Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning jobs, media, police brutality, facial recognition, airline refunds, and campaign donations.

Long story short: tell President Biden to show less "flexibility" with Republicans on his infrastructure package, tell your cable provider to stop carrying the Fox News (sic) Channel, tell big corporations to stop funding police foundations, tell Disney to stop using facial recognition software, tell big airline corporations to refund folks who didn't use their tickets in a pandemic, and tell the American Dental Association to stop donating to Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ). I've provided President Biden's phone number below for the first alert, and email/petition links for the others. Good hunting!

Yesterday we learned that President Biden seemed amenable to passing infrastructure/jobs legislation more like Republicans would like. Was he waffling? Was he doing pro forma meetings with Republicans? Was he playing them in yet another game of 19-dimensional chess? The answer doesn't matter. Here's what matters: we call President Biden, at 202.456.1111, and tell him do not pander to Republicans on his signature infrastructure/jobs legislation. This way, we change the story from "what's President Biden going to do?" to what we're going to do. And if enough of us communicate our will to our President, he'll hear it, if for no other reason that some staffer in the White House is going to be sick of all these phone calls. (And if you tell him you want the corporate tax rate to go higher -- say, to 55%, where it was in the '50s -- well, what's the harm in that?)

Consumers United for Fairness helps you tell your cable corporation to stop carrying Fox News. I've said it many times: even if you're not watching Fox News, you're still paying for it, and even if you make the cable company come out and block Fox News, you're still paying for it, and they'll never change their ways until we take away their money, particularly that pile of passive money they get from every cable TV subscriber in America. Seriously, 75 cents a month per account adds up -- and starving the beast of that 75 cents a month per account will also add up. Yeah, we finally cut the cord last year, but not everyone will do that, particularly if they like their HGTV and their ESPN and their Comedy Central. We've got the power, so let's use it. (And if anyone bellows TEH FREE SPEECHEZ!!!! at you over this, kindly direct them to the "75 cents a month per account" phrase above.)

Sum of Us helps you tell big corporations like Starbucks, Target, and Coca-Cola to stop funding police foundations. Why? Isn't that, like, civic duty or something? Except that police foundations usually get the military weapons and surveillance tech for police departments, which they use to attack protestors and single out folks of color. So it's the opposite of civic duty, actually. And these corporations are trying to appear "woke"! Why, it's enough to make you suspicious of corporate PR! But we've got the Big Stick of Bad PR ourselves, plus the power to stop patronizing these establishments, which even in our monopolistic era ain't as hard as they'd like you to think. So let's do that.

Fight for the Future helps you tell Disney to stop using facial recognition software at their theme parks. Yeah, they say they've started "testing" that software at their Magic Kingdoms, but how much more testing do we need to do? We already know that facial recognition software not only intrudes on our privacy but can't tell Black folks apart any better than your Tea Party uncle can, plus it creates another pile of data most corporations have already proven they can't (or won't!) secure, so hackers can steal it. So it's evil and it's useless -- and useless in a way that makes it more evil. Surely Disney World has more to offer the world than that! And the Big Stick of Bad PR may help them remember that, so let's wield it.

Penn PIRG helps you tell big airline corporations to refund good Americans for all those plane tickets they cancelled in 2020. Too many Americans got vouchers, not refunds, and those vouchers have expiration dates, but the pandemic's still going on, so why should they be punished for continuing to make the right choice? Too often, in this sick, immoral, and decadent civilization, we punish people for doing the right thing and reward them for doing the wrong thing; how about we stop doing that in this instance? If it seems like it might not make that much of a difference to our posterity, rest assured that every time we reward the righteous and punish evil, we make a difference to our posterity. I've seen it happen enough times to know it's worth doing, but every day we must make an example of our good works -- and our good hearts! -- to others. It sure is better than cynicism, I tell you what.

Finally, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell the American Dental Association to stop donating to Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ). They donate to him, I presume, because he's a dentist! Not just any dentist, either, but a member of the Arizona Dental Association's Hall of Fame! No, really, I'm not kidding. Sadly, Rep. Gosar has made a name for himself for other reasons -- for being one of the ringleaders of the Congressional effort to overturn the 2020 Presidential election (including the attempted coup of January 6!), and for making nice with white supremacists at the America First PAC meeting the next month. Dentistry Hall of Fame or no, this is one character you don't want soiling your good name -- a fact six of his nine siblings have taken to heart by endorsing his opponent in his 2018 and 2020 House races! If they can do it, surely the ADA can, too.

UPDATE. I am sorry to say the White House phone number is not working today; try the White House's contact link instead.

Around the table: ho hum, Republican politicians are full of rage and cowardice and whining and ignorance.

President Biden announces the U.S. will withdraw from Afghanistan by 9.11.21 -- really? After only 20 years? -- and naturally Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) thinks such a withdrawal would be "dumber than dirt and devilishly dangerous," proving, once again, that a little alliteration is a dangerous thing. Of course Sen. Graham wants us all to be cowards, clinging to military aggression in order to "keep safe" from the Middle East terrorism that said military aggression has made much, much worse. Why, it's almost like that's the whole idea! Besides, you know what keeps people safe? Stopping the rich from running roughshod over them, a principle folks like Lindsey Graham pretend not to understand.

William Rivers Pitt at TruthOut suggests there may be, ah, something else behind Sen. Manchin's repeated calls for "bipartisanship" -- namely, campaign contributions from the banksters who benefited most from the corporate tax cut of 2017 and don't want to see it go back up. To these banksters, the obvious response would be maybe there are other people in America besides you. They should count themselves lucky they're dealing with Joe Biden, who has only proposed raising the rate to 28%, and not those of us who would raise it to 55%, which is where it was in the '50s, the last decade we stopped the rich from running roughshod over us. You know, maybe we should make it so they have to deal with us.

In a related note, big corporations have started to run ads telling us we better not raise corporate taxes during an economic downturn! These clowns tell us we can't raise taxes because times are bad and then we can't raise taxes because times are good, but I think most Americans can now tell the difference between the taxes they pay and the taxes rich folks and corporations pay. And dig the Mike Pence crony who actually has the nerve to call his tax-fighting lobby the Coalition to Protect American Workers! Instead of spending $12.5 million to run ads opposing corporate tax hikes, maybe you could spend that money, oh, I don't know, safety in the workplace? You know, something that actually deals with "protection"?

In the wake of yet another Breathing-While-Black shooting by police, we are reminded that police can, in fact, pull you over in many states for hanging something from your rear-view mirror, ostensibly the "probable cause" police used to pull over Daunte Wright before shooting him dead. But I've had something hanging from my rearview for over a dozen years, and the next time I get pulled over for it will be the first. I'm pretty sure that's because I'm not Black! Naturally police say they need to be able to pull you over for hanging an air freshener from your rearview so they can investigate all the other sordid things you might be doing, which doesn't sound at all fascistic. But gosh, fellows, ever walk a beat? You know, find out what's going on in a community by talking to the people in that community? Some things we did do better in the old days. Even if you can't always quantify it on a spreadsheet.

When you hear that Republicans want to forge a "truce" between former President Trump and Senate Minority Leader McConnell, please remember that this is all drama. No Republican operatives actually care if Messrs. Trump and McConnell "get along" or whatever -- in fact, they have more of an interest, I would think, in keeping the discord going, not just because it distracts people from more nefarious doings (i.e., the wave of anti-voting bills and anti-transgender bills Republicans are forcing down good Americans' throats at the state level), but because it misleads people into thinking Republican politicians really are a very diverse group with very diverse ideas, when, fact is, they're all whining, bigoted seditionists.

Finally, in a peripherally-related note, David Frum at The Atlantic argues that Republicans might actually be screwing themselves with their vote suppression legislation. To which I would respond: we can only hope! Seriously, he does make a lot of cogent arguments, among them that suppressing mail-in voting actually hurts rural voters who trend Republican at least as much as the urban voters who trend Democratic, though I would like to see a bit more evidence (i.e., turnout rates from more than two counties in Kentucky). But Mr. Frum is absolutely right that "winning votes is better than suppressing them," which leads me to assert, again, that Democrats could make all this speculation worthless by using their power to do good things this year and next, instead of letting Joe Manchin scuttle everything by demanding that we work with Republicans who want to burn everything down.

Action: concerning campaign finance, health care, law and order, drug policy, and D.C. statehood.

Long story short: tell your House Reps to support a Constitutional amendment that would get big money out of political campaigns, and then tell your House Reps to pass the Medicare for All Act, the Demilitarizing Local Law Enforcement Act, the MORE Act, and the D.C. Admission Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a cellphone) to find your House Reps' phone numbers -- or use the email/petition links in the paragraphs below.

People for the American Way helps you tell your House Reps to pass H.J.Res. 1, which would amend our Constitution so that our federal, state, and local governments could restrict campaign financing again. Go ahead and read the bill at Congress.gov; it's pretty short, and it would also allow governments to distinguish between "natural" persons (i.e., you and I) and "corporations or other artificial entities," which opens the door to banning corporate campaign contributions. Like many bills that don't pass, this is a very popular bill, and right-wingers will come at you with all kinds of hysterical stories about "what could happen" if governments were to regulate campaign finance again. Spoiler alert: they're all rubbish -- and you'll know they're rubbish because none of them ever happened between McCain/Feingold and Citizens United.

Demand Progress, MedicareforAllNow.org, and Black Lives Matter all help you tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 1976, the Medicare for All Act. You've seen those memes on Facebook about how you go get your COVID vaccine and no one asks you if you've got health insurance or cash on hand, and wouldn't it be wonderful if you got all your health care that way? Expanding Medicare to include all Americans would get us there, and no, you wouldn't be paying an arm and a leg more for it in taxes -- we could convert the money corporations are already paying for private insurance into an employer-side payroll tax, which wouldn't take one penny more out of your paycheck (since it's employer-side; the payroll tax splits Social Security taxes between employer and employee). Feel free to tell your Congressfolk just that. They'll either be impressed or scared; either reaction is fine.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Reps to pass the Demilitarizing Local Law Enforcement Act, which would repeal the notorious 1033 program which funnels surplus military weapons to local police -- who then use it on protestors against police brutality! I'd call that irony, but aren't we supposed to get pleasure from irony? And don't worry that you've also called supporting the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and/or the Stop Militarizing the Police Act, even if these bills have a lot of overlap -- if you voice your support for all of them, then you'll have told your Congressfolk "stop giving the police military weapons" several times, and that's what they most need to know.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Reps to pass the Marijuana Opportunity, Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act, which would undo a lot of damage caused by the "war on drugs." No, really -- all the "war on drugs" did was put a lot of people in jail; and in the case of pot, it put people in jail because they used a drug that wasn't particularly dangerous, like cocaine or heroin. The MORE Act would make marijuana legal, invest in the communities most harmed by the "war on drugs," and expunge pot convictions from a lot of folks' criminal records. 16 states have legalized pot now; maybe it's time for our federal government to get the message.

Finally, both People for the American Way and the Progressive Reform Network help you tell your Reps to pass H.R. 51, the D.C. Admission Act. Why? Because it would admit Washington, D.C., as a state, that's why. It would be America's smallest state by a sizable margin (is that a sigh of relief I'm hearing from Rhode Island?), but it would not be America's least populous state (it's ahead of Vermont and Wyoming, and nipping at the heels of Alaska and North Dakota), plus it would be able to run itself the way other states do, instead of relying on our federal government to run it. (Sounds almost conservative, doesn't it?) Our government certainly left Washington, D.C. in the lurch on January 6, didn't it? If D.C. were a state, it'd have its own National Guard, and a lot of weekend fascists would think twice about trying that again.

Around the table: the dirty secret about the Republican agenda! OK, it's not much of a secret.

Sonali Kohatkar tells us "Why Republicans Are Betting the Farm on Attacking Transgender People." Long story short: they're trying to stoke rage in voters, and besides, what else they got? And note well that anti-transgender bills are "not being requested by constituents," in one observer's words, but you hear people talk about how much they don't like transgender people solely because it's "in the news" -- and it's only in the news because Republicans push these bills! Gosh, how do such things happen?

Republicans are circulating a memo on Capitol Hill calling the Biden infrastructure plan a "slush fund," but that's easy to counter: is my job a "slush fund"? Is my house a "slush fund"? Is clean water a "slush fund"? Is my kid's school a "slush fund"? Is high-speed internet for everyone a "slush fund"? Is the bridge I take to work a "slush fund"? Is retraining my coal worker uncle a "slush fund"? One could go on.

In a related note, Lindsay Koshgarian at TruthOut reminds us that the Biden infrastructure plan could very easily be funded given the amount of money our government pisses away on wars and tax cuts for the rich. Why, after you confront $6.4 trillion we've spent on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars that have made everything in the Middle East even worse, plus the $2.3 trillion budget gap the Trump tax cuts will cost through 2027, you may come away from this article wishing the Biden plan was bigger! Might as well spend trillions of dollars on stuff we use, after all.

Ho hum, law enforcement officers allege that an antifa activist shot at them first -- thus presumably justifying their shooting him to death -- but their investigation may have left a few things out, such as the fact that the activist in question had a gun with a full clip on him at time of death, or the witness testimony that contradicted the witness testimony cited in their investigation, or the utter dearth of body camera or dashboard camera footage. Indeed, police may even have led an eight-year-old witness upon whose testimony the investigation relied heavily. Still, BUT ANTIFA! is likely to become the BUT HER EMAILS! of the new decade. Seriously, just try talking to a right-winger about January 6.

Finally, Sen. Cornyn (R-TX), noting that President Biden doesn't go on cable news programs, wonders if he's "really in charge." Jesus Mary and Joseph what if he's not going on cable news programs because cable news sucks? I mean, I wouldn't want to go on TV with a bunch of shouty know-nothing assholes either, and everyone's been pretending cable news is far more important than it really is for decades now; if our President wants to shame them by refusing to grace them with his presence, I'm all for it. Besides, Joe Biden ain't supposed to be "in charge" -- we are.

Action: concerning voting rights, civil rights, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell your Senators to pass the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and the Equality Act, and confirm USPS Board of Governors nominees; also, tell big corporations to stop donating to politicians who restrict voting rights. 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 Senators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition links in the paragraphs below. Good hunting!

Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. Most folks aren't falling for the ZOMG TEH CHILD MOLESTURZ WILLZ THE VOTEZ!!!!! stupidity, as evidenced by polling finding that two-thirds of Americans support H.R. 1. Newt Gingrich used to say that if 70% of the people want something, they ought to get it, so only a little more education about what's really in the bill -- an end to legislative gerrymandering, automatic and same-day voter registration, 15 days of early voting everywhere, disclosure of campaign donations over $10,000, an end to particularly nefarious forms of racist vote suppression -- should get us over the hump. Even Joe Manchin might hear it then.

Common Cause, People for the American Way, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The bill would, as you likely know, plug the hole our Supreme Court blew in the Voting Rights Act by creating a new standard with which our Justice Department could stop vote suppression efforts at the state level (specifically, it would subject any state or locality, not just ones in the South, with a record of vote suppression for extra scrutiny). Why haven't Democrats formally introduced this bill yet, or folded it into the For the People Act? I don't know, but does it matter? What matters is what we want, and what we tell our Congressfolk.

The Daily Kos Liberation League and People for the American Way both help you tell your Senators to pass H.R> 5, the Equality Act. As we speak, states are mulling or passing bills outlawing transgender students from competing in the sports that match their gender. Of course they know no boys will become girls just to dominate girls' sports and sentence themselves not only to a lifetime of making less money playing sports but ostracization from their buddies, but as David Frum instructs us, it's not about winning, or even fighting, it's about looking like you're fighting. Let's remind them there are more important things in life -- you know, like fighting real discrimination that gay and transgender folks face all the time, like getting shut out by banks and landlords and employers strictly on the basis of sex.

Common Cause helps you tell your Senators to confirm President Biden's three USPS Board of Governors nominees, not least so they can fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy before he runs our Post Office even further into the ground. His big, bold proposal for getting our Postal Service back on its feet: higher prices and worse service. When I say CEOs are overrated, this is kinda what I mean. Don't let folks say he's just doing what has to be done, because this is America! We don't have to have a Post Office that runs badly! Especially when they're only losing money because Congress mandates that they pre-pay 75 years' worth of benefits! It's a manufactured hostage crisis, again! OK, I've run over my exclamation point quota. Anyway, while you've got your Senators on the phone, you can tell them to pass H.R. 695/S. 145, the USPS Fairness Act, which would repeal that Congressional mandate.

Finally, since we spent a lot of time on voting rights today, Public Citizen helps you tell big corporations to stop donating to politicians who suppress votes. Much more useful, I would say, than merely criticizing them in public, though I don't say that's worthless, precisely. But as many smart people have said, these big corporations gave a lot of money to the politicians who passed laws suppressing the vote. And they've done this dance with us before: they used to say they supported the nefarious American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC) for "economic" reasons, not for Voter ID or Stand Your Ground reasons. It's a load of rubbish. Let's let them know that we know that -- and give them an opening to do better, for once.

Around the table: the *real* reason the Amazon union drive failed, and other hard truths.

As you likely know, the union push at the Bessemer, AL Amazon plant failed, and Jane McAlevey at The Nation offers a fairly thorough post-mortem. Yes, corporations shouldn't get so big that they can push their workers around like Amazon does, but the Bessemer organizers didn't pre-empt obvious lines of attack about union dues, didn't meet workers at their homes rather than their workplaces, and didn't reach out to local community leaders until very late. Hell, they didn't even know how many workers the Bessemer plant had! As Phil Jackson used to say, when the refs are against you, you play above them. What's that? Easy to say when you've got Shaq and Kobe? We workers need to think of ourselves as Shaq and Kobe, because where would America be without us?

Wisconsin Supreme Court rules that state election officials don't have to remove voters off the rolls immediately when they suspect they've moved, although the actual decision is a lot more inside baseball than that -- two conservatives joined three liberals in a 5-2 ruling essentially saying that state law says local, not state, officials must clear voting rolls. Still, it gives us some breathing room, though I'd love to see the lawsuit that mentions that Wisconsin seems to wrongly tag voters of color as having moved more than anyone else.

It is to laugh that Mob Boss Mitch has called the creation of a commission to study the question of whether to add Supreme Court Justices "a direct assault on our nation’s independent judiciary." Surely Mob Boss Mitch, having been around the block a bit, knows that "creating a commission to study a question" is a sure way of ensuring nobody actually does anything about that question! I can only conclude that he's absorbed the lessons of Donald Trump well, i.e., always create drama and let others clean it up.

Congressional investigators unearth emails from Trump Administration HHS appointees in which they do victory laps about how they bullied our government into playing down the COVID pandemic. Note well that their bullying has helped cause over 575,000 deaths to date. Imagine being an asshole, and then imagine being proud of being an asshole, and you've got a lot of the people Donald Trump brought into our government. Is it too much to ask that, without the big man, they have at least as hard a time finding work as the security guard who caught the Watergate burglars did?

Finally, anyone else tired of John Boehner's new tell-all yet? He cusses out Ted Cruz, he complains about Tea Partiers making him look bad, but BFD: John Boehner is just another far right-winger who's spent the last decade-plus letting more obnoxious people make him look more palatable, and that stratagem is as old as the hills. His little Damascus moment when he becomes a Republican is also terribly shallow: "Because I was making a lot more money, the government was taking a bigger chunk of it." Even John Kasich would tell him money's not that damn important.

Around the table: the usual -- insane Republicans, weak Democrats.

Surprise, surprise, right-wingers are cherrypicking to argue that Georgia's new voting law is no more restrictive than Colorado's, leaving out little details like that Colorado votes almost entirely by mail and thus doesn't necessarily need more days of early voting, plus you have to ask for a mail ballot in Georgia, whereas in Colorado you just get one. You know what else right-wingers leave out? That Georgia's new law empowers its legislature to interfere far more in the vote counting than they did before -- and, as you may know, Republicans dominate the Georgia legislature. Gosh, I wonder what they'll do if we see an even bigger Democratic wave in Georgia in 2022?

Ho hum, fossil fuel corporations soaked up over $8 billion in corporate welfare from last year's CARES Act, but cut almost 60,000 jobs. Stick a pin in that for the next time someone squeals that we tax corporations so much that they can't create jobs. The reason they don't create jobs is that we don't tax them enough -- faced with the threat of real taxation, they'll spend their money on paying workers and building stuff, and faced with real regulation, they'll stop gobbling up existing properties just to deduct the mortgage interest. Not to pile on, but big fossil fuel corporations already get over $4 billion in corporate welfare annually.

Reactionary Missouri state legislature tries to thwart a Medicaid expansion, despite the fact that the state's voters amended their constitution in order to expand it. I doubt the state legislature will succeed in their efforts once the courts step in, but then that's not the point, is it? As David Frum instructed us recently, the point is to look like you're fighting, not win, or fight well, or even actually fight. And the rageheads will keep eating it up. And there are a lot of rageheads in Missouri. (Though, as an aside, maybe Lucas Kunce can neutralize them in the 2022 U.S. Senate race.)

New Mexico becomes America's second state (after Colorado) to ban qualified immunity for police officers, meaning folks wronged by police brutality (and other misconduct) can now sue and earn restitution. Folks who respond but how can cops do their jobs now should at least ask themselves why police officers need to be protected from accountability in order to "do their job." And if they find our justice system "skewed" in favor of the accused, they should remember that this is the way our Founders wanted it, and if they ever face a state trying to railroad them, they'll appreciate that a bit more.

"Some" Democrats worry that any tax-hike-on-the-rich in an infrastructure bill will "backfire" on them with the suburban voters who used to vote Republican. My advice to them is this: don't be weak and stupid! The tax "cuts" of 2017 didn't drive them into Republican arms in 2018, after all, and (as the article helpfully points out, I was beginning to think I was the only one who remembered) Barack Obama explicitly said, numerous times, that he wanted to raise taxes on the rich in 2012, and still won re-election. I often think Democratic politicos don't really understand voters, and this "worrying" sure doesn't convince me otherwise.

Finally, Kevin Williamson at the National Review -- another right-winger who thinks we should have fewer and allegedly "better" voters -- compares passing laws that help more people vote to loosening standards so we can have more doctors, but Jesus Mary and Joseph you have a right to vote, but you don't have a "right" to be a doctor. And if you're that worried about stupid people voting, you might as well just wear a sign saying "I can't persuade people to do the right thing." And maybe you ought to wonder why that is. Personally, I've found most people to be fairly intelligent and persuadable. Maybe that's because I expect more from them.

Action: concerning "bipartisanship," the filibuster, whistleblowing, public broadband, methane emissions, and corporate spying.

Long story short: tell Joe Manchin to stop Joe Manchining; write a letter-to-the-editor favoring filibuster abolition; tell your Congressfolk to pass the Peace Corps Reauthorization Act, the Broadband Justice Act, and a resolution of disapproval overturning weak Trump-era methane emissions rules; and tell Spotify to give up its creepy surveillance scheme. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to find your Congressfolks' phone numbers -- or use the email/petition/letter-to-the-editor tools in the links below. And good hunting.

Well, Joe Manchin's really done it this time, not only announcing he'll support no effort to "eliminate or weaken" the filibuster, but that "the time has come" "to usher a new era of bipartisanship." "Bipartisanship" with the party that opposes any and all good proposals and tries to overthrow governments and rewrite voting rules when election results don't go their way? How about "no"? Future historians will point to this moment as the moment Republicans captured the House and Senate in 2022 -- unless we act! Mr. Manchin's phone number, as you likely know by now, is 202.224.3954. Now that he's provoked two action alerts in one week, I'm starting to think he wants to be Donald Trump. No one on Earth should want to be Donald Trump. Even Donald Trump should look in the mirror and say, "wow, I don't want to be that guy."

In a related development, Common Cause helps you write a letter-to-the-editor about the need to get rid of the Senate filibuster. You enter your zip code and see a list of local newspapers to which you might write, and then Common Cause provides a set of talking points you might use to write your letter. Don't fret that Republicans will one day get to impose their will on Americans, because guess what? They do that now, precisely because they exploit the filibuster. Next they'll put holds on bills and demand a physical quorum to turn the lights on and off, but they'll look like little whiny-ass babies when they do that. It would help if Democrats would point to them and say see, they don't want to pass automatic voter registration, that's why they're acting like little babies. But we'll continue to do that if they don't.

The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Peace Corps Reauthorization Act, not merely because the Peace Corps is generally a good thing, but because the bill would create protections against discrimination and retaliation for whistleblowers. That would have helped Sara Thompson in 2010 after the Peace Corps gave her the anti-malaria drug mefloquine, which our own military won't use because it's too dangerous; Ms. Thompson had no recourse, because our Peace Corps would have simply fired her, and now she suffers from mefloquine toxicity. And remember: whistleblowers ain't out for an easy buck, because after they've suffered through years of harassment and unemployment after they blow the whistle on wrongdoing, ain't no easy bucks ever coming again.

BroadbandJusticeAct.com helps you, as you might guess, tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1904, the Broadband Justice Act. The bill would essentially subsidize broadband as a public utility in public housing -- a thing poorer working families might well need, given that so many folks work and go to school over the internet during a pandemic -- and it might be a good first step toward a national broadband service. If you're worried that Big Gummint would oppress you with a broadband service, just remember that plenty of big private corporations already do that (and for an example of that, see the last paragraph below). And if you're worried that your taxes would subsidize someone else's broadband, don't worry, because our tax money subsidizes plenty of things you use, too.

Here, at last, a resolution of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act that would roll back a Trump-era regulation! EDF Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to roll back the Trump EPA's methane regulation, which actually increased the amount of red tape our government would have to hurtle to regulate methane. They said Donald Trump wasn't a conservative -- and they were right! I mean, don't conservatives think more bureaucracy is a bad thing? In any case, methane pollutes our air and packs a bigger climate-change punch than coal -- and not for nothing, but the methane emissions that big drilling corporations vent into the atmosphere represent energy we can't use and (on public lands) royalties our government can't collect. So, what's good about more methane leakage? No, CEOs getting lazier and fatter isn't a "good."

Finally, Stop Spotify Surveillance helps you tell Spotify to abandon its plan to spy on your conservations in order to "better" target music and ads. And here you thought the future would be full of solar panels and cures for intractable diseases and peoples of the world getting along! No, it's full of big corporations trying to get you to buy more stuff, and with Spotify's filing for a patent using voice recognition software, it's also about spying on you to do it. All that fear of government spying we had in the '60s seems so quaint now! It isn't, of course, and we must still fight government spying wherever we see it, but we must also fight corporate spying, too, particularly if our government isn't going to control corporate power on our behalf.

Action: concerning pollution, the right to repair, abortion, marketing to children, Social Security, and banning Donald Trump from Facebook forever.

Long story short: tell PA state legislators to curb pollution and pass "right to repair" legislation, tell Texas state legislators to reject an anti-abortion bill, tell big tobacco corporations to stop aiming their products at children, tell President Biden to fire two notorious Social Security Administrators, and tell Facebook to keep Donald Trump off their platform permanently. The paragraphs below offer email and contact tools for each of these alerts.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Penn Environment helps you tell your state legislators to protect our clean water from longwall coal mining. What's longwall mining? That's when you dig into the ground to remove a long wall of coal (hence the name); this "wall" can be 1500 feet wide and two miles long, and, as you can guess, it can cause an awful lot of pollution and property damage. As it happens, coal corporations don't fill in the "wall" they've removed, so if your house sits above it, you're in big trouble. And of course state officials have found longwall mining responsible for nearly all the mining-related damage our streams have suffered in southwestern PA. Best to switch to solar and wind, which don't churn the earth anywhere near as much as coal corporations do.

Staying in PA for our next alert: Penn PIRG helps you tell your PA state legislators to pass "right to repair" legislation. We heard a lot about this when we were short on ventilators for COVID patients, and ventilator manufacturers didn't make it easy for third party repair techs at hospitals (who have been, in my own personal experience, excellent) to fix them. It's no better for farmers, who can't fix their own tractors (despite being, in my own personal experience, quite handy) because big corporations like John Deere don't make their manuals very accessible. They'd rather you go to them, or to one of their hand-picked "authorized dealers"! But trying to make good Americans so dependent on corporations is not very bootstrappy, you know.

Care2 helps you tell Texas state legislators to reject HB 3326, which would ban all abortions without exception and would charge anyone involved with an abortion with homicide -- which could result in someone getting the death penalty for abortion, since Texas still punishes some murders with the death penalty. The bill cites a dissenting opinion in a recent Supreme Court case concerning Louisiana's anti-abortion law, but seriously, facing the death penalty for seeking a medical procedure literally protected by our federal Constitution, as per the actual majority decision in Roe v. Wade? Some people can't help but do the helicopter dance in front of us. But they aren't "tougher" than the rest of us, they're weaker; otherwise, why would they strut?

Progress America helps you tell big tobacco corporations to stop offering flavored tobacco products to children. You know how Jeff Sessions says pot is a gateway drug to much worse stuff? That's rubbish, but flavored tobacco products actually are a gateway for kids to pick up a cigarette habit as adults, as some four out of five kids who smoke started out with a tobacco product that tasted like chocolate or apple or bubble gum or any number of things. And giving kids a damn nicotine habit? Gosh, I guess big corporations just want a nation full of harried, overworked people, and they want them to start early! I hate to say "children are our future," but they fucking are, and we need to treat them like they are.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell President Biden to fire the two Social Security Administrators who are trying to bollocks up Social Security, then Social Security Works still helps you do that. How have Andrew Saul and David Black tried to bollocks up Social Security? Roll call! They delayed seniors' stimulus checks! They added extra disability benefit reviews just-because! They pressured SSA judges to deny people disability benefits! You worked for Social Security, you fought for it, you paid into it, and you've earned it -- and you sure as hell deserve better than to have assholes steal it from you.

Finally, Free Press helps you tell Facebook to ban Donald Trump from its platform permanently. Hasn't America been a much nicer place since he hasn't been able to bombard us with his obnoxious spew? Yes, it has. Facebook has no moral or legal obligation to keep enabling Mr. Trump's horridness -- especially now that Mr. Trump has announced he's going to start his own social network! This is something people with too much money can do! They're not being "oppressed" by existing social media keeping them off their platforms! They're not being "canceled"! Rage-filled people do nothing but whine, and they still get too much say in our civilization. But we can contain them. We do outnumber them, after all.

Action: concerning health care, immigration, fossil fuel funding, D.C. statehood, paycheck fairness, and pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Medicare for All Act, the Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act, the D.C. Admission Act, and the Paycheck Fairness Act -- and tell them to reject the so-called Fair Access to Banking Act and revoke permits for the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition links in the paragraphs below.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1976, the Medicare for All Act. As Paul Craig Roberts, the father of Reaganomics, said many years ago, when the private sector screws up this badly (high prices, bad service, surprise bills, etc.) then our government has to step in. And Medicare works pretty damn well for our elderly, despite the fact that it's basically a high-risk pool which should constantly fail. Think how much better Medicare would work with all these healthy people in it! (How to pay for it? Easy: assess an employer-side payroll tax at about the amount they're already paying for private health insurance. They act like it just can't be done because they don't have the will to do it. Luckily, we do.)

Amnesty International helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2222, the Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act. What makes a great nation? Treating all people with the dignity and respect they deserve, and much as right-wingers want you to believe that everyone who wants to come here is a murdering raping drug-dealer, most of the folks who want to come here are a) good people and b) running from actual murdering raping drug-dealers. So H.R. 2222 would repeal mandatory detention for immigrants, prohibit solitary confinement, end our government's use of private prisons they refuse to hold to account, and ensuring all detainees get a hearing before an immigration judge. It really is well past time our government acted as civilized as we do.

Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject S. 563, the so-called Fair Access to Banking Act. The bill would compel big banking corporations to fund the fossil fuel corporations they've avoided funding for the last couple of years, under popular pressure, of course. Ain't it just like a Republican to loudly insist that the "free" market is always right until it hits big fossil fuel donors? And then they make the "free" market do what they want! How conservative of them! And they've got some nerve talking about banks "discriminating" against fossil fuel corporations. Major anti-discrimination legislation (the Equality Act) stands before them and all they do is tell hysterical lies about it.

The Progressive Reform Network helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 51/S. 51, the D.C. Admission Act. You know the arguments against D.C. statehood suck when Mob Boss Mitch calls statehood for D.C. "pure socialism." What does that even mean? (And how does it differ from "impure socialism"?) Statehood would actually increase Washington, D.C.'s independence -- it could get vaccine supplies a lot more easily, which is a big deal these days, and it could create its own National Guard, which it sure could have used on January 6! Don't brook any silliness about how "the Founders didn't want D.C. to be a state," lest we use that argument against Idaho, which achieved statehood in 1890, long after all the Founders were dead.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act. Because women deserve to make as much as men for the same work, dammit! Why do people resist this idea? (OK, I know why, but all the reasons are stupid.) Despite the Equal Pay Act of 1963, women still don't make a dollar for every dollar a man makes for doing the same work, but the Paycheck Fairness Act would make it easier for women to find out their bosses are paying them too little and then do something about it. And when Republicans tell you this bill will "just help out the trial lawyers," tell them we'd need fewer trial lawyers if bosses didn't try to get away with wage theft.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to introduce and pass legislation that would revoke all permits for Enbridge's notorious Line 3 pipeline. Line 3 would carry almost a million barrels of tar sands oil daily from southwestern Canada under the Mississippi River to northern Wisconsin. Does running an oil pipeline under the Mississippi sound like a good idea to you? Particularly when you recall that an Endbridge pipeline rupture in 2010 polluted some 40 square miles of the Kalamazoo watershed? Fuel burns once, but clean water is forever -- if we work to keep it.

Around the table: starring our favorite slice of the electorate, the Batshit Insane 25%!

At least Biden Administration Press Secretary Jen Psaki doesn't suffer fools like Newsmax's John Gizzi gladly. Mr. Gizzi says a "private memo" found $1 trillion more spending in the Biden infrastructure plan than the Biden Administration reported, but one request for clarification from Ms. Psaki apparently provoked this slab of word salad: "there’s things there that somebody went through it or is claiming to have gone through it and added it up and came up with $1 trillion more than the president listed." If reporters can barely speak, how can they speak truth to power?

Reuters/Ipsos poll finds more than half of Republicans believe all that rubbish about the 2020 election being "stolen" or the January 6 rioters being liberal protestors "trying to make Trump look bad" instead of the right-wingers you could have found on social media. A little over half of Republicans is pretty close to a quarter of the electorate, which (like many other polling factoids about people believing absurd crap) maps pretty well onto my belief that a quarter of the electorate is batshit insane. I first started to think that after seeing George W. Bush's approvals bottom out at 25%. How innocent those times were.

Big restaurant corporations, including Denny's and McDonald's, publicly oppose a $15/hour minimum wage, but privately tell their investors it won't be "bad for business" at all. McDonald's, at least, has backed off supporting big corporate lobbies' attempts to kill the $15/hour minimum wage proposal, but still, your friends and neighbors might not have heard, so stick a pin in this information next time someone tells you the $15/hour minimum wage is "bad for business." Not everyone you meet is a troll, after all -- you might actually win some converts.

As we contemplate the possibility that your "smart" house might be sharing all kinds of data about your movements and habits with law enforcement, we should note, again, that our FCC passed pretty solid data privacy rules in 2016 -- but the Republican Congress under Donald Trump couldn't nullify them fast enough. We should also note that instead of putting your thermostat on your wi-fi so you can more easily read the outside temperature, maybe you can buy a thermometer and put it outside. You'll have to go outside to read it, but the exercise will do you good.

Apparently a Trump campaign contribution website made it so folks didn't realize they were making weekly donations to Mr. Trump instead of the one-time donations they clearly intended to make. But you'll be pleased to know that too many of his bilked supporters are already making excuses for the Big Man. They say that wasn't Trump, that was WinRed; how does the Smartest Man on Earth fall in with so many swindlers? It makes you think he's not really a great man or something. But for the Batshit Insane 25%, no excuse is too absurd, as long as it keeps the rage gland pumping.

Finally, of course I don't feel sorry for all those Trump Administration workers who can't get work because the job market is, ah, challenging for those folks who worked for the guy who tried to overturn the election -- I mean, if you do evil, you should expect to be ostracized by civilized people! I'll admit, however, that I do feel worse for the lower-profile folks (even former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who might want to go get another degree) than I do for all the far more famous Trumpholes who will make millions in unearned money spewing filth on Fox and Newsmax and OANN over the next few years. See? I do so have a heart.

Action: concerning corporate taxes, voting rights, discrimination, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell Sen. Manchin you want a much bigger corporate tax hike than he does; tell your Senators to pass the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and the Equality Act; and tell your Senators to confirm President Biden's three appointments to the USPS Board of Governors. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to find your Senators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition links in the paragraphs below.

Jesus Mary and Joseph we have to call Sen. Manchin (D?-WV) again, after he said he wouldn't support hiking the corporate tax rate to 28% in the coming infrastructure bill. He said he also spoke for "six or seven other Democrats" (though not "Senators"), but I'd lay money that when I advocate for a 55% corporate tax rate, I speak for a lot more than six or seven other Americans. And does he even watch TV? Even Meet the Press wouldn't shut up about the 55-plus American corporations paying zero dollars in taxes in 2019. So, again, we have to help him put his finger up to the wind, by calling 202.224.3954 and giving him yet another piece of our minds. I hope he's enjoying himself.

The Sierra Club helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. You may have seen ads attacking the For the People Act; though they make less absurd claims than "child molestors voting" and "workers handing out cocaine to voters waiting in line," the difference between them is nothing more than the difference between a mound of dung the flies have found and a mound of dung they haven't found yet. The things the bill would actually do -- automatic and same-day voter registration, campaign finance disclosure, and end to various vote suppression schemes that just-to-happen to target folks of color -- are all quite popular, and Republicans know that, so they're left with telling hysterical lies and hoping Democrats don't change the filibuster.

People for the American Way, Common Cause, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Senators to support the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. You know all these vote suppression bills state legislatures are mulling or passing in over 40 states? The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would stop most of them dead, by requiring pre-clearance of voting law changes for any state or locality that's demonstrated a habit of suppressing votes -- not just certain Southern states, as the Voting Rights Act originally stated. As I've said, voting rights are actually quite popular in America, except with whom, class? Except with sore losers who think they have a "right" to keep winning elections when they show their constituents nothing but the backs of their hands. So let's put a stop to that.

Both the Daily Kos Liberation League and People for the American Way help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. When a Trump-supporting co-worker tried to tell me that the Equality Act would let boys become girls so they can dominate girls' sports -- a story that falls apart under the most cursory scrutiny -- I told him the Equality Act was really about things like preventing landlords and banks from discriminating against customers just because they're gay, and guess what? He agreed that discriminating against gays like that was a bad thing. You have to tell Trump votaries more than once what the Equality Act's really about, but you have the upper hand in every argument you have about the Equality Act because you have the facts. And I insist that counts for something.

Common Cause helps you tell your Senators to confirm three USPS Board of Governors appointees, not just because they're good nominees, but so they can then fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. I gotta say that trying to sabotage our Post Office's efforts to deliver mail-in ballots should get you fired. You know what else should get you fired? Responding to delivery and service problems you created by threatening higher prices and worse service. That's not the kind of bold, entrepreneurial thinking that we celebrate in America, right? Or do we only celebrate thieves anymore? At the risk of being obvious, I can think of one fairly famous historical figure who did not put up with thieves in his house.

Around the table: in which we are reminded, once again, that long-term thinking is better than short-term thinking.

Simon Davis-Cohen at In These Times details the battle good rural Wisconsinites fight against big ag industrial farming operations trying to muscle onto their land. But they're not just battling the big hog processing corporations that pollute their water and sicken their animals and distort their economy -- they're also battling state legislators who preempt local ordinances and generally do big ag's bidding. Hey, that reactionary legislature has passed preemptions against localities who want to offer municipal broadband and rent control, so extending their gnarled hand to the throat of localities trying to protect themselves from factory farms is a no-brainer for them.

Now it can be told: "A Green New Deal Is Actually More Affordable in the Long Term Than Fossil Fuels," per C.J. Polychroniou at TruthOut. Not just because the likely alternative -- runaway climate change on a hopelessly-polluted planet -- is actually far more expensive, but because green infrastructure spending will not only reduce pollution but create jobs doing so, and those folks with jobs will all pay taxes, too. Also, renewable energy will be cheaper than fossil fuel energy in the long run, since you don't have to repeatedly churn the Earth in order to get renewable energy. That reminds me to create that Let's kick climate change's ass! bumper sticker.

This likely won't surprise you, but lower-income folks tend to overpay property taxes while wealthy folks tend to underpay them, and "the inequities in tax assessments are both very large and very common." You know what else won't surprise you? Some counties (shout out to Maricopa County, Arizona!) actually do a pretty good job of making sure property taxes don't fall mostly on the folks who can afford it least. Sounds like our politicians just need the will to do the job, as usual -- which will require action from us, as usual.

The more I read about how easily QAnon votaries dismiss the actual sex-trafficking accusations against an actual sitting Congressman, the more I think he talked so loosely on Tucker Carlson's show -- normally a bad idea when you're under investigation or about to get indicted! -- just to give these folks more to talk about. A theory so hungry for information to distort does need that information, after all. And thus we are reminded, yet again, that there is no debate possible about whether folks are "stupid of evil," not just because stupid is evil, but because looking stupid is too often the cover for evil.

Finally, dig Sen. McConnell (E-KY) actually saying the corporate criticism of Georgia's anti-voting law is "a coordinated campaign by powerful and wealthy people." And thus Mob Boss Mitch pretends to care about the non-wealthy, pretends the "Outrage-Industrial Complex" doesn't operate almost entirely on his side of the political spectrum, and, worst of all, pretends backlashes occur "outside the constitutional order," as if we don't have a right to say anything unless we say it directly to a legislator, and as if criticism anti-voting laws is "unconstitutional." Of course Mr. McConnell is this big a hypocrite so you'll be stunned into silence.

Action: concerning corruption, sore losers, price gouging, antibiotic abuse, and student loan debt.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to fight defense contracting corruption, tell Texas Gov. Abbott to reject the state legislature's sore loser anti-voting bill, tell our government we need to fight big pharma price-gouging on drugs developed with taxpayer money, tell our EPA to reverse its recent decision allowing big ag to spray antibiotics on orange trees, and tell President Biden to forgive $50,000 in student loan debt per borrower. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a cellphone) to find your Reps' and Senators' phone numbers for the first action alert, and then for the others, use either the phone numbers (where applicable) or the email/petition/public comment links provided below.

The Project on Government Oversight reports that our Naval Department plans to cut its internal auditing personnel by 70% -- which means Naval auditors will be much less able to root out contracting corruption. Indeed, you have to wonder if that's the whole idea. Their excuse is that they'll be able to spend more money building ships, because staying within a budget is so hard when you already spend more on defense than the next eight countries on Earth combined! No use saying we might as well gut the auditors because the Navy consistently brings in projects late and overbudget anyway; actually, that's an argument for more auditors. Call your House Reps and Senators about this today and they'll never see it coming.

Public Citizen helps you tell Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to reject the vote suppression bill recently passed by the state legislature. Gov. Abbott's phone number, of course, is 512.463.2000, or 512.463.1782 if you're either from Austin or out-of state (odd tandem, there); let's see if we can jam up at least one of these lines today. You can already tell what the bill would do -- reduce voting hours, get rid of drive-through voting, and keep densely-populated areas from having more voting machines. Plus it would let poll-watchers actually film you voting; I didn't see that one coming, not being evil. Sore losers constantly try to keep people from voting, instead of, oh, gosh, I don't know, being someone worth your vote.

Sorry for the late notice on this, but the Coalition on Human Needs helps you leave a public comment about a federal proposal to keep our government from fighting back against big pharma price-gouging on drugs developed with taxpayer assistance -- but comments are due at midnight tonight, so let's get to stepping. Gosh, if you helped fund a drug with your money, you should get some say over what happens afterward, right? Like, you should especially be able to say don't charge so damn much for this drug that good Americans can't afford it? Maybe we should just have our government develop drugs without resorting to private corporations -- but in the meantime, we need to protect ourselves from getting screwed over by the system we've got.

One of the last things the Trump Administration did before (finally!) leaving office was green-light the use of the antibiotic streptomycin on big ag citrus trees. Because Florida, that's why! But the more antibiotics we spray on crops, the less effective they'll be on human beings and animals when they get sick, and the stronger the superbugs antibiotics can't kill will become. No, we will not, one day, be sitting around a campfire saying "well, the next cut you get can kill you now, but at least we allowed a Republican President to enact a policy designed entirely to help capture the Electoral votes of one state!" Would it be piling on to say that spraying antibiotics on crops is not a long-term solution? No, it would not. Penn PIRG helps you tell our EPA to reverse this corrupt and short-sighted decision.

Finally, both the ACLU and Daily Kos help you tell President Biden to forgive up to $50,000 in student loan debt per debtor. Why? Because colleges overcharge in the first place, because it'll stimulate the economy, because more folks will be able to start businesses and buy homes if they don't have big student loan debts hanging over them, and because our civilization did kinda promise people that going to college would get you a lucrative career and that's kinda been a lie for many years. Don't be the fool who would oppose debt forgiveness because you paid off all your debts! That would be an occasion for me to deploy the phrase it's not all about you, and with Donald Trump gone, I was really hoping to deploy that phrase a lot less.

Around the table: in which we confront, once again, certain unpleasant truths about our political class.

Sharon Zhang at TruthOut reminds us that Coca-Cola and Delta only slammed Georgia's recent vote suppression bill after it passed, which brings to mind Harry Reid's comment about Arlen Specter back when Mr. Specter was a Republican: "he's always there for us, except when we need him." And just as we might also say that Coca-Cola and Delta maybe shouldn't have given so much money to the politicians who wrote the vote suppression laws in the first place, we might also say that the Texas corporations now opposing vote suppression bills making their way to Greg Abbott's desk are just responding to the public backlash, too. Of course corporations should respond to the backlash -- but they should also do the right thing in the first place.

To the surprise of approximately zero attentive observers, at least 55 big corporations paid zero dollars in federal taxes on their 2020 profits, and in fact collectively "earned" about $3.5 billion in tax breaks, meaning we-the-taxpayers paid them $3.5 billion of our hard-earned money to do what? Unemployment rate is still almost double what it was before the pandemic. Stick a pin in this for when Republicans whine about the corporate tax hikes in upcoming jobs/infrastructure legislation. Also note well that well over half of Americans actually like President Biden's proposals better when they learn corporations will pay more taxes. It's like corporations are unpopular in America for some reason.

Speaking of infrastructure, Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) says President Biden could have an "easy win" if he's just pare down his aims to something everyone would pass. To that particular line of rubbish, I offer this response.

Jesus Mary and Joseph will Democrats ever stop underrating Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson? They say he's leaving a trail of slime now with his words, but he's been leaving a trail of slime about everything he's ever talked about for over a decade. And yet he actually ran ahead of Donald Trump in 2016 after the national party left him for dead and Russ Feingold spent a year doing victory laps. So what keeps putting him over the top? Great political ads, that's what! No, not those overrated whiteboard ads -- watch his 2010 family intro ad and his 2016 diaper-changing ad. They're genius. I'd say "Democrats could learn a few lessons," except, ah, how did Russ Feingold win in the first place? With terrific ads!

Amazon spokeshack apologizes to Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) for suggesting he's stupid for believing the entirely true story that Amazon delivery drivers use pee bottles -- and Rep. Pocan responds by saying, in part, "This is not about me, this is about your workers -- who you don’t treat with enough respect or dignity." Remember: when your enemies are down, always keep hitting them. Maybe Rep. Pocan has what it takes to beat Ron Johnson in 2022. I eagerly await the first moron to respond by saying WISCONSINZ WILLZ NEVERZ ELECTZ TEH GAYZ!!!!!, as if Tammy Baldwin hasn't won two Senate elections. No, I'd lay money that it'd happen.

Finally, of course Donald Trump called for a boycott of major league baseball after they decided to move the All-Star Game out of Georgia in response to that state's new anti-voting legislation. I guess Trump votaries will say it's not "cancel culture" because the MLB "canceled" first, though that sure isn't the most mature look. But if Congress manages to get rid of baseball's antitrust exemption in a fit of pique, I can't say I'll be upset.

Action: concerning tyranny, double-dealing, diplomacy, Social Security, pollution, and corruption.

Long story short: tell big corporations to divest from Myanmar's military, tell France to reject an Arctic drilling scheme, tell President Biden to re-enter the Iran nuclear deal, fire two notorious Social Security Administrators, regulate "forever chemicals" in our drinking water, and support international sanctions against Erik Prince for plotting to overthrow the government of Libya. Lots to digest, I know, but you can accomplish all of these aims easily by using the email and petition links in the following paragraphs.

Are there bigger armed whiners than Myanmar's military? They didn't like the election results, so they overthrew the government -- no, they really overthrew the government, plus if you protest this coup, they murder you. They want us to see them as big and strong and tough but I will always see them bawling, in diapers, stomping their feet. Sadly, they don't act in a vacuum, because big fossil fuel corporations like Chevron and Total support the government of Myanmar to the tune of over $1 billion annually, which motherlode now goes to the military, since it now controls the government. Gosh, what ever should these corporations do? I kid, of course -- they should stop sending money to the illegitimate bunch of crybabies now calling themselves the government of Myanmar. Sum of Us provides the petition.

Hey, speaking of Total: they want to drill for gas in the Arctic ocean, and what's more, France's President, Emmanuel Macron, has been criticizing the project in public while green-lighting it in private! Yikes, I hope he doesn't wonder why he loses his next election in about a year! You know what people hate even more than being told they have to stay indoors? When politicians say one thing and do another! Even in these post-modern times, the eternal verities still hold! Naturally, this Arctic drilling project will both unleash yet more pollution and threaten the lives of indigenous folks, but if we all bring the Big Stick of Bad PR, we can strangle this thing in its crib. Sum of Us provides this petition, also.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell President Biden to get back into the Iran nuclear deal the Obama Administration negotiated in 2015 (uh, during which he was Vice President), then both Win Without War and Daily Kos still help you do that. Why? Because it was working before Donald Trump trashed it, and it can work again. Does it seem like Iran's asking for more this time? Doesn't mean they should get it, and doesn't mean they're going to get it! It's like the world doesn't understand what "negotiation" is. Granted, that could be at least partly because Tha Bush Mobb demanded that Iran accept all their demands "before negotiations can begin." But surely we don't need to behold ourselves to any Republican orthodoxy. (President Biden's phone number, as you may recall, is 202.456.1111; you can call him about Iran and the next three items, if you like.)

Social Security Works helps you tell President Biden to fire Andrew Saul and David Black from our Social Security Administration. Why? Because they're trying to destroy Social Security from within, that's why! Because Donald Trump put them there to do just that! Always they deliberately sabotage our government and then say see? Government doesn't work! Like we're all not watching or something. Messrs. Saul and Black did eventually release that data our IRS needed to get stimulus checks out to seniors, but they only did that because we wielded the Big Stick of Bad PR against them. Maybe we should get some people in our government who don't need to be browbeaten into doing the right thing. We deserve it, after all.

Consumer Reports helps you tell President Biden to regulate the notorious plastic chemical PFAS, a chemical found in far too many things that doesn't break down very easily in our bodies or in our air and water (hence the moniker "forever chemicals"). Why not tell our Congressfolk to pass a law getting rid of PFAS, an act even these notorious Congressfolk have warmed toward in the past? Because our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) already has the authority, under the Clean Water Act, to regulate PFAS chemicals, and the EPA works for us. We don't even need to get all George Carlin ("you're a public servant -- go get me a glass of water!") on them. They can just make sure the glasses of water we get ourselves don't have so many toxins in them.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to support international sanctions against former Blackwater/Xe CEO Erik Prince. Not for bilking our government out of all that money being private contractors in Iraq, or for overseeing the shooting deaths of 17 Iraqi civilians in 2007, or for being Betsy DeVos's brother -- just for offering to give weapons and mercenaries to a would-be dictator seeking to overthrow the government of Libya, in violation of international law (which does-so matter, despite right-wingers' notions that it shouldn't). America's gotten in enough trouble for doing that, but having private citizens do it would be so, so much worse. We can make our government account to us, but we'll have a harder time making Erik Prince account to us -- unless we enlist our government to help us in that aim.

Around the table: how to sustain a civilization, part 255.

Our EPA dismisses dozens of "scientific advisors" Donald Trump put in to give big polluting corporations too much say over what our EPA considers "science." Should we call it a "purge"? Certainly not without mentioning that the Trump EPA purged those EPA advisory boards to get those corporatists on in the first place! But getting rid of "scientific advisors" who were trying to skew the science in the direction of corporate polluters is a "purge" in the sense that throwing up rancid milk is a purge.

Researchers find that rural Americans don't get equal access to justice via legal aid programs -- largely because these programs have a built-in urban bias. Mainly they assume everyone has access to broadband (which doesn't make them unique, sadly!), but they also assume everyone has access to lawyers, which, in the most impoverished rural areas, they don't. The first part does sound like a job for community broadband, particularly if the big broadband corporations either won't serve rural areas or price rural areas out.

Some folks find a way to get vaccine appointments -- by going to counties that went heavily for Donald Trump, whose residents often don't seem in a hurry to get vaccinated. And for a moment I said why don't we bus in folks from urban and rural areas who can't otherwise get here? And then I realized that all these MAGAts who aren't getting vaccines would, with no irony, suddenly complain about all these "tourists" taking "their" vaccines away from them! One day they'll realize how small their worlds have become, and how few of their friends and neighbors will talk to them.

Upon hearing that Brazilian President/irredeemable asshole Jair Bolsonaro has been "cornered" by the out-of-control COVID pandemic, which claims more lives daily in Brazil than it does even in America, my first reaction was: "couldn't have happened to a nicer guy!" My second, more edifying reaction: why are we talking about how things affect him, rather than how they affect good Brazilians? The reason: we're reading Bloomberg, which (at least here) seems unnaturally preoccupied with how perceptions of Mr. Bolsonaro affect markets, even by the standards of a nominally business-oriented news organ. Want some real market analysis? Ain't gonna be nobody left in Brazilian markets, the way things are going.

Ho hum, Trump advisor Peter Navarro handed out a crap-ton of taxpayer money for pandemic-related contracts to Administration cronies. No use surmising that "at least Peter Navarro saw what was going on and did something about it," since, well, it didn't result in a decent pandemic response, or even a not-entirely-awful one! No, this is more like notorious Tammany Hall machine manipulator/New York state Senator George Washington Plunkitt saying, as he reviewed his career of "honest graft," that "I seen my opportunities and I took 'em." And again, House Democrats investigating matters reported on by ProPublica reminds us that good journalism helps sustain a civilization.

Finally, David Frum looks at the right-wing outrage over "vaccine passports" and finds it particularly anti-conservative. "A sizable minority of Americans want to use airplanes belonging to others, theme parks belonging to others, sports stadiums belonging to others -- without concession to the health of others or the property rights of owners," he finds, but he also reminds us that "the point," for right-wing drama hounds, "is not to win the fight, or even really to fight the fight. The point is to announce the fight, and to keep raging about it, even if you do not in fact fight it very hard." I don't know if Mr. Frum has reckoned with his role in all of this -- even if that role was long ago, as a Bush Mobb speechwriter -- but we would be fools to dismiss this analysis now.

Action: concerning health care, the Estate Tax, D.C. statehood, unemployment insurance, and antibiotic abuse.

Long story short: Tell your House Reps to pass the Medicare for All Act, the For the 99.8 Percent Act, and the Washington, D.C. Admission Act, and also tell your House Reps to make unemployment insurance better and stop antibiotic abuse on factory farms. 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 House Reps' phone numbers, or use the email/petition links provided in each paragraph below.

H.R. 1976, the Medicare for All Act, would expand Medicare to include every American citizen, so that good Americans will never be at the mercy of lousy care and shifting networks and surprise medical bills ever again. Polls have told us that more than half of Americans want Medicare to cover everyone -- and since big media outlets and/or big corporations conduct these polls, you'd kind of expect them to say the opposite of what they say! -- and lately support numbers have been more like 60%. You may also have heard that "most people like their private health insurance," but I propose one of two possible reasons for that phenomenon: 1) people occasionally get tired of thinking about things that corporations deliberately make more obtuse, and 2) most people aren't using their health insurance at any given moment! Medicare4AllNow and Black Lives Matter provide petitions.

The For the 99.8 Percent Act (no bill number at this writing) would expand the Estate Tax, which has taken a lot of undeserved hits over the last 20 years. I'm old enough to remember when the debate over the Estate Tax (remember the "Death Tax"? Like most of us will ever pay it when we die!) was the stupidest debate in politics; needless to say, other debates have surpassed it. The For the 99.8 Percent Act would hike taxes on billionaire estates to 77% (of that part of the estate over $1 billion, that is), and if you're planning to leave an estate smaller than $3 million, you won't be paying any more money than before. But all those folks who've been profiting off this pandemic? Yeah, they'll be contributing more to water mains and rebuilt bridges than they thought. Roots Action provides an email tool.

H.R. 51/S. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act, would admit Washington, D.C., as our 51st state. Republican arguments against it boil down to one thing: ZOMG TWO MORE DEMOCRATZ SENATORZ!!!!! Remember in the 1930s, when Republicans opposed Hawaii statehood because the people seemed too foreign and they'd just keep sending Democrats to Congress? No, you don't, because Democrats actually opposed the admission of Hawaii because the people seemed too foreign, and Republicans dominated the state back then! Better to focus, then, on how how 85% of its residents want statehood, or how D.C. could have defended itself from the January 6 attempted coup if it had its own National Guard like all states do. Both People for the American Way and the Progressive Reform Network provide petitions.

The Center for Popular Democracy helps you tell your Congressfolk to reform our unemployment insurance system. I'll admit I haven't given this matter a lot of thought, and not just because Republicans are constantly out to destroy what we've got -- why should unemployment be limited only to those who get fired, versus, say, those who quit their jobs because they're getting used like wet dishrags (and can prove it)? And if you remember how Rick Scott screwed up Florida's unemployment application system so badly that even Ron DeSantis kvetched about it, you might be more inclined to have one national system, too. And why shouldn't lower-wage workers get a higher percentage of their missing income? There's a lot to think about here.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to limit antibiotic abuse on factory farms. Seems we've been telling them to do this forever, and I'll admit it's a little depressing that just about everyone except factory farms wants them to stop doing this, and yet very little ever changes. Not nothing, mind you, but if we keep giving more than two-thirds of our antibiotics to nominally healthy feed animals, then diseases will adapt and we'll wind up in a world where the next cut could kill us. And when we do, we won't be saying well, at least we moved slowly and deliberately to protect the profits of our factory farms! Some people love talking about how we liberals "coddle" everyone, but nobody in America gets coddled like big corporations do. And we've got to stop.

Around the table: in which we confront completely-unsurprising findings about wages and taxes.

Uh oh: researchers allege that Florida has been undercounting its COVID deaths. Florida has officially lost 30,000 good Americans to COVID, but researchers say it should be more like 35,000, as Florida has undercounted deaths of folks with co-morbidities, although if you shoot a diabetic in the head, no one says they died of diabetes. Anyway, maybe this is why Florida law enforcement raided Rebekah Jones's house a few months ago, although it still seems to me that governing well is far easier than figuring out how to get re-elected doing as little as possible.

Fearing a "tsunami" of evictions at the end of this pandemic, Boston renters are forming tenants' unions to bargain with their landlords. And why not? Why wouldn't any good conservative prefer a tenants' union to the heavy hand of Big Gummint regulation and Big Gummint law-making and Big Gummint handouts? Oh, wait -- because, in these times, "conservatism" is only about manufacturing rage and protecting absurdly high wealth über alles. I must've forgotten which decade we're in.

Per Eleanor J. Bader at TruthOut, "Colleges Are Using COVID as a Pretext to Make Draconian Cuts to the Humanities." Of course they go after the humanities because they don't "make money," and of course you can see the gnarled hand of ALEC behind some of these efforts. But a civilization that only cares about mammon won't be a civilization for long, and as my 18th Century English Poetry professor used to say, you're going to spend your whole life inside your head, and you want that to be a well-furnished place.

New York state Comptroller data informs us that if our minimum wage went up as fast as Wall Street bankster bonuses, it'd be $44/hour. Should we tell Kyrsten Sinema? Perhaps we should, but she's been a tool of Wall Street since the 2008 meltdown, odd as that will sound to future historians. In a completely unrelated development, a Grinnell College study finds that out of every dollar in big corporate tax cuts, somewhere between 15 and 19 cents winds up in a CEO's pocket. This is, of course, despite politicians telling us that corporate tax cuts lead to more jobs, never mind that we had both a 55% corporate tax rate and full employment in the '50s.

A Good Jobs First study finds that corporate tax breaks at the state level cost public schools at least $2.37 billion in 2019. I'm glad they note, at the beginning of the report's summary, that this figure represents a 13 percent increase over the previous year and thus "came during the pre-pandemic period of economic prosperity." Stick a pin in that for next time the politicians say "the economy's bad, so we should cut corporate taxes" -- or, for that matter, "the economy's good, so we should cut corporate taxes." For the politicians, it's never a bad time to shift more of our tax burden from corporations to individuals and small businesses.

I was about to say I felt sorry for the couple who had Donald Trump crash their wedding at Mar-a-Lago and do his WAAAAAAAAH ME ME ME ME ME act, but then I realized that you take that risk when you decide to get married at Mar-a-Lago. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the happy couple expected him to show up, or even hoped he would. I wouldn't even be surprised to learn they paid extra for the experience! After all, if you're getting married at Mar-a-Lago, you're not working within a budget like the rest of us are.

Finally, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), facing sex trafficking charges, goes on the Tucker Carlson show (nice to be able to get that venue last minute!) and actually makes things significantly worse for himself, trying to debunk accusations that haven't yet been made and trying to draw Mr. Carlson himself into his story. When I first heard about this, I supposed the QAnon crowd would say Mr. Gaetz schlepped that 17-year-old girl around the country because he was fighting the deep-state child-sex ring undercover -- and, sadly, I was right.

Action: concerning "bipartisanship," immigration, voting rights, discrimination, accountability, and keeping Donald Trump off YouTube as well.

Long story short: tell Rep. Gottheimer to stop with the bipartisanship talk already, tell our President to stop putting migrant kids in cages, tell Pennsylvania legislators to reject efforts to restrict the vote, tell car insurance corporations to stop discriminating, tell our FBI to release files pertaining to Fred Hampton's murder, and tell YouTube to keep keeping Donald Trump off its platform. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're viewing it on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to get your legislators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition links provided below.

First things first: Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D?-NJ) needs a talking-to about the "need" to have "both parties" "at the table" for infrastructure discussions and how "(t)his can't just be jammed through without input and consideration from the other side." You want "input" from Republicans, Mr. Gottenheimer? Here it is: Republicans stomped their feet and blocked almost everything President Obama proposed over the next eight years, and when they lost the Presidency in 2020, three-quarters of their House caucus tried to overturn the election, in unmistakable sympathy with the seditionists who tried to overthrow our government on January 6. I'd say Republicans have offered their "input"; now you can offer your input to Mr. Gottheimer at 202.225.4465. Remember: good bills, not "bipartisan" bills! If Republicans want us to "work with" them so badly, they can stop being evil.

Joe Biden's been President a little over two months, but we still separate migrant children from their families and put the kids in cages -- in fact, President Biden just reopened one of President Trump's most shameful detention centers in Texas. You need not make excuses like the annual springtime surge at the border to justify what he's doing -- great nations do right, even when it's hard, and great nations do right even by the folks they ultimately may not admit to their protection. Caging kids is wrong, and separating families is wrong; taking blankets away from children in the freezing cold is wrong, and putting them in solitary when they complain about the cold is wrong. It's stunning that we have to explain any of this to anyone. President Biden's phone number, of course, is 202.456.1111, and Care2 provides a petition.

Pennsylvania legislators apparently want to emulate Georgia and restrict our access to the ballot box; it couldn't be a coincidence that Joe Biden won Pennsylvania by a point, could it? Pennsylvania legislators did indeed enact a lot of voting expansions due to the pandemic, but that doesn't mean those expansions won't be necessary when the pandemic goes away -- folks will still have trouble getting off work and finding babysitters so they can vote, just as they've always done. Maybe Pennsylvania legislators don't relate to any of that. Pennsylvania doesn't have early voting, but it now has early, no-excuse absentee voting, where you can request a ballot and vote at the same time up to 90 days before an election; getting rid of that only hurts working folks. Common Cause provides the petition.

You may not have heard that GEICO and Progressive, two big car insurance corporations, actually charge higher premiums to folks with less education and a lower-paying job! This would seem, to me, to be the opposite of common sense -- charging people with less money more money? -- but it sure seems like the biggest failures reap the biggest rewards in this sick, immoral, and decadent economy. Common sense would also tell you that folks with lots of money and lots of letters after their names may not be the best drivers, driving often requiring a different set of skills than, you know, making money or doing well on tests or writing a good thesis. Hopefully common sense also tells you this is discrimination. Consumer Reports provides the petition.

Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL) has asked Attorney General Merrick Garland to release the FBI's files on Black Panther Party leader/Rainbow Coalition founder Fred Hampton, killed by the FBI and Chicago police in 1969 for the awful crime of organizing folks of all colors to work together for a better world, and if other House members (like yours!) were to join Mr. Rush's call, we might get some action, not to mention some closure. The tremendous movie Judas and the Black Messiah breathes life into Mr. Hampton's works, and the files in question might well prove that then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had a lot more to do with Mr. Hampton's murder than even the movie supposes. And remember: a great nation confronts its faults honestly, takes accountability, and does better in the future. Defending Rights and Dissent provides the email tool.

YouTube suspended Donald Trump's account after the notorious events of January 6, which he absolutely instigated like the fascist dictator he obviously aspires to be -- but now they're thinking of lifting that suspension. Like he has no other platforms to be obnoxious on! We all remember how YouTube began, right? It began as a way for good Americans to make short films and put them up on the internet for other good Americans to enjoy! It most certainly did not begin as a way for corporatist monsters like Donald Trump to create drama, and YouTube -- being, like Facebook, a publishing house for-real for-real -- has no First Amendment or free speech obligation to give Mr. Trump yet another megaphone. Common Cause provides the petition.

Action: concerning taxing the rich, clean water, demilitarizing our police, paycheck fairness, corporate taxes, and whistleblower rewards.

Long story short: Tell your House Reps to pass the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, the WATER Act, the Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act, and the Paycheck Fairness Act; also tell your Congressfolk to close big corporate tax loopholes and strengthen whistleblower rewards. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're viewing it on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to get your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition links provided below.

H.R. 1459/S. 510, the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, would assess a tax on wealth over $50 million for the first time in America -- households and trusts worth more than $50 million would pay 2% on all their assets over $50 million (meaning the tax would leave their first $50 million alone -- but you know they'll whine about it nonetheless!) and then 3% on assets over $1 billion. Sen. Warren (D-MA) says it'll raise $300 billion annually, and given that billionaires alone have amassed another $1.3 trillion in wealth over this last pandemic year, really, this wealth tax ain't too much to ask of people who should be paying 91% of their income to Uncle Sam. The Americans for Tax Fairness Action Fund provides a petition.

H.R. 1352/S. 916, the WATER Act, would start rebuilding our water infrastructure, which would represent a solid investment in one of our most important natural resources, clean water, without which, it's safe to say, we'd have no decent health care in America at all. You can't wash or bathe or disinfect or sterilize with polluted water, after all! Not to mention getting the lead out of all our water pipes will create a lot of jobs for people! I guess Republicans will retort TEH DEFICITZ!!!!!!, but they didn't give one rat's hind quarter about when they were cutting taxes for the rich and for corporations, and whiners always have excuses to avoid doing the right thing. Food and Water Watch provides an email contact tool.

H.R. 1694, the Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act, would limit transfer of military equipment from our Department of Defense to local police departments. I've said this many times: you don't need a drone or a grenade launcher to find murderers and drug dealers -- but you do "need" these things, apparently, to put down protests about your own brutality. Particularly if you're Donald Trump and you want to do a photo-op in front of a church with a Bible in your hand! Seriously, the fact that that moment didn't make 75 million Americans turn against him is our shame as Americans, although admittedly it's more their shame as Trump votaries. And just as we shouldn't try to turn police officers into social workers, we shouldn't turn them into soldiers, either. Restore the Fourth provides the email tool.

H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, now awaits a full House vote; the bill would, like its previous iterations, give women more tools to fight paycheck discrimination, which (despite the Equal Pay Act of 1965) still runs rampant in America, such that women make about 81 cents for every dollar a man makes, when it really should be a dollar for a dollar. The Paycheck Fairness Act would, among other things, prevent employers from disciplining workers for discussing their pay, since that's usually the only way employees find out they're getting shafted. I bet Republicans defend the "free speech" right of bosses to tell their employees what they can't talk about, but do we really want employers to be able to make their employees accomplices in their wage theft? Daily Kos provides the petition.

Did you know that big corporations can pay large amounts of money in class action settlements when they hurt people -- and then turn around and deduct those settlements from their taxes? Yes, this really happens, and it sure hampers us from being a law-and-order nation now, doesn't it? We generally regard punishments as more effective if they hurt, and don't think it's OK because the injured parties are still getting their money, because when corporations get to use their wrongdoing as an excuse to skimp on what they owe on their taxes, we all become injured parties, because that's money that ain't paying cops and ain't keeping the libraries running. So that $26 billion big pharmaceuticals are planning to pay for keeping good Americans addicted to opioids will wind up being yet another windfall -- for them. Penn PIRG provides the email tool, if you don't call your Congressfolk.

Finally, the National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your House Reps to strengthen the whistleblower protections in the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement (or FIRREA) Act. Currently the law caps whistleblower rewards, which means more whistleblowers won't come forward, and the CARES Act just gave away a couple trillion bucks of our hard-earned taxpayer money -- quite a lot of "small business" money went to national restaurant chains! -- so we've got a more immediate incentive to root out corruption. Don't let your Tea Party uncle describe whistleblowing as a "way for scammers to make money," because whistleblowers go through absolute hell for years while the courts evaluate their complaint -- they usually never work in the same field again, and more than a few don't work at all. They deserve our support.

Action: concerning voting rights, equal rights, saving our Post Office, and filling out our FCC.

Long story short: Tell your Senators to pass the For the People Act, the Voting Rights Advancement Act, and the Equality Act and to confirm USPS Board of Governors nominees, and tell your President and your Senators to put a fifth Commissioner on our FCC who'll protect internet freedom and expand internet access. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or on the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to find phone numbers for your Senators -- or use the email/petition tools provided in the paragraphs below.

H.R. 1, the For the People Act, now stands before the Senate, and instead of focusing on hysterical Republican rhetoric about it, let's concentrate on what the bill would actually do: it would curtail legislative gerrymandering; it would allow two weeks of early voting in all states; it would force big campaign donors to disclose their donations; it would make automatic and same-day voter registration the law across the land; it would prevent House members from serving on for-profit corporate boards; it would end certain vote suppression tactics like the Interstate Crosscheck database and make it harder for states to remove voters of color from the registration rolls. Do Republicans think gerrymandering, corruption, big campaign spending, and vote suppression are popular? (People for the American Way and Public Citizen provide contact tools.)

The John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, once formally introduced in this Congress, would give our government additional tools to ensure that everyone with the right to vote can vote, by plugging the hole our Supreme Court blew open in its Shelby County v. Holder ruling. The Voting Rights Act gave our government the ability to nix changes in election law in nine Southern states; our Supreme Court held, essentially, that this provision now discriminates against Southern states (I know, I know), but our Court also said a provision that didn't discriminate in this manner would pass muster with them. Hence the Voting Rights Advancement Act would subject any state or locality, from any part of America, with a history of vote suppression to the heightened scrutiny the Voting Rights Act intended. (Public Citizen provides a petition supporting the Voting Rights Advancement Act.)

H.R. 5, the Equality Act, is yet another good bill plagued by right-wing hysteria, but again, let's look at what the bill would actually do: it would prevent big corporations from discriminating against folks on the bases of "sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity," which, in practice, would mean landlords couldn't deny apartments to gay couples just because they're gay, banks couldn't deny loans to transgender folks just because they're transgender, and colleges couldn't deny admission to women just because they're women, just as a few for-examples. And yes, transgender folks could use public restrooms without getting beaten up. If right-wingers say it means "the end of religious expression" in America, they should ask themselves why they seem to base "religious expression" wholly on whom you can discriminate against. (People for the American Way provides the petition.)

Our Senators need to confirm President Biden's three outstanding nominees to our U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors, not least so they can fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who's just rolled out a plan to "save" our Post Office that relies on higher prices and crappier service. Mr. DeJoy was a corporate executive not too long ago; do people still say big corporate executives know best? I sure hope not -- all they know how to do is redistribute their workers' income upward to themselves. And I know Mitch McConnell stands ready to throw a tantrum and gum up the works on matters like confirming USPS Board of Governors nominees, but seriously, when folks see Republicans demand a precise vote-count just to turn the lights off for the night, how do they think they're going to look? Especially now that folks ain't afraid of Fox News anymore. Progress America provides the petition.

Finally, we need a fifth Commissioner on our Federal Communications Commission; a fifth FCC Commissioner would break all those 2-2 ties that are bound to happen on any important matters now, and a fifth FCC Commissioner who would bring back net neutrality rules and help all good Americans get broadband access would do a great deal of good. We should make our government do good wherever possible, after all -- hey, it's what we demand from ourselves! Now, net neutrality is important, because it gives us more control over our internet experience, but greater broadband access in rural and urban areas is also important, now that so many Americans are going to work and going to school essentially over our internet. So let's get that FCC fully staffed so it can get to work. (Battle for the Net provides the petition.)

Around the table: in which we confront various law-and-order matters, though perhaps not as Our Glorious Elites would prefer.

America's Last Journalist, Greg Palast, tells the story of how the state of Georgia just threw out thousands of Korean-American voting registrations and arrested the lawyer who organized them. Thus we are reminded that the state of Georgia is an equal-opportunity vote suppressor, except, of course, of white votes. And thus we are also reminded that when Mitch McConnell calls the For the People Act "a solution in search of a problem," that one of the many problems is a state that just throws out folks of color's voter registrations whenever it pleases.

FactCheck.org helps you navigate the thicket of yelling and ranting about the recent surge of immigration at the border. It's all our "liberal" media want to talk about, apparently, but long story short, via a Rice University researcher: "The patterns of migration do not seem to correlate to any specific U.S. immigration policy. The numbers seem to go up and down on a logic of their own." And note well that border apprehensions were five times higher in 2000 than in 2020, when we seem to wring our hands about it a lot more now than we did then. Needless to say, you won't like hearing any of that if you're determined to fight on one side or the other.

Baltimore stops prosecuting minor offenses because of the pandemic, and after crime goes down dramatically, the city will stop prosecuting these minor offenses permanently. Moreover, the city will work with local behavioral health workers to redirect sex workers, drug users, and mental illness sufferers to get help, and redirect the savings from making all those minor drug and prostitution arrests to attack actually violent crime. Could Democrats maybe advance this narrative, which is not as counterintuitive as the consultant class would want us to think? Nah -- these are Democrats we're talking about.

Nevada state legislators advance a bill aiming to crack down on police use of force. Restricting violent responses at protests is necessary, and retraining police and requiring more reporting will do some good, but we'll still have to solve the basic problem: that we route the vast majority of citizens' requests for assistance from the state through our police, when no one has the flexibility of mind to deal with the sheer variety (let alone volume) of requests. Best to make our police serve warrants and make arrests, and stop asking so much more of them.

Finally, from Ken Klippenstein at The Intercept we learn that Amazon knew its delivery drivers were using pee bottles on their routes, to wit: "the practice was so widespread due to pressure to meet quotas that managers frequently referenced it during meetings and in formal policy documents and emails." And not just pee bottles, but bags, for guess what. Naturally if you leave pee bottles or poop bags in vans, Amazon disciplines you, and not that you should leave your leavings lying around, but Jesus Mary and Joseph would it kill Amazon to hire more workers so it doesn't work the ones it has to the point where they do their business in their van and then forget to get rid of it?

Around the table: describing mostly sad journeys.

Despite our best efforts, Gov. Brian Kemp has signed Georgia's notorious SB 202, which will severely restrict ballot access, mainly for the Black voters who will not be voting for Brian Kemp or very many Republican state legislators. Given that Joe Biden won Georgia and two Democrats captured U.S. Senate seats in January runoffs, you might well call SB 202 a "sore loser" bill! The good news? The legislature stupidly did this right away, giving Black folks plenty of time to figure out how to vote despite the new restrictions. But next time Mitch McConnell calls the For the People Act "a solution in search of a problem," you can always say here's the problem.

Yes, Virginia, Amazon truck delivery workers do, in fact, urinate into bottles. Because they work 10-hour shifts and have to deliver a package about every two minutes! And if they come back with undelivered packages, they get disciplined and (eventually) fired! And rather than say "well, they're not the first human beings ever to use piss bottles," maybe we should wonder why Amazon doesn't hire more of them -- or, heaven forbid, whether we really need that Game of Thrones DVD set the day after we order it. (As an aside, dig the Amazon twitterer who calls his corporation "the Bernie Sanders of employers." As if! And how did a "Communist" become so popular?)

Ho hum, Joe Biden holds a press conference, and all our "liberal" media want to talk about is immigration and working with Republicans. Perhaps not coincidentally, that's what Republicans want to talk about! I warned that once Donald Trump was gone, our "liberal" media would go back to letting right-wingers be their assignment editors, and I was right! The only positive development since 2009, I suppose, is that there's no obvious Matt Drudge working today. May there never be one again! Putatively intelligent people talked themselves into giving him way too much say over what happens in America back in the day.

In a peripherally-related note, Julie Hollar at FAIR finds that, "For Sunday Shows, Border Is 'Political Crisis,' Not Humanitarian Emergency." It's like they've all forgotten that, to be a truly great nation, you have to treat everyone with the dignity and humanity they deserve. Of course, turning everything into a Goddamn horserace makes you forget just about everything that makes you human, let alone great. And maybe our government should stop treating Central America like its personal piss bottle? (Also, CNN appears to have aired a staged border crossing without knowing it was staged; maybe I was wrong when I said all that Project Veritas BS had taught our media something.)

Peter Slevin at the New Yorker reports extensively on how Iowa's become a hard-right Republican state, to the point where even "solid, mainstream" Democrats lost most of their elections in 2020, and I can't help but retort that these "solid, mainstream" Democrats are mostly Republican-lite -- and Republican voters will always have an inarticulate contempt for Democrats who try to act like Republicans -- and that if Democrats would, say, actually make life easier for small farmers when they have power (which is so, so not Tom Vilsack!), they could withstand the onslaught of Republican lies a lot better. The article says Cindy Axne managed to hold onto her House seat with "face-to-face campaigning," but doesn't tell us what she said face-to-face. That'd be the more important question, one would think.

Finally, I've thought long and hard about Branko Marcetic's article detailing Kyrsten Sinema's metamorphosis from anti-war, Green Party liberal to "proud neoliberal Democrat" who made a little show of rejecting a minimum wage hike, and though this isn't the article's fault, you may come away from it knowing little more about what makes her tick. Possibly I feel this way because I don't condone the acquisition of power for its own sake -- Jesus Mary and Joseph she doesn't even get richer by capitulating to power, just like Scott Walker! Anyway, if you're inclined to think "she's just representing her state," you should ask not just whether she's really just representing the state's powerful interests, but whether she could broaden the electorate (and thus your own real power base!) by taking more populist economic positions. After all, Mark Kelly is up for re-election in 2022 already and had no problem supporting the $15/hour minimum wage; maybe he's figured that out.

Action: concerning voting rights, gun control, police brutality, internet freedom, and Social Security.

Long story short: tell Sen. Manchin you don't care whether our Senate passes the For the People Act in a "bipartisan" manner, then tell your Senators to pass real gun control legislation as well as the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and put a fifth Commissioner on the FCC who'll help defend internet freedom and expand internet access, then tell President Biden to fire two Social Security Administration executives who are trying their damnedest to screw up our Social Security. You can find phone numbers for your Reps and Senators using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page), but I'll also provide email/petition tools for most of these alerts below .

Sen. Joe Manchin (D?-WV) says the American people won't accept "as legitimate" a For the People Act that isn't "bipartisan" -- so go ahead and call him, at 202.224.3954, and tell him you don't give one rat's hind-quarter whether or not any Republicans vote for the For the People Act. We're well past noting that people don't care about "bipartisan" government, they only care about good government -- Jesus Mary and Joseph more than two-thirds of the Republican House caucus, and almost one-fifth of the Republican Senate caucus, supported an overthrow of our government on January 6! And he wants to "work with" these people? You don't "work with" evil, you work around evil -- or over it, or through it. The good news? Sen. Manchin is neither stupid nor insensitive; he can be pulled toward the truth.

In 2018, Thom Hartmann offered the best gun control proposal I've yet heard: make it as hard to get semi-automatic weapons as it is to get automatic weapons, and regulate gun ownership the way we regulate car ownership. Folks would have to jump through a lot of hoops to get a semi: if you had to (for example) have a police officer vouch for you before you get a semi, well, that'll stop a lot of people from getting them. And it ain't that tough to fill out the paperwork for a car, so the paperwork for a gun won't be particularly onerous, either. Rather than support blanket gun bans, you may wan to call your Reps and Senators and tell them you want this instead.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1280, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. Don't brook any silliness that this is a "defund the police" bill -- in fact, it actually increases federal police funding! -- and don't brook any other silliness, either. In fact, you can go ahead and think of this bill's opponents as objectively pro-choke holds, since this bill bans them, or objectively pro-militarizing police since the bill would fight that, or objectively pro-getting away with murder since the bill limits "qualified immunity." That middle item, right-wingers should note, is something that can easily be turned on them, even though it mainly gets turned on anti-racism protestors these days.

Battle for the Net helps you tell our President to nominate, and our Senators to confirm, a fifth FCC Commissioner who'll help restore net neutrality and ensure everyone can have access to broadband internet. Not just because we're the richest country on Earth, but don't they know there's a pandemic on? More folks work from home and take classes from home than ever before, so letting the big corporations do whatever they want (like install data caps, thanks Comcast!) ain't gonna cut it anymore. And, you know, Mitch McConnell said that if we make Senators talk through filibusters from now on, they'll retaliate by slowing everything down, and this fifth FCC Commissioner is just one thing they'll try to hold hostage. But don't be a hostage! Being a hostage is un-American! Just hound them until they give in.

Finally, Social Security Works helps you tell President Biden to fire two notorious Social Security Administration appointees, Andrew Saul and David Black. For what? For gumming up the works wherever they can, that's what! Lately they've prevented some 30 million good Americans -- both seniors and folks with disabilities -- from getting stimulus checks by not giving needed data to our IRS. Think this was just some oversight on their part? Nah, we're not schmucks: they've also tried to make it harder for folks to get Social Security disability benefits, plus they told SSA workers they had to keep commuting to their jobs despite the pandemic -- while they worked from home! Maybe we should put people in charge who aren't trying to burn everything down? (President Biden's phone number is 202.456.1111, if you want to go that route.)

Action: concerning unconstitutional war-making, worker fairness, workplace violence, stupid nukes, and stupider Congressfolk.

Long story short: tell your House Reps to repeal the 2002 AUMF authorizing war with Iraq, pass the Paycheck Fairness Act and the Pregnancy Fairness Act, fight workplace violence, reject new sea-launched nuclear missiles, and censure Rep. Gosar and strip him of his committee assignments. You can find phone numbers for your Reps and Senators using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page), but I'll also provide email/petition tools for all of these alerts below.

Both Win Without War and the Project on Government Oversight help you tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 256, which would repeal the Authorization for Use of Military Force (or AUMF) Against Iraq. The Iraq war killed hundreds of thousands, displaced tens of millions, cost trillions of dollars, helped birth (in ISIS) something even worse than al-Qaeda, and of course Presidents have used it, and will use it, to justify even stupider adventures. And not for nothing, but it probably also cost Joe Biden Iowa and Ohio, if not also Florida and North Carolina, in 2020. I'm serious: Donald Trump looked like the anti-war candidate to a not-insignificant number of folks in those states. It's amazing how many supposedly politically-adept people still don't grasp the intensity of our feeling against that war. Well, we'll keep telling them.

The National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Reps to pass H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, and H.R. 1065, the Pregnancy Fairness Act. These bills would help women in the workplace, the former by giving women more tools to fight pay discrimination, and the latter by forcing employers to provide reasonable accommodations to pregnant workers at the workplace. I say "reasonable" with the Italics Hammer because right-wingers love pretending that any progress, on anything, anywhere, will obliterate all boundaries everywhere. The bill would force bosses to give pregnant women more bathroom breaks; it would not force bosses to let them spend their entire shift in the bathroom. I mean, duh. As for Sen. Rubio's plaint that the former bill is just a sop to "trial lawyers": we wouldn't need so many trial lawyers if bosses would just pay their women workers what they've earned.

Prevent Workplace Violence helps you tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 1195, the Workplace Violence Prevention for Health Care and Social Service Workers Act. Why? Because it's a lot worse there than anywhere else! And also because right-wingers will probably find a judge who'll say the worker safety laws we've got don't apply to violence in the workplace. And also because corporations can ignore OSHA's 2015 guidelines without penalty, because they're guidelines. You shouldn't let guidelines do the work of regulations -- governments tend to cast this as a compromise with corporations, but then the corporations whine about how guidelines always become mandatory sooner or later. But we don't let corporate whining stop us from doing what's right.

Win Without War helps you tell your Reps to pass H.R. 1554/S. 595, the Nuclear SLCM Ban Act. SLCM stands for "sea-launched cruise missile," and if there's anything we don't need more of, it's a nuclear weapon, particularly one that even both Presidents Bush wouldn't green-light. Neither would President Clinton nor President Obama. So why are we even talking about it? Because of President Trump, of course, whose "bold thinking" led him to embrace a weapons system nobody else would, without asking, apparently, if everyone else had reasons for rejecting it. We already have way too many nukes on seacraft, and certainly we shouldn't be putting nukes alongside non-nukes. So, yeah, let's strangle this weapons system in its crib.

Finally, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Reps to censure Rep. Paul Gosar and strip him of his committee assignments. I have no patience with folks who still associate with white supremacists -- who openly want to destroy our government, and sure did help try that on January 6 -- and anyway Republicans stripped former Rep. Steve King of all his committee assignments in 2019, so it's not like this is unprecedented punishment. Rep. Gosar (E-AZ) has walked back his support for white supremacists, but only when confronted by media outlets, and then not on Twitter, so let's not believe that line of BS. Maybe he thinks, like Rep. Greene of Georgia, that getting punished will just make him stronger. But in a thousand years no one will remember the name of either one of them.

Action: concerning clean water, internet access, facial recognition, social media, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell Pennsylvania state legislators to protect clean water, tell Comcast to stop capping data during a pandemic, tell Uber and Uber Eats to stop using facial recognition on its employees, tell Facebook not to give Donald Trump his account back, and tell our USPS Board of Governors to fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. You can find PA state legislator phone numbers using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone), but I've included petition/email links for all five action alerts today.

Penn Environment helps you tell your state assemblyfolk to pass HB 714, which would protect our rivers and streams by preserving forested buffers along our waterways. These buffer zones not only protect our clean water from noxious agricultural runoff, but from the pollution development causes. HB 714 would mandate that at least a 100-foot-wide forested buffer protect all waterways, though some waterways would get a 300-foot buffer; Pennsylvania state legislators tried repeatedly last decade to chip away at these buffers, because capitalism, I guess, but really, a little more protection for our waterways is not so much to ask. Everything you build eventually falls, but clean water is forever -- if you work to keep it.

Consumer Reports helps you tell Comcast to stop putting data caps on its customers and stop charging insane overage fees as well. In my best Jimmy Stewart voice: don't they know there's a pandemic on? Of course, this is Comcast, so I'm sure they do know that more folks are working from home, and attending school from home, than ever before; surely Comcast wouldn't want to be seen as opportunist. Then again, they have monopolies or near-monopolies just about everywhere they operate. Comcast has already shown that the Big Stick of Bad PR can move it -- it delayed rolling out a cap in the northeast after folks brandished that Stick -- but it's still doing this dirty deed in the rest of America, and why should they suffer so Comcast can be richer?

Fight for the Future helps you tell Uber and Uber Eats to stop forcing its employees to submit to facial recognition software. Because facial recognition sucks! It can't tell Black folks apart any better than your right-wing uncle can! Thus it is a very bad way to tell if your drivers are working. Have they never heard of texting customers? I mean, in The Future, there are about a thousand ways to verify if your drivers have made their delivery, and making them snap a selfie of themselves so facial recognition software can fail to recognize them and boot them off the network is a pretty stupid one. As with all stupid ideas, of course, you have to wonder if the stupidity's on purpose. So much failure seems to make so much money nowadays. But that doesn't make it right, nor does it mean we should just tolerate it.

CARE2 helps you tell Facebook not to lift their suspension of Donald Trump's account. Facebook let our former President get away with all sorts of obnoxious behavior, but the attempted coup of January 6 was apparently a bridge too far, and thus Facebook suspended his account. And now they're hoping no one's looking! We can prove them wrong about that. When right-wingers try to frame this as a free speech issue, well, you could respond that Facebook is a publishing house and not a public utility, or you could just point out that Donald Trump is supposedly starting his own social network as we speak, which proves he doesn't even need Facebook! Always they forget about noxious wealth; I wonder why.

Finally, both Public Citizen and Common Cause help you tell our U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors to fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. For his attempts to foul up mail-in voting, of course, and for his attempts to cut services and raise prices, and also for his not-so-secret desire to privatize our Post Office, but you need not recall any of that -- you need only recall how bad mail delivery has been over the last few months, and I sure hope you didn't lose any life-saving medications in that mess.

Around the table: featuring one Republican whose career is likely over and one whose career can't be over fast enough (though it likely isn't).

Our Supreme Court takes up a case involving certain California farmworker regulations that could impact regulations all over America. A California regulation allows union organizers to speak to farmworkers at their job, but a couple of farm owners want to void the regulation, saying it amounts to an unlawful "taking" of private property -- which bodes ill for regulators who want to do food inspections, fire inspections, safety inspections, and the like on what's nominally "private property." My guess: 5-4 in favor of the plaintiffs, with Chief Justice Roberts joining the three nominal liberals strictly due to very, very ample precedent; Justice Kavanaugh writes the ruling, but at least two Justices write or join concurring but much less narrowly-tailored opinions. Happy to be wrong!

Hard to believe, Harry, but tax evasion among the very, very rich is considerably worse than previous assessments had demonstrated. When the top 1% of income-earners don't report more than one-fifth of their income, well, that's a lot of bridges that don't get rebuilt, a lot of water mains that don't get repaired, a lot of police officers who don't get paid, a lot of libraries that can't stay open, and I'm sure you get the idea. Also, a law and order nation would treat tax evasion as just as bad as burglary, which, as I've suggested, it very much resembles.

Colorado Republican state Rep. Matt Soper condemns rising violence against Asian-Americans in his home state -- and promptly gets swamped by other Republican legislators talking about how oppressed they feel by anyone who ever talks about white supremacy. All together now: waaaaaaaaah! Strangely, even though I'm a white person myself, I do not assume anyone who condemns white supremacy actually condemns me, and I take it as my job to let folks of color know I'm not a white supremacist. Why, it's like I learned taking responsibility and self-reliance better than today's nominal conservatives did. How could that have happened?

At least two Wisconsin Republicans compare Sen. Ron Johnson to Joe McCarthy, thanks to both men's interest in embracing and promoting utter horseshit. Sad that Jim Sensenbrenner seems to mean it as a compliment and Charlie Sykes doesn't; I'm old enough to remember feeling exactly the opposite about both gentlemen as I do now. The bad news? Even if Mr. Johnson retires, this hydrochloroquine crap ain't going away soon. The good news? It will eventually go away -- after all, very few bemoan the lives "lost" to our failure to use laetrile to "cure" cancer.

Finally, Postal Service investigators find "no evidence" to support an infamous accusation of Post Office supervisor ballot tampering in Pennsylvania. I'd have said "this is the part of the story that never gets told," except that the accuser in question a) recanted his accusations not too long after making them and b) worked with the notorious Project Veritas to amplify his inanities. It is, I suppose, nice to see our "liberal" media finally treating Project Veritas with the respect it deserves.

Action: concerning voting rights, tax reform, health care, D.C. statehood, and postal banking.

Summary: tell Pennsylvania state legislators to stop curtailing voting rights; tell Congressfolk to enact real tax reform, pass the Medicare for All Act, make Washington, D.C. a state, and pass the Postal Banking Act. Use the tools in the upper-right corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find phone numbers for your Congressfolk and/or your Pennsylvania state legislators. Also, I will provide (when I have them) links for petitions and email tools below.

Pennsylvania passed Act 77 in 2019, which (among other things) allowed folks to register to vote up to 15 days before the election; now the legislature wants to make that limit 30 days again. Why? Because Joe Biden won Pennsylvania, that's why! You'd think Republicans (who control PA's legislature) would look around and see their numbers undiminished after the 2020 election and decide they're safe, but I'll make the same notation I made with Georgia yesterday: Republicans know they can't win arguments on the merits, so they try to game the system to ensure victory. When you're doing that, instead of serving your constituents, you ought to start with the Man in the Mirror. (Common Cause also provides an email-writing tool with which to support wider voter registration times in Pennsylvania.)

President Biden, as you know, has released a tax reform plan; now's the time to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to make it better. I mean, a lot of the Biden plan is good, but it would only get things almost back to where they were before the 2017 tax "reform," and we know that's not enough: we need a 91% tax bracket on millionaire income, we need a 55% tax on corporate profits over $1 million (we can leave it at 21% for under $1 million), we need to count dividends, capital gains, and stock options as income for tax purposes, we need to enact an Elizabeth Warren-style wealth tax, and we need to cap the mortgage interest deduction so homeowners can still enjoy it but slumlords and corporations can't game the system. Oh, and no national sales tax, ever. State sales taxes -- which always hit working people harder than rich folks -- are noxious enough. I know that's a mouthful, but the more we demand, the more we'll get.

Rep. Jayapal (D-WA) has introduced H.R. 1976, the Medicare for All Act, which would, as its title suggests, expand Medicare to include all Americans, gradually over a period of four years. Medicare-for-All health insurance consistently scores over 60% in polls these days -- polls conducted by corporate media outlets, which you would think would have extra incentive to tell you nobody likes Medicare-for-All! Go ahead and tell them how you'd pay for it, too -- either by enacting Sen. Warren's plan to convert money spent on private insurance into a per-employee tax, or enacting an employer-side payroll tax hike that would neither impact employee paychecks or corporate expenses. (Medicare4AllNow.org and Black Lives Matter provide petitions.)

H.R. 51/S. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act, would make Washington, D.C. our 51st state (hence the bill numbers). The case, I trust, is clear -- no, not "Democrats would get two more Senators," but that D.C.'s population outstrips actual states Vermont and Wyoming, that D.C. pays more federal taxes than 22 other states, that federal control of D.C. has proven unwieldy and oppressive, and that, ah, D.C. might have turned that January 6 coup attempt back a lot more easily if it had the apparatus of a state to protect itself. (Both Free DC and Demand Progress provide petitions.)

No one's reintroduced the Postal Banking Act in this Congress yet, but that doesn't mean we can't tell our Congressfolk to reintroduce and pass it; indeed, they're supposed to work on our schedule, not theirs! The Postal Banking Act would allow our Postal Service to offer basic banking services, like savings, checking, and bill-paying, and that would greatly help good Americans who live in rural and urban areas the big banking corporations won't touch. And if it wouldn't help our payday lenders who fill that void and put good Americans into a 300% interest death-spiral, well, too bad, so sad. (Daily Kos provides a petition.)

Action: now more action-packed than ever!

Summary: tell Georgia legislative leaders to stop suppressing the vote; tell your U.S. Senators to protect stimulus checks from debt collectors, pass the For the People Act, pass the Voting Rights Advancement Act, pass the Equality Act, and get rid of the legislative filibuster. Use the tools in the upper-right corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find phone numbers for your Congressfolk; phone numbers for Georgia legislative leaders will be provided below. Also, I will provide (when I have them) links for petitions and/or email tools below, if you prefer these to making phone calls.

First things first: in Georgia, SB 202 somehow ballooned from a two-page bill concerned with a minor point about absentee ballots into a 93-page bill a mere hour before the state House met to consider it! SB 202 now aims to limit early voting, make folks produce more ID, and prevent people from giving you a glass of water when you've been in line to vote for eight hours, among other nefarious works. Thus the Georgia legislature signals they know they've lost the argument and they're just trying to jam their will down your throat while they can. Georgia House Speaker David Ralston's phone number is 404.656.5020, while Senate Majority Leader Mike Dugan's phone number is 404.656.7872; call them and tell them to stop suppressing the vote in Georgia.

Late last week, Republican Sen. Pat Toomey scuttled legislation protecting our stimulus checks from debt collectors. So why didn't this happen with the last two stimulus checks? Because Sen. Toomey and most other Republicans voted to protect those checks! I wonder what changed between now and then. Sen. Toomey intones that debt collectors have "valid legal claims" (which, like, they didn't the last two times?) and anyway Democrats should have tried to work with Republicans (which, like, waaaaaaaah). You get a stimulus check so you can stimulate the economy, hence the name, and you can't stimulate the economy with it if someone's already taken it from you. So call your Senators and tell them to fix this.

Also up for consideration: H.R. 1, the For the People Act, which you know is a good bill because Republicans tell the most hysterical lies about it! Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, as you know, suggested that H.R. 1 would lead to people giving out cocaine to voters as a bribe! For your reference, cocaine remains a Schedule II drug, meaning it's illegal, meaning that, no, H.R. 1 won't permit people to hand it out to voters in line. And Sen. Ted Cruz (E-TX) said the bill would let child molestors vote, though good luck finding that in the bill! So while you have your Senators on the phone, you can tell them to pass H.R. 1, too. (Also, People for the American Way provides a petition supporting the For the People Act.)

The John Robert Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act is, somehow, not part of the For the People Act, which could mean Democrats think they'll pass it more easily, but they haven't re-introduced it in this Congress, either. The Voting Rights Advancement Act would make the Voting Rights Act whole again by subjecting, to Justice Department scrutiny, voting rights changes from any state or locality with a record of vote suppression, not just Southern ones (which formed the core of our Supreme Court's objection in its Shelby County v. Holder ruling). So add that to your phone call with your Senators. (Public Citizen also provides a petition supporting the Voting Rights Advancement Act.)

You can also tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. Word on the street is that right-wingers are calling their Senators en masse, no doubt with fever dreams of men changing gender just to make far less money playing women's sports and transgender folks raping kids in bathrooms when kids are far more likely to be raped by a relative and not in a bathroom. It'd be nice to counter right-wing hysteria with a more sober recounting of things the Equality Act would end, things like banks refusing to lend to gays and landlords refusing to rent to gays, actual things that actually happen, and which shouldn't happen, even if banks and landlords believe in Jesus very, very hard. (People for the American Way also provides a petition supporting the Equality Act.)

Finally, pursuant to all of the goals described above, you can tell your Senators (this won't be that long a phone call, really!) to end the legislative filibuster. (People for the American Way provides a petition for that, too.) Yes, I can list things the filibuster has saved (the Estate Tax, for one) just as well as anyone else, but the filibuster isn't a break-glass thing anymore, but a tool Republicans flat-out abuse -- except when they want to get something done, like the Gorsuch Supreme Court nomination in 2017! Last week President Biden said he thinks the filibuster should be a talking filibuster, so we're moving our leaders in our direction; that only means we have to keep up the pressure.

OK, so I'm getting more good action alerts these days than ever before, hence I'm packing more action alerts into shorter paragraphs. The summary bit at the beginning wasn't part of that thought process, but I'm glad to come up with it anyway; I think it'll make these action posts a bit more digestible, even as there'll be more to digest.

Around the table: now with *even more good news*!

Good news, everyone: President Biden has rolled back a Trump-era regulation which only allowed students defrauded by for-profit colleges, meaning those students can now get full relief. The previous Administration loved itself some for-profit colleges, as you know -- remember Trump University and you'll know why! But when you've proven in a court of law that a for-profit college stole your money, you should get it back. I mean, that's just law and order.

Ho hum, our "liberal" media is all pearls-aclutch about all that infrastructure spending President Biden wants to do, fearmongering about "red ink" and the inflation we haven't had for 40 years. Thus we are reminded, again, that Our Glorious Elites regard any spending that might actually help people as "dangerous," while any spending that helps big corporations is "necessary" if not "harmless." And remember when they predicted runaway inflation would be the result of the 2009 stimulus? Bunch of fucking Carnacs, they were.

In a related note, the Biden Administration apparently wants to pass smaller bills so that it can "set the table" for a giant infrastructure bill later on this year, but I think that's a big mistake, and not just because Republicans have been blocking the mildest reforms for years. I mean, I could almost see their point if creating jobs and building bridges and building out enewable energy were all hard sells to the American people, but they're not. People like jobs, and stuff that works, and not polluting their entire planet. And, really, you're going to have to ram it down these Republicans' throats sooner or later; might as well do it sooner.

ProPublica reminds us that only one state, Arkansas, will put you in jail if you fall behind on your rent -- but, after extensive ProPublica reporting on the matter, that could change. The bill in question might have trouble passing a Republican-dominated government, but still, the lesson here is that good journalism works. Cynics want you to believe nothing works anymore, but cynicism is evil, and its practitioners are also evil, whether they think so or not.

Stop me if you've heard this one before, but Zoom got a tax bill of exactly zero dollars in 2020, despite its profits increasing 40-fold, from around $16 million in 2019 to $660 million. How do they do it? Largely by paying their executives in stock options, which "aren't income" as long as the executives don't redeem the options, and now they're asking for "help" in how to spend all their extra money! No doubt we can think of a few ways to help them do that, but this is exactly the sort of thing that should be against the law in a law-and-order nation. I bet Our Glorious Elites fight it tooth and nail if Joe Biden ever gets in his head to agree with us.

Finally, the Biden Administration appears to have hit its 100-million-vaccine-shots-in-100-days goal about 42 days early. You need two shots of these vaccines for them to be fully effective, and too many Americans still can't get shots, but all in all this underpromise/overdeliver thing might actually catch on. It sure is an improvement over his predecessor's overpromise/pretenddeliver/yell at everyone who points out you haven't delivered philosophy.

Action: concerning racist terror, government spying, intellectual property, and qualified immunity.

First things first. A man, inexplicably described by local police as someone who'd had "a really bad day," shot eight people, including six women of Asian-American descent, at three massage spas in Georgia on Tuesday. These shootings take place in the context of centuries of anti-Asian racism in the United States (the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Japanese internment camps, et al), but they also take place in the context of anti-Asian sentiment arising specifically from the COVID-19 pandemic. And not more than a few hours after the shootings, there was former President Trump on Fox News talking, again, about "the China virus" as if nothing had happened that day. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell "liberal" media corporations to stop using terms like "China virus" on their programming. No, that wouldn't be "politically correct" -- it'd be not being an asshole, and that's not a high bar to clear. And no, it wouldn't be "cancel culture" either -- racists don't have a First Amendment right to an audience.

Meanwhile, both Stop the PATRIOT Act and Defending Rights and Dissent help you tell your Congressfolk to rid us of the wretched PATRIOT Act once and for all. This past Monday, March 15 marked the one-year anniversary of the expiration of the PATRIOT Act's most destructive provisions, including the notorious Section 215, which authorized bulk email and phone data collection without a warrant. (Hey, not for nothing, but how many planes have flied into how many buildings lately?) Still, the politicians apparently want to bring back the glory days of harassing activists and unconstitutionally spying on Americans, this time under the guise of "fighting domestic terrorism." No one wants to see the January 6 seditionists in jail more than I do. But the best way to fight domestic terrorism is also the best way to fight foreign terrorism: make the politicians treat their bosses, the American people, right. We'll still have crazies after that, but we can deal with them a lot more easily once our politicians stop actively hurting us and start doing our will.

In other news, Public Citizen helps you tell big pharma corporations making COVID vaccines to share their knowledge with the entire world, so everyone can benefit. And by "everyone" I mean everyone -- if the whole world can get the vaccine easily and safely, then we're also a lot less likely to get sick again. Quite a few folks will proclaim TEH INTELLECKSHUAL PROPERTIEZ!!!!! like someone's property is more important than people's lives. But the "intellectual property" argument also fails on the merits: J&J got more than $2 billion in taxpayer money to develop its vaccine, while Moderna developed its COVID vaccine entirely with public funding. I wouldn't blame you if you called up Moderna today and said, a la George Carlin, "you're a public servant! Get me a glass of water!" But certainly it's not their property; it's also our property, since we funded it with our money, so we should get more of the say over how it's used

Finally, Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1470, the Ending Qualified Immunity Act, which would, as its title suggests, end "qualified immunity" for police officers. The Ending Qualified Immunity Act would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1871 to explicitly state that police officers who brutalize Americans and violate their civil rights can be indicted and/or sued for damages, since our Supreme Court has ruled that police officers (among others) can't be sued under the Civil Rights Act of 1871 unless plaintiffs can show that said officers violated a "clearly-established law" -- which in practice means that courts will throw out every lawsuit that isn't exactly like a previous one! What new lawsuit will be exactly like another? The world is a big place, after all. But we can all imagine a world where cops terrorize the population. And, sadly, black folks don't have to work nearly as hard to imagine it. So let's work for a better world.

Around the table: featuring the usual Republican insanity and Democratic weakness.

Spain will trial a four-day, 32-hour work week, possibly as soon as this fall, where workers would make the same amount of money and the government would cover all costs during the first year (though less in the years thereafter). It's safe to say that no one's tried it on this scale, though individual employers report that it works pretty well; recall that John Maynard Keynes thought our ever-rising standards of living would be enabling 15-hour work weeks by now, though he didn't predict the massive income-redistribution-upward scheme of the last 40-plus years, which is what leaves us running to stand still. So of course I wish the Spanish the best in their endeavors.

Alan McLeod at FAIR catches the financial media doing all manner of pearl-clutching at the news that potential Brazilian Presidential candidate Luis Inacio "Lula" da Silva has been released from jail. Who would say, out loud, that a politician getting cleared of trumped-up charges is "bad for the markets"? You'd only say something like that if you were an irredeemable asshole, and in this article, they say a lot worse -- plus, they might actually mean Lula will be bad for "US imperial ambitions in Latin America and beyond." Seriously, this may be the most triggering thing I've read in a while -- and I read a lot of triggering stuff.

Ryan Grim at The Intercept describes the formation of the "Woman's Equality Party" (or WEP) in New York state -- a party that seems to exist more to burnish Gov. Andrew Cuomo's (ever-more) suspect feminist credentials than to actually help women win office in New York. I couldn't help but notice, long before paragraph 13, that the WEP is also only one letter off from the Working Families Party (or WFP), and since the WFP is often a thorn in Gov. Cuomo's side -- endorsing Cynthia Nixon in the 2018 Democratic primary after getting seriously burned by Mr. Cuomo in 2014 -- I can't imagine that's an accident.

The COVID relief bill faces its first legal hurdle, if you can call it that, as the state of Ohio sued to block the provision preventing local governments from using federal aid to cut state taxes. I would be surprised to learn states have a constitutional "right" to use federal funds to cut state taxes, but I doubt Ohio politicians filed this suit to make a point or advance a philosophy; rather, I suspect they did it either to beat their chests about how Republican they are or to get ahead of the bill one day becoming unpopular. If it's the latter item, they may be waiting a very long time.

Tennessee historical commission votes to remove bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest from state capitol -- and state Republicans promptly propose a law removing all 29 members and replacing them with 12 new ones. Republicans run everything in Tennessee -- which, again, is the natural result of Democrats being weak -- but all any Democrat has to do is ask: why do you fight for the memory of Nathan Bedford Forrest? Dude made his fortune in the slave trade and then was the Klan's first Grand Wizard! They sure didn't put his bust in the Capitol because he might have had doubts about his life's work at the end.

Finally, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) says he would "talk until I fell over" to prevent the passage of the For the People Act and the Equality Act, though he seems to have some confusion about what those bills would actually do. Anyway, I doubt he'd keep a real filibuster going, and not just because talking until you "fall over" about popular legislation would make you look bad. I doubt it because I think he's soft, just like I think they're all soft. They won't give up their three-martini lunches and big donor dinners to keep a filibuster going; in fact, I think the mere thought of hard work will make them wilt.

Action: concerning corporate welfare, our Post Office, pollution, and internet freedom.

Congress might actually let a "clean" coal tax credit expire this year, after at least two studies find that "clean" coal plants actually pollute more. Now, remember how Congress works: they leave all the unpopular corporate welfare, er, research and development tax incentives for the end of the year, so that they can rubber-stamp them under the "pressure" of finishing their work for the year. It's a cowardly gambit, but we can make that gambit toxic, if we all call our Reps and Senators and tell them we don't want to give "clean" coal our hard-earned taxpayer money if all it does is cause more pollution. They'd prefer not to say it, but it's true: the "tax credits" they hand out to big corporations is your money, money we could spend in ten thousand better ways. And no, they don't need "incentives" to develop new products. Here's the incentive: they get to deduct research and development from their revenues as expenses -- hence the more actual research and development they do, the less they pay in taxes to begin with! So let's not put up with this particular species of Congressional gaslighting any longer.

Meanwhile, President Biden has sent the names of three USPS Board of Governors nominees to our Senate, so Progress America helps you tell your Senators to confirm these nominees post-haste. One is a former deputy Postmaster General; another used to be general counsel of the American Postal Workers Union, and a third is currently CEO of the National Vote at Home Institute, and the quicker our Senate gets them in, the quicker they can fire current Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and help get our Post Office running well again. In a related note, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to reintroduce and pass the Postal Banking Act, which would allow our Post Offices to offer basic banking services again, like they did from 1911 until 1967. Post Offices can not only raise money this way, but they can do a lot of good in communities where banks won't go but loansharks and payday lenders will. Combine these two actions with the USPS Fairness Act -- which would lift the retiree benefits pre-payment mandate Congress absolutely designed to cripple our Post Office -- and we should get the Post Office we deserve as Americans.

In other news, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell big insurance corporation Liberty Mutual to divest from Arctic drilling and tar sands projects. Maybe getting them to divest from Arctic drilling won't be such a big lift -- as you'll recall, the lease sale from early January had rather fewer bidders than anyone expected! -- but Liberty Mutual may need more convincing that tar sands oil production is not some kind of "clean" energy solution, or even an "alternative" one. Oil corporations will transport tar sands oil on pipelines that will spill and will pollute the water we drink and bathe in, and if big corporations and our government won't get with the program, why should big insurers bail them out? Hate to pile on, but tar sands oil is also thick as molasses, and often you need lighter oil to properly refine it. This just sounds more and more like a boondoggle. Might as well get with solar and wind, which'll be around approximately forever -- and if Liberty Mutual won't get on board, we can wield the Big Stick of Bad PR against them until they do.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell President Biden to nominate an internet freedom champion as our 5th FCC Commissioner and tell our Senate to confirm said individual, then Free Press still helps you do that. We ain't getting neutrality back with a 2-2 vote, and we ain't fighting media consolidation or expanding broadband into rural and urban areas or assisting working families with broadband costs or ensuring everyone can go to school during a pandemic with 2-2 votes, either. And "internet freedom champion" is an important part of this formula, too -- we don't need yet another big telecom lobbyist on the FCC. Yeah, former FCC Chair Tom Wheeler was a big telecom lobbyist once upon a time, and he worked out better than expected, but that's only because we held his feet to the fire every single day of his tenure. We did the same to Ajit Pai, and he spent four years mostly ignoring us. So we need someone in there who understands how communications policy affects ordinary Americans like us. It ain't so damn much to ask, frankly. But we won't get it unless we all speak out, and make our will unmistakably plain.

Action: concerning right-wing drama, the filibuster, sanctions, and food safety.

So Colorado Gov. Jared Polis issued a proclamation urging good Coloradans to avoid meat for one day out of the week, but Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts declared his own "Meat on the Menu Day," which I might take as a good-natured rib from a beef-producing state, except that he then said that Colorado's "MeatOut Day" was a "direct attack on our way of life." Gosh, don't anyone tell him what Catholics do on Fridays during Lent! Seriously, abstaining from meat for one day a week represents a "direct attack on our way of life"? Jesus Mary and Joseph will right-wingers ever stop their incessant whining? You may call Gov. Ricketts at 402.471.2244 and tell him to cut the drama, because statements like "direct attack on our way of life" is how people convince other people that having a veggie burger makes you a "terrorist." I do not exaggerate -- it isn't that long a walk from "animal rights protestors are terrorists" to "people who don't eat meat terrorize the meat industry." I love steak myself, but I won't buy it from Nebraska producers as long as their Governor is a whiner.

Speaking of people who really shouldn't open their mouths ever, Sen. McConnell (E-KY) literally promised a "scorched-Earth Senate" if Democrats follow through on nixing the filibuster. How do we respond to threats? We still do the right thing, that's how! Hence you may call your Democratic Senators and tell them to ignore Mr. McConnell's threat and get rid of the legislative filibuster. Yeah, I already knew that Mr. McConnell could unearth many more layers of obstruction. But if Democrats cower before this threat, then they do not deserve to win another election again, ever. Besides which, Mitch McConnell himself ended the use of the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees not even four years ago! And he has also said, far more recently, that folks should try winning arguments before they try getting rid of the filibuster; does demanding a physical quorum merely to turn on the lights in the Senate chamber resemble a "winning argument"? Imagine the spectacle of a group of grown men reduced to doing such things, and you'll help end Mr. McConnell's manufactured hostage crisis post-haste.

Also, as you know, America uses economic sanctions as a weapon against a lot of nations, including Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and Syria, but all of that comes with a cost: the good citizens of those nations can't get food, medicine, electricity, or medical supplies, all of which becomes more acute during a pandemic. You may now know, however, that our Treasury Department has the authority under our laws to allow these nations to import essential products (including food and medicine) during a pandemic. A truly great nation wouldn't need to be told to do this, of course, but we are that nation, so we must tell our government what to do. Toward that end, Roots Action helps you tell our government to stop letting sanctions actually hurt the innocent, especially during a pandemic. Anyone who tells you letting humanitarian supplies through is just a way of letting weapons through -- as if there's literally no such thing as a port inspector! -- has revealed themselves as one of two kinds of people: 1) someone proud of their cynicism, or 2) someone irredeemably cruel. I'm not sure which kind of person is worse.

Finally, our government has long had a jones to speed up processing lines at chicken plants -- a program even Bush the Lesser rejected! -- such that chicken inspectors get hurt more and pus and bile and blood shows up in your chicken casserole more frequently. Also, too, don't they know there's a pandemic on? But along comes H.R. 1815/S. 713, the Safe Line Speeds During COVID-19 Act, which would suspend all waivers our Department of Agriculture has granted allowing big food processing corporations to shoot their chickens by at 175 per minute, plus it'd stop Agriculture from extending those absurdly-high line speeds to pork processors. Further, the bill would defund any Agriculture efforts to speed up lines in the future, and direct our Government Accountability Office (or GAO) to investigate the harm these high line speeds have done to our food processing workers. These are all good works, and just remember that work accidents and food poisoning are still very unpopular in America. Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support food and worker safety by passing the Safe Line Speeds During COVID-19 Act.

Action: concerning corporate taxes, our Postal Service, Rahm Emanuel, and Georgia elections.

The Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act (no bill number at this writing) is back, and like previous iterations of the bill, it would stop corporations from simply declaring that it made a lot of its profits "overseas," this time by taxing "overseas" profits at the same rate as domestic profits. I put "overseas" in quotation marks because tax haven abuse has become acutely absurd over the years -- corporations reported almost $60 billion in the Cayman Islands in 2017, which happens to be about ten times that nation's entire gross domestic product. The bill would also block those notorious corporate "inversions," in which an American corporation merges with a foreign corporation (think Burger King's 2014 merger with the Canadian corporation Tim Hortons) in order to avoid paying taxes in America. Surely not that many Americans look at Burger King and say attaboy! I think the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act merits a phone call to your Reps and Senators. They'll never see it coming.

While you've got your Reps and Senators on the phone, tell them to pass H.R. 695/S. 145, the USPS Fairness Act. You know how our U.S. Postal Service's recent money problems can all be traced to, no, not "bad products" or "bad service" or "refusal to modernize," but with a Congressional mandate to pre-fund 75 years' worth of retiree benefits, a mandate with which literally no other corporation or federal agency must comply. They say "government doesn't work" and then they go out and prove it, by deliberately screwing it up! Well, the USPS Fairness Act would repeal this mandate, and then our Post Office can better serve the American people, as I know they've tried their damnedest to do, despite all the forces allied against them. And the USPS Fairness Act is an actual bipartisan bill! The Senate's lead sponsor is Steve Freaking Daines of Montana, joined by three other Republicans out of six additional co-sponsors; the House bill counts 40 Republicans among its 254 sponsors, and 254, by the way, is a majority out of 435. This is a no-brainer.

Meanwhile, word on the street says President Biden may nominate Rahm Emanuel as U.S. Ambassador to China or Japan. Mr. Emanuel embodies everything we hate about the Democratic Party -- its weakness in the face of corporate power, and its ruthlessness in hurting people toward that aim. Mr. Emanuel helped the Clinton Administration ram "free" trade deals, racist crime bills, and racist welfare "reform" legislation through Congress in the 1990s, then supported the Iraq War while an actual member of the U.S. House. Then, as Barack Obama's first Chief of Staff, he ensured that real progressive legislation died a horrible death in the House, resulting in the Tea Party revolution of 2010, when Republicans claimed the House; then, as Mayor of Chicago, he closed over four dozen public schools after a teacher's strike, privatized city parking services, and suppressed the police killing of Laquan McDonald. So why would a man with that record deserve power and privilege in our government? Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any efforts to give Rahm Emanuel an Ambassadorship.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell our Department of Justice to investigate Donald Trump's attempts to overturn the results of Georgia's 2020 election. Yes, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr is investigating the matter as we speak, but given that Republicans run Georgia's government, you may feel less than confident about their ability or willingness to conduct an impartial investigation. Hell, they could even just be tired, just as Mr. Trump surely intended. And Mr. Carr also just so happened to chair a group that exhorted Trump supporters to descend on D.C. on January 6. But even if Mr. Carr suddenly grows a spine, this investigation certainly concerns our Justice Department, since the phone calls we all heard described a President trying to overturn the election results in Georgia as part of his effort to overturn the results of a national election. And if we let him get away with that, what will future Donald Trumps do? Whatever the fuck they please, that's what. And America deserves better than that.

Around the table: the right-wing drama never ends, part 892.

Micah Lee at The Intercept goes "Inside Gab, the Online Safe Space for Far-right Extremists," so you don't have to. You'll learn that the 20 most popular Gab groups are all Trump/QAnon/otherwise right-wing groups (sadly, I'm pretty sure even "HISTORY BUFFS" is a right-wing group, because note the shouty caps). You know, it should be hard to find right-wing extremists on the internet, just like it should be hard to find porn. I'm old enough to remember when you had to work to find both.

It begins: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott insinuates that if the For the People Act passes, people are going to go around buying votes with cocaine. That's a sign they can't win the argument on the merits! Mr. Abbott describes a case involving an "arrest" and a "prosecut(ion)," but was there a conviction? We'll never learn the answer from Mr. Abbott, which is understandable, because it's not like a former Attorney General would know the difference or anything.

At long last, someone in the "liberal" media asks: "When candidates make reckless statements just to get attention, should they get attention?" I can't complain too much that writing at length about why you're not giving Josh Mandel attention still gives him attention, because I rarely see "liberal" media types grapple with this question, let alone declare that "he-said-she-said" stories aren't the answer. Ideally, though, we'd point to Josh Mandel and say this is what he does. Don't be like him. And let's never speak of him again.

Former Kentucky state House Rep. Charles Booker, who came within an eyelash of knocking off Amy McGrath for the 2020 Democratic U.S. Senate nomination despite her tens of millions of dollars, says he's "strongly considering" running against Rand Paul in 2022. Note to national Democrats: how about letting the people of Kentucky pick their candidate for a change? And how about seeing if a Black Lives Matter candidate can win in the state that killed Breonna Taylor? I won't enjoy Rand Paul acting like he's better than Charles Booker, but that'd also be a sign he's scared to face him.

Finally, Missouri state Republicans profess to fear an Eric Greitens campaign for Senate, roughly four years after the former Governor disgraced himself, but maybe they're just playing. I mean, yeah, the worst version of Mr. Greitens's affair/sexual abuse story is profoundly awful, but does he worship at the Trump altar? Has he avoided getting himself convicted? Will he likely face yet another let's-all-get-along weakling Democrat? The answer to all three questions is yes, so I'd say Mr. Greitens's chances of succeeding Roy Blunt in the Senate are pretty damn good! Unless maybe Cori Bush decides to run.

Action: concerning the right to protest, voting rights, and the filibuster.

First things first: the Oklahoma state House passed a bill late last week, HB 1674, that would immunize drivers who run over protestors. And they passed it at 12.30 in the morning, after meeting for 14 hours already! Because if you try to pass that bill in the light of day, people would be pissed off about it. And you know, not everyone actually accepts that "blocking the road" is completely unacceptable behavior! If you're constantly late getting everywhere or you're feeling like you have too much to do, you might feel that way, but rights don't disappear just because you're stressed or pressed for time, and I would say everyone has a right not to be run over while protesting. Now HB 1674 goes to the Oklahoma state Senate; Senate President Pro Tempore Greg Treat's phone number is 405.521.5632, while Senate Majority Floor Leader Kim David's phone number is 405.521.5590. Give them both a call and tell them HB 1674 is an absolute monstrosity and they should ensure its failure in the state Senate.

Meanwhile, our House passed H.R. 1, the For the People Act, the most significant voting rights bill of the last few decades; now our Senate must act on it, hence People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to support voting rights in America by passing the For the People Act. The For the People Act would do a great many good works: it'd force disclosure of big campaign donors; it'd require states to use paper ballots; it'd make same-day and automatic voter registration the law of the land, it'd mandate 15 days of early voting in every state in America; it'd stop state legislators from redrawing Congressional districts to their party's liking; it'd stop states from using "Interstate Crosscheck"-type databases to deregister voters before proving they've done anything wrong; and it'd stop states from using "address-verification forms" to deregister voters who just so happen to live in communities of color. And what is the Republican response to this? That it's "evil" and a "Democrat power grab." And that's it. Don't take their crap anymore.

In other news, though no one's formally introduced the John Robert Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act yet, it still merits a phone call to your Reps and Senators demanding its passage. As you know, our Supreme Court blew open a gaping hole in the Voting Rights Act with their Shelby County v. Holder ruling, by saying that singling out a few Southern states, as the Voting Rights Act does in Sec. 4(b), for extra scrutiny whenever they changed their voting rights laws was, well, unfair to those states. And now a lot of those Southern states are trying to curtail voting rights as we speak! The John Robert Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would replace the formula our Supreme Court found faulty with a new one, one which would single out any state or locality that's demonstrated a habit of suppressing votes. Republicans retort that "the South has changed," but that's rubbish -- the South has gotten cleverer at hiding its sins, that's all. Pass this bill, and we won't have to put up with that any longer.

Finally, pursuant to our goal in the previous paragraph, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to abolish the filibuster. Republicans will filibuster both the For the People Act and the John Robert Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act when they come before the Senate, and recent history suggests they won't suffer for it at the ballot box -- because Democrats only win elections when a) Republicans look incompetent as well as evil and b) when Democrats do good works. Seems to me Democratic politicians spend all their time waiting for a) when they should be doing b), because when they don't do good works, their most devoted voters stay home next election, and Republicans sweep back into power. Certainly ain't no one going into the ballot box in 2022 saying Democrats didn't do anything, but at least they preserved the sanctity of the Senate filibuster! Yeah, I'd prefer a talking filibuster, too, but they won't do that, so let's make them do the more painful thing instead.

Around the table: right-wingers project their faults onto you! And other total non-surprises.

Something else you may not have known about the COVID relief bill: it hikes some fairly arcane taxes on rich folks and big corporations. They're not the sort of tax hikes you can explain to your uncle in 30 seconds, but they represent progress, though I sympathize with Rep. Doggett (D-TX), who complains that the bill could have done more. But Politico writes this article like taxing the rich and corporations more directly is somehow politically risky, more than eight years after Barack Obama said flat out that the rich need to pay more in taxes and still won re-election, and more than two years after all the Republicans' tax-cuts-for-the-rich didn't help them keep the House.

Nobody asked him, but Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) supports the Bessemer Amazon workers in their attempt to unionize -- but only because Amazon "wage(s) culture war against working-class values," and by "working-class values" he means right-wing values. That means if workers at, say, Chick-Fil-A want to unionize, they'll get no help from Marco Rubio, since Chick-Fil-A isn't "wag(ing)" a "culture war" -- or, more precisely, wages the culture war Mr. Rubio prefers. But seriously, if you don't want Amazon "canceling" right-wing publishing or treating its workers badly, you should keep Amazon from getting that big in the first place! And that notion utterly escapes Mr. Rubio in his op-ed, which must be why he describes Amazon as an "oligopoly" rather than a monopoly. Would it be piling on to say that corporations (not just the "woke" ones!) literally pursue "adversarial relations between labor and management" as a matter of policy, but Mr. Rubio only blames labor laws for that? No, it would not.

Stephen Semler at Speaking Security theorizes that President Biden didn't issue Executive Orders curtailing the Department of Defense's 1033 program (which sends military weapons to local police departments) after getting pressured by the National Association of Police Organizations (or NAPO). A right-winger might call this "special interests getting more say than everyone else," except that said right-winger would approve of the result (not that he'll ever give Mr. Biden credit for it, a lesson I really wish Democrats would have learned by now). Now would also be a good time to remember that ending the 1033 program is just a step on the way to demilitarizing our police.

A UMass-Amherst study finds that Black Lives Matter protests actually decrease police killings of black folks -- by close to 17 percent, on average, in municipalities with protests versus those without. Why, it's almost like public pressure works! So when your "I'm an independent, I listen to both sides" friend asks "why are they still protesting?", you can point to tangible progress as a reason. (If they then say "I bet rioting and looting go up after BLM protests," demand proof! They won't have it -- they'll only have their "independent" attitude, which is not proof.)

In a peripherally-related matter, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) says he "wasn't concerned" about violence from pro-Trump protestors on January 6 because "those were people who love this country," but if Mr. Trump had won and "tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and antifa" protestors had descended on D.C., then "I might have been a little concerned." The enterprising Democrat who runs against him in 2022 can attack him two ways: first, by reminding everyone that Ron Johnson thinks black folks hate America, and second, by reminding Trump supporters that Ron Johnson said Joe Biden won. Does that seem uncivil? Well, when has Ron Johnson ever earned civility?

Finally, I really shouldn't be bothering with such people, but I can't help but notice that when Tucker Carlson describes a heretofore-obscure New York Times writer as a "powerful (person) claiming to be powerless" and a "deeply unhappy narcissist," one could more aptly use those two phrases to describe Tucker Carlson himself! That's how it is with right-wingers -- they call you weak because they're weak, they call you stupid because they're stupid, they call you dramatic because they're dramatic, and they call you full of rage because they're full of rage. "I know you are but what am I?" is really the best response to a right-winger anymore.

Action: concerning corporate welfare, the right to organize, paid sick leave, and the global gag rule.

Have you heard that Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) told an oil corporation executive, to his face, that he shouldn't lie to her that oil and gas corporations don't get special treatment in our federal tax code? More of our Congressfolk should do that! And they should also do as Rep. Porter did, and list the precise benefits big fossil fuel drillers get from our tax code! Just so happens Rep. Porter has introduced H.R. 1517, the Ending Taxpayer Welfare for Oil and Gas Companies Act, which would (among other good works!) raise royalty rates paid back to the taxpayer by the fossil fuel corporations when they drill on public lands. Too many right-wingers get away with saying we have to lower these royalty rates "to create jobs," but what they're really saying is that we have to bilk the taxpayer out of money we deserve "to create jobs" -- only so the executives can pocket the extra money and not create the jobs! H.R. 1517 merits a phone call to your Reps and Senators today. They'll never see it coming, and we know how well they do with things they don't see coming.

Meanwhile, H.R. 842, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act, passed the House earlier this week, not long after Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) exhorted his Republican colleagues to "stop talking about Dr. Seuss, and start working with us on behalf of the American workers," a statement that's as good a springboard to a Senate campaign as any. Only five House Republicans voted in favor of the PRO Act, and you can name four of them (Alaska's Don Young, I'll admit, was a mild surprise), and that doesn't bode well for its passage in the Senate, where Republicans will be able to filibuster the bill. If we make them talk through their filibuster, of course, they might wind up embarrassing themselves! And please understand by "might," I mean "will." So the Economic Policy Institute helps you tell your Senators to help out American workers by passing the PRO Act. The PRO Act will help workers like those brave Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, AL, organize for better pay and better working conditions, and why shouldn't we help them do that? Because prices might go up a few pennies? Gosh, don't be that person.

In other news, we should celebrate the passage of the American Rescue Plan, but good Americans still don't have paid sick leave and paid family leave, unless, of course, they belong to a union, and their union bargained and won those things -- or if another employer tried to forestall unionization by granting those things to their workers pre-emptively! Seriously, some bosses do treat their workers well out of the goodness of their hearts, but they're rarer than a T-206 Honus Wagner card, so I wouldn't lay money on that happening if I were you. And, hello! There's a pandemic happening, which increases everyone's need for paid sick leave, to take care of both themselves and their families! Hence Moms Rising helps you tell our government we need a national paid sick leave program, post-haste. We're about the only rich country on Earth that doesn't have one, and that's nothing to shout WE'RE NUMBER ONE! about. They're going to say there's "no money" to do that, what with this $1.9 trillion bill we just passed, but they're full of soup -- CEOs still make millions of dollars, and corporations make billions in profits, so the politicians can do it if they just have the will.

Finally, H.R. 656/S. 142, the Global Health, Empowerment, and Rights (or HER) Act, would prevent our President from keeping taxpayer aid out of the hands of foreign non-governmental organizations (or NGOs) just because they provide abortion -- if abortion is legal in the United States and legal in the nation(s) the NGOs operate. This is what the "global gag rule" is all about; Republican Presidents institute it early in their terms, while Democratic Presidents rescind it early in theirs. But shouldn't the taxpayer get a say over where their money goes? right-wingers ask. Strange how they never asked that question when Tha Bush Mobb was using my taxpayer money to attack Iraq against my express wishes! But this is why we have representative government -- if every taxpayer had veto power over every spending initiative, nothing would get done, and even worse, we would never learn how to live together in a community or a civilization. Hence Amnesty International helps you tell your Congressfolk to promote women's health and freedom by passing the Global HER Act.

Around the table: in which we confront yet more endless Republican hypocrisy.

From Karen Hao at the MIT Technology Review we learn "How Facebook Got Addicted to Spreading Misinformation." Long story short, in the words of one UCal-Berkeley professor: "When you’re in the business of maximizing engagement, you’re not interested in truth. You’re not interested in harm, divisiveness, conspiracy. In fact, those are your friends." And apparently Facebook's efforts to rein in harmful algorithms since 2018 either failed or were set up to fail. Read the whole thing and you may find yourself convinced that "smart people" aren't all that smart. But I still think people are smarter than AI generally, and particularly once they stop letting their egos dominate them.

Sen. Roger Wicker takes credit for restaurant assistance he managed to get into the COVID relief bill, then gets swamped by Twitter users reminding everyone he voted against said COVID relief bill like every other Senate Republican. I said they'd try to take credit for something they tried their damnedest to kill -- and I was right! Roger Wicker's up in 2024; perhaps we can scuttle his re-election by reminding Mississippi Republicans that he worked with nominal Democrat Kyrsten Sinema on that restaurant initiative.

Senate confirms Merrick Garland to be our next Attorney General by a 70-30 vote. Yes, the same Merrick Garland who couldn't even get a confirmation hearing to be a Supreme Court Justice in 2016. And as much as I really don't want to hear Mitch McConnell (who refused to hold hearings on his nomination) praising him, I really don't want to hear anything Tom Cotton has to say about it. For Tom Cotton, you're "weak" if you're not shooting Black folks for brandishing a cellphone.

The state of Florida will get some good press for getting rid of the five- to seven-year waiting period for most felons to wait to have their voting rights restored, and for restoring more of their other rights, but they don't deserve it -- felons will still have to pay court costs and fines before getting their rights restored like rights should be subject to payment, plus the people of Florida spoke and still ain't been heeded, plus felons should never have lost their right to vote in the first place! Oh, and they still won't be able to own guns, which will certainly induce more folks to suspect that the 2nd Amendment crowd is really a 2nd-Amendment-For-Whites-Only crowd.

All of America's living ex-Presidents cut an ad encouraging everyone to get a vaccine when they can -- all of them except for one manchild, that is. Mr. Trump wouldn't help cut the ad, but has left a statement "reminding" us that he's "responsible" for creating the COVID vaccines, a "reminder" that'll come as a surprise to those scientists who actually created it. How can people who strut around about their own manliness support this whiny-ass baby? Oh, wait: that question answers itself.

Mississippi Governor signs bill preventing transgender girls from competing in girls' sports. I've said it before and I'll say it again: anyone who thinks a boy will become a girl just to get an advantage in sports doesn't understand boys or girls, and not just because all transgender folk face the distinct possibility that someone'll kick the crap out of them: what boy becomes a girl to beat girls at sports and still gets to hang out and talk trash about girls with her buddies?

Finally, some good news: Iowa jury acquits Des Moines Register reporter Andrea Sahouri of "failure to disperse" and "interference with official acts" charges stemming from her coverage of a Black Lives Matter protest in 2020. Give Ms. Sahouri props for refusing to take a guilty plea on one of the misdemeanor charges and instead seeing this thing through to the bitter end -- and winning. And n.b. that the arresting officer's failure (or perhaps "failure"?) to properly preserve body camera evidence wound up figuring heavily in the verdict.

Action: concerning taxes, internet access, whistleblowing, and pollution.

Chye-Ching Huang at the New York Times proposes a way for President Biden to fund his dream infrastructure bill: simply restore our IRS's ability to collect the taxes big money earners avoid paying! This is a wonderful idea, and not just because our IRS didn't collect some $570 billion in unpaid taxes in 2019, and may face a "tax gap" of $7.5 trillion over the next decade: frankly, if you owe money to our government, you owe it to the American people, and you shouldn't short your friends and neighbors. But our government has enabled this noxious behavior by pointedly underfunding our IRS. It should be hard to argue against "making big money earners pay the taxes they already owe," but in these times, we have to get One Real True and Great President Joe Manchin on board; his phone number is 202.224.3954. He wants that infrastructure bill "paid for," but every dollar in IRS funding brings back $6 in unpaid taxes, per our Treasury Department, so, hey, this could help us meet his goal of getting that bill "paid for." And, hey, we're all about helping people reach their goals!

With the departure of Ajit Pai, our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) is short one commissioner, meaning it only has four, and it's hard to break ties with four -- and since two Commissioners are Democrats and two are Republicans, you're going to have a lot of ties. It's not such a great time for that, though, since millions of good Americans don't have reliable internet access and have never needed it more -- how many millions of kids are going to school over the internet again? How many folks are trying to sign up online for a vaccine as we speak? How many big telecom corporations are imposing data caps to squeeze more money out of good Americans, again, during a pandemic? Hence both Battle for the Net and Demand Progress help you tell our President to nominate an FCC Commissioner who will support good internet policy, and tell your Senators to confirm said individual. And let's have one who'll help establish a net neutrality policy like the Open Internet Order of 2015; maybe you haven't noticed the loss of net neutrality, but like the proverbial frog in a boiling pot, you're not supposed to notice it until it's too late. So we need a good 5th Commissioner.

Meanwhile, S. 409, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (or CFTC) Fund Management Act, would increase funding for whistleblowers who expose wrongdoing in the bankster sector of our economy; the Dodd-Frank law of 2010 created the whistleblower program, but Congress hasn't effectively funded the program in years, and it's about to run out of money. And S. 409's lead sponsor, Iowa's Chuck Grassley, is a Republican; one Republican and two Democrats join him as co-sponsors, and you'd hate to think our Senate would smother this bill in its crib merely because it's actually bipartisan. Regardless, whistleblowers deserve compensation for the law-breaking they find, and don't think some of those guys are making stuff up just so they can steal money themselves -- whistleblowers can count on getting blacklisted and threatened if they come forward, so the number of "frivolous" whistleblower complaints is not only quite small, but, ah, handled by circumstances. The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to help protect whistleblowers by passing the CFTC Fund Management Act.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: our Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) has proposed a rule that would cut methane emissions and other pollutants from oil and gas drilling -- a big deal in a big fracking state like Pennsylvania -- but contains a rather important loophole that a lot of frackers will try to drive a Mack truck through: it would excuse "low-producing" wells from the rule. Maybe that seems logical to you: how much can a "low-producing well" pollute, after all? Problem isn't how much one pollutes, but how much they all pollute all together! Turns out more than half of all methane emissions coming from fossil-fuel operations in the Keystone state come from "low-producing" wells, so the proposed rule wouldn't keep as many pollutants out of our air and water as we'd like. And you can just imagine some big drilling operation deciding to evade regulatory scrutiny entirely by drilling only "low-producing" wells! Hey, if I thought of it, you know they have. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell our DEP to close the "low-producing well" loophole in its proposal to cut methane emissions.

Around the table: for the 494th time, bipartisanship with Republicans is impossible!

What if Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's endless demands for adjournment, which delayed the vote on the COVID relief bill, comprise more than some stupid game or rage-stoking exercise? After all, now some 40 Republicans, in voting against Ms. Greene's endless motions to adjourn for the day, can claim to have "supported" the bill even though they all voted against it in the end! It's almost like that was the whole idea. You watch: they'll say they "voted for it" in their re-election campaign ads next year, and Democrats will be caught flat-footed again, even though I offer all this advice for free.

Sen. Mike Lee (E-UT) claims that the recently House-passed bill H.R. 1, the For the People Act, "was written and held by the devil himself." So, to sum: requiring paper ballots is "written by the devil"? National automatic and same-day voter registration is "written by the devil"? Disclosing the names of big campaign donors? Preventing state legislatures from gerrymandering Congressional seats? Ending the practice of de-registering minority voters without even a good-faith effort to establish that they've really moved? All "written by the devil"? Gosh, Sen. Lee, dramatic much?

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) is catching a lot of flak for failing to call for Gov. Cuomo's resignation over sexual harassment allegations when she was the first to call for ex-Sen. Franken's resignation over same, and, without defending Mr. Franken's actions, Ms. Gillibrand did call for Mr. Franken's resignation after hearing a whole lot fewer allegations. Folks who think maybe the Democrats helped run Al Franken out of town because he was good at being Senator now have a lot more to go on. I mean, Mr. Cuomo isn't particularly good at being Governor -- he's just good at looking like he's good at being Governor.

New York City apartment dweller, hunting down a mysterious draft in her bathroom, finds an entire unoccupied (and unrenovated) two-floor apartment behind her mirror. Naturally I was immediately reminded of J.G. Ballard's short story "Billennium," whose characters desperately search for living spaces larger than 38 square feet on a planet with 20 billion people. And Mr. Ballard, being a creature of the mid-20th century, may not have foreseen folks paying thousands of dollars monthly for New York apartments in which its inhabitants feel not all that less compressed than those in "Billennium"'s cubicles.

Finally, Charlie Cook's a pretty good political analyst, but I think he's completely full of soup to claim that President Biden will face some kind of political reckoning because he didn't reach out to Republicans enough during negotiations over his big COVID relief bill. How many times must I tell these pimps! Republicans won't work with you! You either do their will or they try to destroy you! You do not work with people who will not work! Thus, when I read that "Biden may have, in the early moments of his term, crippled his ability to do grand bargains," I am compelled to respond: we can only hope!

Action: concerning diplomacy, monopolies, trophy hunting, and abortion access.

President Biden did run on a diplomacy-first foreign policy, and though one could easily say he broke that promise when he ordered a missile attack on Syria, we could compel him to renew that promise by telling our Congressfolk to pass S. 434, the Iran Diplomacy Act, as Peace Action helps us do. Contra what you've heard from Trump votaries still unable to admit they made a grievous error in supporting the man -- I have no sympathy for them, of course, since admitting your mistakes builds character -- the Iran nuclear deal was achieving its aim (i.e., of keeping Iran from developing nuclear weapons) until Donald Trump withdrew the United States from it because IRANZ IZ TEH BADZ!!!!!! Seriously, if he explained it better than that, he must have only done so to the mirror. Of course, when someone good at being evil comes along -- cough Tom Cotton cough -- we won't be able to avoid war with Iran very easily, unless we've already got the Iran nuclear deal back in place and it's continued to work for a couple of years. Do good works and you inspire people; sustain good works and you make evil works a lot harder.

Meanwhile, Roots Action helps you tell our U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights to break up Amazon. Not just because half of all online commerce goes through Amazon -- and half is far too big a market share, frankly -- but because Amazon has driven so many businesses small and large out of business (I, for one, think a world without Encore Books is a rather smaller world). The Roots Action petition -- a DIY campaign created by a user named Vahid R. -- explains further: Amazon's monopoly status enables it to treat its employees badly, bully its business partners, and reach out and monopolize other sectors of the economy. We all worried that Amazon would eventually monopolize grocery stores when it bought Whole Foods, but it's already done worse than that in cloud computing, where it currently controls about a third of the market, more than its next two major competitors combined. Politicians like to make a show of being mad about big tech, but if we stay silent about monopolists, they won't do anything about it.

In other news, Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to restore the ban on importing trophy animals like elephants. You may recall this being an issue of some notoriety in late fall of 2017, after a photo of one of his offspring sporting a bloody elephant tail went viral on social media, and Mr. Trump actually delayed his plan to reverse the ban -- for nearly four months! Hey, shame doesn't work as well on everyone! And generally we should avoid electing the people most immune to it! In any case, Mr. Trump did follow through on reversing the ban before spring had sprung in 2018, so now it's time to remind our Congressfolk that even though elephants aren't "endangered" in America per se, they are pretty obviously endangered in Africa (i.e., where you'd go to get hunting trophies), where their numbers have sunk from 10 million to less than half a million. And, hey, if you got to know an elephant -- they mimic you, they mourn their dead, they adapt to change, they work together toward common goals -- you'd never hunt one down and cut its tail off just to show everyone what big balls you have.

Finally, the ACLU helps you tell our President to lift unnecessary restrictions on abortion. Specifically, you'd ask President Biden to lift the in-person restriction on getting mifepristone (which, when used in tandem with either misoprostol or gemeprost, induces medical abortion) and instruct our FDA to review all of the restrictions it's put on the drug. Our FDA requires that folks pick up mifepristone in person, which sucks during a pandemic, but also sucks at other times, because Jesus Mary and Joseph you can get Xanax delivered through the mail, so there's no reason you can't get mifepristone through the mail, either. Not to pile on, but if you're poorer, getting the drug through the mail might be your best option. Maybe Mr. Biden -- being personally opposed to abortion but unwilling to tell everyone else how to feel about it, which closely resembles my position on the matter -- thinks being pro-choice but letting our FDA restrict access to mifepristone is a "compromise." But there is no compromise possible with right-wingers, certainly not on abortion. At least not publicly! Ask Scott DesJarlais what I could mean by that.

Finally for-real-this-time, our House didn't vote on the COVID relief bill yesterday, but they'll likely vote on it today, so give your House Reps a call and tell them to pass it, even if you called them yesterday.

Around the table: when is an audit not an audit? And other urgent questions.

Steven Rosenfeld reports on Arizona Republicans' efforts to "audit" the 2020 Presidential race, and if I put "audit" in quotation marks it's because -- and stop me if you've heard this before! -- it sure seems like Republicans want unqualified people to perform this task so they'll "find" more "suspicious" activity. If by some miracle they do the audit right and don't get the result they want -- which is exactly what'll happen if they do it right! -- they'll promptly forget they even did it, and demand another one like they never did one in the first place. Hey, I thought of it, and I'm not very good at being evil.

Michelle Nijhuis writes about being "On the Frontlines of the Battle to Preserve the American West." It's a good introduction to land conservation policy in America, and it also recounts her brief 1990 encounter with the scion of the Bundy family (no, not that one), who thought keeping his cattle away from endangered tortoises was just too big a cross for him to bear. The Bundys' career since then has veered rather past "this land is my land" and more toward "if I can't have it, nobody can."

Surprise, surprise, Stockton, CA finds that giving relatively low-income folks an extra $500 a month actually prompts them to get more work. You will not have difficulty explaining this finding: if you get a little breathing room, you're more likely to consider your situation a bit more lucidly, and take calculated risks to make yourself happier, whereas if you're running to stand still, you're more likely to stay in a bad situation because you feel you have no choice. In any case, a basic income sure does sound like a better use of taxpayer money than corporate welfare.

Hard to believe, Harry, but Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) "Decided Pandemic Was Perfect Time to Buy and Not Disclose Stocks," to the tune of $120,000 or less, and while Kelly Loeffler might call that chump change, it's likely more than you or I have at our disposal. Next time someone tells you Dan Crenshaw is a "straight-talker" or something, this will remind you that he's just like all the others.

Here, at last, some polling out of Arizona that might embarrass Kyrsten Sinema, if she's capable of embarrassment: 61% of respondents say it's more important to pass good legislation than to preserve the filibuster -- including 66% of independents and 42% of Republicans -- while only 26% would keep the filibuster at the expense of the legislation. Why, that sounds like actual bipartisanship to me! And, as usual, you only find actual bipartisanship among voters, not politicians. Would it be piling on to note that you can't even sustain a filibuster with 26%? No, it would not.

In a related note, Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg says getting rid of the filibuster would be a "terrible" idea. He says forcing minorities to talk through a filibuster "would be a good way for the minority party to develop new stars and get plenty of TV coverage and the campaign donations that can come from it," but that statement ignores the simple fact that Republicans have no ideas worth hearing and talking for 72 hours in a row would expose that intellectual paucity pretty quickly, particularly in the social media era. And noting that Senators didn't filibuster all that often when they actually did have to talk their way through it actually undercuts his whole argument. I'm beginning to feel like that was a waste of time, and I suspect the good heart of anyone who wastes my time these days.

Finally, at the risk of sounding all inside-baseball, the Democratic National Campaign Committee (or DNCC) will no longer blacklist consultants who work on insurgent campaigns that challenge incumbents in primaries. Wow, this is like something winners would do! Though Rep. Jim Costa (D?-CA) sure sounds less like a winner and more like a whiner in his disagreement. "We're supposed to be a team"? Only when he wins, I guess.

Action: concerning COVID relief, endangered species, paycheck fairness, and corruption investigations.

Our House may vote on the Senate-passed COVID relief bill as early as today, so now's the best time to call your House Reps and tell them to pass it. (The Senate amended the bill somewhat, and stripped out the $15/hour minimum wage at our Senate Parliamentarian's direction, so our House has to vote on it again.) Now it's not quite the bill our House passed the first time, and even without our Senate Parliamentarian's ruling, I'm pretty sure Sens. Manchin and Sinema would still have acted like they got 81 million votes for President and Vice-President and shot it down. But the bill still does a lot of good works, and I don't just mean stimulus checks, an unemployment benefit expansion running for most of the rest of the year, and actual assistance for states, localities, and folks who can't pay their rent and utilities. I also mean expanded food stamps and expanded EITC and CTC tax credits, which latter item will result (per the Coalition on Human Needs) in the equivalent of a 29% raise for the bottom 20% of working families. And I also mean help for multiemployer pension plans and tax-free student loan relief through 2025. These are all good works, and worth your support; now's not the time to let the perfect murder the good.

Meanwhile, President Biden's rolled back a lot of former President Trump's noxious Executive Orders, but he hasn't rolled back endangered species-related orders yet, so WildEarth Guardians helps you tell our President to use his power to protect endangered species. Specifically, you'd ask President Biden to roll back Trumpian orders allowing developers to injure more endangered species' habitats, tell federal agencies to take climate change into account when listing endangered species and protecting habitats, and instruct our U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to be more proactive in evaluating endangered species generally. I'm not sure what objections reasonable folks could have to any of these, unless "I want big fossil fuel CEOs to make more money" counts as a "reasonable objection." (Spoiler alert: it does not.) You'll also advocate that Mr. Biden work to pass the PAW and FIN Act into law, once Congress re-introduces that bill; the PAW and FIN Act, as you may remember, would prohibit our government from considering "economic factors" of endangered-species regulations, since, as you know, when an endangered species dies, it's gone forever, and squeezing money out of a species' death is an offense before God. I mean, doesn't it sound like one?

In other news, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7/S. 205, the Paycheck Fairness Act. As you know, the Paycheck Fairness Act would give women more tools to fight the pay inequities that have, sadly, become their lot in life -- Census data from 2018 tell us that women still make 82 cents for every dollar a man makes, and that number should be one dollar for every dollar a man makes. No use complaining that qualifications and experience account for the gap, not when bosses go out of their way to deny women the chance to demonstrate those qualifications and accumulate that experience in the first place! Seriously, don't describe the world as if it's the only world that could possibly exist. And don't believe the hype that the bill would make it illegal to pay women differently for having fewer qualifications, because Sec. 3(a) of the bill directly refutes that claim. Certainly don't believe the hype that the bill would be a "boon for trial lawyers," as if the phrase "trial lawyer" is some kind of epithet, like "big corporate CEO." If big corporations would just do the right thing in the first place, as our parents all taught us to do, then we wouldn't need so many trial lawyers, would we?

Finally, MoveOn helps you tell our Department of Justice to investigate allegations that former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao abused her office for private gain. Is this a mere attempt at political retaliation against Mitch McConnell's wife? No, it is not, or else we wouldn't have a 44-page report from a federal Inspector General detailing allegations that Ms. Chao used her office to promote her father's shipping corporation, the Foremost Group. Certainly they were Foremost on her mind! The IG report alleges that she used the Transportation Department to update her father's Wikipedia page, promote his public appearances, and even arrange a trip for him and her sister to China. Possibly we'll find that she did nothing wrong (or, more likely, that she was clever about not actually breaking the law), but the previous Administration (which, ah, employed her as Treasury Secretary) didn't even try to investigate the IG's findings. Also, you know, let things like these go and they'll keep happening. Personal to those morons who'd retort THENZ LETZ INVESTIGATEZ TEH HUNTERZ BIDENZ!!!!!!: uh, that's already happening. Most of us have found that paying attention to the world is the best way to learn about it.

Around the table: the whackjobs have always been with us! And other necessary reminders.

Rick Perlstein and Edward H. Miller at The New Republic remind us that right-wing whackjobs have always been an integral part of the right-wing counter-revolution of recent decades. Like you, I did know about a lot of the things this article discusses (the John Birch Society, R.J. Rushdoony, William F. Buckley, Jr.'s own virulent racism), but I did not know about a lot of other things that have eerie contemporary parallels. Does laetrile remind you of hydroxychloroquine? Do the Birchian "Insiders" remind you of the Trumpian "Deep State"? Do Jerry Falwell's gay child-recruitment fever dreams remind you of QAnon's child-sex ring? Does the "SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL POLICE" '70s bumper sticker remind you of today's Thin Blue Line flag? It's breathtaking, and more than a little consoling, to have all of this evidence in one place. Seriously, this is if-you-read-one-article-this-year territory here.

David Swanson reminds us why President Biden does not require a new "authorization to use military force" (or AUMF). Some folks would find most of the six reasons described herein to be "naive" -- some people are so proud of their cynicism, but cynicism is evil, and our Bible lists pride as the first of the seven deadlies -- but, really, the fact that our Constitution gives Congress, not our President, the authority to declare war should be enough. Even if it is also true that "(y)ou do not end wars by authorizing wars" and "(a)nyone who’d seen the damage done by recent wars would not authorize another goddamned thing" -- and, hate to pile on, that "(w)ar is illegal."

Sonali Kolhatkar reminds us "Why Big Pharma Shouldn’t Have Any Control Over COVID-19 Vaccines." "Because taxpayers pay for vaccine development" and "because governments have to force Big Pharma to do the right thing" are the two most obvious reasons, with "big corporations turn good people against each other" lurking underneath, as always. Ms. Kolhatkar's aptly renders the travails of "vaccine hunters" -- who often find themselves in long lines trying to score "leftover" doses -- as the "vaccine Hunger Games."

Ho hum, the New York Times slams the Brazilian "Car Wash" judicial scandal -- in which a candidate for President got thrown in jail right before an election, thus enabling the ascension of that irredeemable asshole, Jair Bolsonaro -- without examining its own shoddy reporting about the matter over the years. As with the Iraq War-era Downing Street memos -- which our "liberal" media downplayed because "everyone knew" what was in them, though everyone certainly didn't know about what was in them from "liberal" media reporting! -- now the Times claims "it has long been known" that Brazilian Judge Sergio Moro acted unethically and illegally, but you sure didn't "know" about it from the Times! That's some real Orwellian stuff, right there. (Hate to pile on, but "it has long been known"? When you use the passive voice, you might as well hang a sign around your neck saying "I am hiding something from you.")

When you confront Sen. Lindsey Graham's latest attempt to describe his relationship with Donald Trump, you wonder how anyone could spew forth such word salad and still keep getting re-elected. I mean, his rationalizations aren't just stupid, they're obviously stupid, and Ms. Levin correctly says they "sound() like someone rationalizing staying with their abuser." Of course, you probably already know why folks like Lindsey Graham keep getting re-elected: when national Democrats won't use their power for good, any gibbering idiot can get elected on the Republican ticket, and a lot of them make Lindsey Graham sound like a Mensa member, just as Lindsey Graham surely made his forebears sound a lot better back in 1994. That only means we have to stay on our elected leaders, especially now that they probably think that once this COVID relief bill passes, they won't have to work for the next two years.

Finally, Sen. Joe Manchin (D?-WV) says he won't allow Democrats to use budget reconciliation to pass an infrastructure bill, since he's sure he can get at least 10 Republicans to sign on to one and "I am not going to get on a bill that cuts them out completely before we start trying" to talk to them. He sure does enjoy being Thee One Real True and Great American President, doesn't he? But here's the real question: why would anyone want to talk to Congressional Republicans? They block even the mildest reforms, they manufacture the most absurd outrages, and hello! They just tried to overturn the 2020 election, with violence. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Republicans may have 50 Senators, but as far as I'm concerned, they have zero.

Action: concerning free speech, voting rights, the wealth tax, and discrimination.

Kentucky's state legislature aims to take up SB 211, which would, dig this, hand out a jail sentence of up to three months for anyone who "accosts, insults, taunts, or challenges a law enforcement officer with offensive or derisive words," or indulges in "gestures or other physical contact that would have a direct tendency to provoke a violent response from the perspective of a reasonable and prudent person." Gosh, you'd never know there were assault laws on the books! Also, what a bunch of snowflakes, the people who wrote this bill. They are Sen. Danny Carroll (R-2), whom you may reach at 502.564.8100, ext. 712, and Sen. Michael J. Nemes (R-38), whom you may reach at the same phone number, ext. 662. For a retired police officer, Sen. Carroll sure seems to have quite a thin skin -- apparently he can't spell "your" correctly when under pressure. Maybe he learned that at Donald Trump's knee! Anyway, I'm sick and tired of people who try to turn all free speech they don't like into "violence" and everyone who protests racism into a criminal. I'm so old-fashioned I think we should only treat protestors as criminals if they, you know, do something criminal. Like try to stage a coup to nullify the results of the 2020 election! And Danny Carroll sounds like the kind of guy who'd make excuses for those folks.

Meanwhile, Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act, and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, whenever that gets introduced again. Yesterday was the 56th anniversary of the day Mr. Lewis nearly got himself beaten to death leading civil rights marchers across the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama; not too long thereafter, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, which our Supreme Court blew a hole in with its Shelby County v. Holder ruling, which asserted, essentially, that the Voting Rights Act discriminated against certain Southern states by pre-clearing voting law changes from those states. The Voting Rights Advancement Act named for Mr. Lewis would address that assertion by letting our Justice Department pre-clear voting law changes from any state or locality that has demonstrated a record of suppressing votes. And I've listed most of the good things about the For the People Act many times, but the bill would also mandate paper ballots and institute such conditions on "interstate crosscheck"-type systems -- i.e., actually making states match full names and Social Security numbers -- that no enterprising vote suppressor will bother with them. So give your Congressfolk what-for, and don't brook any stupidity.

In other news, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 1459/S. 510, the Ultra-millionaire Tax Act. The bill would impose what's commonly knowns as a "wealth tax" by imposing a 2% annual tax on net wealth over $50 million, and that rate would go up to 3% on wealth over $1 billion. (Folks with, say, $1.5 billion in net worth would pay 2% on net worth between $50 million and $1 billion and 3% on that $500 million of wealth over $1 billion. Too many politicians and "liberal" media members pretend not to understand how tax brackets work, which is why I feel compelled to explain it all the time.) The wealth tax could raise as much as $300 billion annually, which in the context of a $4 trillion annual budget is not exactly chump change. And the bill would also invest $100 billion to hire and train IRS workers -- who, as you know, tend to go after little tax avoiders rather than big ones because they don't have the resources to go after the big ones! -- and impose a 40% "exit tax" on rich folks who renounce their citizenship so they can avoid paying taxes here. These would all be good works, but our Congressfolk won't do them, unless we make it impossible for them not to do them. Like civilized people -- not like Trumpholes who think violence is OK if it feels right.

Finally, People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to pass the H.R. 5, the Equality Act, which our House passed last week. Unlike the COVID relief bill and the For the People Act, the Equality Act actually got three Republican votes! Why, it's a veritable explosion of bipartisanship! Of course, when Republicans refuse to do anything but stoke rage and give corporate welfare to their big donors, no "bipartisanship" is possible, a fact I presume makes Joe Biden sadder than it does me. In any case, don't believe the rubbish about the bill "attacking religious freedoms," because you do not have a "religious" freedom to fire someone because they're gay, or deny a transgender person a loan. Even Justice Gorsuch said the Civil Rights Act prohibits workplace discrimination of gay and transgender folks because, hey, discriminating against them is obviously discriminating against them "on the basis of sex"! So, yeah, don't believe that, and also don't believe the rubbish that passing the Equality Act would "injure women's sports." Anyone who thinks a boy would change into a girl just to get an athletic advantage doesn't know the first thing about boys. Or life.

Around the table: it's the COVID relief bill follies!

Sen. Joe Manchin (D?-WV) flexes his muscle as the One True Great American President of Bipartisanship by spending 10 hours securing cuts to enhanced unemployment benefits in the COVID relief bill. Mr. Manchin will lose his 2024 re-election effort by 20 points no matter what he does, but I'm gobsmacked that more politicians don't see that cutting unemployment benefits is a stupid political calculation, particularly for a Democrat, from whom voters (for better and worse) expect more. I had hoped he'd be satisfied with Neera Tanden's head on a plate, but I was wrong. I'm starting to think my optimism is a fault, not a strength.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D?-AZ) brought a chocolate cake to the Senate -- supposedly to help out staffers who'd been up all night working on the relief bill -- before nixing Sen. Sanders's amendment to put the $15/hour minimum wage back in the bill. She may not have literally said "let them eat cake," but gosh, what a bad look, and I find her story wanting, too -- is cake what you want when you've been up working all night? Does nobody do chicken and waffles in D.C. anymore? (In a related note, I hope the sight of her incomprehensibly swaggering thumbs-down vote to that $15/hour minimum wage amendment launches a thousand memes. You have to have the presence of mind not to look like that when you're denying higher pay to over 40 percent of American workers. Hate to pile on, but Kyrsten Sinema is supposedly one of the Democrats' most disciplined messagers.)

Olivia Goldhill at STAT catches Florida's government giving COVID vaccines meant for rural black residents to rich white ones. No, you can't explain this away by saying "black people hate vaccines," not when black folks make up 18% of Palm Beach County but only 4% of vaccine recipients; go ahead and blame Gov. DeSantis's decision to let the Publix supermarket chain (whose owners donate bigly to his campaigns, naturally) administer the vaccines, because guess which supermarket chain doesn't have stores in places like Pahokee and Belle Glade. Also, he apparently decided not to tell any locals the vaccinations were happening.

From John Logan at TruthOut we learn that Amazon spends $10,000 daily just on consultants who help them keep unions out of their warehouses. Gosh, they're rolling in money during this pandemic, more than just about any other corporation; can't they do something better with all that money? See, when we say "corporations should make as much money as possible because they'll do more good," we have to remember that if you give them too much money, they'll spend it consolidating their power, and that's why we taxed them at 55% during the Eisenhower years. And don't believe Amazon's PR hype. We've delivered millions of meals to people in need! Meaning, gosh, every person who lost their job because of the pandemic got maybe one sandwich? (As an aside, dig the union-busting consultant who claims unions "demonize consultants," like it's some kind of big lift for Americans to demonize consultants.)

Kentucky state legislators, knowing the state's Governor is a Democrat and sensing that Sen. McConnell might not be in the best of health, are scrambling to change state laws so that if Mr. McConnell retires or dies, his seat can easily stay in Republican hands. They say none of that has anything to do with it, of course, but we're not schmucks, and it's telling that "letting good Kentuckians fill the seat via a special election" is lower on their wish list than making Gov. Beshear pick from a list of three Republican names. What do they have to be afraid of? That Charles Booker might actually win a Senate race in the state that killed Breonna Taylor? (As an aside, I'm pretty sure Nick Storm thoroughly enjoyed writing that Mr. McConnell recovered from polio as a youth "with his mother's persistence.")

Finally, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, now the biggest asshole among world chiefs-of-state with Donald Trump out of power, tells his citizens to "stop whining" about things like spikes in cases and record death numbers and lack of vaccines. Even worse, he says "we need a solution" to the pandemic with no apparent awareness that maybe good Brazilians are looking to their fucking President to lead them toward a "solution." At any rate, we must remind too many folks that there is in fact a profound difference between whining about things like "cancel culture" and "whining" about your own government -- which belongs to you and should work on your behalf -- leaving you to die.

Around the table: right-wingers create more drama! And other total non-surprises.

My fellow liberals have made much of a Republican lawyer arguing, before our Supreme Court, that Republicans need certain Arizona vote suppression laws to correct a "competitive disadvantage" with Democrats, but I suspect the right-wing Justices were trying to elicit precisely that argument, so they could claim it's really "not about racism" and wash their hands of laws that just-so-happen to injure a political party. I'd lay money that this will be Justice Barrett's first big majority opinion.

Lest we forget, ProPublica reminds us that Georgia election workers faced a crapload of threats from wrath-addled morons this past year, but law enforcement has made very few arrests. ProPublica also reminds us that too many rumors of "election fraud" get started by people who don't know what they're looking at -- and I suspect the Trump campaign sought out election observers who wouldn't know what they were looking at, because they knew it would create more drama. What else can losers do, after all, but create drama?

Remember how I said the "arguments" against the Equality Act were all hysterical hypotheticals? Sadly, our "liberal" media also seems to prefer hysterical hypotheticals in their reporting, such as it is, on the Equality Act, to the point where right-wingers whining about the unlikeliest locker-room scenarios get a lot of ink and the struggles of gay and transgender folks get hardly any. Why, you would never know the legislation affects them! And one more time: do you have a "religious" right to refuse someone a loan or housing because they're gay? No, you do not.

When I see Fox News spend an entire day whining about "Dr. Seuss being cancelled," I'm reminded that, again, right-wingers create drama because they can't win arguments on the merits. I mean, Dr. Seuss's estate decided to stop putting out the offending books without any mandates or boycotts! You'd think small-government conservatives would applaud! It's the market at work! Also, too, why does a putatively objective news organization adopt Donald Trump's tropes? They say "cancel culture" not just like anyone else outside of the right-wing whinesphere is saying it, but like they thought of it, not him!

You could make too much of eight Democratic Senators opposing Sen. Sanders's effort to reattach the $15/hour minimum wage to the COVID relief bill -- exactly one of them is up for re-election in 2022 (Maggie Hassan's going to have a harder race than she thinks, though!), and they can all describe their opposition as an adherence to Senate procedure or rocking the boat during a pandemic, though those excuses sure do have expiration dates, and they ain't far off. You know what would be the best thing for them to do politically? Pass the $15/hour minimum wage! Ultimately it's up to us to make it impossible for them to do otherwise.

Finally, in a truly breathtaking turn of events, Donald Trump calls Karl Rove a "RINO," or "Republican In Name Only," and demands Fox News fire him. Never mind that the same people who whine about "cancel culture" want Fox News to literally cancel Karl Rove -- I'm old enough to remember when Karl Rove turned the Republican Party into a bullying, fact-hating party, and now he's not good enough for the guy who took bullying and fact-hating to another level! If I were more (less?) spiritually-advanced, I guess I'd find that funny.