Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: time for another exciting installment of "who's the real snowflake?"

From Carol Anderson at The Guardian we learn about "Five Ways the Republicans Will Crack Down on Voting Rights in 2020," and though I'm annoyed again to hear not one mention of the notorious Interstate Crosscheck database of people with similar names, which I would argue delivered Michigan's electoral votes to our President in 2016, it's good to be reminded of the crap Texas tried to pull earlier this year (ZOMG WE HAVE TEH 95,000 NON-CITIZUNZ WHO ARE TEH REGISTURD TO VOTEZ!!!!), because they (and other states) will certainly try to pull it again. I'd be happier if they made such outlandish allegations after the voters turned them out of office.

We are reminded by Alan McLeod at FAIR that for our "liberal" media, "The Bolivian Coup Is Not a Coup -- Because US Wanted It to Happen." Generally when the military forces you out, that's a coup, but as you recall from our "liberal" media's absurdly horrible coverage of the Venezuelan "coup" that actually failed to force out Mr. Maduro, a "coup" only happens to folks we like; if protestors manage to bring down Chile's President Piñera, they'll call that a coup. It brings back memories of the Obama Administration pondering, Hamlet-like, over the definition of the word "coup" back when the Honduran military orchestrated a coup against President Zelaya in 2009.

As amusing as it is to hear right-wingers wonder why anyone would think Administration Senior Advisor Stephen Miller is a white nationalist merely because he wouldn't shut up about being a white nationalist in hundreds of emails to Breitbart, it's even more amusing to hear Breitbart try to gaslight everyone into thinking this is all about politicos pitching ideas to journalists. It happens all the time, they say -- but I bet not very many politicos go on about their deep appreciation of Mein Kampf. (Seriously, ever try reading that? It's almost absurdly turgid -- get from one end of a sentence to the other without re-reading and you'll be halfway to Catholic sainthood.)

After alleging vague "irregularities" in Election Day voting that he said were "corroborated" (though he didn't say by whom), Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin finally concedes his Election Day loss to his opponent, Attorney General Andy Beshear. Kentucky state law doesn't allow gubernatorial candidates to call for a recount, but does allow them to call for a recanvass (or a recount of the vote total); the recanvass conducted by the state yesterday found exactly one additional vote, which is kind of hilarious. And thus we are reminded that you can't just be an asshole to everyone forever and never suffer any consequences. One hopes we are reminded of this lesson again this time next year.

However, about that: former two-term Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick has changed his mind and has decided he wants to run for President in 2020 after all. Oh, splendid, another Democrat who'd lose. I said this before, but it bears repeating: Mr. Patrick imagines his background as a prosecutor and a businessman insulates him from Republican criticism, but nothing insulates you from Republican criticism. If Jesus H. Christ himself ran for President, today's Republicans would call him a dirty hippie and a swarthy foreigner.

Finally, from the "Somehow Not a 'Kids in the Hall' sketch" file: our President's like-named son writes a book called Triggered about how liberals are supposedly triggered by everything, then won't answer questions about it at a California book-signing event, and winds up running away from right-wing hecklers who want to ask him questions about immigration. All together now: what a snowflake. And, you know, if you're afraid to take questions because "the left" will "twist your words," why not, oh, I don't know, articulate your points well enough to be plainly understood by anyone who will listen honestly?

Action: concerning payday lenders, welfare for the rich, and immigrant soldiers.

Still sick of payday lenders charging 400% interest on their never-ending cycles of debt? Did you know that the Military Lending Act caps all payday and car title loans at 36% for active duty soldiers? Well, the Veterans and Consumers Fair Credit Act (I can find no bill numbers at this writing) would expand this and other protections to all Americans. The bill would also let state laws stand if they offer stronger protections than the bill does. Hence Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect working families from predatory lenders by passing the Veterans and Consumers Fair Credit Act. And the payday loan "industry" won't even be able to complain about being forced to "figure out" how to comply with the law, because they've already been offering loans to active duty soldiers under these rules! Oh, they'll cry a river anyway about market disruption, but to be frank, any "market" that relies on trapping working families in a cycle of skyrocketing debt demands disruption, if not obliteration.

Meanwhile, in the wake of the news that the 2017 tax bill's "opportunity zones" have delivered taxpayer money to far too many uber-wealthy developers who are not actually using it to boost depressed neighborhoods, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to end these "opportunity zones" and thus close off at least one avenue through which the wealthy get handouts. Actually, there's another news hook: our Treasury Secretary, Steve "the Foreclosure King" Mnuchin, apparently intervened personally so his buddy Michael Milken (who once did two years' jail time for insider trading and was apparently the inspiration for Wall Street's Gordon Gekko) could get a windfall from an "opportunity zone." "Opportunity zones" supposedly give out tax breaks to developers who help uplift poorer areas, but in practice they just deliver more of your hard-earned taxpayer money to the already-rich who are more likely to gentrify areas than they are to create real jobs and livelihoods. "Creating wealth" in the form of higher real estate prices is fool's gold -- and too often the fools get all the gold.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell your Senators to protect our immigrant soldiers from deportation. If you're looking for a good-guy litmus test to determine who gets to come here and stay here, volunteering to give up your life for your country is a real good place to start. And if you're annoyed that we don't have enough volunteers in our Army to keep it, ah, home-grown, you may want to wonder if that's because of all the stupid wars we fight! Surely we don't want a country where we throw out active-duty soldiers because of their immigration status but allow folks with equally-rickety immigration status continue to work for dung pellets on our President's vineyards, because that's the kind of country he's bringing us -- a world full of flamboyant nativism, but also a world no less full of undocumented immigrants. Why, you have to wonder if that's the whole idea. (Full disclosure: you do not actually have to wonder. It is the whole idea. You can't keep people in a state of rage if you don't keep the objects of their rage around.)

Action: concerning a financial transaction tax, unsafe baby sleepers, and campaign finance disclosure.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a financial transaction tax, also known as a Robin Hood tax or a Wall Street sales tax. We used to have a financial transaction tax in America, but that was 50 years ago; now banksters use the internet to trade like they're all on speed, but don't pay a tax per trade that might actually fund some good things for good Americans. H.R. 2923/S. 1587, the Inclusive Prosperity Act, would impose at most a $5 tax on every $1,000 in trades, while H.R. 1516/S. 647, the Wall Street Tax Act, would tax $1 every $1,000 in trades; I'd go higher and do a full one percent tax, but at the lowest tax rate in the Wall Street Tax Act, we could raise over $70 billion annually. How do right-wingers respond? By taking your pension hostage, of course! As if your pension relies exclusively on the lightning-fast trades speculators conduct -- or as if a less-than-one-percent tax is somehow onerous! But most sane people support a financial transaction tax, and it's well past time most sane people got to make most of the decisions.

Meanwhile, infant inclined sleepers have now killed 73 infants, but you can still buy them! That's right, no manufacture has recalled these sleepers, nor has our government forced them to do so even after our own Consumer Product Safety Commission declared them unsafe. This sorry state of affairs goes on even though every pediatrician worth the title will tell you babies should sleep on their backs on flat and firm surfaces, and even though infant deaths do tend to be all over the news for good reason. Hence Consumer Reports helps you tell the nine corporations that manufacture infant inclined sleepers to recall them immediately. Our current Administration hates telling other bosses what to do, but if we want to remain a civilized society, we have to tell them what to do, and there's a good chance they'll do our will, if for no other reason than that they want the bad publicity to stop. Of course, anyone who builds a device that suffocates helpless infants deserves all that bad publicity. But if they do the right thing, they can make it stop.

Finally, H.R. 2592/S. 1356, the Honest Ads Act, would amend the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 -- our seminal campaign finance law -- so that it would be able to require disclosure for online political ads as well as TV, radio, and newspaper ads, and the bill would also extend that law's prohibition on foreign nationals buying campaign ads to internet ads. I remain one of those folks who think we wouldn't even be talking about Russian interference in the 2016 campaign if Democrats had nominated a better candidate, but it's fairly obvious that more and more Americans (ahem!) look to the internet for their news, and thus deserve the same protections from noxious campaign ads that other folks get. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand campaign finance disclosure to internet ads by passing the Honest Ads Act. I'm sure the right has its lies about preachers being silenced and politicians being able to silence opponents all lined up, but this bill is about disclosure; what do they have to be afraid of?

Action: concerning various forms of Executive branch corruption.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate how much taxpayer money (i.e., our money) is flowing right into our President's pockets. You'll recall how he planned to hold the next G20 summit at one of his own hotels, until popular outcry forced him to do differently, and you may also recall him saying that he's not "supposed to hate" the Saudi Arabian citizens who drop buku bucks at his hotels; even from these two examples, we can see the necessity of determining exactly how corrupt this President might be. The more cynical among us will no doubt chortle that we shouldn't be "surprised" he would do that, but remember that people who say "and you're surprised?" are advertising their own cynicism, and cynicism is evil. (They're also trying to tell you how much better they are than you, and you certainly don't have to take that.) We take it as gospel that politicians shouldn't profit from public service, because that warps the service they give to the public, and we shouldn't carve out an exception for arrogant billionaires.

In a peripherally-related note, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect the Ukraine whistleblower's identity from our President and his cronies. Our President has repeatedly demanded that the public know the identity of the individual who first reported on that infamous phone call to the Ukraine President, but our first job as civilized people is to protect the whistleblower's identity from folks who might decide to threaten or kill said whistleblower. And no, this has literally nothing to do with our President's habeus corpus rights -- he has the right, as an American citizen, to confront his accuser in a court of law, but he has no right to out his accuser so his votaries can take matters into their own hands. This is exactly the risk every whistleblower takes when they confront the abuse of power, whether in government or the private sector. And as civilized people, we either protect those who confront the abuse of power, or we lose the right to call ourselves civilized. It's that simple.

Our Nuclear Regulatory Commission (or NRC) would loosen regulations governing storage of radioactive waste, because what stimulates an economy more than letting some corporation bury nuclear waste in a shallow pit near an aquifer providing drinking water to good Americans? Sadly, too many Americans agree with big corporations that regulations are for LOOZERZ!!!!!, and when their loved ones get cancer from drinking the local water, they just blame Black Lives Matter or something. But the best part of all this? Our NRC is apparently considering changing the rules just so one waste management corporation in Texas can accept the most radioactive materials even though they don't have a license to handle them! Corruption isn't just about abusing the process to harass your potential opponents, or about redirecting taxpayer money to corporations you own, it's also about deforming the rules so your cronies can benefit. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell our NRC to reject its plan to loosen nuclear waste storage regulations.

Action: concerning good bills, good labor law, and good agricultural practice.

Let's see how our list is coming! Call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Don't worry that you're putting out your Senators' staffers by asking them to pass a long list of bills they have no intention of passing, because, hey, they're paid to listen to you, and if they don't like getting a long list from you, they can find another job. Hey, they're already well-connected! And, of course, if your Senators don't like it, they can, you know, pass good bills that protect and strengthen things like voting rights, equal rights, public lands, worker wages, and internet freedom.

Our National Labor Relations Board (or NLRB) has proposed a rule change that would deny graduate school teaching assistants of their right to organize and collectively bargain! What's their rationale behind this -- you know, besides ALWAYZ HURT TEH WURKURZ!!!!!? They're saying that letting TAs organize would "hurt academic freedom"! Always the right wing whines that you Americans will always let self-interest destroy everything, which is, of course, exactly how the right-wing is! And I guess our Administration has not properly considered all the union laborers in the South who vote Republican because at least they're against abortion. The more pertinent issue, of course, is that our institutions of higher learning exploit grad students, and just because they pay to go there doesn't give them a "right" to use them like wet dishrags. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell our NLRB to reject its plan to prevent grad students from organizing for better pay and better working conditions.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would help farmers reduce their dependence on chemicals like Dicamba, the notorious Monsanto creation that drifts into neighboring farms and hurts other farmers' crops. They'll complain that they just passed a big Farm Bill in 2018, but I suspect the folks who get cancer because of Dicamba-infused crops over the next five years won't find that very sympathetic. We have totally given over food production in America to large corporations that only care about growing crops more "efficiently," by which they mean "they efficiently deliver unearned income to executives." But we all know ways of doing agriculture better, including rotating a diverse set of crops; big ag won't do that, because it doesn't enable them to spray tons of chemical crap on crops, which is, after all, cheaper than doing it right. But "it's cheaper" shouldn't be the number one reason we do things -- and it should never be the reason we avoid doing the right thing. I know, it sounds quaint.

Around the table: now with even more rich people whining!

Ari Paul wonders if Deadspin "Can Live Again as a Worker-Owned Website." Long story short: of course it can! Long story somewhat longer: "(t)he cost of paying writers a living wage, never mind hosting a major website and retaining a media attorney (a must if you’re going to be doing daring journalism), isn’t pocket change," and "anyone interested in this will have to pound the pavement looking for funders, people or groups with money that want, deep within their hearts, for independent media to survive." And the money might not be there, because how do folks get rich these days? By sucking up to the already-powerful! This theme's going to come up again shortly.

Like, now: JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon says Sen. Warren "uses some pretty harsh words" that "vilif(y) "successful people," presumably people like himself. And all over our great land good Americans say why, he should hear the words I use! And, seriously, he calls people like himself "successful people" because he can't just say "we shouldn't vilify people who redistribute income from people who work to executives who don't." Or "we shouldn't vilify people who prey financially on other people." You know?

In a peripherally-related note, Microsoft founder Bill Gates says of Ms. Warren's proposed wealth tax that "(i)f I had to pay $20 billion in taxes, it's fine" but "when you say I should pay $100 billion, O.K., then I’m starting to do a little math about what I have left over." Ms. Warren's proposed 3% rate on Mr. Gates's estimated fortune of $106 billion would, of course, not result in a "$100 billion tax bill," but a $3.18 billion tax bill. Also, Mr. Gates added $16 billion to his net worth last year, and, seriously, is there a worse sound on Earth than the sound of the ultra-rich whining?

Billionaire, ahem, successful person Michael Bloomberg has begun to take steps to run for the Democratic Presidential nomination, having apparently identified a shortage of candidates anxious to tell the American people why we shouldn't get anything we want from our government. Kudos to the University of Iowa professor who sees Mr. Bloomberg as someone who would further divide the "center" currently occupied by Messrs. Biden, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar. I mean, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have the left to themselves; I suppose it's still possible they'll split the left enough that one of the other four aforementioned candidates can break through, but, frankly, the math favors the left here. You know what else favors the left? So many of us are so out of fucks to give.

Finally, former Administration Attorney General/long-time former Senator Jeff Sessions has declared that he'll try again for his old seat in 2020, where the punditocracy considers incumbent Democrat Doug Jones the party's most endangered Democrat. This could certainly be a unique opportunity -- Alabama voters might be able to choose the racist who said the NAACP were Communists, or the guy who put two of the Birmingham bombers in jail. I wouldn't worry too much about our President's supposed hatred of Mr. Sessions hampering his campaign, though, because our President revises history like George Orwell never predicted. (Also, too, "I was there to serve his agenda, not mine" -- uh, you weren't our Attorney General to serve our agenda?)

Action: concerning war in Syria, pregnant workers, and fossil fuel advertising.

Rep. Gabbard (D-HI) has introduced H.Con.Res. 70, which invokes the War Powers Act and Article I, Section 8 of our Constitution to force our Administration to remove our soldiers from Syria unless and until Congress passes a resolution authorizing war there, so Just Foreign Policy joins with Change.org to help you tell House Speaker Pelosi to give H.Con.Res. 70, a.k.a. the "Syrian War Powers Resolution," a clean floor vote. You'll recall that the last House Speaker, Paul Ryan, prevented the Yemen War Powers Resolution from coming to a vote by attaching an amendment to the freaking Farm Bill that prevented a vote on it! I'd call that clever, if I didn't insist on cleverness being, you know, not evil. But if enough of us speak out, we can overcome the noise of defense contractors and lobbyists and haters. And by the way, passing H.Con.Res. 70 wouldn't "let the Kurds die" per se -- rather, it would force Congress to authorize military action that would help the Kurds, which is how our Constitution and the War Powers Act want us to do it.

Meanwhile, H.R. 2694, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, is back, and though it is actually already illegal for bosses to discriminate against their pregnant workers, the law also doesn't punish these bosses enough. But this bill would force bosses to make "reasonable accommodations" to their pregnant employees -- recall that word "reasonable," so that you're ready when right-wingers start making up shit about what this bill would allow -- and would also prevent bosses from forcing pregnant workers to accept unnecessary workplace accommodations. The bill would also prevent bosses from simply refusing to hire pregnant workers merely because they don't want to make these accommodations -- I mention that, of course, to forestall right-wing whining that ZOMG WE WILLZ BE FORCEDZ ONLY TO HIREZ TEH PREGGURZ!!!!! Ah, but I kid -- I know just as well as you do that literally nothing forestalls right-wing whining anymore, certainly not shame. In any case, CREDO helps you tell your House Rep to fight discrimination by passing the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell big media outlets not to take any more fossil fuel corporation advertising. No, this is not a "free speech" issue -- partly because free speech is for real people, not corporate "people," and partly because buying ads is more a money issue. But it's not a "free speech" issue mainly because our First Amendment does not guarantee you the right to advertise on big media outlets, and certainly "free speech" isn't an issue of who can pay for more of it -- once a right can be bought, it ain't a right anymore, is it? It's a privilege. And gosh, you don't need TV ads to tell you where to buy gas or how to power your house, so the point of fossil fuel advertising must be something else -- like advertising how "green" they are, when they're really not. Generally, as civilized people, we should be reducing the amount of useless information broadcast on media outlets. I know how square that sounds, but nobody said the work of civilization is sexy -- only that it is necessary.

Action: concerning social media, antibiotic abuse, and pollution.

Twitter has lately declared it won't take money for political advertising, which is interesting, I suppose, but Free Press helps you tell Twitter that they might be better off banning white supremacists from their website. Thanks to our First Amendment, our government can't put you in jail merely for being a racist (though it can if you, you know, beat up black folks), but nothing in our First Amendment says "social media must allow Nazi wannabes to spew filth in public," just as our First Amendment doesn't force publishing houses to accept every single manuscript they receive, or force shopping centers to allow everyone who wants to set up shop there to do so. I would actually be perfectly OK with them using Twitter to get together in private, but Twitter doesn't really differentiate between "public" and "private" very well, and that's Twitter's fault, not theirs, mine, or our First Amendment's. Certainly Nazi wannabes don't need a damn megaphone going off in everyone's ears all the damn time. It's not as if only one person can have First Amendment rights at a time, after all.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Federal Drug Administration (or FDA) to stop factory farms from using antibiotics on feed animals for any purpose other than illness, then Penn PIRG still helps you do that. In recent years, our FDA has mandated more veterinary oversight over antibiotic use on factory farms, which is better, but the stakes really are life-or-death for the rest of us here -- when factory farms use antibiotics on nominally healthy feed animals in order to a) fatten them up and b) allow them to endure squalid conditions more easily, then the end result might well be superbugs that resist any antibiotics, and thus a world where the next cut on your finger could kill you. None of that is alarmism, and all of that is simple logic. And if you're that worried that big factory farm corporations will collapse and we won't be able to buy any meat, find a small farmer to fill that need. They still exist, and if you find them, you can help other people find them, too -- and you can help them find more customers.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Administration to stop its efforts to rescind California's stronger car emissions standards, then Penn Environment still helps you do that. This ain't that damn deep: the only benefits anyone will get from rolling back California's standards are a) big auto CEOs won't have to spend more money making their cars run more efficiently and b) you might -- I said might! -- pay less for a car when you buy it. Now let's list the benefits we get from the California standards: more efficient cars, less gas burnt up, fewer emissions befouling our air, and lower gas bills. (Since California is a big market, automakers tend to avoid building separate cars for different states.) Does "paying a little less for a car" outweigh "paying less for gas the entire time you own that car"? I say it does not, and that's before we reconsider the other benefits listed above. And memo to right-wingers: what happened to "states' rights" as a conservative value? Or was that only ever about slavery?

Action: concerning public lands, phone price gouging, and school lunch shaming.

CREDO helps you tell our Department of the Interior to reject any plans to privatize our national parks. Because they belong to us, that's why! This is typically where right-wingers change the subject and howl WHEREZ DOESEZ TEH MONEYZ COMES TEH FROMZ!!!!, and the correct answer is "from all the taxes you've been cutting on rich people for 40 years," but let's stay focused on the point, which is that public lands belong to us and our government administers them on our behalf. When we sell them to private corporations -- which we can only do once, so it's not actually fiscally-responsible! -- they manage the parks on behalf of their shareholders, or (if they're particularly corrupt) their executives, which means you don't get a say in what happens to our public lands. Oh, sure, governments say they're going to hold private corporations accountable for their wrongdoings, but then they don't, almost like that was the whole idea. So let's keep the meddling middleman out of our public lands by keeping them public -- and thus keeping them ours.

Meanwhile, S. 1764, the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, still awaits consideration; the bill would mandate that our FCC regulate phone calls to America's prisoners so that big telecom corporations don't gouge them, or their families. I mean, really, $25 for a 15-minute phone call? Just because prisoners can't do anything about it doesn't mean we can do anything to them, but sadly, our Congressfolk only think of prisoners when they're trying to whip up hysteria over crime, or deliver taxpayer money to their crony private prison corporations. Is that harsh? Too bad! Too many politicians want to be cruel without anyone calling them cruel, and when they whine about it, they're acting exactly like all those "politically correct" people they also love to whine about. I'm not sure I can even call that irony; I feel like irony shouldn't lead directly to disgust. Anyway, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass s. 1764 and prevent big telecom corporations from gouging prisoners.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3366/S. 1907, the No Shame at School Act, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. School administrators all over America are shaming kids whose parents haven't squared away their school lunch bills -- by making them wear wristbands like this is freaking Nazi Germany, or serving them coal meals when everyone else gets hot meals, or making them throw out their meals, or preventing kids from graduating -- and though they're getting the appropriate amount of shaming from the American people for what they're doing, the fact that they even tried it in the first place means there's no harm in passing a law from preventing them from doing it again. I have long hoped that since so many Americans have experienced debt and poverty since the 2008 financial Armageddon, that experience would make us all a lot more empathetic about each other's experiences. I suppose I still have to wait. But I don't wait for such things quietly, and you don't have to, either.

Our annual Election Day exhortation.

Today is Election Day, which means you ought to go out and vote, if you haven't done so already. If you have any trouble voting, of course, you should call 1.866.OUR.VOTE (or if, like me, you hate mnemonic devices for remembering phone numbers, 1.866.687.8683). (You can also text "Our Vote" to 97779, or visit 1.866.OUR.VOTE's website here.)

What would be a good reason to call 1.866.OUR.VOTE? Being told you can't vote if you have unpaid parking tickets or child support, or getting challenged by official-looking people (or people with guns, even!) who don't have any actual authority to challenge voters, or getting a flyer on your windshield telling you Election Day is on Wednesday for people like you wink-wink. But what if you show up at the polls and the election worker says they can't find your registration? Well, you might be a victim of lousy recordkeeping, or you might be a victim of the notorious Interstate Crosscheck database, which, as you know, helps nefarious state governments deregister voters with the same name as voters in other states, though most names are, as you know, quite common (and Interstate Crosscheck doesn't check middle names or Social Security numbers!) That'd be a damn good reason to call 1.866.OUR.VOTE. Now, if you find yourself deregistered when you know you've done nothing wrong, your disgust will be palpable and righteous, and you may just want to throw up your hands and say to hell with these clowns and then go home. But before you do that, remember that this is exactly what they want you to do. It's the same reason they saturate the airwaves with negative ads the days before Election Day: because they want you to stay home out of disgust, so you won't vote against their cronies. Don't let them manipulate you, and don't let them win. Make the call to 1.866.OUR.VOTE, describe your problem to them, and let them help you take the next step.

Remember, also, that if the corporatists and the racists and the woman-haters win, they'll be just as unpopular tomorrow as they were today -- they will have no mandate, and they will have us to deal with! We'll be calling and writing our Reps and Senators every day, and challenging them at the few townhalls they'll hold, and bird-dogging them at the few public events at which they'll show their faces, because we know that our duty to our country doesn't end today, but begins today. Voting happens one day out of the year, and then Our Glorious Elites want us to sit on our hands the rest of the time, but we can confound their expectations, and their nefarious aims, by expressing our will to our representatives every day after today. And this blog will continue to help you do that, as it has done since 2005.

So good luck today, and God bless.

Action: concerning health care, worker safety, and defense spending.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1384, the Medicare for All Act, now's as good a time as any to call your House Reps and Senators. H.R. 1384 doesn't tell you how it's going to fund Medicare for All, a matter our "liberal" media have been doing a lot of hand-wringing and pearl-clutching about, but Sen. Warren (D-MA) -- you may have heard of her, she's running for President -- has described how she'd fund it, and her plan would do what needs to be done: it would capture the money employers are already spending on private health insurers and redirect it toward funding Medicare for All. She would tax employers (except for small businesses with fewer than 50 employees who aren't providing health insurance) at 98% of the average rate they've been paying private health insurers for employee insurance over several previous years, which would make it useless for big corporations to suddenly convert themselves into franchises or convert their employees into independent contractors. So now we have a weapon against all the how-will-you-pay-for-it hysteria.

Meanwhile, in the wake of Amazon warehouse worker Billy Foister's death -- he had a heart attack at work, but lay on the ground for 20 minutes before anyone noticed, and once the ambulance took him away, his bosses told his co-workers to get back to work -- Demand Progress helps you tell Amazon to stop putting its work quotas above human life. Six Amazon workers have died in the last year, with many more injured, and it ain't for nothing that the National Council for Occupational Health and Safety lists Amazon as one of the 12 worst places to work, because Amazon puts productivity ahead of people, such that folks pee in a bottle lest they get a demerit, and some folks even try to kill themselves. Like this is Foxconn or something! Seriously, bosses don't just redistribute wealth upward to their bosses, they redistribute health -- folks push themselves to the brink trying to meet quotas while Jeff Bezos gets plenty of decompression time as he looks for a new mountain to buy. As they say, next-day shipping might be free, but it comes at a price.

Finally, Joe Biden has apparently told reporters it would be "outrageous" if our government were to attach any conditions to the military aid we give to Israel -- conditions that might include not expanding more settlements into Palestine. So he's beating his chest about being more pro-Israel than anyone else, and we could reasonably question whether it's actually "pro-Israel" to enable their uncivilized behavior, but the more interesting thing is that many of Mr. Biden's favorite Republican Presidents, including Messrs. Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Bush the Better, did exactly the same thing! You'd think a man who yammers on about "bipartisanship" all the time would know it when he sees it -- or that a man who boasts about his "relationships" with Republicans would find some actual common ground with them. Anyway, Just Foreign Policy joins with Change.org to help you tell Mr. Biden that conditioning military aid to Israel is not "outrageous". He doesn't care what we think, but we still tell him, because it's our duty.

Action: concerning voting rights, public lands, and immigration.

Monday is list day! So call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Today we add H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act, passed by our House last week, and I'm pleased to see that Moms Rising has provided a contact tool so you can tell Senate Majority Leader McConnell to hold votes on good House-passed bills. Moms Rising adds H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act (which will help out immigrants who moved here as children) and H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act (which would roll back Administration attempts to weaken protections for folks with pre-existing health conditions), and you can add these in your phone call, too. Plus you can add H.R. 1146, H.R. 1644, and H.R. 2513 in the comment section of Moms Rising's contact tool. Seriously, if we do this enough, we can get these bills passed, and we might even give our President pause before he vetoes them.

Meanwhile, our Administration still has this jones for logging and mining in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, so CREDO helps you leave a public comment with our U.S. Forest Service opposing the construction of more roads in the Forest that would allow more logging and mining there. The Tongass, as you probably know, has thousand-year-old trees in it; how many more times in our history will we be able to hold onto thousand-year-old trees, let alone learn the lessons they have to teach us? You may not find that argument persuasive if you think everything exists to be turned into money, as our President does, or if you think everything exists to be ruled over and used by humans, as our Vice-President does. If you're a civilized person, on the other hand, you might actually find it conservative to hold onto some thousand-year-old trees, not to mention the unique wildlife and indigenous humans that also live in the Tongass National Forest. Conservatism isn't all about making some crony money, after all. Or, at least, it shouldn't be.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2415/S. 1243, the Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. This bill wouldn't get rid of private prisons or punish corporations that import immigrants in order to drive worker wages down, but it would do a lot of positive, necessary, and reasonable things, like force our government to adopt good standards for detention, permit our government to break contracts with private prison corporations that repeatedly violate such standards, and mandate inspections of detainee facilities and investigations of detainee deaths in custody. Show me the person who would oppose such things and I'll show you a flabby thinker who shouldn't get all the say about anything in America. I mean, really, who else would support "no standards for housing detainees" or "holding to private prison contracts even when detainees die" or "sweeping egregious mistakes under the rug"? Because those are the alternatives. And they're not really alternatives -- at least, not to civilized people.

Around the table: concerning Democrat weakness, Presidential misbehavior, and rich folks whining.

Oh, look at this BS: super-rich folks in England whine about how they'll leave the country if Labour wins the national elections next month. And over some piddling changes proposed by the Labour leader Mr. Corbyn, which include raising the top 45% marginal tax rate all the way to (drumroll, please) 50%. Boy, it sure is a good thing for these super-rich that they're all completely indispensable and there are literally no hungry people in all of England looking to take their place.

Speaker Pelosi thinks "Medicare for All" doesn't play well in the Midwest, and issues a general warning that taking up too many "far-left" proposals will doom Democrats with the Great American Center. Strange that running as far right as possible never seems to bite Republicans in their collective backside! Also, she's wrong -- Medicare for All does actually play well in the Midwest, particularly with the rural voters Democrats constantly write off as unreachable. Of course, if you don't actually try to do the right thing, it's a lot easier to convince yourself that doing the right thing never works.

In a related note, Colorado Senator/somehow-still-running Democratic Presidential candidate Michael Bennet says, of Ms. Warren's now fully- and realistically-funded Medicare-for-All plan, that "(r)egardless of whether it's $21 trillion or $31 trillion, this isn't going to happen, and the American people need health care." Yeah, that'll move the needle on his Presidential bid, since history shows that if there's one rallying cry voters can't resist, it's it can't be done! Also, too, we're going to spend $47 trillion over the next decade on health care, so if Ms. Warren can capture that money, as her plan would, then "the American people need health care" is an utterly nonsensical statement. I know, that's a surprise.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) -- the man who gives the Citizen Legislator a bad name -- demands that our National Archives produce email correspondence between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and not at all because he, of all Senators, is uniquely enmeshed in this whole sordid business with the Ukraine. Mr. Johnson's letter doesn't really explain why he needs to look at the emails, except that the law says he can and that Peter Strozk says they exist. I guess BUT HER EMAILS!!!! is all the reason he needs.

Our President, at a Mississippi rally, not only declares that the Democrats' impeachment vote is "an attack on democracy itself" but also an effort to "nullify the votes of 63 million Americans," i.e., those of his supporters. How he feels about the over 73 million Americans who voted against him he did not say, so we are not only compelled to note, once again, that the President is not America, but also that the President's supporters are not the only participants in a democracy. (He also told his audience that he "can't believe" the Mississippi gubernatorial race is "competitive." Does he not think he might have something to do with that?)

Finally, our President says, out loud, in a fundraising email, that his supporters should contribute bigly to the campaigns of three Republican Senators who have supported a resolution condemning the impeachment inquiry. Perhaps not coincidentally, these three Senators are members of the very same body who will be trying this impeachment inquiry in the Senate. When a Bush Mobb ethics chief calls such a thing "criminal" and "a bribe," well, I'm not sure what else one has to say about the matter.

Action: concerning methane emissions, pollution fines, forced child labor, and the Grand Canyon.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to reject its own plan to roll back methane emissions limits, then the Environmental Defense Fund still helps you do that. Literally no one but gas drilling corporations want to prevent gas drilling corporations from venting methane into the atmosphere! Not only does methane pack a bigger climate change punch than coal emissions, not only has an entire methane-mitigation industry risen up around the problem, not only is methane a totally usable energy source, but when gas drilling corporations leak methane off public lands, they're depriving we-the-people of royalties we deserve for even allowing them to drill on our lands. I guess it's something that Congress couldn't nullify the EPA's previous methane limits (thanks to the late Sen. McCain's anger about an unrelated subject) and that the courts have struck down previous attempts to gut the limits, but I won't be happy until we slap this Administration down and it stops getting up. We deserve better from those who work for us, after all.

Meanwhile, you know all about inflation, right? The thing that right-wingers forget about whenever they talk about how $2/hour was good enough for them in 1969, never mind that $2 in 1969 dollars is worth about $14 in 2019 dollars? Well, fines for big polluters in Pennsylvania have remained pretty much stagnant over the last 50 years, which means that what might have been a big bite in 1969 is a slap on the wrist in 2019, so Penn Environment helps you tell your PA state legislators to pass HB 1752, which would increase fines corporations pay for befouling our air and water. Don't let the haters talk about the cost to small businesses, because small businesses ain't the ones polluting. And if you confront them with that, and they respond that big corporations will pass on the costs of the fines to small businesses, ask them if they approve of such behavior, and if they say no (which they'll likely say whether they mean it or not!), ask them why they don't do something about it. After all, this is America, where we do something about big problems, right?

In other news, CREDO helps you tell chocolate manufacturing corporations Hershey, Mars, Nestlé to root the child labor out of its supply chain. Yes, kids still work in cocoa farms so you can have your Nestlé Crunch bar -- a mere 20 years after these chocolate makers pledged to stop using cocoa if children harvested it! -- and they don't do it because they like it, or because they're trying to learn a trade; they do it because they're forced to do it. Please do not tolerate the fool who says I did child labor and it didn't hurt me! The kids who've died doing hard labor don't get to testify about how child labor ruined them, and besides, folks who'd say I did child labor and it didn't hurt me are probably lying to themselves about how much hurt it did them. Nobody just walks away from slavery and torture, after all. And, to answer a common and banal objection: slipping your 12-year-old nephew a ten-spot for reformatting your hard drive doesn't mean we should tolerate forced child labor so we can get M&Ms more cheaply -- not if we want to call ourselves civilized.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act, then Environmental Action still helps you do that. The Grand Canyon has become something of a political football over the last few years, as uranium mining corporations want to befoul both the Canyon and the Colorado River that made it, and I can't understand why any sane and reasonable person would want to spoil the Grand Canyon or pollute the Colorado River, which gives drinking water to nearly 40 million Americans. Note I said "sane and reasonable" there -- folks who'd want to mine for uranium there are not sane and reasonable, as far as I'm concerned. Gosh, aren't there any other ways to make money in America? I mean, come on, best and brightest and boldest entrepreneurs, stop with all the pollution already and go to work. That's what your forebears did, and they helped create the greatest middle class ever. Our current entrepreneurial class just wants to make that middle class their debt slaves.

Action: concerning immigration, corporate welfare, financial predators, and corporate "personhood."

CREDO helps you tell Google to fire former Department of Homeland (sic) Security (sic) poobah Miles Taylor. Mr. Taylor used to be Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen's Chief of Staff, so it's not like he's some low-level bureaucrat who might have been sabotaging the evil efforts of our President to implement his Muslim ban and family separation policies, and now that Ms. Nielsen has left the Administration, he's found a soft landing at Google as "head of national security policy engagement," which sure sounds cush to me. I can already hear right-wingers squealing ZOMG DOESN'TZ HE HAVEZ TEH RIGHTZ TO WORKZ!!!!! Sure he has the right to go find a job, if anyone will hire him, but he doesn't have a "right" to a highly-paid BS job at Google. (His job title has more than three words, so I feel pretty safe in calling it a BS job.) And we, as a civilization, have a profound duty to shame and shun those who hurt us; giving them cush jobs ain't shaming and shunning. I say this as someone who still thinks anyone who worked for Tha Bush Mobb should be too ashamed to show their face in public.

Meanwhile, our President likes to make a show of caring about infrastructure-building in America, so he's angling to funnel your taxpayer dollars to a complex in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio that would turn fracked natural gas into plastics. Sigh. It's like they can never choose right; this is a world where renewable energies are attaining parity in production costs with fossil fuels generally, where fossil fuel corporations are going belly-up left and right (even Robert Murray's coal corporation filed for bankruptcy the other day!) despite Republicans controlling one House of Congress or the other for the last decade. You know what that makes this project, right? That's right, corporate welfare -- for why should our government invest in established technologies that aren't viable either economically or environmentally? Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop the Great Appalachian Corporate Welfare Handout. Remember, we have to tell them, because politicians basically like corporate welfare, even though the people don't.

In other news, H.R. 4724/S. 2640, the Students Not Profits Act, would limit for-profit colleges' access to federal funding unless they can verify that they actually provide their students with an education; I'd have called the bill the "Students Before Profits Act" myself, since I don't believe in giving right-wingers any reason to squeal about SOSHULIZM!!!!, but this bill will protect more students from predatory for-profit colleges like Corinthian, and the bill won't put trade schools out of business, as I'm sure right-wingers will claim, but merely make sure those schools actually do the thing they exist to do. Our last Administration did far too much hand-wringing over how to deal with these for-profit schools that do nothing but redistribute wealth from students to executives; this Administration, of course, openly enables such schools, even violating the law to do so. So we desperately need to start developing a more healthy skepticism about such schools. CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our students from financial predators by passing the Students Not Profits Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.J.Res. 48, which would amend our Constitution to nullify the doctrine of corporate "personhood" and thus allow us to regulate campaign finance reform again, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. You know, the best argument I've heard against campaign finance reform (admittedly "best" isn't a high bar to clear here, since the other arguments are such horsedoodle!) is that you need money to run a good campaign. But that statement pointedly does not explain why that money must be unlimited; more money doesn't lead to better arguments, obviously, but you can make lousy arguments seem more "normal" simply because you have the money to repeat them endlessly. Of course, we also know that money is not speech -- money is property, and we have a long legal tradition of keeping property from destroying our civilization, if we would but use it.

Action: concerning voting rights, facial recognition, youth incarceration, and cash bail.

Pennsylvania legislators are mulling SB 421, which would enact a number of necessary voting reforms at the state level: it would fund new state voting machines that would actually leave a paper trail; it would move the state voter registration deadline from 30 days before an election to 15; it would extend the deadline for absentee ballots from 5 pm on the Friday before the election to 8 pm on Election Day; and it would allow any voter to vote by mail for the first time. None of these sound particularly sexy, I suppose, and we've fought for more vigorous reforms in Pennsylvania before (i.e., same-day voter registration), but this bill will improve good Pennsylvanians' access to the voting booth, and nothing prevents us from fighting for more vigorous reforms later. And by "later" I might well mean "the day after the bill passes"! Legislators imagine they can earn reprieves from the voters' will, but they can't, ever, because doing the people's will is their job. So both Common Cause and the ACLU help you tell your PA state legislators to support voting rights by passing SB 421.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell big corporations Hilton and Unilever to stop using facial recognition technology in their hiring. This facial recognition technology is actually worse than the Rekogition technology developed by Amazon, which has a tough time telling black folks apart -- the HireVue AI system Hilton and Unilever use purports to analyze diction, facial movement, and speaking voice to tell bosses whom they should hire, but as a science, well, it's about as good as those 300-question "integrity tests" they used to give out in the '80s. Job interviews are highly stressful and artificial situations, after all, so you're not learning much about an applicant if you put the tone of their voice and their eye movements under a microscope -- except that interviews make them nervous, which, like, no shit, Sherlock. Hate to pile on, but the development of this technology represents yet another confession by managerial types that they don't know how to do their job. Seriously, if you need another AI "breakthrough" to help you hire good workers, maybe the problem's you!

In other news, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk and state Governors to stop the practice of putting kids in jail. You hear people say how kids are so much worse than they used to be, but your parents and grandparents said the same thing, and good kids (who comprise the vast, vast majority of children!) don't get a whole lot of ink from our sensationalist media. And all of that's not even the point! Here's the point: civilized people understand that kids can't make adult decisions, so those kids who go so far haywire that they commit rape or murder represent a profound failure of all their adult caretakers (their parents, their teachers, their community leaders), and what they need most from the adults in their lives is help. You know what they don't need? Being thrown in adult jail with prisoners who'll prey on them physically, emotionally, and sexually. That doesn't help them; it only helps tough-on-crime cowards feel better about themselves. And that feeling doesn't last, either, so they keep looking for opportunities to "be tough." It's a damn vicious cycle, and we should break it.

Finally, speaking of tough-on-crime cowardice, Daily Kos helps you tell your local district attorneys to end cash bail. We know why: it hurts the poor, it wastes taxpayer money, people don't flee over nuisance crimes, and cash bail makes the accused pay for alleged crimes when we should only make the convicted pay for actual crimes. Yes, I hear some police officers say they feel hamstrung by the absence of cash bail, but police officers tend to see bad people everywhere because they tend to deal with people at their worst, so maybe we should take their resistance with a grain of salt on that basis. And maybe we should also examine the experience of our own work lives! We all tend to resist any change to our procedures at work, even if they're good changes. And then, once they work, we tend to forget we ever resisted them! Would it be piling on to mention that slashing cash bail offenses in Philadelphia is actually working? No, it would not.

UPDATE. SB 421 is now Pennsylvania law, as Gov. Wolf signed the bill on October 31. Kudos to you if you pressured your state legislators to pass this bill.

Action: concerning internet freedom, drug costs, antibiotic abuse, and family leave.

The D.C. Circuit Court, as you know, upheld the FCC's disastrous net neutrality repeal a few weeks back -- but it also nullified that repeal's block on net neutrality laws at the state level. That means, among other things, that California's 2018 net neutrality law -- which some unscrupulous Assembly Democrats tried, but failed, to gut in mid-2018 -- is now in effect, protecting that state's nearly 40 million residents (nearly one-eighth of America's population) from big telecom greed games like blocking, censoring, and throttling websites, or demanding tribute for the "privilege" of having your web content delivered more quickly. Washington, Oregon, and Colorado have also passed laws protecting net neutrality, and a little more than half of the rest of America's states have legislation pending, but haven't passed bills. Hence Fight for the Future helps you tell your state government to protect internet freedom by passing strong net neutrality legislation. Remember: the more states that pass it, the more likely the big telecoms will give up.

Meanwhile, H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act, is not bad -- it would finally allow Medicare to negotiate prices for some drugs (including insulin products since insulin rationing is all over the news and two dozen other highly-prescribed drugs) and would set a ceiling on their prices that doesn't exceed the average price of drugs in six developed countries that all pay a lot less for drugs than we do, but it could be more vigorous, so Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to "strengthen and pass" the Lower Drug Costs Now Act. You will have room for comments -- which might include your preference that such a bill allow Medicare to negotiate for all its covered drugs, or allow Medicare to manufacture generic versions of drugs for which it can't get a good price. S. 99, the Medicare Drug Price Negotiation Act, and S. 377, the Medicare Negotiation and Competitive Licensing Act, would do more than H.R. 3, and though I don't let the perfect murder the good, I don't hold back on communicating my will to my representatives, either.

In other news, our EPA has decided to allow farms to spray antibiotics on certain citrus trees. They imagine that spraying antibiotics will stop "greening" -- which, among other things, literally turns citrus fruits green and renders them inedible -- but if you know that an infected insect causes greening (one of two types of psyllid), you might already be skeptical, and indeed, the solutions most likely to mitigate greening (monitoring, keeping insects away, removing infected trees) all require a lot of workers, whereas spraying antibiotics all over your citrus groves doesn't. But spraying also doesn't do very much good -- so says a study conducted by University of Florida researchers, and though they add that injecting antibiotics into trees works better, again, they would need to pay workers to do that! And of course spraying antibiotics on trees like this could actually do us all a lot of harm, by making superbugs even more resistant, until we're all worried that the next cut could kill us. Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell our EPA to listen to the science and stop antibiotic spraying on citrus farms.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: HB 1739/SB 580, the Family Care Act, would establish a paid family leave insurance program in the state of Pennsylvania. Like the FAMILY Act at the federal level, the Family Care Act would pay for the program by instituting a small payroll tax -- 0.588%, which is a little over half of one percent, not "five percent" or "50 percent," "liberal" media! Yes, I really will never let that go; people should lose their jobs over such mistakes (or should I call them "mistakes"?). Benefits seem a bit low to me, but at least it would compensate more of your salary at the lower end -- workers would get 90% of "the portion of a covered individual's average weekly wage that is equal to or less than 50% of the Statewide average weekly wage," and then 50% of the portion above that. It's not "class warfare" to do that, but common sense: folks with lower income literally can't afford to take days off to take care of sick family members, or sick selves. So Moms Rising helps you tell your PA state legislators to support working families by passing the Family Care Act.

Action: concerning voting rights, law and order, immigration, and endangered species.

Happy Monday, good peoples! You can use the tools in the upper right corner of this page (or, if you're viewing it on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find phone numbers for your Senators, so you can call them and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. And today, we add the recent House-passed bill H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act, which would shine some sunlight on the shell corporations used by banksters, drug kingpins, sex traffickers, tax-evaders, and big campaign donors. With one phone call, you can do something about that, and about voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, public lands, internet freedom, and secure elections. Yes, America is a great country, precisely because of its promise of freedom and justice -- but we must fulfill that promise.

While you've got your phone out, the tools in the upper right corner of this page can also help you find your House Reps' phone numbers, so you can call them and tell them to impeach our President. Why, as I write this, Sen. McConnell (E-KY) is running an ad on Facebook calling the House's impeachment inquiry a "kangaroo court." The House is following rules laid down by Republicans during their impeachment of Mr. Clinton 20 years ago, but attacking the "process" is all you got left when you can't win the argument on the merits. Of course, Mr. McConnell would be one of 100 judges of this impeachment, and it does seem corrupt to attack the "process" of an indictment you'll soon have to try, doesn't it? Let alone raise money for your own re-election over it? It's not quite as offensive as Roger Stone telling us that ZOMG IMPEACHMUNT WILL CAUSEZ TEH CIVIL WARZ!!!!!, but that's not the story you want to take to the Pearly Gates. The story you want to take to the Pearly Gates? How you fought this evil and corrupt President.

In other news, a few big banks still haven't committed to getting out of the whole private-prisons-separating-families business, so Moms Rising helps you tell Citizens Bank, Synovus Bank, First Tennessee Bank, Pinnacle Bank, and Regions, among others, to stop financing private prisons. A large number of well-known banks -- chief among them Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, SunTrust, and PNC -- have pledged to stop financing private prison corporations like GEO Group and CoreCivic, which is a big deal, since these banks represent seven out of every eight dollars those two private prison corporations get, and if they can't get financing from big banks, then they'll be hard-pressed to continue operating. Don't be swayed by the right-wing hype that you'd be putting those families in jeopardy by starving the private prison beast of money, because you know what that is, right? A manufactured hostage situation, that's what -- and one our government could rectify simply by doing its own dirty work. And we could fight that more easily.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 4348/S. 2491, the PAW and FIN Act, then WildEarth Guardians still helps you do that. The PAW and FIN Act is a clumsy acronym, but don't hold that against it -- the bill would reverse the regulations issued by our Administration that put more endangered and threatened species at risk of annihilation, regulations that force our government to consider the "economic factors" of regulations, which means the money gas and oil drilling corporations would lose if they couldn't drill somewhere. How many times must I tell these pimps! We're not supposed to base all our decisions on whether or not someone loses money! Why, if we did that, we'd have ratified the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" so that foreign investors could overturn our laws whenever they lost money to some clean air or clean water law! And once they drill a species out of existence, it's gone forever -- just like the money they make doing it will, one day, be gone forever. None of this is conservative.

Around the table: more notes about various kinds of corruption.

Independent media outlet unmasks a senior Twitter editor as a British psyops agent -- but our "liberal" media largely ignore the story. You'd think our media would be more interested that a government spy, whose specialty is influencing how people think, was that deeply embedded in a social media corporation that influences how people think, but no, and I doubt it's because some media organ no one ever heard of (which hopefully will change!) broke the story. More likely it's because our "liberal" media do not take their duties seriously, and are just looking to fill space between adverts and move up the corporate ladder. Hey, I like to think the best of people, but some people make it awfully hard.

Jeff Ernsthausen and Justin Elliot at ProPublica describe how Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert managed to get "opportunity zone" tax breaks for his properties in Detroit even though they're not in particularly distressed areas of the city. You'll be depressed to learn that getting these tax breaks is mostly about who you know, and even if Mr. Gilbert or his cronies didn't actually break any laws, the result -- money intended to spur investment in poorer communities gets diverted to already-wealthy developers -- is unmistakably corrupt and evil. And of course the way the 2017 tax "reform" sets up these "opportunity zones" is remarkably free of oversight and disclosure, and therefore accountability. Don't right-wingers say they're all about accountability? Oh, they mean accountability for you, not for them.

U.S. Magistrate Judge holds Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in contempt of court for "show(ing) only minimal efforts to comply" with a court order preventing it from collecting more Corinthian College loans. Which is worse: the DOE spokeshack who plays the but-we-didn't-mean-any-harm card, or the one who said, probably rolling his eyes, that "(w)e acknowledged that servicers made unacceptable mistakes," never mind the unacceptable mistakes committed by DOE? Your law and order Administration, ladies and gentlemen!

You may have heard that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been having dinner with a lot of right-wing blowhards lately, but The Intercept checks around and finds that, despite a stated desire to "meet() new people and hear() from a wide range of viewpoints" that Mr. Zuckerberg says drives his dinners with the likes of Tucker Carlson and L. Brent Bozell III, , he hasn't actually broken bread with any liberals. Dig the it's called learning! BS at the end of his twittergasm! I gotta say, these days, when I read about someone rich or famous, normally my first response is gosh, what a fucking asshole.

Bobby Lewis at The Guardian watches 44 months of the Fox News Channel so you don't have to. And also so that you can fully understand that Fox News "poisons" people, which, like, I've seen happen. I've long said that Fox and Friends is the worst program on Fox News, not just because it's so baldly stupid, but because the hosts all pretend to be regular folks. You can take comfort in knowing that most of the regular folks you know are better informed than this. No, really. Don't judge by the guy eating 10 eggs at the Wisconsin diner, who'll blame his next heart attack on socialism.

Another day, another Bernie-can't-win-Iowa article in which voters act like they're trying to predict the winner, not be the winner. Seriously, when you say you're "unsure" how Medicare-for-All "plays in small-town Iowa" (set aside that it actually plays pretty well!) and you wonder if the things he proposes are "achievable things," you're doing democracy wrong -- gosh, if you're a small town voter and you like Medicare-for-All, you can actually make Medicare-for-All seem less impossible by supporting candidates who might actually pass it! This horserace mentality too many voters still have is going to get us all killed one day.

Finally, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) tells reporters that "(i)f Turkey was planning on coming into northern Syria and trying to ethnically cleanse the Kurds, and U.S. troops were caught in the middle, I am not completely convinced that it was a bad idea to get them out of harm's way." I guess that sounded better in his head, though seriously, America afraid of a big bad Turkish invasion? He acts like we're up against Suleiman the Magnificent instead of some two-bit dictator/Presidential man-crush. As an aside, maybe Beto O'Rourke could run ads about this in a 2020 Senate race.

Action: concerning immigration, mandatory minimums, and fossil fuels.

Daily Kos helps you tell our Department of Defense's Inspector General to investigate the militarization of our Southern border. When you hear that our Administration has deployed armed soldiers at our Southern border, you might reasonably ask: are we at war with someone? Our President would no doubt answer "yes," being a member of Our Glorious Elites, and therefore someone who uses the word "war" to mean all kinds of things it does not mean. But we are not at war with Mexico, and U.S. law actually forbids our government from using soldiers to enforce domestic laws. We don't use soldiers to enforce domestic laws because we don't want to become a tinpot dictatorship where people are afraid to be free. I suspect our DoD IG (Inspectors General still display a large amount of independence) will come to the same conclusion we have. But only if we speak out. After all, saying nothing and hoping for the best doesn't work.

Meanwhile, even though our Pennsylvania state Supreme Court overturned mandatory minimums many years ago, word on the street is that our state legislature wants to bring them back, in a four-pack of bills, HB 726, HB 1850, HB 1851, and HB 1852, that would target offenses committed with firearms. I understand that people want to "do something" about guns these days, but this is doing the wrong thing -- we should let judges do their job and decide case-by-case whether possession of a firearm really merits a longer sentence. I've been saying for a while now that we should make it just as hard to get semi-automatic weapons as it is to get automatic weapons, and I'd rather support that solution than another set of mandatory minimums that wind up slamming folks of color harder and costing the taxpayer more money -- and feeding into the prison-privatization machine, too. Hence the ACLU helps you tell your PA state legislators to reject more mandatory minimum sentences.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell big media corporations to stop taking advertisements from fossil fuel corporations and their flunkies. Sound harsh? Consider the simple fact that you already know whatever you need to know about fossil fuels -- you know what fuel your car needs and whether your house takes oil heat or gas heat and whether your stove takes electric or gas, for example -- and fossil fuel advertisements typically therefore extol the virtues of particular fossil fuel corporations; is it really too much to ask that ads give us information we can actually use? It's not particularly of issue that such ads tend to lie about fossil fuel corporations' commitment to renewable energy and about the real effects of pollution and climate change, but ads disguised as "news stories" or "opinion pieces"? They're a big deal, and any media outlet worth its salt would reject them out of hand. They don't do it now because they're corrupt, but that's why we're here: to show them a way out of corruption.

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

Pennsylvania residents, take note: SB 790, which purports to "update" the Oil and Gas Act, would actually do a lot of foul things we've already been fighting for years. The bill would pre-empt certain local ordinances regarding land development -- which the state Supreme Court found unconstitutional when Act 13 pre-empted local anti-fracking ordinances -- and it would eliminate requirements to report smaller spills, which sounds like "right-sizing regulations" until you consider that you won't think it's a "small" spill if 200 gallons of oil befouls your drinking water. And if this bill passes, oil and gas corporations will get to befoul your drinking water and then "replace" it with water that doesn't meet the standards of the Safe Drinking Water Act! That's like letting your kid put dirty socks in his clean drawer, and dirty socks ain't anywhere near as bad as polluted drinking water! So the Sierra Club helps you tell your PA state legislators to protect our drinking water for-real for-real by rejecting SB 790.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to reject our President's nomination of Aurelia Skipwith as the new head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. You can probably already guess at Ms. Skipwith's pedigree -- currently a deputy in the department and (sigh) a long-time Monsanto employee, plus she's the one who requested a review of rules preventing hunters from using cruel and heartless methods to kill animals, like using donuts to lure them out, or shooting mother bears in their dens in front of their cubs. Like that needed any damn review! You won't be surprised to learn that her confirmation process is not going so well -- she's provided incomplete answers to Senators' question, plus she appears to have given our President a campaign donation in excess of $5,000 just a few days after her nomination! I'm old enough to remember when elected officials would do their best to avoid the appearance of a quid pro quo. I guess those are "the old days" now.

Finally, H.R. 3570/S. 2008, the Therapeutic Fraud Prevention Act, would make it illegal to sell "conversion therapy" to LGBTQ folks or to claim that such therapy will convert them from gay folks into straight ones, reduce their attraction to folks of the same gender, or is harmless. Because it's not harmless! Conversion therapy often involves forced re-enactment of past sexual abuses and "exercises" involving nudity and intimate touching; does that sound "harmless" to you? It actually sounds more like some satirist's version of what "converting gays" would be like! I'm sure the right will whine that banning conversion therapy offends their right to act on their "religious" "conscience." And you know what? Our First Amendment does protect folks who merely try to persuade gays not to be gay -- but it doesn't protect any "right" to make money off that act or force "therapy" on them. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect LGBTQ folks from conversion "therapy" snake oil salesmen by passing the Therapeutic Fraud Prevention Act.

Around the table: law and order! And other things this Administration only pretends to care about.

Joshua Cho at FAIR finds our "liberal" media more than willing to link California utility shutdowns to wildfires but not to what's driving the increase in wildfires, i.e., climate change. Because newspapers and TV shows wouldn't dare offend the ignoramuses who think climate change is a Chinese hoax! Seriously, there comes a time when you must dare to offend stupid people.

Surprise, surprise, an Environmental Working Group study of EPA data reveals that folks in low-income areas are far more likely to drink polluted water. Don't necessarily think it's just urban areas, either -- a lot of low-income folks live in rural areas, too. If the urban poor and the rural poor ever get together, Our Glorious Elites will have to change their underwear several times a day.

Ho hum, HUD officials admit to Congress that they "knowingly" missed a deadline to release hurricane reconstruction funding to Puerto Rico, and further admit that they had "no statutory authority" to do so. They went on to say, however, that HUD didn't release the funding because of all the "corruption" in Puerto Rico; of course these people know corruption when they see it. Because they all look in the mirror, amirite?

Also ho hum, our Department of Education gave out almost $11 million in student aid to for-profit colleges they knew didn't have the accreditation required to receive federal student aid. A DOE spokeshack apparently didn't feel like trying very hard to respond, citing a supposed lack of "context," just like all right-wingers do when they can't win the argument on the merits. Law and order!

CNN's Jeffrey Toobin regrets "blowing" the Hillary Clinton but-her-emails story "out of proportion." Would it make him feel better to know that she didn't lose because of the email story? She lost because she's another center-right Democrat, and history tells us center-right Democrats only win the Presidency when the economy is in the crapper. Maybe that wouldn't make him feel better, now that I think about it.

Finally, buried in this wide-ranging PRRI poll is the finding (scroll down to Fig. 9) that 26% of Americans approve of our President to the point where nothing he could do could earn their disapproval. The poll finds our President with a 39% approval rating generally, meaning 13% of Americans approve of him but could change their mind. In any case, the 26% figure maps well onto my oft-repeated saw that 25% of our electorate is bat-guano insane.

Action: concerning whistleblowers, corporate transparency, and D.C. statehood.

The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would allow all federal whistleblowers to get jury trials. Before anyone you know responds with any pablum about "frivolous lawsuits," remind them that whistleblowers in the private sector already get this protection under the law, and intelligence community whistleblowers do, too. You could, if you like, also tell them that arguments about "frivolous lawsuits" tend to rely on anecdotal evidence (and bad anecdotal evidence, at that), and that corporations file about four out of every five lawsuits in America. But you might do better telling them that whistleblowing isn't so much about spotting corruption and getting paid as it is about putting yourself and your family through hell just to do the right thing. Most folks wouldn't want to be whistleblowers if they knew how unemployable they'd become -- but they also wouldn't disrespect the folks who do go through it, the way the "frivolous lawsuits" crowd does.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act, then Public Citizen still helps you do that -- but word is the House will vote on it this week, so act soon. The Corporate Transparency Act would force corporations to disclose their "beneficial owners," i.e., the folks who create the corporations and, presumably, benefit financially from their existence. And that will force banksters, terrorists, tax-evaders, sex traffickers, drug money launderers, and big campaign donors -- who all use shell corporations to hide their wrongdoing -- out into the light. There's a reason these hoodlums all start corporations in America, and that reason is that America is (per a Global Financial Integrity study from 2014) the second-easiest nation on Earth to start an anonymous corporation, behind Kenya. And don't let right-wingers get it twisted -- you have a right to anonymous speech, but you don't have a right to anonymous money-making. Why? Because money isn't speech -- money is property.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your government that Washington, D.C. deserves statehood. Why? Because they want it, because they deserve it, because not giving them statehood deprives them of the representation in Congress that all other Americans have, and because the arguments against statehood are stupid. Of course said arguments generally boil down to NO MORE DEMOCRATZ IN TEH CONGRESSEZ!!!!!, but Jesus Mary and Joseph Republicans should try winning some damn elections in D.C. before whining about it. Nobody whines about Wyoming returning Republicans to virtually every state and federal office year after year! Funny that we mention Wyoming, because the argument that "Washington, D.C. is too small" falls apart when you realize that Washington, D.C. has more residents than Wyoming. And the argument that "Washington, D.C. is so badly-run that it doesn't deserve statehood" is a pile of dung, too -- particularly when you remember that Congress constantly meddles in its running. Anyway, remember when that U.N. official reported that some parts of rural Alabama had the worst poverty he'd ever seen in the developed world? Did we argue for taking away Alabama statehood then, in the face of obvious governmental failure? No, we did not.

UPDATE. The Corporate Transparency Act has passed the House -- which means we'll be adding it to our list of bills for the Senate next week. Good job, peoples!

Action: concerning social media, school lunch shaming, and Bahamian refugees.

In the wake of reports that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been hobnobbing with notorious right-wing figures like Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro -- ostensibly in order to understand why right-wingers constantly whine about Facebook's "bias" against them! -- Free Press helps you tell Mr. Zuckerberg to adopt vigorous rules defending its users from abusive hate speech. So far Mr. Zuckerberg has hidden behind the First Amendment in his effort to avoid adopting such standards, but the First Amendment doesn't protect us from Facebook; it protects us from our government, and Facebook, as a publishing platform, has no obligation to publish every single noxious utterance of every single asshole in order to adhere to a notion of "free speech" -- or, at the very least, no obligation to make these utterances public. And if he wants to know why right-wingers constantly whine about Facebook's bias, he doesn't have to ask Ben Shapiro -- he can ask me. Right-wingers constantly whine about Facebook's bias because whining is all you can do when you can't win arguments on the merits. You're welcome.

Meanwhile, you've heard horror stories of schools sending collection notices to families who can't afford school lunches, or putting wristbands on their children so everyone can identify them by their debt? Sounds like something you'd have seen in Nazi Germany, right? Well, H.R. 3366/S. 1907, the No Shame at School Act, would put a stop to school lunch shaming, would prevent school districts from handing over parents' private info to debt collectors, and would streamline the certification process for school kids so that simple misspellings (for example) won't lead to school lunch debt. You'd think civilized people would know better than to make a kid's life miserable just because his parents don't make a whole lot of money -- so I guess that means the people who would do such things aren't particularly civilized. Civilization isn't just something we have to maintain, after all; it's also something we have to earn. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop school lunch shaming by passing the No Shame at School Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to allow Hurricane Dorian refugees save haven in America, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Hurricane Dorian slammed into the Bahamas last month, leaving over 70,000 good Bahamians without homes, but our President, of course, cited the possibility of allowing "some very bad people and some very bad gang members and some very very bad drug dealers" into the country, as if America has never had a vetting process for refugees, ever. Gosh, nobody ever said you have to be stupid every single time you show mercy; why do you suppose some people would like to link the two in your mind? And why do you suppose our President would want you to think we have always just let people into America willy-nilly? It couldn't be because fear is the only weapon he has left, could it? It's not like he can point to a whole lot of good works as President (or as a human being, really) and persuade people to support him that way. But we're better than him, so let's do better than him.

Action: concerning all kinds of corruption.

I know, this Administration's a total crapshow right now, but before we give the proper amount of attention to their drama, please use the tools in the upper right corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a cellphone) to find phone numbers for your Senators, so you can call them and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Our House already passed all these bills, and our Senate has no business ignoring our will on voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, public lands, internet freedom, and secure elections, respectively. It's a shame we ever have to remind our Congressfolk that the people actually have concerns other than the miserable dramas Our Glorious Elites force upon us day after day, but nobody said our duty as citizens was easy. And they need us more than we need them.

And now, to the drama: you can also use the aforementioned tools on this page to locate your House Reps' phone numbers, so you can tell them to impeach our President; if you're still not entirely sure why you should do that, David Swanson gives us approximately 25 reasons. And yes, our Administration's Acting Chief of Staff, Mick Mulvaney, did actually say that our President withheld foreign aid to the Ukraine so Ukrainian investigators would get dirt on Democrat servers; as for the fact that he tried to walk it back later, well, you can't unring a bell. But worse than that, he said you are stupid if you think there's a problem with that! I'm not sure how else to interpret "I have news for everybody: get over it. There's going to be political influence in foreign policy." If you are proud of your "worldly" cynicism, you probably find this argument persuasive, but if you find a civilization's moral standards worth upholding, and you demand that our politicians be better people than they are, you won't. Cynicism is evil, and evil demands only one response -- a fight to the death.

Finally, in the wake of the news that the next G7 meeting would be held at a property owned by our President, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate our President's habit of profiting from his office as part of their impeachment effort. Our President has since changed his mind about holding the next G7 summit there, but I'm old enough to remember when politicians would avoid such corruption merely because it looked bad, and violating our Constitution's emoluments clause actually is bad, and you don't need a polisci degree to see why: when our President decides to hold a world meeting at one of his own properties, he's showing us that he doesn't care so much about us as he does his own pocketbook. Again, it's a shame I have to spell any of this out -- and it's a bigger shame that our President has spelled it out himself by saying, out loud, that he's not supposed to "dislike" the Saudis because, after all, they spend a lot of money at his hotels. But corruption doesn't smell better just because folks laugh about it more than they used to.

Around the table: time for another exciting installment of "how much is enough?"

David Brooks is getting far too much credit for saying "the only plausible choice" in a race between our President and Elizabeth Warren "is to support Warren." No one gets to talk about a "wave of insular intolerance coursing through parts of the American left" without noting that there are Nazi wannabes out there right now cracking heads, and I'm long past tired of all his cherry-picking of the data (he says Ms. Warren is "one of the few Democrats who could actually lose" based on one poll showing her losing six points with independent voters after a very narrow set of polling questions). You know what's worse, though? His dreaming about everyone-getting-together-and-getting-things-done when the 2016 election instructed us that voters are beyond tired of that scam. David Brooks: even when he's right, he's wrong.

Steve Wamhoff at ITEP says that "Depreciation Tax Breaks Are a Problem that Deserves More Attention." "Accelerated" depreciation, for example, lets corporations take a larger part of the deduction of a piece of equipment at the beginning, which means less tax revenue to pay for the services you've come to expect from your government. Services like, you know, police, libraries, and firefighters. And a lot of corporate tax breaks are about "reward(ing) companies in return for making investments they would have made anyway," which is, you know, stupid. I mean, they already get to expense these investments; how much is enough?

Gregory Shupak describes how our "liberal" media got "Alarmed" by an "Imaginary U.S. Pullout from Syria." This means that what he did was actually worse than reported: it not only leaves the Kurds to die, but doesn't get us out of the Middle East! Why, this guy's almost as good at getting important stuff completely wrong as Bush the Lesser was! It's clear our President framed his withdrawal the way he did to get some more anti-war votes in 2020, which might work, but at least he won't get them from anyone who's actually paying attention, like us. Sadly, when our "liberal" media gets it wrong, they divert our attention.

I think it's actually a big deal that former Ohio Governor/Presidential aspirant John Kasich thinks our House should impeach our President, regardless of the fact that he's not in office at present, and regardless of the fact that Mr. Mulvaney's press conference was so off the rails. But I feel compelled to note that we would be wrong to describe Mr. Kasich as a "moderate" merely because he demonstrates the presence of a soul with some consistency; we would more accurately describe him as a conservative -- which, of course, means you would better describe the folks who call themselves "conservative" on the TV as "reactionary" (if you value civility above all) or "bat-guano insane" (if you don't).

Finally, Hillary Clinton insinuates that Russia is "grooming" Rep. Gabbard to run as a third-party candidate in 2020 so our President wins re-election. Jesus Mary and Joseph does she really think she lost in 2016 because of Jill Stein? Mrs. Clinton lost that race because she didn't miss an opportunity to tell you she would ignore the people's will in favor of Our Glorious Elites' will -- which didn't stack up well against her opponent's railings against immigration and "free" trade, even -- and if Democratic party poobahs get their way, they'll make the same mistake in 2020 with a Biden or a Buttigieg, and a Tulsi Gabbard 2% showing won't be the reason they lose. Once our current President proved that an unqualified and unhinged asshole could win an election, the palette of the possible widened in America, so in 2020 we certainly don't need to hold ourselves hostage to another center-right can-win let's-work-with-arsonists candidate to win. Besides, you don't win big unless you bet big.

Action: concerning government spying, marketing to children, and clean water.

You may recall that our FISA court revealed that our FBI routinely conducts unauthorized searches of NSA-collected data; we have already told our Congressfolk this week that the NSA shouldn't be collecting that data without a warrant, but we also need to tell Congress to close the "backdoor loophole" that allows our FBI to access the information, as Defending Rights and Dissent helps us do. You know, a lot of good folks labor under the impression that the "grave threats we face" (I just can't help quoting then-Senator Obama explaining why he'd done a 180 on government spying!) are somehow unique to our time, and I could be glib and just say "read a history book," but I'd rather just say that the values that sustain us -- you know, things like courage, doing unto others, speaking truth to power -- are not unique to our time, but have been part of our heritage for uncounted years, and when we abandon those values in the name of "security" or "fighting grave threats," then we die the thousand deaths of the coward. So let's stay on our Congressfolk to help us preserve these values.

Meanwhile, the Children's Online Privacy Act (or COPPA) helps parents protect their children's privacy by restricting the data corporations can harvest from children and limiting how they use it. But naturally the big corporations look at kids as money pots, whose data they can use to empty their parents' pockets faster, and so they're pressuring our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to loosen up COPPA -- and that pressure may be working, as evidenced by our FTC's decision to review the effectiveness of COPPA several years before the law requires it, and one commissioner's statement that the review would "tak(e) care of children and data both," when the law only requires them to help take care of children, data being, as you know, a thing that does not require care. Always they pretend that things are just as (or more) important as people! But they're not, and we don't have to take this lying down: we can let the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood help us tell our FTC to do their legally-mandated job to protect children's privacy from the corporations that would exploit them.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our EPA to reject its own proposed rollback of coal ash storage rules, then Penn PIRG still helps you do that. "What would be worse than over 100 toxic coal ash storage sites lying in high-risk flood zones?" their latest email missive asks. "Answer: loosening the laws that protect our health and communities from contamination by those sites." Yeah, you knew where that was going, too, didn't you? Coal ash is the byproduct of coal plants -- one might do better calling it coal poop -- and contains carcinogens and other dangerous chemicals. And this coal poop can very easily leech into good Americans' drinking water, as the folks in Roane County, TN and Eden, NC can attest. But then again, clean drinking water is only the bedrock of good health care in America; it's not money or power, which are literally the only things this Administration cares about. Power corrupts, and money only makes you miserable in time, but clean water will always sustain us -- if we will but work to keep it.

Action: concerning shareholder power, adoptee citizenship, copyright trolling, and paid family leave.

Apparently because no regulation that serves the public interest can be allowed to survive under this abomination of an Administration, our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) is mulling whether to roll back rules that would inform shareholders of big business decisions involving pollution, campaign contributions, and offshore tax evasion. I guess their reasoning (such as it is) is that shareholders don't care about anything but money, which is certainly true of our President, but as I keep saying, our President is not America, and I bet you won't even find very many Republican-appointed judges who don't understand that shareholders make decisions on where to invest for a variety of reasons -- a thesis proven by the very existence of shareholder resolutions aiming to get corporations to pay their executives less, or address climate change. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell our SEC to scuttle its own efforts to make corporations less accountable to their shareholders. Protecting shareholders from corporate abuse is, after all, our SEC's very reason for existence. That's not my opinion; that's the law.

Meanwhile, our Administration has been deporting immigrants who were adopted by American citizens but never got citizenship when they were adopted. What, you thought adoption automatically led to citizenship? So did I! Our Administration never tires of looking for these little loopholes in the law, do they? All so they can look "tough" when the truth is they are not tough, they are weak -- only weak people care so much about looking tough, and only strong people possess the quality of mercy, particularly when it concerns folks who have spent almost their entire life in America. Hence H.R. 2731/S. 1554, the Adoptee Citizenship Act, would expand citizenship to immigrants adopted by Americans under certain conditions (i.e., the immigrant got adopted before turning 18, and was present in America at the time of adoption). You'll noted that, at this writing, the House version of this bill actually has more Republican sponsors than Democratic ones, which makes it what? An actual bipartisan bill! 18 Million Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Adoptee Citizenship Act.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Reps to reject H.R. 2426/S. 1273, the Copyright Alternative in Small Claims Enforcement (or CASE) Act. The CASE Act would push "small claims" into an "alternative" court which of course isn't a real court of law, but a "Copyright Claims Board," not staffed with judges but still empowered to levy up to $30,000 in fines if you (for example) share something copyrighted in a meme on Facebook. And dig Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA) claiming that the $30,000 cap limits the scope of this bill to "truly small claims"! You think $30,000 is "small"? I suspect not. I suppose we can't expect much better from the political party whose current standard-bearer once claimed to have gotten his start in real estate with a "very small loan" -- of a million bucks! So now is the time to stand up -- not just for the rule of law, which guarantees us our day in court, but also for the notion that $30,000 isn't a "small claim." It's like our leaders don't understand a thing about regular folks, which is why we teach them.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1185/S. 463, the Family and Medical Insurance Leave (or FAMILY) Act, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Most working Americans can't take time off to take care of themselves or a sick loved one, or a newborn baby, without taking a risk they'll lose their jobs or fall into a debt hole, but the FAMILY Act would create a national paid family medical leave program, and if you make $50,000 annually, you would pay a mere $8.33 monthly to enjoy its benefits. We could debate whether that tax rate (two-tenths of one percent paid by worker, the same amount paid by employer) should be progressive -- that your rate should be higher the more money you make -- but that alone wouldn't be a good reason to withhold support, particularly in one of the few rich nations that doesn't have any paid family leave for workers, unless employers are generous enough to give them or unions are canny enough to negotiate them. So let's get it done.

Around the table: featuring new installments of "why our President didn't make his tax returns public" and "why his supporters will never come around."

ProPublica has seen tax records from four of our President's properties, and says they "show major inconsistencies." How hard they must have bit their tongue! At least one source puts it more directly: "It really feels like there’s two sets of books -- it feels like a set of books for the tax guy and a set for the lender." This isn't that big a surprise, I suppose, if you recall the actions detailed here. I guess our President's votaries would call all that smart, but the rest of us would call it evidence of criminal behavior.

Gregory Shupak points out how our "liberal" media orchestrate a "False Balance Between Fascists and Anti-Fascists." Long story short: fascists are evil, antifascists aren't. Long story somewhat longer: fascists routinely resort to violence, while antifascists resort to violence as a last resort -- which can come more quickly than you might like, since fascists overtly want to create a world that's devoid of non-white people. A lot of things in this world are actually pretty simple -- but "liberal" media "balanced" coverage makes it more complicated. Why, it's almost like that's the whole idea.

Ho hum, L.A. police officers search non-white folks for contraband more often than white folks, but white folks are actually likely to have more of it. Oops, sorry, I forgot: we are never allowed to criticize police officers or else they just won't be able to do their jobs. At least, that's how a lot of punditoids act on TV! I mean, imagining police officers as so weak they can't do their jobs right if you hurt their fee-fees is actually quite insulting to them. Also, too, your First Amendment free speech rights exist pretty much exactly for this purpose.

Remember when our President signed an executive order purporting to keep lobbyists out of his Administration? Well, surprise, surprise, his Administration has employed four times as many lobbyists in three years as the previous Administration did in its first six. Which means he's doing about eight times as badly as his predecessor! You probably already suspected this, having witnessed our EPA and Department of Interior get headed up for lobbyists. What is the right-wing reaction to this news? Oh, probably something along the lines of YOU ARE TEH TRAITURZ!!!!!

Virginia Eubanks at The Guardian discusses the new frontier in debt harassment: "zombie debt collection." Here's how it works: our government decides you collected too much money in food stamps 30 years ago, sends you a notice alleging they told you about this all those years ago and because you didn't respond then you can't get a hearing now, and then garnishes your paycheck or tax refund, or your children's paycheck or tax refund. And are they going after big corporations that haven't paid their taxes? Of course not! They're going after poorer working families, like a boss. (Is it too much to ask that we turn "like a boss" into an insult?) Also, too, you know how well debt collectors tend to keep records, which is to say not well. And you won't be surprised to learn that the Clinton-Gingrich welfare reform of 1996 begat this particular problem.

Finally, a friend pointed me to Julie Goldberg's 2017 article explaining the difference between "Christian" and "Christianist." Long story short: it's the same as the difference between "Muslim" and "Islamist" -- the former is a religious person, and the latter is a person trying to force their religion upon you. Long story somewhat longer: you can't reach any of our President's "Christian" supporters with any of Jesus's actual teachings because their "religion" isn't Christianity, it's tyranny -- and in America, certainly, it's also white racist tyranny. (I hate to pile on, but Christianists tend not to go to church a whole lot, either, and you can see why: if they did, they might meet people who can show them a better way to be.)

Action: concerning detainment, banksters, and wildlife.

Our Administration loves looking "tough" on immigrants, but H.R. 2415/S. 1243, the Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act, would force our government to adopt actual standards for detention that are as good or better than American Bar Association's proposed standards from 2014. The bill would also allow our government to break contracts with private prison corporations that repeatedly violate these standards; I'd prefer never to use private corporations for detainment, but this bill would still improve matters. And the bill would mandate inspections of detainee facilities and investigations of detainee deaths in custody. These are reasonable, even mild, changes -- we should still work to prevent corporations (and "businessmen" like our President cough cough) from importing immigrants solely to drive wages down, and if we should do that, we'll better be able to show mercy to those running from real harm, but this bill will improve lives. So Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to advance the cause of civilization by passing the Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act.

Meanwhile, Wells Fargo must have thought they'd done enough PR work to make everyone forget that they opened accounts for customers without their permission, because now they're apparently "forgetting" to close accounts their customers have asked them to close for a few months, which results in negative accounts and significant fees. Nice work if you can get it! Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to investigate Wells Fargo for its alleged wrongdoing. You might be wary of doing so, knowing how thoroughly our current Administration has gutted the CFPB, with the explicit purpose of making it "friendlier" to banksters. Why, that's like a cop saying he wants to be "friendlier" to burglars! And this, from the "law and order" Presidency! But I digress, and anyway, if this wrongdoing is as easy to diagnose as it sounds, our CFPB might want an easy victory to "prove" it's still working on our behalf. That would be cynical of them, but the result would be the same if they weren't so cynical -- money saved for customers, and justice done.

Finally, you know that we designate certain areas of the country as wilderness areas so that we can protect wildlife -- but what about the wildlife that has to migrate in order to survive, but finds highways and buildings in their way? H.R. 2795/S. 1499, the Wildlife Corridors Conservation Act, would provide for endangered and threatened species by protecting new and existing wildlife corridors, a matter that'll become far more important for those species as climate change drives them to move to new habitats. And in the wake of the U.N. report saying that a million plant and animal species are in danger of extinction right now, well, that matter's actually pretty important. Folks who worry that WE'LL NEVER BUILDZ ANYZ OFZ TEH THINGZ EVAHZ AGAINZ!!!!! would do well to ask whether what they really want is never to be bothered by anything other than self-interest. Really, man-in-the-mirror moments such as these can be very instructive. Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect threatened species by passing the Wildlife Corridors Conservation Act.

Action: concerning free speech, government spying, and corporate "personhood."

You've no doubt heard by now that hundreds of thousands of good Hong Kong citizens have taken to the streets in protest of their government's attempts to pass a bill that could result in innocent citizens being extradited to China -- boy, that sure smells like corruption, doesn't it? -- and you may also have heard that Hong Kong's government has used violence to try to put down the protests. But you may not have heard (though you probably won't be surprised to hear) that Hong Kong law enforcement has been using American "crowd control" weapons to do it. Hence H.R. 4270, the Placing Restrictions on Teargas Exports and Crowd Control Technology to Hong Kong Act (or PROTECT Hong Kong Act), would prohibit the sales of the sorts of things police use to stifle good people's free speech rights -- and everyone has free speech rights, whether their governments recognize that or not. So Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to support free speech and peaceful protest in Hong Kong by passing the PROTECT Hong Kong Act.

Meanwhile, Demand Progress helps you tell your House Reps to let Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act expire for good. Section 215, as you know, is the section that permits our government to hoover up financial, medical, and phone records without a warrant or even evidence of wrongdoing; it's the nightmare scenario dystopian writers warned us about for decades, and the fact that we're talking about it doesn't mean "it's not that big a deal," but only means dystopia doesn't arrive all at once or announce itself once it's here. (And, you know, Muslims and folks of color would probably disagree that "it's not that big a deal" in the first place.) But with even our National Security Agency opining that they don't really need all that information to do their work, and with Congress mulling USA PATRIOT Act reauthorization as we speak, now's a pretty good time to make our will known to our Congressfolk. I mean, anytime is a good time to make our will known, but we'd be fools to pass up good opportunities.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass a Constitutional amendment that would help us rein in the campaign finance spending that lets big corporations have more say in our democracy than people do, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. The Constitutional amendment in question is H.J.Res. 48, better known as the "Democracy for All" amendment, and would state explicitly that "(t)he rights protected by the Constitution of the United States are the rights of natural persons only," and that "(a)rtificial entities" like corporations would be "subject to regulation by the People, through Federal, State, or local law." That ought to help bring corporate power to heel, since corporate power is a problem right-wingers seem loathe to admit even exists. They pretend that since our Founders weren't very much concerned with it, we shouldn't be, either, but we're Americans, which means (among other things!) that we're not slaves to sophistry.

Action: concerning civil rights, impeachment, and law and order.

First things first: use the tools in the upper right corner of this page (or, if you're viewing it on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find phone numbers for your Senators, so you can call them and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Yeah, I know, there's an impeachment effort going on, and we'll get to that, but our House has already worked to pass good legislation supporting voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, public lands, internet freedom, and secure elections, and your Senators should work to pass this legislation, too. And if our President vetoes all of it, as I'm sure he would, then let him be accountable for it. It comes with the job, after all. Too often we excuse the inaction, or the bad actions, of our leaders. Let's stop doing that.

Meanwhile, you can use the aforementioned tools on this page to find phone numbers for your House Reps, too, so you can call them and tell them to impeach our President for his wrongdoing. Don't call your Senators, though. They're supposed to try the impeachment. It's annoying to hear some of our Senators currently running for President call for impeachment, because that's rather like a judge demanding an indictment. But other Senators get their role wrong, too: Sen. Alexander said last week that though what our President did was "inappropriate," an impeachment proceeding would "only divide the country further." At least Mr. Alexander wasn't Administration crony Roger Stone, who said that impeachment would bring about "a spasm of violence and insurrection in this country like you’ve never seen" and that "a politician who votes for it will be endangering their own life." I don't know about you, but when evil people try to scare me into doing the wrong thing, that only makes me twice as resolved to do the right thing. Which is to call my Rep and tell them to impeach this arrogant, ignorant, unprincipled, sorry excuse for a President.

In a related note, Daily Kos helps you tell our Congressfolk to hold Administration officials who ignore their subpoenas in contempt. Like me, you probably thought the law-and-order issues were pretty cut-and-dried, but apparently not! Apparently if our 46% President believes he can't be touched while in office, or that the impeachment proceeding against him is somehow "illegitimate," he can direct his underlings to defy legal writs to show up in court and testify! Actually, he can't do that, or else anyone could simply refuse to comply with the law, but Democrats in the House seem to be answering his defiance with a shrug, and though you might argue that we could interpret this collective shrug as a shrug of confidence, well, come on, these are Democrats we're talking about -- they're either weak, or they're actively collaborating with evil while merely appearing weak. But that's why we're here: to provide the steel in their spine so they can do the right thing.

Around the table: just because it's free speech doesn't mean it's not whining! And other lessons.

Our President received a well-covered setback in court last week, concerning his ability to keep Congress from seeing his tax returns, but he also got smacked down in two other rulings. A federal district judge stayed his rule denying green cards to folks who've ever received certain forms of public assistance -- calling the rule "simply a new agency policy of exclusion in search of a justification" -- and another federal district judge declared unlawful the "national emergency" declaration he used to fund a vanity border wall, and said he'd block the plan after getting input from both sides. Victories are hard to come by, but they do sustain us through tough times.

Georgia Southern University students burn books by a Latina author after a "contentious" Q-and-A she held there. Book-burning is as much constitutionally-protected speech as flag-burning, but I won't linger too long on that point, nor will I linger too long on how kids look like Nazis when they burn books, or the university's apparent ignorance of their in loco parentis rights -- rather, I'll linger, as is my habit, on the fact that anyone who burns books because they think they should have all the say about everything is a whining, diaper-loaded brat loudly advertising not their "toughness" but their insecurity. You know, like our President.

FAIR finds most of our big "liberal" media news organs strangely uninterested in studies finding that our military is a major driver of climate change. I'd long supposed that our obsession with building and moving was the main driver behind climate change, but I hadn't actually considered that our obsession with war-making plays a comparable role. And just as more efficient drive trains in automobiles got cancelled out, emissions-wise, by an increase in their construction, our military's honest efforts to combat climate change is likely to be cancelled out by the next 47 wars our politicians want to fight. And our "liberal" media loves war, so you won't hear about it from them.

On the heels of our surprise withdrawal from Syria/leaving of the Kurds to destruction at the hands of Turkey, Stephen Zunes at TruthOut reminds us how often our government has used the Kurds like a wet dishrag. And not just during the Persian Gulf War, either! We've also given Turkey truckloads of help in oppressing their own Kurdish population, all 15 million of them. (Mr. Zunes doesn't address it here, but the Kurds also did fight for the Allies in World War II, despite the impression our President may have given you. They fight the Nazis, they fight ISIS -- what does a brother have to do?)

Finally, in case you were wondering, Thom Hartmann at TruthOut reminds us how our Founders felt about impeachment. Long story short: our Founders obsessed about corruption, and how much damage an "executive" or "magistrate" (they weren't calling him "President" yet) could do. You probably already knew that in a general sense, but it's good to have it spelled out. Elbridge Gerry -- who ultimately didn't sign our Constitution because it didn't (yet) include a Bill of Rights -- spells out the need for "the necessity of impeachments" most plainly: "(a) good magistrate will not fear them. A bad one ought to be kept in fear of them."

Around the table: from government spying to right-wing whining.

We have just learned that a FISA judge ruled a year ago that our FBI has been improperly searching through all the personal data our NSA has been hoovering up. And THAT! Is the MOST! SURPRISING! THING! I! Have EVER! HEARD! Who could have predicted that data collected about alleged foreign perpetrators would sweep up so much data on Americans, and that law enforcement would use that data? Who besides "anyone who thought about it for a minute," I mean? And you like how our FBI calls their investigations "assessments" so they can justify not following our Constitution and getting warrants?

William Rivers Pitt at TruthOut reminds us that "Abandoning the Kurds is Not an Anti-war Move." You probably didn't need that reminder, being a subtle enough thinker thanks to your Master of Science at The School of Politicians Constantly Lying to You, but maybe you know someone who's got too much else to think about who needs to hear that the only two choices in foreign policy are not "stay in Syria forever" and "let all the Kurds die." (Dig, also, the National Security Council source who says our super-awesome greatest deal-maker ever President got "rolled" by Turkey.)

Book-length study reveals that, for the first time ever, the 400 richest American families pay a lower average tax rate than the bottom half of American families. BUT WHATZ ABOUTZ TEH 47 PERCENTZ WHO PAYS TEH NOTHINGZ!!!!!, say the haters. Well, the study takes into account all the things that right-wing trope doesn't, not just by including state and local taxes, but by including "indirect taxes" like business licenses and drivers' licenses, which cost the same for everyone and thus represent a larger percentage of working families' income than they do of the super-rich's income. Now cue right-wingers moving the goal-posts and cherry-picking irrelevancies.

You heard someone say Elizabeth Warren lied about being told to leave that teaching job she had years ago because she was pregnant? Well, they're wrong. The minute I read that Ms. Warren's employer actually voted to renew her contract and accepted her resignation with regret, I said "well, that doesn't actually prove that no one told her she shouldn't be working there because of her pregnancy"; I'd say it's gratifying that people have to go this far to prove her wrong, but lies travel halfway around the world before the truth gets its pants on, as they say, and our super-corrupt President did successfully attach the "corruption" label to Hillary Clinton, so he'll also try to attach the "liar" label to Ms. Warren, even though he's the biggest liar we've ever seen; she'll be harder to take down, because she actually has a real agenda, unlike Mrs. Clinton, whose only agenda was victory. I guess right-wingers like lies OK as long as they're big. Or "bigly."

Finally, Rudy Giuliani, who almost fled the country the other day, compares his and our President's predicament favorably to the Salem witch trials, and thankfully Bess Levin at Vanity Fair corrects the record about the Salem witch trials' supposed "fairness." When will right-wingers finally tire of their heroes constantly whining? They won't, because they characterize their own whining, and the whining of their heroes, as legitimate, and they characterize the legitimate grievances of folks who aren't on their "team" as "whining." They are truly irredeemable, and I leave their souls to God.

Action: concerning human rights in Iran and Yemen.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell the government of Iran to release human rights lawyer/activist Nasrin Sotoudeh, then Amnesty International still helps you do that. Iran threw Ms. Sotoudeh in prison back in 2011, ostensibly for "spreading propaganda" and "conspiring to harm state security" but more likely for representing opposition figures in court; Iran threw her in jail again in 2018, this time supposedly for "espionage," "dissemination of propaganda," and "stoking corruption and prostitution," but also for two other charges, "being a member of a human rights organization" and "disparaging the Supreme Leader of Iran," which you'll easily recognize as charges snowflake governments throw at people. The latter prison sentence is likely really over her activism against compulsory wearing of the hijab (or head covering) in public (hence "prostitution," I suppose). If Iran throws people in jail for that, they deserve all the bad PR they get from the rest of the world. So let's help them change their ways -- or give them what they deserve.

Meanwhile, word on the street is that our Congress is finishing up its annual defense spending bill, and annual appropriations bills are often our best opportunity to force our government to do right by us, so Demand Progress helps you tell Congress to include amendments defunding our involvement in the Saudi/UAE-led war on Yemen. We've gone extensively into why we shouldn't fund this war: because we're aiding and abetting in the committing of war crimes in Yemen, because the Houthi rebels targeted by the Saudi/UAE coalition are some of the best al-Qaeda fighters around, and because the Saudi/UAE rationale for war has always seemed like inside baseball at best and petty absurdity at worst. Why should we antagonize a President who has already vetoed some form of disengagement from the war on Yemen four times this year? Because duty is duty and will is will, and we have a much better chance of having our will done if we communicate it to our Congressfolk, even when it's not convenient for them to hear it. And of course, we should not worry about antagonizing the President. He should worry about antagonizing us.

Action: concerning banksters, whistleblowers, and abortion.

Another year, another attempt to "reform" Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by privatizing them, which would effectively end their efforts to help low-income working families own homes. This idea didn't originate with our President, but he's sure glommed onto it, as he seems to glom on to all bad ideas eventually. Of course, privatizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would not "modernize" them, unless you have a very low opinion of modernity indeed, and it certainly wouldn't "stop another financial meltdown," because Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac didn't cause that meltdown to begin with. Bankster greed and hifalutin financial instruments caused the meltdown, and it'll cause another one -- particularly since hedge fund managers (whom our President supposedly hates, but you don't believe that, because it is to laugh) have grabbed themselves a big chunk of both corporations, and are now hoping to fully add them to their casino economy. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop the privatization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Meanwhile, with whistleblowers all in the news these days, S. 2529, the Whistleblower Programs Improvement Act, would (as its title suggests) better protect those whistleblowers who expose corruption in the financial services sector of our economy. The bill would clarify that the protections of our laws extend to whistleblowers in commodities and securities (our Supreme Court apparently being unclear about that), would speed up the processing of whistleblower claims, and would beef up funding to the CFTC Consumer Protection Fund. If we'd had stronger whistleblower protections in 2008, the banksters might not have come so close to completely destroying our economy as they did. It's not beating a dead horse to keep reminding you of the 2008 bankster meltdown, since Congress too often seems to forget it happened. The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect good American citizens who expose fraud and corruption by passing the Whistleblower Programs Improvement Act.

Finally, with an overturning (or, at least, a crippling) of Roe v. Wade within our Supreme Court's grasp, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2975/S. 1645, the Women's Health Protection Act. States have been putting up hurdles to women getting abortions since the Republican wave of 2010, but this bill would prevent states from putting up these hurdles, which include forced ultrasounds, unnecessary tests, medically-inaccurate information, third-trimester abortion bans, forcing women to explain why they want the abortion and denying them if the state doesn't find their explanation "good enough," and absurd physical plant requirements for hospitals (this final item coming up before our Supreme Court shortly, in June Medical Services, LLC v. Gee). Like I said yesterday, rights are rights regardless of how legislatures "feel" about them, and no one makes a man write an essay on why he wants a vasectomy before letting him have one, do they?

Action: concerning cable fees, abortion, and public lands.

Tired of surprise cable TV fees that inflate your bill by over $35 a month? Well, H.R. 1220/S. 510, the TRUE Fees Act, would essentially outlaw those fees by forcing cable corporations to include all of them upfront in a base subscription price. The bill would also let you get out of your cable contract without penalty if your provider pushes some new fee on you. Big cable corporations of course oppose the TRUE Fees Act, and they might well be telling you that TEH BIG GUMMINT FORCEZ UZ TO IMPOSEZ TEH FEEZ!!!!!, but you should know that they've lied about that in court before, and you should also consider that such an objection really doesn't matter, since the TRUE Fees Act requires transparency. And if the big cable corporations call it a "rate-fixing" maneuver (which it's not!), they should be prepared for your reaction to be we can only hope! Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to support cable customers by passing the TRUE Fees Act.

Meanwhile, H.R. 1692/S. 758, the EACH Woman Act, would repeal the Hyde Amendment that has (except in very limited circumstances) prevented our government from funding abortions over the last 40-plus years. The problem with the Hyde Amendment is that it essentially makes a matter of right (you have a right to have an abortion, after all, per our Supreme Court's ruling in Roe v. Wade) into a matter of means -- folks who have the right to have an abortion but can't afford abortions can't get them (if Medicare, Medicaid, or other government-subsidized health insurance won't help them). I guess for some folks that's a feature, not a bug, but a right is a right for everyone, not just for the people who can afford it, and none of us should use the powerless as a political pawn in order to gain a small advantage. Do I particularly want abortions to happen? Of course not! No one does! But a right is a right, regardless of what we "want," and we don't ask of rights that they never challenge us. So Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to support abortion rights by passing the EACH Woman Act and thus repealing the Hyde Amendment.

Finally, H.R. 4273/S. 2467, the Transit to Trails Act, would fund more public transportation buildout to public parks, so that everyone can enjoy the public parks we all pay for with our taxes. After all, why should only people who can afford cars get to visit public parks? Why shouldn't everyone? Remember: anyone whose answer would include words like "riffraff" is an elitist, and elitism is un-American. At least, that's how I was brought up. And anyone would would answer with a statement like THEY GET TEH GOODIEZ WHY CAN'T I!!!! very likely isn't counting the goodies they already get with their tax dollars. Seriously, if you pay taxes, as prescribed by law, you should get to enjoy the things your taxes buy. And folks who ask WHEREZ TEH MONEYZ COMINGZ FROMZ!!!!! should note the $10 million annual price tag, which ain't much in the context of an annual $4 trillion federal budget. So the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to improve our access to our public parks by passing the Transit to Trails Act.

Around the table: from Kentucky to Syria, and guess where we find more hope?

Hazard (KY) job program helps give recovering drug addicts work, pay, and "a sense of purpose" as they help build affordable housing. "Research is starting to show what advocates have known anecdotally: having a job makes a significant difference in long-term addiction recovery," but try getting a job without skills, or with a criminal record. The program helps half a dozen folks annually gain construction skills and get jobs; maybe a few of our billionaires could break off some of their largesse and fund more programs like these, particularly in rural areas like Hazard? Or do we have to tax them harder to get it done? It's a question worth pondering.

Ho hum, our "liberal" media repeatedly insinuates that Messrs. Sanders, Warren, and Biden for being "too old to be President." Mr. Sanders's heart attack is obviously worth contemplating when deciding whom to vote for in a Democratic primary, but writing off all septuagenarians as physically and mentally unable to do the job is an awfully convenient argument given that the Democratic nominee will almost certainly be one of three septuagenarians. Maybe the one who takes selfies for four hours after a rally? And our "liberal" media never seem to mention the 73-year-old who currently occupies the Oval Office. Maybe that's because he constantly acts like a spoiled brat.

Also ho hum, Republican megadonor/notorious "America Firster" still manages to get H1-B visas for foreign workers even as our President cracks down on said H1-B visas. Of course, our President also uses undocumented immigrants wherever he can, and his votaries excuse that, because BUILDZ TEH WALLZ!!!!!. When Charles Baudelaire said that genius was the ability to hold two disparate ideas in the mind at one time, I don't think he was actually describing hypocrites or their enablers.

Uh oh: Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has apparently violated a court order preventing her office from going after some indebted Corinthian College students, and could face jail time. You'll remember Corinthian College as the for-profit college chain that went under in 2015, but not without putting a lot of its students in a big debt hole first; the Obama Administration set up a program to help some of them get loan forgiveness, but this Administration's Education Department has virtually (and unlawfully) shut down the program, resulting in students incorrectly getting billed for loans and even getting their wages or tax refunds garnished. Again: you can't just skimp on your duty under the law just because you don't want to do it, or because you don't believe it's your duty under the law.

Finally, I've been loathe to go after our President for pulling out of Syria, since I'm no fan of our presence in the Middle East, but I find it hard to believe that our only two choices were "stay in Syria indefinitely" or "let the Turks kill all the Kurds," especially with this supposedly uniquely talented "deal-maker" in charge. Naturally our President has opened himself to charges of corruption, given that he has, well, business in Turkey that he doesn't have with the Kurds. One sad part of all of this is that now even more of our descendants will say this is the way the world is and there's no sense in trying to change it. We can help avert that catastrophe by making this President into the poster child for How Not to Be.

Action: concerning anti-Semitism, corporate welfare, and endangered species.

You may have heard that a group of racists have begun compiling a "list" of Jewish critics on the Telegram chat platform. You may not have heard that this project was apparently too racist for both 4chan and Twitter! The compilers claim they don't intend any violence, but of course they haven't explained what other purpose the list could have -- it couldn't be a mere attempt to alert folks about who their critics are, because it only has Jews on it; gosh, you'd think fighting a World War over this crap would have given contemporary folks more instruction. But nobody said winning and securing victories over evil was easy, so Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell Telegram to take down the anti-Semitic list. Again, this is a public list, and Telegram's own terms of service indicate they're a lot tougher on public utterances than private ones, and again, our First Amendment does not protect terroristic threats (and what else could this public list of Jews be?).

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: HB 1100 -- which supporters call the "Energize PA Legislative Package," but detractors call the "Ethane Cracker Welfare" bill -- would indeed give corporate welfare handouts to manufacturers of petrochemicals and fertilizers. They act like not paying taxes on your expenses isn't enough! Does HB 1100, in its purported effort to "energize" our power grid, include any tax breaks for solar, wind, or geothermal corporations? Of course not -- it's almost like the reactionary state legislature only cares about handing out welfare to corporations that pollute more. Not to pile on, but ethane crackers (which are "petrochemical," after all) generally turn fracked gas into single-use plastic, and nobody thinks we really need more of that clogging up our land and water. Hence both Penn Environment and Food and Water Watch help you tell your state Senators to fight pollution and corporate welfare by rejecting HB 1100.

Finally, in the wake of our Administration's regulatory changes designed to gut the Endangered Species Act, H.R. 4348/S. 2491, the Protect America's Wildlife and Fish in Need Conservation (or PAW and FIN) Act, may give us yet another clumsy legislative acronym, but it would essentially nullify these recent changes, and prevent any other Administration from using "economic factors" to decide how it's going to enforce the Endangered Species Act. You know, there really aren't that many people who complain about "burdensome" regulations; mostly CEOs complain about it, because it forces them to spend some of that money they'd earmarked for gilding the plumbing in their 19th vacation home. They don't put it like that, of course -- they say it's a "burden on small businesses," as if "small businesses" go around killing endangered species with drilling projects! The Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect endangered species by passing the PAW and FIN Act.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence, impeachment, and Social Security.

Happy Monday, good peoples! It's time, once again, to call your Senator and tell them to support voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, public lands, internet freedom, and secure elections by passing H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. And none of them get to play the well-the-bills-aren't-getting-voted-on card, because they could use the prestige of their offices -- that which remains, at least -- and publicly pressure Mr. McConnell into holding a vote on the bill. Of course, none of them really want to do that, since he's making himself look bad on their behalf, knowing that if he allows a vote on these bills and they all vote against them, they'll look bad. But again: their 13-dimensional chess games don't matter; only our will matters.

After that, you may want to get your House Reps on the phone and demand that they support an impeachment inquiry against our President. I haven't advocated for his impeachment up until now, partly because the President I really wanted impeached (that would be Bush the Lesser) did worse, partly because I didn't want the Russia investigation to distract us from our duties as citizens, and partly because, well, I wanted him to twist in the wind until his own vanity and ignorance buried him. But when a man admits to trying to leverage foreign aid into a foreign investigation of a political opponent, then Congress would be derelict in its duty if they did not impeach. The fact that he's tried to un-admit it in the following days means nothing. Really, though, impeachment is too good for him. Whatever happens to him, one thing must happen: I want our descendants to point to this man and say see this guy? Don't be him. If you're gonna be like him, you deserve to be alone until death.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 860/S. 629, the Social Security 2100 Act, then Social Security Works still helps you do that. The Social Security 2100 Act would accomplish much of what we've been trying to accomplish for years: it would put Social Security on sounder financial footing (not that you should believe any hysteria about the "cost" of "entitlements"!) by expanding the income that can be taxed into the system, and although I think it's actually rather odd to exempt income between $132,900 and $400,000, that's still a big improvement. The bill would also expand benefits to ensure our seniors have a more dignified retirement, and would index future cost-of-living increases to a measure of inflation that would actually reflect the bills seniors face -- and not the stupid "chained CPI," which would assume that if a price rises too high, folks will just switch to something else! Seniors have fixed costs (like medicine) they can't just "switch" their way out of! So let's pass the Social Security 2100 Act and treat our seniors better.

Around the table: concerning public banking, internet freedom, our IRS's priorities, our President's options, and small farmers.

State of California enacts public banking legislation. If I were the author of this article, I might not have run from noting that the only other public bank in America is in North Dakota right to TEH CRITICZ SAYZ!!!! in paragraph six, at least not without noting that North Dakota survived the end of the fracking bubble mostly because it has a public bank which even that state's Republican-dominated government has made no move to dismantle. And dig the fool comparing public banking to the DMV (dude, 1985 just called, it wants its right-wing propaganda back) and saying public banking "just doesn't work," as if he's oblivious to the fact that private banks nearly destroyed this economy not that long ago.

In case you were wondering why the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the FCC's nefarious net neutrality repeal: the judges agreed that the FCC had "broad authority" to reclassify (or, perhaps, re-reclassify) broadband services as "information services" as long as they could come up with a convincing argument to do so. But I still suspect a lawsuit challenging the FCC's process in soliciting public comments would succeed, and this Buzzfeed report, in part describing efforts to jam the FCC's inboxes with fake anti-net neutrality comments, could provide plenty of ammo toward that effort.

ProPublica finally hears back from the IRS on why it targets poor folks disproportionately vis a vis rich folks, and you won't like the answer: it's too expensive to target rich folks. On one hand, thanks, Republicans who gin up BS scandals to justify cutting IRS funding, and thanks also, Democrats, for going along with Republican drama! On the other hand, the IRS should know that great reward only follows great risk. And Democrats who run campaign ads on how the IRS goes after poor people oh never mind these are Democrats we're talking about.

Austin Sarat at The Conversation asks the horrifying question: "Could President Trump be impeached and convicted – but also reelected?" His answer: yes, since our Constitution is silent on the matter of what a man removed from office could do afterward -- specifically deferring that question to the Senate, in the course of its trial of the House's impeachment. My answer: yes, if Democrats spend 2020 doing victory laps and don't stand for anything regular Americans want. You know, kinda like they did in 2016.

Finally, I'm as displeased as anyone else that our Agriculture Secretary told Wisconsin dairy farmers that small dairy farms may not be able to survive in a world dominated by factory farms -- seriously, a dairy farmer about to cut his own wrists doesn't want to hear that our economy doesn't guarantee him a livelihood! -- but I am puzzled that Secretary Perdue seems to think the rise of big ag corporations is a relatively recent development, as if Hollywood didn't make half a dozen films about this very subject all at once in the mid-'80s. I feel compelled to note, of course, that his pessimism about small farmers is a bit odd, coming as it does from a public servant who has some power to protect small farmers from oblivion. Such pessimism certainly isn't part of the American can-do spirit.

Action: concerning drug policy, fossil fuels, and family planning funding.

H.R. 3884/S. 2227, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act, would remove pot from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act -- which would make pot legal all across America -- and would also provide for reinvestment in communities most affected by pot arrests and would help folks serving pot-related sentences get them commuted or reduced. Frankly, the MORE Act's sentencing reforms and community reinvestment provisions aren't as direct (and therefore not as effective, I would think) as those of H.R. 1456/S. 597, the Marijuana Justice Act, but the Marijuana Justice Act's lead sponsor, Sen. Booker, is now a co-sponsor of the MORE Act. The Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the MORE Act, but they allow you to edit the message, so nothing stops you, really, from using it to demand more effective drug policy reform legislation like the Marijuana Justice Act. Be sure to read both bills at Congress.gov beforehand, though; they're not long.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell General Electric to scuttle its plan to build coal plants across the planet. They must be figuring that since coal doesn't make any money in America anymore -- and that's not because of some imaginary "war on coal" but because of natural gas that's now much cheaper and renewable energy sources that are getting there -- they can make money building coal plants overseas. They might even be figuring that some of these countries would be lucky to have a coal plant! But that would be short-sighted and self-serving of them, since those countries would be even luckier to have renewable energy systems, which are just as easy for a corporation to build anymore. You have to wonder why GE doesn't do that! It couldn't be because, as Ralph Nader used to say, you can't own the sun and the wind, could it? I kid, of course -- the stew of short-sightedness and self-servingness I've already identified explains everything quite well. It's why I like people better than corporations.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) to stop handing out Title X funds to notorious anti-birth control and anti-abortion centers, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. I expect this HHS effort to die in court one day -- the law authorizing our government to disperse Title X funding mandates that it fund comprehensive family planning services, not services that withhold information about abortion for supposed "conscience" reasons. Seriously, if that's your conscience, you're in the wrong business! I feel compelled to note that it's not necessarily conservative to oppose abortion -- Barry Goldwater used to say that the uterus was one more thing our government shouldn't meddle in. But a real conservative who opposes abortion wouldn't direct public funds to anti-abortion centers like this; a real conservative would amend our Constitution to outlaw abortion. You have to wonder why they don't.

Action: concerning government spying, climate change, and endangered species.

Demand Progress helps you tell your House Reps to repeal Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, which allows our government to collect information (like financial transactions and medical records) on good Americans who've done not a damn thing wrong. Hopefully we're running out of people who would protest but you could become a terrorist one day, you never know! Sadly, the surest way to run out of those people would be to have more of them know their government is spying on them, because we all think we're completely innocent and it's only those people who need our government to keep tabs on them. But when you give government that power, you know they're going to have their own definition of "those people," and that definition is going to skew black and brown and Muslim. You may not be black, brown, or Muslim, but this is America, so someone you know and love probably is, and you shouldn't wait until they get caught in our government's dragnet before you do something about it.

Meanwhile, you may have heard that several big asset management corporations have begun to push big corporations to address climate change -- but BlackRock hasn't, and has, in fact, undermined shareholder resolutions aimed at getting big corporations to change their ways and pollute less. Shareholder resolutions are about the closest thing investors have to democracy in the corporate world (though it's certainly not preferable to democracy!), and even a resolution with substantial minority support can get corporate boards to do the right thing, but BlackRock, with all the billions it controls, doesn't seem to be on board, and that may be your money tied up in there if you have a pension or retirement account somewhere. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell BlackRock to start pushing corporations to do more to combat climate change. Don't believe them if they tell you retirees will suffer if you make us do the thing! Hopefully you recognize that as a) hostage-taking and b) not at all the American can-do spirit.

Finally, H.R. 2245, the Ceasing the Importation of Large Animal Trophies (or CECIL) Act, is of course named for the endangered African lion killed by a hunter back in 2015 -- you remember Walter Palmer, the most hated man in America that week? -- and it would help prevent more "trophies" from coming into the United States. If you're hung up on the notion that an animal that's endangered over there might not be endangered here, please note that our Endangered Species Act does list animals from other nations. And you'll also want to attend Sec. 3 of the bill, which would mandate that our Secretary of the Interior certify, before handing out any hunting permits, that the a potential trophy animal's country of origin "adequately provides for the conservation and monitoring for that species." If we enact and enforce such protections, we'll have fewer rich jerks showing off their trophies of vulnerable animals. So Environmental Action helps you tell your House Reps to protect endangered species by passing the CECIL Act.

Action: concerning hate speech, pollution, and paid family leave.

Facebook may have instituted a ban on explicit racist hate speech, but they seem to be having a little trouble enforcing it; that couldn't be because Facebook makes millions of dollars from ads promoting hate speech, could it? I suppose they'll tell us that they have a big platform and it's just very hard to find every instance of hate speech, but that only means their executives can break off some of their billions and hire more people to do the job. And remember what Dean Baker taught us: that Facebook is really a publishing platform, and thus should be subject to the same rules every other publishing house has to follow (though the law doesn't see it that way); they don't have a "right" to put up all manner of hate speech any more than ABC has to accept every single idea for a sitcom they get. Hence Free Press helps you tell Facebook to do a damn sight better at keeping racist pablum off its platform. (While we're at it, we might as well let CREDO helps us tell Twitter to do the same, since Twitter's brain trust, such as it is, doesn't even seem to find it a priority.)

Meanwhile, another day, another Obama-era anti-pollution regulation our current Administration wants to roll back because Obama! This time, our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) wants to make it easier for coal corporations to spew out coal ash, because what's a little undrinkable water when there are already absurdly high executive salaries to plump up even further? Of course, our EPA will accept public comments on their proposal until October 15, so Environmental Action helps you tell our EPA to reject its own proposal to roll back coal ash protections. Coal ash puts arsenic, lead, and other carcinogens in our groundwater, which makes folks sick; just ask the good citizens of Roane County, TN, where a coal ash pond ruptured in 2008, spewing forth over a billion gallons of coal ash slurry, or the good citizens of Eden, NC, where a pipe running underneath a Duke Energy coal ash pond ruptured and spewed nearly 40,000 tons of coal ash into the Dan River. They're the folks our EPA is supposed to protect from pollution.

Finally, H.R. 1185/S. 463, the Family and Medical Insurance Leave (or FAMILY) Act, would, as you may know, establish a paid family leave program in America, to be funded by a 0.4% payroll tax to be divided equally between employer and employee, and no, that's not "4 percent" or "40 percent," in case our "liberal" media tells you that. People who make that "mistake" on cable news programs should be fired! Sorry, I've seen that too often to just let it go. This means that if you make $50,000 annually, you'd pay a total of $100 annually to support a program where everyone who works (including yourself!) can get family medical leave benefits. $100! That's $8.33 a month! That's a little over five junior bacon cheeseburgers at Wendy's! I don't like how we always sacrifice so that Our Glorious Elites don't have to, but this is hardly a crippling sacrifice, and (unless you're self-employed) you won't even be footing the whole bill out of your paycheck. Hence CREDO helps you tell our Congressfolk to support working families by passing the FAMILY Act.

Around the table: impeachment is too good for this clown! And other lessons.

Remember when our President said he wouldn't cut Medicare? Well, apparently he's planning an executive order that would expand privatized "Medicare Advantage" health insurance plans -- which would likely result in Medicare benefit cuts for everyone else. Remember when Republicans used to whine about President Obama's executive orders? AMURIKAN CAESAR!!!!!, they squealed. Good times! The idea that our President will save a socialist government program from "socialism" is laughable, and should only remind you that the whole idea of Medicare for All is that everyone gets the "advantage."

Justice Department Inspector General's report on a week-long power outage at a Brooklyn jail in the middle of winter "seems more preoccupied with the episode as a public relations blunder than as a humanitarian disaster," says Nick Pinto at The Intercept. And that's exactly why we're a sick, immoral, and decadent society: we constantly grope at the "optics" of something evil, rather than just getting up and calling that thing evil. Also too, we don't think of America as a place where "humanitarian disasters" occur, though we should, since they do.

Former Bush Mobb advisor opined back in January that our President won't be impeached and removed from office, but will resign in exchange for immunity for himself and his family. I'd rather let him twist in office than cut that deal -- a deal that'll likely never happen anyway simply because of the number of people, at state and federal levels, you'd have to get on board with it. And if the economy is going to be as bad in 2020 as Mr. Steinberg says (and I'm far from convinced it will be that bad), what leverage would our President have to cut a deal? Why, even the damn Democrats might not take that deal!

We learn from Connor Sheets at ProPublica that sheriffs in Alabama are releasing prisoners on "medical bond" when they get sick so the state won't have to pay any of their medical bills. Naturally at least one Alabama DA is worried that prisoners who get out on medical bond will break into your house, and one sheriff also seems to think prisoners can get "a dozen honey buns" on commissary. Are we sure it's the inmates who are sick? And note well that if we a) get rid of cash bail and b) expanded Medicare to include everyone, we wouldn't be faced with decisions like this in the first place.

Finally, the incomparable Dean Baker calls our Administration's attempt to drill for oil in ANWR "a gratuitous act of environmental destruction." Further, "people in power" are "taking actions that show they don’t give a damn about the world they pass on to future generations" and "spitting in the face of people who value the environment to show they can wreak destruction for no good reason whatsoever." These are all completely accurate statements, and it is not "uncivil" to say them -- and people who would say so are telling you (guess what?) that they can't win the argument on the merits.

Action: concerning war with Iran, billboards in space, and facial recognition technology.

As you no doubt know, our President's in a good bit of trouble right at the moment! And you know what that could mean? Why, it could mean war with Iran! Yeah, I know, he's made noises about not wanting war with Iran, and he did cut John Bolton loose not too long ago, but he's also done a lot of saber-rattling lately and plans to send more troops to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Now, a lot of his attempts to gin up a war have fallen flat so far, and you have to hope we all remember how Bill Clinton fired a couple of missiles in Mr. bin Laden's direction a couple days after admitting to his affair with Ms. Lewinsky -- not to mention all the times we got color-coded terror alerts from Tha Bush Mobb after some unrelated reversal or other! But, just in case our President is able to change the subject from his own rotten doings, Demand Progress helps you tell our Congressfolk to ensure our President can't go to war with Iran without Congressional approval. You know, like our Constitution says.

Meanwhile, some corporations want to put giant billboards in orbit! Yes, it's true! Like we don't have enough crap in the sky! Actually, the "billboards" will be groups of satellites that congregate to form the image of a corporate logo, but the difference is semantic, and the end result will be the same: you won't be able to look up at the sky without someone trying to sell you something. And, ah, you can imagine what'll happen if even more satellites occupy the night sky, right? Some of them will accidentally crash into each other. This may be what led the late, great Carl Sagan to call billboards in the sky an "abomination." Yes, not only is this a bad idea, it's an old idea, which also makes it a zombie idea. Well, we all know what to do with zombies, so Environmental Action helps you tell your House Reps to put the beatdown on the notion of giant floating billboards in the sky. People spend their time wishing for a better future and floating billboards is what they come up with?

Speaking of which, Fight for the Future helps you tell major live event corporations not to use facial recognition technology at their events. Why? Facial recognition technology invades the privacy you expect to have at a live event -- yes, you do expect some privacy, even at a "public event"; does everyone need to know where you are at all times? Facial recognition technology is also pretty terrible; no doubt you have heard that facial recognition technology, like your Tea Party uncle, can't tell black people apart very well. No government at any level regulates facial recognition technology very well -- for example, none of them regulate how long a corporation can hold onto the data it's scraped at a live show. And using this bad, unregulated, invasive technology can do folks real harm -- it can get them deported, detained, or otherwise harassed, again because our governments don't do their job and regulate how corporations can use the technology. And rather than hold our breath and wait for governments to do their job, let's just not use the crap, OK?

Action: concerning Senate intransigence, trade agreements, and surprise hotel fees

It's Monday, which means it's the day we call our Senators and tell them to support voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, public lands, internet freedom, and secure elections by passing H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. You can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to find your Senators' phone numbers. We give Mob Boss Mitch a lot of guff, and justifiably so, for refusing to even hold votes on any of this legislation because he thinks he's the boss of us and he knows better than us, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention that Democrats might have passed all these bills because they knew they wouldn't pass and it would make them look good without actually accomplishing anything. But their 13-dimensional chess games don't matter; only our will matters.

Meanwhile, Public Citizen helps you call your Congressfolk and tell them not to vote on the USMCA trade agreement (a.k.a. "NAFTA 2.0") until our Administration fixes it. Specifically, you'll ask them to ensure our Administration gets rid of the corporate welfare for big pharma and improves the labor/environmental standards, and I think you should also make a point of saying that you want the changes to the investor/state dispute settlement (or ISDS) system either kept or made even better, because the USMCA isn't all bad just because the President who negotiated it is an irredeemable asshole. If they renegotiated the deal to get rid of the corporate welfare and the lax standards but also put back the ISDS system that enables foreign investors to nullify our laws and allows corporations to outsource our jobs, I'd say that's an even worse deal. So be sure you communicate your will precisely to your Congressfolk. They just love "mishearing" you, or telling you their pile of crap is exactly the meatloaf you asked for.

Finally, if you're fed up with surprise fees in your hotel bills -- fees that bleed almost $3 billion a year out of our bank accounts -- then Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4489, the Hotel Advertising Transparency Act of 2019. H.R. 4489 -- per one of its sponsors, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX) -- "would require the prices regularly advertised by hotels and online travel agencies to include all mandatory fees that will be charged to a consumer, excluding taxes." Hence they won't be able to hide their "WiFi fees" and their "in-room safe fees" and their "resort fees" and even their "towel fees" (I know, right?) in their "low" prices. Gosh, how long before they start charging "bed fees" and "wall fees" and "floor fees" and "no secret camera behind your mirror fees"? Hotels have largely concocted these hidden fees in response to the pressure of winning in online comparison shopping, which only proves (as if we needed more proof!) that the future ain't all it's cracked up to be.

Action: concerning worker safety and discriminatory travel bans.

H.R. 3668, the Asuncion Valdivia Heat Illness and Fatality Prevention Act, would mandate that our Secretary of Labor, whomever that is, issue regulations that prevent workers from dying of heat exposure. Heat causes more deaths than any other weather-related phenomena, after all, and it'd be nice to have national standards that might protect workers from falling dead after 10 hours picking grapes in 105 degree heat, as Mr. Valdivia himself did in 2004. If you read the bill, you'll be pleased to see that it tells the Secretary of Labor to create a good heat exposure standard -- if the Secretary of Labor, whomever that is, decides, for example, to simply ignore the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health's 2016 recommended standard for heat exposure, then they'll run afoul of Sec. 4(a)(1) of the bill, and federal courts will strike it down. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect workers by passing the Asuncion Valdivia Heat Illness and Fatality Prevention Act.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2214/S. 1123, the NO BAN Act, and thus repeal our President's infamous Muslim ban, then CREDO still helps you do that. The House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs Committees have begun hearings on this bill this week, so this might get to a full House bill in the coming months, and then get added to the list of bills we tell the Senate to pass even though "Mob Boss Mitch" won't let them come to a vote. Even if the bill dies in the Senate, we always do good when we communicate our will to our Congressfolk, and if they refuse to do our will, then we have them on the record as having failed us. The NO BAN Act wouldn't just roll back our President's Muslim ban -- which our Supreme Court blessed even though our President said, out loud, that he totally intended to single out Muslims -- but would greatly hamper his ability to issue future bans based on religion. And that is kind of the point of our Constitution, gang -- to prevent Presidents from having all the say about everything.

Action: concerning corruption and more corruption.

You may have heard that our House of Representatives has launched a formal impeachment inquiry against our President, so Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to get our President's tax returns as part of any impeachment effort. Don't brook any silliness from the right about "re-litigating the 2016 election" -- the same election in which 54% of the electorate voted against our President and he only won by getting pluralities in three swing states, but I digress -- because if he's really got nothing to be afraid of, he ought to cough up his tax returns. More likely he does have a lot to be afraid of -- not just of good Americans finding out exactly how compromised he is, which should be the focus of an impeachment investigation, but also of good Americans finding out he's actually dirt-poor in real terms, which would be icing on the cake. But generally, if the President fears it, we ought to do it.

In a related note, Win Without War still helps you tell Speaker Pelosi to ensure that the part of the House defense authorization bill that forbids our Department of Defense from spending taxpayer money at our President's properties makes it through conference. You can almost see her saying well, we don't need this now, because we've got an impeachment going on, can you? You can also see the impeachment effort falling flat, and then we'll be left with neither a justly-disgraced President nor the force of law preventing taxpayer money going right into said President's pockets. Really, it's the right thing to do, keeping taxpayer money from lining our President's pockets; you can imagine our Founders agreeing, right? You can also imagine our Founders spinning in their graves over the continued drama of this President abusing his power and enriching himself off these abuses. But you can't count on Congress to stop it -- unless we make our will unmistakably known to them.

Around the table: concerning the elusive "independent" voter and the even more elusive "booming economy."

Good news, everyone! A 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals panel has struck down our FCC's latest attempt to loosen media consolidation rules. FCC Chair Pai bemoaned the fact that federal judges have been striking down such FCC efforts for 15 years, claiming that "no evidence or reasoning — newspapers going out of business, broadcast radio struggling, broadcast TV facing stiffer competition than ever —...will persuade them to change their minds," though you and I might argue that media consolidation itself drives all this "struggling," "going out of business," and "facing stiffer competition than ever," and thus more media consolidation isn't the answer. It makes sense, of course, when you remember that Mr. Pai only cares about media owners, and not regular Americans whom our media supposedly serve. And certainly not local media.

What's vital to kicking climate change's ass, according to Vandana Shiva at Truthout? "Biodiversity-based agriculture," that's what. "The Earth has roughly 300,000 edible plant species," she writes, "but the contemporary global human community eats only 200 of them. And, according to the New Scientist, 'half our plant-sourced protein and calories come from just three: maize, rice and wheat.'" Why? Because big ag corporations prefer to grow only one thing, since that's the best way to make money redistribute wealth upward to executives. Of course, big ag doesn't grow stuff just for food, but also for fuel, which (hate to disturb all those right-wingers who think every liberal is an ethanol addict) ain't good for our world, either.

Another day, another study suggesting that our "liberal" media's obsession with the "moderate," "undecided," or "independent" voter is a myth. And surprise, surprise, when you ask these "moderate," "undecided," or "independent" voters about economic and immigration issues, they're all over the liberal-conservative continuum. Actually, it looks to me like a plurality (though not a majority) of "independent" voters are in the "more egalitarian"/"more pro-immigration" quadrant -- and a more pronounced plurality of "moderate" voters also camp out there. How interesting.

You may have heard that some 69% of American voters don't like our President personally, but the Wall Street Journal/NBC poll reporting that result also said that 19 of those percentage points came from folks who dislike our President personally but like his policies, which makes the number of folks who don't like him or his policies 50%, so we should worry more about the fact that roughly a quarter of the electorate is bat-guano insane and eats up every slab of drama he puts out, while another quarter is happy to "hold their noses" at the polls and say "but regulations and judges!" Of course, a take-no-prisoners Democratic nominee who could change the subject to what Americans actually care about could beat him.

Our President loves talking about his GREATESTZ ECONOMIEZ EVERZ!!!!!, but Robert Reich reminds us that wages have gone up barely a blip over the last 40 years, the unemployment rate's low in part because a lot of folks have given up looking for work and a lot of others who'd like full-time work only have part-time work, and health care and housing costs are skyrocketing well beyond the pace of inflation. And the next time someone says I have to balance my checkbook, why can't government?, just remind them that Americans actually have $4 trillion in consumer debt right now, and that figure excludes mortgages. Which are also debt, even if it works out reasonably well if you hold on to the house long enough.

Next time you hear about how corporations would really rather like someone other than our current President in that office, recall that said corporations are not only getting a lot out of our President's deregulatory agenda, they've been the ones actually setting the agenda. "And those rollbacks really have touched on so many different areas where the government is supposed to be protecting the public, not protecting corporate profits," says Public Citizen's Amit Narang. Of course, we should know better than this already, having witnessed so much corporate hand-wringing over our President before he won. Why, it's almost like they ran a scam on us or something.

Finally, you may have heard that House Democrats are opening up an impeachment inquiry into our President, and, well, our President didn't take the news well: "Such an important day at the United Nations, so much work and so much success, and the Democrats purposely had to ruin and demean it with more breaking news Witch Hunt garbage. So bad for our Country!" All together now: waaaaaaaaah! If a liberal complained like this, right-wingers would call it whining; now they just echo their Personal Lord and Savior's words. I guess they've become that which they most hate.