Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning endless war and endless corporate mergers.

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 And unlike past bills purporting to repeal the AUMF -- you may recall last year's S.J.Res. 59, which would have repealed the 2001 AUMF but also expanded Presidential power to start war without Congressional authorization -- this bill would simply repeal the 2001 AUMF 240 days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

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

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

Action: concerning media monopolies, paid family leave, and health care.

Word on the street is that FCC Chair Ajit Pai will recommend approving the proposed T-Mobile/Sprint merger, so today might be a good day to call our Justice Department at 1.202.804.1389 and urge them to reject the merger. In this era of right-wing dominance, our legal system tends to view the "harm" caused by corporate mergers very, very narrowly: they only seem to care whether or not a merger will dramatically raise prices for consumers. Mergers do tend to raise prices for consumers simply because they decrease competition, but our courts need to go back to viewing "harm" as broadly as they used to do. Ask one of the tens of thousands of people who are going to lose their jobs as a result of this merger whether it causes them harm. Ask the working families who get discounted service from T-Mobile and will almost certainly lose it in the merger whether it causes them harm. We know concentrated corporate power harms all of us, so let's get to fighting.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: Moms Rising helps you tell your state legislators to pass paid family leave and medical leave legislation. (Legislators plan to introduce bills toward both ends shortly.) America is, as you know, the only country on Earth that doesn't provide paid family or medical leave for its citizens -- and it is also, as you know, the only country on Earth that has seriously proposed raiding Social Security pensions to pay for family and medical leave! -- but we could pay for family and medical leave insurance with a minuscule payroll tax hike, or, heaven forfend, by amending the state Constitution so that rich folks actually pay a higher rate of taxes than working folk! Why would it be a minuscule tax hike? Because not everyone uses insurance at once! Indeed, that's how insurance has always worked. Six American states, the District of Columbia, and the rest of the planet already do it, so let's do it in Pennsylvania as well.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1384/S. 1129, the Medicare for All Act, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. Right-wingers love asking, where's the money for that?. Usually, the answer is "tax the rich so that gazillionaires don't have 22 vacation homes or start collecting mountains," but, truth be told, we're not going to tax the rich to the tune of $3.4 trillion annually, which is what the right-wing Mercatus Center tells us Medicare for All health insurance will cost. However, we also know that we're already planning to spend $49 trillion over the next 10 years on health insurance, which means that, yes, we already know where the money is; we just have to capture it. Capturing it will be harder to explain than to do, but we also know that this is America, the can-do country, and matters of accounting should never stop us from doing the right thing.

Action: concerning discrimination, aircraft safety, and internet freedom.

Last week the House passed H.R. 5, the Equality Act -- with eight Republican votes! Eight! It's a firestorm of moderation! I kid, of course -- I'm old enough to remember when the Republican Moderate Caucus in the Senate had two dozen members; now it doesn't even meet for lunch! Still, that might bode well for passage of the Equality Act in the Senate, since all 47 Democrats will vote for it and a handful of Republicans still style themselves as moderates. Perhaps a handful more will style themselves as independents who worry about more important things than continuing to discriminate against gays and transgender folk -- but only if we get in their grills! Hence you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a smartphone) to find your Senators' phone numbers so you can call them and tell them to pass the Equality Act. Maybe our President will veto it (at Vice President Pence's urging, no doubt!), but let's at least make him do it.

In the wake of numerous news reports about safety failings of the Boeing 737 Max plane, which caused two of them to crash in six months, Penn PIRG helps you tell our Federal Aviation Administration (or FAA) to mandate the "optional" safety features that could have prevented those crashes, and Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to increase FAA funding and take decision-making power about safety standards away from airplane manufacturing corporations. When folks started telling us that "the private sector does everything better," and started privatizing government functions, they assured us that government would still hold corporations accountable when they failed -- and then they started privatizing the accountability itself! It's like telling burglars to decide the length of their own jail sentences because, hey, they know best! Truth be known, airline deregulation has been a problem as long as I've been alive; maybe now's the time to stop all that?

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to vote for H.R. 1644/S. 682, the Save the Internet Act, then Free Press still helps you do that. Americans across the ideological spectrum -- yes, actual conservatives and actual liberals -- support the Save Internet Act, because it would restore net neutrality, the principle that big telecom corporations should treat all network traffic the same, and thus you, and not some corporation, should get to decide where you want to go on the internet. But politicians don't support it, because politicians care more about big telecom money than about people. Harsh? Nah, just truth. How do we know? They can't concoct a good argument against net neutrality -- take their complaining that internet regulation needs a "light touch," when net neutrality is obviously "light touch"! When an internet regulation doesn't mandate content or price, that's light touch.

Around the table: in which the calculus of defeat reveals itself, again!

Tennessee House Speaker Glen Casada, who has shepherded numerous anti-gay and anti-transgender bills through that state's House over the last few years, has announced he'll resign his leadership post in the coming weeks. A Tennessean report revealed that Mr. Casada had exchanged sexually explicit text messages about women with his Chief of Staff; that's despicable behavior, obviously, but would it be too much to ask that bad legislators resign in shame after trying to pass despicable bills? (Mr. Casada says he'll keep his House seat; other Republican legislators have objected, but I doubt that'll amount to much.)

Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) becomes the first Republican House Rep to call for impeachment of our President, and Mehdi Hasan at The Intercept wonders why more Democrats aren't calling for it. They probably think it's "smart politics," but then they also think that running yet another center-right milquetoast who wants everyone to "get along" in the name of "bipartisanship" will beat our President in 2020, just like it didn't do in 2016. And they're also wrong, as Mr. Hasan says, to suggest that they don't want to do anything to rile up our President's base, because anything riles them up, and bases don't win elections without a lot of help. (And Jesus Mary and Joseph our President needs to shut up about "TREASON!" He's going to make the word meaningless, and that's one of those words we need to define accurately and precisely.)

I don't know that the Venezuelan media offer "far more diversity" than American media, but Lucas Koerner and Ricardo Vaz at FAIR make a fairly compelling case that the Venezuelan press is far more diverse than our "liberal" media would like us to think. No, I think imputing malice to our "liberal" media is entirely appropriate there -- weren't they just doing their damnedest to create the impression that a coup was about to take down the Maduro government any second now? Yes, they were. And the "facts" our "liberal" media often presents are easily refutable by folks who've actually spent any time in Venezuela. Maybe there's a solution in there, somewhere.

Fresh off his pardoning of a bankster who wrote a glowing book about him, our President is apparently thinking of pardoning a few actual American war criminals on Memorial Day. On Memorial Day! Could it be that our President really is a Democratic plant trying to make the very idea of ever voting for a flag-waving jingo again revolting? That's not the way to bet, of course, and (as Sen. Graham might say, if he weren't such a toady these days) the whole idea of being an American is most emphatically not to prove that you can act just as uncivilized as your enemy. (As an aside, I think the Times is rather optimistic to suppose that Attorney General Barr might be trying to prevent this from happening; Mr. Barr is, after all, the man who helped Bush the Better pardon all those Iran-Contra conspirators. I'd be happy to be wrong, of course!)

Finally, a warning about polls suggesting that folks feeling good about our economy won't help our President get re-elected: ask them again in late October of 2020. If the economy's still "good" then, and the Presidential candidates have spent six months tearing each other down, then I suspect a fatigued populace will be more likely to ascribe the drama to "both sides" and return our President to office, a tragedy continued Republican vote suppression will facilitate. But who knows? Maybe Democrats will nominate someone who changes the conversation away from our President and towards a just, sustainable, and hopeful future. I kid, of course.

Action: concerning trade, banksters, pollution, and voting rights.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to remove corporate welfare for big pharma from the recently-negotiated USMCA trade agreement. Folks call the USMCA "NAFTA 2.0," but it deserves better than that, since it vastly curtails the use of the "investor-state dispute settlement" (or ISDS) system that nullifies our laws and outsources our jobs. Unfortunately, the USMCA also extends monopoly patent protections for big pharma corporations (for drugs they couldn't have made without government funding, no less!), which keeps generic drugs off the market and thus keeps drug prices high. In an era where EpiPens cost as much as $600 a dose, where hedge fund managers drive up the price of drugs by 700% or more, where drugs sell for $1,700 a dose when they sell for $8 a dose in Australia, and where insulin costs so much that diabetics risk death by rationing it, our trade deals shouldn't make all that worse. So let's get Congress to fix it.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect good Americans from financial predators by passing the Loan Shark Prevention Act. The bill would, as you may know, set a maximum interest rate of 15% on "any extension of credit" -- unless the state in which the borrower lives sets a lower maximum rate -- and would explicitly prevent concocting fees to evade the 15% cap. Now, a 15% cap would just so happen to kill the payday lending industry, but let its defenders on both sides of the aisle make fools of themselves justifying the 300% interest rates on short-term loans that wreck soldiers' lives. As I've said, I'd set much lower limits on car loans (2%), mortgages (3%), and personal loans (6%), but the 15% cap would make credit card debt more manageable. And caps such as these don't destroy industries, though they may prevent such industries from buying more corporate welfare through campaign donations. What a shame that would be!

In other news, the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban PFAS chemicals from our products. I'm sure PFAS chemicals seemed like a wonder material once upon a time, but now they're everywhere, from Teflon pans to fast-food wrappers to fire-fighting foam to rain gear to popcorn bags to dental floss, and chances are you've got it in your bloodstream as we speak, because PFAS never breaks down. And scientists have linked PFAS chemicals to cancer, kidney damage, thyroid problems, and child developmental issues. This isn't a situation where you can just avoid bad stuff, because PFAS is, basically, everywhere and in everything. Some 20 bills currently under consideration in the House and Senate would address PFAS chemicals; now we just have to impress upon our Congressfolk the urgency of the problem. Don't be one of those who'd say "well, what are we going to make our dental floss out of now?" America is a can-do country, after all.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1/S. 949, the For the People Act, then People for the American Way still helps you do that, and if you want to call Sen. "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell and tell him directly to allow a vote on the bill, then his Senate website provides phone numbers if you scroll all the way down. Don't imagine that the House flipping back to Democrats this past November means "the people have overcome" all the voting rights issues. Democratic candidates got more votes than Republicans in Wisconsin state legislature races in 2018, yet Republican legislators still hold almost two-thirds of that state's seats, and that's because Republicans have aggressively gerrymandered the state. The For the People Act would fix that, by making states use independent commissions, and not self-interested legislators, to redraw Congressional districts. The For the People Act would enact reforms in voting rights and campaign finance, too. So let's keep on 'em.

Action: concerning immigration, war, pollution, and taxes.

Mark Morgan, our President's latest nominee to head Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, says he can look in the eyes of an unaccompanied minor at the border and decide right there whether or not he'll grow up to join the MS-13 gang. Where do we begin with that? That MS-13 isn't an existential threat, but something politicians throw around to justify racist immigration policies? That the science doesn't support the notion of unaccompanied minors (or, indeed, undocumented immigrants in general) committing more crimes than native-born Americans? That if you think you can tell someone's criminal future by "looking in their eyes," you're an arrogant drama hound who should be nowhere near any levers of power? Maybe that last one is the one you lead with, when you use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to find phone numbers for your Senators, so you can tell them to reject this absurd nomination.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2354/S. 1039, the Prevention of Unconstitutional War with Iran Act of 2019. The bill would prevent war with Iran without express authorization from Congress, which is how it should be, even if far too many allegedly smart people tell you that such bills "hamstring the President." Hamstringing the President is how our Constitution wants it! It's a feature, not a bug! I'd love to add "and this President exemplifies the kind of person who should not have any sort of unilateral power," but I'd be afraid of calling someone into existence who's far worse. Don't believe reports that our President has told his acting Defense Secretary he doesn't want war with Iran -- and "since when do you trust this guy?" is really the wrong answer. The right answer is: since when do you trust your President? Americans don't just "trust their President" -- Americans check their President.

In other news, our EPA has decided to ban methylene chloride -- used in paint strippers, linked by scientists to liver and nervous system problems, and declared by our EPA to be a likely carcinogen -- so yay EPA, right? Not so fast: our EPA has, incredibly, exempted commercially-used methylene chloride from its ban, meaning that folks who work with paint strippers for a living will still be exposed to the chemical. I'll say it again: this Administration hates doing anything for anyone other than bosses. And this isn't even an example of "streamlining regulations," since our EPA specifically calls for input on a new system of training and certifying workers, because, why not put all the burden to do right on workers, and none of it on bosses? Our EPA's public commenting process on this matter closes this week, so the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell our EPA to enact a real ban on methylene chloride.

Finally, the House passed the Taxpayer First Act earlier this year, and though the bill accomplishes many useful ends, it also prevents our IRS from ever offering a decent online tax-filing portal. Not impressed? Then consider that our IRS has a sort of gentleman's agreement with private tax prep corporations like H&R Block and Intuit, in which our IRS avoids offering free online tax-filing so that these corporations can do it -- but consider also that H&R Block and Intuit haven't just been forgetting to remind low-income Americans that they offer this service, they've been actively hiding this service! Thus we have yet another reminder that private corporations don't have to answer to you, but your government does. Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell your Senators to ensure that our IRS can offer free online tax-filing services to all Americans. They don't have to scuttle the whole bill to do that -- they only need to amend it. It ain't that tough.

Around the table: concerning law and order, journalism, corruption, warmongering, and abortion.

Ho hum, Renee Dudley and Jeff Kao at ProPublica find that at least two data recovery corporations promised better security from ransomware but mainly just paid off ransomware hackers and then charged their customers more money. Both these firms guaranteed data recovery without paying hackers off, of course, and now some hackers routinely recommended at least one of these two firms to their victims; the article also describes a third corporation which could be paying off hackers while overcharging its clients, including our police departments. Nice work if you can get it! I do wonder how many "law-and-order" types will continue to squeal about immigrants while shrugging at cybercrime.

Julianne Couch at The Daily Yonder describes a local journalist in Iowa who's actually doing local news in Iowa. Local journalist Sheri Melvold's daily hour-long program doesn't give any PR to for-profit businesses, but does help local residents find out if schools are closed, or where the next church dinner is, or whether the arts center needs help -- and though she won't put opposing politicians on the air to talk past each other, she doesn't let them just say whatever, either. It sure helps that KMAQ AM/FM is one of the few radio stations in America that hasn't been gobbled up by a big corporation forcing cookie-cutter programming down our throats. Let's have more stations like that!

You've likely heard by now about the NRA's, ah, financial troubles, and now the New York Times finds the NRA has bled over $200 million from its charitable foundation since 2010. The only question is whether the NRA actually used money its donors intended for charity for lobbying purposes instead -- or, worse, all the fancy clothes long-time CEO Wayne LaPierre apparently billed to his expense account. I'd prefer to hear about the NRA's ties to gun manufacturers, of course, since gun sales seems more their obsession than gun rights. In the meantime, I guess we can always remember that time Oliver North seemed like the most ethically-upright person in a room.

In the wake of our Administration's desperate efforts to provoke Iran into doing something-anything to justify some sort of military action, British General says, contra American government sources, that "there's been no increased threat from Iranian-backed forces" in the Middle East. Two predictions: 1) we'll be hearing numerous whispers about Gen. Ghika's supposed or actual character flaws, and 2) none of those whispers will prove he's wrong. Still, ain't nothing our "liberal" media loves more than a war, and I don't imagine they'll do a very good job being skeptical about our Administration's assertions. Just look at how happily they enabled our Administration's efforts to effect regime change in Venezuela (though, thankfully, the Venezuelans have thwarted their efforts thus far).

In a related note, I wouldn't put too much stock in reporting that our President "doesn't want a war with Iran," for at least three reasons: 1) it could be an abject lie, 2) it draws people into a drama over the "tension" between our President and the NSA he went out of his way to hire, John Bolton, and 3) it enables our President to say "I had no choice" if Iran does do something even mildly provocative. Nobody in America thinks of themselves as a hawk or a warmonger -- they think they have "no choice." Telling Americans they have "no choice" is really the only way to get us to sign on to evil anymore. Thus are the lessons of the "war on terror."

Finally, Dahlia Lithwick at Slate suggests that "Alabama’s Extremist Abortion Bill Ruins John Roberts’ Roe Plan." I agree that the Roberts Court would rather chip away at abortion rights a bit at a time, but I don't think the Alabama law "ruins" their effort -- reactionaries can't succeed unless they can point to someone even worse, and now the Roberts Court has their someone-even-worse, more than one of them, in fact. Even if the Alabama law dies at the hands of the Roberts Court, I think that aids their long game.

Action: concerning clean air, the Muslim ban, net neutrality, and prison privatization.

CREDO helps you tell our EPA to scuttle its own efforts to let corporations pump more soot into our air. When right-wingers tell you how our President has "freed" this economy by "unshackling" corporations from "burdensome" regulations, this is what they mean, whether they like it or not: dirtier air for all of us to breathe, and thus more sick and dead people. And at the risk of beating a dead horse: money goes away, but clean air can sustain a civilization forever. Right-wingers will probably pretend to agree with that statement, and them move on to asserting that "the science doesn't really conclude that breathing in soot is bad for people." No, really; they'll put it like that, because that's what they do: sow doubt about things we all actually agree about. That's what they have to do when they can't win the arguments on the merits.

Meanwhile, H.R. 2214/S. 1123, the NO BAN Act, would rescind our President's Muslim travel ban and prevent future Presidents from enacting similar travel bans that obviously target folks based on their religious beliefs. Actually, I should say their parent nation's religious beliefs, since you can't identify an individual's religious beliefs merely by identifying their home country. Our Supreme Court gave the Muslim ban its blessing, and I'll always be sore about their willingness to use a proctoscope to divine lawmakers' "animus" against religious bigots in their gay-marriage cake-baking ruling but their absolute disinterest in our President's obvious, stated animus against Muslims -- which, again, doesn't bode well for Chief Justice Roberts's efforts to convince everyone the Court isn't "political." Anyway, Demand Progress (among other good government groups) helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight bigotry by passing the NO BAN Act.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1644/S. 682, the Save the Internet Act, then Free Press still helps you do that. The Save the Internet Act would reinstate the net neutrality regulations the FCC enacted in 2015, before the 2017 FCC repealed them. Most folks would tell you they haven't really noticed a difference before and after net neutrality repeal, but big telecom corporations wouldn't block and censor and slow down websites right away, because freedoms best disappear a little at a time. You also have to consider that net neutrality repeal has a good chance of dying in court; big corporations won't want to do so much blocking, censoring, and throttling if the courts say they can't tomorrow. Indeed, that's why they largely obeyed net neutrality principles before the FCC codified them! But the courts could actually sanctify the FCC's repeal, so let's get our Congressfolk to pass the Save the Internet Act.

Finally, hot on the heels of announcements from Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase that they'll start to divest from private prison corporations, CREDO helps you tell Bank of America and SunTrust to divest from private prison corporations also. Getting two big banks to divest from corporations like GEO Group and CoreCivic is a big deal, but why stop there? All the big banks should know the Big Stick of Bad PR if they continue to invest in the private prison corporations now best-known for helping our Administration separate families at the border. Of course, I think the evil of private prison corporations goes deeper: they take taxpayer money to do our government's job (of incarcerating those citizens who've broken our laws), and they generally cost more than public prisons and do a worse job of treating prisoners humanely. That's what you get when you bring public functions to the altar of mammon -- more waste, less accountability, and more evil.

Action: concerning budgeting, drug addiction, voting rights, and monopolies.

"One major reason" Congress never passes a budget on time anymore, according to Public Citizen's latest email missive, is "poison pill policy riders" slipped into must-pass appropriations bills; you can name a lot of poison pills that have found their way into budgets over the years, like our President's months-long partial government shutdown over his vanity border wall. A Republican Congress wouldn't fund that wall, you remember, so he induced a shutdown until he got his way (or, more precisely, could con his votaries into thinking he got his way). But this year (as in recent years!), "poison pills" include riders preventing our government from finishing various campaign finance disclosure regulations. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass clean budgets, without noxious "poison pill" policy riders. How popular is anonymous big money campaign spending, after all? So popular Congress has to take the budgeting process hostage to enable it!

Meanwhile, H.R. 2569/S. 1365, the Comprehensive Addiction Resources Emergency (or CARE) Act, would allot $100 billion over the next 10 years to address opioid addiction -- and not in a punitive way, because that clearly ain't working. The CARE Act would spend money on treatment, support services, and early intervention, among other things, and it would give states and localities considerable power over how they spend that money, not that right-wingers will notice actual conservatism happening under their noses. If you still think we "have" to put drug addicts in jail, just ask yourself? Have you ever gotten high on anything (not necessarily something illegal!) that could have hurt you in some way? And did the threat of incarceration ever stop you from getting high on that thing? The Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to get folks affected by the opioid crisis real help by passing the CARE Act.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1/S. 949, the For the People Act, then People for the American Way still helps you do that. And since Senate Majority Leader "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell (E-KY) says he won't hold a vote on the For the People Act, because, and I quote, "I get to decide what we vote on," you can go to his Senate website, scroll all the way down, and find a phone number so you can call his office and tell him to hold a vote on the bill already. Use whatever number gets you through; hell, I've had to do that with my Senators for a while. Nine phone numbers I have in my cellphone for each of my two Senators! And sometimes I have to call all nine! But if we had the ethics, voting rights, and campaign finance reforms contained in the For the People Act, maybe, just maybe, our Senators would be a bit more accessible to us. We are their damn bosses, after all! And if we get in their grills enough that they pass the For the People Act, maybe they'll start acting like it.

Finally, American Family Voices helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to block the proposed Bristol-Myers Squibb/Celgene merger. I'm old enough to remember when Bristol-Myers and Squibb were two separate corporations! And now they want to get bigger? Big pharma corporations are already too big, and have too much power -- witness how often their price-gouging schemes actually get a lot of coverage in newspapers and TV news programs, and how little they suffer for it! When you're big enough and powerful enough, after all, you can buy Congressional legislation that protects and expands your power -- generally they're not stupid enough to take a quid pro quo bribe, but they all know the game, and this proposed merger would be the largest one ever. If we want to hear less about 800% price hikes for life-saving drugs, we should prevent big pharma corporations from getting so big in the first place.

Action: concerning health care, student loan debt, and social media monopolies.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1384/S. 1129, the Medicare for All Act, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. The main obstacle to this bill's passage, for real, is that, unlike everywhere else on Earth, employers buy health insurance in America, and that hides the cost from you, because if you had to buy it, or pay taxes to your government in order to buy it, you'd know how much it costs. Here's how much it costs, between governmental and private spending: about $10,000 per person in America. The average income in America is a bit under $50,000; force corporations to add that $10,000 in as salary, and then tax the resulting salary at roughly 16%, and we'd spend the same money on health care we're spending now, but we could cover everyone and cover them better -- and folks wouldn't see one penny missing from their paycheck. Think it over, and you'll see it works.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell our Education Secretary to scrap plans to sell off federally-backed student loans to banksters. Whoa, you ask, is she really thinking of doing that? Of course she is -- for her, as for the rest of this disgusting Administration, everything is an opportunity to make Our Glorious Elites more money, and "everything" includes those fraudulent loans that weigh down students with nightmarish debt. An individual with morals would consider helping out students with their fraudulent debt -- or, hell, even canceling it! Predatory colleges did lie to those kids about their job prospects, and even about their own ability to stay in business! But this Administration considers financial predators and for-profit colleges their constituency. Which is fitting, I suppose -- our President himself had to settle three lawsuits for $25 million concerning his "university" right after getting elected. See? He knows corruption!

Finally, hot on the heels of Facebook's own co-founder writing a New York Times op-ed calling for our FTC to break up Facebook -- and you should read it, both for its defense of antitrust action and its sad history of how we've abandoned it over the last several decades -- Demand Progress helps you call our FTC and tell them to break up Facebook. "Breaking up Facebook" would require Facebook to sell Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram, which might even enable you to enjoy those social media communities again, since they won't be under Facebook's thumb anymore (and will each have owners who might make them better applications). Our FTC is mulling a sizable fine for Facebook, as punishment for failing to protect customer private information, but even a $5 billion fine is peanuts to a powerful monopoly like Facebook -- a better punishment would be to take away their power to monopolize markets and do harm. Breaking up monopolies, after all, is fundamentally pro-freedom.

Around the table: starring weak Democrats, malicious Republicans, and actual hard-working Americans.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, now seeking the 2020 Democratic nomination for President, seems to aim for a "middle ground" on climate change policy. Never mind that this "middle ground" looks suspiciously like we'd just be clawing our way back to the Obama-era status quo, or that a "middle ground" is less likely to save our planet than an agenda corporatists will label "radical" and "extreme" -- dig this flatugasm from a Biden spokeshack: "What we learned from the Obama administration is unless we find middle ground on these issues, we risk not having any policies." Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph: "what we learned from the Obama Administration" is that once you signal to right-wingers that you won't fight, they'll just move further right, and you won't "hav(e) any policies" worth a damn.

In a related note, Mr. Biden thinks that, once our current President is out office, Republicans will have an "epiphany" and work with Democrats again. The evidence, of course, points to the opposite conclusion, especially when you remember that Republicans stonewalled the center-right Mr. Obama in 2009 and 2010 and were rewarded with 63 more House seats and six more Senate seats. The only thing that'll shake Republicans out of their stupor? Shame and humiliation in unmistakeable proportions in 2020. And Democrats will surely prevent that, by running out as many "electable" "non-ideological" "problem-solvers" as possible.

Rachel M. Cohen at In These Times visits Kentucky -- where high-paying coal miner jobs have left an indelible mark in residents' minds -- to describe some of the issues we'd have in shifting to renewable energy. A coal miner who has transitioned to renewable energy work warns that the transition costs money (he had to intern for six months) and might not persuade coal miners used to making high five figures who honestly believe that the coal jobs really are coming back. And a liberal activist also reminds us that even though Kentucky has moved right (especially in recent years), "FDR was just a peg or two under Jesus Christ here," which again suggests that maybe we need more actual liberals, and fewer "electable" centrists, running for office.

Greg Stohr at Bloomberg notices that "Mystery Delays Push Divisive Supreme Court Issues Into Election Year." Some analysts cite the contentiousness of the Kavanaugh hearings as a possible reason, but they may be misapprehending the lesson of those hearings a bit, i.e., that if those hearings had gone on into November, we'd probably have a larger Republican caucus in the Senate, and we might not even have a Democratic House! Delaying decisions on abortion, immigration, transgender issues, etc., into 2020 turns Republican voters out -- and regardless of the outcomes! If they rule the way Republicans would prefer, then "the President delivered," but if they don't, then "the President must be re-elected so he can get better judges on the Supreme Court." In the long run, though, this ain't gonna help John Roberts convince everyone that federal courts aren't political.

Finally, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) is the lone Republican to vote against one of our President's judicial nominees, specifically citing, as his reason, said nominee's 2011 characterization of former President Obama as an "un-American impostor." And Politico treats us to five paragraphs about how this is Mr. Romney's "latest break with the President," citing precisely two other "breaks." And note that the judicial nominee still got confirmed, because, like all the rest of them, Mitt Romney only stands on principle when it makes no difference.

Action: concerning debt, social media, climate change, and discrimination.

The Loan Shark Prevention Act (for which Congress.gov has no bill number at this writing) would cap interest on all consumer loans at 15 percent -- which would include credit cards and essentially eliminate the entire payday lending industry. Note well that the Loan Shark Prevention Act would prevent lenders from concocting fees to replace the money they'd lose. Myself, I'd add caps specifically on auto loans, mortgages and personal loans (I'd do 2%, 3%, and 6%, respectively), but a broad 15% cap would certainly save working people money on their credit cards. And banks wouldn't go broke -- they just wouldn't be able to buy Congressfolk as easily as they can now. And the folks who'd call the Loan Shark Prevention Act a "job-killing" bill? We could describe them as objectively pro-usury. You can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to find phone numbers for your Reps and Senators, so you can call them and tell them to pass the Loan Shark Prevention Act.

Meanwhile, you think Facebook's got it bad now, after being exposed as a corporation that's careless with our personal information? Then get a load of reports indicating that Facebook is aiding and abetting wildlife trafficking and looting of Middle Eastern archaeological sites, and has even enabled hate groups to hijack its software to auto-generate more video content. Facebook seems to think it's doing a great job at the last item, while admitting that it "could do better" about the other two, which we've totally never heard before! The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to fully investigate these allegations and punish Facebook as their investigations demand. Why the National Whistleblower Center, you ask? Because without anonymous whistleblowers -- who risk years of unemployment and abuse whether their identities get exposed or not! -- we'd likely never have known about any of these things going on. And why the SEC? Because Facebook is a publicly-traded corporation which may be injuring its shareholders with its actions.

In other news, Corporate Accountability helps you urge your state Attorney General to investigate allegations that Exxon knew climate change was coming, but lied to shareholders and the American public about it in order to keep making money. You may know the story by now: Exxon knew enough about the relationship between fossil fuel pollution and climate change by the late '70s that it taught scientists about it, but didn't come clean about it with shareholders or customers, instead embarking on a long and very well-funded campaign of obfuscation and disinformation. Change being the only constant, you'd think a corporation that knew about climate change would maybe adapt by gradually switching over to renewables, but, alas, Exxon did not face a 55% corporate tax during the late '80s, nor did its executives face a 91% income tax on millionaire income, so Exxon moved to protect its money rather than the planet on which its employees live. And for that, we should at least investigate Exxon.

Finally, the House Judiciary Committee passed H.R. 5, the Equality Act, out of committee last week, and the full House may vote on it this week, so the National LGBTQ Task Force helps you tell your House Reps to support civil rights for gay and transgender folks by passing the Equality Act. The Equality Act would extend full protections under the Civil Rights Act to gay and transgender folks, which will no doubt prompt some right-wingers to squeal BUT TEH CIVUL RIGHTZ ACTZ WAS FOR TEH BLACKZ!!!!!, which would generally represent more enthusiasm for black civil rights than they had when Congress was debating the Civil Rights Act. What a wondrous thing, when folks suddenly discover their support for past civil rights legislation in their efforts to keep other folks from getting civil rights! But for the gay and transgender folks who get shut out of jobs, apartments, and freaking bathrooms because of other people's bigotry, we need to pass the Equality Act.

Action: concerning Iran and "usable" nukes.

The government of Iran has sentenced Nasrin Sotoudeh to 38 years in prison and 148 lashes, for (among other "charges") "being a member of a human rights organization" and "encouraging corruption and prostitution," which you no doubt recognize as BS charges concocted by a government that's insecure in its power. And what has Ms. Sotoudeh, a human rights lawyer, actually done? Advocate against Iranian law mandating that all women wear the hijab, or head covering, for one thing. What's wrong with wearing a hijab? Absolutely nothing! What's wrong with threatening to imprison women who don't wear it? Absolutely everything! But no doubt she's also in prison for spending most of her career representing minors facing death sentences, opponents of the Iranian government, and abused children threatened with going back to their abusive parents. Hence Amnesty International helps you tell the Iranian government to free Ms. Sotoudeh.

Meanwhile, our government deployed a carrier "strike group" and a "bomber task force" to the Middle East last week, purportedly as a "warning" to Iran, but the Navy said the deployment was "regularly-scheduled," so our Administration's posturing about it sure smells like a false flag operation. But, as Zombie Lyndon Johnson would tell you, false flag operations work far better when Americans aren't so cynical about our President. A false flag op is about all our Administration has left, though -- pulling out of the nuclear deal which was working! may have induced Iran to demand more from the deal's European partners, thanks to the sanctions our government reinstituted after pulling out, but everyone remembers that our President only pulled out of that deal because he felt like it. Still, we might need to head off yet another stupid war, so Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation mandating no military action against Iran without Congressional approval.

Finally, our President's 2020 budget has so much to recommend it, and one of those things is, yes, the "low-yield" or "usable" nuclear weapon, which he'd like to put on our submarines. What an idea man! It's like he didn't grow up in a time when folks worried more about nuclear annihilation than anything else! It's like he has no idea that a "usable" nuclear weapon suggests that all the other nuclear weapons we have in our arsenal are completely useless! And it's like he thinks this is a bad thing! Happily, H.R. 1086/S. 401, the Hold the LYNE Act (thought of this, didn't you? I can't help it either), would prevent our government from researching, developing, or producing the Trident D5 low-yield nuke, so Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep "usable" nukes out of our President's hands by passing the Hold the LYNE Act. No, it really doesn't matter that this President is the very image of the person who should never have any weapons ever. He ain't the first, and he won't be the last.

Penny Rants for Saturday, May 11, 2019: concerning Democrat weakness, "liberal" media propagandizing, and more of President Manchild's shameful behavior.

From the "How Many Times Must I Tell These Pimps?" file: Joe Biden says our current Administration represents an "aberration" as far as the Republican Party is concerned. We could tabulate, with ease, all the ways in which that's so full of shit it's coming out its eyes, but let's instead remember that Hillary Clinton rode that trope all the way to 48% in the 2016 election. And then let us remind ourselves that trying to "appeal to Republican voters" is a vain cause: 25% of our current electorate is bat-guano insane, and another 25% will hold their noses in the voting booth because he's pro-life or appointed good judges or "slashed regulations." Better that our Democratic candidates consider why 100 million people don't vote in Presidential elections and maybe figure out how to turn some of them out. Hint: people who don't vote don't give one rat's hind quarter if Democrats think Republicans are good guys, because that's drama; these voters only care about their government doing right by them.

Dave Lindorff, writing at FAIR, catches our "liberal" media trying to fool large numbers of Venezuelans and Americans into thinking that attempted coup against President Maduro was actually succeeding. Seriously, the only other way to interpret some of these "news" "reports" is to assume incompetence on an unprecedented scale -- how does one invent an election the would-be coup leader Juan Guaido "won" (as CNN did) or fail to notice zero supporters in an airfield instead of "thousands" (also CNN) or run photos of Mr. Guaido addressing supporters on a completely different day (the New York Times)? Luckily, there are plenty of news organizations -- ones that aren't so insecure as to call themselves "The Most Trusted Name in News" -- doing good reporting on Venezuela right now; Mr. Lindorff lists a few, though you'll have to go to the internet to find them. And this, again, is why we need a la carte cable packaging. And net neutrality. And anti-trust enforcement.

The aforementioned New York Times does dig into our President's taxes, again, finding that he reported losses of over $1 billion on his federal tax forms between 1985 and 1994, and naturally our President responds by simultaneously calling the report a (sigh) "highly inaccurate Fake News hit job" and explaining the report's findings away: "(y)ou always wanted to show losses for tax purposes...almost all real estate developers did -- and often re-negotiate with banks, it was sport." So he says "show losses for tax purposes" and I say "steal food out of the mouths of our children and our children's children," and folks who agree that defunding schools and libraries and police officers is "sport" are not the kind of folks I want in my foxhole. (Hey, speaking of Fox, the Fox and Friends crew think the losses the Times report depicts a life that's "pretty impressive" and "beyond what most of us could ever achieve," without mentioning that such a life is more within your grasp when your father gives you hundreds of millions of dollars.)

Finally, speaking of our President, I really thought that 2017 ad that both extolled his record and told his critics to get off his back within 30 seconds was the most appalling example of self-absorption I'd ever seen, but this twittergasm -- "(d)espite the tremendous success that I have had as President, including perhaps the greatest ECONOMY and most successful first two years of any President in history, they have stollen (sic) two years of my (our) Presidency (Collusion Delusion) that we will never be able to get back" -- tops it. Or bottoms it, as the case may be. How can you be TEH GREATESTZ PREZNITZ EVAHZ!!!! and have your entire term as President "stollen" at the same time? For the man who won 46% of the popular vote, struts around like he won 66%, and whines like he won 26%, such mental gymnastics are child's play. And you know he misspelled "stolen" on purpose, in order to get everyone talking about that, and not about how shameful it is to see a grown man -- the nominal leader of the free world, no less! -- act like this in public.

Action: concerning health care, voting rights, and worker pay.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1384/S. 1129, the Medicare for All Act, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. You may have read Paul Krugman's recent New York Times column stating (among other things!) that although it "(c)ould" be true that Medicare-for-All will result in better health care, and that we'd pay less in taxes to support it than we're currently paying in premiums, these would be hard to sell to the American people. And indeed, when folks confront the loss of their private insurance and how we're going to pay for that, support does fall off. But Medicare-for-All wouldn't poll well in the first place if folks were that emotionally-invested in their private health insurance; their support wavers not because they really think their insurer's doing a great job, but out of fear of the unknown. And we don't let that keep us from doing the right thing, do we?

Meanwhile, Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to allow folks serving time in prison to be able to vote. No, letting prisoners vote won't turn prison into a "country club" (seriously, people say that to you whenever you argue that a civilization should treat prisoners better!), but it will prevent some fairly serious problems. One, our government won't be able to put people in jail just to prevent them from voting! I wouldn't argue they're doing that now -- I presume that putting folks in jail, particularly black and brown folks, is an end in itself, and our government looks at their inability to vote as icing on the cake -- but if I thought of it, you know they have. Two, denying prisoners the vote lets governments pack Congressional districts with large numbers of people who can't get proper representation! Sadly, state governments are already doing that. So let's put a stop to it.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell our government to give back pay to federal contractors during the government shutdown over our President's vanity border wall earlier this year. Federal employees got back pay, of course, but our government contracts a lot of work out to private corporations, and those workers didn't get back pay, though it wasn't their fault, or their employers' fault, that they didn't work. And a lot of these workers work low-paid jobs as cafeteria workers, security guards, and janitors. Which doesn't make their work any less important! And they have bills to pay just like the rest of us! Of course, our government shouldn't be contracting this work out to private corporations, and not just because these little government shutdowns leave them out in the cold. But we ought to do right by them while they're working for us, although our President is the kind of person who high-fives himself for sticking it to people who work for him.

Action: concerning voting rights, torture, pollution, and social media.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1/S. 949, the For the People Act, then People for the American Way still helps you do that. After all, if you've been watching this space, you've very likely already advocated for most of the things this bill would do, like redistricting reform, automatic voter registration, campaign finance disclosure for large donors, and public campaign financing. You've also very likely fought efforts to remove voters from voting rolls for no good reason other than that they might vote against the kind of politician who'd like less people to vote, and the For the People Act does something about that, too. Plus it'd make Election Day a national holiday and keeps House Reps from serving on for-profit boards. Who could oppose such things? The Republicans who parade their hatred of all that's good, that's who. And that's why we need the For the People Act.

Meanwhile, H.R. 2407's title, the Promoting Human Rights for Palestinian Children Living Under Israeli Military Occupation Act, will set off some rageheads right off the bat -- you'll hear them say how dare you call it an occupation! as if that's the worst thing a human being could possibly do. Or as if it's anti-Semitic! But criticizing Israel's actions in Palestine is not in-and-of-itself "anti-Semitic," and nor are attempts to induce better behavior from Israel. And even if you think people criticize Israel too much, you should be put off by reports of Israeli soldiers separating Palestinian children from their families and torturing them while in detention. These things may not create terrorists, but they do create broken people, and we can't keep creating broken people and calling ourselves civilized. Hence Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose cruel treatment of Palestinian children by passing H.R. 2407.

In other news, S. 1187, the Safe School Meals for Kids Act, would phase out food tainted by the ubiquitous pesticide chlorpyrifos from our school lunch programs. Scientists have linked chlorpyrifos to numerous neurological and developmental disorders, and indeed our EPA banned chlorpyrifos from home use almost 20 years ago. Yet our Administration drags its feet on imposing a broader ban, even though our courts have mandated it, and even though kids who eat fruits and vegetables sprayed with chlorpyrifos -- which they likely are, since big ag corporations spray about 10 million pounds of it on crops every year -- may well be getting 140 times what our EPA has considered safe exposure. After all, cutting pollution doesn't make executives richer! Where our Administration won't act, perhaps our Congressfolk will -- but not unless we act. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep kids safe from pollution by passing the Safe School Meals for Kids Act.

Finally, Roots Action helps you tell Facebook to stop with its bogus attempts at "fact-checking." You'd think we'd be happy that Facebook is actually checking facts, since so much BS gets spread around there, but they've partnered with decidedly-non-objective outlets like CheckYourFact.com -- a Koch brothers-funded project of the Tucker Carlson-created The Daily Caller -- and the right-wing Weekly Standard. That can't be an accident, could it? Nor could it be an accident that Facebook actually purged pages (including ZeroHedge) because the previously unknown website PropOrNot smeared them as pro-Russian propaganda hounds right after the 2016 election? It never occurred to them to seek out the decidedly non-liberal FactCheck.org? But all we need from Facebook, really, is an end to speech that our First Amendment doesn't protect, like terroristic threats. We certainly don't need "fact-checking" that's worse than the Wild West.

Action: concerning internet freedom, racism, and financial predation.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to promote real internet freedom by passing H.R. 1644/S. 682, the Save the Internet Act, then Free Press still helps you do that. Net neutrality -- the principle ensuring that you, and not some corporation, should get to determine where you go on the internet -- has actual bipartisan support across the political spectrum, with liberals and conservatives fighting for it, and nobody wants a corporate-controlled internet constantly herding you to junk news and junk culture websites but the big telecom corporations and their lackeys, but unfortunately their lackeys constitute a majority in the Senate! But as I always say: it doesn't matter what they want, it matters what we want. We the people have spoken numerous times over the past decade; we just have to keep speaking until they hear us. And castigating them for not hearing us would not be untoward of you.

Meanwhile, People for the American Way helps you tell our Department of Justice to require state and local police departments to report civilian deaths in custody, and to share that information with the public. Our Administration's first Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, acted like doing such a thing was insufficiently supportive of our police! That's rich -- since when is it "support" to turn a blind eye to injustice? And if I took race out of it -- that is, if I didn't mention that victims of deaths-in-police-custody sure do seem to be disproportionately nonwhite -- most folks would recognize how absurd it is to equate "support" with "doing nothing about good Americans dying in police custody." I mean, getting good data about the problem is the first thing we ought to be doing. But this Administration won't do it, unless we get in their grills about it.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell our FDIC to stop the proposed SunTrust/BB&T merger. Haven't heard much about these banks? Well, would you want to? Seriously, given our recent history, would we want a bank to be nationally-known? SunTrust and BB&T would become America's sixth-largest bank, with close to $450 billion in assets, if the merger were to proceed, and then you'd know their name like Bank of America and Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs; does that sound like something to which any corporation should be allowed to aspire? A merger this size will certainly result in jobs lost, jobs like bank teller and bank manager that regular Americans work, and nearly half a trillion in assets would mean more bankster power to influence legislation and condition corporations to play ever more hifalutin financial games that crash economies. And we've had enough of all that in America, even if our leaders pretend the 2008 financial crash happened in another universe.

Action: concerning war, financial predation, pollution, and racism.

With the Venezuelan non-president attempting, and utterly failing, to overthrow the democratically-elected President Nicolas Maduro, but our Administration still insisting it's considering a "full range of options" for military intervention there, Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1004/S.J.Res. 11, which would block our Executive branch from indulging in any military action in Venezuela without express authorization from Congress. Which is how it's supposed to be, after all! Congress declares the war, and the President fights it. Too many folks today think "the President declares the war," but that's not what our Constitution says -- our Constitution makes Congress declare war precisely so that an Executive doesn't get too powerful. Congress has largely abrogated this duty over the decades, but they'll get back on track, if enough of us speak out. Ideally, they'll have no damn choice.

Meanwhile, our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) put out decent payday lending rules in 2017 while Richard Corddray was still in charge, so naturally this Administration's now-defanged CFPB wants to put out new payday lending rules that roll back protections for good Americans against financial predators. Because freedom! I'm sure the same folks who reflexively say "if you can't do the time don't do the crime" about various worthwhile criminal justice reform initiatives will say "if you can't pay back the loan, don't get the loan" about payday lending rules, though they'd vastly overestimate the financial options available to the poorer working families whom payday lending corporations target with their 300 percent loans. Such folks always attack the victims of injustice rather than the perps, which isn't very "law and order" of them. Stop Payday Predators helps you tell our CFPB to reject its own efforts to expose more good Americans to payday loan predators.

In other news, our Administration is trying to roll back offshore drilling regulations our government put in place after the 2010 Spillageddon in the Gulf. You remember that, right? Almost five million barrels of oil spilled, almost $100 million lost by the Louisiana shrimp industry, all those animals coated in oil and dying of organ damage and hypothermia? This Administration, in its zeal to serve executives and only executives, would dramatically loosen testing requirements for the blowout preventers that would, as their name suggests, prevent another Deepwater Horizon blowout from happening. What is it about oil CEOs that makes them act like their mamas never taught them to clean up their own messes? Maybe it's the feeling that we might be able to power our nation without them! Anyway, Environmental Action helps you tell our Department of Interior to scuttle its own plans to roll back oil drilling safety protections.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Department of Justice to stop using the "Black Identity Extremist" as an excuse to spy on peaceful black protestors, then Free Press still helps you do that. You'd think our FBI would be more obsessed with unpeaceful white supremacists, since there seem to be more of them now than there were a few years ago and I wonder what changed? But, alas, our FBI still sees the actually-wronged trying to work within our democratic processes to make it right and calls that evil, as they've done virtually since their inception. But if they would take police brutality more seriously, they might find they have fewer black protestors to spy upon, and maybe they can get more important work done. Then again, spying on and harassing black protestors tends to create more of them, which means more money for spying and harassment, ad nauseam. After all, why solve problems when you can partake in endless dramas instead?

Action: concerning discrimination, pollution, health care, and our Grand Canyon.

The House Judiciary Committee held hearings last week on H.R. 5, the Equality Act, a bill which would extend the protections of the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act (among other laws) to gay and transgender folks. Because yes, landlords can reject you just for being gay or transgender, and so can employers, schools, and banks, and they should only be able to reject you for good reasons -- like, you know, being a bad tenant, employee, student, or borrower. So don't get flummoxed by all the whining right-wingers do about people being "forced" to hire gays when they're bad workers, not just because the Equality Act won't compel anyone to do that, but because you don't have a "right" to a certain kind of neighbor or student or employee if your "right" is all about denying other people their rights. So People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to support all Americans' rights by passing the Equality Act.

Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania state legislature is contemplating a swarm of pro-pollution bills -- namely, HB 430, HB 509, HB 762, HB 806, and HB 1055 -- and the Sierra Club helps you tell your PA state legislator to protect our air and water by rejecting these bills. How would these bills make our air and water dirtier? Mainly by giving the legislature veto power over clean air and clean water regulations issued by the Executive branch-- but also by rubber-stamping drilling permits whenever the state Department of Environmental Protection has a backlog, which surely wouldn't prompt gas and oil drilling corporations to flood the DEP with bogus permits, would it? And also by mandating a "collaborative" approach to regulating, rather than a "punitive" one, an approach I guess they'd also have us adopt with burglars, rapists, and murderers. The polluters have lost the argument, but they won't concede defeat unless we make them.

In other news, H.R. 1948/S. 518, the Lymphedema Treatment Act, would mandate that Medicare cover certain items used in treating lymphedema, including compression garments and bandaging systems. Lymphedema, as you may know, occurs when a blocked lymph node traps lymphatic fluid somewhere in the body, causing swelling in soft tissues. It might not end there, though: after swelling, you might get discoloration of the skin, dermal thickening, or ulcers (among other things) and you'd also be at a higher risk for infections. Lymphedema is often a side effect of cancer treatments that compromise the lymphatic system; there's no cure as of yet, but folks with lymphedema can manage the condition somewhat. And an astounding 58 out of 100 Senators (including 18 Republicans) seem to agree that Medicare should cover some of the equipment used to treat lymphedema, so Breast Cancer Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to help lymphedema sufferers get the treatment they need by passing the Lymphedema Treatment Act.

Finally, our Administration still has a jones to open up our Grand Canyon to uranium mining, even though such mining would pollute the Colorado River, and therefore also the drinking and irrigation water upon which close to 40 million good folks depend. But H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Protection Act, would permanently shield over a million acres of public land surrounding the Canyon from mining leases. The 20-year moratorium on uranium mining in the Canyon has certainly helped matters, but why not do better? Because our President believes that public lands exist only to make some boss, somewhere, some money? Because our Senate insists on inhabiting the wrong side of history, and our House might be too timid to oppose them? Because "free" markets and "socialism"? Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our Grand Canyon by passing the Grand Canyon Centennial Protection Act.

Penny Rants for Sunday, May 5, 2019: special "Our Glorious Elites still suck!" edition.

Ho hum, our President overcharges our government, and therefore you and I, for services rendered to our government at our President's Mar-a-Lago resort -- including an infamous $1,000 liquor tab. This means, essentially, that our White House "pays a bill" and our President "reaps the revenue." Nice work if you can get it! I was about to ask what insignificant or imaginary plaints beginning with "well what about" will fill the mouths of our President's votaries when they hear this news, and then I thought, "why bother? They're a minority, and we should ignore them -- according to their own feelings about minorities!" But that would all be a bit glib, really -- whenever our President "sticks it to the man," these folks imagine it could be them "sticking it to the man," even though they'd actually be sticking it to themselves. Could this disconnect have come about because our government has, for many years, given nothing to its owners but the back of its hand?

Speaking of Presidential corruption, apparently Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller wrote Attorney General William Barr twice about the latter's misleading summaries of the Special Prosecutor's report. And after the second letter, Mr. Barr called Mr. Mueller and said told him to call him if he had an issue. (Mr. Barr himself told this story, to Congress, so no use proclaiming TEH FAKE NEWZ!!!!!) Of course, the answer to "what's with the letter?" is obvious: a letter puts Mr. Mueller's frustrations in writing, and writing is, of course, harder to ignore than the he-said-he-said of a phone call. Mr. Barr went on to say that Mr. Mueller was really upset with (guess who?) the media, although, again -- and here we go back to "what's with the letter"! -- Mr. Mueller apparently didn't even mention the media in his correspondence Mr. Barr. And then Mr. Barr did what they all do when they're caught doing wrong -- acted "peeved" about the whole thing. Once again, we find that the kind of folks who accuse everyone else of whining do most of the whining themselves.

And speaking of that: I give Kyle Kondik at Sabato's Crystal Ball a lot of credit, not just for saying that assessing a candidate's "electability" is "like nailing Jell-O to a wall," but also for reminding us that the very fact of our current Administration "presents a great counter-argument to the idea that campaign professionals and pundits can confidently determine in advance who is electable to the presidency and who is not." I'd go further: Our Glorious Elites constantly tell us that actual liberals aren't "electable" because if they didn't, we might elect more of them, and get more good things done, rather than keep settling for the hostage's choice of weak tea from Democrats or poison from Republicans. I mean, we should take heart that they used to say Ronald Reagan was too extreme to win the Presidency! About 100 million Americans don't vote; if an actual liberal can capture even five percent of them, maybe the word "electable" will have a definition that better approximates reality.

Action: concerning Medicare-for-All, the For the People Act, and internet freedom.

The House of Representatives has begun to hold hearings on H.R. 1384/S. 1129, the Medicare for All Act, and they've taken some well-deserved flack for inviting a mere one Medicare-for-All supporter to testify at these hearings, but that's something we can counteract, by letting Public Citizen help us tell our House Reps to get health care for all Americans by supporting the Medicare-for-All Act. We spend more money, on crappier health care, than any other highly-developed nation, and tens of millions of Americans still don't have health insurance -- but heaven forfend we pass a bill that even right-wing think tank Mercatus Center says will save us money, because SOSHULIZM!!!!! Seriously, if you talked only to politicians and their "liberal" media enablers, you'd think Americans don't like Medicare-for-All. But if you talk to real Americans who live outside the Beltway, you'd find a nation full of people who've had it up to here with how badly private health insurance corporations have bollocksed everything up.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act, then Sign for Good still helps you do that. H.R. 1 would enact a suite of necessary reforms for which we've already agitated in our support for other bills; these reforms include automatic voter registration, national same-day voter registration, national early voting, prohibitions on various forms of vote suppression, state redistricting reform commissions, campaign finance disclosure for large donors, and public campaign financing -- among many others! Why would someone oppose these reforms? Perhaps because they worry that they'll start losing elections if we pass these reforms -- so it may be no coincidence that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has said the bill won't come up for a vote in the Senate because, and I quote, "I get to decide what we vote on." It's well past time to make him irrelevent, and H.R. 1 is one way to do that.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to restore internet freedom by passing H.R. 1644/S. 682, the Save the Internet Act, then the Electronic Frontier Foundation still helps you do that. The Save the Internet would restore your internet freedom by wiping out the FCC's 2017 net neutrality repeal and reinstating the FCC's 2015 Open Internet Order that codified net neutrality protections into law, and thus allowed you, good citizen, to go where you want to go on the internet, rather than have your favorite websites blocked and throttled by big telecom corporations. But what's that, you say? The FCC called their 2017 net neutrality repeal the "Restoring Internet Freedom" order? Yeah, they meant the "freedom" of corporations to block, censor, and slow down websites, which means they get more freedom than you do, again. As Americans, we don't need to put up with that.

Action: concerning war in Yemen, Venezuela, and Iran.

Word on the street sayas the Senate will vote today (Thursday) on whether to override our President's veto of the Yemen war resolution, so you can call your Senators today, using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or on the bottom of this page, if you're on a smartphone). We would need over a dozen more Republican Senators to vote our way this time, but we keep telling them, they'll know they're bucking the popular will if they keep standing with our President. Folks get this twisted by thinking of our President as "Commander-in-Chief," but our Constitution only charges him with the duty of prosecuting a war, not deciding when to go to war. And why should we be in Yemen? Because we like famine and bombing school buses? Because we like fighting people who fight al-Qaeda better than almost anyone on Earth? If the answers are "no," our duty is clear.

It's not just Yemen, though: Administration-supported opposition forces apparently failed to engineer a coup in Venezuela earlier this week, and if I may say so, this most recent coup attempt makes the folks who put Hugo Chavez out of office for a few days in 2002 look like super-geniuses. Our President sure knows how to pick a winner! He must think this is like the business world, where you pick losers and then make sure someone else pays you for your loss. Anyway, H.R. 1004/S.J.Res. 11, the Prohibiting Unauthorized Military Action in Venezuela Resolution of 2019, would do pretty much what its title says: prohibit our Administration from spending money to wage war in Venezuela unless it gets specific authorization to do so from our Congress -- again, as our Constitution mandates. So Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop any Administration efforts to wage unconstitutional war in Venezuela.

And it ain't just Venezuela, either: our Administration continues to rattle sabers with Iran, imposing tighter economic sanctions and designating Iran's Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization, which sure will make a lot of other militaries jealous. President Obama actually had Iran handled with the multination nuclear deal, but of course our current President pulled us out of that deal, and our Secretary of State has lately asserted that the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) already gives our President authority to attack Iran. However, H.R. 2354/S. 1039, the (guess what) Prevention of Unconstitutional War With Iran Act of 2019, would keep our Administration from waging war on Iran without (guess what) explicit Congressional authorization, so the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to prevent our Administration from waging unconstitutional war on Iran.

Action: concerning corporate welfare, government spying, and our President's tax returns.

H.R. 1711/S. 780, the No Tax Breaks for Outsourcing Act, would do a great deal to stop the flow of corporate money into overseas tax havens. The bill would end the practice of "corporate inversion" -- by which American corporations merge with foreign corporations in order to "become" foreign corporations and avoid paying taxes here -- by treating all corporations that do most of their business here (or if most of the shareholders haven't changed) as American corporations. The bill would also subject "offshore" profits to the same corporate tax rate as domestic profits (although of course it would continue to exclude foreign taxes paid). Afraid to act on this bill because Republicans won't pass it? "Republicans won't pass it" is the very reason to act on this bill -- let them explain how pro-corporate, and anti-person, they are! CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight real tax evasion by passing the No Tax Breaks for Outsourcing Act.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our government to stop spying on journalists covering our Administration's ongoing humanitarian crisis at our Southern border, then Progress America (among other organizations) still helps you do that. Various immigration-related government agencies have been monitoring journalists and then handing over the data to our Department of Homeland (sic) Security (sic); anyone think maybe getting a warrant before spying on people would be a good idea? Or is that too quaint? To those who would say that we shouldn't bother getting warrants because the situation is "so dire," I would ask: why would we think journalists covering the humanitarian crisis is causing the crisis, or exacerbating it? And to those who exclaim OBUMMER GASSEDZ TEH CHILDRENZ!!!!!, I would merely say that changing the subject concedes the point.

Finally, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell our Treasury Secretary to stop preventing our House of Representatives from getting our President's tax returns. People who call the House's attempt to get these tax returns a "WITCH HUNT!" should do three things: a) slap themselves, b) consider that calling something like this a "witch hunt" insults the memory of all the good women who died in real witch hunts, and c) recall that every Presidential nominee since Richard Nixon in 1968 has voluntarily released their tax returns. Frankly, what little we know of his tax returns suggests he's broken the law multiple times over the years, and the only folks who think he won't release them because he's under audit are the folks who want to believe it. And no, this doesn't set a "bad precedent" for the rest of America, because anyone might have to answer for their law-breaking at any time.

Action: concerning voting rights, clean water, and paycheck fairness.

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk and state legislators stop denying prisoners the right to vote. Why? Because denying prisoners the right to vote gives governments the power to deny the vote to whomever they can throw in jail. Could it be a coincidence that America not only incarcerates more people than any other nation on Earth, but incarcerates a disproportionate number of Americans of color? Even if it is actually coincidence, there's no denying that the result is racist. And there's another problem: the census counts prisoners for the purpose of apportioning Congressional districts, which means the unscrupulous can pack prisoners into rural districts and deny them a voice in those districts! If you're inclined to retort that we've always denied prisoners the right to vote, please re-read the previous four sentences, in which I explain why that's a bad idea. And maybe slap yourself.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to reject the proposed Pebble Mine in Alaska's Bristol Bay area, then the Alaska Wilderness League still helps you do that. You probably thought this was all over when Scott Pruitt's EPA announced its own lack of support for the mine, didn't you? But that only meant Pebble Mine supporters would try to get their foot in another door, hence the Army Corps of Engineers' public commenting period. You already know that Pebble Mine would not only pollute Bristol Bay waters, but kill the world-renowned sockeye salmon industry that thrives there -- which means, not incidentally, that Pebble Mine would also be a job-killer. But you probably also know that Pebble Mine is also the kind of project that might not ever get built, but will enable someone to bilk someone else out of a lot of money. Your comment could help stop all of that.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass H.R. 7/S. 270, the Paycheck Fairness Act, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. The House passed its version last month, with only seven Republican votes -- to think that only seven Republican House Reps can use this vote to tout themselves as moderates! In the Senate, of course, it's worse -- Republicans hold 53 of 100 seats, and of those, I can see two who would vote for the bill. That doesn't mean we give up, though -- it means we inform them of our will, again and again and again. And the Paycheck Fairness Act would make it easier for women to find out their bosses are paying them less than their male counterparts for no good reason. You'd think that'd be a conservative solution -- you know, to give good Americans tools to help themselves. Of course, today's Republicans are reactionaries, not conservatives. But that's just another reason to keep fighting.

Action: concerning discrimination, government spying, and internet privacy.

Sadly, pro-discrimination bills are advancing in the Tennessee state legislature -- HB 1274/SB 1499 would force the state to help localities defend their bathroom bills, SB 1297 would call the mere presence of a transgender person in a locker room an "indecent exposure" incident, and SB 1304 would let adoption agencies discriminate against particular parents as an act of "religious" "conscience." You'd think state legislators would have something better to do than make it harder for gay and transgender folks to live their lives! But this is now the hill far-right religious bigots will die on. The good news, I guess, is that they've already died on so many other hills, but that's only because we fought them, and kept fighting them after it seemed we lost. Hence the Tennessee Equality Project helps you tell Tennessee state legislators to oppose HB 1274 and oppose SB 1297, SB 1304, and SB 1499. And if you're in Tennessee, you can join protests at the capitol; you can get more information here and here. The legislature will start deliberating on all these bills today, so the quicker you act, the better we'll do. Good hunting!

Meanwhile, H.R. 1942/S. 936, the Ending Mass Collection of Americans' Phone Records Act, would, as its title suggests, stop our National Security Agency from collecting American phone records without a warrant. Proponents of government spying always gloss over those last three words, "without a warrant," in their never-ending efforts to smear those of us who respect our Constitution as "weak on terror," but no one opposes law enforcement carrying out its duties in a lawful manner. And considering how quickly our government can get warrants to investigate terror activities, you have to wonder why our government has needed more power -- and if you concluded that they "need" that power so as to silence its opponents and smear protestors as "terrorists" (or "socialists"!), I wouldn't blame you. So the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ending Mass Collection of Americans' Phone Records Act.

Finally, word on the street is that Congress is trying to draft online privacy legislation -- but that Congressfolk are already giving in to big telecom corporations. Not that this is a tremendous surprise, if you recall that the Republican-dominated Congress nullified FCC internet privacy regulations in 2017 using a "resolution of disapproval." Given our Congressfolk's propensity to wilt before the prospect of campaign contributions (or campaign contributions for potential opponents), we will no doubt have to lend some steel to their spines, hence Fight for the Future helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass internet privacy legislation that puts us, and not big corporations, in charge of our private information. That link has a lot of good information, such as Mr. Snowden's statement that "(a)rguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say." Indeed.

Around the table: how quickly Wall Street bonuses outpace the minimum wage, and other horrible truths.

Sen. Sanders says folks in prison should be able to vote, and gets an earful from center and right. Opponents center and right whine WHAT ABOUT TEH MURDURURZ ANDZ TEH TERRORIZTZ!!!!!, but they say that only to provoke rage in people. If folks in prison can vote, our government won't be able to throw people into prison to keep them from voting them out. Note well that the "war on drugs" mainly throws black and brown folks into prison, and you'll begin to see what that means.

Aimee Picchi at CBS News notes that if the minimum wage had grown at the same rate as Wall Street bonuses have grown since 1985, it'd be $33.51/hour today. And minimum wage workers do so much more for America than banksters do! No use whining that the minimum wage has gone up 116% since 1985, not just because it ignores Wall Street bonuses going up about 1,000 percent over the same time, but because inflation has gone up over 136% during that time. Something's tricking down, but it sure ain't wealth.

Fox News's Andrew Napolitano says that not only did our President obstruct justice numerous times during the Mueller investigation, his obstruction is also "immoral," because his obstruction didn't even "save a human life or to preserve human freedom" but merely "to save him from the consequences of his own behavior." Naturally Fox News relegated these insights to the internet, like all cable news corporations do when they don't want to rock the boat, but Mr. Napolitano's condemnation is still worth hearing -- and repeating.

You recall that deal that prohibits the IRS from offering free filing services to good Americans as long as private corporations like TurboTax offer the service? Well, it seems that Intuit (TurboTax's parent corporation) has inserted code on TurboTax's website that keeps Google from helping you find that free service!. So, in short: TurboTax has an agreement to keep the IRS from offering free filing services to taxpayers, says it'll offer the service instead, and then keeps you from seeing it in search engines. Nice work if you can get it! (Sadly for those who insist the "free" market must be allowed to solve every problem, H&R Block is doing the same thing.)

We learn from Motherboard that Twitter doesn't ban white supremacists from its platform the way it bans ISIS from its platform because the algorithms it uses to ban ISIS only catch a few peaceful Arabic-language sites, while a white supremacist ban would catch more than a few Republican politicians. And? You have a First Amendment right not to be put in jail by your government, but you do not have a First Amendment right to use Twitter, and if you think Twitter's banning you for no good reason, you have to prove it. I think right-wingers get so angry about the prospect of Twitter banning them because they can't prove it. I just wish their anger didn't scare Twitter into weakness. (And, ah, one more time: Twitter should hire people to moderate their boards instead of counting on computer software to do that. Hiring people is job creation, after all, and if Twitter can't pay people to do that very important work, then maybe Twitter shouldn't survive. Why is it always left to the liberal to be the hardass these days?)

Finally, George Goehl at The Guardian says something that should be fairly obvious in America: that if Democrats would fight big ag factory farms and all the pollution they cause, they'd win back rural voters. Of course, Democrats are counting on all that factory farm donation money, so they won't do something that might actually win back rural voters -- they'll go on pretending to be Republicans-lite about crime and drugs and immigration and "right-sizing regulations," which hasn't ever fooled anyone, really.

Action: concerning health care, food inspection, and cable fees.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1384/S. 1129, the Medicare for All Act, then Peoples Action still helps you do that. What would we gain by expanding Medicare to include all Americans -- you know, besides better and cheaper health care that leaves no good Americans out in the cold? We would get more power over our lives! How much power do you have over your health insurer when they slam you with a surprise bill? Can you go get yourself a better health insurance corporation? Not when you get health insurance through your job, and not when a mere five health insurance corporations cover over half of all insured, and not when buying insurance by yourself would cost you a lot more than what you're paying now. Now what would happen if your government slammed you with a surprise bill? You can fight that -- you can embarrass them in the media, and you might be able to get people fired, or even get people voted out. All we need, as Americans, is a fighting chance. The Medicare for All Act would help give us one.

Meanwhile, our Administration, ever sensitive to big ag bosses and their need for gilded plumbing in their 19th vacation homes, has proposed slashing federal pork inspectors by 40%, so that big ag corporations don't "suffer" from the PR headaches of poisoned food, never mind how much the rest of us actually suffer from poisoned food. Food poisoning is one of the few things that can get substantial coverage from our drama-addicted media, so naturally this Administration wants to relieve them of their responsibility not to make their customers sick. Also, our Administration would let big ag corporations use their own employees instead of federal inspectors -- think their employees might have some incentive not to anger their bosses with news of pus and bile and feces in their meat? -- and would speed up slaughter inspection lines because of course they would. Hence CREDO helps you tell our Department of Agriculture to abandon its plans to cut inspection workers and let more big ag corporations to inspect their own meat.

Finally, you love getting surprise fees on your cable bill, right? Well, H.R. 1220, the TRUE Fees Act, would make that a less ubiquitous occurence by forcing big telecom corporations to include most of their fees in their advertised price and to break down their electronic bills so that the consumer can see all the fees and taxes in their bill. The bill would also make big telecom corporations give consumers at least 21 days' notice before jacking up any fees, and if any consumers don't like it, they can end their contract with those big telecoms without any penalties. (Admittedly that latter part would mean more if big telecoms didn't have monopolies in most areas.) And the bill would also void forced arbitration clauses in customer contracts; we should get rid of forced arbitration clauses (which, as you likely know, deny you your day in court and put you in a "court" more to the corporation's liking) every chance we get. So Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to support price transparency by passing the TRUE Fees Act.

Around the table: stories about public banking, taxes, news deserts, retail worker activism, and "stability."

"I've Seen Goldman Sachs From the Inside," writes Nomi Prins at Truthout. "We Need Public Banks." There's a Mack truck-sized opening for the "fiscally responsible" "moderate" to point out that relying on banksters for infrastructure funding is far more expensive than relying on public banks. And it's no use complaining that public banks would be corrupt too, because as a citizen you can do more about public bank corruption. When they say don't let the perfect murder the good, this is kinda what they mean.

Misha Hill and Lorena Roque at the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy ask the right question about the "opportunity zones" created by the 2017 tax "reform": "Opportunity for Whom?". The answer: "opportunity" for big developers to get even more corporate welfare from the taxpayer, as they push folks of color out of historically black and brown neighborhoods. And I'll bet more than a few of them are keeping buildings empty to get even more corporate welfare from the taxpayer, too. (Stick around for the last five paragraphs, though, to learn that there really are solutions to urban poverty, and that they even go beyond "stop handing out corporate welfare.")

Daily Yonder publisher Dee Davis explains how her area of East Kentucky became a "news desert." If you're thinking "but now you can get any viewpoint on social media at the click of a button," think again -- the Clinton/Bush the Lesser era saw the mushrooming of religious broadcast stations at the low end of the FM dial, stations now "weaponized by conservative think tanks and by Evangelical church networks," and if you've watched Fox News for any length of time you'll recognize how "the emotional button-pushing remains constant" on these stations. Wishing for a time when you could read two real local newspapers in almost any area of the country may sound like a conservative dream, and maybe it is, but it's also a democratic one.

Bryce Covert at The Nation describes the works of Rise Up Retail, a group of retail workers who have agitated for better treatment under the law, many of them after losing their jobs at retail chains owned by hedge-fund managers. You know hedge-fund managers are vampires, redistributing the wealth of their workers upward to themselves and hollowing out the corporations they run, but you may not know that Rise Up Retail is getting good bills a hearing, like S. 3170 in New Jersey, the so-called "Toys 'R' Us" bill that would mandate more severance and notice for workers at corporations about to go under. What hedge fund managers did to Sears and Toys 'R' Us (and Ms. Covert goes into great detail about that) ain't illegal, but it should be.

Finally, I know you all had a good laugh when former Clinton impeacher Kenneth Starr said that impeaching our current President would be "so bad for the country," but let's not let pass his explanation, such as it is, of why impeaching our current President would be "so bad": "(t)he American people want stability." "Stability"? What about this Administration has ever evinced stability? Someone tell Mr. Starr that a rhetorical hostage situation only works in America if we're not already spitting laughter.

Action: concerning Social Security and economic policy.

Social Security Trustees released their annual report on Monday, and you've seen all the crappy headlines: ZOMG TEH SOSHUL SECURITEEZ CANTZ PAYZ TEH FULL BENEFITZ BY TEH 2035!!!! and ZOMG TEH COSTS WILLZ EXCEEDZ TEH INCOMEZ NEXT YEARZ!!!!! If you're old enough to remember the ZOMG TEH SOSHUL SECURITEEZ WILL GOEZ BROKEZ BY 2016!!!!, then you won't be impressed. But if you're acquainted with simple arithmetic, you can see that raising the ceiling on payroll taxes so that income over $132,900 can be taxed into the system will not only help keep Social Security solvent, but also allow us to expand its benefits so our seniors can have a more dignified retirement. And ideally we're all going to be seniors one day, so what we do for them we do for us, too -- particularly since we're all paying into the system now! Social Security Works helps you tell Congress to protect and improve Social Security by passing H.R. 860/S. 269, the Social Security 2100 Act.

Meanwhile, H.R. 2176, the Return to Prudent Banking Act, would (among other things) bring back the famed Glass-Steagall "wall" separating your bank account from a bank's risky investment activities. You still remember the big bankster meltdown of 2008, I trust? And you remember how politicians all went on the TV to blame anyone but the banksters? And you remember how banksters barely suffered for their evil, but the taxpayer had to bail them out? And you remember how well banksters have done in the succeeding years under a weak Democratic President and then an evil Republican one? Well, forcing banks to keep their speculative investments from crapping all over your savings and your investments would be a good way to start bringing the banksters to heel, as it is the duty of all civilized people to do. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back some sanity to banking by passing the Return to Prudent Banking Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to keep Stephen Moore off our Federal Reserve Board of Governors, then a group of good-government organizations still helps you do that. You know we should keep Mr. Moore off our Federal Reserve because he's long advocated the kind of economic flimflam that has destroyed state and local governments and served only to redistribute worker income upward to bosses. You may also have heard that he owes our government some $75,000 in unpaid taxes and that he owes his ex-wife four times that amount in alimony. His defenders will say these are the kinds of mistakes "big people" make all the time when they have a lot of money -- which only argues for not letting people get that "big" in the first place, as well for rejecting the me-first-and-only economic theories that cause all these "big people" "mistakes."

Action: concerning pollution and paycheck fairness.

The Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell big money-managing corporations BlackRock and Vanguard to pressure ExxonMobil and Chevron to move toward renewable energy at their next shareholder meetings. BlackRock and Vanguard are two of the biggest retirement-fund managers in the world, after all, and their agitation can get even ExxonMobil and Chevron moving in the right direction. Of course, these pension funds might have your money in them, so the enterprising corporatist might retort DON'T MAKEZ UZ DO TEH SOLARZ AND TEH WINDZ OR YOUR RETIREMENTZ WILLZ BE TEH GONEZ!!!!! Maybe you don't want your pension fund dependent on a future where coal-oil-and-gas belch pollution into our air and water with impunity, but consider, also, that a) energy is not the only sector of the economy BlackRock and Vanguard invest in and b) coal is doing badly and renewable energy is doing rather well, so any supposed impact on your pension might just be a bit overstated.

Meanwhile, the Adani Group is still trying to put a coal mine on the edge of Australia's Great Barrier Reef -- which has suffered enough over the years, frankly -- but they're going to need a big corporation to insure their mine. A few big insurance corporations, to their credit, have said no -- but Liberty Mutual hasn't, yet, so Sum of Us helps you tell Liberty Mutual not to do business with the corporation that would destroy the Great Barrier Reef. It's not enough to describe the unique ecosystem the Reef supports -- plenty of bad people act like that's all stupid, and too many good people believe them. Fact is, the fuel they make goes away, and the money they make goes away, but the Great Barrier Reef can last forever, if we simply avoid destroying it -- particularly for a source of fuel that contributes less and less to our economy and more and more to the pollution that's destroying this planet. I hope that all doesn't sound too conservative.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. Women still make 80 cents for every dollar men make, on average, and when you adjust for factors like experience and similar qualifications, women still don't make a dollar for every dollar men make. The Paycheck Fairness Act would, among other things, keep employers from retaliating against workers who discuss their pay with each other, since that's generally the only way women find out they're getting shafted. Of course, Mob Boss Mitch, who "get(s) to decide what we vote on" in the Senate, won't want to hold a vote on the Paycheck Fairness Act. Maybe he'll grace us with another op-ed (which no mob boss likes writing!) intoning seriously about "trial lawyers," which they always talk about when they've got nothing. Still, let's do our duty; at least it'll make them look bad, again, and that'll add up.

Action: concerning war with Iran, the For the People Act, and the Save the Internet Act.

Our Administration isn't just saber-rattling with Venezuela these days -- they've also set their sights on Iran, by designating part of the Iranian military as a "terrorist organization" and refusing to rule out attacking Iran under that 2001 AUMF that Congress should have repealed long ago. Hence S. 1039, the aptly-named Prevention of Unconstitutional War with Iran Act, would defund any Administration effort to attack Iran without explicit Congressional approval. There are plenty of reasons to dislike the Iranian government (they're fundamentalists, they're a police state, they held 52 good Americans hostage for over a year from 1979-81, etc.), but those are not necessarily reasons to wage war on Iran. And we all saw how the occupation of Iraq went; now try that in a country with three times the population. Win Without War helps you tell your Senators to pass S. 1039 and thus slow our Administration's bloodlust for war with Iran.

Meanwhile, Sign for Good helps you tell the Senate to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act, and thus protect our right to vote. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (E-KY), as you know, has said he won't bring H.R. 1 up for a vote in the Senate despite its passage by the House because, and I quote, "I get to decide what we vote on." Ah, no: the American people decide what you vote on, and if the American people want voting rights reform, campaign finance reform, redistricting reform, and ethics reform, there is no "I get to decide." We have become such a cynical people that we just shrug when a guy like Mob Boss Mitch says "I get to decide what we vote on." But if we act in numbers they can't ignore, we can change that. Toward that end, you might want to call Sen. McConnell's office, either in D.C. or at one of his Kentucky contacts; you can find that information at his website. Don't worry if you're not a Kentucky resident; no one put a gun to his head and made him leader of the entire Senate, after all.

Finally, speaking of things Mob Boss Mitch doesn't want to do, the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1644/S. 682, the Save the Internet Act, and thus restore net neutrality protections for good Americans. The FCC repealed its Open Internet Order in 2017, as you know, and thus allowed big telecom corporations to block websites, make them load more slowly, and otherwise herd you into junk news ghettoes. You may not have seen very much of that lately, but that means nothing -- any unearned power gets abused eventually, and no freedom disappears so completely as one that disappears slowly. Yes, your right to go where you want to go on the internet is a freedom, and some corporation's "right" to make you go where they want you to go so they can make more money is not a freedom. At least, it ain't freedom for us -- and protecting our freedom is our government's job.

Around the table: a Presidential veto over Yemen, and other revolting developments.

Ho hum, our President vetoes resolution aiming to end our involvement in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen, calling it a "dangerous attempt to weaken my constitutional authorities." Ugh, one more time: Congress authorizes war, not the President. Also, too, he suggests the resolution will "endanger() the lives of American citizens and brave service members," which is, also, exactly the opposite of how it works -- no one kills us out of jealousy; they kill us because our government can't stop interfering in their affairs. And the safest way to protect our soldiers? Stop sending them off to stupid wars.

It's about time someone noted that our "liberal" media constantly insist that our agitation for better and more liberal policies constitutes a "purity test," but never use that term to describe the centrist insistence that liberals toe the centrist line. Of course the policies we advocate, like Medicare-for-All, just so happen to be popular across the ideological spectrum -- Medicare-for-All even gains support from a considerable number of conservatives. So "purity tests" means "elites being pressured in ways they don’t like." Well, waaaaaaah.

In a related note, Peter Bloom at Common Dreams says that Sen. Sanders's Fox News town hall "revealed a different way of bringing the country together" -- namely, a "new type of political unity -- one based on a shared desire to transform a corrupt system rather than tribal party allegiances." Centrists would no doubt agree that we can only create "national unity" by appealing to a broad cross-section of the populace, but they somehow think a broad cross-section of the populace wants Social Security and Medicare cuts and constant appeasement of the farthest right Republicans. I think we've spent a long time tabulating exactly what Americans do want, and it sure ain't whatever keeps Our Glorious Elites in power.

Proving once again that a little alliteration can be a dangerous thing, our Administration announces a new round of sanctions against the "troika of tyranny," Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Gosh, no one sits on their laurels like a right-winger does -- Venezuela is the only nation on that list that hasn't been a right-wing bête noire for decades. I also presume the inclusion of Nicaragua might be in advance of a few gazillion ads showing Bernie Sanders in Nicaragua in the early '80s, which they may be overestimating as a crippling blow.

Finally, Sen. Mitch McConnell (E-KY) launches his re-election effort with a jab at Democrats over that Obama Supreme Court nomination Mr. McConnell's Senate refused to take up. I'm not going to lie and say it's not funny, but whom, exactly, does this convert? This does nothing but anger up the already-angry, and at some point angering up the already-angry simply doesn't work anymore -- particularly if (not that this is likely!) Mr. McConnell gets a decent opponent in 2020.

Action: concerning civil rights, recycling, and tax reform.

S. 1082, the BE HEARD in the Workplace Act, would help good Americans better battle sexual and racial harassment in the workplace. Among other things, it would extend Title VII civil rights protections to all workers, including interns, volunteers, independent contractors and small business workers; it would allow workers to prove harm in sexual harassment cases by proving that the harassment altered the "terms and conditions" of employment; and it would prohibit employers from forcing binding arbitration and non-disclosure agreements upon workers. It would also bring the minimum wage for tipped workers up to the minimum wage level for non-tipped workers, which we ought to do, but the reforms I've listed in the previous sentence would bring a lot of vulnerable workers (yes, interns are profoundly vulnerable at the workplace!) out of the shadows and would get them the tools they need to fight harassment at the workplace. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support working folks by passing the BE HEARD Act.

Meanwhile, in the wake of news reports that the city of Philadelphia sends over half of its curbside recycling off to be incinerated, Penn Environment helps you tell Philadelphia's Mayor and City Council to fix Philadelphia's recycling program. One can't blame Philadelphia's good residents for feeling betrayed at having done their part while the city fails to do theirs -- and to think that the city has the gall to blame its residents for "contamination" (i.e., putting non-recyclables out with recyclables), when Philadelphia's contamination rate is in line with or lower than the national average. The city also suggests that it can't get contracts that are cheap enough or long-term enough, which requires us to believe that a) there just aren't hungry people willing to make their mark in this field and b) contractors have somehow stopped preferring the certainty of a long-term contract. We should say to the city: enough with the excuses already; just do your damn job.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to actually reform our tax system, so that it makes corporations and the rich pay their fair share, then Americans for Tax Fairness still helps you do that. And if your Tea Party uncle tells you that TEH TOP THREE PURCENTZ ALREADY PAYZ MORE THAN HALFZ OFZ ALLZ TEH TAXUZZ!!!!!!, remind him that in the country he grew up in (it's not a stretch to imagine that your Tea Party uncle is fairly old, right?) taxed corporations and the rich a lot harder, and then spent that money building a middle class which could expect a better life for their children and their children's children. Of course, in the country we have now, Our Glorious Elites constantly tell us we can't have nice things like Social Security and Medicare anymore. They're wrong -- good Americans can have these things, as long as billionaires break off some of that money they're currently using to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes.

Action: concerning Muslim bans, birth control, product safety, and taxes.

H.R. 2214/S. 1123, the NO BAN Act, would reverse our President's various Muslim bans and prevent future Presidents from issuing similar travel bans, mainly by amending the Immigration and Nationality Act so that it explicitly prevents discrimination against foreigners based solely on religion. What's that, you say? Our Supreme Court said the Muslim ban wasn't an attack on religious freedom because it also happened to include a few nations our Administration obviously put there to provoke such a ruling? Well, our Supreme Court was wrong, and not just because they simply refused to consider our President's stated intent (to enact a "Muslim ban, but legally") when they've bent over backwards to amplify supposed "intent" in other rulings. They're wrong because a billion Muslims live on Earth and if Islam was really so "violent," ISIS would be as big as pre-World War II Germany. Hence People for the American Way helps you tell our Congressfolk to truly honor our actual religious beliefs by passing the NO BAN Act.

The National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a pair of bills that would increase our lawful access to birth control. H.R. 2182/S. 1086, the Access to Birth Control Act, would require pharmacies to supply birth control medication to anyone who can lawfully get it, regardless of any pharmacist's "religious" "beliefs," since "conscience" doesn't give you the right to discriminate against others. Folks who profess worry that the bill will force pharmacies to dispense birth control medication to folks who can't pay for it or who don't have a prescription in states where the law requires they get one, etc., can go ahead and read previous versions of the bill at Congress.gov to find out they're wrong. Or they can just admit they're trolls. H.R. 2091/S. 1049, the Access to Contraception for Servicemembers and Dependents Act, would expand access to birth control for our soldiers and their dependents, without the cost-sharing schemes that can limit that access.

Did you know our FDA can't get cosmetics off the shelves that have asbestos in them? Even makeup marketed to children? I wouldn't market makeup to children, personally, but if I were so inclined I certainly wouldn't market makeup to children with a chemical scientists have strongly linked to lethal lung diseases. If your Tea Party uncle tells you that of course the FDA can't get cosmetics off our shelves because it's called the Food and Drug Administration, remind him that the law that expanded the FDA's power in 1938 is called the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, and it came about because of (among other things) the mascara "Lash Lure" that purported to give women a permanent eyeliner look but instead blinded them. I'd hate to one day find folks dying of mesothelioma because they used makeup as kids. Anyway, PennPIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to give our FDA the power to remove cosmetics from our store shelves.

S. 1138, the Working Families Tax Relief Act, would expand the Earned Income Tax Credit (or EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (or CTC), by expanding the size of the benefit taxpayers who qualify for the credit would receive. You should distinguish that from right-wing efforts to "expand" the EITC and the CTC so that higher-income folks can get the credit; the effort described in S. 1138 actually helps working families, while the right-wing "expansions" only pretend to. You should also distinguish the Working Families Tax Relief Act from the so-called Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the law that promised tax cuts to the middle class but instead delivered massive tax cuts to rich folks and corporations -- and slammed a lot of middle-class taxpayers with a tax bill this year instead of the tax refund they'd come to expect. The National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the struggle of working families by passing the Working Families Tax Relief Act, because it's a bill that actually lives up to its name.

Action: concerning human rights, war in Venezuela, and our Federal Reserve.

Iranian lawyer/activist Nasrin Sotoudeh faces almost 150 lashes and almost 40 years in prison from the government of Iran, and for what? Well, by the looks of it, it's for a life of fighting for human rights! The charges against her included "being a member of a human rights organization" -- didn't know that was a crime, did you? -- and "encouraging corruption and prostitution," which you know is BS because they lumped them both together! You may also know it's BS because Ms. Sotoudeh has advocated against Iran's law mandating that women wear a head covering (or the hijab). You may recall the Shah of Iran outlawing the hijab (and the chandor, or the flowing robes many Muslim women also wear) in 1936, an act that surely added up when the Islamic revolution threw him out in 1979, but putting women in jail now for advocating against the hijab surely doesn't represent an improvement. Hence Avaaz helps you tell world leaders to put pressure on the Iranian government to release Ms. Sotoudeh.

Our President has been itching for war in Venezuela for some time now, perhaps because a floundering President always needs a war to take good Americans' minds off his incompetence, and possibly because he thinks it'll be as easy as President Reagan's invasion of Grenada in 1983! Of course, if you've been attending the history of American intervention in foreign lands, you'll no doubt think differently about them, and you don't even need to go back very far -- you need only remember how we were to be "greeted as liberators" in Iraq, or how badly Libya's been doing in the wake of our 2011 invasion. Venezuela has nearly 32 million people, at least five million more than Iraq did at the time of our 2003 invasion, and they actually like President Maduro a lot more than our "liberal" media would have you believe. Hence Demand Progress, among others, helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1004, the aptly-named Prohibiting Unauthorized Military Action in Venezuela Act.

CPD Action (among other groups) helps you tell your Senators to reject the potential nomination of right-wing economic blowhard Stephen Moore to our Federal Reserve Board, whenever our President gets around to nominating him. In opposing this nomination, you need not be the kind of fellow who'd lament the fact that no President would ever nominate a really good economist like Moshe Adler or Michael Hudson or Paul Craig Roberts to the Fed. You only need know that Mr. Moore has spent his entire career peddling the kind of economic hogwash with which other politicians have achieved total disaster -- most recently former Kansas Governor Sam Brownback, whose supply-side "experiment" ended in vital state functions (like, you know, education) being chronically-underfunded. We've got enough untalented people making far too many important decisions in our lives; we certainly don't need one more.

Around the table: concerning health care and that one Senate seat the Republicans are counting on picking up in 2020.

I appreciate hearing that other countries with private health insurance do a lot better than we do at it simply because they regulate what insurance corporations have to cover and how much doctors can charge for care a lot more aggressively than we do. But I guarantee you that if we pressed for similarly strong regulation instead of Medicare-for-All, right-wingers would call that "socialism," too. After all, they called the Heritage Foundation's health care plan "socialism" once a Democratic President embraced it, and they call everything else they don't like "socialism," so beginning negotiations with what you'll settle for is impossible with these people.

In a related note, we learn from Sarah Lueck at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities that if our Supreme Court does eventually strike down the Affordable Care Act, the Republican plan to replace it -- the so-called Protect Act -- wouldn't live up to its name. Which I'm sure is very surprising! Here's the main wrinkle: the bill would literally ban insurance corporations from throwing people off their rolls for having pre-existing conditions -- but it would also let insurance corporations simply not cover those pre-existing conditions in the first place! It gets worse from there, and is exactly the kind of thing that's going to drive even more good Americans into demanding Medicare-for-All.

Well, this isn't a good look: Fox News's Bret Baier, in a town hall featuring Sen. Bernie Sanders, asks his audience if they really want a "government-run" health care system, and his audience responds with cheers. It's easy to pick on Fox News for running into that wall, but the rest of our "liberal" media would be similarly dumbfounded to discover people who would rather have our government administer health insurance than the private corporation that's likely screwed them over repeatedly, and that's because media people talk to each other far, far more than they talk to regular Americans.

From the "It's Early, But..." file: Mason/Dixon poll finds Roy Moore leading other Republicans in the 2020 Alabama U.S. Senate race. National Republicans think this seat will be an easy pick-up, but I wouldn't be so sure: while Sen. Doug Jones has the same kind of center-right profile that delivered Jon Ossoff to oblivion, he's also the guy who put two of the Birmingham bombers in jail, and perhaps not coincidentally, black voters did turn out in tremendous numbers for him in 2017. Admittedly the other, non-girl-dating Republican candidates in the race would probably have a better shot at beating Mr. Jones than Mr. Moore would.

Finally, scientists at Tel Aviv University create the world's first 3D-printed heart made from "human cells and patient-specific biological materials." 3D printers haven't previously been able to make tissues with blood vessels, and creating an organ from the patient's own tissues reduces the chance that a host will reject a transplanted organ. We've got a long way to go here -- the heart they made is about the size of a cherry and would need unspecified "training" to function like a human heart -- but this is still a big step.

Action: concerning health care, internet freedom, financial predation, and racism.

H.R. 1384/S. 1129, the Medicare for All Act, would expand Medicare to include all Americans; thus the number of Americans who don't have health insurance would go down from 34 million to zero. You've no doubt heard that close to 70% of Americans support Medicare-for-All -- and that this number gets much closer to 50 once some of its putative supporters have trouble explaining how we're going to fund it. Here's all you need to know: Medicare projections have us spending $49 trillion on health care over the next decade, while even the right-wing Mercatus Center says Medicare-for-All will cost less than $33 trillion over that time, which means Medicare-for-All will be less expensive than our current system. Then we capture the lion's share of that $49 trillion, and fight through the inevitable right-wing propaganda campaign against it; I know, I make it sound easy, but we can make it a lot easier by continuing to step up, as both CREDO and Public Citizen both help you do.

Meanwhile, the House has passed H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act, which would roll back the FCC's 2017 net neutrality repeal and reinstate the FCC's 2015 Open Internet Order that established net neutrality as the law of the land. Net neutrality, as you know, is the principle that forces internet service-providing corporations to treat all network traffic neutrally -- without, for example, making websites load more quickly or slowly, or preventing websites from loading at all. The latter example basically describes censorship -- you don't like censorship, right? -- and the former example suggests the kind of internet we'd have if we let big money buy faster access for its junk news and junk culture. So net neutrality might make the big telecom corporations less "free," but it makes citizens more free -- to find alternate viewpoints, or be alternate viewpoints, on our internet. Hence Stop the FCC, Consumer Reports, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to fight for real internet freedom by passing the Save the Internet Act.

In other news, our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau -- which, under this Administration, seems like an evil alternate universe version of its former self -- plans to roll back the payday lender rules it instituted a few years ago. And not because those rules didn't go far enough, though that was a common complaint among many observers -- our Administration, as you know, considers any regulation evil if it might keep a corporation from acting badly; why, it's almost like they think bosses, and not good Americans, are their real constituents! Hence the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell our CFPB to scuttle its own plans to roll back rules that help stop payday lenders from preying on customers. The rules they're trying to roll back would force payday lending corporations to establish if potential customers can pay back loans without being likely to descend into a spiral of debt; is that really so much to ask?

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our FBI to stop targeting black protestors as "black identity extremists," then a consortium of good-government groups (including the ACLU, Demand Progress, and Defending Rights and Dissent) still helps you do that. If "black identity extremist" seems to you an awfully cumbersome phrase -- perhaps, even, so cumbersome as to preclude the possibility that it describes reality -- then, well, you're not alone. But smearing black protestors as part of some insidious larger evil is, sadly, a long-standing tradition in America, particularly in our FBI, whose original director, J. Edgar Hoover, once said that the Black Panthers "represent() the greatest threat to internal security of the country." He said that some 50 years ago, at the height of the Cold War -- and, not incidentally, after black protestors had helped spur our government to pass historic civil rights laws, how sad, that only racism seems to outduel anti-Communist hysteria in America.

Action: concerning taxes, Yemen, and pollution.

You may have heard that the Taxpayer First Act (which passed the House and now awaits consideration in the Senate) would forever prevent our IRS from offering good Americans free tax filing online, like many other nations do; the IRS could do that now but doesn't, in apparent deference to private tax prep corporations like H&R Block and Intuit. But there's really no good reason to prevent the IRS from providing this service to good Americans; if you're waiting to scream SOSHULIZM!!!!! at the idea, well, that ship kinda sailed the day you decided not to be a tax evader. To be sure, the Taxpayer First Act has some pretty good things about it, too -- it would shield low-income working families from private collection actions, for example -- but there's no reason we must swallow poison pills in order to get nice things in America, so Demand Progress helps you tell your Senators to ensure that our IRS can offer free tax filing services to all Americans.

Meanwhile, both our House and our Senate have passed S.J.Res. 7, the resolution mandating that our government end unconstitutional participation in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen -- and word on the street is that our President might actually sign it. It's of no consequence that he might have said he'd "look at" the resolution just so one of his votaries can yell HE ENDEDZ TEH WARZ!!!!! at us a year or so from now, because our duty remains the same: to communicate our will to our President. Hence Just Foreign Policy has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell our President to sign S.J.Res. 7 and get us out of the moral quagmire that is the war on Yemen. We may want to remind him (since his advisors probably won't!) that helping make war on the Houthis in Yemen also just so happens to injure our fight against al-Qaeda, since the Houthis are some of al-Qaeda's bitterest and most effective enemies.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our EPA to reject its plan to undermine the Mercury and Air Toxics Rule, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that -- but be quick about it, because the EPA's comment period ends on Wednesday. If our EPA rolls back these protections, we'll have more pollution in our air, which means we'll also have more asthma, more heart attacks, and more premature deaths. Of course, if mammon is all that matters to them, we could also point out that with all these extra asthma attacks, hearts attacks, and premature deaths we'll have more hospital and ER visits and more missed days of work and school -- and all of that costs money. Of course, it doesn't cost some coal CEO money, so maybe our EPA doesn't care. But duty is duty, and if we talk to our government about the monetary costs of pollution, we can at least corner them.

Finally, the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Senators to extend the electric vehicle tax credit, so that good Americans can continue to get a deduction of up to $7,500 for every electric car they buy. I wouldn't blame you for worrying that this might be corporate welfare, but here's why it isn't: one, electric cars aren't the predominant form of automobile in America; two, electric cars are better for our air and water than cars running on oil; and three, it's perfectly alright for our government to spur production of technologies if they work better than what we've got. I'd take far less seriously the NO MOREZ WELFAREZ FOR TEH TESLAZ!!!!! objection, because any big automobile corporation, not just Tesla, can make an electric car, and thus also benefit from the increased sales that a tax credit would spur. And anyway, what about the actual corporate welfare fossil fuel corporations still get after all these years?

Around the table: from actual frivolous lawsuits to frivolous charges of "domestic terrorism."

Seems like all I do when I talk about the Tennessee legislature is complain, and not without reason, but let's give them kudos for passing an anti-SLAPP bill with teeth. SLAPPs, as you may know, are "strategic lawsuits against public participation," or lawsuits designed only to silence otherwise First Amendment-protected speech, and Tennessee's bill (which only requires the Governor's signature at this point) would require the courts to consider motions to dismiss before allowing lawsuits to proceed any further. Hence, a blow to actual frivolous lawsuits; now if they'd just stop obsessing about gay and transgender folks.

Rod Dreher at The American Conservative does the dying cause of conservatism a solid by locating tyranny in corporate behavior for once. He locates that tyranny largely in corporate abridgment of your privacy and not in, say, laws and regulations that enrich banksters and corporate executives at everyone else's expense -- which latter item would upset conservatives as much as liberals, since conservatives profess an abhorrence for concentrated power -- but baby steps, folks. And I'm glad to hear someone else say that social media has as much power to serve bad governmental actors as it does to liberate us from them. I still think dissent is better off expressed than hidden myself, but I guess that's just one of the things that makes me a liberal.

Ho hum, twice as many Fortune 500 corporations paid zero dollars or less in corporate taxes this year, the first under the Republican tax "reform," than in previous years. Nobody could have predicted that slashing the corporate tax rate without closing very many corporate tax loopholes would have resulted in this! One day we'll get it through our "liberal" media's thick heads that tax breaks for corporations are completely unnecessary and illogical, since corporations already get to deduct expenses before paying taxes. I mean, gosh, how much more of this BS must we take?

Also from the "Nobody Could Have Predicted!" file: our Administration lets private child adoption agencies take federal or state money and turn away Catholic and Jewish parents. Take federal money, follow federal rules, I've always said, and if our laws forbid discrimination, then you can't take federal money and discriminate, period, end of. But maybe in a year or two they can get a Supreme Court decision that explicitly says NO WE ONLY MEANT TEH GAYZ!!!!!

Our Administration apparently considered dropping off all asylum-seeking immigrants in so-called "sanctuary cities," as a sort of punishment to Democratic-leaning urban areas, I suppose, but although I abhor politicians treating people like they exist to be used, I almost sorta wish he'd gone through with it, just so the good folks in those cities could assimilate the new immigrants with no problems. Then again, if there'd been even one problem with an asylee in any city, you can bet Fox News would talk about it 24-7 for a week, so maybe this is for the best after all. (What a surprise to learn that this was all Stephen Miller's idea! Stephen Miller has a face even a mother could punch.)

Finally, few-if-any politicians handle abuse better than Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), but I wish she'd handled this incident a little differently. Upon being called a "domestic terrorist" by the Ohio College Republican Federation, she responded by saying "this puts me in danger every time" and "we get a spike in death threats" whenever some right-winger says something that awful. I'm absolutely certain she's not lying, but no one wants to hear a politician talk about how hard they have it. A better response would have been "I eagerly await hearing that you've actually called law enforcement about this very serious accusation and that you're not just making an ass of yourself in public," or "every time you call me a terrorist, you're admitting you can't win an argument with me."

Action: concerning climate change, pollution, and the Electoral College.

Our government can pretend all it wants that climate change isn't happening and pollution isn't making it worse, but we've got other ways to fight it -- like telling big asset managing corporation like BlackRock to divest from fossil fuels, which Sum of Us helps you do. It's a shame we even have to tell folks with money to help us make the world a better place -- hell, we all remember when right-wingers used to say that folks with money need to be "free" from the horrible tethers of taxes and regulations just so they could be "free" to make the world a better place! -- but duty is duty. And BlackRock pumps more money than any other entity into new coal-producing plants (which sure ain't very forward-looking of them!) and BlackRock's fancypants "green" investment funds only comprise some three percent of the corporation's total assets. So, yeah, BlackRock could be doing more, and doing a lot more good.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our EPA to reject its own plan to scuttle the 2011 Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, then Environmental Action still helps you do that. How many times must I tell these pimps! Pollution actually kills people! And over 900,000 good Americans wrote public comments supporting these standards back in the day, which represents the vast majority of comments received about the matter; does the EPA mean to assert that public opinion simply doesn't matter as much as a dying industry's ability to redistribute income to its executives? I kid, of course -- the EPA absolutely means to assert that! The only thing this Administration cares about is other bosses! Maybe this regulatory rollback effort will die in court, like almost all the others have, but we still need to speak up, because even if our voices don't get heard by this Administration, the courts will still need to hear us.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to abolish the Electoral College, then CREDO still helps you do that. My, how trolls come out in force when you advocate for electing our President with the popular vote -- you know, the way we elect Reps and Senators and Mayors and Governors and state legislators and city councilfolk and the local PTA. Mostly the trolls just ignore what you actually say, even when you've preemptively dealt with their objections, but sometimes they also "remind" you that "America isn't a democracy but a constitutional republic," or they might even say "democracy equals mob rule." The latter statement, of course, is code for "most people aren't as good as I am," which is un-American, while the former is merely pedantic -- we call America a democracy because that's what we aspire to be, and stomping all over our aspirations for America really isn't the hill you want everyone to see you dying on.

Action: concerning clean water, Social Security, and the minimum wage.

H.R. 1417/S. 611, the WATER Act, would pay for water and sewer infrastructure restoration in America by hiking the corporate tax rate from 21% to 24.5%, and you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a cellphone) to find your House Reps' phone numbers and call them to tell them to support this bill. And what, exactly, will right-wingers' arguments against this bill sound like? Will they pretend that a hike in the corporate tax rate is a personal tax hike, despite the mountain of recent evidence that a corporate tax cut sure ain't a personal tax cut? Will they demand that "the market" fix our water infrastructure ills, despite the mountain of evidence that whenever "the market" takes over an essential function of our civilization it charges out the wazoo for bad service? No matter; opposing cheap, public, clean water is not the hill any sane person wants to be seen dying on. And the insane people don't get all the say around here.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell our Administration to stop sabotaging Social Security. Our President has pledged not to cut Social Security benefits, which he presents as some great gift to us ("thank you oh thank you sir for not setting this particular house on fire tonight!"), but if he's going to sign onto continued Social Security Administration budget cuts and office closures, then he will, in fact, cut benefits, because the word "benefits" doesn't extend solely to the amount of money in your Social Security check, but also describes the help Social Security can give you when you try to navigate the system, and it gives you a lot less help when the closest offices close (not everyone lives in a city or a suburb, after all!) or have fewer staff. And now they want to start charging fees to replace Social Security cards! I wouldn't blame you for thinking that maybe your taxes already paid for stuff like that.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to help out working families by passing H.R. 582/S. 150, the Raise the Wage Act, then Progress America (among other good-government organizations) still helps you do that. You know the deal: average wages don't rise much more quickly than inflation, if they do at all, and "average" wage increases, just like "average" tax cuts, don't necessarily put more money in your pocket -- most of the wage increases over the last decade have gone to people at the top, and if that ain't income redistribution, then what is? The Raise the Wage Act would hike our federal minimum wage to $15/hour over the next five years, and ultimately raise the minimum wage for tipped and disabled employees so that they get the same minimum wage as everyone else in six years. Just don't call it a "job killer," because the folks at the top are the real job killers.

Action: concerning corporate behavior, law and order, and paycheck fairness.

S. 915, the Reward Work Act, would make corporations ensure that employees comprise at least a third of the seats on their boards of directors, and would also prevent corporations from indulging in stock buybacks, as they've been doing since the 2017 tax "reform" cut their tax rate from 35% to 21%. How many times must I tell these pimps! Corporations don't invest windfalls in their workers, but in executive pay and executive power; if you want a corporation to invest in workers, you have to tax them harder, so that they're faced with the choice of spending money on workers or giving it to our government in taxes. That's how it worked during the New Deal era, after all. And putting more workers on decision-making boards will induce those boards to make better decisions, maybe even decisions reflecting realities in the workplace! So Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Reward Work Act.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: the Senate is mulling SB 149, popularly known as Marsy's Law, which purports to create "victims' rights" in our state Constitution. Maybe that sounds like a good idea, but SB 149 would allow alleged victims to withhold information sought by the accused, which violates our constitutional habeus corpus rights, and would further mandate a "prompt conclusion" of their case and an end to "unreasonable delay," both of which could also violate your due process rights. And you have to remember that, as a person accused of a crime, you wouldn't just face your accuser -- you'd also face your government and all the power it can marshal against you. That's why defendants get what seem to be "extra" rights -- they actually level the playing field. And just remember: you could be a defendant at any time. Hence the ACLU helps you tell your state legislators to reject the wrongheaded Marsy's Law.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. The House passed the Paycheck Fairness Act a few weeks back, but Senate Majority Leader "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell (E-KY) has famously said -- about that other big House-passed bill, the For the People Act -- that, and I quote, "I get to decide what we vote on." That should strike you as profoundly undemocratic. And it should also strike you that if we want a democratic nation, we should all get in our Senators' grills until they can't avoid our will any longer. It's not like the Paycheck Fairness Act is some stupid piece of crap like the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act or the Affordable Care Act "skinny repeal" bill -- the Paycheck Fairness Act would give women more tools with which they can fight pay inequity, and what's wrong with that? Not a damn thing, that's what. So let's make sure the Senate hears us.

Around the table: thoughts about war, health care, clean water, and the absurd notions Our Glorious Elites entertain.

Saudi-led coalition bombs residential area in Sanaa, the capitol of Yemen, killing upwards of 11 people -- most of them children running away from a bombed-out school. But please, Administration spokeshacks, please keep telling us about your "serious constitutional concerns" about Congress for once asserting its constitutional war-making powers to keep us from slaughtering civilians in deference to an unreliable ally.

Dig this pile of horsedoodle from Forbes, entitled "Britain's Version of 'Medicare for All' is Struggling With Long Waits for Care." Tried to get an appointment with a specialist lately? Then you won't be impressed to hear that less than four-tenths of one percent of the British population have been waiting more than six months for some kind of indeterminate health care. Been to the ER lately? Then you won't be impressed to hear that 15% of good British folks have to wait more than four hours at the ER. Also, has it occurred to the author of this piece that if wait times are up or post-cancer longevity's down since some date in the past, that might just be due to a government running the program badly? In England, if your government's running the health care system into the ground, you can elect a new government. In America, we can't just elect new big health insurance corporations -- and the result is that Hep C patients face annual six-figure medical bills, diabetics ration insulin until they die, and folks at risk of anaphylactic shock go to the park without the $600 EpiPen that'll save them from death-by-bee-sting.

George Goehl at The Guardian asks if our "unsafe water crisis" can "unite Americans." Long story short: everyone drinks water, so yes. Long story somewhat longer: about one in 15 Americans drink unhealthy water now, and it's not just "those people" in Flint but also poor whites in the shadow of factory farms in Iowa, so hell yes. If Democrats are lucky enough to hold the House and win the Senate and the Presidency in 2020, they could help matters immensely by doing something good with their power for fucking once. We'll stay on them the whole way, but they have to do their jobs, too.

Alice Speri at The Intercept writes about, get this, American law enforcement officials supposing that (in her words) "the mostly black activists demanding an end to police violence in the U.S. might join with Islamic fundamentalist groups promoting violence abroad." How do law enforcement personnel (and media personnel!) draw a line from creating an oppressive "Islamic state" in the Levant to ensuring police don't beat the crap out of black folks in America? I kid, of course -- if you're an American ragehead, everything you don't like is equal to everything else you don't like, and all these everythings are part of a massive conspiracy specifically targeting you.

Finally, you knew this was coming: our Administration actually plans to run on its record "protecting" our clean air and clean water. Kudos to Bloomberg for calling our Administration's case "cherry-picking"! Of course, not only has our President benefited from laws and regulations put in place before he ever graced us with his presence, but he's also benefited from his own incompetence, as most of his attempts to roll back clean air and clean water regulations have died in court. And if you're impressed that WE HAVE TEH CLEANESTEST AIRZ EVAHZ!!!!!, remember that Tha Bush Mobb used to do victory laps every year about record homeownership.

Action: concerning internet freedom, corporate welfare, and sexism.

H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act, cleared the House Energy and Commerce Committee last week, and could get a full floor vote on the House this week, so you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on your smartphone) to find your House Reps' phone numbers, and then call them to tell them to pass the Save the Internet Act. The Save the Internet Act would reinstate the FCC's 2015 Open Internet Order, which protected your right to go where you want to go on the internet, rather than have big corporations make you go where they want you to go. Big corporations haven't been doing much blocking, throttling, or censoring since the FCC destroyed net neutrality in 2017, true, but of course big corporations don't take all your freedoms at once -- they take them a little at a time until one day you can't go to your favorite websites because they didn't pay the necessary tribute. If we get Congress to pass the Save the Internet Act, we'll stop that.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to ensure that the new U.S.-Canada-Mexico trade agreement doesn't lock in absurdly high drug prices, then Replace NAFTA still helps you do that. The new USMCA trade agreement -- or "NAFTA 2.0," as they call it -- does curtail the use of the hated "investor-state dispute settlement" system that threatens to nullify our clean air and clean water laws, and that's no small thing. But it also extends monopoly protections for big pharmaceutical corporations (under the rubric of "protecting intellectual property," like a drug patent is a novel or something!) so that they can prevent other corporations from developing generic versions, and thus keep drug prices absurdly high. Big pharma corporations don't need any more corporate welfare -- especially when they also get massive infusions of taxpayer money to develop their drugs. Why, it's like Our Glorious Elites want to keep "socialism" all for themselves! But they don't get all the say around here.

H.R. 1882, the Menstrual Equity Act, would ensure that all women have access to menstrual hygiene products, since students, prisoners, and homeless folks also need tampons, pads, and panty liners and can't always get them. The Menstrual Equity Act would also require Medicaid to cover menstrual hygiene products and would mandate that all large employers and federal public buildings provide these products without charge. Some folks would read the above and have all sorts of strange reactions, like giggling uncontrollably and wondering WHAT MORE DO TEH HOMELESSEZ WANTZ!!!!! To such folks I would say three things: 1) slap yourself, 2) grow up, and 3) consider how you'd feel if your body started bleeding uncontrollably at any moment and you couldn't do anything to stop it. I know, I know, empathy is so quaint, but all civilized people practice it. CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Menstrual Equity Act.

Around the table: mostly about taxes, antitrust, and real compromise.

We learn from Jesse Eisinger and Paul Kiel at ProPublica that the IRS has had a tough time going after ultrawealthy tax-dodgers. Congress deserves some of the blame, for repeatedly slashing IRS funding and thus helping drive experts out of the agency, but of course the bad actors who design these labyrinthine tax-avoidance schemes deserve most of the blame. And dig the chutzpah of at least one IRS target proclaiming (successfully, it seems!) that the IRS's detailed questions about his dealings were themselves a "burden." As if their schemes aren't a burden for the rest of us!

In a peripherally-related note, another ProPublica report wonders why a particular impoverished Mississippi county has the highest IRS audit rate in America. You won't like the answer: because more than half the county uses the Earned Income Tax Credit (or EITC), and the IRS audits EITC recipients more than anyone but the very richest taxpayers. The article doesn't say it, but I would guess that EITC audits are pretty easy pickings for the IRS -- you don't exactly have an army of folks getting the EITC who know how to game the system as well as a billionaire does.

Sen. Wyden (D-OR) proposes taxing capital gains more like income, since it is, in fact, income. Details are scant at present, but the Wyden plan would go after the "appreciation of assets owned by the very wealthy as income each year" as income; if that strikes you as "taxing folks for the sin of holding onto their property," consider that letting the wealthy build up tens of billions of dollars this way essentially taxes folks for the sin of working, since we don't generally get the opportunity to buy property and sit on it. Also consider that wealthy folks frequently set up deals so that it doesn't look like they're selling their property when they actually are. (Mr. Wyden's plan would also eliminate capital gains tax cuts for the very wealthy, which would make that tax more progressive.)

Ho hum, our President promised that corporate tax amnesty repatriation would bring back as much as $4 trillion, but corporations have brought back less than $700 billion, and they're bringing the money back a lot more slowly now. Promise made, promise kept! Still, if his eventual Democratic opponent is just another Democrat who doesn't mean what they say, then this moron of a President will still get re-elected no matter how many promises he breaks.

Speaking of which, noted pre-emptive compromiser Barack Obama worries about a "circular firing squad" that could torpedo the next Democratic nominee. Uh, no: liberals demanding what they want and demanding that their elected officials actually fight for it will get us far better policy in America, and Mr. Obama certainly shouldn't act as if liberals being liberal "weakens the movement." The man piddled away his 2008 mandate from the voters by "reaching out" to an opposition party that did nothing but stamp its feet and yell no, so he has no standing to lecture us on the importance of compromise. You compromise from strength, not weakness.

Finally, if you're wondering how right-wingers and their enablers will attack Sen. Warren's proposal to break up big tech corporations, the incomparable David Dayen provides us with a primer on all their bad arguments. Go and study the whole thing, from the multitudinous conflicts of interest antitrust critics have to the irrelevant worst-case scenarios they concoct, and also note that breaking up big corporations is an honorable American tradition, over a century old, no matter how many corporatists call it "radical." Of course you already know that calling something "radical," like calling something "socialist," is a signal that the person doing the name-calling already knows they can't win the argument on the merits.

Action: concerning *a la carte* cable packaging, the Muslim ban, and the Electoral College.

Just the other day we discussed, as we do, how awful cable news is and why we need a strong a la carte cable packaging law, one that would allow us to stop paying for cable channels we don't want to support, and though no one has introduced an a la carte bill this session, what prevents us from calling our Congressfolk (using the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page) and demanding one? Nothing, that's what -- and our agitation is likely all that'll ever get us one. It's tempting to think social media and streaming video are reducing our dependence on cable, but most folks still get their news from the TV (despite my best efforts!), so we need tools to ensure we can all get better news from the TV. You can always challenge a license of a a traditional over-the-air TV station, but with cable news channels, you have to go after their moneypot -- and if large numbers of us stop paying for their act, they'll change their act right quick. So let's get to it.

Meanwhile, the soon-to-be-introduced NO BAN Act would not only repeal our President's hated Muslim ban, but make it tougher for him and those who follow him to enact more of these bans. Yeah, I know, our Supreme Court said the Muslim ban didn't violate our Constitution (likely only because our Administration finally had the sense to include a few non-Muslim majority nations in their travel ban), but the credibility of that ruling is strained, to say the least -- the Court utterly ignored that time our President told Rudy Giuliani that he wanted to do a "Muslim ban, but legally" ("I'd like to commit murder/burglary/arson, but legally!"), but went very far out of its way to find some mean thing a Colorado commissioner said about far-right religious folks that apparently justified striking down a ban on discrimination against gays there. Hence Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to support actual religious freedom by passing the NO BAN Act once it's introduced.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to abolish the Electoral College. Why? Because literally entrusting the election of Presidents to an unelected body of 538 folks betrays our democratic ideals, and because two madmen have won the Presidency while losing the popular vote just since 2000. In that order, too -- the latter may have reminded us of the former, but the former is more important. Don't believe that if we abolish the Electoral College that heartland states will have no say in our government, because these states already enjoy disproportionate representation in the Senate. And feel free to detect racism in statements that parties will just turn out the vote in the cities if we dump the Electoral College. And when folks say "I don't want New York and California picking my President," you can say "I don't want the South picking mine." Some people profess to like the popular vote, until their candidate doesn't win. Those people just need to grow up.

Action: concerning human rights, clean water, and education funding.

H.R. 1945, the Berta Cáceres Human Rights in Honduras Act, would cut off federal funding of Honduran military and police operations, at least until Honduras's government investigates and prosecutes human rights violations by their security forces against activists there -- activists like Berta Cáceres herself, murdered in 2016, with two of the eight suspects arrested in her murder linked to the notorious School of the Americas (now WHINSEC). But Honduras has long been hostile to those who speak out for indigenous rights, be they protestors, farmers, or journalists; 2014 saw a dozen such activists get killed. But don't confuse this with our President's cutting off of humanitarian aid to Honduras -- humanitarian aid contributes rather more to security in Honduras than arming their security forces does. Hence Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support human rights by passing the Berta Cáceres Human Rights in Honduras Act.

Meanwhile, Environmental Action helps you tell our Administration to comply with a federal court order to strengthen coal ash storage regulations in order to protect good Americans' clean water. Our Administration has a dismal record trying to defend its regulations in federal courts, but it has also shown, shall we say, a reticence to obey the will of the people as expressed in our laws and the courts that interpret them. Coal ash contains arsenic, mercury, and plenty of other goodies that make people and wildlife sick, and you can now find groundwater pollution near coal ash sites in nearly half of all American states. Of course, this Administration cares little for the world we pass on to our descendents -- it cares only about the now, and more specifically about the riches that can be plundered by bosses now. In a way, they're like the right-wing caricature of liberals. But they ain't the boss of us.

Finally, Education Secretary DeVos got a lot of negative publicity last week for announcing her intention to cut federal funding for the Special Olympics, but you can't discount the possibility that she took the hit on that so she could slip even more nefarious cuts past us -- like cutting billions of dollars from public education funding and crafting billions more in unearned tax credits for private schools. I wish I could put this some other way, but our Administration hates any part of our government that actually works on the people's behalf, and acts like our government's sole purpose is to funnel taxpayer money to Administration cronies. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the priorities of our Education Secretary and properly fund our public schools. And if you're the fool who says states fund public schools you libtard ha ha I said libtard snort, don't also be the fool who constantly whines about how high your property taxes are.

Around the table: featuring yet another reason we need *a la carte* cable packaging.

The incomparable Nathan J. Robinson at Current Affairs reads South Bend Mayor/Democratic Presidential aspirant Pete Buttigieg's autobiography, finds it wanting. There are literally dozens of insights here, but let's just say that Mr. Buttigieg is just another guy who wants you to think he's a liberal -- since liberal policy prescriptions are actually quite popular! -- but is actually just another center-right technocrat who values "bipartisan cooperation" with the political party that thinks cooperation equals capitulation. Also, too, when folks complain about "out-of-touch" elites, the Harvard- and Oxford-educated, consultant firm-groomed Mr. Buttigieg is really what they mean, no matter how nice he seems or how many languages he speaks. Every time he mentions "smart sewers" in the first debate, take a drink.

Study finds that employment in the solar power industry fell by a little over 3 percent last year, largely due to tariffs on Asian imports. I'd prefer we made the solar panels here, too, but I'm sure some fossil fuel CEO or other told our President that this would happen if he slapped tariffs on the nations that produce these panels (or the materials the panels need), and our President laughed with glee at the thought. But not only do these tariffs come down gradually and then disappear after 2022, federal tax credits will also come down gradually and then disappear after 2022, which means solar job creation will likely go back up in the short term, so I guess our President gets to take credit for that, too. Seriously, none of this is beyond his ability to calculate -- the man only wins political battles by manufacturing crises like these. Just like Mr. Bush.

Almost-bankrupt corporation Sears hands out $25 million in bonuses to executives, then cancels life insurance for its retirees. Bonuses for what? For finding a hedge fund to grind the corporation into the ground for good while sucking the marrow out of it for the executives? Always they demand loyalty, but never do they show it to us "little people." When a man realizes he needs to live in a gated community for his own safety, does he start to think that maybe the problem is him?

Our President, less than a week after saying he wanted to completely destroy the Affordable Care Act and make Republicans the "party of health care," has announced that Republicans won't vote on their new plan, whatever it is, until after the 2020 election, which sure isn't the textbook definition of courage. Also, why does he imagine that "private health insurance" is "beloved"? The only people who really like their health insurance are the people who haven't had to use it lately, and it's a long walk from "like it, I guess" to "TEH BELOVEDZ!!!!!"

Finally, Fox News's Jeannie Pirro returns to the air after a short hiatus, and declares that folks who accused our President of colluding with Russia are "traitorous" and "treasonous." I sure am glad she said both words, or I wouldn't have understood what she meant! Seriously, two things: one, Article III, Section 3 of our Constitution doesn't call accusations, or attempts to prove accusations, "treasonous." Two, don't people hate TV pundits who yell all the time? I'm old enough to remember when on-air meltdowns ended careers. This is yet another reason we need a la carte cable packaging -- we're paying for all these tantrum-throwers on our TV, even if we're not watching them, and if we could stop paying for them, they'd clean up their act right quick.

Action: concerning drone strikes, transparency, and federal budgeting.

Win Without War helps you tell Congress to ban secret CIA drone strikes. You no doubt know that our last two Presidents have conducted multitudinous drone strikes in foreign lands upon which Congress has not declared war, killing American citizens and foreign civilians; you may also remember that President Obama authorized the CIA to conduct the strikes in order to avoid violating the letter of the Geneva Convention. Then, just last month, our current President reversed Mr. Obama's 2016 executive order requiring the public disclosure of drone strikes, so now we now have to work a lot harder to figure out what our government's doing, which is kind of the opposite of transparency, so we might as well stop the drone strikes entirely It's no use telling me that disclosure "hamstrings" our President, because hamstringing our President from conducting war without Congressional authorization is a feature of our Constitution, not a bug.

Meanwhile, in a related note, our Defense Department lately exempted some 5,000 pages of documentation describing Google's work on a government drone project (known as Project Maven) from the Freedom of Information Act, on the rather suspicious grounds that their work comprises "critical infrastructure security information." Civilized people know that it's too easy to go around justifying any proposal by screaming that we're all going to die if we don't adopt it; thus civilized people set boundaries that respect both a project's requirement for secrecy and the people's right to transparency. And Project Maven uses AI to pilot and target drones, so we have every right to know whether Google's AI is any less sucky than anyone else's or how many false positives it's had in testing, at the very least. Hence Demand Progress helps you tell our Department of Defense to stop blocking FOIA requests about Project Maven.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject our President's hateful, hurtful, stupid budget, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. You know the basic gist of this budget: slash spending that actually helps good Americans (including Medicare spending, no matter how much our President denies it), but ratchet up fraud-and-waste-drenched defense spending, in a nation that already spends more on defense than the next eight nations on that list combined. Now, you also know that even Republican-dominated budgets haven't hewed to this line, not even during those two recent years of total Republican control of our federal government. But surely you know why that is: because we the people have demanded it, and a truly draconian budget existing only to please the politicians' big donors would result in mass defeats of Congressfolk all over America. So you know we need to keep the pressure on them to do our will.

Action: concerning H.R. 1, discrimination, and transparency.

H.R. 1, the For the People Act, would enact a suite of necessary reforms in the areas of voting rights, campaign finance, ethics, and redistricting. The bill passed the House, but Senate Majority Leader "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell (E-KY) said he wouldn't bring it up for a vote, because, and I quote, "I get to decide what we vote on." Well, he also called it a "Democrat power grab" -- which I guess he'd know all about, having orchestrated so many Republican power grabs! -- and he also said it was "radical" and "socialist," which is what they all say when they can't win the argument anymore. But regardless of what he says, he doesn't get all the say around here -- we do. Hence People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to reform our democratic processes by passing the For the People Act. You can also find phone numbers for Mr. McConnell at his website. His D.C. number is (202) 224-2541, but you'll likely have to call one of his local Kentucky numbers to speak with someone.

Meanwhile, pro-discrimination bills are still moving in Tennessee's state legislature, as the full House plans a vote tonight (Monday night) on HB 836, which would not only let private adoption agencies reject gay couples because of their "religious" "beliefs" but force the state to fund such agencies, and the state's Civil Justice Subcommittee is mulling HB 1274, which would force the state to defend any locality that enacts one of them-there "bathroom bills" folks use to humiliate transgender folks. In other words, these bills act like the folks who are used to getting all the say about everything all the time ever are "oppressed," while actually oppressing folks who deviate in some way from what the majority calls "normal." Hence the Tennessee Equality Project helps you tell Tennessee state legislators to reject both HB 836 and HB 1274. One more time: no one in America has any "right" to use "religious" "beliefs" as an excuse to deny other folks their rights.

Finally, the House passed H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would, as you know, give women more tools to fight the wage inequality they face (and yes, they still face wage inequality even when you adjust the data for similar experience and skill). I bet Mob Boss Mitch, being TEH DECIDURZ!!!!!, won't want to hold a vote on that, either, and I bet he'll call it "radical" and "socialist," too, even though neither word aptly describes what the bill would actually do. Is it "radical" or "socialist" to keep employers from retaliating against employees when they discuss wages at their job? Is it "radical or "socialist" to keep employers from refusing to hire people merely because of their past wage history? Of course not. You might better describe these things, and the Paycheck Fairness Act, as "sensible" or "responsible." Hence Moms Rising helps you tell your Senators to support fair wages for women by passing the Paycheck Fairness Act.