one more time: methane packs a much bigger climate-change punch than even coal emissions, leaked methane is a waste of usable energy, and leaked methane also deprives the taxpayer of royalties if said leaking occurs on public lands. But what's all that pollution and waste and lost revenue next to gas drilling corporation executives being able to gild the plumbing on their 19th vacation homes? Seriously, that's all our Administration's new rule does: hand out welfare to corporations and rich people. Like everything else they do! Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your Senators to block this Administration's new methane emissions rule. Congress would have to accomplish this by passing a "resolution of disapproval," and you may be tempted to wait until a new President and a new Senate come into office, but I wouldn't count on that, and anyway, our duty is always to do the right thing right now.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our government to block the proposed sale of DNA-collecting corporation Ancestry to big private equity corporation Blackstone, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. Hopefully I've identified the problem with the proposed sale by identifying what each of these corporations does -- it's bad enough that big corporations get their grubby hands so deep in your investments, so you certainly would not want their grubby hands in your private information, and your DNA is as private as it gets. And I do not accept the notion that "you give your DNA to someone to help figure out where you came from and you take your chances." Why must it be like that? Because the internet's a big place? Because the "free" market is sacred? I'm so old-fashioned I only think doing what's right is sacred, and letting big corporations buy your DNA info is wrong. And I've never believed the internet is "too big to civilize," no matter how much Our Glorious Elites want you to believe it. And I always choose civilization over chaos.

Around the table: in which we describe the difference between the "deep state" and how Presidential votaries imagine the "deep state."

When I hear that our President claims the right to "put" "down" any riots that might occur after the upcoming election, I hasten to point out that after his victory in 2016, the violence came exclusively from the right, even though liberal protestors took to the streets almost immediately. I also point out that most of the violence following 2016 was of the spray-swastikas-on-statues variety; now that so many of our President's votaries cannot deny, in their heart of hearts, how awful he is, how much worse will they react this time, win or lose?

Factcheck.org evaluates fanciful tale of how nearly 20,000 fake IDs seized at Chicago airport means TEH VOTURZ FRAUDZ!!!!, and finds it wanting. Even our Bureau of Customs and Border Protection won't say the IDs are for "voter fraud," though they do list five other possible utilities the fake IDs might have. Illinois's Secretary of State office lists a sixth -- that the fake IDs help underage college kids get into bars -- and I think we'd all do well to apply Occam's Razor here.

Our President suggests that Joe Biden might be taking unnamed performance-enhancing drugs in order to appear more with-it. "That's what I hear," he says, because "hearing" stuff means never having to verify if it's true! You know, there could always be another explanation for Mr. Biden's poor debate performances early on: he's been faking infirmity in a long game of rope-a-dope. It's not a game I'd play; I would prefer dominating opponents, not least because too many liberals think they're too good to do that. Anyway, I guess we won't know more until after the next round of debates.

Another day, another Administration official saying that he tried to change CDC reports about COVID-19 so they'd put our President in a better light because he was fighting the "deep state." They really hope you can't tell the difference between lawful restrictions on Presidential power (i.e., not the "deep state") instead of bureaucratic attempts to ignore the express will of the American people (i.e., the "deep state" as described by Michael Glennon, among others). But, again, the President is not America, and I'm sure our "deep state" is quite pleased with him, since the defense contractor welfare is still flowing and corporate executives are concentrating shareholder power like they haven't in almost a century.

Finally, I suppose we should be thankful that Presidential confidant Roger Stone has provided (via his interview with Alex Jones) a helpful list of all the awful things our President could do if he loses on Election Day, ranging from seizing ballots in Nevada to using the Insurrection Act to arrest various enemies; it's the kind of histrionics that makes me wonder if our President really is a Democrat plant. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if our President just packs it in following a defeat -- not just because whining on Twitter for the next four years would be so much easier than having to follow through on a declaration of martial law, but also because it'll manufacture weeks of drama over the "betrayal" his supporters feel at his "abandonment" of them, followed by years of drama over their inevitable reconciliation.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, our Post Office, Arctic drilling, and corporate welfare.

Happy Monday, good Americans! Now would be a good time to call your Senators (whose phone numbers you can find 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 pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act, and H.R. 8015, the Delivering for America Act. At this writing, 122 days have passed since our House passed the HEROES Act, even though the HEROES Act would do everything a decent COVID-19 relief bill should do, like fund testing and tracing, extend enhanced unemployment benefits, and issue another round of stimulus checks. But, alas, Republicans hold our Senate, and the only thing Mob Boss Mitch McConnell knows how to do is stamp his foot and say no. The Delivering for America Act, which would roll back the changes our Postmaster General made to wreck our Post Office, has been awaiting a Senate vote for a somewhat shorter length of time, but this is no less shameful, considering the 2020 election could be at stake. So keep calling your Senators, because shame is all that'll get them to act. No, it works; I've seen it work before.

Meanwhile, opening ANWR to oil drilling was one of the "accomplishments" of the 2017 tax "reform," and our President has lately announced plans to drill in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR). But bad politicians have been trying to open up ANWR to oil drilling corporations for decades, and at this writing five of America's six largest banks have said they won't fund any drilling efforts there. Whether that's because drilling on public lands is rather unpopular or because the big banks know there won't be enough oil in ANWR to justify the effort, I couldn't say. I can say, however, that the notorious Bank of America is the big bank that has not said they won't fund drilling efforts in ANWR, hence the League of Conservation Voters helps you tell Bank of America to reject the funding of Arctic oil drilling projects. Not just for the caribou or for the Gwich'in people, but also for the waste of effort -- it's just not worth destroying ANWR just so a few oil corporation executives can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. Believe me, that's all that's going to come from ANWR drilling. Well, that and pollution and disruption of ancestral homelands.

Finally, H.R. 7781, the End Polluter Welfare Act, would increase royalties for drilling on public lands, prevent our government from offering "royalty relief" to big drilling corporations, repeal liability limits when oil and gas drillers pollute our lands, end new federally-funded fossil fuel research, stop internationally-sourced funding from going to fossil fuel projects in America, and get rid of a bunch of "tax incentives" toward fossil fuel development -- among many, many other things. Seriously, giving fossil fuel corporations welfare handouts would be a little like giving the New York Yankees extra money every year so that they can "stay competitive." Fossil fuel subsidies currently outstrip renewable subsidies by about 2 to 1; this, when renewable energy actually needs taxpayer help precisely because the fossil fuel corporations are so big they can stamp out alternatives. And if you've attended the fact that our West Coast is presently on fire, you know we need those alternatives post-haste. Hence Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support sane energy policy by passing the End Polluter Welfare Act.

Action: concerning credit reporting and gun violence.

US PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban negative credit reports during the COVID-19 pandemic. Because over 40 million good Americans lost their jobs and still need to put food on the table! Ideally, credit reports measure how well you manage money, but who's managing money well during this pandemic? Only the rich, and it's a lot easier to balance the checkbook when money's coming in by the boatload. As it happens, this pandemic seems to be prompting a lot of mistakes on credit reports -- compare the number of credit report mistake complaints filed over the last five months with the number of similar complaints filed during the same five months of 2019 and you find they've almost doubled. Stupid or evil, who cares? The end result is the same: good Americans can't get loans and can't get jobs, through no damn fault of their own -- or, more precisely, because of the incompetence and venality of our President. Don't blame good Americans for his bad works, that's what I say. Even if the "free" market demands it.

Meanwhile, Amnesty International helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund community anti-gun violence programs. To the tune of $150 million, which ain't that much in the context of a $4 trillion-plus federal budget. And note well that "community anti-gun violence programs" is not the same thing as "banning handguns." If you know someone who can't tell the difference, well, you may want to leave their instruction to God. We can only be so reasonable, after all! By "community anti-gun violence programs," we mean direct intervention and outreach on streets and in hospitals, and these ideas have worked in the past, when they've been well-funded, of course. And again: $150 million on one hand, $4 trillion on the other; if you can save lives and rescue souls with a mere four one-thousandths of one percent of our federal budget, you do it. And, you know, funding intervention and outreach is also a job creation scheme -- unless you're one of those benighted souls who thinks working for our government somehow doesn't count as a job.

Around the table: in which a Presidential offspring makes less sense than an AI language generator.

Our President told Bob Woodward that he knew COVID-19 would be profoundly deadly but told Americans differently (i.e., "it's going to be fine") because "I don't want to create a panic." But that's not leadership -- leadership would have sounded more like this is going to be bad, but we'll fight our way through it and we'll come out on top. And it would have reduced "panic," though I seriously doubt it would have saved very many lives, since "show(ing) strength" only goes so far if you don't actually know what you're doing. Don't expect this to be a Damascus moment for your Confederate flag-flying neighbor, though. We must leave their instruction to God.

In a peripherally-related note, Tucker Carlson claims that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) -- who has spent years positioning himself as a staunch ally of our President -- brokered all those interviews with Bob Woodward which are garnering our President so much deservedly negative publicity now. But only weak people and drama addicts look for someone to blame all the time. And, ah, Mr. Graham is up for re-election this year, in an unexpectedly tight race, and now South Carolina's Presidential votaries might be thinking he's not a "real conservative" (particularly since he's also lately bashed QAnon).

The putatively more capable Presidential son won't condemn Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse, saying "(w)e all do stupid things at 17." OK, everyone who did something stupid when they were 17, raise your hand! Yeah, that's my hand up, too. Now everyone who shot three protestors when they were 17, raise your hand! Not so many hands now, eh? And thus we are reminded, yet again, that money can't buy a clue.

Having heard that Americas PAC radio ad about Biden family finances, I remind you that ProPublica covered the long story of how Jim Biden has benefited financially from being Joe Biden's brother. Of course, our President has done far, far worse than anything ProPublica relates in their reporting, but then that's the whole point: every time you bring up our President's obvious corruption, his votaries say "well, what about the Biden family?" And though "well what about" is what people say when they can't win the argument on the merits, his votaries don't care about persuasion so much as shouting you down.

Finally, AI language generator GPT-3 writes an op-ed at The Guardian to reassure us that artificial intelligence isn't such a bad thing. The op-ed is actually a human-edited melange of eight op-eds, and the human editors basically told it what to say. Even so, I still think we have less to fear from AI than from greedy/stupid people making AI do more of our work than it should. Anyone who's ever dealt with the self-checkout kiosk at the supermarket or been disappointed yet again by autocorrect knows what I'm talking about.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act and social media.

Word on the street is that Sen. McConnell (E-KY) plans to start voting on his "skinny" COVID-19 relief bill -- so now's a pretty good time to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act. There's no need to humor Republicans who want to look like they're "doing something" about tens of millions unemployed and a thousand-plus deaths every single day from COVID-19 -- they can just pass the HEROES Act, which our House passed almost four months ago and which would extend enhanced unemployment benefits, expand COVID-19 testing and tracing, help out states and localities suffering from a shrinking tax base, fund our Post Office so it can better handle all the votes-by-mail it's going to have to deliver, and issue another round of checks bigger than the ones we got from the CARES Act. Really, there's no need to reinvent the wheel here; our House already passed the HEROES Act, and all our Senators have to do is pass it. Then our President has to sign it! But let's take this one step at a time.

You remember the Burmese military's genocide of its Rohingya Muslim population? All that village-burning, murder, and rape, plus 800,000 refugees fleeing to Bangladesh? Facebook played a big role in helping folks spread lies about and threats at the Rohingya while all that was going on -- and now won't hand over information that the Republic of Gambia has filed suit in our federal courts to get. Facebook must think they're too big for the Republic of Gambia! Or, perhaps, Facebook thinks its own apologies about enabling the genocide are enough, apologies I'm sure the families of the dead find very persuasive. Actually, Facebook claims the requests are too broad -- why, they're making requests for info all the way back to 2012! When, ah, the Burmese military also killed a lot of Rohingya. These killers said what they wanted to do out loud on Facebook, so the Republic of Gambia might be able to nail them in court -- but only if we speak out! So Sum of Us helps you tell Facebook to stop enabling the ongoing coverup of genocide in Burma.

Around the table: in which a Senatorial staffer comes up with a novel way to look at health care affordability.

The VOTER FRAUDZ IZ REALZ!!!!! crowd must have been quite aroused at the news that one thousand "double-voters" may face charges in Georgia, but they ought to chill. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said a thousand Georgians face "investigation" because he probably already knows he won't be able to prosecute anywhere near that many (and n.b. that I said prosecute, not convict!). We don't know, for example, how many Georgia voters canceled their absentee ballot once they voted at the polling booth, which is perfectly legal, and we also don't know how many of that number filed a provisional ballot because the state couldn't verify whether it had received their absentee ballot yet, which is also perfectly legal. So the real number of prosecutions (which, again, are not convictions!) will almost certainly have fewer digits than the number Mr. Raffensperger announced on Tuesday.

Our President has apparently figured out that saying Pentagon officials "want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy" will not only a) divert attention from coverage of his stupid dead-soldiers-are-losers remark and b) snatch up some anti-war voters who aren't satisfied with the idea of voting for Joe Biden! I mean, I can't entirely blame them, and if you've ever met a Ron Paul fan who voted for Mr. Obama because the Republican alternative wasn't adequately Paulist, you'll know our President isn't being dumb here. Still, these Pentagon officials are the ones he put in there, and a man shouldn't get to slam defense spending after doing all that bragging about increasing defense spending. Also, too, we're still fighting wars all around the world.

You know how I say it's not a Congressional staffer's job to challenge us when we express our will? Well, at least one staffer in the office of Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) didn't get the memo, telling a three-time cancer survivor that no, you shouldn't be able to get health care if you can't afford it -- "(j)ust like if you want to go to the store and buy a new dress shirt, if I can’t afford that dress shirt, I don’t get to get it." Because needing chemotherapy is "just like" getting a new shirt! Ain't no apology from Sen. Tillis gonna wash that stain out -- even if this somehow isn't a case of like hiring like, you don't hire staffers that clueless because you just don't know what you're getting.

Our President adds 20 names to his list of possible Supreme Court nominees. His 2016 list definitely helped him win, and even now, rank-and-file Republicans who find him obnoxious-or-worse will more likely hold their nose if they know they're getting a Supreme Court Justice out of it, and that's true even if they've never heard of Amy Coney Barrett or Amul Thapar. Our President has challenged Joe Biden to put out a similar list, but that could backfire on him -- why wouldn't a list of folks like Goodwin Liu or Leah Ward Sears galvanize the liberals who find Mr. Biden wanting? Perhaps he's counting on Mr. Biden deciding putting out a list is beneath him, which isn't a bad calculation.

Finally, former Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman cuts an ad endorsing Republican Susan Collins in the Maine Senate race, saying "I'm a lifelong Democrat but I put my country first." Because if there's anything our country needs, it's another fake "moderate" who never deviates from the party line when it matters and who only preaches "bipartisanship" when it means caving to Republicans! Seriously, though, let Republicans light $400,000 on fire hoping anyone still looks to Joe Lieberman (or Susan Collins!) as a beacon of anything. In fact, is there a way we can get them to spend more money on that ad? And maybe even spend it on TV?