Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning monopolies, corruption, and taxing the rich.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to investigate the Live Nation/Ticketmaster monopoly, investigate Justice Thomas’s alleged conflicts of interest, and pass a Billionaire’s Minimum Income Tax. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate the Live Nation/Ticketmaster monopoly. Yes, Live Nation (which assimilated Ticketmaster in 2010) is a monopoly, given that they control 70% of the live event market, and last month’s Taylor Swift presale tickets scandal doesn’t begin to tell the full story of how badly they serve that market – Ticketmaster also keeps a good chunk of those notorious fees they’re not supposed to keep, plus their lax security lets scalpers buy up tickets in bulk and charge concert-goers even more money. So it turns out MTV didn’t kill the live show – ticket monopolies did. Good Americans deserve better, so our Congressfolk should do better.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s alleged conflicts of interest. You know, like his wife openly colluding to overthrow our government on January 6! Naturally he’s ruled the wrong way on January 6-related matters that have come before the court since then, and though he might be able to argue that his rulings are entirely consistent with the philosophy he’s expressed on our Court for 30 years, c’mon, we’re not schmucks. I long to live in an America where people are shamed out of their status for being corrupt! But if we want that world, we have to demand it, and work for it.

Finally, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Billionaire’s Minimum Income Tax before they go home for the holidays. It’s hard to get such things through Congress, but the more we demand it the harder we make it for Congress to ignore us. And one more time: nobody “earns” a billion dollars. Billionaires get where they are not through “talent” or “hard work” but because they leverage their privilege and their wealth to hurt other people. And if we want to be a sane, moral, and decent civilization again, we need to tax billionaires a lot harder.

Action: concerning monopolies, corporate welfare, and saving our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell our FTC to stop the proposed Kroger/Albertsons merger, tell the Argentinian government to end fossil fuel subsidies, and tell President Biden to get rid of USPS Postmaster Louis DeJoy. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to stop the proposed Kroger/Albertsons merger. You don’t have to believe that no corporation should be able to own any other corporation (as I do!) to see why the Kroger/Albertsons merger is such a bad idea – like all other mergers, it means killed jobs, higher prices, fewer choices, and more worker income redistributed upward to corporate executives. In this particular case, it also means a $4 billion payout to hedge fund banksters as they bleed Albertsons dry, and what did they do to deserve that? You already know the answer: nothing.

350.org helps you tell the Argentinian government to end all fossil fuel subsidies. What, Argentinians deserve freedom from corruption less than we do? People are people, after all. And the Argentinian government has become notorious for funneling taxpayer money to crony fossil fuel corporations, to the tune of over $3.5 billion just between 2016 and 2018, just to corporations operating in the Vaca Muerta area of western Argentina. Again, Argentinians deserve the freedom that clean water affords anyone who has access to it – mainly, freedom from illness – and they also deserve a government that spends their money on them, not on corporate welfare. So let’s help them get that.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to finish the job of getting rid of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. You know the main story by now – Mr. DeJoy, another in a long line of talentless CEOs our economy belches out like it’s just had a bowl of beans, has slashed jobs, cut services, and raised prices, which ain’t good for all the Americans who rely on our Postal Service for life-saving medications. But the side stories – his efforts to hijack voting by mail and block electric mail trucks, and his investment in the corporation that just so happened to provide the free COVID tests our Postal Service sent out – also testify to his evil.

Action: concering tax cuts for working families, maternal health care, and the *Hobby Lobby* ruling.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to bring back the expanded Child Tax Credit, pass the SHINE for Autumn Act, and investigate the alleged Alito leak over the Hobby Lobby ruling. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the expanded Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion from 2021, and make it permanent. That expansion delivered $250 and $300 checks per child into working families’ bank accounts every month during the latter half of 2021, but then 50 Republican Senators and Joe Manchin refused to extend the expansion, with Mr. Manchin notoriously alleging that people were using that money on drugs! Ah, no – they were using it to offset the high inflation Mr. Manchin used as his excuse to block almost everything else. And thanks for letting Republicans off the hook, Joe! I still prefer him to Kyrsten Sinema.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5487/S. 3972, the Stillbirth Health Improvement and Education (or SHINE) for Autumn Act, which would, as its title suggests, fund more research into stillbirths in the hope of preventing them. Over 60 babies come out stillborn every day, which means over 60 grieving families every day, and for what? The greatest nation on Earth should be able to prevent that, and not for nothing, but Black and Brown families experience the tragedy of stillbirths a lot more than the rest of us. Couldn’t be all of the polluting factories we tend to concentrate in Black and Brown neighborhoods, could it? We’ll never know, unless we spend the money to find out!

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our Senate Judiciary Committee to investigate the alleged leak from Supreme Court Justice Alito about the notorious 2014 anti-birth control Burwell v. Hobby Lobby ruling to certain right-wing activists. Though this alleged leak might not be illegal, that’d likely only be because Supreme Court Justices don’t have to adhere to the same ethics laws as every other federal judge. And a Senate Judiciary Committee investigation would sure be a good way to get some momentum for a law that would protect us from the Supreme Court corruption we all know we’re experiencing right now.

Action: concerning killer robots, paid sick leave, and campaign finance disclosure.

Long story short: tell the San Francisco government to get rid of its killer robots, and tell President Biden to issue executive orders guaranteeing paid sick leave for railway workers and campaign finance disclosure by federal contractors. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Public Citizen helps you tell the San Francisco government not to allow its police to deploy killer robots on their citizens. Incredible that I even have to write that sentence, but duty is duty, no matter where it takes us. The NYPD started using killer robots in 2020, but stopped after public backlash; if New York’s government can be cowed by good people communicating their will, so can San Francisco’s. Even if they think they know better than everyone else! Which is not a liberal character flaw, any more than San Francisco is a “liberal” city; San Francisco is a rich tech bro city, and anyone can think they know better than everyone else. This is America, after all.

The People United helps you tell President Biden to issue an Executive order granting railroad workers paid sick leave. The Obama Administration mandated that for all other federal contractors, but exempted railway workers, so it seems to me there’s ample legal precedent to do it. And even if the presence of a labor contract pre-empts such an Executive Order – I don’t know if that’s true, but it could be, even concerning a legal contract Congress just forced down railway workers’ throats – then let right-wingers sue and overturn it! It’ll just force them to spend money they didn’t earn, it’ll keep the issue in the public eye, and it might well fail. And thus we will have done a good work.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to issue an Executive Order forcing all corporations that contract with our government to disclose their campaign contributions. Right wingers will squeal BUTZ HOWZ WILLZ ANYONEZ MAKEZ ANYZ CONTRIBUSHUNZ IFZ THEYZ CAN’TZ BEZ PRIVATEZ!!!!!, but you shouldn’t be so ashamed of how you spend your money, should you? And anyway, this is taxpayer money big corporations spend trying to elect ass clowns! We deserve to know what they’re up to! And we also deserve to know if big corporations are indulging in actual corruption to feed at the taxpayer trough. Which – at the risk of sounding old-fashioned – they shouldn't.

Around the table: I have seen the future; brother, it is murder.

“Brain-computer interfaces” (or BCIs) might enable soldiers to fight remotely, and might even allow soldiers to “turn off” their fear, but here’s an idea: don’t do any of that! "What might soldiers accomplish if they just weren’t afraid?" is the wrong question to ask, particularly in this era of guerrilla warfare, where hackers will probably win the battle with BCI-enabled soldiers anyway! BCIs have more humane uses (i.e., helping the disabled), and some folks have given the ethics a great deal of thought; if only America had a way of stopping the unethical use of technology, you know, like with laws and such.

An artificial intelligence agent gets good enough at Stratego that it now outranks almost every human on Earth. Machines may not have egos like people do – study any military history and you’ll be amused and/or disgusted by how badly Our Glorious Elites have botched wars just to appease their own egos – but again, how about we don’t leave wars up to machines? I mean, yes, it’s interesting that an AI agent play a game with “imperfect information” so well, but instead of imagining how we could “fight wars better” – again, a dubious notion in the guerrilla warfare era! -- how about we imagine how we can avoid wars better?

Ho hum, right-wingers claim that vaccines kill people with blood clots, naturally by blowing one fact (that the J&J vaccine, accounting for 3% of all vaccine administrations, cause a kind of blood clotting in literally four out of every million doses) way out of proportion, pretending that postmortem blood clots aren’t common, and repeating a whole slew of other debunked claims. Also, too, just because someone dies after getting the vaccine, that doesn’t mean the vaccine killed them. If I shoot a diabetic in the head, no reasonable person would claim he died of diabetes, but right-wingers would make a movie saying exactly that if they thought they could enrage enough people.

Marion County (IN) Superior Court Judge blocks Indiana’s abortion ban – on religious freedom grounds! After all, mainstream Judaism and Islam both authorize it in certain circumstances, so banning abortion more broadly interferes with those folks’ exercise of their First Amendment-guaranteed religious freedom. Will our Supreme Court, with its stated concern for religious freedom, uphold rulings such as these? I kid, of course – nothing matters to the far right wing of our Court except imposing their will on America. Why, I bet they’ll figure out a way to rule that the Jewish/Muslim/other non-Christian women who filed the suit “don’t have standing” to challenge it!

Our Senate has passed the Respect for Marriage Act. The bill they passed wouldn’t compel churches to hold gay weddings, but as long as our government recognizes them, most folks couldn’t care less if churches do. The bill would also repeal the noxious Defense of Marriage Act, confer federal benefits to any gay couple legally married, and force states to recognize marriages legal in other states. However, the bill wouldn’t compel those 35 states that have anti-gay marriage laws on the books – laws those states will enforce if/when our Supreme Court overturns Obergefell v. Hodges – to legalize gay marriage, and that’s a thing that’ll come back to bite us. Verdict: it's progress, but it's not quite justice.

Finally, our Senate has passed a bill that’ll keep railway workers from striking – but also rejected a separate measure that would have given railway workers seven days of paid sick leave, which had (justifiably!) been a sticking point in negotiations. One has to wonder why our House put the seven sick days in a separate bill, one more easily rejected by our Senate, instead of daring right-wing Senators to oppose the whole package because they hate giving workers time off. Sadly, the only answers I can come up with are “cowardice” and “evil," which reduces to "evil" or "evil."

Action: concerning corporate spying, media fees, and big corporate mergers.

Long story short: tell ShotSpotter to stop spying on good Americans, tell DirecTV to say no to higher Fox fees, and tell our FTC to stop the proposed Kroger/Albertsons merger. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell ShotSpotter to stop spying on good Americans. ShotSpotter sells “gunshot recognition technology” that, surprise, works just as badly as facial recognition technology, since it can hardly tell the difference between a gunshot and a loud bang at a construction site. Despite that, cities use ShotSpotter to send police officers out to Black and Brown neighborhoods, which just increases the possibility of more needless deaths at the hands of cops. And ShotSpotter doesn’t just record gunshots (and “gunshots”) – it also records what people say and do nearby. Without a warrant! Hence we use the Big Stick of Bad PR.

Daily Kos helps you tell DirecTV not to cave in to Fox’s demands for massive carriage fee increases, which you know DirecTV will pass on to all of its customers, who may include you. I’m old enough to remember when Fox could dictate fees to the big telecom services for its “services,” and no, its regular TV offerings aren’t good enough to offset all the harm the notorious Fox News Channel has done and will continue to do. So now would be a good time for us to lend some steel to DirecTV’s spine and tell them to stand up to Fox’s demands for more money. Maybe they’ll have to drop Fox entirely! What a shame that would be.

Finally, More Perfect Union helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission to stop the proposed Kroger/Albertsons merger, which will create yet another mega-corporation in a world that already has too many of them slashing jobs, raising prices, and imposing their will on good people. Oh, and paying their executives way, way too much money; we can’t forget that, since that’s the real reason corporations merge. Luckily, we have laws against this sort of thing, and though it may take a while to get judges who’ll remember we have laws against this sort of thing, we can have an FTC that remembers – if we keep reminding them.

Action: concerning fair contracts for workers, tax cuts for working families, and lower insulin costs for all Americans.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to strike a fairer deal with railway workers, bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion, and cap insulin costs for all Americans. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. Both More Perfect Union and Patriotic Millionaires help you tell your Congressfolk to strike a fairer deal with railway workers, i.e., a deal that gives them more paid time off like all workers deserve. Railway workers are always on call and get one day off a month – one! – so we shouldn’t be forcing a bad contract down their throats. No use arguing that “these workers are too important” to give them more paid time off, because bosses have been using that argument against workers forever. Hospital workers are too important! Teachers are too important! Jesus Mary and Joseph if they’re that important, shouldn’t we make sure we take care of them?

Change.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit expansion from 2021 permanent. That expansion put $250 or $300 checks per child every month in working families’ bank accounts, and it sure helped them weather skyrocketing inflation in 2021, but Republicans and Joe Manchin let it expire. If Democrats had run on their vote for (and, ah, their opponents’ vote against) the Child Tax Credit expansion in 2021, I think they’d have kept their House majority and expanded their Senate majority. Still, good works are good works, and bringing back that expansion now would help keep children out of poverty now.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend the Medicare $35/month insulin cap to all Americans. Because all Americans deserve it! Don’t let your friends be like Herschel Walker, telling everyone they “gotta eat right” and imagining that’s the answer to diabetics (including the many who’ve had it since birth!) risking death by rationing their insulin! And don’t brook Republican attempts to overturn the protections we got in the Inflation Reduction Act, either! These Republicans are objectively anti-health, objectively pro-sickness, and objectively pro-inflation. And you thought being objectively pro-big donor was bad enough!

Action: concerning corporate welfare, tribal lands, and marriage equality.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop handing out corporate welfare and pass the Advancing Tribal Parity on Public Land Act and the Tribal Cultural Areas Protection Act, and tell your Senators to pass the Respect for Marriage Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop handing out corporate welfare to big corporate donors like they do every year. We just had a midterm election that was, ah, not as big a win for Republicans as they’d hoped; once they formally organize to lead our House again, they’ll propose all kinds of stupid corporate tax cuts for their big donors, so we need to communicate our will to our Congressfolk, again. Like I said, they do this every year, at the end, when we’re all preoccupied with the holidays, but there’s another reason to deny them this year: corporate profits are driving at least half of the worst-in-40-years inflation we’re suffering. Make sure to tell them that.

The Native Organizers Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 8108/S. 4421, the Advancing Tribal Parity on Public Land Act, and H.R. 8109/S. 4423, the Tribal Cultural Areas Protection Act. The former bill would prohibit sale of any public land where a native American nation has treaty or other reserved rights, while the latter would establish a federal system protecting sites of cultural significance to native Americans. That all sounds pretty common-sensical to me; the only people who’d hate it are the big corporate executives who want to turn everything into a mine or a mall. And we’ve already taken enough away from native Americans.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 8404/S. 4556, the Respect for Marriage Act, which somehow still hasn’t passed our Senate, despite getting 47 Republican yea votes in our House back in July. And sadly the other side’s arguments against it are profoundly disappointing – they won’t say they just don’t want gay and interracial couples to marriage, so they can’t land a punch! One announced that “This Depraved Law Would Allow Pedophiles to Marry Children,” as if there's literally no such thing as consent, as if our laws don’t already prohibit adult-child marriages. So let’s not let bigots have all the say about everything.

Action: concerning campaign finance disclosure, law and order, and climate change.

Long story short: tell President Biden to force big corporations to reveal campaign contributions, tell our DOJ to indict Donald Trump already, and tell our DOT to implement the climate change-reporting rule they promised (and which our laws mandate). Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to issue an executive order forcing all corporations receiving more than $1 million in taxpayer money to disclose their campaign spending. Such an order would cover a lot of corporations, since a lot of corporations contract with our government, and while we’ve got to do something about all this big corporate campaign donations helping to elect utter fools, we also have a right to know whether big corporate campaign donations also help corporations get federal contracts they don’t deserve. So President Biden could shine a light on corruption big and small – but he won’t, unless we get in his grill about it.

Woman Up helps you tell new Justice Department special prosecutor Jack Smith to indict Donald Trump already. If you get a little annoyed with right-wingers shouting in your ear that YOUZ CAN’TZ EVENZ SAYZ WHATZ TEH TRUMPZ DIDZ!!!!!, just remember that this is how he wants it – he wants chaos and disorder so you’ll forget what coherence and order feel like. Also remember that he knew he lost the 2020 election but spread lies about it for the express purpose of overturning the will of the American people and staying in office. And that’s enough of a reason to indict the man. And it's just for starters! If we let him off, if we embrace cynicism, we’ll never have real law and order in America again.

Finally, the National Campaign for Justice helps you tell our Department of Transportation (or DOT) to implement a new greenhouse gas-measuring rule already. A 2012 law mandated the rule, the Obama Administration took its time writing one, and then the Trump Administration said, as it so often does, to hell with the law and the only thing that matters is worshiping mammon; then the Biden Administration took office, announced they’d do something, and then, nothing. Because DOT Secretary Pete Buttigieg thinks the Democratic party will be the same in 2028 as it is now! Thus we get in our DOT’s grills again.

Light posting notice plus action.

Posting will be light over the next week-plus, so enjoy your holiday, and prepare yourself for the drama of a Republican House (albeit one with a rather slim majority).

For today, though, two items: the U.S. Senate may vote on H.R. 8404/S. 4556, the Respect for Marriage Act, as early as today, so you'll want to get on the horn with your Senators and tell them to vote for that bill. This bill might actually pass, and if it does, it will protect gay marriage and interracial marriage from whatever horror our Supreme Court is cooking up. I told my right-leaning Senator, who will be replaced by John Fetterman in January, not to listen to people who claim their "religious" "conscience" demands that our government prevent gay folks from marrying. If you don't want to gay-marry, I said, then just don't gay-marry. Shame that rage-filled right-wingers seem to have no idea how that works.

Also, Pennsylvania residents, take note: not long after I declared the Larry Krasner impeachment dead, the Pennsylvania state house up and impeached him, for something, I guess. Two-thirds of Pennsylvania's state Senators will have to vote to remove him from his office as Philadelphia District Attorney; Pennsylvania has 29 Republicans out of 50 state Senators, so they'd have to bully at least four Democrats into voting to remove him. Thus now's a good time to call your state Senator and tell them not to enable this right-wing sore loser drama Republicans want to inflict upon us. (Republicans rushed to impeach Mr. Krasner because, pending the results of two races in the Philly suburbs, they may have lost the Assembly.) Mr. Krasner has, frankly, enacted rather mild criminal justice reforms in his five years as DA, and any cop who says I CAN'TZ DOZ MYZ JOBZ ANYMOREZ!!!! simply because he can no longer indefinitely detain a guy for peeing against the wall of a bar at 3 AM is a whiner. And Jesus Mary and Joseph I hate whiners. I hate whiners with guns even more.

Anyway, enjoy time with family and friends this week, and thank you for all your good works.

Action: concerning drug prices, Presidential power, and social media.

Long story short: tell President Biden to expand public drug manufacturing capability to lower drug prices, tell your Congressfolk to make Presidential legal memos more transparent, and tell big corporations to stop advertising on Twitter. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell President Biden to expand public manufacturing capacity for insulin so that it doesn’t cost good Americans hundreds of dollars every month like it does now. With Republicans finally getting the 218th seat that’ll give them a majority in our House, we sure can’t expect any such action coming from them. But President Biden can use existing authority in the Bayh/Dole Act to allow our government to make more insulin at low prices – insulin that’ll compete with price-gouging big pharma corporations. Hey, the “free” market isn’t providing! And when that happens, our government must step in.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to require the Presidential Office of Legal Counsel to publicly release all of its legal opinions, past and present. Why should they keep them from us, after all? I kid, of course – they keep them from us because they know we’d see through them! After all, our government hasn’t just used OLC “secret memos” to shield Donald Trump from accountability – these memos have also justified torture in violation of the Geneva Conventions (and American law) and expanded, unconstitutional war-making power for our Presidents. Don’t buy the “national security” argument, either. They should be able to keep us safe and be accountable to us.

Finally, Inequality Media helps you tell big corporations to stop advertising on Twitter. General Motors has suspended advertising on Twitter, and if big corporations to follow suit, we might even think of them as guardians of civilization again one day! Elon Musk has turned Twitter into a cesspool of hatred and drama since buying it, and we must hold him accountable for that; absent legislation making social media liable the way publishing houses are, we can wield the Big Stick of Bad PR against any corporation that would advertise on Twitter. We should ask them not to advertise there first, though. We are civilized, after all.

Action: concerning data privacy, internet freedom, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell our FTC to keep law enforcement’s grubby mitts off our private data, tell our Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner, and tell President Biden to remove Donald “Lee” Moak from our USPS Board of Governors. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to stop private data-collecting corporations from selling all your private info to law enforcement. If law enforcement wants that information, they should get a warrant from a judge; supporting “convenience” or “efficiency” here is nothing more and nothing less than supporting fascism. Seriously! If law enforcement can just buy your personal data, and look at it whenever they like, what’s to stop them from going on fishing expeditions once they decide you’re an enemy? Hey, were you at George Floyd rallies in 2020? Well, congratulations – now you’re an enemy. It’s way too easy for cops to do that, which is why we restrict their power.

Demand Progress also helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner with a quickness. They’ve been dragging their feet about this nomination for two years, and as a result, our FCC can’t do the work Congress has given them to do – work that not only includes reinstating network neutrality as virtually everyone in America left right and center wants them to do, but also allocating a lot of infrastructure money, since Congress has passed a few of those bills over the last two years, too. Currently our FCC suffers from 2-2 votes caused by not having a fifth Commissioner, and if Gigi Sohn is extraordinarily well-qualified no matter what corporate lobbyists say. So let’s get on this.

Finally, Save the Post Office helps you tell President Biden to replace Donald “Lee” Moak on our USPS Board of Governors, preferably with a nominee who will replace the notorious Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. Mr. Moak is one of Mr. DeJoy’s biggest supporters even as he freely admits – because such admissions apparently mean nothing anymore! – that he hardly understands his work on the Board. The only thing he seems to “understand” is that raising prices, slashing jobs, and cutting services in a nation where many Americans rely on our Postal Service for life-saving medicines is somehow a good plan! And that’s why he’s got to go.

8 thoughts about the midterms.

1. Again, I wanted humiliation for Republicans – I wanted them to lose a lot of seats in our House and Senate. Still, Democrats will hold the Senate, meaning they’ll get two more years of judges, and by my reckoning they’ll finish with at least 213 House seats (adding in Alaska, Maine’s 2nd, Oregon’s 6th, Colorado’s 8th, New Mexico’s 2nd, and California’s 9th, 21st, 47th, and 49th), with 218 still possible, though unlikely (the best remaining path being through California’s 3rd, 13th, 22nd, and 41st and then Colorado’s 3rd in a recount). The last election like this? 1982, the election that cemented the Reagan Revolution! Democrats picked up over two dozen House seats that year, but with Boll Weevil Southern Democrats pretty much voting with Reagan all the time, Republicans had a working majority in the House then, if not an actual one, and Democrats netted only one Senate seat, reducing the Republicans' actual Senate majority from 54 to 53.

Heartening, in that context, but not for long – Republicans may act humbled now that they didn’t get the electoral sturm und drang they counted on, but if/when they win our House, they’ll promptly forget their humility and act like the fascists they wish they were. Incessant investigations into Hunter Biden, ugly and shameful though that’ll be, might be the best result we can expect from a Republican House. I doubt they’ll successfully defy our will to use the debt limit to force Social Security and Medicare cuts – though they’ll try, and, again, it’ll be ugly and shameful – but they might succeed in defunding our FTC and our SEC and our CFPB and our DOJ’s Antitrust Department; in fact, I bet that’s their real endgame, because the longer Biden Administration actually enforces antitrust law, the worse shape Republicans will be in every election after this one. We’ll be getting on Joe Biden about that! And you know our “liberal” media will pump out ten thousand think-pieces about how the so-called Freedom Caucus “holds Speaker McCarthy hostage.” News flash: Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, and Marjorie Taylor Greene are who the Republican Party is now. Kevin McCarthy is their beard. And he likes it that way.

On the other hand, if Democrats do manage to hold our House, we’ll have a lot less drama. And if leadership would read people like Josh Gottheimer the riot act, that sure would be nice.

2. Ballot questions, again, generally made democracy look good – put a question directly to voters and they usually make much better choices than politicians do. Three states enshrined abortion rights in their state constitutions, while a fourth (Kentucky) rejected an effort to make abortion unconstitutional there and a fifth (Montana) rejected an effort to create a massive loophole in abortion rights. Nebraska and Nevada voters raised state minimum wages to $15/hour and $12/hour, respectively; Connecticut and Nevada voters expanded voting rights, while Arizona voters rejected stricter Voter ID requirements; and California overwhelmingly rejected ballot initiatives that would legalize online sports betting and sports betting on tribal lands (and they say people don’t have morals out there!). Pot legalization was a mixed bag – Maryland and Missouri voters said yes, while Arkansas, North Dakota, and South Dakota voters said no – but that’s two more states legalizing pot (and thus lightening police officers’ burdens), and I’m old enough to remember when zero states legalized pot.

3. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez – whom the pundits said wouldn’t win Washington’s 3rd, but what do they know? – has provided the blueprint for how Democrats should win back rural and rust belt areas, much more so than Tim Ryan, it turns out. Unlike the right-wingers who hide behind “small businesses” when they try to cut their corporate paymasters’ taxes, Ms. Perez can tell you how the catalytic converter shortage exposed real supply chain problems (i.e., that big dealerships can muscle small car repair shops out of parts with impunity). She also talks about police reform in a way working folks would relate – stop buying night vision goggles and start paying cops more, she says. And no use saying well, she only beat a Trumphole, because, hey, did Tim Ryan beat his Trumphole opponent? No, he did not.

4. A lot of bad people got re-elected – though if Ron Johnson really sold his soul to the devil for another term as a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, he paid too much – but at least Paul LePage got absolutely buried in his attempt to reclaim the Governor’s mansion in Maine, where (thanks to ranked-choice voting) independent candidates can no longer take enough sane people’s votes away from Democrats. To think Mr. LePage had the cojones to say that folks on the left and the right have just got to start talking to each other again! That’s like Donald Trump saying people in America are too angry! (Actually, Mr. Trump did say Greta Thunberg, who’s a billion times the person he’ll ever be, was “too angry.”)

5. So how did incessant Republican whining about “rising crime rates” resonate with voters? Now it can be told: not very well! It worked especially poorly in Pennsylvania, where state legislators tried to make impeaching Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner (for not doing enough about crime, or something) their October Surprise; that effort fell flat at month’s end, likely because it was always noxious and offensive drama, but if “rising crime” were such a winning issue generally, then how did Pennsylvania Democrats get in position to flip the state legislature’s lower house after entering Election Day 23 seats down?

6. Looks like I’m getting a dozen emails a day from Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia for another few weeks, now that he’ll face Republican Herschel Walker in a runoff. Maybe Republican voters will stay home merely because the race won’t decide Senate control anymore, but maybe they won’t, and if Republicans take our House before then, Democratic voters will be rather more demoralized than they know now. Still, I’d be pleased to see Democrats take this race seriously and win it, not just because Mr. Warnock is a good Senator who deserves to win, but because with 51 seats the party can marginalize Kyrsten Sinema even further. Yes, as we’ve already seen with the Inflation Reduction Act, we’re much better off dealing with Joe Manchin’s old-school corruption than Ms. Sinema’s post-modern corruption. Let her go work for a hedge fund in two years, where she can sell her relationships, no, not with other Democratic Senators, but with Republican ones. You ever see her in a photo with other Democrats? No, you have not – but you’ve seen plenty of photos of her with Republicans. Such a maverick!

7. So whom are we going to war with first – Russia or Florida? Republicans clearly have an even bigger stranglehold over that state than we realized in 2020. Calling Marco Rubio an empty suit would represent a profound insult to empty suits, yet he beat Val Demings by 16 points. And Val Demings was a good candidate! Meanwhile, Ron DeSantis beat Charlie Crist by 20, which should remind us that you don’t run a nice guy against an asshole. Mr. DeSantis’s redistricting antics netted Republicans three more House districts, though even in that he was outpaced by the incompetence of New York Democrats, who netted Republicans four.

8. John Fetterman flipped the only Senate seat to change hands by beating Mehmet Oz 51-47, while Josh Shapiro trounced Doug Mastriano by 16 points in that state’s gubernatorial election; Mr. Oz wasn’t as execrable a candidate as Mr. Mastriano – we’re talking about the difference between a clown and an arsonist here – but I must conclude that Mr. Fetterman’s stroke and subsequent shaky debate performance moved the needle in Mr. Oz’s direction. If we’d gotten to see John Fetterman at his best in this campaign, he might have won by 20 points, and then the pundits, who know nothing about anything of consequence, would have mystified him by saying he’s a “unique” candidate. It’s true that Democrats don’t often run a guy who’s that funny, that smart, that social media-savvy, and that able to relate to working folks, but truth is there are people like John Fetterman all over America, and a lot of them even want to serve the public. Will Democrat consultants notice them now? I kid, of course – if you’re paid to be blind, you’ll stay blind.

Action: concerning corporate taxes, health care, and homelessness.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk not to cut corporate taxes, to sustain expanded Medicaid and CHIP coverage, and pass the Ending Homelessness Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk not to cut corporate taxes during the upcoming lame duck session. Corporations are making record profits, said profits being responsible for half our current inflation, so why give them more handouts? We know cutting corporate taxes is unpopular, not just because Republicans cut them dramatically in 2017 and lost the House the next year, but also because our Congressfolk always leave corporate welfare giveaways until the end of the year, when they hope everyone’s tired and not watching anymore. Well, we’re watching, and fatigue doesn’t keep us from our duty, so let’s give them what-for.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect expanded Medicaid and CHIP coverage in end-of-year legislation. You know, instead of their aforementioned habit of handing out corporate welfare! You’d think our Congressfolk wouldn’t dare cut children’s health insurance – the first three letters of CHIP do stand for “children’s health insurance,” after all – but then Congress totally let the CHIP program lapse in 2017 because they were working too hard on tax cuts for rich folks and not hard enough for, you know, our children. So, yeah, we need to remind them to work for working families.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4496, the Ending Homelessness Act. Rents are shooting through the roof and folks are behind on their rent thanks to pandemic job losses, so yeah, we’d be cruel not to give working families more help affording a place to live. The bill also prevents our government from using criminal history to deny housing assistance – gosh, do we believe in rehabilitating people or not? – and would also prohibit housing discrimination because of a renter’s veteran status. Hey, it ain’t our soldiers’ fault we make them fight stupid wars, so let’s not injure them coming and going.

Action: concerning monopolies, data privacy, and workers' rights.

Long story short: tell our FTC to investigate the proposed Kroger/Albertsons merger, tell big tech corporations to protect our data, and tell our DOL to crack down on corporate misclassification of workers. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to investigate the proposed Kroger/Albertsons merger, which would merge at least a dozen grocery store chains into one bloated corporation. Sound like a good idea to you? Only if you enjoy job losses, higher prices, fewer choices, fewer stores, and less local control over groceries! Executives love that crap, because it enables them to pay themselves more money, but they shouldn’t get all the say about everything. Oh, and this merger would also enable hedge fund banksters to bleed Albertsons dry as a condition of the merger! Why, it’s like they negotiated this merger in the Bizarro world! So let’s put a stop to it.

The Kairos Fellowship helps you tell big tech corporations like Google and Meta to protect our personal data a lot more vigorously than they do now. Many folks have kinda given up and said there’s just no privacy on the internet, and maybe that sentiment induces folks to put up fewer shirtless photos of themselves on their newsfeed, but it more likely induces them to just give up on protecting their privacy, though corporations have no inherent right to sell your personal data just because you’ve given it to them. Seriously, why must everything be for sale? And not for nothing, but with the end of Roe v. Wade, we sure don’t want corporations selling our personal data to anti-abortion activists.

Finally, More Perfect Union helps you tell our Department of Labor (or DOL) to crack down on corporate misclassification of their workers. Big corporations be all like all our workers are contractors LOL so they can avoid giving workers health insurance and paid time off – and also so they can avoid paying their legally-mandated half of Social Security and Medicare taxes! Should they be allowed to do that, merely because it’s “clever”? Folks think of a lot of “clever” things I don’t think of, but the reason I don’t think of them is I’m not constantly trying to get over on the rest of the world. And people who are shouldn’t get all the say about everything.

Action: concerning data privacy, the debt ceiling, and treating prisoners like human beings.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop passport data abuse, ditch the debt ceiling once and for all, and pass the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to prevent our State Department from giving law enforcement access to your passport data willy-nilly. Ideally law enforcement would need a warrant to get your passport application data, but our government has spent the last 20 years assaulting the very idea of getting a warrant – this, even though judges will get out of bed to give warrants if the situation’s that urgent, and even though getting a warrant was good enough for our government for over 200 years. No, 9.11 did not “change everything”! And people who think 9.11 “changed everything” are exactly the sort of people I do not want in my foxhole!

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to eliminate the debt ceiling once and for all. Republicans said they’d take the debt ceiling hostage to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits, so let’s take the weapon away from them before they break our damn country with it, shall we? The debt ceiling doesn’t do anything for America; politicians have only ever applied the notion of “fiscal restraint” to spending that actually helps good Americans, but time was our Congressfolk just raised the ceiling whenever we got too close to it. Now it’s like pulling teeth to get it raised, with Republicans the way they are now, so it was never any good coming or going, and have I mentioned that I really, really hate drama?

Finally, both Americans for Financial Reform and Color of Change help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2489, the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act. This bill would give our FCC the power to cap prices for phone calls from prisoners to their family, since now big telecom corporations charge an arm and a leg for that, and prisoners don’t exactly have an arm and a leg to spend. But when prisoners keep in touch with their families and get out of prison, they tend to stay out; folks still think we’re supposed to help criminals get better, right? So let’s help criminals get better by passing this bill. Putting profits above people is evil.

Action: concerning immigrant kids, bankster fees, and judicial ethics.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Children’s Safe Welcome Act, clamp down on predatory overdraft fees, and pass the Judicial Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

RAICES helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 8349/S. 4529, the Children’s Safe Welcome Act. You remember family separation at the border under the Trump Administration, and the revelation that the separated kids lived in squalor in our detention centers? The Children’s Safe Welcome Act would prevent that, by prohibiting family separation, ensuring that unaccompanied kids get legal representation, and giving more health care to kids at the border. Nobody’s afraid of immigrant kids getting legal representation, right? And the answer to “why do they get it but not me?” ought to be “why doesn’t everyone get it?” We are the greatest nation on Earth, right?

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to rein in usurious bank overdraft fees. When you think about it, banksters collecting $35 every time you overdraw your account is an awful lot like not working. And if you’re the person who says then just budget correctly and don’t spend more than you have, well lucky you! With the cost of higher education and health insurance (to name just two costs Americans can’t just ignore!) rising much, much faster than inflation has done, maybe not everyone has the headspace to realize that their next $3 cup of coffee will put them in the red. And $35 fees sure overstate the tiny amount of work a bank does to keep them afloat!

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Judicial Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act, which would at long last make Supreme Court Justices adhere to the same ethical standards as every other federal judge. Clarence Thomas (whose wife helped immensely with the attempted January 6 coup) isn’t the news hook here, for once: this time it’s Amy Comey Barrett, who hasn’t been transparent about her husband’s work representing corporate clients. Always they think they’re too “great” for ethics rules. But what’s the lesson of America? The American people are great, and individuals who think they’re better than the rest of us are fools.

Action: vote!

If you have any problems voting today – said problems may include, but are not limited to, finding the polling place, voter intimidation, accessibility issues, voting machine problems, and provisional ballot issues – or if you witness anyone having these or any other problems – Election Protection has a toll-free line for you to call. It's 1.866.OUR.VOTE – or, if mnemonic devices such as "OUR VOTE" actually slow you down when you're trying to dial (as they do for me!), that's 1.866.687.8683. We’re already witnessing plenty of vote suppression and intimidation going on, from armed “poll watchers” accusing voters at drop boxes of being “mules” to actual Republican officials going door-to-door to tell good Americans they can’t vote. So don't be skittish about making that call, just as our enemies aren’t skittish about preventing you from voting.

Do not despair about the possibility that Republicans will gain either or both houses of Congress today, because if you despair, and don’t vote – or worse, if you don’t vote because you don’t think your preferred candidate will win! – then the forces of evil will be that much stronger. I haven’t looked at a poll in weeks, once I decided that Republicans were “gaining momentum” in polls for no good reason. The war on Ukraine is going as badly for Russia as it ever has, job growth remained robust in October and November, and our GDP increased by almost three percent during the third quarter of 2022; even inflation has gone down rather more than the current year-over-year figure would indicate – year-over-year it’s still over eight percent, but over the last three months for which we have inflation figures (July, August, and September), we’ve seen a hike of only around one percent total, which works out to a little over four percent annually. So what, exactly, has happened to suddenly give Republicans “momentum”? If anything, Democrats should have momentum, not just with the January 6 attempted coup showing the Republican Party’s true face, and not just with our Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade – an act Alexander Cockburn said, at least once, would cast Republicans into the electoral wilderness for a generation – but with Republicans saying, out loud, that they’d take the debt limit hostage to force Social Security and Medicare cuts. Yikes, why would anyone vote for a Republican after all of that? And yet a lot of folks will, so you’ve got to get out there and vote.

I know at least a few of you will read the previous paragraph and decide that I’ve become “captured” by Democrats. Consider, however, that over the last two years, Democrats have done more to earn our votes than they have in many, many decades. The Biden Administration is fighting monopolies more aggressively, and successfully, than any Administration has done in at least 40 years, and the Fed’s interest rate hikes will also help break the banksters’ stranglehold over our economy; I cannot overstate the game-changing, paradigm-shifting nature of these moves. And this Democrat-led Congress has passed legislation that will create renewable energy jobs and fight climate change, saved our Postal Service from the crippling benefit-funding mandate under which no other corporation or public entity ever had to operate, capped insulin prices for Medicare recipients at $35/month, and let Medicare negotiate the prices of drugs – not all of them, and not until 2026, but once the foot’s in that door, it’s going to be very hard to shut. And yet Republicans like Marco Rubio are arguing at this very moment that the progress we’ve made on Medicare drug price negotiation should be reversed! Again, they deserve no seats in Congress, let alone whatever they wind up with.

Finally, once again, remember that voting is a citizen's absolute minimum duty in America. This is our government, no matter how little it resembles a good government, and our duty as citizens is to make it a good government, first on Election Day, but also on every day thereafter. Still, our work on every day thereafter will be a lot harder if we don’t turn all the Republicans out of office we can. And there are only bad reasons for not voting. Negative campaigning is an especially bad one – folks do realize politicians run negative campaigns in order to alienate voters and make them stay home, right? If you stay home, you can't vote against the bad people who want you to stay home! And cynicism about the state of the nation is not only a bad reason to stay home, it's a bad reason to do anything. Yes, things get discouraging. But I pray that we always have the strength to refuse to drink from the cup of cynicism.

Around the table: good people fight bad people, part 842.

This article’s headline reads “People Return to Offices, Productivity Plunges,” and though I would warn against worshipping at the Altar of Productivity, I’m quite glad to hear someone in our “liberal” media finally blaming bosses instead of workers. And when I hear that bosses are installing “productivity-tracking software” on their workers’ computers, I am reminded, yet again, that the good boss inspires more productivity while the bad boss acts like a damn fascist trying to control what he can’t control.

Right before midterm elections, we pick up another victory over monopolists, as a King County (WA) Superior Court Commissioner granted a temporary restraining order preventing two banksters from essentially looting the grocery chain store corporation Albertsons in advance of its proposed merger with Kroger. The banksters in question – the private equity corporations Cerberus Capital and Apollo – made the tactical error of making their looting, ahem, dividend recapitalization, a part of the merger, which puts the entire proposed merger in danger, if our government will be aggressive enough. And they might!

Ho hum, right-wingers push another activists-are-the-real-fascists narrative by saying the hundreds of writers and Penguin employees who spoke out against Justice Barrett’s $2 million book deal are the real “censors,” the real “book bann(ers),” and the real “cancel culture” practitioners, though we all know right-wingers are the actual censors, book banners, and cancel culture practitioners – as right-wingers themselves prove by calling for the “firing” and “blacklist(ing)” of everyone who has (so far unsuccessfully) protested the future Barrett book! Anyway, do publishers have a First Amendment obligation to publish every single conceivable manuscript? No, they do not. The end.

When I hear that Texas Republicans have been trying to suppress the vote by confiscating smartphones, looking over voters’ shoulders in voting booths, and going around to voters’ homes to tell them they’ve voted illegally when they haven’t – and I think that last item merits a slander lawsuit! – all I can say is that this is where the feedback loop of masturbatory rage leads. I’m also reminded that William S. Burroughs used to say all a junkie wants is junk – not food, not water, not sex, just junk – and today’s rage-addled right-winger is little different than a junkie. I guess that should call for more compassion on my part, but rageheads do a lot more harm than junkies do.

Elon Musk has run Twitter for a week and already he’s fired a bunch of employees after failing to give them the notice required by law, and now they’re suing him. These bazillionaires all think they’re so great – too great for our laws, apparently! – when in reality they trip over their own dicks more than you or I ever will. And though one hates to say bad things about someone who popularized the electric car, note well how that electric car hasn’t gotten any cheaper over the last 10 years. I’m old enough to remember when the Toyota Prius was too expensive for working families, but I’m also old enough to remember when it wasn’t anymore.

Whoa Nelly: the Republican candidate for North Carolina’s 13th U.S. House District actually wants to create “a community-level review process outside the jurisdiction of the federal government” that would evaluate whether a woman can get an abortion because of rape or incest, and though his campaign thinks that’s a compromise position (you know, from NO ABORSHUNZ EVAHZ!!!!), Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall had another name for it: a “rape panel,” which I expect will stick, though “Star Chamber” wouldn’t be a bad name for it, either. Think it might be much easier to, gosh, I don’t know, let the woman and her doctor decide the matter without state interference? Think that’d be a more small government solution than any “rape panel” would? Barry Goldwater would have said so.

Finally, Emily Oster at The Atlantic thinks we should “declare a pandemic amnesty” so we can all “move forward,” and, ah, no. There is no equivalence between yelling at someone who got too close to you on a hike in April of 2020 and the millions of Americans who simply wouldn’t get a vaccine in 2021 out of rage – the former may have hurt your feelings, but the latter reignited the damn pandemic. The author doesn't explicitly mention these latter folks, probably so we'd all avoid making the comparison I just made. I lump those latter folks in with all the other folks I’ll never forgive, like (for example) the Iraq war hawks who called me “traitor.” Don’t worry, God’ll sort me out in the end.

Action: concerning Social Security, Medicare, food assistance, and taxing the rich.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect Social Security and Medicare, approve additional food assistance spending, and pass a Billionaires’ Mininum Income Tax. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect Social Security and Medicare. From whom? From Republicans, of course, who have actually come out and said that if they take either or both houses of Congress next week, they’ll take the debt limit hostage again so they can force benefit cuts to Social Security and Medicare. You know, as opposed to the Medicare cost cuts Democrats passed in the Inflation Reduction Act, the same cost cuts Republicans are trying to portray as benefit cuts! They really do live in an up-is-down world, but if they take either or both houses of Congress, they’ll try to force us to live in that world, too. And that’s why we communicate our will early and often.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to approve the $100 million they’ve already authorized for the Emergency Food Assistance Program, which, as its name suggests, helps working families who can’t get enough food from our “free” market. Don’t fall prey to “this program only helps Those People” horsedoodle, because you could be one of “those people” at any time if you lose your job. Politicians keep acting like programs taxpayers pay for could never help them. Gosh, I wonder why that is. And by “I wonder why that is” I mean “they mean to keep voters in a feedback loop of masturbatory rage as they pick their pockets.”

Finally, Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Billionaire’s Minimum Income Tax. From spring 2020 to spring 2022, billionaires’ net worth increased 70% – did your net worth increase 70% during that time? No, it more likely went down, since you were more likely out of work at the beginning of that time! And sadly, while all that extra money doesn’t buy happiness, it sure does buy politicians (cough Kyrsten Sinema cough) who’ll let them pay less in taxes than working families do. You want to know what else it could buy? Programs we all benefit from even if we don’t actually fall on hard times.

Around the table: of mansion taxes and antitrust victories.

When I hear that Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters have blocked over 300 highways in protest of his loss to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the Brazilian Presidential election earlier this week, all I can say is get over it! Your guy lost! I mean, even the bad man himself has told protestors to stop blocking highways, and has reportedly moved more quickly on his own transition than Mr. Trump did. These protestors would do much better getting organized about their concerns, if indeed they have any concerns they can articulate. In the meantime, this rubbish could be coming to America in a little less than a week.

Big news from Matt Stoller is that our Department of Justice has successfully blocked a proposed big corporate merger, that of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, and now might be a good time to remind everyone that if we put Republicans back in charge of either or both houses of Congress, they will defund all of our government’s efforts to fight monopolies. Another way of putting that might be that Republicans would defund the police. Seriously.

In a peripherally-related note, Sasha Abramsky at TruthOut reminds us that armed “election monitors” in Arizona are “Just the Tip of the Voter Intimidation Iceberg.” True law-and-order adherents like you and I will be heartened that Arizona Secretary of State/gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs has referred no less than half a dozen complaints to our Justice Department, but we won’t truly be safe until we successfully shame and shun right-wingers into complete and deserved loneliness. Sound harsh? Hey, it’s not violence.

When you hear that “celebrity politicians” are doing well in These Interesting Times by “getting the public to register transgressive behavior as entertainment,” you may be reminded that Satan was a much more compelling character than God in Paradise Lost. But we must remember that transgressive behavior is entertaining only if it’s fiction (and not always then, either!). We must also remember that Herschel Walker running for Senate is real, and if he wins, there’ll be real consequences.

Big real estate corporations have spent over $5 million trying to defeat a “mansion tax” in Los Angeles – and do the pro-mansion tax forces there understand that they have all the leverage? I mean, today’s moguls never think long-term financially, so that point where it costs less to pay the damn tax must be coming pretty soon. But to think they have the cojones to assert that a mansion tax would raise rents! Like they’re not already raising rents as high as they can! Like any civilized person should simply tolerate big corporations simply “passing their costs on to the consumer”!

Finally, when I hear that Paul Pelosi’s attacker was on a “suicide mission” to hold certain politicians accountable, all I can say is well, that’s how you’d have to do it! And seriously, I get tired of hearing assholes say they’re going to “hold politicians accountable” on a series of imaginary grievances. There are ways to hold Nancy Pelosi accountable for her actual corruption, but such thoughts will never touch the mind of David DePape. Let him rot in jail for the rest of his natural if he thinks breaking skulls solves anything.

Action: concerning treating prisoners like human beings, corporate spying, and chemical disasters.

Long story short: tell the Alabama Department of Corrections to treat prisoners more humanely, tell our government to investigate TikTok’s parent company for illegal spying on Americans, and tell our EPA to protect good Americans from chemical plant disasters. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell the Alabama Department of Corrections to start treating prisoners like human beings again. You need not indulge in any if you can’t do the crime don’t do the time horsedoodle or you sound like you want all prisoners to eat caviar horsedoodle or how is it different from any other prison horsedoodle; all ye need do is consider that our Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Alabama in 2020, saying they violated prisoners’ Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment. That's right, the Trump DOJ did this! So go ahead and assume it must be pretty awful, and act accordingly.

Public Citizen helps you tell our government to investigate potential criminal behavior by TikTok or its parent corporation. ByteDance, the corporation that owns TikTok, stands accused of either tracking locations of particular American citizens or planning to do so – no, not even tracking locations so they could sell more ads, and certainly not tracking them as part of an internal workplace investigation. No, they just wanted to spy on Americans! If we’re not going to tolerate that from our own government, and we shouldn’t, then why would we tolerate it from a corporation? Why would we tolerate it from a foreign corporation? We would not, so let’s not.

Finally, Public Citizen also helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to do everything it can to protect good Americans from chemical disasters. While our EPA’s revised Risk Management Program for chemical plants improves on our existing one, it could still do more, like make chemical plants submit their own risk management plans more quickly than within four years, or requiring backup power on all equipment, or create a third-party anonymous reporting hotline to supplement in-house reporting and whistleblowing. When it’s your neighborhood on fire from a chemical plant, you’ll think these are all good ideas, too, so let’s help ensure we’ll never have to contemplate such things.

Action: concerning voting rights, treating prisoners like human beings, and immigrant youth.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Election Mail Act and the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act, and pass legislation protecting immigrant youth. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 4487, the Election Mail Act. The bill would (among other things) require our Postal Service to process all mail-in ballots the same day they get them, to process mail-in ballots free of charge to the voter, and require states to count mail-in ballots postmarked on or by Election Day that arrive up to seven days after Election Day. And if that makes Republicans whine about how we should always know the winner by 8 pm on Election Day, well, tough toodles. Better to make mail-in voting easier for all Americans. And we all have to deal with change, so why should we coddle Republicans in their incessant efforts to avoid dealing with change?

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2489, the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act. Big telecom corporations get to charge usurious rates for prisoners to talk to their families, and these big corporations have massive bankster funding behind them – thus explaining why Americans for Financial Reform brings you this action alert. Prisoners who stay in touch with their families are also more likely to stay out of jail once they get out; you can see why banksters invested in big telecom corporations and private prison corporations don’t want that, but again, why should they get all the say about everything?

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation protecting immigrant youth (i.e., “dreamers”) from deportation. To a nation they left when they were very young and therefore not of their own free will and therefore also to a nation they won’t recognize, I feel compelled to mention again. In the meantime, we could keep hoping that reactionary judges (and Justices!) might interpret the law in such a way as to not be cruel bastards – or we could tell our Congressfolk to solve the problem with legislation. And if they don’t, we tell them again until they do. Easier than relying on a right-wing judge, that’s for sure.

Action: concerning workers' rights, data privacy, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell our Department of Labor to crack down on bosses misclassifying workers as “contractors,” tell Uber to stop selling customer information to third parties, and tell President Biden to improve our Postal Service. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Department of Labor to crack down on worker misclassification. Corporations like calling their workers “independent contractors” even when those “contractors” come to the office every day and use their facilities to get their work done, and why is that? So they don’t have to cover their health insurance, workers’ compensation insurance, or (even!) pay the employer’s half of the payroll taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare. For too long we’ve just assumed that if a corporation calls its workers “contractors” we just have to put up with it. But we don’t! Of course, we need to tell our government that.

Fight for the Future helps you tell Uber not to sell its customers’ ride history to advertisers. Sound innocuous? You know, besides the fact that somebody knows what you’re doing and now wants to sell you something based on that, which is pretty creepy? Now imagine people using Uber to get to church, or a doctor’s office, or an abortion clinic, and I trust you begin to see the problem. And if you’re tempted to retort but it’s just for advertising, remember how many intrusive technologies have entered our lives by being “just for” something else. You may have brought an Alexa into your house so it could play music more easily, but now it’s recording your conversations.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell President Biden to replace Donald “Lee” Moak on our U.S. Postal Service’s Board of Governors once his term expires at the end of this year. Mr. Biden has shown a disquieting willingness to keep Mr. Moak on the Board, though Mr. Moak has been a key ally of the notorious Postmaster General DeJoy, so we have to get in our President’s grill. Of course, as Public Citizen reminds us, it’s not just about ousting Mr. DeJoy – who has slashed services and raised prices like Americans don’t depend on our Postal Service for life-saving medications or anything – but about improving our Postal Service with services like postal banking.

Around the table: governments politicize protests, and other horrible truths.

Steven Rosenfeld estimates that over 42 million Americans will mail in their ballots this year, a 40 percent increase from the 2018 midterms. More folks getting comfortable with mailing in their ballots is a good thing, but we’ll have the same BS in Pennsylvania and Michigan this year that we had in 2020, where mail-in ballots can’t by law be counted until Election Day, and Republicans will appear to be “winning” races until the mail-in ballots all get counted. If they get counted! As I said last week, I think Doug Mastriano could pull some armed shenanigans in Pennsylvania (i.e., where “election protectors” physically prevent counting of mail-in ballots); think Tudor Dixon might try the same in Michigan?

Sam Biddle and Murtaza Hussain at The Intercept detail how Iran’s government suppresses protest and dissent by controlling the internet. “While disconnecting broad swaths of the population from the web remains a favored blunt instrument of Iranian state censorship,” they write, “the government has far more precise, sophisticated tools available as well,” like SIAM, which Iran uses to disrupt web usage. SIAM slows down connections to the point where the government can break encryption codes and spy on users’ content more easily; couple that with Iran’s notorious human rights record and you can see why good Iranians are protesting – and why they have so much trouble getting the change they need and deserve.

Ho hum, Department of Homeland (sic) Security (sic) releases relatively-unredacted report detailing how thoroughly the Trump Administration DHS politicized the Portland protests of mid-2020. Because taking video of police putting down protestors for political ads just wasn’t enough! Our DHS tried to compile a dossier on every single Portland protestor, but still collected far too much information on protestors, and when they couldn’t prove (or even reasonably assert) that IT WAZ ALL TEH ANTIFAZ!!!!! they said it anyway. And don’t take comfort that the Trump Administration went about their evil incompetently, because they only aimed to create chaos, and they sure succeeded in that.

ProPublica finds our IRS has “largely abdicated its enforcement responsibilities as churches have become more brazen about publicly backing candidates.” And naturally some of these preachers who are “pushing the envelope” have become quite the drama hounds about it: dig the one who says “(t)he establishment media is coming after me” and “(p)eople of faith are under attack in this country” – where was he when the Bush Administration was harassing Muslims? Cheering it on, I bet! – or the one who says you’re “stupid” and “don’t know what you’re talking about” if you think he violated the law, a line of argument which always persuades folks who think differently!

Speaking of drama: after a union-supporting Starbucks barista in Buffalo says his bosses fired him for wearing a suicide awareness pin at work, Starbucks workers in seven states wear the pin in solidarity. Will Westlake wore the pin to honor a co-worker (and fellow union supporter) who committed suicide; you’d think bosses would pay more attention to what happens in their stores! But if Starbucks bosses can throw this big a tantrum over a pin, how do they expect to run a business? And if you’re thinking this might not be union-related, consider how many baristas say Mr. Westlake helped out their efforts even as his own store voted against unionizing.

Finally, because we need all the reminders we can get that corporate greed causes inflation, Exxon posted the highest profits ever by an American oil corporation for a three-month period, showing $17.9 billion for the third quarter of 2022. Yes, gas prices actually went down in August and September of that quarter, but the Economic Policy Institute instructs us that corporate profits still cause over half of our inflation. Democrats haven’t been talking enough about how corporations stoke inflation, but worse, they’re not talking enough about what they’ve done about it – they’ve curbed monopolies and let Medicare negotiate drug prices, where a Republican government would have just shown us the back of their hand.

Action: concerning data privacy, political prisoners, and forever chemicals.

Long story short: tell our FTC to protect our data from law enforcement, tell various world government to stop oppressing political opponents, and tell our EPA to protect us from “forever chemicals.” Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to bar law enforcement from buying private data sold by third-party data collecting corporations. Since Congress won’t move on the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, which would accomplish the same end, we must turn to our federal agencies, which also have the power, granted by law, to protect us from law enforcement fishing expeditions. I guess the cops will say how can we do our jobs, just like they do when we try to stop them from killing Black folks when they brandish a cellphone. But your rights and your freedoms matter more than law enforcement’s convenience.

Amnesty International helps you take action on 10 separate cases of world governments oppressing political opponents. Read about their stories (in the internet age, that never takes as long as it seems like it should) and you’ll notice disturbing patters: people protesting peacefully or expressing an opinion that’s different from that nation’s Glorious Elites, then that nation throwing them in jail on trumped-up charges and/or torturing them. It’s a tired, tired story common to snowflake governments, tired enough that you may get tired yourself – or, worse, that cynics may exploit your fatigue. Never let a cynic tell you what to do. Cynicism is evil, its proponents prisoners of evil.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to protect good Americans from PFAS chemicals. Which we call “forever chemicals” for a reason: they’re awfully durable, which must have seemed a positive back in the day, but we now know they’re so durable we can’t get them out of our air and our water – and our bodies. And scientists link PFAS chemicals to cancer, fetal development issues, and other health issues, with folks in Black and Brown communities more affected (since industrial plants more likely exist close to these communities). So we need to tell our EPA to take the most vigorous action possible under the law, not least because we can get them in court if they ignore us.

Finally, I’ve started making campaign donations again – apparently that $200 I gave to Doug Jones in 2020 was a gateway drug! – so in the interest of full disclosure I’ll list them here. Surprise: they’re all Democrats! Because the Republicans are the party of whining and drama and sedition and book banning and spreading COVID and banning birth control and cutting Social Security and Medicare and they ain’t worth my money! So: $100 each to Katie Porter, Matt Cartwright, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Gary Chambers, and Val Demings; $27 to Charles Booker, and $25 each to Tim Ryan, Cheri Beasley, Catherine Cortez Masto, Raphael Warnock (though I’m still deleting all his emails!), and John Fetterman. I'm sure I've missed many worthy candidates (though I urge you to pay more attention to Ms. Perez, in Washington's 3rd House district), and I want all these folks to win their races. But whether they will or not is up to us, and then after Election Day it’s up to us whether they do our will or not.

Action: concerning racism, tax cuts for working families, and immigration.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Sgt. Isaac Woodard, Jr. and Sgt. Joseph H. Maddox GI Bill Restoration Act, bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion, and codify DACA protections for “dreamers” into law. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first: as you may know, the GI Bill helped a lot of WWII soldiers buy houses they wouldn’t have been able to buy otherwise, but racist enforcement of the GI Bill left most Black soldiers behind. No, really – when you’re Black and you fill out your application five times and your government loses it five times, that’s racism. But H.R. 5905/S. 3210, the Sgt. Isaac Woodard, Jr. and Sgt. Joseph H. Maddox GI Bill Restoration Act, would help fix that, by making survivors and direct descendants of WWII Black soldiers eligible for the GI Bill benefits their forebears were denied, the benefits that lifted so many Americans into the middle class for the first time. So this bill merits a phone call to your Congressfolk.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion that helped so many good Americans weather the pandemic and inflation in 2021. The CTC expansion deposited $250 or $300 checks (per child!) every month in working families’ bank accounts in 2021, and why aren’t Democrats running ads saying we cut your taxes and Republicans fought us? Regardless of their negligence in this area (or because of it!), we should get in our Congressfolks’ grills and make our will known, that the CTC expansion kept millions of kids out of poverty and we should bring it back so they can get back out of poverty. Why does anyone deserve poverty, after all?

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to permanently enshrine DACA protections for immigrant youth into law. I’m speaking, of course, of the children who came here long before they were capable of remembering their birth country – and thus had literally no say in coming here, of course – and who have maintained a residence here and contributed to American society. I have just given at least three reasons why deporting them would be unconscionably cruel. We’re either a great nation or we’re not, and if we’re unconscionably cruel, then guess what? We’re not. So let’s not let such cruelty be our legacy.

Around the table: don't mess with Katie Porter's whiteboard! And other important lessons.

Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) demonstrates via her famous whiteboard that sharp increases in corporate profits drive at least half of our inflation, and at least one TV station fact-checks, and confirms, that finding. Now that one media outlet has spread the word, the forces of evil face more of an uphill battle. But it’s getting late, so this message needs to be in Democrat ads, like, yesterday, and they should couple it with an anti-monopoly message – and they should remind everyone that Republicans are pro-monopoly and will defund all the federal agencies that fight monopolies if they get control of either or both houses of Congress.

Tired of hysterical Republicans squealing about TEH CRIMEZ RATEZ GOINGZ TEH UPZ!!!!!!? Then perhaps Justin Nix at The Conversation can help you help benighted souls make sense of “the crime rate.” Of course, if you’ve noticed politicians talking about “crime going up” and then justifying it by using data showing one crime (like murder or carjacking) going up, you won’t be surprised by anything you read. And if your relatives all think crime is going up because they’ve been watching the same six clips of violent crime on their news programs for years on end, ain’t nothing we can do for them anyway. We minister to the redeemable; the rest we leave to God.

You’ve heard of auto corporations trying to put some of their features (like heated seats) behind a subscription-enabled paywall? Well, New Jersey state legislators are mulling a bill that might make such things illegal, which might make it the most popular legislation ever, since literally any sentient being can foresee a future where your “subscription” to your brakes “lapses” at the worst possible time. But the bill would still allow subscriptions for software services in cars, and big automakers could drive a Mack truck through that loophole. Of course they’re still whining about it: “the bill would significantly impact the ability of automakers to offer consumers the choice of purchasing additional convenience features through a subscription model,” one law firm says. Didn’t know a corporation’s “right” to force an unwanted “choice” upon you was sacrosanct, did you?

Ho hum, Mississippi wants to privatize Jackson’s water system after that city’s residents went without water for much of August and September, but Naomi LaChance at The Lever instructs us that partial privatization has already helped cause the problems Jackson has been having! The state has received some $75 million in federal funding under the 2021 infrastructure law; how much of that money has gone to Jackson, where the water was brown as coffee for a bit? Zero dollars, naturally. This story also has pollution and bankster interference going for it. Says one observer: “If you can’t afford to improve your water system, how could you possibly afford to have profits extracted from your community just to pad the bottom line of a corporation?” It’s a question worth asking!

Armed Arizona “poll watchers” are already “guarding” ballot drop boxes, even accusing certain individuals of being “mules.” I’m glad they’re not calling me that, because my response would be what’s your address so I can serve you with a slander lawsuit? And this is only the beginning! Just wait until Doug Mastriano’s armed thugs try to prevent any mail-in ballots from being counted in Pennsylvania on Election Day. Hey, it’s not like he’s running ads, raising money, doing interviews, or participating in debates, so how else is he going to win?

Finally, Michael Moore, who predicted Donald Trump's 2016 Presidential win, thinks there’ll be a “blue tsunami” at the polls this November. Too many independents watch the news now and decide there’s no use voting because Republicans "have momentum" – or, worse, decide to vote for Republicans because they "have momentum," how perverse! – but Mr. Moore’s analysis maps onto mine; after January 6, liberals ain’t so much afraid of right-wingers as angry at them, and that anger ain’t subsiding anytime soon. And Democratic ads, for all their faults, actually show a lack of fear for once. And like I said, this “movement” toward Republicans among the electorate is based on nothing. Certainly not Republicans’ declaration that they’re going to cut Social Security and Medicare! I mean, who knowingly votes for that?

Action: concerning the war on Yemen, money laundering, and the debt ceiling.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to get us out of the war on Yemen, pass the ENABLERS Act, and abolish the debt ceiling. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a War Powers Resolution getting us the hell out of the Saudi/UAE coalition’s war on Yemen. Because it’s killing good Yemeni civilians as well as taking out some of the world’s best fighters against al-Qaeda, funny how that works out, right, Kurds? Saudi Arabia’s also cut back oil production as a sop to Russia, whose government deserves no sops at all. Too many politicians act like we have no alternative to allying with Saudi Arabia, too many generals wind up becoming consultants for Saudi Arabia, and too many regular Americans act like Saudi Arabia’s OK because Iran’s worse. Like the Greatest Nation on Earth should ever have to choose!

The Project on Government Oversight helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5525, the ENABLERS Act. I’ve been calling folks who give aid and comfort to dictators “enablers” for close to two decades now, so it’s nice to see Congress getting into the act. The ENABLERS Act would give our government more tools to crack down on the many forms of money-laundering that enable Russia to continue its doomed-but-still-evil war on Ukraine; I suppose some folks on the right (cough Rand Paul cough) would complain that this would give government more tools to snoop into your bank account, but it’s actually hard to look like you’re laundering money for Russia unless you’re doing that.

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to abolish the debt ceiling. Used to be the debt ceiling was just useless, since Congress raised it all the time without controversy, but now the debt ceiling is a tool of evil, since Republicans take it hostage every time they want to hurt good Americans. I am not overstating the case! As we speak, Republicans are telling us that if they get control of either house of Congress again, they will create another debt limit drama aimed at forcing cuts to Medicare and Social Security. Republicans are being so obvious about it that Democrats are even running ads about it! So, as with the filibuster, it’s best to take weapons away from legislators when they abuse them.

Action: concerning social media, monopolies, and intrusive government.

Long story short: tell big social media corporations to stop spreading election-related BS on their platforms, tell our FTC to stop the proposed Kroger/Albertsons merger, and tell Florida to stop collecting information on girls’ periods. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Sum of Us helps you tell big social media corporations Meta, Google and TikTok to stop passing along election-related BS. We’re all aware that lies spread on these platforms before the truth can even get its pants on, but if you recall Facebook’s role in helping Myanmar oppress Rohingya Muslims a few years ago, or have noted Meta’s rubber-stamping of ads calling for violence in Brazil (the runoff Presidential election is this coming Sunday), you know the situation is even more dire than that. And you also know that social media algorithms push evil right-wing content on you even if you’re King of the Liberals, so we need to brandish the Big Stick of Bad PR once again.

Both Demand Progress and Public Citizen help you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to stop the proposed Kroger/Albertsons merger. Mainstream media reports make it seem like it’s just Kroger and Albertsons joining together, but these corporations already own over a dozen big grocery corporations, so why should they get to consolidate their power further? Our choice is clear: either we allow big corporations to funnel even more unearned money toward their executives, which right-wingers seem to think is our only duty as a civilization – or we stop corporations from gaining even more power to price-gouge, which more closely resembles our actual duty as a civilization.

Finally, UltraViolet helps you tell the Florida High School Athletic Association (or FHSAA) to stop collecting information on female athletes’ periods. Yes, this is where we are in some areas of the country: where anti-gay and anti-trans insanity reaches a fever pitch, they start monitoring when you have your period, for your own safety and security, of course. How offensive: they do it for the “safety” and “security” of the small, weak people whom right-wingers herd from one manufactured outrage to the next, so they don’t ever connect with the real outrages that should drive them to act. “Leave girls alone” should be the motto of our public education system, even in places that aren’t Florida.

Action: concerning transgender, data privacy, and monopolies.

Long story short: tell the government of Paraguay to legally recognize transgender folks, tell our FTC to protect our data privacy, and tell our Justice Department to break up ticketing monopolies. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Amnesty International helps you tell the government of Paraguay to recognize transgender folks there. You know how Republicans in America want nobody to play a sport with any folks other than those in the same birth gender? In Paraguay, they’d get their wish on that and many, many other things – trans folks literally can’t get the documentation that would match their gender identity, plus they get banned from protesting, or beaten up when they don’t get banned. Trans folks ain’t hurting nobody other than the testosterone-addled men who want to fuck everyone, so we should all be giving them what they need – which, for many, is the right to be seen and recognized and then left the hell alone.

Fight for the Future helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to protect good Americans’ data privacy as vigorously as possible. Our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) issued pretty good privacy rules in 2016, but then the Republican Congress of 2017 repealed them using the “resolution of disapproval” process, and that’s an evil act for which far too few of them have been punished. Still, we ain’t powerless, especially now that our FTC has decided to weigh in on the matter, and especially now that our FTC isn’t packed with right-wing ideologues who think corporations should police themselves, even though corporations will never police themselves. So let’s get to it.

Finally, More Perfect Union helps you tell our Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division to break up Live Nation Entertainment. Still known more popularly as “Ticketmaster” over a decade after Live Nation absorbed it in a 2010 merger, it now dominates over two-thirds of the ticketing and live events market, and that’s reason enough to blow them up. But if you’ve been to any live show lately, I bet you can think of a few other reasons – like huge surprise fees and higher prices that sometimes go up even after you put the ticket in your cart! And Judd Legum at Popular Information describes even worse behavior; you’ll definitely want to blow them up after reading it.

Around the table: from smaller wind turbines to an affirmation about the midterm elections.

A corporation called Aeromine has developed a 10 foot-tall wind turbine that can apparently produce the power of 15 solar panels – though Aeromine recommends pairing its technology with solar panels to achieve self-sufficiency. The turbines only fit on flat roofs, and thus Aeromine pitches them toward warehouses and apartment buildings (though plenty of city rowhomes also have flat roofs). I demand progress, not perfection, from new technologies, so I’m interested to see if these turbines become a game-changer. I wish Aeromine the best in their efforts.

Daniel Byman at the Lawfare blog asks “What is a Terrorist Movement?” If you’re disappointed with the difficulty in finding good answers to that question – and it is difficult, given how many terrorist groups influence mass murderers who don't belong to any groups – you can at least be consoled that Mr. Byman concentrates more effort on white supremacy than Islamic extremism, the latter of which was never the “existential threat” right-wingers said it was. I mean, if that was an "existential threat," what happened to the administration of President bin Laden? And remember how right-wingers all threw tantrums on TV when the Department of Homeland Security talked a tiny bit about white supremacist terrorism in 2009 and 2010? Sure seems like they doth protested too much now, doesn’t it?

Fifth Circuit panel rules that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s funding mechanism is “unconstitutional,” despite the fact that our government funds plenty of agencies similarly. Our CFPB will likely appeal to the full Fifth Circuit, which may yield a different result, or our Supreme Court, which may not. But our CFPB is actually doing the best job of discouraging monopolies right now, which I’m sure has nothing to do with the fact that right-wing judges (all three members of the Fifth Circuit panel were Trump appointees) do their damnedest to destroy it. Recall, also, that Justice Kavanaugh declared the CFPB’s hierarchical structure unconstitutional while he served on the D.C. Circuit.

Supreme Court Justice Barrett denies the Brown County (WI) Taxpayers Association’s “emergency” suit against the Biden student debt relief plan, leaving in place a lower court’s ruling that the Association doesn’t have standing to sue against it. Which makes sense, since, like, what harm has the student debt relief plan actually done to this "taxpayers association"? One hopes Judge Barrett's denial is good news for the whole notion of standing, a notion threatened by (among other laws!) Texas’s anti-abortion law which empowers virtually anyone to sue abortion providers and/or abortion recipients. But I often get the sense that our Supreme Court uses the standing issue just to avoid taking on controversial decisions. Which means that, yes, their last term could have been even worse than it was.

Akela Lacy at The Intercept calls the Pennsylvania Senate race “The Biggest, Dumbest Race for the Senate,” and while she certainly doesn't excuse Mehmet Oz’s role in that, she mostly concentrates her ire on John Fetterman, who has run a social media-savvy campaign that’s also avoided topics like Medicare-for-All and climate change, not to mention Pennsylvania state legislators’ absurd attempts to impeach Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, which they clearly hope will be the October Surprise to buoy Republicans up and down the ballot. I haven’t been upset with all of Mr. Fetterman’s low blows – Republicans only deliver low blows, and Mr. Oz makes himself an inviting target fairly often! But I see her point as well; we’re missing yet another opportunity to demonstrate to the world that rural folks only vote Republican because Democrats don’t stand up for them nearly enough.

Finally, our “liberal” media has spent the last week or so swearing that the midterms are now “breaking” in Republicans’ favor – but you have to ask: what’s changed? As far as I can tell, all that’s changed is that Republicans have sworn to create another debt limit drama so they can cut Social Security and Medicare, and why should voters flock to that? Republicans are still the party of book banning, whining about masks and vaccines, and overturning the results of elections they don’t like, and now I can't escape the feeling that our “liberal” media are putting their thumb on the scale, either out of a shallow attempt to create horserace drama or out of an actual hope that voters who care about our civilization will get discouraged and stay home. How do we get around that? We don’t get discouraged, and get out and vote and get in our Congressfolk’s grills in numbers they can’t deny! Funny how the antidote to depression about democracy is, well, more democracy.

Action: concerning political prisoners, campaign finance disclosure, and chemical plant safety.

Long story short: tell Iran to release Vahid Afkari, tell President Biden to require campaign finance disclosure for federal contracting corporations, and tell our EPA to protect good Americans from chemical spills and explosions. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

First things first: Amnesty International helps you tell the government of Iran to release political prisoner Vahid Afkari immediately, expunge his record, and drop any charges against him. Mr. Afkari's story has a lot of recognizable particulars: participated in peaceful protests against Iran’s repressive regime, got arrested on trumped-up charges, got sentenced to over 30 years in jail (plus 74 lashes), has spent the last two years in solitary, and now has health issues that I’m sure are completely unrelated to the injustices his government has inflicted upon him. But, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, only a snowflake government does this to their own people. And if we pressure them enough, they’ll fold, because that's what snowflakes do.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to force corporations that contract with our government to disclose their campaign spending. This should be a layup – most corporations do business with our government sooner or later, and they spend taxpayer money, which is to say our money, so we deserve to know which politicians they’re funding. Right-wingers will whine that this would have a “chilling effect” on “free speech,” but it won’t, because money is not speech. Corporate executives will still be able to say what they like; they’ll just be less able to bribe their way to getting what they like. And why should they have it so easy, when the rest of us must howl to be heard?

Finally, the National Resources Defense Council helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous Risk Assessment Plan possible for American chemical plants. More than one out of every three Americans lives within three miles of a chemical facility, meaning more than one out of every three Americans faces a significant chance of exposure to toxic leaks, fumes, fires, and explosions. And not for nothing, but most of these Americans are Black, Brown, or poor; why, it's almost like that's the idea. But if we believe that everyone deserves a chance in America – and even right-wingers make a show of believing that – then we must protect everyone from the toxic waste that could sicken, injure, or kill them.

Action: concerning pollution and drug prices.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject bills that would call plastic incineration “recycling,” pass bills lowering drug prices for all Americans, and reject bills that would repeal the drug price-lowering planks of the Inflation Reduction Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject legislation that would reclassify plastic incineration as “advanced recycling.” “Recycling” it into what? Plastic incineration would merely pump out more toxins and carcinogens into our air, while allowing big plastic corporations to circumvent the Clean Air Act at the same time. They say they can recycle more plastics this way, but burning crap still ain’t “recycling” any more than burning a log “recycles” wood. We already have too much plastic in our drinking water, and therefore in our bodies; we don’t need another crap-ton of it in our air as well. So let’s get in our Congressfolk’s grills about this.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower drug prices for all Americans with a quickness. Too many right-wing politicians act like “price controls” is a cuss word, when good Americans suffering under 8% inflation would like some control over the prices they pay. And prescription drugs can cost an arm and a leg – and with insulin, especially, that phrase is too often literal. Republicans already voted against capping insulin at $35/month for all Americans; how much longer can they get away with flouting the people’s will and the popular good? Let’s make the answer to that “never” by communicating our will in force.

Finally, in a related note, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any bill that would repeal the lower drug-price planks in the Inflation Reduction Act. Yes, some Senate Republicans are actually trying to do this! These include James Lankford of Oklahoma, who isn’t as far ahead of his opponent in polling as Oklahoma’s red-state status would predict, and Mike Lee of Utah, who’s actually tied with independent candidate Evan McMullin in at least one recent poll. And they also include Marco Rubio of Florida, who must not realize he’s drawn a fierce candidate who can beat the pants off him – a disturbing image, I know, but also what he deserves.

Around the table: tabulating various kinds of corruption for the 814th time.

Thinking maybe sports isn’t a healthy outlet for our stress after all? Rick Eckstein at The Conversation discusses “how abuse is baked into American sports.” As you read about how many young athletes don’t speak out about verbal and physical abuse out of fear of getting “benched,” you may recall those Little League Dads who yelled at their kids all the way from the batter’s box after they struck out. You may also recall how news coverage has bled into “liberal” media news coverage in more ways than one, not just in sports news executives moving into straight news divisions, but also in all the horserace coverage. You may also decide that “winning at all costs” is just as toxic an attitude in politics as it is in sports.

Uh oh: Rep. Ted Budd, the Trump-endorsed North Carolina Republican Senate nominee, helped a pair of big banks merge in 2019, and the resulting behemoth not only laid off over a thousand workers and closed a few hundred branches, but it’s also resulted in at least one low-interest loan and tens of thousands of bucks in campaign donations for Mr. Budd!. I guess Donald Trump would call all that “smart”! Seriously, if Democratic nominee Cheri Beasley doesn’t make a whole lot of hay about this, she deserves to lose this race. There’s no “let’s not be too strident about corruption” vote out there to be had.

Ho hum, six of the seven biggest health insurance corporations get more than half their revenues from our government – i.e., the taxpayer, i.e., us – but still jack up prices much faster than inflation just like they were doing before the Affordable Care Act became law. Oh, but expanding Medicare to everyone would be TEH SOSHULIZMZ!!!!! The only people who think of “socialism” as a scare word are far right-wingers who let everything anger them. And even fewer folks get their hackles up at the words “price controls.” A lot of good Americans would like some more price control in their lives! (They’d also like to not be moved from their Medicare plans to Medicare Advantage plans – which deny a lot of claims! – without their consent.)

Wondering why rent prices are going up so quickly? Brace yourself: one corporation’s algorithm might be responsible for most of it. Algorithms ruining things where people might manage them more deftly – gosh, where have I heard that story before? But at least the algorithm isn’t an irredeemable asshole, like the people who promote the algorithm, who are the sorriest bunch of tone-deaf losers I’ve ever heard. They actually celebrate when prices go up beyond what good Americans can afford! They actually encourage landlords to leave units open because the jacked-up prices of their occupied units more than compensate! They actually say that landlords have “too much empathy” compared to the algorithm! If I were the Deity, they would abide in fire for all eternity.

The Center for American Progress describes, at some length, how “Offshore Wind Can Lower Energy Prices and Beat Out Oil and Gas.” Wind power has competed, expense-wise, with fossil fuels for the better part of a decade now, and “spills and cleanup costs are negligible with offshore wind,” (n.b. “negligible,” not “non-existent,” right-wing trolls!). This is all true regardless of the histrionics right-wingers employ about the “noise” (obviously none of them have ever lived in New Jersey!) or the “piles of dead birds” (as a friend of mine said once, it sure is a good thing oil spills have never killed any birds!). Time to kick climate change’s ass!

Finally, dig this simple-minded horseshit poll from Fox News alleging that more Americans want help from our government than they used to. I don’t mind the result, I guess (more Americans want help than don’t), but I do mind the question: whether you want your government to “lend me a hand” or “leave me alone.” Gosh, binary much? Good Americans want more help from their government where they need it and less interference where they don’t; most of us favor expanding Medicare to include everyone, for example, but I bet none of us favor expanded warrantless spying. Those are just the first examples that leaped to my mind! Did anything leap to Fox News’s mind when they formulated their poll, besides goading Americans into being the stupidest version of themselves?

Action: concerning abortion, dicamba, and insurrectionists.

Long story short: tell our VA to maximize abortion coverage for our veterans, tell our EPA to ban dicamba, and tell big corporations to stop donating to Republican insurrection-symps. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Moms Rising helps you tell our Veterans Administration (or VA) to enact the most vigorous abortion rights protections possible. Our VA provides care to about 6.5 million American veterans, and they risked their lives for us – no, really, they did, even though our politicians have largely sent them off to stupid wars for the last few decades – so they deserve the strongest health care protections they can get. And that includes abortion care! Currently our VA only proposed covering abortion care under very narrow circumstances; luckily the commenting tool leaves space for you to describe some more conditions requiring abortion care coverage. As we learned this summer, not everyone knows that information, and they need to.

Penn PIRG helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to ban the notorious herbicide dicamba. Our Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals banned dicamba in 2020, which set off predictable howls of WE’LL NEVER HAVEZ FOODZ AGAINZ!!!!! from right-wingers, but if we can’t make food without spraying toxic pesticides all over it, then we deserve death. (Luckily right-wingers are being dramatic about all of this, as usual – we’re all still eating two years later, after all.) Dicamba also has this nasty habit of drifting to other farms and killing other farmers’ crops, and we still care about farmers, right? And not just about big ag corporate executive pay? So let’s get in our EPA’s grills about this, so they do the right thing.

Finally, the Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell big corporations to actually keep their word and stop donating to Republican politicians who tried to overturn the 2020 election. Now, over 70 corporations, including the likes of PepsiCo, Target, and Zillow, have kept their word, and they deserve our thanks for that, but a slew of other corporations – some 1,200 corporations and industry groups – have broken their word, mainly by donating to corporate PACs they must have thought nobody was watching. But we were watching! And we wield the Big Stick of Bad PR! Corporations don’t like bad PR, but if they deserve it, we must give it.

Action: concerning endless war, taxing the rich, and workers' rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to repeal Iraq War authorization, tax billionaires a lot harder, and pass the PRO Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Both Win Without War and the Friends Committee on National Legislation help you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF). Yes, it’s still on the books, though the Iraq War has been over for more than a decade and both Presidents Obama and Trump have abused it to launch more unwise and unconstitutional military adventures. No one calls them “wars,” of course, since wars kinda have a bad name now. Why do wars have a bad name now? Why, mainly because of the Iraq War, which the 2002 AUMF authorized, a profoundly evil war George W. Bush and his votaries used to tar all their political opponents as traitors. If you want to stop that from ever happening again, then raise hell about the 2002 AUMF.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Billionaire Minimum Income Tax. Billionaires made out a lot better than the rest of us during this pandemic, not because they’re “better people” or because they “worked harder” or because they “contributed more to society,” but because when you start out with billions of dollars, it’s much easier to make billions more, particularly when our civilization acts like “letting the rich do what they want” is not only a good idea but the only idea. A half-century ago we had only one billionaire, and (not coincidentally!) a much fairer America, and the Billionaires Minimum Tax will help us get that America back.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842/S. 420, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. The PRO Act would outlaw state-level “right to work” laws, which we might better describe as “right to work for less money, fewer benefits, and fewer protections from bosses’ whims” laws, even though I suppose that's not as snappy "Right to work” laws allow workers to work in union shops without paying union dues, but no one who joins a union simply doesn’t know that dues fund the many services a union provides, and not for nothing, but the higher salary workers make when they're in unions tends to outstrip dues. Certainly that's been my experience for a few decades now.

Action: concerning various forms of corruption.

Long story short: tell Puerto Rico’s government to end its association with the private power corporation that is failing its citizens, tell Pennsylvania state Senators to reject corporatists on the state Public Utilities Commission, and tell President Biden to replace two USPS Commissioners with folks who’ll fire Postmaster General DeJoy. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

MoveOn helps you tell the government of Puerto Rico to cancel LUMA Energy’s contract to deliver power there. Given the near-daily outages good Puerto Ricans suffered before Hurricane Fiona plunged them into near-total darkness, I’d say LUMA hasn’t even fulfilled its contract! And yet Puerto Rico’s government, which has until November 30 to renew LUMA’s contract, might well feel like they “have no choice,” despite good Puerto Ricans taking to the streets to protest LUMA’s failures. Don’t they know this is what private corporations do – do such a bad job that they make you feel like you “need” them? Let’s encourage Puerto Rico not to fall into this trap.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Food and Water Watch helps you tell your state Senator to reject Gov. Wolf’s appointment of a pair of corporate cronies to the state Public Utilities Commission. One’s a re-appointment of a Commissioner who tends to come down on the side of private energy corporations more than objectivity demands, while the other has long-standing ties to energy corporations as a lobbyist. Right-wingers love telling you that only people in the industry understand the industry enough to regulate it; hopefully you see that as a pile of dung. They don’t say only burglars understand law enforcement, but their own logic compels them to conclude that.

Finally, Save the Post Office helps you tell President Biden to avoid renominating U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors Commissioner/Trumphole Donald Moak, and Daily Kos helps you tell Mr. Biden to replace both USPS Commissioners with expiring terms and replace them with folks who’ll fire Mr. DeJoy. These Commissioners approve of Mr. DeJoy’s cut services/raise prices/slash jobs plan, especially considering how many good Americans depend on our Post Office for their life-saving medicines. But we won’t get the service we deserve from our Post Office unless we speak out.

Around the table: bad people doing bad things and running for office, part 732.

So the latest January 6 hearings have established fairly well that our former “stable genius” President knew full well that he’d lost the 2020 election, and spread lies about it anyway for the express purpose of overturning the result (and the will of the American voters). Epistemological hand-wringing aside, one would think “Trump Knew” would be a fairly important fact – our media have long suggested that Donald Trump didn’t really get that he lost, because insanity – yet I wonder if this fact will resonate with very many more voters. Your right-wing acquaintances will deploy a lot of stupidity – “they think that’s news?,” “I’m tired of hearing about this already,” “what’s the big deal now that we know the system worked?” – to prevent it from resonating; you can ignore it, except, of course, if it sways your friends and family.

And now, after much hilarity, British Prime Minister Liz Truss has not only abandoned plans to cut taxes for the rich, but she’s even re-embraced a plan to hike corporate taxes Recent polling has shown an almost absurdly large lead for the opposition party, Labour – seriously, I’ve never seen a party get over 50% in a British poll! – but luckily for Ms. Truss, she doesn’t have to face the voters again until January 2025. I suppose she could always push for Scottish independence in the meantime, since that would seriously hamper Labour from forming a government. Or she could call a snap election tomorrow! That would be some chutzpah, but chutzpah may be all the Tories have left.

Another day, another reminder that executive pay has risen far, far faster than working families’ pay, i.e., your pay. CEO pay went up an inflation-adjusted 1,460% from 1978 to 2021, while worker wages went up a mere 18.1% during that time – I wonder how many Costco memberships Paul Ryan says that’ll buy! – and, you know, workers are a lot more productive than in the old days, while bosses are a lot more useless. As a bonus, the article reminds us that when Fed Chair Jerome Powell says he’s raising rates to “get wages down,” he means your wages, because he certainly doesn’t mean the wages of big corporate CEOs. The article further reminds us that Sen. Sanders (I-VT) put forth a bill that would have at least raised corporate tax rates for corporations that paid their CEOs too much, but neither the Democratic-held House nor Democratic-held Senate would vote on it. Then again, think a Republican-held House or Senate would vote on that? That is to laugh.

Uh oh: Ohio Republican Senate nominee J.D. Vance loses a fundraiser after Spectrum News informs his campaign their intent to report that the fellow hosting the fundraiser was “one of several Ohio pain doctors cited in a lawsuit against Purdue Pharma and others for the amount of opioids they prescribed and the amount of money they received from major drug companies.” And the best the Vance campaign could do in response was say hey, he’s not in jail, which resembles a lot of folks' best defense of Donald Trump these days. This could make all of Tim Ryan’s stiff ads about opioids more effective, but really, nobody should lose to a pretend redneck who couldn’t escape Ohio for the bankster world fast enough.

Sen. Ron Johnson (E-WI) had quite the night during his second debate with Democratic nominee Mandela Barnes, getting laughed at for (among other reasons!) saying that “the FBI set (him) up with a corrupt briefing and then leaked that to smear me” when warning him that he was a “target” of Russian propaganda. “The FBI set me up” is already a social media meme, but I still suspect Ron Johnson will win this race, no matter how many debate audience members mock him, because I don’t think Mandela Barnes is ready for prime time. I’d be happy to be wrong! Because nobody should lose to a man who gives the “Citizen Legislator” a bad name.

Finally, Sen. Raphael Warnock and challenger Herschel Walker, vying for a Senate seat representing Georgia, faced off in a debate Friday night. Lowering expectations and saying “(t)his race ain’t about me” were smart moves on Mr. Walker’s part, of course, and “there was a baby in that room” was a pretty good retort, too, but I don’t think any of these moves will get him more votes. On the other hand, Sen. Warnock decisively won the insulin debate, not just because Mr. Walker said “you got to eat right,” which helps no one who was born diabetic, but because Sen. Warnock turned his ire on big pharma, and that will win Sen. Warnock more votes. And finally a Democrat says corporate profits help cause inflation! I mean, it’s almost too late for that message.

Action: concerning overtime pay, workers' rights, and climate change.

Long story short: tell President Biden to extend overtime pay protections to more American workers, tell Starbucks executives to rehire the workers they illegally fired for organizing, and tell our Department of Transportation to fight climate change as vigorously as possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell President Biden to expand overtime pay protections for millions of Americans. Currently workers making up to $35,000 annually can earn time and a half for every hour worked over 40 hours in a week – former President Trump actually did raise the limit from $23,476 annually while in office, which makes four things he did right in four years – but folks making $35,000 annually doesn’t put you on Easy Street, as anyone making that amount of money already knows, raising the limit to $83,000 (roughly equivalent to the “happiness wage”) would help our working families a lot more.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you demand that Starbucks executives rehire workers they illegally fired for trying to organize unions at the workplace. Starbucks bosses must think they can convince our NLRB that they really fired all those people for improperly disposing of lattes or something, but everyone knows Starbucks treats their workers badly by now, so they’d do better just admitting they were wrong and bringing back the workers they fired. Bosses really do forget where they came from – or, perhaps, they’re ashamed of where they came from, and spend a lifetime trying to cover that up. Whatever! They do evil, and we need to stop them from doing evil.

Finally, the National Campaign for Justice helps you tell our Department of Transportation (or DOT) to enact the most vigorous climate change rules possible. Our DOT has proposed a rule requiring state and local governments to report on climate change emissions on roads and train routes and reduce those emissions; naturally fossil fuel corporations, who already get too much say about everything, stand ready to whine about being made to do anything differently, but remember that when they whine about “jobs” and “mandates” they’re really whining about their executives making less money, and preserving executive pay is no reason to make important decisions.

Action: concerning drug prices, marriage equality, and affordable housing.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to cap insulin prices for all Americans, tell your Senators to pass the Respect for Marriage Act, and tell your Congressfolk to expand affordable housing in year-end spending bills. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to cap insulin prices for all Americans. The Inflation Reduction Act caps insulin prices for Medicare patients, since that was all they could get through reconciliation; Democrats did try to get 60 votes for legislation capping insulin prices for everyone, but 43 Republican Senators opposed, so that legislation failed. Are Democrats running ads excoriating them for their vote on the insulin cap, particularly since they all also voted against the insulin cap for Medicare patients? If they are, they’re being quiet about it, which defeats the purpose of advertising. So we’ll do it for them, then.

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 8404/S. 4556, the Respect for Marriage Act, which would codify gay marriage and interracial marriage rights into our laws, preventing our Supreme Court from obliterating them, as they did with abortion rights in the Dobbs decision. Word on the street is that Democrats almost-but-not-quite got 60 votes for the bill or for some version thereof, but decided to wait until after the midterms, when they figured the voters might have delivered more Senators to the Democrats. But who cares what they want? They’re supposed to do what we want – to protect rights for which we’ve fought.

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand affordable housing funding in their year-end spending bills. Because that sure would be a better way of spending money than handing out yet more corporate welfare in the form of “tax extenders”! Eviction moratoria are long gone, too many Americans are way behind on their rent, and rich folks are still buying up too much of our housing just so they can show “assets” and get cheap loans from banks. That last era is about to end, thanks to our Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes, but good Americans still need – and deserve! – affordable housing, and where the “free” market won’t deliver, our government must.

Around the table: starring bad people and William Shatner.

Sonali Kolhatkar writes that if Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (a.k.a. Lula) wins the Brazilian Presidency, “he must not only rebuild the social investments that Bolsonaro destroyed, but also restore trust in a nation damaged by fascism’s sophisticated propaganda machine.” Like fellow irredeemable asshole Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro has wreaked a lot of havoc on the good citizens of Brazil, and if paragraph 5 seems a little extreme to you, recall all the times American media celebrated the prospect of a Bolsonaro presidency because it’d be “good for business.” Also recall that the “orchestrated effort to attack democracy in Brazil” included the Car Wash “corruption” probe that toppled a liberal President and briefly put Lula in jail. And finally, recall that the main difference between a foreign dictator and an American corporate executive is that an executive has the luxury to act civilized.

“The CIA Thought Putin Would Quickly Conquer Ukraine,” writes James Risen and Ken Klippenstein at The Intercept. “Why Did They Get It So Wrong?” Long story short: “U.S. intelligence missed the impact of corrupt insider dealing and deceit among Putin loyalists in Moscow’s defense establishment, which has left the Russian army a brittle and hollow shell,” and they missed it because they relied more on high-tech surveillance observing things like troop movements than, you know, people on the ground who might have told them the Russian government is totally corrupt. Machines failing to do the work of people: where have we heard that story before?

You might not expect to hear from William Shatner that going up into space actually caused him “overwhelming sadness,” but while he’s not the only person who ever went up into space and experienced the void as, well, a void, we should remember that most the times we’ve “seen” space we’ve seen it in sci-fi films and TV shows, which their creators construct to excite and entice us. The first group of people who cross the void to another place will be profoundly lonely, and we won’t even know how they fared in our lifetimes. Read the whole thing, though – Mr. Shatner implores us to be aware “not only of our insignificance, but the grandeur around us that makes us insignificant” – the grandeur of being on Earth, that is.

I expect exactly zero right-wingers to care that J.D. Vance’s anti-opioid non-profit completely fizzled after five years, two op-eds, and two Twitterings – as we’ve just been reminded with Herschel Walker, right-wingers care about nothing except winning, and they tend to think showing up equals winning – but making a big show of caring about a problem and then doing nothing about it seems absolutely toxic to me! And if one guy's absence could really capsize the whole effort, as Mr. Vance claims, then it wasn’t much of an effort. I will say the ads Tim Ryan is running about this feel rather odd to me – regular folks don’t sound this scripted in real life; maybe Mr. Ryan’s not as good a candidate as I thought. But Mr. Vance is such an absurdly bad candidate that maybe he doesn’t have to be.

When I hear that Sen. Ron Johnson (E-WI), the man who gives the Citizen Legislator a bad name, actually suggested we ought to repeal the federal minimum wage, all I can say is: what will it take to send this man home for good? I actually take some comfort in his relatively good polls recently, not just because attacking Mandela Barnes in late September and early October ain’t as good as attacking him in late October and early November, but because maybe this time Wisconsin Democrats aren’t leaving Mr. Johnson for dead. Also, Russ Feingold, the man who couldn’t campaign without tying at least one hand behind his back in 2010 and did victory laps for months in 2016, isn’t running.

Finally, I don’t know if Sen. Tommy Tuberville (E-AL) thought he was killing two birds with one stone by saying that Democrats “want reparations because they think the people that do the crime are owed that,”but I do know that calling Democrats “pro-crime” is quite desperate, particularly from a guy who has reportedly violated the STOCK Act at least 130 times since assuming office not even two years ago. Republicans really have nothing of consequence to offer anyone, do they? Just remember, folks: no matter how stupid Tommy Tuberville looks or sounds, he’s not stupid. He’s evil.

Action: concerning immigration, pollution, and corruption.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the DREAM Act, reject efforts to gut the National Environmental Policy Act, and prohibit Congressfolk from trading in stocks. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 264, the DREAM Act. Like President Biden's recent moves on marijuana pardons and student loan debt, the DREAM Act is not some radical act, but a bill that would simply expand the number of immigrants brought here as children who can stay in the only country they know anything about, as long as they demonstrate continued residence here and continued contributions to society. Shouting about PROTECTINGZ TEH BORDURZ!!!! and BUILDINGZ TEH WALLZ!!!! is entirely inappropriate in the context of someone who literally had no say in coming to America. In fact, it’s damn cruel. Is it so fucking much to ask for people not to be cruel in America?

US PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk not to weaken the National Environmental Policy Act. When you hear the likes of Joe Manchin talk about “permitting reform,” they really mean they don’t want federal agencies to evaluate big gas, oil, and pipeline projects for the harm they might do to our clean air and clean water, hence the drive to “reform” the National Environmental Policy Act. I guess we should be happy that Republicans helped take down Mr. Manchin’s infamous “side deal” on “permitting reform,” which they appear to have done out of pique. The pique of evil people is a hell of a thing to count on, though; we’d do better to count on ourselves, doing our job as Americans.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation banning members of Congress from owning or trading individual stocks. Because you can’t trust people who are compromised by their own investments! And if your Congressperson pretends to get all offended at that, trust your own common sense rather than their histrionics. Congresspeople oversee vast swaths of our economy, and if they invest their own money in the parts of our economy they’re overseeing, they won’t do it on our behalf, but on their own. It’s that simple. Congress has really dropped the ball on this matter this year, but that just means we have to make them do better.

Action: concerning banksters, government spying, and workers' rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Wall Street Looting Act and the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, and tell your Senators to pass the PRO Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5648/S. 3022, the Stop Wall Street Looting Act. You know how banksters buy up corporations just to bleed them dry, putting people out of work and depriving others of services they need? The Stop Wall Street Looting Act would fix that, by protecting workers first when corporations go under and ending the hedge fund manager “carried interest” loophole, among other reforms. I know, I know, we’ve agitated for this bill for years, it seems like, and even Democratic Congresses never hold votes on it. But that doesn’t mean we give up – it means we get in their grills more about it.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, which would prevent private data corporations from selling your personal data to law enforcement. If you think that’s not a problem now, you will when law enforcement uses the data they bought to go on fishing expeditions that ensnare you or someone you love! Because they’ll do that, sooner or later, if only to justify their existence. Demand Progress also points out that our own military has just bought software that will let them monitor some 90% of all internet traffic, and I would hope that nobody thinks our military should spy on us without a warrant.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842/S. 420, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. Good Americans are organizing for better working conditions like they haven’t done in years, but big corporations still herd them into mandatory anti-union meetings and then threaten the workers they can’t brainwash; the PRO Act would all that a lot harder. If bosses don’t want workers to unionize, they should try doing better by their workers, rather than saying there’s no money. Bosses say “there’s no money” because they take all the money! And that ain’t right when working families are trying to figure out which bill they can get away with not paying this month.

Action: concerning fracking, flooding, and recycling.

Long story short: tell the Delaware River Basin Commission to do more to protect folks from fracking, tell insurance corporations to treat Floridians affected by Hurricane Ian better, and tell our EPA to regulate “widely-recyclable” plastics more vigorously. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

MoveOn helps you tell the Delaware River Basin Commission (or DRBC) to give the good citizens of the Delaware Valley a more comprehensive ban on hydraulic fracturing, a.k.a. "fracking." The DRBC has decided to ban this kind of gas drilling in the Delaware River Watershed – which is good, since fracking pollutes drinking water – but has not banned either importing fracking wastewater or exporting clean water for use to frack elsewhere, which is not so good. I mean, if we’re trying to protect our clean water from pollution, we must protect it from all fracking, not just the fracking that could occur in our backyard. For once we befoul our drinking water with fracking chemicals, we don’t ever get it back.

Change.org helps you tell insurance corporations to stop shorting good Americans injured by Hurricane Ian. You’d think insurance would cover flooding caused by a hurricane, right? Particularly in a climate change era? Sadly, no: insurance corporations have been going rather far out of their way to deny good Floridians the help they need, and no this isn’t “people’s fault for not knowing what insurance they need” – flood insurance is actually hard to get, and when folks don’t know what insurance they need, that’s mostly because insurance corporations avoid telling them the truth and governments don't stop them. But can insurance corporations withstand (even more) bad PR from denying (even more) claims? I think we’re about to find out!

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to regulate “widely-recyclable” plastics a lot more vigorously. You’ve heard of “wish-cycling,” where you throw a lot of different plastic containers into your recycling bin hoping they’ll take them all? Anyone with a good heart has done that at some time or other, but the way things are, manufacturers, not our EPA, get to declare their plastics “widely-recyclable,” which means more not-actually-recyclable plastics choking off life in our oceans and making their way into our bloodstreams. So if our EPA needs to shorten the list of “widely-recyclable” plastics, they ought to do it. Then we can deal with our plastic problem a lot more honestly.

Around the table: from OPEC+ shenanigans to Presidential pardons.

Sen. Schumer (D-NY) excoriates OPEC+ for deciding to ratchet back oil production, which has already helped drive American gas prices up, and though he concentrates most of his fire on how this move affects Russia’s war on Ukraine – which is not going so well for Russia, you may have noticed! – I can’t help but notice that we’re less than a month out from midterms here, and higher gas prices won’t help Democrats hold either House or Senate. Republicans could help out, I suppose, by excoriating President Biden for failing to get better behavior out of Saudi Arabia when he went there over the summer, which sets up the easy retort: so you’re saying we’re not appeasing Saudi Arabia enough?

I wish it were more of a surprise that celebrity chef/philanthropist José Andrés has tried to block an initiative that would raise wages for tipped workers in Washington, D.C., his base of operations, but I’ve seen nominally liberal restauranteurs do similar things before, and a lot nominally liberal bosses in any field clench when their own employees demand better from them. But this is one reason we live in communities – so that we have folks who can grab us by the scruff and tell us we’re going wrong. (Don’t believe the hype that Mr. Andrés et al are “just trying to preserve jobs in the wake of the pandemic.” First off, it’s rubbish, and second off, if they didn’t say that, they’d just say something else.)

Once again, from the “I Shouldn’t Have to Spend Any Time on This Shit” file: per Factcheck.org, “(t)here is no evidence that babies are harmed by drinking breast milk from mothers who have received a COVID-19 vaccine.” You may have heard differently on social media – that, for example, a study found that “7 out of 11 women had mRNA in their breast milk.” Generally you don’t hear that a) it was actually 5 women out of 11 and b) it was an infinitesimal amount of mRNA that disappeared in less than 48 hours. Also too, 11 women ain’t exactly a big sample, and if you’re a mom, do you really want to put yourself at risk of dying from COVID by not getting vaccinated? Thus we are reminded, once again, that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and also that clichés often endure for good reason.

Many have wondered just why Mehmet Oz gave a speech at a Florida fundraiser not very far from one of Adolf Hitler's cars, and I suppose right-wingers will shrug and say “it was a museum,” I think Mr. Oz once again is actually looking to appeal to fascists in Pennsylvania, just like he did when he criticized John Fetterman for being too anti-authority. But I’m not sure that’ll work – only a few American fascists really like Hitler, and those can easily make a show of hating him. Remember what Richard Spencer was talking about right before he got punched in the face that time? He was talking about how much actual Nazis hated him. Fake “independence” continues to disgust me.

Uh oh: New Hampshire Senate Republican candidate Don Bolduc unfurled this gem about “who should decide abortion rights”: “It belongs to the state. It belongs to these gentlemen right here, who are state legislators representing you.” While New Hampshire doesn’t allow state-level ballot referenda, legislators don’t “decide for you” so much as do your will, or at least that’s how it’ll work when we all insist that’s how it should work. And if you’re running for office, the last thing you want say is any variation of these men decide abortion for you. Between this and his flip-flip-flopping on the 2020 election being “stolen,” Mr. Bolduc’s not having a good month, and this is not a good time to have a bad month.

When I hear that well over half of all Republican nominees for House, Senate, and the four top state offices think Joe Biden “stole” the 2020 election he actually won by seven million votes, I think Democrats should absolutely run ads about all of them, so that independent voters know who the whiner is and who the adult in the room is. That way we can prevent a good chunk of them – perhaps even those running in “safely Republican seats,” since we all know that can turn in a minute since we’ve all seen it happen in our lifetimes – from ever holding office. I still have my doubts that Democrats really want to win races, though – I mean, why take on actual responsibilities when you can raise lots of money either way?

Finally, President Biden issues pardons for all Americans convicted of simple marijuana possession since that became a crime in 1971, and orders a study on descheduling marijuana, adding that keeping pot on Schedule I along with drugs like heroin “makes no sense.” Only around 10,000 Americans will get pardons – if your state rung you up for pot possession, you’d need to go to your Governor for a pardon – but this is all more than I expected from President Biden, even though he said he’d do that and more, so I applaud it. I feel compelled to point out, though, that (like his student loan forgiveness program) it’s also exactly the kind of good first step that shouldn’t attract a lot of Republican anger but does anyway, because Republicans only do anger these days. Plus they’re all running on TEH CRIMEZ!!!!, because what else can they run on, their great ideas? The good news: most Americans want to legalize pot, and they don’t automatically associate toking with murder.

Action: concerning taxes and war.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion and make it permanent and pass a wealth tax on the ultra-rich, and tell your Senators to repeal the 2002 Iraq War AUMF. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion (from the American Rescue Plan Act) and make it permanent. That CTC expansion put $250 and $300 checks (per child!) in good Americans’ bank accounts every month in 2021, which sure did help when inflation shot upward, but Congress let it lapse at the end of 2021 – or rather, 50 Senate Republicans and Joe Manchin let it lapse at the end of 2021. Working families sure could have used it last year, and they sure could use it now, too. And frankly bringing it back should be a no-brainer – even for a Congress that all too frequently demonstrates it hasn’t a brain in the building.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a wealth tax on the ultra-rich, and with a quickness. A recent Congressional Budget Office (or CBO) report told us what we all kinda knew already, that the richest one percent of Americans have increased their wealth by almost $30 trillion over the last 30 years; meanwhile the rest of us worry about getting slammed with surprise medical bills and wonder how much of the rent we can get away with not paying this month. So yeah, we’ve gotta change that, and it sure ain’t like taxing the rich harder polls badly! I guess all that’s left is for Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D?-AZ) to intone for the 211th time that she won’t raise taxes on the rich because working families small businesses tough times Arizona I’m a maverick.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to repeal the notorious 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) in Iraq, which the last four Presidents have all used to justify all manner of military misadventures that have spilled our blood and treasure for the greater glory of American defense corporations. Sorry, in the absence of a strategy at least somewhat moored in reality, I must assume that’s why it still happens, and if we take away this AUMF, there’ll be less of it. And not to pile on, but that’s five words they’re using to say “wage war.” Why don’t they just say “wage war”? Couldn’t be a profound lack of courage, could it?

Around the table: containing at least three trips down Memory Lane.

What’s the latest BS 2020 election conspiracy theory? Why, that certain “voting machines have features built into them under the auspices of protection or equal access for people with disabilities that can be used nefariously,” and supposedly were in Maricopa County to help deliver Arizona to Joe Biden. And why is this a BS theory? Because (among many, many other things!) over 90% of Maricopa County’s ballots were mail-in ballots, and only a few hundred folks even used the equal-access machines in Maricopa County, in a state Mr. Biden won by over 10,000 votes. And why is this theory even more disgusting? Because it implies that “helping disabled people vote” equals “cheating at elections,” and thus we should never fight discrimination ever. And what should we do to folks who come up with such “theories”? Shame and shun them unto death, that’s what. Healthy communities put up boundaries, and healthy communities also know when to get tough.

University of Exeter-led study surprisingly finds that Alzheimer’s disease changes non-neurons rather more dramatically than it changes neurons. Scientists had long supposed, reasonably, that Alzheimer’s has its biggest effects on neurons, but the Exeter-led study was able to isolate different kinds of cells much better than previous studies had done, hence the finding. This finding could change or expand the kinds of treatments doctors can use on patients with dementia; if you’ve witnessed first-hand how dementia takes over a mind, this will give you hope that folks in the future may be spared this debilitating disease. I wish the researchers the best.

Did you know that the FBI compiled a file on Aretha Franklin that was over 270 pages long? Given her lifelong involvement with the civil rights movement, I guess it’s not surprising, though the sheer clumsiness of the FBI’s efforts to tie her to pretty much any fevered fantasy is either amusing or disgusting, depending on your level of spiritual elevation. (I vote “disgusting” and I still don’t know which level is higher or lower.) I guess I’m curious about the FBI files on Robin Gibb; perhaps our FBI was listening a little too closely to “I Started a Joke.”

When I hear that tech billionaires are not only “dumber than you think” and think of themselves as “utterly powerless to affect the future” in the face of apocalypse, but are also “comedic monsters, who really mean to leave us all behind,” I am reminded that several of these fools are running for U.S. Senate right now, namely J.D. “Pretend Redneck Bankster Robot” Vance in Ohio, and yet another "libertarian" with a face even a mother could punch, Blake Masters in Arizona. I am also reminded that though my father’s and grandfather’s gardening talent has largely eluded me, I could still feed myself in an apocalypse far better than any of them could.

When I hear that New Hampshire Republican Senate candidate Don Bolduc has now taken his third distinct position on the 2020 election – in order, he said it was stolen, then that it wasn’t stolen, and now that he doesn’t know – I’m reminded that people hate flip-floppers. He’d have done a lot better sticking to “it was stolen”; even the folks who don’t agree will more likely respect a man who sticks to his guns, as it were. I’m also reminded that Scott Walker took three separate positions on birthright citizenship in just one week that time he ran for President; anyone remember how many delegates he won? Oh, right, he flamed out before the primaries.

Finally, Herschel Walker sure has had a rough week, what with that allegation he paid for a woman's abortion and his son's turning oh him. I wonder if all this news is coming a bit early in the month, but then I also wonder if too many voters suspect any revelations they hear in late October, so maybe early October is the new late October. It sure was for Roy Moore in 2017 – though it wasn’t for Donald Trump in 2016 and, more importantly, was for Hillary Clinton that same year. Will right-wingers have pause before pulling the lever for him? I kid, of course – the only thing that matters to them is power, which they’ll have more of if Mr. Walker beats Sen. Warnock.

Action: concerning "free" trade, government spying, and workers' rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reauthorize the Trade Adjustment Assistance program and pass the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act and the PRO Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to reauthorize the Trade Adjustment Assistance program (or TAA). TAA expired this past July 1, but good Americans have lost their jobs to “free” trade agreements that outsource jobs to other nations since then, so they need our help – and if your job gets outsourced one day, you’ll need that help, too. Right-wing criticism of TAA essentially amount to “too many of the wrong people getting too much help,” which surely doesn’t resonate with anyone who's gotten help, and anyway is beside the point – if our government can do it better, they should, but “this could be done better” doesn’t equal “this should not exist,” except, apparently, in the right-wing mind.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. Currently our laws prevent your internet service providing corporation (or ISP) from selling your private data to law enforcement – but our laws do not prevent your third-party data-collection corporations (which buy your data from your ISP) from selling your private data to law enforcement! If law enforcement thinks you’ve committed a crime, they should get a warrant from a judge to get your private data, not simply buy it from some corporation that should never even have had it in the first place. Our Founders gave us Fourth Amendment protections from searches and seizures for good reason.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842/S. 420, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. The PRO Act would make it harder for bosses to prevent their workers from organizing by threatening and propagandizing them – a lot of workers have organized lately! – plus it would nullify notorious “right-to-work” laws at the state level, which you would do better to call “right to work for less” laws. Remember: they say “right-to-work” laws “give you a choice” whether or not to join a union, but if you don’t join a union, you’ll have a lot less choice about everything – pay, benefits, working conditions. So don’t believe the hype.

Action: concerning voting rights, discrimination, and saving our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell state Secretaries of State to make it easier for college students to vote, tell the Biden Administration to stop discrimination in health care, and tell our USPS to fire Postmaster General DeJoy. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

RISE helps you tell state Secretaries of State to make it easier for college students to vote. You’ll hear right-wingers say college kids aren’t really invested in the area where they’re going to school, though, hey, nobody likes people who act like the Emotion Police! Right-wingers also love saying you should have to work harder, not easier, to vote, though if you have to “earn” rights, they're not really rights! Of course their real problem is that college kids don’t vote Republican very often, but if they don’t like how they vote, maybe they should try attracting their vote, instead of suppressing it. That's what a bootstrapper would do!

Moms Rising helps you tell our Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) to enact the most vigorous rule possible prohibiting discrimination in health care. Moms Rising also helps you describe how you’ve faced discrimination in health care; chances are, if you’re Black or Brown or female or gay or transgender, you have, whether it’s a doctor dismissing symptoms because “Black women always exaggerate” (yes, some doctors say that!) or a doctor refusing to treat a trans patient because of his “religious” “conscience.” I’ve said it before, but if you won’t treat people because of your “religious” “beliefs,” you need to find another profession – maybe one that doesn’t involve service.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell President Biden to install two more members of our U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors so the Board can fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. Who really, really deserves it – he’s cutting services, raising prices, and slashing jobs like this is some private corporation he can bleed for his own benefit or his shareholders’. But our Postal Service is a government agency that belongs to us, and thus should serve us, not some corporatist ideology. One of the main reasons they should serve us? They deliver a lot of our life-saving medicines through the mail. And if we want our Postal Service to do that right, we have to get rid of the bosses who’d do it wrong.