Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning voting rights, Medicare-for-All, corruption, Social Security, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to secure voting rights, enact a Medicare-for-All health insurance system, ban Congressional stock ownership, reject Andrew Biggs's nomination to our Social Security Advisory Board, and confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to protect our right to vote in America. Yeah, they've already refused to pass voting rights reform legislation several times -- or, more precisely, refused to get rid of the filibuster so they can pass it without Republican votes -- but that only means we keep telling them and telling them and telling them until they have no choice but to do our will. Best also to let them know that their love of the filibuster is horseshit. How do we know? Because they had a chance to enact a compromise -- force Senators to actually talk through their filibuster like in the old days -- and they wouldn't do that, either.

National Nurses United helps you tell your Senators to enact a Medicare-for-All health insurance system. Last week I described how Medicare for All would save good Americans money, but I should also describe how the privatized health insurance system costs us money: by putting up bureaucratic roadblocks to care that end up being rationalizations to deny care -- you think anyone in a single-payer country knows what a referral is? -- and also, of course, by jacking up the cost of medicine like (most famously) EpiPen and insulin. These are life-saving drugs, so big corporations can charge whatever they want, and you just have to pay it! Wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to do that?

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6678/S. 3631, the Ban on Congressional Stock Ownership Act, which would prevent members of Congress from owning stocks. Back in February, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (E-GA), who has on occasion tried to cast herself as someone who's against all these stupid wars we fight, bought somewhere up to $15,000 of Lockheed Martin stock a mere two days before Russia invaded Ukraine, and I would think folks naive if they thought she did that blindly. And she's far from the worst offender in Congress! Now, this bill has actual bipartisan support, but isn't moving very quickly; couldn't be that they're hoping we don't know anything about it, could it? Too late!

Civic Shout helps you tell your Senators to reject the nomination of one Andrew Biggs to our Social Security Advisory Board. Why? Easy: no one who wants to privatize Social Security should serve on the board of Social Security. Why, putting him on the Social Security Advisory Board would be like putting insurrectionists on the January 6 Committee! You know, for "balance." Just as there is no possible "balance" between freedom and fascism, there is no possible "balance" between Social Security and those who'd privatize it. Every time the stock market dips from now on, just ask a Republican: aren't you glad we didn't privatize Social Security like you wanted to do?

Finally, More Perfect Union helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner already. How do we know she'd do a good job? You know, besides the fact that she worked on our FCC's net neutrality order from 2016? Because the Fraternal Order of Police (who asked them? Big money did!) has campaigned against Ms. Sohn for her support of end-to-end encryption; they're afraid end-to-end encryption will keep them from doing their jobs. Jesus Mary and Joseph all they need to do is get warrants! Encryption won't save criminals from warrants; it could save us from government spying, though. Seems to me we'd want more anti-spying people in our government.

Around the table: in which someone actually proposes saddling all elections with an Electoral College.

This FactCheck article does a pretty good job summarizing our recent baby formula issues. I'm reminded that when you hear "should immigrant babies get formula before American babies?" that a better question would be: so babies don't deserve formula merely because they're immigrants? And if the answer is "well, not before our babies do," then ask why the Greatest Nation on Earth should have to choose. Marcus Aurelius would shake his head at all of that.

Colorado Republican gubernatorial candidate wants to bring the Electoral College to Colorado statewide elections! Why a man would think "doing away with the popular vote for statewide elected officials" is a winning message is a bit of a mystery. If he were to somehow succeed in this nefarious plan, I can't say for sure our Supreme Court would strike it down, even though precedent commands it. Perhaps Sam Alito would say one-person-one-vote isn't a deeply-rooted enough right.

An anti-price-gouging bill aimed at oil corporations -- not the Windfall Profits Tax Act, but not a bad bill -- barely passed the House, with four House Democrats joining all Republicans in voting against it. Naturally Democrat anti-bill arguments were all hostage-taking: if we fight price-gouging, what will we do when we need more oil later? Why, you could argue against almost anything that way! If we put this CEO in jail for butchering his secretary and drinking her blood and eating the flesh from her bones, what'll we do when we need his leadership later? Of course, a truly great nation wouldn't need to answer that, because a truly great nation would train its people up into greatness. Clearly we've failed there with folks like Rep. Kathleen Rice, last heard helping to scuttle efforts to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices.

Hamilton Nolan at In These Times tells us that the Amazon Labor Union victory in Staten Island, NY, requires organizers to recognize that "all of the time unions spend arguing with one another over who has the right to organize which workers, in which industry, at which company is one gargantuan waste of time." You'd think unions would already have thought of that, being on the ropes for the last 40-odd years as the share of union workers in the economy has dwindles from around 33% to around 10%, but then being on the ropes against an economy that seems to grow more diabolical by the day may make you inclined to cling to what you've been doing and tell yourself you just need to do it harder. Still, as Mr. Nolan says, "(b)uilding multi-union coalitions requires unions to recognize the futility of arguing over jurisdiction, and instead do the opposite: combine forces and organize without freaking out over who gets to put their label on the end product."

When I read David Brooks telling us that liberals need to stop looking down on right-wingers and pretending that only they have a monopoly on understanding right and wrong, I am tempted to replace the word "liberal" with the word "right-winger" everywhere in that op-ed and guess what? It works about as well that way; liberals certainly have no monopoly on believing their way is the only way. David Brooks apparently didn't hear any right-wingers calling Iraq war opponents traitors 20 years ago, let alone right-wingers constantly calling liberals weak since time immemorial, and that's the kind of blind spot that'll never help you ingratiate yourself with your new Democrat friends. (And those of us who do not imagine a wall between what Mr. Brooks calls the "moral freedom" ethos and the "you are not your own" ethos won't be persuaded, or even enriched, by the last 36 paragraphs. We certainly won't be convinced that the conservative worldview's "existential()...crisis" is a recent phenomenon. That carcass has been stinking up the joint for years.)

Finally, a right-winger actually tells Congress, under oath, that "places like Washington, D.C." use fetuses to power street lamps. As with right-wing efforts to call everyone who doesn't beat up a gay person a "groomer," I think legal remedies already exist to redress such absurdities. Never mind that she actually said that under oath; anyone can pretend they thought what they said was true as far as they "knew." No, someone with standing to sue needs to sue her -- someone with decision-making power in the D.C. utility grid, perhaps? And no, her saying "places like Washington, D.C." won't give her wiggle room; everyone knows what she meant. Playing whack-a-mole with these lies won't save us, but getting the liars to pay in a court of law might.

Action: concerning climate change, corruption, pollution, mine reclamation, and peaceful protests.

Long story short: tell Home Depot to stop using the Canadian boreal forest for its products, tell our government to investigate FDA corruption in re our baby formula shortage, tell our Army Corps of Engineers to examine pollution from pipelines more vigorously, tell President Biden to nominate a Director of the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, and tell the Washington Post to stop calling for the removal of peaceful protestors outside Supreme Court Justices' houses. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Environmental Action helps you tell Home Depot to stop sourcing its wood products from the Canadian boreal forest. Our reasoning is the same for our world's largest intact forest as it would be with the Amazon rainforest or the Tongass National Forest: old trees are our best weapon against climate change; they don't call them "the lungs of the planet" for nothing. Thus turning them into cabinets or toilet paper is, in this context, rather short-sighted. And if we can prompt the world's largest hardware store into abandoning logging in the forest, we'll likely get others to follow. If not, the Big Stick of Bad PR is always ready for deployment.

Progress America helps you tell our government to investigate our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) for its role in our current baby formula shortage. And I don't care what corruption at our FDA this uncovers! If you don't want to get shamed and shunned by your civilization, then don't hurt people. Chances are that investigators will find that the revolving door between industry and our FDA doesn't help us deal with food safety crises, and they might also find that our FDA has given established baby formula-manufacturing corporations too much of a free pass on safety inspections. That'd be a shame to learn that, but knowledge is power.

The Climate Reality Project helps you tell our Army Corps of Engineers to close the loopholes that big oil and gas drilling corporations use to evade scrutiny about the pollution their proposed pipelines cause. Specifically, we'll call for less "fast-tracking" of pipelines. We should be "fast-tracking" solar and wind projects, if we must "fast-track" anything at all! Yet big oil and gas drilling corporations constantly assert that their pipelines are "too urgent" to ensure they don't spew filth into our water tables. But no one will be sitting around a campfire in a hundred years saying we can't drink the water now, but at least CEOs made good money for a while!

The Sierra Club helps you tell President Biden to nominate a Director of the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement. We should blame our Senate for dragging their feet on confirming Mr. Biden's nominees, but this one's on our President, because he hasn't even put a name forward. The long name gives you the idea that this is some bureaucratic rando, but with all the coal mines closing up around America, reclaiming and repurposing that land becomes a lot more important, and someone's got to run things at the department that would do that work. And, ah, this is the kind of thing that actually helps potential Trump voters in Appalachia. So how about we do it?

Finally, FAIR helps you tell the Washington Post to stop calling for the repression of peaceful protesting outside of Supreme Court Justice's homes. They actually suggested these protestors were totalitarians! By suggesting that they were "(e)rasing any distinction between the public square and private life"! Key word there, of course, is any -- protesting outside of the private homes of public figures who have, very publicly, made known their opposition to the popular will does not erase literally "any" distinctions between public and private spheres. And, ah, who exactly "harassed" or "intimidated" these Justices? If anything, protestors have been too polite.

Around the table: in which we describe yet more foolish behavior.

Malia Jones at The Conversation advises that we stop obsessing about "risk assessment" in re COVID and return to risk reduction: "wearing masks, getting vaccinated and boosted, avoiding indoor crowds and improving ventilation." The last item often requires legislation (for public buildings) and/or shaming and shunning (for private buildings), but you have a lot more control over the first three items. Remember: you're better off trusting an actual epidemiologist on these matters than a social media "influencer."

Study reverses memory loss in aging mice by "washing" their brains in cerebrospinal fluid. The fluid apparently washes out waste products, bathes brain tissue in proteins, and boosts growth of myelin, the sheathing material that protects neurons. Needless to say no one's done this in humans yet, but if it works anywhere near as well as it did in mice, it could be a game-changer in treating dementia and similar conditions. I wish the researchers (from at least four nations!) the best in continuing their work. If only spinal fluid could wash out the memory of watching all those pricks on Fox News!

Find yourself cringing a bit that Spain has outlawed harassment of women who try to get abortions at clinics? The key word in that formulation is harassment -- you don't need to be that creative, of course, to exercise your right to free speech without actually harassing an individual. But I would have struck the words "annoying" or "offensive" from the list of proscribed behaviors -- let shame, not the law, handle that stuff; outlawing "intimidating or coercive acts" is justice enough. It'll all be moot in the United States, of course, once our Supreme Court rules there's no right to an abortion anymore.

When I hear that Elon Musk says he'll be voting entirely for Republicans this year because Democrats are "too much captured by the unions" which is to laugh, I can't help but think I might be using that information as a reason not to vote for Republicans! But in truth, we've got enough evil to which we can tie Republicans (book banning, immaturity about masks and vaccines, fear about confronting their own racism, and of course, January 6), and also Elon Musk just isn't as unpopular as other titans of industry such as Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg. At least, not yet.

Gov. Ron DeSantis (E-FL) has signed a bill that actually makes protesting in front of a private home illegal. How typical -- if someone, somewhere, is being an asshole, Ron DeSantis gets insanely jealous and tries to be an even bigger one. And where sane people see peaceful protestors, Mr. DeSantis sees only "angry mobs," which sure is rich coming from a man who obviously aspires to be a one-man angry mob. I'd say our Supreme Court would smack this down with a quickness, citing the precedent about protesting at abortion workers' homes, of course, though given how many good Americans have protested their houses lately, I'd just as soon expect the opposite -- which sure would be ironic, coming from a gang of jurists who've spent their lives devaluing other folks' lived experiences.

Finally, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says he opposes NATO membership for Finland and Sweden, and though I prefer not to resort to ad hominem arguments, if Mr. Erdogan's against it, that's a pretty good reason to be for it. And dig his reasoning! Finland and Sweden haven't "taken a clear stance against terror organizations"? I think everyone's taken a "clear stance" against "terror organizations," though we may disagree that the Kurdistan Workers’ Party actually is a "terror organization." Anyway, yammering on about "terror organizations" is what dictators do. We know Mr. Erdogan's a dictator not just by what he does, and not just by how easily he wins re-election these days, but by the fact that our former President has such a hard-on for him.

Action: concerning Iran, gas prices, drug addiction, our Supreme Court, and our past mistreatment of Native Americans.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to support the Iran nuclear deal, lower gas prices, and pass the MAT Act, the Judiciary Act, and the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Peace Action helps you tell your House Reps to support re-entry into the Iran nuclear deal. Congressfolk on both sides have shown a disquieting unwillingness to re-enter that deal, and for what? To appease Trumpholes? To "put distance" between them and President Biden? To gain imaginary and irrelevant leverage over Iran's Republican Guard? Gosh, how about doing the right thing for the right reason for once? The Iran nuclear deal was keeping Iran from developing nuclear weapons, but because Donald Trump decided to shit all over anything Barack Obama did that actually helped Americans, he took it away from us. And now Congress wants to make it harder to get it back? Tell them no.

Change.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to "protect Americans and keep gas prices low," because sometimes you gotta be simple and direct. And also sometimes because your Congressfolk are thick-headed because they only talk to each other and Beltway consultants! Recall Katie Porter telling us that her Democratic colleagues didn't talk about inflation because they didn't see anything about it in polling? The stupid is strong with some of our Reps and Senators! Anyway, if you want to deliver a more specific message -- like "pass H.R. 7061/S. 3802, the Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act, which would tax excessive oil corporation profits at 95%," you can add that to your signature.

People's Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1384/S. 445, the Mainstreaming Addiction Treatment (or MAT) Act. All this locking people up for using and abusing drugs, tell me: has that worked? No, it has not, by the evidence that far too many Americans are still addicted to drugs. The MAT Act would remove certain bureaucratic obstacles to prescribing certain narcotic drugs that treat addiction. "Removing certain bureaucratic obstacles" may be the argument that seems to have attracted a stunning 46 House Republican co-sponsors! But only three in the Senate, meaning the Mitch McConnell Obstruction Machine may yet roll over it. Unless we speak out in numbers they can't deny, of course.

Stand Up America helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2584, the Judiciary Act, which would increase the number of Supreme Court Justices from 9 to 13. I've been saying we need four more Justices to keep up with 13 federal Appeals Courts, but recent events have made the necessity of getting better Justices up there more urgent to me. And I'm sure it's even more urgent for the women and gays and transgender folks who would be directly affected by Sam Alito's made-up "deeply-rooted" doctrine. I'm able to imagine such a thing because I possess the quality of empathy, a quality today's Supreme Court Justices seem to suppress. Surely Joe Biden can find four more Justices who get what it's like to be human.

Finally, the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5444/S. 2908, the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act. Federal boarding schools aimed to "civilize" the Native American, but they separated families and abused students, which ain't exactly civilized behavior. Some folks will refer to this bill as an "apology tour" or "cancel culture" or whatnot, but admitting you've done wrong, and then righting that wrong, is about as American as America can be. Note well that the Quakers put out this action alert and the Quakers admit their own past wrongdoing in running more than two dozen boarding schools! That's how you do it.

Around the table: in which we identify the *real* extremists.

Surprise, surprise, an Anti-Defamation League study of 450 murders committed by domestic extremists in America (like the Buffalo murders earlier this week) concludes that right-wingers commit about 75% of them. (By their tabulation, Muslim extremists commit 20% and left-wing extremists commit a mere 4%.) "(T)he American political right has a violence problem that has no equivalent on the left," the article says, but that only means right-wingers will simply redefine "murder" until it includes things like not inviting right-wingers to your barbecues or shaming your right-wing father-in-law for watching Tucker Carlson. I've even heard right-wingers call such things "a kind of death"! You know what's "a kind of death"? Death.

Researchers at Brown University and Microsoft AI Health inform us that if every American adult had gotten vaccinated, we could have saved well over 300,000 lives. Against over 1 million dead, that's a sizable amount. An earlier Kaiser study put that number at 234,000 -- by not counting folks who'd died while vaccinated-but-not-boosted -- and I put more persuasive power in that figure, since not getting boosted was more likely not a matter of ideology. Still, that's more than one out of every five deaths. And the other side's argument is all waaaaaaah personal choice you can't tell me what to do stop the steal!

When I hear that "Online data could be used against people seeking abortions if Roe v. Wade falls" -- a perfectly explicable outcome, since most folks turn to the internet for information about reproductive health care! -- I am reminded that the FCC passed pretty good data privacy rules in 2016, but Congressional Republicans nullified them in 2017 with a quickness, because if it's an instance of government helping you, then Republicans must shit on it. Also too, law enforcement can search your cellphones without even getting a warrant because legislators either don't understand technology or go out of their way not to understand it because big campaign donors don't want them to.

Ho hum, Mississippi, the state that aims to end Roe v. Wade via its 15-week anti-abortion law, also just so happens to be the worst state in the Deep South for providing health insurance coverage to low-income women. Medicaid recipients get only 60 days' worth of post-partum care in Mississippi (though the Affordable Care Act allows expansion of that care to one year), though at least one study found that over 80% of post-partum health care costs come after 60 dats. Why, it's like that was the whole idea! I'd look for big corporations to pressure to pull out of Mississippi, but there ain't hardly any there to begin with; Republicans really are going to run that state into the ground, which will hurt all the good folks who live there.

Buried deep in this excellent Steven Rosenfeld piece about Pennsylvania's Republican nominee for Governor, Doug Mastriano is a description of the first Josh Shapiro attack ad against him, and it's like the ad's makers rolled up as much Democrat weakness as humanly possible into one ad, which you don't even know is an anti-Mastriano ad until the end! Look, here's how to attack Doug Mastriano: call him weak for refusing to accept the 2020 election results and doing his damnedest to overturn them. Republicans love wearing Democrat epithets, from "deplorable" all the way to "ultra-MAGA," as badges of honor; let's see Mr. Mastriano work that alchemy with the word "weak." I'd say I hope it makes him melt down in public, except that public melt-downs aren't the career-enders they used to be. Just ask our former screamer-in-chief, Donald Trump.

Finally, maybe the Buffalo shooter could evade any plagiarism charges Tucker Carlson might level against him, but the part of their collaborative work I can't stand is this anti-diversity argument from Mr. Carlson: "Can you think, for example, of other institutions such as, I don’t know, marriage or military units in which the less people have in common, the more cohesive they are?" Ahem: civilization is not a marriage or a military unit; these two institutions are parts of civilization, and insisting that the whole of civilization be exactly like any of its parts is small-minded. Even 15 years ago I thought Tucker Carlson was doing the best he could as a conservative; now I think he was just fronting, and his current fascist-worship was the endgame all along.

Action: concerning law and order, food safety, abortion rights, cluster bombs, and social media.

Long story short: tell governments to end cash bail, tell our FDA to limit lead in fruit juice, tell your state legislators not to restrict abortion rights, tell President Biden to join the Convention on Cluster Munitions, and tell your pension fund to support shareholder resolutions that would rein in Facebook's bad behavior. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Daily Kos helps you tell our state, local, and federal governments to end cash bail. Don't listen to the loud voices saying how can cops do their job without cash bail? If you can't do your job without holding people indefinitely without trial, then you need to find a new job. Our Constitution guarantees your right to a "speedy trial," not a "trial whenever we get around to it so we can reassure the weak we're doing something about crime." Certainly you have a right to a speedy trial even if you don't have a crapload of money! And if a poll tax is unconstitutional, why isn't cash bail?

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to put a stricter limit on lead in fruit juice. Our FDA has proposed lowering the current limit on lead in fruit juice from 50 parts per billion to 10 ppb for apple juice and 20 for other juices, but manufacturers are perfectly capable of meeting a more stringent 1 ppb limit -- even if they say it'll "cost them money"! -- and that lower limit sure would be a whole lot better for folks who drink it. Especially kids! They'd have a lot less brain damage, cancer, and diabetes, that's for sure, and thus a longer life, with more potential for doing big things. That is what America's about, after all.

With the impending reversal of Roe v. Wade, Roots Action helps you tell your state legislators not to restrict the right to abortion. I've been loathe to criticize pro-lifers in the past -- though not pro-life politicians, particularly the ones who make their mistresses get abortions! -- but I suspect a lot of pro-lifers simply don't understand that (for example) a woman who tries to carry her fetus to term, but has to abort it because it'll kill her if she doesn't, isn't a "murderer." When it happens to them, perhaps they'll get it, but I wouldn't wish that on anyone, and if I can get it -- having absolutely no chance at ever getting pregnant myself -- then why can't they?

Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to join the world cluster bomb ban, particularly now that Russia and Ukraine are using cluster bombs on each other. Over 100 nations have banned cluster bombs by signing onto the Convention on Cluster Munitions, but of course we're not one of them. Seems to me that if you're a law-and-order adherent, you'd oppose cluster bombs. Why? Because they kill people long after the war is over, which is neither lawful nor orderly. Let's not become so decadent a civilization that we beat our chests about how lawful we are but then let unexploded bombs kill people 50 years after we've all forgotten we were ever enemies.

Finally, Sum of Us helps you tell your pension fund to vote in favor of shareholder resolutions that would curb Facebook's ability to injure our civilization, i.e., with their algorithms that help white supremacists find each other easily. Now, because Mark Zuckerberg gives him and his cronies 10 votes for every vote everyone else casts, the resolutions won't win. But they rarely do! Even a resolution that gets 25% demonstrates that shareholders might be willing to take their money elsewhere, and executives tend to poop their pants at that thought. Maybe I should put the image of Mark Zuckerberg pooping his pants in folks' heads more often.

Around the table: tabulating even more right-wing drama!

House January 6 panel subpoenas five Republican House Reps, including wannabe-Speaker Kevin McCarthy. At the risk of going out on a limb, I expect he'll defy the subpoena, because that's what hard guys do! Laws aren't for him; laws are for Those People! All that will endear him with Trump votaries, who hold these two beliefs as irrefutable truth. (As an aside, if justice seems to be moving a little slowly, recall that Joe Lieberman had subpoena power during the Enron hearings but didn't use it.)

Guess what else is causing our current baby formula shortage? Big corporations dissuading our FDA from conducting more regular/more stringent inspections, that's what! Because waaaaaaaah it'll cost us money, though Abbott Nutrition (the corporation with all the contaminated baby food!) spent $5 billion last year just on stock buybacks. Remember: when you give corporations more money, they don't do the right thing. When do they do the right thing? When we make them do the right thing, through vigorous safety inspection and regulation.

Is it nice to know that Tucker Carlson's recent drama about a purported "masculinity crisis" is older than dirt? I'm not sure anymore. Anyway, long before the bow-tied Hungry Man heir, Bernarr Macfadden trained Italian fasicsts and told us they were more vigorous than Americans, which sure turned out to be a laugh once World War II started and Germany had to bail them out, and even President Eisenhower's Council on Youth Fitness came about because we were afraid the Communists were more manly, though today's "Communists" are somehow 97-pound weaklings and unstoppable killers all at once. And if you're tempted to think the guy who went on an all-milk diet seems harmless by comparison, recall that we have just had a two-year education in how health fads can be most emphatically not-harmless.

Republican Governors Youngkin of Virginia and Hogan of Maryland tell our Justice Department to crack down on protests at Supreme Court Justices' houses, but I bet you just can't guess why they can't do that: because our Supreme Court long ago decided that going to the homes of Planned Parenthood workers was also First Amendment-protected free speech! Of course Messrs. Youngkin and Hogan know that; they're just stirring up drama, like all right-wingers do. "(P)reserve the integrity of our American judicial system" my ass -- Sam Alito just made up a rule aiming to scuttle 70 years of American jurisprudence.

Ho hum, Michael Grabell at ProPublica describes "The Plot to Keep Meatpacking Plants Open During COVID-19." Long story short: "the callousness of meatpacking executives and the level of industry influence over the Trump administration were far greater than previously known." Emblematic of that callousness, Tyson implemented mask-wearing and social-distancing on the chicken lines very quickly -- in China, not in the United States! Result: by July of 2020 you could tie over 6% of all COVID-19 cases to meatpacking plants, and then a few months later these meatpacking corporations were all desperate for schools to reopen, and you know why. I hope their 300% profit hikes get them into heaven, because I'm not sure anything else will.

Finally, Arizona Attorney General/Senate candidate Mark Brnovich's 2020 election lies are so brazen anymore that even Arizona Republicans have slammed him for it. I won't call this drama per se, since everyone can see the extensive documentary evidence of Mr. Brnovich's two-facedness on this issue, but I don't want to give Arizona Republicans too much credit, either, for without that evidence they might have more easily brushed off his evil works. See, thanks to January 6, I can hardly give Republicans the benefit of the doubt anymore. And I don't think that's my failing! Sooner or later, America has to get back to blaming the real villains.

Action: concerning baby formula, Medicare for All, paid leave, drug prices, and price-gouging.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to fix the baby formula crisis, expand Medicare to include all Americans, pass paid family/sick leave, lower drug prices and expand home health care, and pass a windfall profits tax on oil and gas corporations. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. You've heard of the national baby formula shortage, which is a matter of life and death for a lot of babies? Matt Stoller explains why it's happening -- short answer: monopolies -- and prescribes solutions, which you may call your Congressfolk about. These solutions include: temporarily allowing baby formula imports, particularly from nations with good (or better) food safety regulations; restructuring food stamp markets so they don't create baby formula monopolies; and breaking up our FDA so that one agency doesn't regulate both food and drugs. We may not get the change we need right away, but if we keep at it, it will. And if we do nothing, we'll get nothing.

National Nurses United helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare to include all Americans. Medicare for All will cover more folks for less money, end of story. Don't believe me? Believe the right-wing Mercatus Center, which tabulated the cost of Medicare for All at $32 trillion over 10 years -- or some $17 trillion less than the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid's forecast of all health care spending over the next decade. How do you pay for it, then? Simple: assess an employer-side payroll tax (meaning workers don't pay it!) amounting to what big corporations already pay for the private health insurance that rejects your claims for no good reason and doesn't cover everyone.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact paid family and sick leave for all Americans. Since right-wingers constantly squeal WHEREZ WILLZ YOUZ FINDZ TEH MONEYZ!!!!!, I'll note that Sen. Gillibrand's original bill would have funded it with a 0.4% payroll tax (half paid by the employer, half by the worker), which, for someone making $50,000 annually, would amount to a little over $8 a month. $8! So everyone can take time off to take care of their kids, or their parents, or their grandparents, or themselves when they need to. And I'd fund it by bringing back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income and the 55% tax on corporate profits, which wouldn't be "socialism" so much as "what we did in the 1950s."

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower prescription drug prices and expand at-home health care services. Most people want these things, so why can't Congress do it? Because Republicans won't do it! And also because Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema won't do it, because they think they're so much smarter than everyone else! In 2 1/2 years if not sooner, these fools will be shown the error of their ways; wouldn't it be nice if a massive popular outcry helped them see the error of their ways sooner? That goes for your Republican Reps and Senators, too. If enough of us speak out, then doing nothing will actually get them fired for once.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a windfall profits tax on big oil corporations. Because sky-high prices shouldn't lead to sky-high profits! I'm old enough to remember when corporations didn't raise prices solely because of increased costs. Why? Partly because shame still meant something back then, and also partly because we had fewer monopolies then, so we had a higher chance of finding a corporation that wouldn't rob you merely because it had the opportunity. Now they just gouge us because they can. If we pass a windfall profits tax on them, then they can't.

Around the table: special "Pennsylvania primary drama" edition!

So Donald Trump endorsed state Sen./January 6 attendee Doug Mastriano for Pennsylvania's Republican nomination for Governor mere days before the Tuesday primary, and one feels compelled to ask: what took him so long? Mr. Trump sure does like to get behind a winner, and Mr. Mastriano has had a pretty hefty lead in most polls for a few weeks now; that probably explains it. State Republicans say he can't win, but surely they understand things better than that! Republican wave or no, Mr. Mastriano has a decent shot against state Attorney General/presumptive Democratic nominee Josh Shapiro, particularly if Mr. Shapiro does the Democrat thing and act like he's got it in the bag.

Meanwhile, does the Trump camp seriously expect us to believe, in re Kathy Barnette's late surge in the PA Republican Senate nomination race, that "no one saw this coming"? I saw this coming, and I get paid by the hour! Of course, I mistakenly thought Jeff Bartos would benefit from "not being one of the two rich out-of-state guys in the race," but apparently his role in this drama has only been to take front-runners out, first Sean Parnell (he leaked the news of Mr. Parnell's divorce proceedings, you may recall), and then Messrs. Oz and McCormick (if I saw the ad he ran on that topic once I saw it a hundred times). Still, anyone could have seen this coming, particularly students of Deb Fischer's 2012 Senate campaign in Nebraska.

Much has been said about Ms. Barnette's loose tongue on Twitter since she's become a thing, but I take particular exception to her claim that "homosexuals LEAD with their sexual preference" (shouty caps in original). No, Ms. Barnette, you "lead with their sexual preference" by only talking about gays in terms of sex, which is but one aspect of anyone's life. I don't know how many more ways I can put this. Fun fact: Ms. Barnette lost in Pennsylvania's 4th House district in 2020 by 19 points -- and not only wouldn't concede defeat, but launched at least one frivolous lawsuit to stop it from happening!

And yet Republican efforts to stop Ms. Barnette's candidacy reek of desperation, as would any last-minute effort to stop a candidate whose surge you didn't see until it was far too late. I can't get away from that "Crazy Kathy Barnette" ad on TV (and if she were a man, think they'd call her "crazy"?). The ad not only takes alleged "praise" for Barack Obama and Black Lives Matter way, way out of context, but repeats phrases like "white racism" and "structural racism" with a sneer, as if that alone makes them "crazy" things to say! I could never vote for Ms. Barnette in the general election, but I hope she beats her opponents' asses beet-red in the primary, because the "Crazy" ad is exactly the kind of thing that should bring shame and shunning upon anyone who creates it.

Finally, the New York Times wonders why Rep. Conor Lamb, despite "Ha(ving) All the Makings of a Front-Runner," is not actually the front-runner in the race for the Pennsylvania Democratic Senate nomination. I wouldn't blame you if you shot out because liberals are sick of this shit, that's why, but at least the Times did cite that (not in those precise words) as one of the two reasons, the other being the Lamb campaign's own "missteps." What were these "missteps"? Taking front-running status for granted, trying to appear "above the fray," calling yourself the "most electable" candidate -- in short, all of the things Democratic consultants always tell their candidates to do! If folks like John Fetterman and Lucas Kunce and Gary Chambers and Charles Booker can win their Senate elections this year, maybe folks will stop listening to the defeatist pablum of Democratic consultants. Why, folks might even realize that they're the reason Democrats went from (in Paul Begala's words) "the party of the factory floor to the party of the faculty lounge."

Action: concerning inflation, pollution, corruption, law and order, and immigration.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ending Corporate Greed Act, the Green New Deal for Public Schools Act, the Bipartisan Ban on Congressional Stock Ownership Act, and the People's Response Act, and tell your Congressfolk to end the Title 42 program. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7443/S. 3933, the Ending Corporate Greed Act, which would tax excess corporate profits at 95%. Want to do something about inflation, Democrats? This is it! Let Republicans explain how no corporate profit can really be "excess"! Let Republicans pretend record-high corporate profits have nothing to do with high prices! Most Americans are smarter than that -- yeah, supply chain issues have also contributed to inflation, but mainly it's corporate greed. Of course, this'll only work if Democrats bang that saucepan. And they'll only bang that saucepan if we bang that saucepan first, as loud as we can.

Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4442, the Green New Deal for Public Schools Act. The original Green New Deal was always a simple "sense of Congress" resolution, but this bill would actually remake our public schools into energy-saving, climate-helping, job-creating buildings, and it would, according to scientists, accomplish the equivalent of taking 17 million jobs off the road. Republicans will whine about the price tag -- $140 billion annually for the next decade. Can you think of anything Republicans have done lately that cost that much or more and did no good? Oh, right, the 2017 tax "reform." So drink a big glass of STFU, Republicans.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6678/S. 3631, the Bipartisan Ban on Congressional Stock Ownership Act, which would pretty much do what it says it'll do -- prevent members of Congress and their spouses from owning any stocks, bonds, derivatives, and the like. Because owning them clouds your judgment when you have to make decisions about them! Which is obvious to anyone who thinks about it! The list of exceptions in Sec. 2(c) -- T-bills, public pension funds, other investments that don't present a conflict of interest -- could be pared down a bit; a lot of public pension funds are in the death-grip of hedge funds these days. But this still represents progress.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4194, the People's Response Act, which would fund alternative public safety responses -- alternative to policing, that is. Some folks would call that "defunding the police," but I suspect they're the same people who call everything "socialism" and "Communism"; this bill wouldn't "defund the police," but would fund approaches like mental health workers and youth programs that would work better than throwing everyone in jail all the time. It'd take a lot of pressure off our police, too; I say that if you want to "support the police," you stop asking them to do every conceivable thing like our brains are that flexible.

Finally, the Progressive Reform Network helps you tell your Congressfolk to end the xenophobic Title 42 program. A lot of Congressfolk -- including, even, some Democrats I actually like! -- are acting like the end of Title 42 would be the end of the world, but that's rubbish. Title 42 expels would-be immigrants without their lawfully-mandated legal hearings for "health reasons," but has it kept COVID numbers down in the U.S.? Obviously not! Right-wingers who refused to mask and refused to get vaccines powered the COVID pandemic quite well enough on their own, thank you very much! So this is no time for any politician to strut like a peacock about being "tough" on immigration.

Around the table: in which Democrats maybe get a clue, or maybe they don't.

Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA), who deserves re-election as much as or more than any other Congressperson, tells us Democrats are having trouble realizing just how bad inflation affects working families. One of her colleagues told her "we're not seeing it in the polls," apparently completely unaware of how that would sound to anyone who doesn't breathe Beltway air. You don't find out what you need to know through polls! You find out through talking to your constituents. Who are also your bosses. (And Ms. Porter aims her anger at CEOs, which more Democrats should try. Bosses aren't that popular, as you know -- except with other bosses and the politicians who eat out of their hands.)

That being said, the latest inflation figures actually comprise better news, perhaps better than our "liberal" media would like. CNBC's headline talks of "inflation barrel(ling) ahead," but the year-to-year rate actually dropped from 8.6% to 8.3%, while the month-to-month rate dropped rather more sharply, from 1.2% in March to 0.3% in April; if inflation grew at the April rate for a year, the yearly rate would be 3.6%, while at the March rate, it'd be 14.4%. That's a big deal, and only Beltway insiders care that it "fell short of forecasts." Regular Americans don't buy bacon with forecasts.

How do "liberal" media outlets "manufacture opinion" on the Title 42 immigration issue, according to David W. Moore at FAIR? By inducing as many folks as possible to actually answer the question -- despite the fact that very few Americans pay very close attention to it -- first by omitting a "don't know" or "unsure" or "no opinion" option, and then by giving respondents rather incomplete information about the issue. Fox News's poll, for example, suggested to respondents that Title 42 was entirely a health care issue; did they note that would-be immigrants actually have a right to a hearing before being deported, which Title 42 denies? Of course not -- just as they didn't note that right-wingers kept this pandemic going quite well on their own, without help from "caravans" and the like.

Alex Pareene talks with Tom Scocca about automobile dependence, apparently an acute problem in New York City, where I have never considered driving anywhere to be a good idea. Our governments' devotion to public transit has been wanting for, oh, just spit-balling here, for a little over 40 years, which maps easily onto Mr. Pareene's discussion about "how quickly and easily you become a sociopath, even a borderline eugenicist, behind the wheel." It's a great discussion, one that almost offhandedly births a great idea: stop calling them "accidents" and start calling them "automobile violence."

I actually had to remind myself that Steve Bannon's threat against Mark Esper for the horrible crime of telling everyone how terrible Donald Trump's last year in office truly was is drama, just like it is whenever right-wingers attack each other. I guess we'll know it's drama when Mr. Esper utterly fails to sue Mr. Bannon, since terroristic threats -- even deliberately vague ones -- do not enjoy First Amendment protection. (No, it really is a threat! The only way "(w)hen we come to power...You are going to be held accountable for this, bro" is not a threat is if Mr. Bannon had said, right beforehand, "ignore everything I'm about to say.")

Finally, the Democrats' new line of attack against Republicans -- calling them "ultra-MAGA" -- shouldn't give us much hope that they, or we, will survive the midterms. Instead of letting Republicans "lean into" their own branding, how about you call them weak? I mean, whining about masks and refusing to get vaccinated is weak. Having big book-burning rallies is weak. And trying to overthrow the government when your candidate loses by seven million votes is weak. I want Democrats to call Republicans weaklings, and then I want to see Republicans try to "lean into" that.

Around the table: in which we contemplate various legal matters.

Elon Musk says he'd reverse the Twitter ban on Donald Trump, calling the ban "a morally bad decision, to be clear, and foolish in the extreme," and if I can think of an even clumsier way of putting that I'll let you know. His point is that the ban didn't silence Mr. Trump, though, actually, it kinda did -- not totally, but we don't let the perfect murder the good, do we? And none of Mr. Musk's nattering on about "free speech" changes the fact that Twitter is a publishing house -- whether he likes it or not, whether our laws recognize it as such or not -- and no belief in "free speech" requires that Twitter publish Donald Trump's ramblings any more than it requires that Random House publish mine.

Normally we turn to Patrick Cockburn for incisive analysis of foreign policy, but here he writes about "Mistakes I Made in Response to My Son's Mental Illness." Mr. Cockburn quit his job in order to "devote all efforts to helping Henry recover," not realizing that "I could not do much more than I was already doing and being jobless simply added to the strains on the family." He also didn't realize his son wasn't taking his meds for several years, which matters because "few therapies help until a person is stable on medication." The good news: coming together as a family or community helps "frequently a lot more than (people) think." And Henry has "done far better than most" in his predicament.

Folks are whining way too much about protestors holding vigils outside Brett Kavanaugh's house and the like; while I object to directly petitioning courts to rule the way I want them to; I certainly don't object to good folks taking to the street. Not too many months ago right-wingers waxed rhapsodic about a bunch of obnoxious truckers honking their horns all day and night because they didn't want to wear masks or get vaccines. (Naturally Susan Collins called the cops after someone wrote a chalk message outside of her house. Those poor, oppressed politicians! Sure, it's brightly-colored sidewalk chalk today, but what about tomorrow?)

Mob Boss Mitch suggests that Republicans will pursue a federal abortion ban if our Supreme Court overturns Roe as expected, and we say "suggests," of course, because he's trying to say it without actually saying it. And for good reason -- polling has lately told us that Democrats are doing better on the generic Congressional ballot, and do even better than that once voters figure out whicn one's the pro-choice candidate. In the meantime, Mitch ain't fooling anyone -- there's a reason he is literally the most unpopular Senator in America. Sadly, there is also a reason Democrats haven't given him the humiliating retirement he deserves. More than one reason, actually.

So why does Tucker Carlson say Disney's "behavior" "sounds like the behavior of a sex offender"? Easy -- because he knows actually coming out and calling them a sex offender might erase his family fortune in a lawsuit. The guy with the ZZ Top beard who calls you a "groomer" may not be so careful. Seriously, "grooming" is actually a thing, and if someone accuses you of "grooming" because you're not a complete asshole to gay and trans kids, get their name and sue them for slander. Right-wingers would call that a "frivolous lawsuit," even after you win it, so ain't nothing you can do about that. (What behavior was Mr. Carlson talking about, anyway? Your guess is as good as mine!)

Finally, speaking of the relationship between truth and lawsuits, One America News airs a 30-second statement stating, in part, that "Georgia officials have concluded that there was no widespread voter fraud by election workers who counted ballots at the State Farm Arena in November 2020" -- including, of course, the two workers who filed defamation lawsuits against the network. A settlement between the two parties forced that statement, and though the plaintiffs had the right idea there, I would have demanded a stronger statement -- "Georgia officials have concluded" gives OAN too much wiggle room -- and I'd make them read that statement on-air once every three or four hours every day for the rest of their lives. Hey, I've had enough.

Action: concerning taxes, abortion, discrimination, and ethics.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expand the Child Tax Credit, protect abortion rights, pass the Equality Act, and strengthen ethics provisions for our Supreme Court Justices. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk not to pass a massive research and development tax break for corporations without first bringing back the expanded Child Tax Credit. You can also say expand the CTC and reject that slab of corporate welfare in the first place! But really, this is simple: working families should pay fewer taxes, because it's harder for them to make ends meet, while corporations flush in record profits should not get any tax breaks. They can write off their research and development already, because it's an expense; why are we letting them deduct that twice? And where's Joe Manchin's concern about inflation whenever the topic of corporate welfare comes up?

Both MoveOn and Change.org help you tell your Congressfolk to protect abortion rights in America. Abortion is health care -- for the woman whose fetus has no brain or organs, for the woman raped by her brother, for the woman who will die if she gives birth, for the woman terrorized by her partner over her pregnancy, and yes, also for the woman who knows she can't raise a child now because she has no money (not everyone can just go work for a hedge fund, after all!) or because she knows she won't raise that child right. And we've lately learned that between 60 and 66% of Americans (depending on the poll) think abortion should be legal in most circumstances, so I think the people have spoken here; now we must remind our representatives to listen.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. By the reasoning, if you can call it that, of Justice Alito's draft opinion, they'll overturn Obergefell v. Hodges at the first opportunity, so we need to codify equal rights for gays and transgender folks in our laws -- otherwise right-wing governments will continue to use the specter of gay and transgender folks to induce rage in our weakest Americans. Plus banks and landlords will be able to deny services to gay and transgender folks just because of who they are. That's what'll continue to be if we don't pass the Equality Act, and that reality should offend all of us.

Finally, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation holding our Supreme Court Justices to the same ethical standards to which we already hold all other federal judges. It's tempting to blame Sam Alito for all of this -- since his draft ruling that would overturn Roe v. Wade has convinced just about everyone who can still be convinced that our Supreme Court is just another political body -- but actually it's Clarence Thomas who didn't recuse himself from a decision involving his wife's involvement in the January 6 attempted coup. Remember: your job, as a citizen, isn't to "trust your government"; it's to make your government worthy of your trust.

Around the table: in which the right-wing dramasphere remains aflame.

Greg Palast absolutely skewers Dinesh D'Souza's new film, 2000 Mules, which aims to "prove" that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election he lost by seven million votes. Long story short: Mr. D'Souza says he has a crap-ton of evidence of election fraud but, strangely, doesn't present it -- I'm old enough to remember when we all considered that a tell! -- and even the geolocation data "proving" Black men visited vote drop-off boxes 20 times each actually is only "accurate" within 93 feet! The argument gets much, much worse from there, as you would expect if you were even distantly acquainted with Mr. D'Souza's work. But for some Americans, the only "truth" is their own unquenchable rage, and they're clearly Mr. D'Souza's intended audience here.

Another day, another FAIR article reminding us that our "liberal" media talks to far too many right-wing rageheads about transgender issues and not enough to, well, transgender folks themselves. Yikes, pimps, talk to trans kids! They know more about themselves than you do! And certainly more than folks who present themselves as "influencers" but just want to hook you on another rage drug. (As evidenced by the fact that Breitbart "covered" the Texas "child abuse" directive more than most other media outlets. They're probably spinning it as "we got more trans sources than the Washington Post!" They're hoping you don't know how to read a chart.)

New York and California bills would create workers' councils so that workers' viewpoints can be heard a bit better. California's proposed Fast Food Sector Council would also include franchisees, who are also pretty put-upon by their bosses. I don't have nearly as many problems at work as fast-food employees -- they work, after all, in an industry that "literally cannot comply with wage, hour, safety and health law and still make a profit" -- but for the last decade or so, my bosses have all seemed to understand not one part of the work I do, so I heartily applaud such a move. And I bet when you think about it, you do, too.

Uh oh: the Staten Island, NY District Attorney actually used asset forfeiture cash to buy facial recognition software. Why, that's two fists of evil, right there -- it's like selling arms to the Iranians in order to get the money to arm the Contras. Even better, Staten Island has stopped using it, because it, you know, sucks, which you or I could have told them for nothing. Also too, they used asset forfeiture cash so they wouldn't have to use tax money, because politicians have been selling us a no-tax fantasy the last 40 years or so. Ideally, taxes pay for things we all may need at some point or other. Ideally, they do not pay for facial recognition software that can't tell Black folks apart any better than your right-wing uncle can.

Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-OR), justifiably facing a primary challenge from his left, runs ads touting his support for overturning our Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling -- without mentioning that he's directed close to $400,000 of Super PAC money to his own campaign. There's the world I want and the world I live in, I can already hear him intoning, but don't you love how these center-right politicians run left once they get a primary challenge? His vote late last year for the Build Back Better Act -- after he vowed to vote against it! -- I would similarly not attribute not to a Damascus moment on his part.

Finally, right-wing media outlets have reported that Justice Alito has removed himself to an "undisclosed location" after his draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade leaked -- based on a single source who said it on Fox News but now can't remember "whether I saw in on Twitter or somebody told me." And for that the right-wing dramasphere blew up yesterday. Don't cry any tears for poor Ilya Shapiro; I'm sure this all went down exactly the way he wanted it to. It may take him years to figure out how thoroughly Our Glorious Elites have used him.

Action: concerning monopolies, racism, pollution, abortion, and bad media.

Long story short: tell your government to fight monopolies, environmental racism, and truck pollution; tell big corporations to stop funding anti-abortion politicians, and tell Verizon to drop OAN from their lineup. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Department of Justice (or DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to enact the most vigorous rules possible against mergers. Mergers hurt people -- through lost jobs, higher prices, and increased corporate power to do more harm. I bet "higher prices" sure resonates with good Americans right about now, but increased corporate power also means lower wages, dirtier air and water, and more dangerous products. It also means no Medicare drug price negotiation, if you've paid attention to Kyrsten Sinema's big donor gatherings. We can help put a stop to all of that, by telling our government what to do.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell our EPA to help communities afflicted most by pollution -- meaning, generally, our poorest communities, which will also be Black or Brown communities most of the time. Right-wingers can sneer at the notion of "racist pollution" all they want, but big polluting corporations situate their most polluting facilities near the poorest neighborhoods for a reason -- namely, that the poorest communities are also the least powerful communities, and thus the least able to stop pollution from overrunning their neighborhood. Thomas Sowell might cringe to hear this, but there's only so much damn bootstrapping folks can do; they also need help keeping polluters out of their grills.

The Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell our EPA to enact the most vigorous heavy-duty truck emission regulations possible. I said "regulations" just to trigger right-wingers who think regulations are inherently evil! Heavy-duty trucks aren't the most common vehicles on our roads, but they do cause most of the air pollution that wrecks our lungs. And we might as well ask for zero emissions from our trucks; even if we don't get them, we stand a much better chance of getting something better than what we've got. And no, regulations don't kill jobs. Corporate executives kill jobs. You know they'd replace you with a mound of dung if they could get away with it.

People for the American Way helps you tell big corporations to stop funding attacks on abortion rights, mainly through their donations to anti-abortion politicians. They say they do it for economic reasons, which is an excuse almost calculated to offend someone like me more, but their intent doesn't matter when the result is a Supreme Court that's all but declared open season on every right not specifically imagined by a 250-year-old dead man. Don't brook any right-wingers saying it's their money and they can do what they want with it. It's your speech, too, and you can shame them and shun them if you like. Corporations don't have more rights than you.

Daily Kos helps you tell Verizon to drop the notorious One America News Network (or OAN, or OANN) from their lineup. We got AT&T to do it, so now we get other corporations to do it. OAN purveys noxious right-wing propaganda with every breath their on-air personalities draw, but don't settle for throwing up your hands and saying they have the right to free speech. First off, people have First Amendment rights, not corporations. And second, insofar as a corporation has a right to speech, it doesn't have a right to publication of that speech, on a platform, anymore than I have a right to compel Random House to publish my books. We have to think harder about this stuff than we used to.

Around the table: in which right-wingers salivate at their new-found prospects.

What is "the anti-abortion movement's next target," according to Kiera Butler at Mother Jones? Birth control, of course. After all, the "reasoning" Justice Alito used -- that rights not specifically listed by our Constitution should be "deeply-rooted" in order to enjoy Constitutional protection -- would form the basis for overturning Griswold, which allows birth control and is only eight years older than Roe. I fail to see how privacy isn't a "deeply-rooted" value in America, though; one would think the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution would ring a bell. Anyway, read the article to discover (among other things) how well "suspicion of vaccines" maps onto "suspicion of birth control."

Did we all get a good laugh over the guy who painted Mr. Trump's face on his lawn winning the Republican primary for Ohio's 9th U.S. House district? Well, note well that Ohio recently redrew that district so that it's now one Mr. Trump would have won by three points. Marcy Kaptur's a good egg, the sort who has long won over independents and right-leaning voters, but in the meantime, let's discover which nuclear power corporation Mr. Majewski worked for as an executive, if any, and let's also see his text messages leading up to January 6. After all, Ginny Thomas also said she "left before the riot."

Looking to blue states as abortion havens in a post-Roe world? Not so fast: not every state has laws that guarantee that right fully. Parental notification laws still apply in many of them, and not every state makes health insurance corporations cover them (or lets Medicaid cover them); even in California, abortion after fetal viability is illegal. And while judges don't often deny a minor's request to bypass parental notification laws (Texas judges denied 7% of such requests last year), that won't be much comfort to those who do get denied, because it just happened to 100% of them.

Does PayPal have the right to shutter accounts of left-wing media organizations, as they've done to at least two media outlets lately? Depends on the contracts those outlets signed, of course, but broadly, yes. Do we have the right to shame and shun them for it? Hell yes we do! Nobody buys that "some potential risk associated with this account" rubbish with Consortium News, right? Yeah, I may not agree with everything Consortium says about Russia and Ukraine, but PayPal cutting off their ability to collect money doesn't exactly attest to PayPal's confidence.

In another post-redistricting Rep-on-Rep House race that always leads you to wonder who pissed off whom, avid Trumphole Rep. Alex Mooney leads actual moderate Rep. David McKinley by 15 points in West Virginia's 2nd House district Republican primary. David McKinley may not be the only Republican politician I still like, but I can't remember any others at the moment. If he took on Joe Manchin in 2024 and won, I wouldn't be heartbroken, but chances are another Trumphole would beat Mr. McKinley in that primary, too. Anyway, Mr. McKinley's relative lack of success in touting his Joe Manchin endorsement should maybe caution the Penguin about that 2024 race.

Finally, when I hear that Gov. Greg Abbott (E-TX) wants to challenge our Supreme Court's 1981 ruling that all children in America, including those of undocumented immigrants, must get public education -- mainly because THEREZ AREZ SO MANYZ OFZ TEH IMMIGRANTZ NOWZ!!!!! -- I feel compelled to note that more folks routinely came over the border in the '80s and '90s than now, drama and hysteria over the "crisis at the border" notwithstanding. Indulge me in my belief that saying so means something, even though I expect that fact to "elude" Sam Alito, too.

Around the table: in which we dissect a really dumb Bill Gates rumor.

Joshua Prager, in an interview with ProPublica's Alexandra Zayas, describes how the pro-choice movement "lost the battle" for Roe v. Wade. But while the pro-life movement was considerably more creative (just look at all the phrases they made mainstream, like "partial-birth abortion"), fact is "it's much easier to try to knock something down than to defend it," and now the Supreme Court ruling, once it comes down, is "going to galvanize the tens of millions of people who are horrified about what’s happening now." We all saw this right after Donald Trump's election.

I hate to think the worst of anyone, even the Amazon executives who have promised to reimburse American employees so they can travel to get abortions (among other medical treatments), but I can't help but ask if this isn't just a scheme to fire workers. Workers can go get what they need, only to find their bosses (be they unscrupulous or merely under constant pressure to "reduce costs") rejecting their proof of treatment paperwork even if it's the most perfect paperwork ever, and hoping said workers just give up instead of fight for their job back. Hey, it's a big corporation, so we have to ask. (Occam's Razor might compel me to accept that this announcement more likely aims to distract us from Amazon's other announcement ending paid sick leave for employees with COVID.)

Starbucks has announced plans to raise wages and benefits -- but only for workers who aren't unionizing! "That’s not how labor law works and Starbucks knows it," says one union organizer, but here's what else Starbucks knows: raising wages for some people and not others divides workers, because what else can you do when you're Starbucks? Go back in time and treat all your workers much better than you did? Our Glorious Elites have no solutions to offer, only stratagems aimed to divide and conquer us. I hope all Starbucks workers have the wisdom to see through this nefarious plan.

This Roll Call profile of Rep. David Cicilline's relatively recent interest in/obsession with reining in monopolies gives us a quick history of antitrust law in America, mostly through the eyes of a staunch defender of bad antitrust policy; you'll be able to see through his cheerleading once you realize that he doesn't explain how antitrust policy specifically gives us an "advantage" over European economies -- or, more likely, once you ask who all that American GDP growth really benefited, exactly. So the article's not great, but it's good exercise for the mind.

Surprise, surprise, J.D. Vance didn't get more support from rural areas in winning the Ohio Senate Republican primary, but got about the same amount of support across the state. You know, in case you were thinking the Hillbilly Elegy author had some sort of magic key to getting rural votes -- the only "magic key" he had was Donald Trump's endorsement (though I'm pretty sure Mr. Trump's "J.D. Mandel" moment wasn't the big man losing his train of thought but simply hedging his bets), and again, it didn't mean more in rural areas. Ohio Democratic Senate nominee Tim Ryan sure hit him hard the day after the primary, though. Mr. Ryan may not be Sherrod Brown, but he's always hit a lot of the same notes, particularly the anti-war and anti-free trade notes. And that sneer when Mr. Ryan says "CNN"? I've seen that sneer in the mirror. I like his chances; I hope he stays focused.

Finally, Snopes.com does a fact-check on the theory that Bill Gates "owns most American farmland" "so he can cause food shortages," and finds it wanting -- Mr. Gates likely owns more American farmland than any American individual, but that comes to only 0.03% of all American farmland. (That's three one-hundredths of one percent, not "three percent" or "30 percent." I just know some troll's going to say it.) The interesting thing about this theory -- and if I ever have infinite time, I bet I'll discover far too many conspiracy theories are like this! -- is that it completely disappears big ag corporations from the conversation, though they'd be far more likely to cause food shortages than Bill Gates. And a lot of Twitter users have used ZOMG BILL GATEZ OWNZ ALLZ TEH FARMZ!!!!! to argue that we shouldn't worry about Elon Musk taking over Twitter, which is offensively stupid arguing, akin to saying you are only allowed to worry about one thing at a time! or if you think x is wrong, you're not allowed to say anything else is wrong. Yeah, I know, they're trolls. But as a famous philosopher once said, when a man lies, he murders some part of the world.

Around the table: more fallout from our Supreme Court's draft ruling.

What's even worse about Justice Alito's draft ruling overturning Roe v. Wade? That it opens the door to our Supreme Court doing so much more harm! As one observer writes, the ruling "disavows the entire line of jurisprudence upon which Roe rests: the existence of 'unenumerated rights' that safeguard individual autonomy from state invasion. Alito asserts that any such right must be 'deeply rooted' in the nation’s history and tradition, and access to abortion has no such roots." Of course abortion was legal in the United States until the early 1900s, so it actually has "deep roots." But can you think of any other rights they'll say aren't "deeply-rooted" enough? Yes, reader, you can! Like the right to gay and interracial marriage, the right to use birth control, and the right to keep your government out of your bedroom. As another observer put it: "Requiring civil rights to be 'deeply rooted in history' is a great way to say 'if you didn’t always have civil rights, then you should never have them,'" never mind that there is such a thing as arguing you should always have had these rights in the first place.

You heard Justice Barrett wonder why we even need abortion when we've got adoptions and no-questions-asked baby drop-offs? Kathryn Joyce at Salon tells us why that's more ignorant than it sounds. Long story short: relinquishing a baby for adoption is actually very traumatic, to the point that almost no one does it at a drop-off, plus the processes we've used for adoption (including "homes for unwed mothers" and, more recently, "shepherding families") have brutalized women, plus a lot of families want the "right" babies and you know what that means. Too often our Supreme Court Justices sound like aliens from another planet -- remember how Antonin Scalia asked what's the big deal with taking a day off to get your voter ID sorted? I'll bet that man never have had to ask for a day off in his life! So Barack Obama wasn't so dumb to say a Supreme Court Justice have a sense of what someone else's life is like. The right-wing majority on our Court sure doesn't have enough of a sense of that.

What is The Hidden Reason for Starbucks Worker Organizing, according to Armando Vega at The American Prospect? The pandemic, of course! A lot of Starbucks cafés shut down at pandemic's onset, which cut the workforce and, perhaps more importantly, cut workers off from each other. Then the sharp increase in mobile ordering didn't drop off once cafés reopened, meaning Starbucks had far more work than it had workers to do the work. Then Omicron hit, and workers made dozens of reasonable suggestions for protecting themselves from the vastly increased risk of contracting COVID -- only to have management "laugh() in our face," in the testimony of one worker. So it goes far beyond workers simply getting a little distance from their jobs and seeing things more clearly.

Four writers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation discuss ways Elon Musk could improve Twitter, and yes they're all good ideas, even though I already know how Mr. Musk feels about "less automation" and more humans in content moderation, "humans" being something only to be "authenticated" in his now-infamous phrase. (And authentication has its own problems, as you know if you know people in any kind of trouble anywhere on Earth.) But why isn't "starve the beast and let it die" an option? I think Facebook, terrible as it is today, was a net positive 10 years ago, but Twitter is a swamp and has always been a swamp, even in those days it wasn't particularly eager to amplify the voice of white supremacists. I'd advise everyone on Twitter to leave and go back to using email listservs. It's harder work, but so are most things worth doing. And photos and videos don't slow down your connection as much as they used to.

Kimberly Tower and Camille Gélix at The Conversation discuss how Marine LePen "gain(ed) ground with youth voters" -- and why American right-wingers have so far failed to do same. They don't come out and say it, but where American politicians make a show of fighting corporate power, Ms. LePen makes a better show, with actual proposals supporting French "economic self-sufficiency," financial assistance for student workers, and tougher food-safety regulations on meat. Meanwhile, American right-wingers love energy exports more than energy independence, lambaste college students for not bootstrapping enough, and want corporations to do their own food inspections. Broadly speaking, Ms. LePen lost more decisively to Mr. Macron than I expected, but she also lost by less than she did in 2017, and unless folks like Jean-Luc Mélenchon can get more traction, I don't see this story ending well.

Finally, a Democrat decisively wins a special election in a Michigan state house seat that has been in Republican hands since time immemorial -- at least partly because her Republican opponent has lately said rape victims should "lie back and enjoy it," a "joke" I first heard 40 years ago and one which sure doesn't play well given, ah, recent developments at our Supreme Court. And yeah, that's not the only stupid thing that guy has said lately, but more interestingly, Carol Glanville seems fairly focused on things that might actually get people to vote for her! Now, I'm not saying this is a bellwether race. But I am saying that defeating evil is possible in any district, anywhere, if we but imagine it.

Action: concerning abortion, equality, ethics, power, health, and monopolies.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to codify abortion rights protections into our laws, pass the Equality Act, ensure Supreme Court Justices adhere to ethics standards, pass the Palestinian Children and Families Act and the PASTEUR Act, and confirm Alvaro Bedoya to our FTC. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Avaaz helps you tell Congress to codify abortion rights protections into law. The easiest way for Congress to do that, in theory, would be for our Senate to pass the already House-passed H.R. 3755, the Women's Health Protection Act, but they've already refused to do that. Sen. Schumer says he'll bring it up for a vote again, so that (if nothing else!) everyone will see how their Senators voted, which could be a big deal on Election Day 2022, though I can't say for sure. One thing I can say for sure: it won't end here! If the leaked ruling overturning Roe v. Wade turns out to be the actual ruling, it will give our Court a pretext for going after gay marriage, birth control, and anti-sodomy laws, too. We'll have a very busy time fighting for what we already had, and we'll have to keep fighting for them. Which we'll do, because duty is duty.

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act, which would protect gay, transgender, and others from discrimination. Because right-wing state legislatures have been attacking these folks just as surely as they've attacked voting rights and abortion rights the last year and a half! And, as I've said, it'll soon be open season on rulings like Obergefell Griswold, and Lawrence, so we've got to codify protections against discrimination into our laws. Gay and transgender folks don't deserve to be fired, frozen out of apartments and homes and loans, or hounded out of public restrooms merely because they are who they are, so let's stop politicians from enabling all those evil things. And quickly.

In a related note, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure our Supreme Court Justices follow the Federal Judge Code of Conduct. Once there was a time we could convince ourselves that it'd be somehow uncivil to make the highest Court in the land adhere to the same standards as all other federal courts, but no more. And I'm not the only person who thinks so! Polling has told us for years that more and more Americans look at our Supreme Court as a political body, with its own policy aims; Justice Alito's leaked draft sure hasn't helped that look! Neither has Justice Thomas's wife's actions in support of the January 6 coup, or Justice Thomas's alleged poobahs with Gov. DeSantis; it ain't just about Justice Thomas, though. All judges must bow to civilization.

Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2590, the Palestinian Children and Families Act, which would start to extract some accountability from Israel in exchange for American aid. The government of Israel continues to oppress the Palestinian people -- lately in the form of separating families and detaining Palestinian children in prisons where they're more likely to get COVID -- and yet we continue to give them military aid, apparently out of a belief that "support" means lockstep agreement with every policy. Support doesn't mean that, and neither does friendship. And Israel is the far more powerful actor here! Being the far more powerful actor means you must not use your power to oppress others, even if that oppression looks like "security." It never is.

The Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3932/S. 2076, the Pioneering Antimicrobial Subscriptions To End Up-surging Resistance (or PASTEUR) Act, which would help fund the antibiotics of the future. And we're gonna need them! We presently use seven out of every 10 antibiotics not on sick people or sick animals, but on nominally healthy feed animals, and that means more superbugs and more of a possibility that we'll bring back the days when the next cut on your hand could kill you. All so big ag executives could make more money! (They'll say it was so we could have cheaper meat, but is that really a lot better if you can't survive a cut on your hand?) I'd spend directly on making antibiotics, rather than grant money to corporations to do it, but we can fix that later. We need action on this matter now.

Finally, today's as good a day as any to a) call Senate Majority Leader Schumer (here's his contact info) and tell him to schedule a vote on President Biden's nomination of Alvaro Bedoya to our Federal Trade Commission, and b) call your 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) and tell them to confirm Mr. Bedoya. Mr. Bedoya's opposition to government spying and expertise in digital privacy issues would be enormous assets to our FTC, plus he'd provide a likely third vote in favor of more vigorous antitrust prosecutions; perhaps for this last reason he couldn't get through the Commerce Committee (which deadlocked on his nomination twice), and required a discharge petition to get his nomination considered by our full Senate. But now they must act. We deserve no less.

Around the table: everyone's a terrorist! And other absurdities.

A now-former VP at Kelloggs, referring to the 10-week strike this past fall, told a meeting of lawyers and union-busters last week that "the union leadership" at his corporation "were behaving more like terrorists than partners." I said they'd call us all "terrorist" one day and I was right, but I feel compelled to note that "terrorists" and "partners" is one hell of a dichotomy to present when discussing labor negotiations, and not just because the other, truer word for "partners" is subordinates. Labor negotiators should of course be civilized, but being "civilized" may not even require civility, depending on the situation. And what are the specific "terrorist" tactics of Kelloggs workers? You won't learn that from Mr. Hurley's audio remarks, but you'll hear a lot about Joe Biden making an "inappropriate" statement and certain social media outlets being too powerful for arguably the biggest name in breakfast cereal and, of course, George Soros, because apparently right-wingers can't perform a whining rant without bringing him up.

You've heard of folks going north of the border for affordable prescription drugs? Now meet the family that went south of the border, to Mexico, to avoid yet another several-thousand-dollar health care bill. The kicker, of course, is that the Fierro family of Arizona has health insurance! Which costs them $1,000 every month! So you can see the attraction of spending $5 to get a doctor to pop your son's dislocated shoulder back in place. Recall that almost half of Americans don't have the money saved to cover a several hundred-dollar expense, and none of them are saving their way to health care happiness by skipping coffee and avocados.

Now Texas Gov. Greg Abbott thinks he can "invoke war powers" by declaring the migration of refugee-seekers from other lands an "invasion," which supposedly would comply with Article I, Section 10 of our Constitution. But words mean things, and folks running from oppression to seek sanctuary don't constitute an "invasion" unless you can prove they're all fronting, which he can't. So this looks to me like just another Greg Abbott drama, one where he flexes his muscles and accomplishes nothing, like his mass inspection of trucks coming through the border that (per Texas's own Agriculture Commissioner!) caught exactly zero would-be immigrants and produced exactly zero drug seizures.

Laura Ingraham opposes student loan debt forgiveness by saying her mother worked as a waitress until she was 73 to pay off her kids' college bills so why can't yours? Other Twitter users dunked on her in ways you might easily expect ("You let your mom work until she was 73 to pay your debts?"), though not too many pointed out the most pertinent fact -- that college cost a lot less when Ms. Ingraham went to Dartmouth. Which gives the lie to "(l)oan forgiveness just another insult to those who play by the rules." Ah, folks who took out loans to go to college whose tuition went up 600% in 35 years also "played by the rules," and a lot of them took out loans that actually cost more to pay off after 10 years, even after you "play by the rules" by making all your payments on time. By charging this much for college, and charging this much for loans, we have profoundly betrayed all those who played by the rules. Loan forgiveness would right that wrong. And if we can't right wrongs, what's the point of America?

Hoo boy now Sen. Ron Johnson (E-WI) says it "may be true" that COVID vaccines cause AIDS. That should be weapons-grade PR against the Senator, no matter how many ads he runs in which he plays catch badly with his grandson, but that man has been spewing out filth for decades now, and Democrats keep underestimating him. Well, by "Democrats" I really mean Russ Feingold, and he's not running this time, thank God, so maybe now they have a shot, so to speak, at defeating him. (How do vaccines "induce AIDS," you ask? Google it and you'll find a line of "reasoning" that rivals QAnon for sheer stupidity, plus is full of big scare words. Naturally "America's Frontline Doctors" also figure in the drama.)

Finally, anyone else think the "leak" of a draft of a Supreme Court ruling that would overturn Roe v. Wade was an inside job? An "attack" by the "radical left" my ass -- any liberal in a position to leak the draft not only knows it would have intimidated exactly zero of the five (or six!) right-wing Justices prepared to endorse it, but also knows that even though more Americans support abortion rights than oppose them, the other side has more folks who'd run through a wall for their position. Right-wingers would totally leak the draft for three reasons: one, to keep the base ginned up; two, to give independents six months to forget all about it before Election Day, and three, and most importantly, to remind the base that they've actually done something for them. People like it when you do something for them; it's well past time for Democrats to commit to that lesson, rather than whine about how they "just can't get to yes" on things 80% of Americans want. (As an aside, Alexander Cockburn used to say that the day our Supreme Court actually overturns Roe v. Wade, Republicans will wander in the wilderness for decades. I sure hope he's right.)

Action: concerning labor, immigration, corruption, cluster bombs, and law and order.

Long story short: tell President Biden to do better by American workers, tell our government to roll back the notorious 287(g) program, tell state legislators to ban non-disclosure agreements between corporations and legislators, tell President Biden to stop our military's use of cluster bombs, tell the Manhattan D.A. to drop murder charges against Tracy McCarter, and tell our DOJ and USPS to investigate Louis DeJoy for corruption. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to use his lawful authority to expand worker power in America. How would he do this? He could raise the overtime floor so more good Americans can get time-and-a-half when they have to work more than 40 hours in a week; he can force federal contractors to give their workers adequate overtime, sick leave, and vacation time; he can issue new workplace safety standards to protect outdoor workers (like farm and construction workers) and warehouse workers, among other things. And he doesn't have to go to One True Great and Real Super-American President Joe Manchin for any of it -- he can just issue Executive Orders, which our laws allow in these matters, and walk away. And then his approvals might finally go back up! People like it when you do good works, after all.

The ACLU helps you tell our government to roll back the notorious 287(g) program, which nominally gives local law enforcement officers the job of federal immigration officials in an effort to combat crime, but which, in practice, leads to totally non-violent and non-criminal brown-skinned folks getting deported for busted taillights or driving without a license. So 287(g), as our government has practiced it the last five years, doesn't reduce crime and doesn't get rid of the "worst" undocumented immigrants! You would also have to ask why we always seem to be in an immigration "crisis" when we already have so many tools at our disposal, and you might have to conclude that right-wingers don't want to stop undocumented immigration, because then how would they create drama and hysteria? Hey, if I see it, I say it.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell state legislators to ban non-disclosure agreements (or NDAs) that legislators sign with corporations. Because it's profoundly undemocratic! Legislators are supposed to account to their constituents, and a non-disclosure agreement interferes with that. Naturally proponents of corporate NDAs say they "protect sensitive negotiations," but why are they sensitive in the first place? Because if you found out that, say, your Mayor was negotiating to outsource parking meters to a big corporation, you'd be mad? Because they were using your money in a way you'd never approve of if they made their deals in the light of day? Doesn't matter how nice people are when they defend these things; evil doesn't need a Snidely Whiplash mustache anymore.

Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to join the Convention on Cluster Munitions and thus ban the use of cluster bombs by our military. Because they're indiscriminate killing machines, that's why! And they don't just kill over large areas, they also kill over time, because a lot of them don't explode right away. Thus good Vietnamese still get injured, maimed, and killed by cluster bombs we dropped there 50 years ago. Hey, that war's been over since 1975; is it sane, moral, or decent that the Vietnam War still kills people? Think of what your life would be like if some enemy nation dropped cluster bombs in your county, and you never knew if one was going to blow you up on the way to Wawa or ShopRite or the movie theater. Sounds awful, doesn't it? So let's not unleash such horrors on other folks.

Color of Change helps you tell the Manhattan District Attorney to drop charges against Tracy McCarter, accused of murdering her ex-husband. Who repeatedly beat her up, and after she left him, which took guts, he got drunk and assaulted her, and she stabbed him to death in self-defense. Somehow the state refused to present a grand jury with evidence of her abuse, saying it wasn't "substantial enough," which is kind of a bass-ackwards way of admitting there was abuse and anyway shouldn't the jury have decided that if they were mulling charging her with murder? The new Manhattan D.A. even declared his support for Mr. McCarter on the campaign trail; guess what he's been doing since then? I mean, besides giving up on prosecuting Donald Trump. That's right, not a word from him about Ms. McCarter. We ought to try to change that.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our Justice Department and U.S. Postal Service Inspector General to investigate Postmaster General DeJoy for personally profiting from the COVID tests our USPS delivered to households in January. Don't brook any silliness about he did some good, why shouldn't he personally profit from it? That is the mark of sickness, immorality, and decadence -- you're supposed to do the right thing because it's the right thing; if you benefit from it, how do you really know you're doing the right thing? I mean, anyone can cobble together a system of values based on what's gotten them goodies in the past; how about we put together a system of values that sustains and nourishes a civilization beyond what it does for us? Or is that old-fashioned?

Around the table: how an apology *should* sound! And other truths.

HHS Inspector General finds that private Medicare Advantage plans denied over 80,000 requests for pre-authorization of medical care in 2019, even though Medicare proper would have covered that care. Medicare Advantage also denied payment for claims nearly one-fifth of the time, even though (again) Medicare would have required payment. And how many people give up rather than challenge these denials? Think on all of that when you imagine that privatized Medicare is "better." Privatized Medicare is better for health insurance CEOs, but not for our seniors.

Former white supremacist Evan McLaren -- who, among other things, marched for the wrong side in Charlottesville in 2017 -- disavows his association with white supremacy in a statement published on Substack. We've been burned by others who "left" the movement only to still hate Jews, but Mr. McLaren's statement took my breath away, frankly; I'll quote the last paragraph in its entirety: "I apologize to everyone who was affected in any way by my past activities. The main purpose of this statement, however, is not to apologize. I do not realistically expect to repair my public reputation, to the extent that it meaningfully exists, or to heal rifts with people I have alienated. I don’t hope or expect to be forgiven. My only purpose here is that, on those occasions when someone happens to explore the Internet search results related to my name, they might also find this statement as an indication that, while I was a source of toxic energy and opinions in the past, I am at least not that anymore." Now that's an apology -- no ifs about it! Joe Rogan might do well to study it before his next screw-up.

From the "I Shouldn't Have to Explain This" file: no, California will not "legalize infanticide" by passing AB 2223, because "don't automatically investigate stillbirths" and "never, ever investigate stillbirths" are not the same thing. Of course the right-wingers who created this drama in the first place knew that; they were just hoping you didn't know that. Now you do, and you can move on to more important things, like making sure polluters and financial predators go to jail.

Nick Vachon wonders "Where Are All the 'Pro-Worker' Republicans Now?" after Amazon and Starbucks workers win organizing efforts, but of course he poses the question rhetorically: Marco Rubio's "support" for Amazon workers hinged entirely on Amazon's refusal to sell some of his favorite right-wing books. No, I'm not inferring here; he spelled that out! And I can't help but think he supported the Bessemer, AL Amazon workers because he suspected their effort would fail. I guess there's a limit to how much point-scoring Republicans will try to do against these "woke" corporations. And, frankly, Democrats are little better, what with their deep abiding love of white-collar workers and their utter cowardice in pushing populist (and popular!) solutions. I could help them with that.

Kevin Kuehn and Kevin King at The Conversation discuss teenagers' self-harming behavior and how to combat it. I wouldn't pay too much attention to recent teen self-harming data -- teens were in lockdown for a big chunk of 2020, after all -- but you won't be surprised to learn that "participants reported higher levels of distress right before they self-harmed or thought about suicide, and reported significantly reduced levels of distress immediately following." I mean, you wouldn't do it otherwise! I would suggest that self-harm gives at least some teens the illusion of control over situations over which they otherwise have very little or no control. Remedies for self-harm include more connection with more people (as with drug addicts) and validating feelings that prompt self-harming behavior without validating the behavior itself.

Finally, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) vows to investigate the "origins of COVID," which scientists have already determined, should Republicans win the Senate and he get a Committee Chair. Maybe he should concentrate on winning re-election first! If Charles Booker focuses on insulin prices and Ukraine policy -- two subjects he's discussed a lot already, and two areas where Rand Paul's weak -- Mr. Paul could be in for a big surprise. (No, the fact that Mr. Booker's a Black Lives Matter activist won't be a liability in the state that killed Breonna Taylor.)

Action: concerning the Child Tax Credit, drug prices, Social Security, tax filing, animal cruelty, and our FCC.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to bring back the expanded Child Tax Credit, lower prescription drug prices, reject any effort to cut Social Security benefits, let most Americans file their taxes for free, pass the Prohibit Wildlife Killing Contests Act, and confirm Gigi Sohn to our FCC. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby, helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the expanded Child Tax Credit that delivered $250 and $300 checks into working families' bank accounts through most of 2021. Inflation was 8.5% last month; think those checks would have come in handy as working families bought groceries and clothes and school supplies? Yes, I think they would have. But Republicans don't want working families to have them -- every last one of them voted against the CTC expansion in the first place, we must remember. I repeat for the benefit of angry independent voters: every last Republican voted against the CTC expansion. In the meantime, your Reps and Senators need to know that working families need the expanded CTC, and rich folks have to pay more in taxes to fund it, well, we're all in this together, right?

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower prescription drug prices for all Americans. What's the news hook this time? Rep. Kurt Schrader (D?-OR) saying in a TV ad that he's fought for Medicare drug price negotiation when he actually did his damnedest to water down Medicare drug price negotiation proposals -- then also claiming that lowering drug prices would "stifle innovation"! I've said it before and I'll say it again: no rich corporation innovates on a damn thing; innovation comes only from necessity, and a corporation that's gamed the system so that all of its decisions result in it getting richer never faces necessity. That's just one reason we need to communicate our will to our Congressfolk, again and again and again until they do our will.

National Campaign for Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to cut Social Security benefits, including efforts like the notorious TRUST Act, which would allow Congress to fast-track Social Security cuts without debate. Does that sound like democracy to you? Or does it sound like a way to steal what belongs to the people without having to account to the people? I kid, of course; it sounds exactly like the latter, and though of course Republicans love anything that lets them bypass democracy, you'd hate to think that Democrats would be so cowardly that they'd support a system that lets them do unpopular things without facing the anger of the people. Again I kid! Of course that's right in their wheelhouse. And that's why we fight their efforts to the death.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to let most Americans file their taxes for free. This is already legal! Our IRS already has all the info on your W-2, and can autofill the blanks on your tax form without the assistance of any third party! And yet we still trundle off to joints like H&R Block to "get our taxes done." Why? Because of a "deal" our IRS cut with tax prep corporations years ago that allows them to (among other things) offer "free" tax filing at the end of a bureaucratic labyrinth you won't likely have the patience to get through. I say if you have leverage -- and if you have the law behind you, you have leverage -- you use it for more than getting next-to-nothing out of big corporations. So let's tell our government to do that.

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7398, the Prohibit Wildlife Killing Contests Act, which would, as its title suggests, ban most wildlife killing contests; the only exceptions would be certain kinds of birds and invasive species. I guess some folks will tell you wildlife killing contests help keep down populations of predators, but not only do scientists find that's not true, they also find that the animals who feed on the bullet-ridden carcasses get poisoned and/or killed as well. And certainly don't brook any silly allegations that this bill is "anti-hunting." It's not "anti-hunting," it's anti-sadism, it's anti-cruelty, it's anti-uncivilized behavior. Killing animals is a desultory job if you have to do it; celebrating it as a "game" just cheapens your soul. And don't we have enough of that?

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to confirm pro-internet freedom warrior Gigi Sohn to our Federal Communications Commission. How do you know she'd do a good job at our FCC? Not just because she helped get strong net neutrality rules enacted during Mr. Obama's second term, but because big media lobbyists have fought her nomination to the death! Currently our FCC only has four Commissioners, which means they can't bring back net neutrality or ensure that rural and urban areas get their fair share of infrastructure money because every vote will end 2-2. Ms. Sohn will break those ties, and she'll break those ties in the direction of the people's will. Seriously, no one opposes net neutrality except big corporations and their lackeys. And they shouldn't get all the say around here.

Around the table: shot by both sides, part 844.

Josh Bivens at the Economic Policy Institute finds that higher corporate profits make up about 53% of inflation, which maps on well to Matt Stoller's "back of the envelope" calculation from earlier this year that corporate profits made up about 60%. His lengthy disquisition on why "macroeconomic overheating" isn't causing inflation is worth reading, but so is his reminder -- because we need another one! -- that the whole world is experiencing inflation, which means that no one should blame your stimulus checks.

Farhad Manjoo at the New York Times asks (because someone was going to sooner or later, I guess) "Is Elon Musk Really That Bad?" Somehow Mr. Manjoo erases the family diamond mine from Mr. Musk's "troubled childhood in South Africa," and don't we all feel fairly confident that at least 80% of good South Africans had a more troubled childhood than Mr. Musk did? And listing ways Mr. Musk could improve Twitter certainly doesn't prove he would improve Twitter, let alone that he will, or has. That whole passage about Mr. Manjoo driving a Model S in California is hysterically tone-deaf, and I'm not even sure the Tesla car itself represents a great achievement, at least not until working families can afford it, which we've been waiting for now for over a dozen years. As I recall, the Toyota Prius became budget-friendly more quickly! Anyway, Bess Levin provides a more convincing list of good reasons to dislike the guy.

Our Centers for Disease Control (or CDC) has found that about 60% of Americans -- and, quite troublingly, a larger percentage of American children -- have had COVID-19 through the end of February. Their previous finding was that about 40% of Americans had COVID through late January. This may be why we're not living through another hellish spike at the moment -- too many Americans have had the disease. Still, keep masking up for the sake of your immunocompromised friends and neighbors. They sure deserve better than the claptrap internet "influencers" have been peddling.

When I hear that Rep. Lauren Boebert (E-CO) rather strongly dislikes Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (E-GA) and doesn't want to be caught dead with her in the same room anymore, I am reminded, as I hope you are also reminded, that this is all drama, designed to distract you from what they all want to do -- which is, basically, to deny you agency in your own civilization and to make sure a very small number of elites run things, which those elites have done and will continue to do very, very badly, because they only care about themselves. Also too, everyone saw that photo of Reps. Boebert and Greene taunting President Biden during his most recent State of the Union address, so no one's going to believe any reports of a "rift."

When I heard that David Brooks had written an op-ed which concluded with the statement "Democrats are going to have to find a posture that is tough on disorder, and tough on the causes of disorder," I said this had better not go the way I think it's going to go. Reader, it did -- his complaints about crime, education, border security, "politiciz(ing) everything," and "overstimulating the economy" all miss the mark on "the causes of disorder," at least as I've been explaining them for nearly 20 years. What causes disorder in America? The greed, folly, and venality of our ruling classes, that's what. You want to get "tough on disorder," you go after polluters and financial predators, instead of lamenting that crime is up in 2021 over 2020 like we weren't all locked down in 2020.

Finally, when Beltway knuckleheads say that President Biden is trying to "to crack the Manchinema puzzle" in passing whatever part of his domestic agenda he can still get passed, I want to grab them by the lapels and scream there is no puzzle! Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema exist to foment drama, and they'll lead the rest of the caucus on until the very last minute and then snatch the football away. Best thing Democrats could do right now is cobble together a proposal based only on things they've already agreed to do, and then hold a vote on it. If these two vote against it -- and I bet they would! -- then Democrats should move on to ensuring they get more seats in Congress next term so they don't have to deal with them anymore. Yes, Democrats can increase their majorities in 2022. I mean, they're running against insurrectionist crybaby book-banners who all voted against funding the police and against tax cuts for working families.

Action: concerning Social Security, billionaire taxes, labor, Title X, and Native communities.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security 2100 Act, the Babies Over Billionaires Act, and the PRO Act, increase funding for Title X services, and pass the CDC Tribal Public Health Security and Preparedness Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5723, the Social Security 2100 Act, which would actually expand Social Security benefits and tax higher incomes into the system to help pay for those benefits. Social Security keeps a lot of folks out of poverty, but why shouldn't it keep us out of poverty at a higher level? After all, we worked for it, we paid into it, we fought for it, and we deserve to enjoy it in our old age. And in a sick, immoral, and decadent society where Rick Scott feels secure enough in his evil that he can actually propose sunsetting Social Security within five years, and where Mitt Romney feels secure enough in his evil that he can actually propose fast-tracking Social Security benefits without debate or input from the American people, it's long past time for us to play offense.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7502, the Babies Over Billionaires Act, which would tax unrealized (i.e., unsold) gains of folks worth over $100 million at 30 percent and then use that money to establish a Family Investment Trust Fund, which would disburse that money to the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services "for programs relating to supporting family well-being and the development of children." Hence, Babies Over Billionaires. The bill leaves establishing such programs a bit up in the air for my taste, but we could hash that out in amendments; I certainly wouldn't pass up an opportunity to get at all that money rich folks will never spend, but will instead use as collateral for the low-interest loans that really subsidize their lifestyle.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. We watch corporations do a lot of shady stuff to evade our labor laws, like calling their employees "contractors," forcing them to sit in anti-union propaganda meetings, and intimidating and firing workers who try to organize. The PRO Act would put a stop to all of that! And then working folks' victories over employers like Starbucks, Verizon, and Amazon could multiply all across the land. We know Republicans will filibuster this bill in the Senate, but let's at least have a vote and force them to stand against the 60% of Americans who'd like to be in a union and the 12% of Americans who are already in one. Seriously, it's well past time for Democrats to stop playing not to lose and start playing to win. We do it, so why can't they?

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to increase funding for Title X family planning services, not merely restore funding to pre-Trump levels. Title X helps working families afford things like birth control, cervical cancer screenings, breast cancer screenings, and HIV testing. Of course you know Donald Trump spent the last four years crippling Title X services, mainly by prohibiting Title X funds from going to clinics that shared information about getting abortion care; this wound up impacting about half the good Americans who used Title X services during the Trump years. Because what is government for, if not for punishing people randomly to make a point? That's what bad government is for, of course, but good Americans deserve much better than bad government.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7577/S. 3968, the CDC Tribal Public Health Security and Preparedness Act, which would allow CDC Public Health Emergency Preparedness funding to reach Native American communities. Native Americans suffered just as much or more from the COVID pandemic as anyone else, and they also suffer high rates of both chronic health care issues (such as heart disease and diabetes) and chronic infrastructure issues (like lack of electricity and running water). There's no moral reason to exclude Native Americans from this funding, but extending assistance to Native communities also means diseases like COVID won't keep rising back up and biting all of us in the ass.

Around the table: now with *even more* corruption and whining from the right!

No, it is not absurd to claim, as Sonali Kolhatkar does at Counterpunch, that "Policing Causes Violence, Not the Other Way Around." Not just because the science tells us it's true, and not just because you can easily recall recent incidents (like the recent New York subway shootings) that increased police presence did not prevent. I think we've all experienced the phenomenon where we make problems worse by paying much more intense attention to them! And I'm old enough to remember when conservatives said "you can't just throw more money at a problem and hope it'll go away." But even those conservatives told us out of the other side of their mouths that we should throw all the moneys at police because crime. Also too, if we stopped using them as the Swiss Army knives of the state, we'd have better police officers for less money.

Hard to believe, Harry, but big nursing home corporations have sued to stop a New York state law that would force them to spend more money on patient care. Because they'd lose money! What cojones! They think the very notion of losing money an apocalyptic drama, but the neglect they foist on their workers and their patients is the real apocalypse. See, this is why we don't "let business be business," or "let big business make the important decisions." Also too, the very existence of "profits" in such a business testifies to the amount of care patients don't get -- after all, patient care is an expense. Bring back the 55% corporate tax rate and I bet we see a change right quick.

McDonald's franchises used Paycheck Protection Program (or PPP) money to pay rent to McDonald's. No, really! McDonald's, the parent corporation, owns the land upon which individual fast-food joints operate, and collects rent from them, so the franchises took money meant to keep good Americans working and used it to keep franchises more or less current on their rent. Nice work if you can get it! See? Government doesn't work! right-wingers exclaim, though it was their heroes who ran government so badly. Public Citizen's Lisa Gilbert must be being very polite to say that PPP had "noble intentions," because I never got that vibe, particularly after big corporations collected so much welfare. I mean, people don't think their local McDonald's is a "small business," do they?

In a related note, some policy bigwigs are now asking "whether the stimulus checks were a mistake" given all the inflation we're having now, and all I can say is: seriously? We're debating this? It's never a "mistake" to keep tens of millions of good Americans out of poverty they would have descended into through no fault of their own; I would have done it differently (less PPP, more CTC), but to say it's not worth it because corporations are now taking advantage of us and jacking up prices at will? And not for nothing, but those checks amounted to $3,200 total over 12 months, and I sincerely hope we all know by now how quickly we can go through $3,200.

Another day, another far right-wing whiner running for state Senate in Michigan who laments that he "(c)an't even watch a college basketball tournament without commercials telling me I have to feel guilty because I think a family should be a white mom, a white dad and white kids." Reminds me of all those years I couldn't even watch cable news programs without pundits telling me I was a traitor and a terrorist sympathizer! So yeah, Randy Bishop, fuck your feelings. I will say -- not at all in his defense! -- that while I approve of all the interracial couples I see in TV advertising, I fear that future historians will one day conclude that our society was a whole lot more accepting of interracial marriage than was actually true. But since (as Franz Boas used to say) racism disappears when interracial marriage becomes accepted, I hope that point will be moot in 20 years or so.

Finally, after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (E-GA) calls herself a "victim" of the January 6 attack, a Capitol police officer displays graphic photos of the actual injuries he suffered that day. That's some expert counter-trolling on the part of Aquilino Gonell, though I'm sorry he had to go through it at all. But we're all victims of Ms. Greene's slow-motion train wreck of a Congressional career.

Action: concerning law and order, pollution, labor, corruption, and privatization.

Long story short: tell Texas Gov. Abbott to grant Melissa Lucio clemency, tell Citigroup to get out of the Amazon rainforest, tell Verizon to recognize retail worker unions, tell our EPA to cut pollution from trucks and buses, tell our government to investigate Postmaster General DeJoy, and tell BlueTriton to stop taking the public's water. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

First things first: Ultra Violet helps you tell Texas Governor Greg Abbott to grant Melissa Lucio clemency. A jury convicted Ms. Lucio of murdering her two year-old daughter in 2007, but, well, let's just say it's a bad sign for a verdict when five of the original jurors want a do-over because of evidence they didn't get to hear, evidence that included how thoroughly investigators coerced her to confess in the first place. I'm sure some folks would rather just adhere to the original verdict, not out of laziness but out of a sense that we've got rules, but I think they're misguided: one of the ways we protect our civilization is we make damn sure someone's guilty before we do something like kill them, since you can't really take that back. Erring on the side of innocence is a feature of civilization; too many folks think it's a bug.

Stand.Earth helps you tell Citigroup executives to stop funding oil drilling in the Amazon rainforest. Yes, that still happens, and not just because Jair Bolsonaro runs things in Brazil! But Citigroup executives meet today for their Annual General Meeting, so now's as good a time as any to wield the Big Stick of Bad PR against them. They've funded oil drilling in the Amazon -- the world's best weapon against climate change, I feel compelled to restate -- to the tune of $40 billion over the years, which doesn't just mean pollution, but also means running roughshod over the rights of indigenous folks who live there. And yeah, it also means collaborating with the aforementioned irredeemable asshole whom I hope Brazilian voters will be able to turn out of office this year. Yeah, I said collaborating. As Rush Limbaugh used to say, words mean things.

More Perfect Union helps you tell Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg to recognize the Verizon retail workers' union in Washington state. Stop me if you've heard this before, but Verizon made over $4 billion in profits while cutting retail worker pay, which I guess is how they answer the question how do you think I got so rich? Verizon workers also suffer from the chronic understaffing and absurd scheduling practices that plague so many retail workers in America; could that be the reason Starbucks and Amazon workers are trying to unionize? Don't believe the hype that retail jobs are just unstable and workers should know that when they sign up. As if they have much of a choice! And anyway, calling misery "natural" betrays a profound lack of imagination.

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to cut pollution from buses and semi-trucks. Again, throwing up your hands and saying they're big vehicles and they're just going to pollute! shows a profound lack of imagination. Semis and buses pump out a quarter of all pollution from vehicals despite comprising only five percent of all vehicles, and if they only get, say six miles to the gallon, wouldn't they be twice as clean if they got 12? This is the kind of imagination that makes good policy! You can't just sit there and say we'll never get them to get 50 miles to the gallon, so let's give up, but right-wingers want you to make that mistake non-stop, because then their paymasters (like big corporations that don't want to buy all new trucks) get everything they want. And why should they?

Daily Kos helps you tell our Department of Justice and United States Postal Service Inspector General to investigate Postmaster General Louis DeJoy for possible lawbreaking -- specifically, by holding onto investments in the corporation that just so happened to produce all those free COVID tests we got in the mail. No, it's not a matter of using your connections in the business world! For one thing, our government should have made the damn tests themselves, and for another thing, you're not supposed to personally benefit from the decisions you make on behalf of the public. I'm old enough to remember when public servants avoided the appearance of corruption; now they wave it in your face. Waving it in our face should get them punished, but it won't, unless we act.

Finally, Sum of Us helps you tell BlueTriton CEO Dean Metropoulos to stop taking public water from the drought-addled communities, or, indeed, any communities. BlueTriton, as you likely know by now, used to be Nestlé’s North American water stealing ahem bottling operation last year, but it's time we reminded the world there ain't no putting lipstick on that pig. And why should there be? Why should corporations get to siphon public water and then charge hundreds of times the amount they paid for the water? They call it "preserving a resource," but governments can do that. The most important thing here is that water doesn't go the way of health insurance, higher education, child care, and, hell, rent -- as an essential item that working families can't afford anymore.

Around the table: water is a human right! And other truths.

When I read about indigenous water rights activists traveling all over Mexico to protest corporate "looting" of good Mexicans' water, I feel a little ashamed that I'd never considered that hydroelectric projects could steal water from farmers. I mean, gas fracking corporations stealing water I knew about, but hydro still retains a green sheen that deflects criticism. I'm also reminded that Mexico's constitution literally guarantees the right to water to its citizens, and that corporate use of public water (which all water should be!) violates that right. I wish the water protectors in Mexico luck, especially since Mexico is one of those places where they'll shoot you in front of everyone for defying the will of corporations.

USC report finds that "what the safety net promises" low-income working families "and what it delivers are vastly different." And gives reasons! Some programs simply don't offer help to all those who need it, while others are so riddled with bureaucracy and complicated rules that eligible families simply give up applying, and that's before we get to language barriers, the absence of "a single go-to source of information that clearly and easily communicates what programs a family is eligible for," and, of course, the stigma of being a "welfare queen," which, as we recall, only existed in the darkest imaginations of Ronald Reagan. The good news? Even the Biden Administration seems to get there's a problem, and has taken steps to fix it, though we'll need to take more steps.

When I heard that many good Americans who oppose abortion would still help a friend of family member get one, I wondered if that meant those folks aren't very anti-abortion at all, but just fronting about it. But I should have known better! Not just because anti-abortion folks do set boundaries (only a few would pay for it, but more would help pay for it, almost half would help plan it, and three-quarters would offer "emotional support"), but because we all know from the gay marriage debates that the most rabid anti-gay marriage votary can easily crumble once it's his or her son or daughter who's gay.

I find myself far less impressed than many observers that Joe Manchin's approval rating in West Virginia has shot up over the last year-plus, despite his nefarious trashing of a popular legislative agenda, because the spike in his approvals comes almost entirely from Republicans. And those who would say he's really "got his finger on the pulse of West Virginia" should consider a) whether very many Republicans who approve of him now will vote for him in 2024 if a real Trumphole runs against him or b) whether someone who actually led on Build Back Better, and explained to his right-wing constituents why it'd be good for them instead of constantly cutting it down, could have achieved the same results. Seriously, when they say Joe Manchin "really understands his people," they're kind of cutting down "his people."

When I hear that Elon Musk's proposed purchase of Twitter might well "forc(e) us off a platform that we otherwise find just too hard to quit," I say we can only hope! I used to love my Twitter feed back in the day -- the old 140-character limit sure helped me say more with less! -- but it's always been a damn swamp where you could only stand out by being a prick. And I fear the mass exodus from Twitter won't be big enough, since (as Ms. Marcotte says) too many people think they need it to stay "plugged in" to current events. On one hand, I get that; I get most of my news through email, but I sure haven't left Facebook. On the other hand, anything worth doing is hard, and when do we start punishing trolls with shame and shunning?

Finally, when I hear that Democrats have yet to commit to a unified strategy for the midterm elections, I find I'm more than happy to help! What has unified Democratic government gotten us? an ad could say. The end of the pandemic. Seven million more jobs. The deficit cut by $1 trillion. Wages going up faster than they have in decades. Not a single American soldier lost in Ukraine. And the monopolies that cause inflation getting challenged in court for the first time in decades. And what have Republicans been doing all that time? Burning books. Defending dictators. Making it harder for you to vote. Whining about masks and vaccines. Oh, and this: (cut to January 6 footage). Vote Democrat on November 8. You're welcome again, Democrats.

Action: concerning monopolies, drug prices, gas prices, campaign finance, forced arbitration, immigration, and internet policy.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the American Innovation and Choice Online Act and the Open App Markets App, tax the windfall profits of big oil corporations, pass a Constitutional amendment that would allow campaign finance law again, pass the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act, reject any bill that would force President Biden to reinstate Title 42, and confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

With the news that both H.R. 5017/S. 2710, the Open App Markets Act, and H.R. 3816/S. 2992, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, passed through the Senate Judiciary Committee by large bipartisan margins, it's time to tell Senate Majority Leader Schumer (whose contact information you may find here) to put the bills on the floor, not wait for "commitments" from 60 Senators. Because that's a stalling tactic! Both of these bills would strike blows against big tech monopolists, so our Senate should pass them. While you've got him on the line, tell him to put H.R. 6833, the Affordable Insulin Now Act, up for a vote as well. The bill would cap insulin prices, and "waiting to see how the broader reconciliation bill goes" is another stalling tactic! We already know how it'll go: Joe Manchin will string us along for six months and then say he just can't get there. Enough already.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to tax big oil corporation windfall profits. Right-wingers will say that's "taxing success," but it's actually taxing greed, or taxing price-gouging, either one will do. Every time they call something like that "taxing success," they murder a part of our world, because they help condition folks into thinking corruption equals success. We've got to get back to the society that equates corruption with evil. Anyway, just four big oil corporations made over $70 billion in profits last year, and brook no silliness about how that's only six cents per gallon or whatever, because hello! $70 billion! You can't just slice $70 billion into ladyfingers. Next up on the right-wing noise machine: CEOs are underpaid because they only make 12 cents for every breath they draw!

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.J.Res. 80, which would amend our Constitution to allow governments to regulate campaign finance like sane people again. Let me be clear: nobody but a troll gets up in the morning and says praise the Lord corporations can spend as much money as they want on stupid campaign ads that put us all in a crappy mood! We actually live in a world where two-thirds of Republican voters want the kind of campaign finance laws that our Supreme Court outlawed in their notorious Citizens United v. FEC ruling, so we should pass H.J.Res. 80. Brook no slippery-slope arguments from right-wingers! A Constitutional amendment will not open the floodgates for all kinds of free speech restrictions, not least because money is not speech.

Daily Kos, Public Justice, and Public Citizen all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 963/S. 505, the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act. Why do so many good government groups want us to pass this bill? Because forced arbitration is awful! It forces people to redress grievances with corporations through arbitration rather than court, and guess what? You're far more likely to lose in arbitration -- it doesn't matter that oh, but the average award is bigger in arbitration if you lose. And not for nothing, but forced arbitration is yet another one of those monopolistic practices by which corporations fix wages. And since wages are the price an employer pays for your labor, wage fixing is also price fixing, and price fixing, as we know, is illegal. Judges don't call it that enough, but we're working on that.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any bill that would preserve the notorious Title 42 immigration policy. Title 42 supposedly aimed to keep immigrants from making the COVID pandemic worse, and guess what? It didn't work -- with their whining about masks and vaccines, right-wing Americans kept that pandemic going quite well by themselves, thank you very much. No, the Trump Administration came up with the Title 42 program just to give them another reason to keep immigrants out of America, and too many Democratic politicians are going all Henny Penny at the prospect of even more immigrants, and the Republican attacks that will come with them. But failing to do the right thing on immigration because Republicans will attack us for it is cowardice. Which, again, Democratic politicians are good at.

Finally, FAIR helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner. All you need know about her nomination? That the Wall Street Journal doesn't want her on it, out of a "fear" that she'll "silence conservative voices." Oddly, both the One America News Network and Newsmax have supported her nomination! If the Wall Street Journal thinks net neutrality (which Ms. Sohn would help restore) amounts to "censorship" of "conservative voices," that's their problem, because net neutrality -- which would prevent internet service providing corporations from delivering some files faster than others -- is not censorship. Like "conservative" and "socialist," "censorship" has become a word its users torture until it tells them what they want to hear. But we don't do any kind of torture here.

Around the table: your smartphone spies on you! And other horrible truths.

Obscure phone-tracking corporation proved its mettle in the burgeoning field of surveillance by spying on NSA and CIA cellphones. When you read, hopefully not for the first time, that "(c)ountless common smartphone apps are constantly harvesting your location and relaying it to advertisers, typically without your knowledge or informed consent," I hope you remember that our FCC enacted some pretty good privacy-protection rules in 2016, only to have 2017's Republican Congress repeal them through the notorious "Resolution of Disapproval" process. I hope you remember that when Republicans pretend to "fight big tech," too. (And buying data may be easier than getting a warrant, but they're using our money to do it, which means we ought to get more say over the whole process.)

Stop me if you've heard this one before: our government hardly knows where all that military aid to Ukraine is really going, raising the possibility that it could "wind up in the hands of other militaries and militias that the US did not intend to arm." If you're thinking this is exclusively a feature of a Biden Administration, I've got three words for you: Osama bin Laden. In Ukraine specifically, this could mean white supremacist jerks who fight alongside good Ukrainians against the Russians now but just wait until after this is all over. The specter of a far right-wing governing coalition across Europe ain't as far off as we'd like, and you can't count on the likes of Boris Johnson and Emmanuel Macron to stand against it.

When I hear that our Justice Department says conditions at the Parchman state prison in Mississippi violate our Constitution, I shudder to think what those conditions might be -- and what conditions our DOJ has said nothing about! "Mississippi violated the rights of persons incarcerated at Parchman by failing to keep them safe from physical violence and for failing to provide constitutionally adequate mental health care," our DOJ says, but I wish that sounded substantially different from other prisons! Even worse: Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves can do no better in response than to say they've reduced the population at Parchman and they're working toward getting more officers!

So Texas Gov. Greg Abbott spent $4.2 billion in taxpayer money for, ah, "enhanced" truck inspections earlier this month, and guess how many immigrants they caught or drug seizures they made? Zero and zero, respectively. That's per Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, who was trying to put lipstick on this pig by saying Mr. Abbott "successfully persuaded Mexico states (sic) to enhance security on their side of the border." I'm sure that's not why he did it, though. He did it because it created drama. That's the only reason right-wing politicians do anything anymore.

In a related note, I hear that a Republican memo purports to be a "Road Map for Attacking Democrats on Immigration." They say Democrats shouldn't attack Republicans if they want to win the midterms, but why doesn't anyone issue similar warnings to Republicans? I've only been asking this question for at least a decade now. And I've got another question: why would voters who saw through the nakedly racist opportunism of the "caravans" in 2018 fail to see through Republican opportunism about the same thing in 2022? I sincerely hope that after the second week of November we can all say that was a rhetorical question.

Finally, I understand that Barack Obama told Stanford University that he didn't fully realize "how susceptible we had become to lies and conspiracy theories, despite having spent years being a target of disinformation myself." Alternate headline: "Obama Regrets Not Fighting Hard Enough for Civilization."

Action: concerning monopolies, transparency, drug prices, social media, data collection, and conservation.

Long story short: tell our FTC and DOJ to enact the most vigorous anti-monopoly policies possible, tell our SEC to force big investment corporations to be more transparent, tell President Biden to use all his legal power to lower prescription drug prices, tell big social media corporations to detoxify our news feeds, tell Zoom to stop trying to collect more data on users under the guise of "reading emotions," and tell our Interior Department to restore endangered species protections for gray wolves. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Public Citizen helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice to enact the most vigorous anti-merger guidelines possible. It's pretty simple: mergers kill competition, kill jobs, and raise prices, as we're seeing with three shipping magnates controlling 80% of the market and dictating terms to the rest of us, as we see when big corporations all but announce they pass on higher costs to good Americans to keep the outrageous profits coming, as we see in a hundred relatively small sectors of the economy (semiconductors, lab supplies, local media) where monopolies become the lynchpins that undo much larger sectors, and as we see when investment funds all but say they're looking to invest in monopolists über alles. All that's evil, so we've gotta fight it, and we've gotta fight it to the death.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Securities and Exchange Commission to force big investment corporations to be more transparent about their fees and their performance. Folks liken such transparency to a good nutrition label that helps you avoid foods with too much salt or fat or added sugars, and it's a good analogy; that must be why the banksters hate it so much! Banksters would prefer you just trust them that they can make your investments grow faster than anyone else, when their track record (particularly vis a vis state pension funds!) suggests they not only don't do better than the others but they charge you more than the others. You like to make more money, right? Then you ought to support more transparency from banksters.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell President Biden to use his already-existing lawful power to lower prescription drug prices for good Americans. When even the New England Journal of Medicine tells you to do it, maybe you ought to listen! You can likely enumerate the ways Mr. Biden could do it -- he could seize patents of taxpayer-funded drugs (i.e., most of them) and let more generic manufacturers make drugs, or he could start investigating price-gouging among drug manufacturing corporations -- but he could also simply immunize our government from patent infringement suits. Hey, drug prices are going up way, way faster than (even today's!) inflation, and people die as a result, so I say do it all, and do it now.

The Kairos Fellowship helps you tell big social media corporations to "fix the feed," which is to say get the hate and lies out of our social media newsfeeds. They can do this in a couple of ways: first, by fixing or getting rid of the algorithms that ensure that obnoxious, hateful crap gets prioritized in your newsfeed; second, by hiring more people in order to monitor obnoxious, hateful crap on social media; and third, by disclosing their efforts in these directions. They'll hate to do all of that, because it's more work for them and more money they'll have to pay other workers! But making a mania of squeezing more money out of less work is more surely the mark of decadence than any celebrity drama you see on TMZ. This mania hurts America, and all civilizations, in every conceivable way, which is why we consecrate our lives to stopping it.

Fight for the Future helps you tell Zoom to stop scrutinizing emotions on Zoom calls. Zoom is, guess what, trying to use AI to read our emotions so they can create yet another datastream they can sell to third-party data brokers, but guess what else? Like facial recognition technology, their emotion-reading technology sucks! I mean, why not use AI to read the bumps on our heads, or better yet, measure our craniums? Facial expressions don't all say one thing or another, as anyone who's ever heard of sarcasm knows, and if they think an algorithm can read us pretty well, I got some everyday jerks that algorithms have helped turn into frothing white supremacists to show them. And not for nothing, but Zoom ain't the only game in town for video conferencing. But we'll try the Big Stick of Bad PR before resorting to boycotts.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell our Interior Department to restore protections to gray wolves under the Endangered Species Act. The gray wolf may not be endangered per se, but our ESA has never been about waiting until things got dire for a species before stepping in, and with Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana embarking on state-sanctioned, testosterone-addled wolf hunts this year, things are getting pretty near dire, even if our ESA has helped the gray wolf come back from the brink over the last half-century. I mean, there's protecting your cattle, and then there's killing one-fifth of the wolves in your state in a mere two and a half days, as Wisconsin has lately "accomplished." I'm not particularly anti-hunting, but I am anti-stupid, and states are acting dan stupid about wolves.

Around the table: featuring some of the unexamined assumptions that make us miserable.

Matt Stoller finds the failure of three recent DOJ antitrust cases to be a good sign for our efforts to break free from monopolies, partly because, well, you don't make good law if you don't risk losing cases, but also because two of those cases will get new trials thanks to hung juries, and also because our DOJ demonstrated that wage-fixing violates antitrust law (even if they couldn't convict on particular price-fixing accusations). Mr. Stoller wonders if juries won't convict because "cheating has become normalized in American culture, so people have a tough time viewing stealing from your employees as crime." That could be, but it could also be that we've all conditioned ourselves to value winning above all else -- as Mr. Stoller suggests, folks don't want to lose, even if losing would prepare the ground for future victory -- and thus juries "pick winners" when they should be doing justice.

Ho hum, prime time TV news programming goes on and on about how rising wages, not corporate greed, causes inflation. Again, folks have just accepted profits-über-alles as a feature of the landscape -- as it most certainly was not when corporate taxes and taxes on executive salaries were much higher and stock buybacks were illegal -- and erasing corporate profits from the discussion pits worker against consumer, meaning it pits American against American, just like they want it. When we fight each other, of course, we don't fight the real enemy. And yet even as our "liberal" media would blame your year-old $1400 checks for inflation more than they'd blame corporate profiteering, not even three in 10 Americans think corporations have "no choice" but to raise prices in the absurd manner they've been doing.

Oh look, now Amtrak wants to use our TSA's notorious "no-fly" list to stop good Americans from using our national train system. As Paul Craig Roberts has said, if a "no-fly" list has a million people on it, why aren't we having terrorist attacks involving planes every day? I'd also point to the notorious "Interstate Crosscheck" database, which deregistered voters for the heinous crime of having the same name as a citizen of another state, thus depriving them of their right to vote before charging them with any kind of "voter fraud." Thus it's not a "risk" that "limited information provided by Amtrak will result in inaccurate watchlist match results," but a certainty. And then, I guess, our government will squeal NASHUNAL SECURITEEZ!!!! so that anyone wronged by the "no-fly" list can't redress their grievance in court. Funny how that works.

Here's some good news: an Atlanta, GA Apple Store becomes the first one to file for a union, with Apple employees in at least six others looking to do same. If you're thinking that maybe $20/hour is already good enough for "those workers," you might want to try making it in Atlanta on $20/hour! Apple has 272 stores in the United States, so Apple workers have a long way to go to reach the levels of Starbucks organization, even, but I wish them the best. And I suspect that Apple's anti-union arguments will be even stupider than Starbucks's have been -- and, speaking as a long time Mac user, I also suspect they'll be a lot more condescending.

And now for another exciting edition of "The Headline Says It All": "McConnell and McCarthy Talked a Big Game About Dumping Trump After January 6, Then Did Nothing Like the Cowards They Are." Mr. McConnell, in particular, might like to more closely study the example of fellow Kentucky Republican Senator John Sherman Cooper (served 1946-49, 1952-55, and 1956-73), who famously told Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio, after Mr. Taft suggested he should vote the way the party wanted him to vote, that he represented the people of Kentucky, not the party. I kid, of course -- Mitch McConnell is as empty and soulless a human being as has ever lived, and would never do anything for any reason other than power. (Later, Mr. McCarthy denied ever having said he'd dump Mr. Trump, even after the world learned his comments existed on tape. What a great Speaker he'll be!)

Finally, I can't say I'm against the Florida law that dismantles the "special district" basically run by the Walt Disney Corporation, but I notice the law wouldn't dismantle the district until June of 2023, or nearly eight months after the election in which the bill's biggest booster, Gov. Ron DeSantis, is running! Since the district's disappearance means over $150 million in higher taxes annually for Orange and Osceola counties starting next year, I'd say that's not exactly a profile in political courage. Maybe a campaign ad from his eventual opponent can frame it as such! Or an ad could talk about forcing those two counties to raise taxes next year in the larger context of the drama Mr. DeSantis constantly foments. There's a winning argument here, if Democrats would but make it.

Around the table: full of helpful reminders and helpful warnings.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) says Democrats will lose midterm elections if they don't do "big big things" "that are both badly needed and very popular with all Americans." You know, like we've been saying for a while, but still, it's good to hear a Democratic Senator say it. It's also good to hear a Democratic Senator say "Democrats cannot bow to the wisdom of out-of-touch consultants who recommend we simply tout our accomplishments." This is the woman who won re-election in 2018 by 30 points without running a single campaign ad on TV! Which at least one out-of-touch consultant then said was a big mistake if she wanted to run for President. Sexism sucks.

Alex Pareene provides yet another helpful reminder that right-wingers fully understand how journalism works, but simply don't want anyone to actually do it. "This new right fundamentally doesn’t want 'newsgathering' to happen," he writes. "They want a chaotic information stream of unverifiable bullshit and context collapse and propaganda." As late as 2006 you couldn't get away from right-wingers who insisted, in America, that a journalist's only job was to write down what the President said and report it. I didn't think it could get any worse than that; as usual, I was far too optimistic.

When you confront the headline "Southwest Missouri high school teacher accused of using critical race theory loses job," I wouldn't blame you for thinking you mean she wasn't even "convicted"? But then, using a worksheet called "How Racially Privileged Are You?" isn't a crime, even if it makes some parents sad, and boy does the school come off as a bunch of cowards! Ms. Morrison refuted all their arguments and still heard but I'm hearing you're teaching CRT. Too many people value what they're "hearing" over what is. And some parents need to grow up.

If you needed more evidence of how cool Prince was, now you can watch the Purple One defend striking public school teachers as an 11-year-old boy in 1970. The Minneapolis public school system had a world-famous music program, which not only produced Prince and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis and (of course) Morris Day but also Hüsker Dü and Alexander O'Neal who could sing a phone book. (Seriously! First time I heard "Saturday Love" I said is that Howard Hewitt?)

When I hear that "anti-woke" "warrior" David McCormick not only condemned "structural bigotry" right after the George Floyd shooting but went out of his way to make transgender folk more welcome at his hedge fund than anywhere else, all I can say is, well, buh-bye, David McCormick. Such are the wages of trying to con knuckle-draggers into voting for you. Now Pennsylvania Republicans can either have the Trump-certified candidate (Mehmet Oz) or one of the candidates Mr. Trump will happily certify if they win the primary (Jeff Bartos or Kathy Barnette).

Finally, I know Ted Cruz thinks he's funny when he says that Disney's (recent) opposition to Florida's "Don't Say Gay" law will lead one day to "Mickey and Pluto going at it," but he's not funny just like he wasn't funny when he was bashing Lisa Simpson, and Jesus Mary and Joseph one does get tired of slippery slope arguments. It's bad enough that folks still think homosexuality somehow leads to bestiality somehow, like a dog could conceivably consent to have sex with a human, but to assert that a rare corporate stand against bigotry will lead to the depiction of animal sex in a cartoon is ludicrous. I'd call it surreal, but surrealism has more rules than this.

Action: concerning drug prices, billionaire taxes, labor, forced arbitration, free tax filing, and pollution in public lands.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to lower prescription drug prices, pass a Billionaire's Income Tax, allow Congressional staffers to organize, pass the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act, let working families file with the IRS for free, and pass the Reducing Waste in National Parks Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Senators to lower prescription drug prices using the reconciliation process. Since Republicans aren't going to help! Republicans think they're a lock for getting our House and Senate back, so they're just going to prevent anything good from happening, like that doesn't hurt people! You know who else needs to hear this message, though? Democratic Senators Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Bob Menendez of New Jersey, that's who! They're not going to listen to anyone but their own constituents -- or, if they can get away with it, just their big donors! -- but if enough of their colleagues hear it, that might help light a fire under their asses. People like that don't do the right thing until they have to.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Billionaire's Income Tax and start taxing wealth the way we tax regular income. Republicans (and Joe Manchin!) will leap forward to tell you that we've never taxed that way, but of course there is a little thing called the Estate Tax, and anyway we need to start taxing these people that way, because they run roughshod over the rest of us. And these billionaires don't ever have to sell the property that makes them wealthy because banks will give them cheap loans to live on! Nice work if you can get it! Now, don't brook any nonsense from House Reps that "it's not worth doing because it won't pass the Senate." Even if it doesn't, it's still worth it to put our Senators on the spot.

More Perfect Union helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation allowing Congressional staffers to organize for better pay and working conditions, specifically by repealing Congress's exemption from our labor laws. Congressional staffers get paid $30,000 to $40,000 annually in one of America's most expensive cities to work 60 to 80-hour weeks -- plus many of them have second jobs! -- and this means that most of the folks who work as staffers are folks who come from wealthy families, and don't we have enough wealth being slung around in Congress? If Congressional staffers can organize for higher pay and shorter work weeks, then more folks from all walks of life will be able to work there, and that would do us a lot better than having Congressional staffers who don't really understand how hard most Americans have it.

Public Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 963/S. 505, the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act. Public Justice's email missive puts the whole case pretty succinctly: "(f)orced arbitration is rigged...it basically allows big companies to avoid accountability when they do something wrong. And you have no say! If you make a claim, you can’t go to court. You can’t get a fair hearing. And 9 times out of 10, you will lose. And there is nothing you can do about it." Unless you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act, that is! Don't believe the hype that "the average arbitration award is x thousand dollars," because if you lose (and you very likely will), your "average award" will be zero dollars. Plus the corporation can sue you back and win! And that's no way to get justice in America.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make tax preparation easy and free for all Americans with relatively simple tax needs. If you work for a living, our government should send you a pre-filled tax form (since they know, from employer-provided W-2 and 1099 forms, how much you make), and indeed our government has the legal authority to do that! So why don't they? Bet you can't guess -- because big tax-filing corporations don't want them to! And as you know from the news, the "deal" they made with our government "mandates" that these corporations provide free tax filing to low-income earners, but good luck finding it, not least because these corporations do their damnedest to steer you away from it! If you don't have investments so complex they look like corruption, you should be able to file your taxes for free.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5533/S. 2960, the Reducing Waste in National Parks Act. Keeping single-use plastics out of our national parks? You mean, we don't do that already? Indeed, we do not. And thus our National Park Service must deal with some 70 million pounds of trash every year, and you can bet that plastic bags and plastic wrap and plastic water bottles make up a sizable chunk of that; a review of Yellowstone National Park nearly a decade ago found that plastic bottles comprised half that park's waste stream. And we didn't know this when we embraced the shatterproof bottle, but plastics have become so ubiquitous that we now ingest about a credit card's worth of plastic some way or other every single week. Talk about unintended consequences!

Around the table: they're banning *math textbooks*! And other absurdities.

When I heard that the Florida Department of Education had rejected 41 math textbooks for various reasons, including "references to critical race theory," I found the tale was so absurd I wondered if media outlets were overplaying it. Apparently they are not! Even though Florida also said they'd rejected the math books for "inclusions of Common Core" and "the unsolicited addition of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) in mathematics," I noticed they put their objections to critical race theory first, so I guess this really must be mostly about math books containing word problems about Tony and Aisha taking a train together. Banning math books is weapons-grade PR, of course -- for the Democrat who actually uses it! Don't worry about being civil, gang, because Republicans never do.

You won't be surprised to hear that child care and elder care programs can reduce inflation, even though it's the opposite of the Gospel According to Republicans and Joe Manchin. They're still complaining that those $1,400 checks you got a year ago have caused all this inflation, and not the greed of corporations making record profits. Anyway, child care and elder care both cost an arm and a leg -- because what are you gonna do, not get it? -- and thus subsidizing these things can help working families fight the effects of inflation. No, that won't cause more inflation! Remember: corporate greed causes inflation, and we've got tools against that, like good tax policy and strong antitrust enforcement.

When I hear that "Liberal Cities Are Not Immune to Mounting Attacks on Abortion Rights," I remember that cities are actually pretty diverse, and that while a lot of folks in them vote Democrat mainly because the alternative is untenable, not everyone who does that is pro-choice, and the anti-abortion movement can peel some of those folks off, and in the long run maybe even convert them to Free Marketeers. And sadly, though my world is big enough for a liberal anti-abortion group, the "Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising" hangs out with too many right-wing nutjobs to be that group.

Here's something we should be saying a lot more: "Ron DeSantis loves using very young kids as political props." The phrase "using children" should be weapons-grade PR enough, frankly, particularly when you're surrounding yourself with children as you sign anti-abortion legislation and anti-education legislation. It works the other way for him, too, when you recall that he bullied a group of college students into taking their masks off because wearing them, he said, was "COVID theater." That man sure does know all about theater, that's for sure. But not a whole lot about leadership.

At last someone else sees why Ron Johnson keeps winning Senate elections in Wisconsin -- not just because Democrats prepare for victory so badly, but because Mr. Johnson himself sounds like a jerk on right-wing radio but then seems so nice on his TV ads. Something for everyone! Democrats hammering him on how he personally benefited from the 2017 tax "reform" might work, but Democrats showing off his two-faced nature to everyone might also work. Some folks will secretly root for a guy who "sticks it to the man" by getting himself a tax cut -- this, even though the taxpayer is "the man" here -- but folks like liars a lot less.

Finally, I guess I'm not surprised that President Biden has reopened fossil fuel drilling leases on public lands -- legalese aside, the guy can do very little about the corporate greed that's actually driving inflation, but he has to at least look like he's doing something, though giving out a lease doesn't produce more gas tomorrow. But I am a little surprised (and pleased!) that his Administration raised the royalty rate for drilling on public lands by 50%; oil and gas drilling corporations will whine about having to pay the taxpayer more for the privilege of drilling on public lands (i.e., our lands), and sadly that could well mean that President Biden changes his mind! I sure hope not, though. If we're going to have drilling on public lands, let's at least make some bank. And if the "high price of drilling" scares oil and gas drilling corporations away, well, I'll just have to deal with it.

Action: concerning online privacy, child marriage, law and order, education, public water, and plastic pollution.

Long story short: tell the California legislature to pass a bill protecting children online, tell your Congressfolk to pass a child marriage ban, tell our FBI to investigate Jelani Day's death, tell state governments to teach the history of all Americans and not just white ones, tell BlueTriton's Chair to abandon his public water-stealing ways, and tell our government to stop buying single-use plastics. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will, and 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, where appropriate.

First things first: Sum of Us helps you tell California legislators to pass AB 2273, the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, which would help keep kids safer online. Specifically, the bill (per its abstract) would set standards for corporations "that creates goods, services, or product features likely to be accessed by children"; these standards would include "considering the best interests of children" at all stages of production and providing clear community and privacy standards, plus the bill would prohibit them from collecting and using kids' personal data. Big tech corporations want to kill the bill, but let's not allow them to have all the say about everything; kids deserve an internet that speaks to their needs, not one that contorts them into "adults" before they're ready, and certainly not one that bombards them with targeted ads before they can handle it.

Change.org helps you tell our Congressfolk to pass a national child marriage ban. Only six out of 50 states have a minimum marriage age of 18, and it doesn't matter that some religions approve of child marriage, because our civilization as a whole does not, because kids can't make adult decisions about consent to sex or marriage, and in any case religious "freedom" doesn't give anyone the "right" to abridge anyone else's rights, which child marriage most certainly does. Also, kids forced into marriage are too young to file for divorce or get into a domestic violence shelter, leaving them no options except abuse and molestation. If we want to earn the mantle of "civilized people," we need to outlaw child marriage; 300,000 children getting married in America between 2000 and 2018 testifies that we need to do better.

Daily Kos helps you tell our FBI to investigate the suspicious death of Jelani Day, a Black graduate student and aspiring doctor who disappeared last August and whose body was found face-down in the Illinois River 60 miles away from his school a week and a half later. That's suspicious enough, but local police declared his death a drowning three weeks after finding him, and claimed to find no evidence of foul play or intoxication, though they found some of his personal items in more than one location a mile away from his car, which had no keys or license plates. Local police have seemed strangely incurious about all of these suspicious events; perhaps our FBI will demonstrate that curiosity this tragedy, and justice, demands. But only if we demand it of them.

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell state governments that our schools "must teach American history, not just straight white history." Right-wingers all over America have demanded that schools excise any teaching of American racism that might offend their frail sensibilities; right-wingers have a word for this kind of person (that would be a "snowflake"), but then they rarely demonstrate very much self-awareness. I quarrel, a little, with the petition's metaphor likening these right-wingers to a "squeaky wheel get(ting) the grease." I mean, it is apt, of course, but a better one would be the emptiest wagon makes the loudest noise. Over the decades, right-wingers have embodied this metaphor over and over again with their drama and hysteria. One does tire of it.

Sum of Us helps you tell BlueTriton Chair Dean Metropoulos to stop siphoning off public water everywhere he goes. BlueTriton bought Nestlé's water bottling operation in North America last year and renamed it, but you can't just put lipstick on any old pig, particularly when BlueTriton has kept up the old Nestlé habit of buying up all the public water it can on the cheap so it can put it in bottles and sell it as "spring water" or whatever. Why do we bother petitioning Mr. Metropoulos? I wouldn't blame you for thinking that's a little like petitioning the Riddler or Mr. Freeze, but we petition him to put him on notice that his name may, one day, be mud to future generations. If there are any! I mean, if folks like Mr. Metropoulos get their way, future generations may not have any water to drink unless they're very, very rich!

Finally, the Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell our federal government to stop buying single-use plastics. More specifically, you'll ask the General Services Administration, which controls procurement, to prohibit federal agencies from buying these plastic products. Since they pollute the world and cause health problems for so many people and animals! Our federal government is the world's biggest consumer, and if they will stop buying single-use plastic products, then there'll be a lot less demand for them, and then there'll be a lot less of them clogging up landfills and getting into our air and water and bodies. I can already see the headlines on Fox News: Big Government Won't Let Defense Department Buy Bottled Water! But gosh, how did we ever hydrate before bottled water? They hope you don't ask.

Around the table: featuring stories about the power of organizing.

When I hear that far-right Christians aim to redeploy the "Astroturf" stratagem that worked so well for them in Virginia in 2021, I feel compelled to remind everyone that once we reveal such a stratagem (and I'll continue to reveal it as often as I can!) it becomes less effective, and also that as even E.J. Jackson knows, running against Terry McAuliffe isn't the hardest thing a candidate can do. Their stratagem might succeed, though, if Democrats don't point out all the Astroturfing going on in these races. People are too quick to accept that someone they know personally couldn't possibly be part of an Astroturf group! But too many of them are, and borrowing a hedge-trimmer from one of them doesn't make them more "real."

Andy Kroll at Rolling Stone not only digs up evidence that our FBI did, in fact, know a lot about the January 6 attempted coup before it happened, but also reminds us that our FBI professes that it simply doesn't have the legal tools to detect right-wing agitation before it happens but can detect and disrupt more peaceful liberal agitation with laughable ease. Which further reminds us that law enforcement agencies always use events like the January 6 attempted coup to justify even more surveillance power over the American people, when they hardly need it! They just don't focus very much on right-wing protestors, for some reason. Also, they don't seem to need to get warrants very often; there's a reason we get warrants.

On March 29, wind power produced more electricity than either coal or nuclear power for the first time; though not as much as natural gas. I can already hear the right-wingers squeal that TEH BIG GUMMINTZ GIVEZ TEH WELFAREZ TO TEH WINDZ POWERZ!!!!!, as if either coal or nuclear power would be able to provide any power at all without massive federal taxpayer support. Think how much power wind could supply if big corporations had done the smart thing and embraced it long ago! Versus the dumb thing of clinging like grim death to fossil fuel technology that's going to make our planet unlivable. (No, they're not "smart" merely because they've made a lot of money. Try taking money with you to the Pearly Gates.)

Luis Feliz Leon at New York Focus reminds us that the Amazon Labor Union organizing effort in the Staten Island warehouse "broke many of the traditional rules of labor organizing, while making history." The ALU had virtually no funding, no prior experience organizing, and no support from other unions; they also made "amateur missteps" like filing for an NLRB election before having majority card-signing support and refraining from home visits and door-knocking. So how did they win? They organized by talking to workers in break areas and in the cafeteria rather than at home -- since, as one organizer suggests, most folks look at their home as a safe space from work -- and used social media apps to specifically to reach workers whose command of the English language wasn't that great face-to-face. Besides, they're not the first independent union to win! In the '30s, those unions won all the time -- and after ALU won, more established unions supported them.

Mark and Paul Engler at Waging Nonviolence interview Rebecca Tarlau about "What U.S. Organizers Can Learn From Brazil's Landless Workers Movement." "(W)e need to contest power in all spaces of social life" (i.e., not just in the political sphere), "whether that’s in the media or the schools or with the land," and Brazil's Landless Workers Movement has been doing that for decades, whether through gaining permanent settlements or through establishing and maintaining health care clinics, educational curricula, and food processing plants. So they've essentially seized power without very much compromise by providing for their own needs as much as possible and through that service "prefiguring an alternative way of being" -- though when the Black Panthers (among others!) tried something similar in the United States in the '70s, our governments demonized them and our law enforcement took them down.

Finally, Indonesia's Parliament passes a bill criminalizing many forms of sexual violence, the first of its kind in that nation. Many observers think it doesn't go far enough -- it tackles domestic abuse, child marriage, forced marriage, and sexual exploitation but not rape -- while the religious right there complains that it doesn't include proscriptions against extramarital sex (like those guys really want that!) and "deviant" sexual orientations. My father would say if all the extremists are upset, it must be a good bill; I won't go that far, but I will call it progress, even if, as I suspect, getting it passed was (in Ronald Reagan's famous phrase) like crapping out a pineapple.

Action: concerning taxes, law and order, energy security, protecting our democracy, immigration, and copyrights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to extend the Child Tax Credit expansion, oversee FBI investigations more closely, pass the Energy Security and Independence Act and the Protecting Our Democracy Act, support ending Title 42, and reject the SMART Copyright Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to revive the Child Tax Credit expansion that put $250 and $300 checks in the bank accounts of working families. Because that will help people struggling with inflation! Don't believe the Manchinean hype that "expanding the Child Tax Credit caused the inflation in the first place." For one thing, if that were true, inflation would have gone down by now, since the CTC expansion expired almost four months ago. For another, corporate greed causes most of the inflation we're experiencing! Corporate pre-tax profits went up 25% in 2021; recall that inflation was about 7% for the entire year. It's cruel to "get tough" on folks who need help making ends meet, and not to get tough on the powerful people who cause all the problems.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to conduct more stringent oversight of FBI "sensitive investigative matters" -- i.e., investigations of political organizations, religious organizations, public officials, or the media. We learned last month that our FBI allowed more than two errors per investigation on average in 2019, errors that contravened our FBI's own rules about these investigations and included such basic failures as failing to get proper authorization to even start an investigation. Law enforcement officers must answer to the law, and if not to the law, then certainly to internal procedures; we can't let them cut corners, because good Americans get hurt when they do. Sure, it's a "political organization" today, but tomorrow it could be you or I.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7439/S. 4013, the Energy Security and Independence Act, which would amend the Defense Production Act of 1950 so that it would cover energy production in America. Donald Trump will tell you that'd be "black helicopter territory" if our government stepped in and made big corporations produce renewable energy so we wouldn't have to rely on foreign countries so much, but no, it's not "black helicopter territory" for our government to actually insure that we rely on ourselves for our energy needs. And if big corporate CEOs think losing a few million dollars off their annual salaries constitutes "government oppression," I'd like to introduce them to some Russian anti-war protestors who could explain to them what oppression is really like.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5314, the Protecting Our Democracy Act, which our House passed late last year. That also means contacting Senate Majority Leader Schumer (here's his contact info) and telling him to schedule that vote in the first place! No excuses about this one or that one maybe not voting for it! Hold their feet to the fire! The Protecting Our Democracy Act would prevent Presidential abuses of power like those perpetrated by Mr. Trump during his four notorious years in office, specifically targeting a President's ability to profit from his office and abuse his pardoning power, both of which Mr. Trump surely did. I guess this bill's opponents will yammer on about all that being in the past, ignoring the fact that the past teaches a great deal about what to avoid in the future. Hmm, that sounds almost conservative.

NETWORK, the National Catholic Social Justice Lobby, helps you tell your Congressfolk to support ending the Title 42 "health care-related" immigrant expulsion policy. President Biden (finally!) announced that he's ending this cruel policy, one former President Trump supposedly enacted to keep COVID out even though Mr. Trump's most devoted supporters then proved they can keep a pandemic going all by their damn selves. But quite a few Democrats have spoken out against this announcement in recent days -- they smell blood, might it be their own? -- but don't believe the hype that Joe Biden's not giving us tools to deal with the influx of immigrants. Those tools are laws and courts; they take a long time to work their will because they serve justice, not the need for second-rate politicians to "look tough."

Finally, No Censorship Filter helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject S. 3880, the so-called SMART Copyright Act. The SMART Copyright Act would basically force every internet entity that handles content to install automated filters aiming to catch copyright infringement, but if there's something worse than an overzealous human censor, it's an algorithmic censor that can't be reasoned with, let alone tell the difference between actual infringement and fair use! Seriously, too many politicians think machines can just do anything, when the tech bros feeding them that nonsense just don't want to hire people and pay them and give them health insurance and vacation time and paid family/sick leave and the like. And these tech bros laugh at the politicians they con! We won't be laughing if this bill passes, though.

Around the table: fighting the good fight, part 865.

You may want to see what some of your fellow Americans are telling our FTC and DOJ about how they want stronger antitrust enforcement. First off: in 2010, our FTC received 32 comments about antitrust enforcement rules; so far they've received over 100 times that amount! Second, a lot of these folks really know their stuff, and a lot of them have suffered serious abuse from their monopolist employers; after reading them, you will not be able to tolerate some corporate lobbyist telling you that most public comments come from people who don't know what they're talking about and only corporations really know what's going on.

From the "Nobody Could Have Predicted!" file: a whistleblower informs us that privatized Medicare plans are stealing millions of dollars from Medicare (and therefore the taxpayer, i.e., you and I). You may not read anything that surprises you -- OK, the woman who got diagnosed with prostate cancer might surprise you -- but the "aggressive medical record coding" will likely strike you as a euphemism for "inventing diseases so one can overbill for treatment." Remember that if Republicans take control of Congress, they'll refuse to fund going after Medicare fraudsters because "we can't afford it," just like they did last time. Law and order!

Should I have anticipated that a propagandist would one day slap the word FAKE over real video footage of dead war victims, as Russia has done in its war on Ukraine? Maybe, but if I'd put a detail like that in a short story back in the day, my creative writing professor would have rapped my knuckles. If I'd put in details about TV talking heads describing the dead bodies as "actors" or people Ukrainians supposedly killed after the Russians left to make the Russians look bad -- or about the whole "fact-checking" organ that just regurgitates state propaganda -- he'd still have rapped my knuckles, though he might have at least applauded all the effort I put in. The way things are now, I wouldn't even write satire about any of that.

David W. Moore at FAIR advises us not to trust polls on Florida's notorious "Don't Say Gay" law, mainly because pollsters tend to give folks incomplete information about the law when they ask them about it, rather than simply asking them about it. They give really incomplete information about the law, too -- how many Americans would support it if they knew it actually restricted instruction about sex through 12th grade and forced school counselors to rat on kids who tell them they're gay to their parents? I suspect folks don't actually approve of those things regardless of how they feel about gay and trans students.

Ho hum, TV ad claims that illegal ballot harvesting delivered both of Georgia's U.S. Senate seats to Democrats in 2020 -- as a way of attacking incumbent Republican Governor Brian Kemp, whom they see as inadequate to the task of fighting "voter fraud." Even the notorious True the Vote, which lodged the ballot harvesting complaint to which the ad refers, would not say the ballots harvested were themselves fraudulent, but of course that's only because saying so absent evidence would invite a lawsuit they'd almost certainly lose. Still, that doesn't prevent the masturbatory rage machine from churning onward, which I think is the whole point anyway.

Finally, people will give you a lot of reasons Donald Trump endorsed J.D. Vance for the Republican nomination in the Ohio Senate race, but let me be the one to say: don't believe any of it! Donald Trump latched on to J.D. Vance because Mr. Vance was starting to gain ground on Josh Mandel in polls, and with the primary less than three weeks away, Mr. Trump didn't want to get left behind, or be seen endorsing a "loser." I especially don't believe that Mr. Trump was "soured" by the Josh Mandel/Mike Gibbons chest-to-chest moment; the only thing that would have "soured" him about it, I would think, would be that it didn't come to actual blows.

Around the table: from Manchinean betrayal to right-wing feelings.

Andy Kroll at Rolling Stone reports on "How Joe Manchin Knifed the Democrats -- and Bailed on Saving Democracy," and even though I'm tempted to say we did kinda see all this happening in real time, it's still good to have the whole story of how Joe Manchin prevented Democrats from passing voting rights reforms in one place. Long story short: Democrats gave him everything he wanted, had every reason to believe they had a deal with him -- and he still betrayed them and, more pertinently, us. I've said this before and I'll say it again: whereas the story of 2009-10 had the entire party as the villain, the story of 2021-22 has Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema as the villains, and that fact will help Democrats at the polls this November.

OSHA data tells us that Amazon warehouses employed 33 percent of all warehouse workers in 2021, but was responsible for nearly half of all warehouse injuries. Also, warehouse injuries jumped 20% at Amazon from 2020 (when they were trying to appear to be on their best behavior, for obvious reasons) to 2021. Also, their serious injury rate is about double that of other warehouses, all because they all think they're engineers and their underlings are mere tools. No wonder they're starting to have some success in unionizing! Regardless of what right-wingers try to tell you, this is the kind of shit people are really tired of. Also too, do we really need that Doctor Who DVD the day after we order it?

Big clothing corporations garner a sizable part of their revenue from credit cards, and "revenue" too often means "usurious late fees and interest rates. Aside from the experience most folks have -- that credit cards are, in the end, usually a burden rather than a boon -- retail workers in this field hate being forced to push credit cards upon customers, sometimes at the rate of one every four customers (at American Eagle). The "rewards" for getting more credit card applications than your co-workers range from a gift card to a stick of gum -- not, you know, health care benefits or comp time or higher pay! All this so that big corporate executives can continue to make a crap-ton of money for doing as little work as possible.

I think too many of us are misconstruing Sen. Charles Grassley's remarks at a Waukon, IA town hall earlier this week -- he didn't actually say he'd vote against repealing the Affordable Care Act; he's probably just saying Republicans won't have a two-thirds majority in House and Senate in 2023, which is the only way Republicans could get a repeal done (since President Biden would veto a repeal effort). Sen. Grassley may well regret actually meeting voters if he's going to get questions like that, though. I mean, "voted to repeal Obamacare 16 times" sure sounds like an attack ad. That's a suggestion, Admiral Franken.

Amanda Carpenter at The Bulwark laments that Pennsylvania Republicans will nominate an election conspiracist for Governor in 2022. And that is profoundly disappointing; I'd hoped Dan Laughlin would at least make me feel bad for voting against him. Instead, we have the guy who bussed people to the January 6 attempted coup, the former U.S. Attorney who's tried to have the stolen election myth both ways, the hanger-on who became an "alternate elector" and demanded a "full forensic audit," and the state Senator who has let the Trumpholes completely cow him. Oh, and Dave White, he of the ad that compares Democrats who criticize his election conspiracy-mongering to crying babies. Of course people like Dave White are the real crybabies, but any of them could win if Josh Shapiro gets complacent the way Democrats do.

Finally, when I hear that "conservatives feel blamed, shamed and ostracized by the media," I'm tempted to say good! It's finally working! Of course, I don't think any of the folks quoted in the article are "conservatives"; I think they're reactionary rageheads. But after 20 years of you hate America and you're a traitor and you're with the terrorists and you're a socialist and you're a Communist and you're the real racist and you're a groomer, they should get down on their knees and thank the Lord that "I’m just done with dealing with people like you" is the worst they get from their friends and co-workers. And their attitude toward our media is worse! Our "liberal" media patronized these fools for decades until Donald Trump finally made doing that toxic, and right-wingers complained about media "bias" "against" them the whole time! And seriously, if right-wingers think they have it bad in America because they can't "be themselves" in the break room, they should try being an anti-war protestor in Russia.

Action: concerning monopolies, health care, pollution, and "liberal" media folly.

Long story short: tell our FTC and DOJ to crack down on mergers, tell your Senators to confirm Alvaro Bedoya to our FTC, tell HHS Secretary Becerra to reduce Medicare premiums, tell Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection to better protect good Pennsylvanians from PFAS chemicals, tell CBS to stop hiring Trump Administration trolls as "news analysts," and tell the Washington Post to stop giving all its oxygen in the education debate to right-wing trolls. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will, and 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, where appropriate.

The American Economic Liberties Project helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission and our Department of Justice to draw up merger guidelines that will actually encourage competition in America again. With Lina Khan as FTC Chair and Jonathan Kanter overseeing antitrust law at DOJ, our government has actually shown a fervor for doing exactly that, and though our FTC doesn't have a fifth Commissioner installed yet (which see next paragraph), the Administrative Procedure Act doesn't permit our government to simply ignore the popular will when it asks for it on matters like this, or else it'll have to answer in federal court, which, as you probably recall, was how most of Donald Trump's regulatory changes died. And if we make it harder for corporations to merge their way into monopolies, we'll bring inflation down. That's worth doing, right? (Matt Stoller, as usual, provides essential background.)

In a related note! You'll want to call your Senators and tell them to confirm Alvaro Bedoya as the FTC's fifth Commissioner; you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to find your Senator's contact info, and you can find Senate Majority Leader Schumer's contact info here, so that you can remind him to schedule a vote on Mr. Bedoya, whose expertise in privacy and technology certainly would help our FTC, since expertise in these issues is, well, lacking in our government generally. Don't believe the hype that Mr. Bedoya has "divisive views," because his views (on protecting kids' online privacy, for example) only divide Our Glorious Elites -- who sincerely believe that no concern of any good American should keep them from making as much money for doing as little work as possible -- from the rest of us.

Both Social Security Works and Drug Prices Are Too High help you tell HHS Secretary Becerra to lower Medicare premiums. Why? Well, specifically because our Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (or CMS) raised Medicare Part B premiums last year, in anticipation of having to cover the exorbitantly expensive and notoriously unproven Alzheimer's drug Aduhelm, which would have cost $56,000 per patient per year. Now, thanks largely to your activism, our CMS has decided it'll only cover Aduhelm for Medicare recipients in clinical trials, but since it's not going to be paying out all that money, it ought to bring premium prices back down. It's only fair! And it was never fair to make everyone pay for a drug our CMS committed to without making sure it even works.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Penn Environment helps you tell our state Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) to enact more vigorous rules protecting the public from PFAS exposure. PFAS chemicals, as you probably recall, are those "forever chemicals" found in all kinds of products which hardly break down once and now pollute our drinking water. You'll find the gnarled hand of PFAS in a lot of cancers, hormone disruption, immune suppression, and kidney disease; our DEP is doing something, at least, but has excluded a few PFAS chemicals from their rule, meaning it doesn't do enough to keep good Pennsylvanians healthy. That's why we're here, though, and remember: if they just flat-out ignore us and only do what big chemical corporations want them to do, we can go after them in court.

Social Security Works helps you tell CBS not to give cush "analyst" jobs to right-wingers who deserve shame and shunning from the rest of America. Still angry that Tha Bush Mobbers got any work after the humiliations they inflicted on America between 2000 and 2008, but still want to see actual conservatives on TV? Well, former Trump Chief of Staff/man who wears glasses so people punch him in the face Mick Mulvaney ain't it. I would never call that man a conservative; I'd call him a reactionary, or a corporatist, or, I'll admit, a few worse things. And note well that CBS didn't even mention which Administration he'd served under the first time they put him on the air! That means they know they're doing wrong. Which makes our duty to fight their wrongdoing even more urgent.

Finally, FAIR helps you tell the Washington Post to stop letting right-wing bigots have all the say about everything in their articles about education. The title of their April 5 article didn't promise a whole lot to begin with -- "Teachers Who Mention Sexuality Are 'Grooming' Kids, Conservatives Say," and I still think anyone accused of "grooming" who isn't actually grooming should sue. Then, 13 paragraphs later, you finally hear an opposing point of view. I guess the Post will respond "well, we were reporting on what conservatives said," which a) they're not conservatives, they're reactionaries! and b) why not focus on what regular folks say -- including gay and trans kids! -- rather than right-wing trolls who pollute every pond they wade in?

Around the table: featuring rich folks' tax avoidance and Democrat weakness.

And now ProPublica lists America's 400 highest earners from 2013-18 and the tax rates they paid. How do they get away with paying so little? Well, thanks to Tha Bush Mobb's 2003 tax "reform," we tax investment income at much lower rate than the rest of income, even though it's all, you know, income. And a lot of rich folks donate stocks, which means they get to deduct the stocks' value from their taxes without even selling it and paying taxes on it. Nice work if you can get it! The 400 highest earners pay an average of 22%, which rate is higher than most other folks -- but most other folks pay more in payroll taxes, and 22% of a small pile ain't the same as 22% of a hundred-times-higher pile, particularly when having 100 times more than the next guy doesn't mean you need 100 times the food and shelter. I'll keep explaining that until all the haters shut up like they should.

Per Politico, Democratic politicians are adopting "firmer postures on law and order." Does this mean Democrats are, at long last, demanding that polluters and banksters get their just desserts when they inflict massive injury on our civilization? I kid, of course -- for too many Democratic politicians, as for too many "liberal" media hacks, "law and order" only ever means "putting more Black folks in jail and then doing the helicopter dance about it." (Also, could it be that we're seeing an "uptick" in crime in 2021 over 2020 because we were in lockdown in 2020? Again, I kid: of course that's the reason. Can't do too much burgling when you're sheltering in place because you're afraid you'll die if you don't.)

Gallup puts six separate climate change solutions to Americans, and found that they approve of all of them by large margins!. More than 70% of Americans approve of tax credits for home installation of clean energy systems, tax breaks for businesses that do same, and higher fuel efficiency standards for autos; as Newt Gingrich would say, if 70% of the people want something, they should get it. Of course, as we know, none of this matters nothing to the crowd that intones about lasting change and the importance of bipartisanship. But that just means we have to get in their grills more. (Even strict methane limits gets 62% approval; remind folks that methane leakage deprives good Americans of both energy and royalties -- when corporations drill for gas on public lands, that is -- and I suspect that number goes way up.)

I wouldn't get too down about polling in Nevada showing Democratic incumbents (including Sen. Cortez-Masto, whom I've always liked) running behind their Republican challengers, not just because it's only April and not just because they still might get actually unelectable challengers, but also because what one observer identifies as a handicap to those incumbents -- that "it is very difficult to convince undecideds to vote for you when they remain undecided despite telling us that they are very interested in voting in this election" -- is, frankly, just as much a handicap to the challengers. The undecideds who are "very interested in voting in this election" have also thus far looked at Adam Laxalt and remained undecided.

Our Justice Department puts a former Republican staffer in jail for 12 years for running a child porn ring; I have a tough stomach for evil, but I found some of the details here nauseating. So why don't we ever hear about liberals getting jail time for child porn? I won't indulge in any further sarcasm about this, lest some stray ragehead pretend such sarcasm confirms his rage.

Finally, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (E-GA) lashes out at a reporter asking her about the January 6 attempted coup by saying it only happened "one time"! In other news, we only dropped one H-bomb on Hiroshima. Later she lashed out at coverage of her initial lashing out, accusing our media of fomenting "drama" like she's not a wholesale dealer in drama herself! Between this and her police report on Jimmy Kimmel, I'm sure she thinks she's had a good week. But if her eventual Democratic opponent (who will likely be absurdly well-funded) gets even 35% in her heavily-gerrymandered district in 2022, I'd start putting that district on my watch list.

Action: concerning insulin, monopolies, privacy, banksters, and media.

Long story short: tell your Senators to pass the Affordable Insulin Now Act; tell your Congressfolk to pass the Open App Markets Act and the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, reject the Kids Online Safety Act and the SMART Copyright Act, and pass the Stop Wall Street Looting Act; and tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first: our House passed H.R. 6833, the Affordable Insulin Now Act, earlier this month, so now's the time to tell your Senators to pass this bill as well; you can find their phone numbers using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page. Also, you can find contact information for Senate Majority Leader Schumer here, and tell him to schedule a vote on the bill post-haste. Brook no excuses! Nobody cares if it "has the votes"! Democrats act like it's a mortal sin to lose votes, but sometimes the best way to win a vote in the long term is to lose it in the short term! Won't Ron Johnson's opponent, or Rand Paul's, want to run ads about their refusal to stop price-gouging of diabetics? And won't Mark Kelly and Raphael Warnock (who's sponsored the Senate version) want something to run on? This is Politics 101.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5017/S. 2710, the Open App Markets Act, and H.R. 3816/S. 2992, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act. Both these bills would stop big tech corporations from herding you toward their chosen products, versus letting you get the products you'd like, and note well that the big tech corporations are getting all Henny Penny about these bills. As the article points out, when big corporations tell you a bill would result in apocalypse, you can be pretty sure they're more scared than you should be. Getting to use the app store of your choice to get apps? Preventing big corporations from favoring their products in your searches? That hardly sounds like the end of the world -- unless, I guess, you're used to making money without earning it.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject S. 3663, the so-called Kids Online Safety Act, because (and stop me if you've heard this before!) it wouldn't keep kids safe from online predators so much as it would expand internet surveillance upon them (and, of course, on us as well). The bill would also let state Attorneys General censor websites they deem unsafe for children, which, given so many state-level politicians have done recently, will let them call gay and trans websites "predators." This is exactly the kind of bill that lets politicians look like they're doing something, but actual child molestors and sex traffickers will still circumvent these "protections." Put it like that, and you may move the needle for some of your Senators.

Fight for the Future helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject S. 3880, the so-called SMART Copyright Act, which would force every website to put content filters on it. To what end? To "protect copyright," supposedly, but "content filters" are algorithms, and algorithms won't err on the side of fair use, but will censor like mad, which will cripple free speech on the internet, almost like that's the whole idea. How do we protect copyright, then? We do it with the laws we have; the internet is not so unique a thing that existing laws won't protect copyright anymore. And we also do it by forcing corporations to hire people, not machines, to monitor for copyright violations! Corporations wouldn't hire anyone to do anything if they could get away with it, but people are so much more subtle and effective than machines.

Stop Wall Street Looting helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5648/S. 3022, the Stop Wall Street Looting Act. This bill would stop banksters from buying up corporations and draining the wealth out of them by doing at least four things: 1) making banksters legally liable for the wreckage they leave; 2) closing tax loopholes that make predatory behavior so lucrative; 3) protecting workers first when big corporations go bankrupt; and 4) forcing banksters to reveal costs and returns to investors. A bankster who decides to go all In the Company of Men on some big chain restaurant will think twice about bleeding it dry and leaving working families out on the street if he might go to jail for all of that! And even country club jail time would be more law-and-order than corporations paying a fine and then deducting that fine from their taxes.

Finally, Free Press helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner. How do you know that Ms. Sohn would do a good job at our FCC? Because Comcast went very far out of its way to lobby against her nomination -- and then got caught trying to hide that fact in its lobbying disclosure forms! Our FCC has been deadlocked 2-2 for over a year, meaning (among other things) no net neutrality restoration like virtually everyone in America wants and no work ensuring that infrastructure money helps build out broadband in rural and urban areas where it's needed. I don't care that Republican Senators will oppose the nomination; I don't care that Kyrsten Sinema might oppose it (since she opposes net neutrality, what a maverick!). I only care about doing the right thing, and making our elected leaders do the right thing, and this right thing is long overdue.

Around the table: why we need Utopian thinking, and other truths.

Paul Rosenberg interviews historian Victoria Walcott about why we need Utopian visions to create social change. Ms. Walcott's new book (Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement) not only reminds us that the rapid-fire successes of the Civil Rights movement only came about through decades of education and agitation, but that young Coretta Scott gave Martin Luther King, Jr., Edward Bellamy's famous Utopian novel Looking Backward while they were still courting, and the book informed much of Dr. King's thinking during the '60s. She also reminds us that the notion that "working-class people had a right to leisure, had a right to intellectual life, had a right to artistic endeavors" was once a Utopian vision. Her book comes out later on this month. (And not for nothing, but far too many of us embraced dystopian thinking during the '80s and '90s, not just because of the right-wing ascendancy in America, but because of our own immaturity.)

Robert McChesney and John Nichols, writing at the Columbia Journalism Review, propose a "Local Journalism Initiative" to revive local news organs. The internet (and monopoly news corporations, don't forget) have basically killed the advertiser-funded model of journalism, so Messrs. McChesney and Nichols would turn to taxpayer funding to restart the web of local news organs that kept us all connected until recently. The Initiative would send a lump sum of money to every county and then that county's eligible voters would vote on which three news organs to spend it upon (though, depending on the vote, more news organs than that could receive the money); the only news organs that could receive that money would be non-profit, county-based, functioning for six months, completely independent of any larger entities, and publish original content at least five days weekly. All that's for folks who read "taxpayer funding" and saw only the spectre of totalitarianism -- and for folks who think the BBC's failures mean NO GUBMINT INVOLVEMENTZ EVAHZ!!!!!!

From the "He's Not Wrong!" file: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) wants a "strategic pause" on negotiations over the COMPETES Act, saying that Jeff Bezos shouldn't get a "$10 billion bailout to fuel his space hobby." And they say there are no populists on the left! Of course there are; our "liberal" media just ignores them. But the way he puts it is the way we should all put it, not just because nobody actually likes "bailouts," but because once right-wingers weaponize a word or a phrase, it's only right that we should take the words from them and point them back at them. (His repurposing of Sen. Manchin's "strategic pause" phrase is just icing on the cake here.)

Iowa judge rules that former one-term Rep. Abby Finkenauer can't appear on the Iowa Democratic Senate ballot in early June, because a few of the signatures she gathered for the campaign have no dates on them. Losing this case by literally three signatures sounds petty, but if you're that close to the line (Iowa requires a certain number of signatures, but also requires that at least 100 of them come from at least 19 different counties), you didn't do your job. Overall, I'd say this is no great loss. And it's also a boon for Admiral Mike Franken, who's been all over my Facebook feed saying how bad Fox News is for his soldiers, which sure doesn't make me hate him.

I'll admit I was surprised that Donald Trump endorsed Mehmet "Dr." Oz for Pennsylvania's Senate seat this year -- I'd figured he'd just prefer to wait to see who won and then pretend that was his choice the whole time. David McCormick's road to the nomination just got a lot harder -- and, ah, nobody really thinks Rick Santorum's quickly-issued endorsement will save him, right? Rick Santorum lost his last statewide election by 18 points 15 years ago and he was the incumbent! -- but I can't say Jeff Bartos's road to the nomination got that much harder; one could see benefits and drawbacks to having only one opponent he can call a carpet-bagger. If Mr. Oz is the nominee, then Republicans may not have as easy a time saddling John Fetterman with the story of the Black man he chased down with a gun, since their guy basically said on TV that we'll have to sacrifice more children to the economy. (Also, don't believe that the Trump brain-trust is having a "meltdown" over this endorsement. It's always drama when right-wingers fight in public, and of course it's bad drama.)

Finally, this just may be my favorite headline so far this year: "U.S. Didn’t Expect Major Explosions When an ISIS Bomb Factory Was Bombed." The article describes "a flawed 'collateral damage estimate' before an airstrike that killed scores of Iraqis in 2015," but (and I know this will come as a shock to you!) I don't think stupidity explains this mistake; I think malice does. Not in the I WANTZ TO KILLZ TEH NONWHITEZ PEEPULZ!!!! sense, but in the sense that you find it harder to prove to everyone you're "tough on terror" if you pass up targets "merely" because they might literally blow up and kill innocent people. I'm not sure I can say that's better, though. (And brace yourself for yet another iteration of nobody could have predicted in one of the post-strike assessments.)

Action: concerning anti-war protestors, law and order, pipeline safety, climate change, mercury emissions, and Arctic drilling.

Long story short: tell the Russian government to stop hurting antiwar protestors, tell the Biden Administration to actually lead on trying Mr. Putin before the ICC, tell the Biden Administration to give up its fascination with "carbon capture" technology already, tell our EPA to bring back strong mercury emissions rules, and tell Travelers Insurance to stay away from Arctic drilling projects. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Roots Action helps you tell the Russian government to stop hurting Russian antiwar protestors. The news is full these days of stories of Russian citizens spouting pro-war propaganda, but there's a reason for that: the Russian government arrested all of its anti-war protestors and detained them! In America, our government just laughs at you when you protest them, but in Russia as in many other nations, you could lose your freedom, your livelihood, or your life. They probably count themselves as "civilized" because they don't just shoot them dead in the street! But it takes more than that to be civilized. And not for nothing, but if you've ever been called "traitor" for opposing the Iraq war, then Russian anti-war protestors are your brothers and sisters, and they need your help now more than ever.

Win Without War helps you tell the Biden Administration to lead the effort to put Vlad the Bad on trial at the International Criminal Court for war crimes against Ukraine. I don't need to recount the various war crimes Mr. Putin has committed against Ukraine; you can see them on the TV and on the internet. But despite what Mr. Biden has said, apparently off the cuff, our government generally doesn't have any appetite for prosecuting war crimes at the ICC, lest someone one day prosecute our leaders for war crimes! That's why we've got to speak out, and make no mistake, we're not just fighting Mr. Putin here; we're also fighting a future Donald Trump Administration (or a worse one!) when it enables our troops to commit rape and torture and mass murder in some foreign land to distract from some other evil they're committing against the American people.

Food and Water Watch helps you tell the Biden Administration that "carbon capture" technology is not a climate change "solution." What's wrong with "carbon capture," which aims to trap carbon emissions and store them? It never captures the amount of carbon they say it will, and big corporations use it as an "energy source" only to get more oil out of the ground. Carbon capture proponents will say it should be part of an "all of the above" energy strategy, but stupid ideas should never be a part of any strategy, ever. And if enough of us tell our government to scuttle its carbon capture dreams, our government will eventually have to explain to a federal court why they ignored us. Our recent experience in this area has suggested that wouldn't go well.

Environment America helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous mercury pollution rules possible. Environment America's email missive puts it most succinctly: "When power plants burn coal, mercury is released up the smokestack. That toxic mercury then rains down into our soil and waterways, poisoning fish and threatening our health. Mercury pollution is linked to increased risk of neurological illnesses and nerve damage. Kids are especially vulnerable to the impacts of mercury and can suffer severe developmental issues." Our EPA had a pretty good mercury rule once, and it cut mercury emissions by 85% between 2012 and 2016; I bet you just can't guess what happened next. Well, he's gone now, so now it's time to undo all his evil works.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell Travelers Insurance to refuse to insure oil and gas drilling projects in the Arctic. Because drilling in the Arctic is not only fraught with danger -- the inevitable oil spills are harder to clean up in that frigid region -- but because drilling in the Arctic will threaten actual, thriving industries, like Alaska's famous salmon industry. And oil drilling ain't just about digging a hole and shoving a well into it; it also involves clearing trees, paving roads, and running pipelines, all of which disturb and destroy ecosystems. And not for nothing, but given that Alaska already pumps out a ton of oil and more Arctic drilling doesn't promise that much more, think maybe big corporations just want to ruin protected areas? And should we encourage that kind of immaturity?

Around the table: featuring yet another parade of pretenders!

As Hungarian Prime Minister/irredeemable asshole Viktor Orban proves even harder to dislodge than Bibi Netanyahu, the American right-wing press heralds his most recent re-election "as a victory against secularism and wokeness" and "an example for the Western world." I've always said we live in a sick, immoral, and decadent society, but Mr. Orban is the very emblem of that decadence, not a warrior against it. And all the folks who think the absurdly high costs of rent, college, child care, and health care aren't the "real" problem with our society, but some kid who prefers "they" as a pronoun is? They're nothing more than Useful Idiots for decadence.

Cory Doctorow asserts that "gig companies" are either "violating employment law, or they’re violating antitrust." "(A) neglected -- and powerful -- aspect of antitrust is its prohibition on 'vertical restraint': when a company seeks to control the business of its suppliers," he writes, and when corporations like Uber and Doordash prevent their "contractors" (who are their suppliers, essentially) from working for other corporations or setting prices they can charge customers, that's "control(ling) the business of its suppliers." So: big gig corporations violate minimum wage and health care laws if they call their employees "employees," and violate antitrust law if they call them "contractors." They obviously counted on never seeing another President who'd go after monopolies. Ha ha!

For those of you keeping score at home, Starbucks workers at 200 stores have now filed for union elections, with at least 13 of them successfully forming one. Starbucks has nearly 9,000 stores in the United States (with close to 6,500 more that it licenses to operate within other stores), but note well that workers hit the 100-store milestone in close to six months and then hit the second 100 in a hair under seven weeks. Starbucks is still pretty powerful, and surely can peel off inattentive workers with even the stupid arguments they've made so far, so I wish these folks the best in their efforts to organize one of the largest chain-store corporations in America.

This article describing Congressional candidate Daniel Lee's work on the Culver City Council successfully enacting rent control, tenant protection, and single-family home zoning ordinances during the last few years may be even more valuable revealing the workings of one of Mr. Lee's main opponents, the notorious "assassin journalist" Ron Bassilian. (So does he shoot journalists, or is he a journalist who shoots other people? The world may never know.) Mr. Bassilian founded Protect Culver City -- which sure sounds innocuous enough, until you ask from whom -- and describes himself as a "moderate," but not only did he write an early "alt-right" tract and spew racist filth on Twitter, he just so happens to be most energized by things that also offend Our Glorious Elites, who don't want any of the little people to tell them they can't charge whatever they want for rent! In short, he's another Useful Idiot for corporate power pretending to be jes' folks.

When you read about Great Plains farmers fighting the prospect of a network of CO2 pipelines crossing their land, with the aim of pushing carbon emissions deep into the ground like that's going to undo climate change, you may be compelled to wonder what all the "salt of the earth" types who preen in Congress think about that. Don't they love the small farmer above all else? Don't they have a unique connection to those people, and to the land? More likely these peacocks will dismiss the grievances of actual small farmers as "special interest agitation" or conflate them with the Lakota "terrorists" who have fought alongside small farmers against previous pipelines. (And not for nothing, but most corporations won't even sequester the "recovered" emissions in the ground, but use them in future fossil-fuel projects.)

Finally, Stanford University engineers develop solar panels that can work at night. Solar cells actually have a lower temperature than the air around them at night, so by attaching a thermoelectric generator to a solar cell, you can produce a small amount of electricity. While some observers say you can't produce very much electricity this way, the Stanford engineers say they see "no intrinsic difficulties" in scaling up their product so that it can produce a lot of power; I suspect the truth is in the middle, which would still represent progress. Now watch the Fox News crowd guffaw over the prospect of "solar panels at night," like they think their own ignorance is a power source.

Action: concerning clean water, forced arbitration, scientific integrity, corruption, and plastic pollution.

Long story short: tell your Philadelphia City Council to replace lead-contaminated drinking fountains, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act and the Scientific Integrity Act, ban members of Congress from trading in defense stocks, investigate corruption allegations against Postmaster General DeJoy, and pass the Reducing Waste in National Parks Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Philadelphia residents, take note: Penn Environment helps you tell your City Councilmember to pass Bill # 220221, which would force the city school district to replace all drinking fountains in schools with lead-filtering ones by 2025. That's because a recent study found 98% of Philly school drinking fountains had lead in them, and recall that no amount of lead in drinking water is safe, and that any amount of lead a child ingests can cause brain damage. So doing something about this shouldn't be this difficult, particularly since the American Rescue Plan Act delivered an extra $1.1 billion to Philly public schools and the district would only have to spend (per Penn Environment) around $6 million of that to fix the problem. But politicians won't do the right thing unless we demand it.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 963/S. 505, the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act. I don't want to downplay the importance of the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act; it is a major piece of legislation, and I don't think I ever described the Affordable Care Act with that phrase. But why not press your advantage? Forced arbitration is unjust in every contract, for every reason -- and if arbitration is so great, why do corporations force you to use it? If you want to band together in a class action suit with other similarly-wronged folks, why should corporations get to stop you? Because they "deserve" more say than you? They don't -- but they'll get it, if we don't speak out.

Breast Cancer Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 849, the Scientific Integrity Act. The Scientific Integrity Act would force Executive3 branch agencies to create (and enforce!) a scientific integrity plan that keeps politics out of scientific decisions. After all, we just had President Troll pack EPA scientific boards with corporate polluter hacks, and that's not the kind of thing that free people should have to put up with. The bill would also keep political employees from muddying up scientific data and give whistleblowers more power to expose wrongdoing. Oh, and it ain't just about the EPA: our Food and Drug Administration sure hasn't earned a reputation for sobriety as of late, what with their greasing the skids for the Alzheimer's drug that may not even work. So, yeah, let's put a stop to that kind of thing.

Inequality Media helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban members of Congress from trading in defense stocks. Why can't we cut the defense budget, even though we spend more money than the next 8 nations combined and still never feel secure? It couldn't be because nearly 50 members of Congress have almost $7 million in investments in defense contracting corporations, could it? I'm still appalled how cheaply people can be bought -- yes, $7 million is a lot of money even when divided among 50 individuals, but you know that's a drop in the budget next to our annual defense budget, meaning that defense contracting corporations can purchase a lot of legislative power for their buck. We need to make a world where our leaders avoid even the appearance of evil.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate Postmaster General DeJoy for yet another potential conflict-of-interest, this one concerning the free COVID tests our Postal Service delivered to our houses. Turns out Mr. DeJoy owned stock in one of the corporations that supplied COVID testing kits to the public, and didn't divest himself of said stock; some folks no doubt think this is no big deal, but owning stock in a corporation that might get work from our Postal Service while you're running said Postal Service is an invitation to corruption, the kind of thing our laws proscribe precisely because we don't want such corruption to happen. America may be the get-ahead country, but we don't want it to be the get-over country, and that's why we fight corruption.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5533/S. 2960, the Reducing Waste in National Parks Act, which would ban single-use plastics in our national parks. Not just because you don't want to see that while you're hiking or climbing, but because our national parks protect a lot of our clean air and clean water, not to mention ecosystems you don't see anywhere else. And seriously, how many cheap plastic bags do you need at the Sequoia National Park? There are plenty of alternatives to plastic bottles, coffee cups with plastic lids, and take-out containers, and the internet is anxious to tell you all about them. I suppose some folks must oppose a bill like this, but I suspect they're the same folks who think freedom is mainly all about being as obnoxious as possible and preventing others from shunning you for it.

Around the table: featuring a lot of evil right-wing rich folks and their evil enablers.

Studies say book banning at schools is worse than ever; the American Library Association study finds more attempts to ban books in 2021 than in any of the past 20 years. Naturally, most of these books feature Black, Brown, gay, or trans folks, and the PEN America report found that in literally 98 percent of book bans, school administrators didn't follow established procedures for challenging books -- yes, there are procedures for that! -- which means they're either unusually cowardly or unusually unscrupulous, neither of which is a good look in a civilized society. In a sick, immoral, and decadent society, I guess, it's totally acceptable. Dear Democrats: run against book banning in the midterms.

I can't imagine that "paid relational organizing," which pays folks to talk politics with their friends and neighbors, is a "novel" strategy in electoral politics; I can't tell you how many times I've suspected that the right-wing friends on my Facebook feed are all paid trolls for the Republican Party. The strategy's creators may be right that folks talking to each other means more than the phone calls most of us don't even answer anymore or (even) traditional door-knocking, but they might also be letting their love of technology override their judgment. Boy, it's a good thing that's never bitten Democrats in the ass before! I kid, of course. Even more important than "relational organizing": establishing a record and then running on it. Democrats have established a record, and if it ain't even the record they tried to establish, they can still run on it.

Jesus Mary and Joseph I'm so tired of right-wingers using stupid math not just to assert that TEH RICHEZ PAYZ MOSTZ OFZ TEH TAXEZ!!!!!, but that "the middle class is not really paying any kind of a fair share" of taxes. Setting aside that Ohio Republican Senatorial candidate Mike Gibbons, last seen losing an argument with Josh Mandel, thinks "the top 20%" are all in the same club; setting aside, also, that folks who "pay no taxes" on April 15 still pay plenty of sales taxes, payroll taxes, and state income taxes; setting aside, even, how rich folks shield most of their wealth from taxation by simply never selling stocks and properties and the like: rich folks are supposed to pay most of the taxes; it's how we keep them from taking everything away from us! Saying "the middle class is not really paying any kind of a fair share" of taxes is uniquely stupid, though, and if Democrats have any guts -- again, I kid.

When you hear that Peter Thiel has called Warren Buffet a "sociopathic grandpa" for failing to worship at the altar of crypto, you may be compelled to wonder: why "sociopathic"? Sociopaths have trouble telling the truth, respecting other people's feelings, and telling the difference between right and wrong, plus they also display a tendency toward impulsiveness and risk-taking; how does Mr. Buffet's stated opposition to crypto display any of those things? We never learn, but hey, they're just words, it's not like they mean things. Or is Mr. Thiel merely unable to avoid projecting his faults onto others?

I would not have wished for Will Smith to come along and slap Marjorie Taylor Greene, as Jimmy Kimmel did on his live show the other night, but Ms. Greene should know better than to file a police report about the matter, since a wish for violence isn't the same as a threat of violence -- which she should especially know since she herself has wished, out loud, for "a bullet" to magically make its way "to the head" of Nancy Pelosi. Now at least four individuals need to file libel charges against Ms. Greene for calling them "pro-pedophile," and then we can restore a semblance of law and order to this great land

Finally, when you hear Kyrsten Sinema tell a gaggle of Koch-affiliated "business" interests that "extreme rhetoric" interferes with her efforts to create "lasting results" for Americans, remember what she has really opposed: she has opposed raising taxes on the rich and on corporations back to where they were a mere six years ago, and she has opposed letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices, and polls typically tell us that more than 60% of Americans want higher taxes on the rich and on corporations, and that 80% of Americans want Medicare drug price negotiation. Remember, also, that when she says Build Back Better "did not have the support to move forward," remember that the bill didn't move forward because she withheld her support on the above-named matters, matters that did, as I've said, have the support of the American people. So her battle, then, ain't between Kyrsten Sinema and "extremists," but between Kyrsten Sinema and America. (Also too, all her unctuous intonations about "small businesses" are right out of Paul Ryan's playbook from 10 years ago. That's how forward-thinking she is.)

Around the table: tabulating even more right-wing projection.

Uh oh: Tennessee Republicans propose a common law marriage bill between "one man" and "one woman," but forget to include age requirements, such that evil adults could force children into marriages when they're just 13. We know from the whole Roy Moore imbroglio from 2017 that this is a thing with the far right in America! Which reminds me that the QAnon conspiracy theory might also be projection. Let's not lose sight of the fact that this "common law marriage" excludes gays, and our Supreme Court might have something (more!) to say about that. (Hate to pile on, but the phrase "a conscientious objection to the current pathway to marriage in our law" holds no meaning whatsoever, since no one forces you to gay-marry as part of the "current pathway.")

From Sarah Lazare at In These Times we learn "How Workers Used Amazon's Captive Audience Meetings Against the Company." Long story short: be ready to answer their anti-union propaganda! Long story somewhat longer: "Be() just as antagonistic to them as they're being to us" at captive anti-union meetings, then being super-polite (but no less fierce, there's a difference!) at future meetings, plus also plenty of "(w)e are not a 'third party,' we work here" and using the mere fact of captive meetings to organize. A moment perhaps too understated: "People would appreciate being able to sit down and not have to work, but at the same time they thought the meetings were bullshit." I'm sure after being worked like machines, many Amazon workers saw captive meetings more positively merely because their bosses weren't grinding them into dirt for a short time.

When you hear that Republicans are converting Democratic voters at four times the rate Democrats are converting Republican ones in Pennsylvania, you have to remember that this statement would be true if Republicans literally converted four voters and Democrats converted one. The article tells a bunch of stories about hard hats pissed off about inflation and crime, but doesn't present that factoid in any sort of useful context until paragraph nine, when we learn that registered Democrats still outnumber registered Republicans, 4 million to 3.4 million, though we still don't learn how many voters chose no party affiliation, or third-party affiliation). And not until paragraph 14 do we get any hard numbers -- 1,315 Democrats have crossed over in Philadelphia. Out of how many total registered voters in Philadelphia? Over 1.1 million. Verdict: bad argument.

Ho hum, a former White House adviser now running for a U.S. House seat in New Hampshire voted in Presidential primaries in two separate states in 2016, which almost certainly violates federal law. "But I lived here in January and voted, so why can't I vote again when I moved here in June now that my candidate is out of the race?" should invite only one answer: one person, one vote. Republicans whine about "voter fraud" whenever they don't annihilate their opponents in elections anymore, and yet they're the only ones we ever seem to catch doing it. There's a lesson in there, somewhere.

When I confront the question of how we should read great Russian writers like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in the context of Russia's war on Ukraine, I must confess it had never once occurred to me that we shouldn't read them -- their work, like that of Anton Chekhov, predates the soul-destroying reign of Josef Stalin, and no one should presume they're "uncivilized" merely because Vlad the Bad is profoundly uncivilized. Indeed, I would argue that the only folks who think so either have never read these authors (Anna Karenina, for the record, is every bit as great as its devotees say it is) or feel so helpless in the face of horror that they would think almost anything to regain the mere illusion of control. Also, Messrs. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky know more about war than Vlad the Bad will ever know about anything.

Finally, despite Republicans' best efforts, our Senate confirms D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to our Supreme Court, by a disturbingly narrow vote of 53-47. Anyone else see a problem with the following paragraph? "Multiple Republicans, including Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Josh Hawley of Missouri, accused the judge of being lenient toward child sexual abusers. Fact-checkers say that the claims are misleading and that Jackson's sentencing decisions were in line with her peers on the federal bench." Give yourself a gold star if you think we should demand that journalists check the facts, instead of having "fact-checkers" do it.