Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: don't let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya, John Bolton! And other tales.

"John Bolton Tried His Best to Draw the U.S. Into a War," writes Alex Emmons at The Intercept. "Luckily, He Failed." But don't suggest that our President was crazy-like-a-fox and brought Mr. Bolton into the fold so he could expose his fraudulent ideas, because our President flat-out pissed all over the Iran nuclear agreement when it was working and reimposed sanctions on Iran, supposedly so he could get a "better deal." And with what leverage? You'll recall the shot-down drone and the seized tankers and you'll see that our President never had any leverage -- after all, are you going to bomb the crap out of a country that's playing the diplomatic equivalent of I'm-not-touching-you?

A retired Air Force colonel blows the whistle on what he calls "gross financial mismanagement" and "gross waste" at our Guantánamo Bay detention center. I'll admit I was gobsmacked to discover that even one conviction (and exactly one conviction!) has ever come out of Guantánamo. But that's what you get when you create drama over "dangerous people" who would "go back to terrorism" if they were ever released, never mind that we can hardly convict them of anything after 10, 15, or almost 20 years. (See, it's not just our President who creates drama. George W. Bush was a master at it.)

Voter ID, Interstate Crosscheck, and voting roll purges you know about, but states and localities have been suppressing the vote in one other important way: closing polling places, too often without notice. 13 states now have over 1,000 fewer polling places than they did six years ago; I wonder why? A lot of them close polling places supposedly because they're not compliant with the Americans With Disabilities Act, but why close it and not, say, make it ADA-compliant? Don't say "because that costs money," because that answer won't win in court.

Ho hum, leaked documents reveal how our FBI is hiding data about how it responds to white supremacist violence versus black protestor "violence." They call it all "Racially-Motivated Violent Extremism," just as not too many years ago they called it all "Abortion Extremism" when mainly anti-abortion folks committed the violence. Yet the FBI still tabulates the "Racially-Motivated Violent Extremism" by race, and thus should be able to account for their actions.

Finally, the number of folks without health insurance in America went up in 2018 for the first time in nine years. You won't be surprised at the main culprit -- a drop in public health insurance program coverage under a reactionary Administration -- nor will you be surprised that Southern and Hispanic children seem to get hit harder. Boy, it sure is a good thing our President promised really great health care for everyone, and then said he'd do something about high drug prices before declaring that high drug prices were all Medicare's fault. Also, too, why is he so desperate to annihilate pre-existing condition bans? Pre-existing condition bans are the one thing about Obamacare everyone likes. Oh, I guess that's our answer.

Action: concerning corporate tax avoidance, health care, and workplace harassment.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell Congress to investigate allegations of over $2.5 billion in tax dodging on the part of Walmart. Walmart apparently created a fake overseas entity in a foreign country that (conveniently) neither the foreign country nor ours would claim jurisdiction upon, but whatever the details, fact is Walmart doesn't pay enough in taxes, and that means less of the good services we all expect from our tax money. I know some folks, unscrupulous and not, will claim that we're taking "low prices" hostage by "going after Walmart." But saying don't make Walmart pay more in taxes, or we won't be able to afford paper towels is itself a hostage crisis, and quite unbecoming of the American can-do spirit. As for the folks who don't have anywhere to get their groceries other than Walmart, we can do other things to fix that -- like, say, aiding farmers' markets and breaking monopolies.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Rep to co-sponsor H.R. 1384, the Medicare for All Act, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. H.R. 1384 has 118 co-sponsors, but as you know, the House has 435 members, 235 of whom are Democrats, meaning that just over half of the more left-leaning party supports Medicare-for-All. And they should support it! The Medicare for All Act would insure all Americans, cut costs (mainly by cutting administrative overhead), and let you keep your doctor (by forcing doctors to accept Medicare for All health insurance, except those who only perform services the bill doesn't cover, like high-end plastic surgery). The big health insurance corporations say folks like their health insurers ("until they actually try to use it" is the part they leave out!) and generally fearmongering the population. But we're can-do Americans, and we don't have to put up with that.

Finally, H.R. 2148/S. 1082, the BE HEARD in the Workplace Act, would expand protections against workplace harassment in a number of ways. The bill would, for the first time, expand the law's protections to interns, trainees, volunteers, independent contractors, and small business workers, and would also help workers redress the harm caused them by harassment by outlawing forced arbitration agreements and restricting the use of non-disclosure agreements. (You'll recall that Gretchen Carlson couldn't take Fox News's Roger Ailes to court for his sexual harassment of her because of a forced arbitration agreement in her employment contract.) And if you hear someone say this bill would prevent them from doing business, you're free to wonder how much of their business model depends on harassment. The National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect working families by passing the BE HEARD Act.

Action: concerning war on Yemen, public water, and public lands.

So what else is up with the must-pass defense spending bill? The House version restricts our involvement in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen -- a war where we're somehow helping kill some of the best al-Qaeda fighters on Earth! -- and prevents our government from selling weapons to the Saudi/UAE coalition; the Senate version, naturally, doesn't have these provisions, but it's conference time, and why should we settle for weak conference bills when we could demand strong ones? Hence Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep strong anti-war provisions in the defense spending bill. I don't care that our President might veto it -- wasn't he supposed to bring a different kind of foreign policy to the Oval Office, instead of doing whatever Israel and Saudi Arabia want him to do? Meanwhile, good Yemenis starve to death and watch their children get bombed at school.

Meanwhile, Nestlé is at it again, this time trying to get its permit renewed to draw over a million gallons of public water per day from Florida's Santa Fe River. How many times must I tell these pimps! People need all the water they can get! They sure as hell don't need some big corporation siphoning it off and selling it back to them! Naturally, the Suwannee River Water Management District (which covers the Santa Fe) has declared the Santa Fe to be "in recovery" as of 2014 -- meaning that it didn't meet the District's minimum requirements for river flows and water levels -- and back then, Nestlé was "only" siphoning off a quarter of what it's proposing now! I doubt the Santa Fe would "recover" from Nestlé suddenly drawing off four times the water it used to draw off. Hence CREDO helps you tell the Suwannee River Water Management District to reject Nestlé's petition to siphon off even more public water than it did before the Santa Fe declined.

Finally, our President has been trying to get our National Forest Service to re-evaluate whether the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which applies to national forests, also applies to the Tongass National Forest, and perhaps suspecting he'd lose that argument (as evidenced by the fact that the name "Tongass National Forest" does, in fact, contain the words "national" and "forest" in it), he's now told our Secretary of Agriculture to open up some 10 million acres of the Tongass to loggers! Brazil's Mr. Bolsonaro told farmers and loggers to burn whatever they wanted out of the Amazon, and then our President did what? He got jealous! Our President really does teach us all about the Seven Deadly Sins. And we can in turn teach him about, you know, the rule of law and the fact that words do actually mean things by telling our Department of Agriculture to reject any plans to allow logging in the Tongass National Forest, as CREDO helps us do.

Around the table: concerning internet freedom, corruption, voting rights, health care, and gerrymandering.

Thinking "I don't miss net neutrality"? Well, Northeastern/UMass-Amherst researchers have found that AT&T throttles Netflix and YouTube over two-thirds of the time and Amazon Prime not at all for its wireless customers. "(A)nd it’s not based on networks being overloaded," one of the researchers strains to point out. And every streaming service, as I'm sure you're aware by now, doesn't carry everything. This ain't like Verizon throttling California firefighters in the middle of a wildfire, but it might take more of this to get the public at large (and not just the few million Americans paying attention) to fight for what this President and his FCC have taken from us.

As our President takes over $120 million from emergency management funds and gives it to ICE, we learn that our Department of Homeland Security (or DHS) has spent nearly $120 million on office furniture. Priorities! To be absolutely fair and balanced, Fox News reported in early 2015 that the Obama DHS had spent $150 million on office furniture -- from 2010 to 2014, suggesting that this Administration is nearly twice as corrupt as the last one, and proving that when Democrats throw money at DHS, it doesn't impress right-wingers.

The state of Ohio plans to purge over 200,000, but is using a list riddled with thousands of errors. An "error," of course, is a voter on the list who hasn't died, hasn't moved, and has voted within the last six years; the problem with using lists like these -- you know, besides that they're obviously aimed at deregistering voters who tend to vote against the dominant political party in Ohio right now -- is that folks don't find out they've been deregistered until it's too late, because who asks themselves, self, am I still registered to vote, having done literally nothing to warrant deregistration?

Ho hum, ABC puts a panel on to discuss Medicare-for-All, using right-wing Republican Chris Christie and right-wing Democrat Rahm Emanuel for balance. Gosh, Wendell Potter or Timothy Faust not available that day? I mean, it's not like you just can't find people who'll make the case for Medicare-for-All -- even people who want to be on TV and get famous! -- though I'm sure you can't find as many elite cronies to do it. The good news? We're now past the "first they ignore you" and "then they ridicule you" phases of the debate into the "then they fight you." "Then you win" comes after that -- although, admittedly, it might take a while.

Finally, you've likely heard of the late Thomas Hofeller, the "master of modern gerrymandering," and the cache of files his daughter found after he passed? Well, Igor Derysh at Salon describes how Mr. Hofeller helped North Carolina gerrymander its districts specifically to dilute the black vote. Mr. Hofeller said, out loud, that he was trying to help "non-Hispanic whites," so it's hard to see how anyone could say this wasn't about race, especially after confronting his voluminous research on voters' racial makeup (and noting how the legislature split the largest historically black college in America into two Republican districts). The good news is that North Carolina's Supreme Court struck down that state's maps last week; now we hope our Supreme Court doesn't meddle (which it didn't in Pennsylvania).

Action: concerning campaign finance disclosure, factory farm waste, PFAS chemicals, and food safety.

California actually passed strong campaign finance disclosure legislation in 2017, but that law didn't cover everything -- it still lets big donors push out mass text messages without revealing themselves, and it also hides the big donors behind massive petitioning efforts. But AB 201 and SB 47 would close these loopholes, so the California Clean Money Action Fund helps you tell California state legislators to do more to expose big campaign donors by passing these bills. AB 201 would force candidates to put their names on text messages and PACs to put committee names or URLs leading to disclosure info; SB 47 would require petition gatherers to disclose the top three donors of that petition before soliciting a signature. We're looking at a few hundred million text messages and over two dozen ballot initiatives (in 2018) that require more sunlight, so this isn't a "solution looking for a problem" -- you know, like Voter ID or Interstate Crosscheck.

Meanwhile, H.R. 3844, the Farmer Fairness Act, would at least address this issue as it related to factory farm waste. As it is now, big ag corporations have gamed the system so that the small farmers who own the animals on factory farms take all the blame for the waste on big factory farms, while the big ag corporations make off with all the profit! But the Farmer Fairness Act would "require all persons exercising substantial operational control over the concentrated animal feeding operation," which would include anyone who "exercises any control over the activities, operation, or management of a concentrated animal feeding operation." Hence both small farmer and big factory farm would be on the hook for polluting nearby rivers and streams with their animal waste. Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight big ag domination of small farmers by passing the Farmer Fairness Act.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would better address the clean-up of ubiquitous and poisonous PFAS chemicals, then the Union of Concerned Scientists still helps you do that. Specifically, you'd tell your Congressfolk to support provisions of the must-pass defense authorization bill that would better track PFAS contamination and better coordinate PFAS cleanup efforts; this is a big deal -- not just because scientists have linked PFAS chemicals to cancer, thyroid disease, and liver damage, not just because you can find PFAS chemicals in so many commonplace items ranging from nonstick saucepans to food packaging, but also because firefighting foam is a major source of PFAS chemicals, and our soldiers do put out a lot of fires. So, for once, let's pass some defense spending that helps all of us, and not just some defense contracting corporation's CEO.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to stop our Administration's plans to reduce safety inspections at pork processing plants, then Penn PIRG still helps you do that. What on Earth has possessed our last two Administrations to try to mess with meat inspections? Do they not know that food poisoning always gets into the news? It seems like the best of our politicians listen too much to big agricultural corporations like they know everything, when mostly what they know is how to redistribute income upward from consumers (and farmers!) to themselves. Some "expertise," that. Of course, the worst of our politicians only pretend to be that stupid, but actually mean to make their big ag cronies richer and damn the consequences for everyone else. Oh, well, I guess Americans are only the people who eat the food. Seriously, we deserve better, from both our food processing corporations and our politicians.

Action: concerning robocalls, working families, Arctic drilling, and racist policing.

Both houses of Congress have passed anti-robocall bills, and now they must conference out a bill to send to our President, and you know how House/Senate conferences can be a good place to pull all the teeth from good legislation, so Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the strongest possible anti-robocall bill. The ideal bill would give good Americans free call-blocking tools and anti-spoofing technology, force all robocallers to get your permission before even calling you, and get tough with those who'd violate either of these tenets. Yes, there's a time to get tough and a time to go easy; usually the emptiest wagons of our law-and-order discourse get tough and easy at all the wrong times, but I can assure you that getting tough on robocallers would be getting it right. None of us want people we don't know calling us, particularly if they're just trying to separate us from our money.

Meanwhile, H.R. 3760/S. 2112, the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights Act, would fix a major injustice inflicted upon domestic workers: their near-total exclusion from the protection of federal labor laws. Domestic workers often can't get overtime pay, can't get workers' comp, and can't get justice when their employer harasses them; would you put up with that if it were you, or someone you loved? No use protesting that my boss treats me/my loved one fine, so I don't need the law, because laws are for everyone, and if something happened to you or your loved one, you might find our your boss is a fair-weather friend, and then you'll need the protection of the law. Would it be piling on to mention that most domestic workers are folks of color? No, it would not be piling on. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to support working families by passing the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights Act.

In other news, H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, may come up for a vote in the House this week -- at which point I guess we'll be adding it to our weekly list of good House bills that Mob Boss Mitch won't allow the Senate to vote on, but it's still very much worth it to call your House Rep and tell them to support the bill, as the Alaska Wilderness League helps you do. Drilling anywhere in the Arctic is a dicey proposition, as it's much harder to clean up a spill in frigid waters than it is in more temperate waters and oil corporations don't even want to do that, right, BP? But drilling in the Arctic also interferes with a) a thriving salmon industry and b) a Native American population that deserves our protection from corporate greed. Sadly, we also must consider that this President can't be trusted to develop a region with any other aim in mind than to enrich his cronies. So let's stand against him and his venality yet again.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our FBI to stop targeting folks who protest fascism, cruel immigration policy, and racist policing, then Free Press still helps you do that. Right-wing politicians from our President on down have the gall to think these are the folks who threaten our nation, while all these white supremacist murderers swing their penises in our faces! Of course, these white supremacists generally support right-wing politicians from our President on down, but our FBI is supposed to be above all that, and if, historically, they haven't been, that's no reason to demand better of them, since, really, they work for us. And I'll brook no silliness about how they're our "first defense" against trouble and thus we should let them do what they want. Civilized people set boundaries, tell these "defenders" when they've gone too far, and take steps to ensure it doesn't happen again. That's not too much to ask of us.

Action: concerning voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, internet freedom, and secure elections.

It's Monday, so it's time to call your Senators once again and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. You can find your Senators' phone numbers using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page, or the bottom of this page if you're on a cellphone; and you can find Senate Majority Leader "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell's phone numbers here, though you'll have to scroll down a bit to find them. I mention Mob Boss Mitch, of course, because our House has passed all of these bills, but our Senate hasn't, because Mr. McConnell won't allow any votes on them. Didn't know that was how democracy worked, did you? Anyway, you don't have to tell your Senators why they should pass these bills, unless you really want to -- their staffers are there to take down your will, not argue with you about it. But I'm going to go ahead and describe the bills (and the paltry arguments against them) in some detail, since I haven't in a while, and I want you to get to the phone with the most confidence you can have. If you do, they'll sense that, and if enough of us call them, they'll bend to our will.

H.R. 1, the For the People Act, includes a lot of terrific initiatives -- it would allow national automatic voter registration, require disclosure of large campaign contributions, create a public campaign financing system, make Election Day a national holiday, and mandate that states use nonpartisan commissions to draw up districts. All of these things have large support across the ideological spectrum, and their opposites (making it harder to vote or register to vote, letting state legislators carve out Rorschach-blot fiefdoms, letting corporations spend whatever they want to elect their lackeys) don't. What did Mob Boss Mitch have to say about the For the People Act? He called it "a Democrat power grab," which every right-winger in America would call whining if a liberal said something similar. And if a man equates more access to voting with Democrats getting more power, he might want to think about how maybe Republicans aren't convincing enough people to vote for them. That'd be pull-yourselves-up-by-your-bootstraps thinking, wouldn't it? So your Senators have no excuse to oppose the For the People Act. That's going to be a theme in the next several paragraphs.

H.R. 5, the Equality Act, would amend the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act (among other laws) to extend civil rights protections to gay and transgender folk, who can still get fired, denied housing, and denied credit just because of who they are and whom they love. The objections to the Equality Act are truly ludicrous and, frankly, reminiscent of racist objections to fair housing laws in the 1960s -- haters say they'll be "forced" to hire gay or transgender folk when the truth is the law would force them not to discriminate against them merely because they're gay or transgender, and folks who can't tell the difference between these things may not be cut out for the hard work of civilization. But wait, there's more! Haters pretend employers will be prevented from firing gay or transgender folk for good reasons, which they won't, and that male athletes will get sex changes in droves to compete and dominate in women's sports leagues, which, like, can you see such athletes hanging out with their crew after doing something like that? I mean, duh. The haters are not only wrong, they're stupidly wrong. That's also going to be a theme in the next several paragraphs.

H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, is not a "boon to trial lawyers" as its opponents say, but merely a bill that would give women more tools to fight pay discrimination. The bill would outlaw clauses in employment contracts that prevent workers from talking about their pay, and would prevent retaliation against employees who do talk about their pay -- and these are important, since talking about your pay is usually how you find out you're being shafted. The bill would still allow employers to pay men and women differently based on bona fide factors like, you know, skill levels and qualifications, but would restrict employers' ability to manufacture a "bona fide factor" merely based on salary. You know, of course he's more qualified, I pay him more, QED? The bill would also stiffen penalties for discriminating against women workers. And somehow all those good things get translated into BUT TEH TRIALZ LAWYERZ!!!!! in the right-wing mind, as if the words "trial lawyers" are a magic spell that transforms all bad arguments into good ones. Ranting about "trial lawyers" is just playing team sports, but our real duty as citizens is to do good works.

H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act, would raise our minimum wage from $7.25/hour to $15/hour gradually over the next six years -- yeah, I made sure to put those last six words there, for all the haters who say IT'S TOO TEH FASTZ!!!!! -- and would increase that minimum wage every year thereafter in accordance with the rise in the median hourly wage, so that maybe we'll never have to hear again how some 70-year-old made $2/hour when they were starting out and what's wrong with kids today? When they made $2/hour, it had the buying power of $12-$15/hour, which is, as you see, higher than our current minimum wage. The bill would also hike the minimum wages for tipped workers and disabled workers gradually and close the gap between these and the regular minimum wage -- because you don't think big corporations will try to convert everyone into a tipped or disabled employee just to avoid paying them more? Dear reader, they will. So don't brook these complaints, or any scare numbers about "jobs lost" that either won't actually happen or would amount to a drop in the bucket of monthly job creation numbers, and certainly wouldn't compare with all the good folks a higher minimum wage would bring out of poverty.

H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act, would reverse the FCC's 2017 net neutrality repeal and reinstate the FCC's 2015 Open Internet Order which originally encoded the principle of net neutrality in law. Net neutrality, as you know, dictates that internet service-providing corporations should deliver all files to your computer at the same speed and with the same priority -- and this principle alone has made the internet the greatest information-sharing source of all time. But the corporatists at the FCC hated that, because it meant you had the power to determine where you wanted to go on the internet, and corporations had less power to herd you into junk news ghettoes like they do so easily on TV or in print. So don't brook, for example, Justice Kavanaugh's argument that corporations have a First Amendment "right" to restrict whatever internet traffic they like, as if we somehow don't have First Amendment rights to visit whatever website we want! Net neutrality used to be a principle that enjoyed bipartisan support among politicians -- and it still enjoys broad, bipartisan support among regular Americans like ourselves. So, again, our Senators have no excuse not to support this bill.

H.R. 2722, the Securing America's Federal Elections (or SAFE) Act, would mandate voter-verified paper ballots for federal elections. This is a big deal, since (as we just saw in Mississippi) a lot of electronic voting machines don't let you vote for the person for whom you want to vote! Sometimes, when you've been doing something a certain way for hundreds of years, a machine actually can't do it better! Voter-verified paper ballots won't stop unscrupulous politicians from creating boxes of fake ballots, I suppose, but if you want to do that, you have to get a lot of other people to buy in, and only one of them needs to snitch to make your "victory" illegitimate. And you can steal votes a lot more easily with software, particularly when it's developed by some private corporation that'll fire any "snitch" who speaks out about its flaws. The bill would also fund state efforts to update their voting systems, which you know some states "forget" to do in their black and brown neighborhoods. As with H.R. 1, the For the People Act, you have to wonder why Mob Boss Mitch thinks it's just not worth it to make sure everyone can vote. What could he be afraid of?

Speaking of Mob Boss Mitch, he talks a lot these days about "bills we can pass," and acts like taking votes on bills that "can't pass" are a "waste of time." You know that's all rubbish -- even if these bills fail to pass the Senate, forcing your Senators to go on the record against voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, internet freedom, and secure elections is certainly worthwhile. But I want you to really think about Mob Boss Mitch's words, and measure the sheer contempt for the popular will they betray: nothing is worth doing unless a group of Senators pass a bill the President will sign. That's nowhere near the way it should work! How should it work? Absent a legitimate Constitutional concern -- and not just the bogus "concerns" of big donors passed off as "legitimate" concerns -- our Reps and Senators should pass the bills we tell them to pass, and the President should sign the bills we tell him to sign. We cannot rest until we have a system that works this way -- and when we get that system, we cannot rest in our duty to conserve that system for future generations, who will then have to work to keep it. But when we can do that, we'll have the "more perfect union" of which President Lincoln dreamed.

Around the table: from unconstitutional watchlists to Presidential drama.

In a stunning and welcome development, a U.S. District Court judge has ruled that our government's "terrorist watchlist" is unconstitutional. As Paul Craig Roberts would say, if 2.1 million Americans are on a terrorism watchlist, why aren't we having major terrorist attacks every day? Of course you already know the answer, just like you know the answer to "why don't they charge these Guantánamo detainees with crimes after 15 years?" I do not look forward to our Supreme Court justifying the watchlist as an Executive branch prerogative in the "war on terror," but in the meantime, I feel the same as Hassan Shibly does: proud to be an American.

Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst actually tells townhall meeting attendees that Congressfolk need to "sit down behind closed doors so we’re not being scrutinized by this group or the other, and just have an open and honest conversation." After all, our representatives can only have "an open and honest conversation" if none of their constituents/bosses are listening to them! Ms. Ernst should also know that no one says "you're throwing Granny off a cliff!" when folks propose expanding Social Security -- only when folks propose hurting or destroying it. "Behind closed doors" really should be a career-ending utterance, but we can't be sure her eventual Democratic opponent will even bring it up.

You know our FBI prefers to harass black protestors as white supremacists actually shoot people up, but you may not know that our FBI also loves considering immigration activists as "violent extremists" even though they present no evidence of any immigration activists actually committing any violence. Don't worry, though -- entities like Fox News will just redefine "violence" until it includes "speaking out against injustice." After all, why should Our Glorious Elites be forced to endure criticism from people with First Amendment rights?

I get that obituaries of controversial figures will tend to avoid those figures' controversial nature, but the New York Times's obit of David Koch sure seems to go way over the top. He was a "man-about-town philanthropist," a "seemingly limitless storehouse of Elks club-inflected jokes," even a "playboy," not the founder of numerous right-wing think tanks that still pollute our discourse with bad arguments, or the founder of the corporation that has paid three quarters of a billion dollars in pollution fines and no doubt should have paid a lot more. What can you say, though? Elites gonna elite.

I'm a bit stunned that the normally outstanding ProPublica actually published a hit piece on Medicare-for-All -- a much higher-quality hit piece than you'd get from some health insurance industry hack, I'll grant, but seriously, why would we make Democratic Presidential candidates' prevarications the piece of dirt around which we form a pearl? Journalists would be on much surer ground actually reading the Medicare-for-All bill (which would explicitly let you keep your doctor and explicitly cover everything without copays, regardless of what the article's headline says) and wondering whether the bill that might eventually become law might not resemble it enough. (Oh, and that's not $32 trillion more over 10 years if the private health insurance industry goes away, it's $32 trillion total, which is still $17 trillion less than CMS has predicted we'll spend over that time. And rather than worry about how high taxes would go, we could fund it by assessing employers a fee per employee that'll be less than they're already paying for private health insurance. They'd be fools not to take the savings.)

Finally, Katha Pollitt at The Nation compiles an unfortunately-not-all-inclusive list of our President's misdeeds during the month of August, and it's a list undreamt of by the best mid-century satirists. I do not expect such a list to reach our President's votaries, of course, and I also suspect it won't reach Republicans inclined to say yes-he-acts-badly-but-judges-and-regulations. The 100 million or so people who didn't vote for President in 2016? Yeah, they might be receptive -- but only if the Democrats decide to offer an actual alternative in 2020. These folks are just gonna be "mad at both sides" if Joe Biden is the nominee. Indeed, that's surely the purpose of all our President's drama.

Action: concerning birth control and media monopolies.

Our Administration is trying its damnedest to redirect public Title X funding away from organizations like Planned Parenthood and toward organizations like Obria, which is notorious for giving incorrect information about abortion and for refusing to give birth control to its patients, even though birth control sure seems like the best way to reduce abortions. If you're tempted to think that this move merely reflects a shift in our government's priorities, remember that providing comprehensive family planning services is the whole purpose of Title X, and I don't think even now you'll find too many federal judges who'd be convinced that Congress explicitly authorized the provision of half-assed family planning. Shame that the law-and-order crowd doesn't see our Administration's poor funding of family planning as a law-and-order issue; maybe if more black people were involved in the law-breaking, they'd see it. Anyway, Daily Kos helps you tell our Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) to stop illegally giving taxpayer money to fake family planning centers.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell our Justice Department to block the proposed CBS/Viacom merger. CBS and Viacom are saying they need to merge so they can compete with Netflix, Disney, and the like, but who cares what's good for CBS? I'm such a bastard I only care what's good for America, and you know what happens when big corporations merge: they cut jobs, raise prices, and redistribute more worker income upward to their executives -- which, admittedly, sounds exactly like the program of this entire Administration, whose Attorney General, William Barr, is another one who thinks "freedom" is all about letting corporations do whatever they want and damn the consequences for the rest of us. But the fewer corporations that own all of our media, the worse it is for us, not just in lost jobs and lost income, but in lost freedom to get the kind of critical information and alternate viewpoints with which civilized people make good decisions. When a big corporation owns a media outlet, after all, that media outlet not only avoids criticizing its owner, but any other big corporation that owner does business with. And that's just another kind of corruption we need to fight.

Action: concerning taxes and "free" trade.

David Koch passed away a few weeks ago, and if we want to make his life truly meaningful, we can, at the least, allow Americans for Tax Fairness to help us tell our Congressfolk to close the loopholes that result in the kind of absurd fortunes like the one Mr. Koch amassed largely tax-free. Some folks on the right indulge in a sort of hyper-individualism, in which they assert that we're only free when one person is as free as we can imagine, and if you see a kind of logic in that, you must also see that when one person achieves that much freedom, they trample over everyone else's freedom merely to make a meaningful life for themselves. When we restrained the freedom of the richest individuals, we created the greatest middle class in history -- and in recent decades we've destroyed that middle class by indulging in these individualist fantasies, where we celebrate those with billions of dollars they can never spend, fleets of classic cars they can never drive, or the umpteen huge vacation homes they can't live in at once. So let's promote some real freedom.

Meanwhile, the Amazon rainforest, a.k.a. "the lungs of the Earth," continues to burn, largely because of the lawless regime of Brazil's President, Jair Bolsonaro, who has encouraged loggers and farmers to burn trees in order to "spur development" -- and, not incidentally, infringe on the rights of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon. Mr. Bolsonaro, as disgusting a human being as has ever held office, has gone on to accuse non-governmental organizations of setting the fire themselves, and has figured their motive as trying to make money off climate change, though sane people know that no environmental group will ever make as much money fighting climate change as a big corporation will make causing it. Anyway, while European nations offer financial aid with one hand, they're planning to conclude yet another of those notorious "free" trade "deals" with Mercosur, a sort of South American common market composed of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. If you're familiar with "free" trade, you know that'll just make everything worse, so Sum of Us helps you tell the European Union to scuttle the EU-Mercosur "free" trade "deal."

Action: concerning war in Yemen, methane pollution, and discrimination.

Both Houses of Congress have passed defense spending bills that include amendments that would get our soldiers out of the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen and stop our government from selling weapons that kill good Yemenis -- but, of course, now both Houses have to go to Congress, and some folks who should know better (Sen. Reed of Rhode Island, for one) are making noises about ensuring they pass a bill that our President will actually sign. How many times must I tell these pimps! You do the people's will, and you let the President take the heat for ignoring it! I tell you, they've got some serious Stockholm Syndrome sufferers in our Congress. Hence Avaaz provides some phone numbers: you can call Sen. Reed at 202.224.4642, Speaker Pelosi at 202.225.4965, and House Armed Services Committee Chair Adam Smith at 202.225.8901, and tell them to keep anti-war amendments in the defense spending bill. It has to pass, after all, so our Congress holds all the cards here. They ought to start acting like it.

Meanwhile, our Administration has announced its final proposal for methane pollution limits -- and of course they're gutting them, because if a regulation actually protects good Americans from corporate pollution, it cannot stand! (Alternately, if President Obama issued a regulation, it cannot stand!) Allowing gas and oil drilling corporations to leak methane from their wells and pipelines willy-nilly not only packs a bigger climate-change punch than coal emissions do, they also deprive good Americans of royalties if the drilling operations are on public lands -- methane is, after all, a usable energy source. Hence Penn Environment, Environmental Action, and the Environmental Defense Fund all help you tell our EPA to reject its own proposal to increase methane pollution. Why bother telling our Administration to do things they don't want to do? Because they're taking public comments on it, meaning they have to come up with a very, very good reason to ignore the public will, or else the courts will smack them down -- as they've done to a great many of our Administration's regulatory "efforts" so far.

Finally, our Administration is also trying to let corporations get federal contracts and discriminate against people on the basis of their "religious" "conscience." Using religion as an excuse to discriminate is an old scam -- folks used the Bible to justify slavery, after all -- and using "religious" "conscience" to (for example) fire pregnant workers, avoid hiring gays, and force transgender employees into the wrong bathrooms isn't significantly different. Chances are it ultimately won't pass Supreme Court muster, since our Supreme Court ruled in the Hobby Lobby case that closely-held corporations (i.e., ones with a handful of owners), and not just any old corporation with a knuckle-dragging CEO, can exercise "religious" "conscience." But this Administration doesn't care about law and order; they only care about stoking rage in their votaries. Hence the ACLU helps you tell your Department of Labor to reject its own proposal to allow federal contractors to discriminate on the basis of "religious" "conscience."

Around the table: from economic blues to voting machine foul-ups.

Dean Baker thinks that though "The Economy Looks Grim for Workers," it "Might Not Bring Recession." Why not? Because very few sectors of the economy (housing construction, auto sales) are big enough to take the economy down by themselves anymore, and I bet banksters tell us this is why we should let them run everything! After all, that time the banksters took down the economy by themselves was so long ago! I still suspect the economy might take a dive merely because it's been in recovery so long (even if, as Mr. Baker suggests, we might better put "recovery" in quotation marks), but Mr. Baker's thesis is certainly more convincing than reading the tea leaves of inverted yield curves on T-bonds.

Nate Silver says Joe Biden doesn't have an enthusiasm problem so much as an "Iowa problem," and though I think we really ought to describe the difference between enthusiasm for beating a hated incumbent from enthusiasm for electing a new one, I do recall John McCain also having a similar problem in 2008 (he finished fourth in the Iowa caucuses that January), and then over the next few months Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney basically split the not-McCain vote so that Mr. McCain won the nomination; I suppose you could see Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren playing the Huckabee/Romney parts in a similar drama. But all that's not a good sign for Joe Biden, either -- John McCain lost the 2008 general, after all, and you probably remember that back in 2000 John McCain was the upstart who made people excited to vote for him, and when has Joe Biden ever been that?

181 CEOs sign a Business Roundtable resolution proclaiming that they can't just worry about delivering more money to shareholders anymore, and that they also have to worry about workers and our climate, among other things, but Tom Conway at OurFuture reminds us that they're just pulling a stunt and that we will need to "force" them to really clean up their act. I've long said that forcing CEOs to pay a 91% tax on income over a million bucks and forcing their corporations to pay a 55% tax rate will bring them back into the fold of civilized people, but the other reforms Mr. Conway cites in paragraphs 25 and 27 will also help. (Note well, also, that these corporations declaring that they have to do more for our communities don't pay a whole lot of taxes to begin with.)

Jesus Mary and Joseph Jon Ossoff is thinking of running for Senate. Mr. Ossoff rode that boatload of funding for the 2017 Georgia 6th House special election all the way to 48%, just as I figured he would -- he was, after all, another center-right Democrat who said an awful lot about right-sizing regulations and bringing high-tech jobs to the region and very little about his major accomplishment in life (his production of an al-Jazeera report exposing ISIS sex slavery). And a Black Lives Matter activist wound up winning Georgia's 6th in 2018, proving, again, that "raising a lot of money" is nowhere near as important as "inspire people to vote for you."

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson gets the Queen to close Parliament for most of the two months before the U.K. has to exit the European Union at the end of October, precisely so they can't stop the no-deal Brexit Mr. Johnson seems to desire. They call it "coup-like," but I see this as abject desperation on Mr. Johnson's part, and people do understand that British elections aren't like American Presidential elections, right? Mr. Johnson's position depends on a) his party's electoral fortunes or b) his ability to form a coalition government if the Tories don't get more than half the seats in the House of Commons, so people "liking" Boris Johnson means rather little if they don't also like his party, the same party that can't seem to hammer out a deal to gracefully exit the EU. And if expected food/fuel/medicine shortages materialize, then how does he win after everyone saw him go out of his way to bring them about? He won't be running against Joe Biden, after all.

Finally, Mississippi voters went to the polls earlier this week to vote in primaries for various statewide offices, and voters in upwards of nine counties reported that they tried to vote for one Republican gubernatorial candidate but got their vote switched to another, who just so happens to be the state's sitting Lieutenant Governor. And that's why we need paper ballots -- ballot counters would have to alter them or "lose" them to steal an election, and most of them would pause before doing that, but nobody feels guilty when a "faulty" machine does it for them.

Action: concerning fair housing, racism, and our duty as civilized people to shame those who have wronged us.

Our Department of Housing and Urban Development (or HUD) has proposed using algorithms to evaluate housing applicants. Ask yourself: why does an algorithm need to handle a task humans have been handling for years? The answer: because algorithms don't have families and don't need to use the bathroom. In other words, because they're not people. Call me old-fashioned, but if something's important enough to do, a person should do it. And if you think people are fallible, well, algorithms are worse -- facial recognition algorithms think all black people look alike, job-recruiting algorithms can't hire women, and social media algorithms can't root out violent racists. And HUD's algorithm would track how often applicants go out clubbing, like people are never supposed to have fun or something. So CREDO helps you tell our HUD to do public housing the right way and reject its own proposal to hand over functions to computers.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell your Senators to block the nomination of racist Steven Menashi to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. In "Ethnonationalism and Liberal Democracy," which he wrote for the University of Pennsylvania's international law journal back in 2010 (so no use saying "youthful indiscretion," amirite?), Mr. Menashi concludes that the more ethnically diverse a state is, the more ineffectual it is. He sounds like a man after our President's own heart! And Mr. Menashi's elite pedigree (he graduated Stanford and clerked for Justice Alito) doesn't excuse him; rather, it points out (as if we needed more of this!) how irredeemably corrupt and decadent Our Glorious Elites have become. If a white supremacist can smile, speak softly, and write complete sentences, they're not better than the barely coherent guy at the end of the bar, they're worse. Is it too much to ask to have fewer of them in positions of power?

Finally, CREDO also helps you tell ABC to drop former Administration spokeshack Sean Spicer from its upcoming season of "Dancing With the Stars." I have long believed that if you work for evil, then we, as civilized people, should shun and shame you. That's why I didn't think Condoleeza Rice was "oppressed" by the public pressure that prompted her to withdraw from her Rutgers commencement speech gig in 2014: frankly, someone who worked for Tha Bush Mobb should never have received such an invitation in the first place. I can already hear the right-wingers, not usually known for public displays of compassion, demanding to know WHEN WILLZ TEH SHAMINGZ STOPZ!!!!! "When people stop acting shamefully" would be the answer. And I can hear them saying WHYZ DO YOU HAVEZ TO BRINGZ TEH POLITICZ INTO ITZ!!!!! But, really, folks, Sean Spicer brings the politics with him wherever he goes, and when you work for evil, civilized people shouldn't rush to put you on family TV programming.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence and public lands.

It's a new week, so it's time once again to call your Senators and tell them to pass the following bills: H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Why would your Senators be afraid of bills that support voting rights, civil rights, fair pay, better pay, internet freedom, and secure elections? I mean, these are all popular things. Of course their leader, "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell, won't allow the bills to come to a vote, because (and I quote) "I get to decide what we vote on." But when we flood our Senators' phone lines with calls demanding votes on these bills, Mitch McConnell's opinion won't mean a damn thing, and his power will disappear. After all, his power isn't rooted in good works, and (despite appearances!) that's the only sustainable power there is.

Meanwhile, with the Amazon rainforest literally on fire as we speak, CREDO helps you tell big private equity corporation BlackRock to stop investing in the Amazon's destruction. How is BlackRock investing in the Amazon's destruction? By putting its money into the logging, mining, and big ag corporations that are deforesting the Amazon -- and thus, not incidentally, injuring the Amazon's ability to sequester the carbon dioxide that causes climate change. Trees absorb carbon dioxide and give off oxygen -- you'd think more big corporations and big investors would respect that simple truth, but the only "truth" they respect is the money that'll do them no good at the Pearly Gates. Still, with the burning Amazon all over the TV news, maybe we can make BlackRock feel the Big Stick of Bad PR. (Hate to pile on -- OK, I really don't -- but BlackRock also invests in the destruction of the indigenous folks who live in and protect the Amazon. How about that -- folks who live in a place are actually invested in protecting it! It's like an actual conservative value or something.)

Finally, H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, would delete that section of the so-called Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that authorizes oil and gas drilling leases in the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve (or ANWR). The New York Times recently reported that our Administration said we'd get about 40 times more money out of drilling in ANWR than we're actually going to get over the next decade, but that's not news to those of us who've been following the issue since Tha Bush Mobb tried to drill the hell out of these public lands, and seriously, what kind of public servant would be persuaded by the promise of a mere one-half of one percent of our annual federal budget, and over 10 years? The kind who only listens to big donors, that's who, and that's who passed that damn tax "reform" in the first place. But we can at least rectify the injury done to our public lands by telling our House Reps to pass H.R. 1146, as the Alaska Wilderness League helps us do.

Around the table: in which we examine a lot of whining and bad arguments from right-wingers.

The National Review publishes a 13-article issue called "Against Socialism," and the incomparable Nathan Robinson at Current Affairs rips it apart. Seriously, read the whole thing, and witness how right-wingers consistently set up straw men because that's all you can do when you can't win the argument on the merits. (Former Bob Novak protege/antiwar.com contributor Timothy Carney survives Mr. Robinson's scrutiny much better than the others, which isn't surprising, since Mr. Carney's a good egg.)

Thinking maybe this particular Administration, having promised to do better on terror-related issues than its predecessors, might actually be living up to that promise? Well, Dave Lindorff at The Nation finds our government's terrorism watch lists have expanded -- apparently to include him, as he has been searched several times at airports. And surprise, surprise, our government has padded these watchlists mainly with journalists and activists. Recall that Paul Craig Roberts has more than once asked why, if a no-fly list has a million people on it, we don't have a lot more terrorist attacks.

Dahr Jamali at TruthOut examines the ongoing fires in the Amazon rainforest and finds, guess what, a right-wing asshole in charge of a government that's bending over backwards to hand over more and more of the Amazon to logging, mining, and big ag corporations. And of course Mr. Bolsanaro, as disgusting a human being as has ever walked the Earth, plans to target the indigenous populations who have done the most to protect the Amazon from corporate pollution. Which is a big deal, actually, as the region, popularly known as "the lungs of the world," produces about one-fifth of Earth's oxygen.

The New York Times begins a "1619 Project" that puts slavery more at the center of American history, and right-wingers whine about it. Rebecca Onion is absolutely correct to note that we liberals shouldn't waste our "good faith on old, dead-end conversations" with right-wingers who can't take criticism, so I'll that I think it's more patriotic to face your sins and correct them than to whine about the people who actually do it. Also, hasn't the right been telling us for years that whining isn't conservative? You do have to wonder why they do it so often.

Finally, you know our President said a lot of stupid crap on Twitter this week, and I can't even say any of it is worse than any of the other crap he's said in that forum; perhaps I'm just weary of the pile. Thus I'm going to make a simple rule for this blog: if our President said it on Twitter, I'm not covering it. Also, I have blocked our President's Twitter account, and I think all y'all ought to do the same. It'd be nice if our media would follow suit, too. We might even call it "starving the beast." (And if anyone tells you you're "violating his free speech rights," remind them that our First Amendment does not require us to sit passively while someone screams in our face.)

Action: concerning campaign finance, Social Security, and immigration.

H.J.Res. 48, the "We the People" amendment, would at last allow we good Americans to pursue our dream of campaign finance reform. Section 1 would restrict Constitutional rights to "natural persons," i.e., you and I and everyone you know -- and not "artificial entities," like corporations. Section 2 would not only allow federal, state, and local governments to restrict campaign spending again like we used to in the days of McCain-Feingold, but would instruct judges not to interpret campaign spending as "free speech." Because how many times must I tell these pimps! Speech is speech, and money is property. Defenders of dark money rush forward to remind us that being heard takes money, but in doing so they show (among other things!) their apparent inability to grasp the word "restrict," which does not mean "stop entirely." Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support campaign finance reform by passing the "We the People" amendment.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to expand, not cut, Social Security benefits by passing H.R. 860/S. 269, the Social Security 2100 Act, then the Economic Policy Institute still helps you do that. The Social Security 2100 Act would expand benefits, index benefit hikes to an inflation index that actually reflects how seniors live, and fund its expansion by taxing pay above $400,000 into the system for the first time. And how will the opponents of the Social Security 2100 Act respond? By calling Social Security an "entitlement" -- how gracious of them, to give you the thing you've worked for and paid into all your life! -- and by saying we have to cut it to avoid exaggerated future budgeting shortfalls (remember when Social Security was supposed to "run out of money" in 2016?). But saying we have to cut a cherished program that benefits all of us sooner or later really isn't the can-do American spirit.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell furniture corporation Wayfair to stop making money off our government's notorious concentration camps for immigrants, then CREDO still helps you do that. You may recall that courageous Wayfair workers walked out in late June over their employer's habit of furnishing immigrant detention centers, including centers with children separated from their families. These workers also wrote an open letter to Wayfair CEO Niraj Shah demanding that Wayfair donate the proceeds from the furniture it's already sold to a non-profit legal service and end all future contracts that enable our Administration's nefarious immigrant detention policies. And what has Mr. Shah's response been? Approximately crickets. And it's been almost two months! That means we need to keep wielding the Big Stick of Bad PR until he feels it. And then any other big corporate CEO who might enable our Administration's policies will fear it.

Action: concerning trade, food stamps, and evil media.

Public Citizen helps you tell your House Reps not to vote on our President's USMCA trade agreement until he fixes its problems. Those problems include extended intellectual property protections for big pharmaceutical corporations -- which will keep drug prices higher, and drugs less accessible to the public, for longer -- and its relatively weak labor and clean air/clean water standards. If you're thinking big pharma deserves to make more money off what it makes, remember that most drugs don't get to market without a lot of government help, i.e., taxpayer help, i.e., your help. Remember, also, that no one should have monopoly power over life-saving drugs. The USMCA will drastically curtail the use of "investor-state dispute settlement" (or ISDS) systems which nullify our laws and outsource our jobs, and that's no small thing. But the other things aren't small things, either, and we deserve the best trade agreements we can get. So get on the horn to your House Reps and communicate your will.

Meanwhile, our Administration has proposed taking away state options, under the federal food stamps program, to assist working families who have significant child care and shelter bills. Sounds wonky, I know, but the end result will be no more food stamps for three million good Americans who still need it, so the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell our USDA to reject its own proposal to take away food stamps from so many people. No, it's not absurd to tell them to reject their own proposal -- it was absurd for them to propose something that merely injures us. And when I say "us," I do mean us -- we all pay into the food stamps program with our taxes, and any one of us could need it at any time, and we're not "lazy" or "stupid" merely because we need to avail ourselves of it. Hate to pile on -- OK, I don't -- but depriving states of flexibility in administering federal programs sure doesn't sound very conservative.

Finally, Fox News talking head Tucker Carlson called white supremacy a "hoax" a few weeks back, and then promptly went on "vacation," but now he's back, albeit with fewer advertisers, so now's as good a time as any to remind you that Media Matters still helps you tell big corporate advertisers to "drop Fox." Big cable corporations won't let us buy cable channels a la carte, so the next best thing we can do is make Fox toxic to big corporate advertisers, since as long as Fox is making money, they'll never change. At least not for the better! Pressuring Fox advertisers is already working -- Mr. Carlson's program has been hemorrhaging advertisers for a while, and big fast food chain corporation Long John Silver's has lately pulled all its ads from Fox. Still, corporations like Expedia, Allstate, and Applebee's still seem to look at Fox News as just another avenue to hawk their wares. But big corporate CEOs ought to be ashamed of themselves for giving money to Fox News. It's a good thing the Big Stick of Bad PR still works.

Around the table: featuring the horrible truth about "free" trade.

Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals rules that the state of Colorado violated the U.S. Constitution when it replaced three electors who planned not to vote for Hillary Clinton, though she won the state's popular vote. I think they ruled correctly -- and that's why we need to get rid of the Electoral College! I'm a little surprised and ashamed that it hadn't occurred to me until today that our President could win re-election regardless of his share of the popular vote, if enough electors simply buck the will of their state's electorate. If Democrats were more street-smart, they'd make the Electoral College a big campaign issue. They're not, of course, so they won't.

The incomparable Dean Baker reminds us that, contra what our President says, "China Did Not Trick the U.S. -- Trade Negotiators Served Corporate Interests." "Both Republican and Democratic administrations signed trade deals that made it easy to manufacture goods in China and other countries, and then export them back to the United States," he writes, meaning corporations could take advantage of "low-cost labor there" and "low-cost supply chains" so they could destroy their competitors and make a mint. Thus "the trade deficit was the result of their efforts to increase their profits," and American working families "lost 3.4 million manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2007." In other words, the trade deficit with China is a feature of American policy, not a bug. The fact that it gives our President opportunity to grandstand about foreigners "taking advantage" of America is just icing on the cake, and our corporate overlords are nowhere near as upset about such grandstanding as they'd like you to think.

Department of Energy study finds the price of building wind farms lower than the price of building a natural gas plant. And natural gas was the "cheap" fossil fuel! Some caveats apply -- renewable energy tax credits might disappear, for one -- but note well that if our President calls all of this TEH FAKE NEWZ!!!! that his own Department of Energy said it. He does appoint "the best people" to his government, right? (But as much as he rants about "piles of dead birds," I'm sure he'll also tout the fact that three states that now get 30% of their power from wind -- Kansas, Iowa, and Oklahoma -- all voted for him in 2016. Why? Because while you're trying to make sense of his chaos, he just makes more chaos. And yes, I could have written that sentence about George W. Bush in 2004, too.)

Rutgers University study finds that roughly one out of every thousand black men will die during an encounter with police. Sadly, right-wingers will twist this around to SEE YOU ARE TOO TEH SAFEZ 99.9% DON'T DIEZ!!!!!, without telling you that black men and boys are 2.5 times more likely to die during police contacts than white men and boys. They'll also probably twist this around to say black men and boys are five times more likely to kill themselves than get killed by police, without mentioning, that, hello, nobody should worry about whether the next time they talk to a cop will be their last.

Finally, our President claims that Jews who vote Democrat exhibit "either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty." Presumably he means "disloyalty" to Israel, but suggesting you're disloyal to a foreign country if you oppose our President or his party is no less offensive than suggesting you're disloyal to this one. And, ah, could it be that Jewish voters went harder for Democratic Congressional candidates in 2018 than they did for Hillary Clinton in 2016 at least in part because more of them fear they'll be killed by the very same white supremacists our President has emboldened? Anyway, no President should conflate himself with our country and call his opponents "disloyal." This is a grown man acting like this.

Action: concerning public lands, racism, and equal pay.

Our Administration is desperate to open the Tongass National Forest to road-building, which seems innocuous on its face -- except that logging and mining corporations have long angled to get roads built in the Tongass so they can get their logging and mining operations in there! Hence H.R. 2491/S. 1311, the Roadless Area Conservation Act, which states that our government "shall not allow road construction, road reconstruction, or logging in an inventoried roadless area where those activities are prohibited by the Roadless Rule," as adopted in early 2001. That's right, yet again we have to tell this Administration that they have to follow legally-enacted regulations, which we might otherwise describe as "the law." But duty is duty, no matter where it takes us, so Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect public lands by passing the Roadless Area Conservation Act. Obeying the law, protecting pristine areas from development -- why, that all sounds conservative, doesn't it?

Meanwhile, you've no doubt heard by now that our FBI considers black protestors a more important security threat than white racists, even though, ah, recent events would seem to counter that assessment. I mean, when mass murderers repeatedly say out loud how much they hate non-white people, wouldn't you have to pay attention? And even though police commit most of the violence that purportedly "accompanies" black protestors, our FBI has cooked up a "black identity extremist" category, which is even more absurd when you consider that for hundreds of years we systematically denied black folks any sort of identity other than chattel. Hence CREDO helps you tell our FBI to get its priorities straight, and go after white supremacists more than black protestors. If you really think black protestors have nothing really to protest anymore, well, a) you're wrong and b) that would have literally nothing to do with a reasonable assessment of whether black protestors or white supremacists are more dangerous. We fought a World War against the latter, after all.

Finally, H.R. 3804/S.2083, the Athletics Fair Pay Act, would mandate that our government pay U.S. Women's Team soccer players the same as U.S. Men's Team soccer players. Seems like a no-brainer to me, particularly since the U.S. Women's Team has won four out of the eight women's World Cup tournaments ever and the Men's Team has only been to one men's World Cup final and didn't even qualify for the tournament in 2018. And if your Tea Party uncle objects by saying oh, so now we're going to pay the WNBA the same as we pay the NBA?, well, you may be tempted to say why not?, particularly if you're not all that emotionally-invested in what your favorite athletes make (or if, like me, you're working toward that 91% tax bracket on millionaire income which would pretty much end the era of absurd pro athlete salaries). But comparing it to the NBA/WNBA is actually beside the point -- the NBA and the WNBA are private entities, but the U.S. Men's and Women's soccer team play for our country. So Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to promote equal pay by passing the Athletics Fair Pay Act.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence and sane drug policy.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass six good House-passed bills that "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell won't even allow them to vote on, well, you can still call them and demand both that they vote on it and that they pass it. We need to call them, because if we don't, these Senators can always say "well, I didn't hear about it from my constituents," and we should never let them use that excuse -- particularly during the month of August, when they're all in their home states meeting with constituents, at least nominally. You better believe their big donors are trying to get their attention this month! The six bills in question, as you may recall, are H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Anyone who opposes voting rights, civil rights, fair pay, better pay, internet freedom, and secure elections doesn't deserve to be a Senator anyway.

Meanwhile, H.R. 1456/S. 597, the Marijuana Justice Act, would not only remove pot from federal scheduling (which would essentially legalize pot), but would withhold federal funding for prisons in states that haven't legalized it and have arrested a disproportionate number of folks of color for pot-related offenses. The bill would also expunge federal convictions for pot-related offenses and establish a Community Reinvestment Fund to help communities ravaged by the notorious "war on drugs." We spend too much time and money chasing after pot-smokers when they do about as much damage as drunkards do, and you no doubt recall how our effort at banning alcohol went. Of course, we also spend so much time and money chasing after pot-smokers because our government thought it was a great way to oppress civil rights protestors! Don't just take my word for it, though -- take the word of President Nixon's domestic policy guru/Watergate co-conspirator John Ehrlichmann! Change.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact saner drug policy by passing the Marijuana Justice Act.

Penny Rants for Monday, August 19, 2019: special "media coverage of Democratic Presidential candidates still sucks!" edition.

Julie Hollar at FAIR catches our "liberal" media reframing attacks on Joe Biden as attacks on Barack Obama. They take their cue from Mr. Biden on this one, of course, just as objective journalists would! Of course, in the real world, where we observe and tabulate behavior more scientifically, we find the Democrats running for President going very far out of their way not to attack the Obama legacy, such as it is, and when your right-wing pals start yelling ZOMG ALL THEY DOEZ IZ ATTACKZ TEH OBAMAZ!!!!!, the bank-shot response will be "you mean like you did for eight years?" Democrats shouldn't take every criticism of policy as an attack on a person, since that's what folks do when they regard politics as a spectator sport, rather than the participatory exercise it actually is. And if I were Mr. Biden, I wouldn't be so confident that "Democratic primary voters" will make the "judgment" he hopes they'll make. After all, if the Obama Administration were that great, we wouldn't have the President we have now.

Sen. Bernie Sanders told ralliers that the Washington Post doesn't exactly like him, and our media protested that couldn't be true because OUR BOSSEZ DO NOTZ TELLZ UZ PRECISELYZ WHATZ TO DOZ!!!!, and then we are reminded that "liberal" media bias against Sen. Sanders is actually a thing that exists and can be measured. You may remember the 16-negative-headlines-in-16-hours spasm in which the Washington Post indulged back in 2016, but you may not remember the litany of Sanders-is-factually-correct-but-understanding-the-world-is-hard-so-he-must-be-wrong "fact checks" the paper has performed on his assertions since then. Calling his policy prescriptions "unrealistic" is just icing on the cake (and, you know, plenty of can't-happen stuff has actually happened), but saying his attacks on our media "echo" our President's is just plain wrong. Sen. Sanders accuses our "media" of bias, while our President calls their accurate reporting on him "fake news"; I wonder why they would want to equate the two.

Naturally it ain't just Bernie Sanders our "liberal" media doesn't like -- the New York Times treats us to a story of Democrats "worrying" about whether Elizabeth Warren has what it takes to defeat the beast, full of the usual anecdotal evidence and "conventional" "wisdom." The article worries about her "professorial style" in paragraph six, but it had already demolished that worry in paragraph two in telling us that "(f)ew candidates inspire as much enthusiasm as she does among party voters" -- after all, folks with "professorial style" don't "inspire" "enthusiasm," do they? Naturally the article also worries about her "uncompromising liberalism," even though at least one candidate stands to her left, and uncompromising centrism is clearly overrated as a winning formula. (Aside to the Democratic voter who says "(i)f it were completely up to me, I’d vote for her": it is completely up to you. Your job is to express your will, not get caught up in the 13-dimensional chess games Our Glorious Elites would rather you play.)

Our New York paper of record went on to cover the Beto O'Rourke campaign "reboot" with horserace analysis over whether Mr. O'Rourke can "break through." And the analysis ain't even that deep: can Beto somehow stand out among all the other candidates "taking the fight" to our President? seems to be the beginning and end of it; we don't even hear from moderate Democratic voters or think-tank punditoids, as we often do with Messrs. Warren and Sanders, respectively. Certainly the Times offers no analysis of whether "taking the fight" to our President doesn't play directly into his hands -- he loves it when you say his name and treat him like he's the center of the universe, and I'm old enough to remember when "taking the fight" to George W. Bush wasn't enough to beat him, either. The more you talk about how you want to make America a more perfect union, the less you talk about our President, but our "liberal" media is content to imagine that by criticizing Messrs. Sanders and Warren over "electability" concerns and Mr. O'Rourke over "visibility" concerns, they're being fair and balanced!

Action: concerning lead poisoning and obnoxious racism.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: HB 930 would protect Pennsylvania's children against lead in their schools' drinking water, by requiring testing, mandating testing result disclosure to parents, and keeping lead levels in school drinking water below five parts per billion. We're now five years after the Flint drinking water crisis, and residents across Pennsylvania are finding lead in their school drinking water, but we still don't have vigorous standards against lead, though any amount of lead causes brain damage in children, and they don't exactly grow out of that. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your Pennsylvania state Reps to protect our children by cosponsoring and passing HB 930. What's the argument against testing our schools' water for lead, I wonder? That "we don't have the money"? If a civilization accepts that as a reason for failing to protect our children, then that civilization deserves to die -- particularly if it keeps handing out endless welfare to corporate cronies.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Twitter to do a much better job policing hate speech on its site, then Color of Change still helps you do that. And to those who squeal TEH FREE SPEECHEZ!!!!, recall that our First Amendment protects us from our government, not from commercial media -- just as your local newspaper is under no obligation to print your neighbor's rants about black folks merely because he wants to be heard, Twitter can ban any speech it likes, and its executives need only worry about whatever PR backlash might result. And if (as Dean Baker said not long ago) Facebook is a publisher and thus should be held to the same standards to which we hold other publishers, then so is Twitter. Twitter's CEO, unfortunately, seems to think obnoxious racism is difficult to define. Here's a clue: when they start putting up swastikas, it means they're obnoxious racists. I mean, you'd have to be, to take up the banner of a nation we defeated in war over 70 years ago.

Action: concerning financial predation and the death penalty.

Because our Administration hates all regulations that actually help good Americans, our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) wants to gut its whistleblower protection program. You can understand why governments hate whistleblowers -- because they expose the wrongdoing of politicians and political appointees! -- but the sheer hatred of the last two Administrations is still a bit surprising. Our SEC's proposed rules would automatically disqualify any whistleblowers who take their concerns directly to SEC Commissioners, would disqualify whistleblowers merely because they filled out paperwork wrong, and would put an arbitrary cap on whistleblower rewards; I'm no great defender of filling out paperwork incorrectly, for example, but the SEC's proposal would be like taking a sledgehammer to an ant. Why, it's almost like they're coming up with ways to protect their cronies from scrutiny! The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell our SEC to abandon its plans to make whistleblowing on financial firms a lot harder.

Meanwhile, the ACLU helps you tell Missouri's Governor to grant clemency to Russell "Rusty" Bucklew, because lethal injection would be, in his case, cruel and unusual. Mr. Bucklew suffers from a rare disease that grows tumors full of blood in his head and neck, and if he gets lethal injection, chances are those tumors would rupture and cause Mr. Bucklew to choke to death on his own blood. If you're reading that and saying so what? He's gonna die anyway, then you're doing civilization wrong -- we're supposed to be leaving as good example for future generations to follow, not wallowing in considerations of expediency until we become corrupt and cynical. And if you're familiar with the crime for which Mr. Bucklew got convicted, you might well be tempted to ask he sure didn't treat his victims with very much mercy, so why should we? Answer: the whole point of civilization is to lift ourselves above the murderer's level, not bring ourselves down to it. Maybe setting a good example will come back into vogue one day, but only if we lead.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2155, the Stop Wall Street Looting Act, then Color of Change still helps you do that. S. 2155 would make it a lot less attractive for big private equity corporations to do the thing they've done with impunity the last decade -- buy up large retail corporations, run them into the ground, and suck their wealth out in bonuses and fees on their way out the door. To think they have the gall to say we shouldn't "punish success," and that our richest Americans are merely the ones who have worked the hardest! How does running corporations into the ground and extracting their wealth benefit our civilization? Hell, how does it even qualify as "work"? And these predators have wiped a million jobs from our economy over the last decade; funny how folks who squeal about an increased minimum wage "killing jobs" have nothing to say about that. A lot of these folks are just nihilists, of course, but civilized people don't admire wanton destruction, let alone predators getting rich off it.

Action: concerning racism, immigration, and debt.

Wondering how hate groups get such a foothold on the internet? It ain't because they're right or because they're popular -- it's because they get money to spread their hate, and big charity corporations enable this horror by allowing some $11 million to flow through their "donor-advised funds" (or DAFs) between 2014 and 2017. Don't get the idea that "helping racists donate money to racist groups" is some kind of free speech issue, because a) money ain't speech and b) our First Amendment doesn't exist to promote hate speech, but merely to prevent folks from being thrown in jail merely because their speech is noxious to civilized people. And, ah, what law compels big corporations to fund hate speech merely because some donor wants to? If a donor wants to donate that badly, they can just write a check and send it where it needs to go; our First Amendment does not require that funding hate speech be easier than that. Hence Color of Change helps you tell big corporations to stop enabling the funding of hate groups.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell nine big hotel chain corporations to refuse ICE in their apparent quest to turn American hotels into immigrant detention centers. It's hard for me to see exactly how ICE could compel hoteliers to do this on their behalf, except through intimidation, and indeed four big hotel chain corporations (Marriott, Choice, Hilton, and Hyatt) have refused to cooperate with ICE. You don't even need to find ICE particularly odious to demand that hoteliers stop enabling them! You only need wonder why our government can't provide proper housing for detained immigrants on its own. And you might well conclude that maybe our government spends too much taxpayer money on private prison corporations -- which apparently can't do the job, or else ICE wouldn't be turning to Motel 6. Remember when we all used to imagine that evil was administratively apt? Yeah, this Administration sure is full of "evil geniuses." Nobody ever said Lex Luthor couldn't work within a budget.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) not to make it easier for collection corporations to harass us, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. Yes, that's right, our CFPB, which exists to keep us away from financial predators, would allow debt collectors to call you seven times weekly per debt -- meaning per loan, per credit card, per health care bill, and heaven forbid have more than one of any of these -- and would also let debt collectors call your friends and family! I still know right-wingers who would say well, then, don't take on any debt you can't afford! They say this as if people plan to get slammed by unscrupulous health insurance corporations! But you may, if you like, point out them that debt collectors too often call folks about debts they've already paid or never had to begin with. Surely your right-wing acquaintances will find that objectionable. They are very proud people, after all.

Around the table: of unearned mandates, law-and-order posturing, and rich folks acting stupid.

Our Administration finalizes rules putatively allowing them to enforce the Endangered Species Act far less vigorously than before. Among the changes: our government can how "take into account" the purported "economic costs" of saving a species; perhaps our alien overlords will do the same when mulling whether to save humanity! And where does Commerce Secretary Ross imagine our President has a "mandate" to "eas(e) the regulatory burden on the American public"? First off, they're not "easing" a "burden" on "the public"; they're just making it easier for big corporate cronies to make more unearned millions. Second, 54% of the electorate wanted someone else to be President in 2016, so he has no "mandate" other than the ones our Constitution gives -- you know, the ones he ignores at every opportunity. So I guess we'll see these pricks in court, then.

Acting CBP Chief will not confirm for CNN's Jake Tapper that CBP is investigating any of our President's corporations for their well-reported reliance on undocumented immigrant labor. While it is true that "there are investigations going on all the time that you’re unaware of," it is equally true that I am not a schmuck, and I do not expect ICE to show up in Bedminster anytime soon, not because our President is innocent, but because they knows better. Or, maybe, because he's their bastard. I'd prefer the former reason, but either one is alien to a nation where we pride ourselves that no one is above the law.

Speaking of which, Current Attorney General William Barr tells the Fraternal Order of Police that those newly-elected district attorneys who do not shove their testicles in your face to prove their toughness are, of course, "anti-law enforcement." Here's a clue: if you say someone is "anti-law enforcement," you're pretty much telegraphing that you can't win the argument on the merits. It's like saying something is "socialist." And I'm going to go out on a limb and say that his statement that suspects should always "comply first" with police instructions and then "if warranted, complain later" will not resonate very much with families of folks executed by police after, say, pulling out their cellphone or telling a police officer they have a registered firearm in their car.

Visa CEO says he won't block gun sales, saying, as a matter of comparison I suppose, that "(w)e shouldn’t tell people they can’t purchase a 32-ounce soda" and "(w)e shouldn’t tell people they can’t buy reproductive drugs." I guess he brings "reproductive drugs" in because he's trying to say he's Hip Like Us, but comparing guns to soda is rock-stupid, because no Big Gulp has ever killed 30 people in 60 seconds. People like Mr. Kelly love saying everything is a "slippery slope," but actually almost nothing is -- civilized people have been debating the boundaries of what we allow and what we outlaw for thousands of years, but I guess corporate CEOs are too bold to acknowledge history and heritage.

Finally, wealthy supporters of our President who live in the Hamptons whine that they have to keep their support of our President "in the closet" (way to insult the entire gay experience, whiners!) for fear of ostracization and lost business, and even "physical violence." America is going into a "dark place," they say, and given our President's overt racism I sure would have said that differently! If rich folks really fear physical violence they can call a cop, but they don't seem to understand that when folks injure our community, we ostracize them, because that's how civilization is supposed to work. Or, to put it in a way our President's supporters might better understand: fuck your feelings.

Action: concerning Social Security, methane emissions, and working families.

You know how we've been talking about expanding Social Security, so that we can get ahead of talk from Our Glorious Elites about cutting "entitlements"? Well, H.R. 860/S. 229, the Social Security 2100 Act, would do just that, by actually increasing benefit amounts, increasing the amount of Social Security benefits retirees can enjoy tax-free, and creating a Consumer Price Index that accurately reflects seniors' economic trials. You know, rather than using "Chained CPI," which assumes that if something becomes too expensive, folks just switch to something cheaper. Can you imagine seniors "just switching" to cheaper drugs? No, you can't. Social Security has helped hundreds of millions of Americans live a more dignified retirement, free of poverty and want, and this is despite 40 years of politicians and their corporate paymasters trying to wreck the program and advancing every problem they've created as a reason to cut the program. So Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our retirements by passing the Social Security 2100 Act.

Meanwhile, H.R. 2711, the Methane Waste Prevention Act, would require gas drilling corporations to capture 99 percent of the methane gas that escapes from their operations within five years. H.R. 2711 would also require gas drillers to flare (or burn) that minuscule amount of methane gas they fail to trap, and would require our government to set standards for gas drilling equipment so that it doesn't leak methane gas. Methane leakage is, as you know, a byproduct of hydraulic fracturing (or fracking), and it tends to trap far more carbon emissions in our atmosphere than even coal does. And methane is also, you know, usable fuel which does us not one bit of good if it's floating around in our atmosphere. Don't abide any whining about how all this is so hard and will cost gas drilling corporations money; their money isn't more important than our air and our climate. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our clean air and help slow the advance of climate change by passing the Methane Waste Prevention Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject our President's nomination of Eugene Scalia to be our next Secretary of Labor, then CREDO still helps you do that. We don't oppose him because he's the late Justice Scalia's son, but because, well, of his entire career helping big corporations run roughshod over working people; the Wall Street Journal called Mr. Scalia one of the banksters' "go-to guys for challenging financial regulations," which doens't exactly speak to his love of working people, as does his work helping WalMart overturn a Maryland law which would have mandated that WalMart contribute something-anything to their workers' health insurance. Mr. Scalia also seems to have a unique animus against ergonomic safety regulations, which you'd only find sympathetic if you haven't noticed that technology has created more desk jockeys than hard hats over the years. He even lamented that such regulations would force businesses to "hire more workers," to which the only reasonable response would be: we can only hope!

Action: concerning good House bills and a bad Senate bill.

It's Monday, so it's time once again to call our Senators and tell them to pass the following bills: H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. The House passed all these bills, but the Senate won't even vote on them, because Senate Majority Leader "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell (E-KY) won't even hold a vote on any of them. He even calls himself the "Grim Reaper" now! Who but an insane person would be proud of the fact that they refuse to pass legislation promoting voting rights, civil rights, equal pay for women, a higher minimum wage, freedom from corporate interference on the internet, and safe and secure elections? Seriously, let that be your meditation object as you call your Senators. You'd think a few of them would want to go on the record supporting the things I've listed above, but too many of them think of politics as nothing more than team sports -- a profound offense to those of us who call America our team.

In the wake of a mass murder apparently perpetrated by someone who really, really hated immigrants, Republicans have responded swiftly -- with legislation that would further injure immigrants! Yay priorities! S. 1494, the so-called Secure and Protect Act, would (among other nefarious works) impose an unnecessarily high screening standard on potential aslyees, essentially prevent Central American refugees from even getting asylum in the U.S., and deny immigrants due process by subjecting them to abnormally fast "rocket docket" hearings. Naturally, Judiciary Chair Lindsey Graham (R-SC) called a Committee vote on the bill without even letting Democratic members speak on it, which is what you do when you're really confident in your bill. And aslyees and refugees are actually the least likely people to commit terrorism, because, you know, they're fleeing terrorism in their home countries. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to resist this persistent posturing about immigration by rejecting the so-called Secure and Protect Act.

Around the table: Joe Biden revises his career yet again, and other dramas.

Jesus Mary and Joseph now Joe Biden is trying to convince us he opposed the Iraq war and "was as outspoken as much as anyone at all in Congress," including, I presume, Barbara Lee, Bob Graham, and Ron Paul. Sooner or later even deaf, dumb, and blind infants will tire of Mr. Biden's attempts to revise his 40 years of professional capitulation to the right. And this is why he'll lose in 2020.

Alan McLeod at FAIR catches cable news channels suggesting that if you can't afford that vacation, you could just put it on a credit card! Remember when our Administration was telling folks furloughed over our President's vanity border wall tantrum that they could just take out a loan to make ends meet? This is what we get when we enable a bankster class that does no work other than converting other people's debt into their wealth.

Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals upholds North Dakota law insisting that voters all have a residential street address in order to have Voter ID (and therefore to vote) -- though around 20 percent of the Native American population actually don't have these street addresses. Which our own Supreme Court will be anxious to overturn citing the "undue burden" standard in Planned Parenthood v. Casey! I kid, of course -- these Justices are very, ah, selective about their precedents.

Former #1 overall NHL draft pick Joe Murphy, who carved out a solid 15-year career as a second-line winger, is now 51, homeless on the streets of Kenora, Ontario, and showing symptoms of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (or CTE). We know football is bad for the human brain, but I bet one day we find out that hockey is even worse -- the game's effects on its players' brains hidden by the anonymity that's more likely to be their lot once they stop playing and return to their Canadian hinterland hometowns, as they tend to do.

In case you were tempted to argue that recent mass shootings mean we should give our FBI "more tools" to stop them, Chip Gibbons at In These Times reminds us that not only is the FBI more obsessed with "black identity extremists" than white racist terrorists, but it already has "extraordinary tools" that it's just not using against white racists. In other words, our FBI would rather use its vast powers against good Americans than use those powers to protect us. And naturally Joe Biden would pass a "domestic terrorism" law to respond to mass shootings, which surely wouldn't have the same ill effects as all that anti-crime legislation he's enthusiastically pushed over the years.

Finally, why does our President give a thumbs-up for the camera as he's taking a picture with an infant orphaned by the El Paso shooting? To get us to talk about that, and to get embroiled in yet another one of his dramas, that's why -- and, unfortunately, fighting drama means calling attention to the fact that it is drama. Think of it as a periodic vaccination. Also, think of what our President might not want you to find out as you're obsessing over his latest drama -- like, just as a for-example, that he still uses undocumented immigrant labor while he rails against undocumented immigrants.

Action: concerning good science, bad science, and bad media.

You've heard, no doubt, about our Administration's multitudinous attempts to hide and purge scientific information that good Americans deserve to know. Hence S. 2220, the Open and Responsive Government Act, would amend the Freedom of Information Act so that folks couldn't hide "confidential" information from the public unless it would actually cause them substantial harm. S.2220 would also specify more precisely that you can't withhold a big slab of information from the public merely because a portion of it might meet the "substantial harm" standard. These are good ideas, of course, but why are they urgent now? Because our Administration's EPA has packed its scientific advisory boards with (you guessed it) industry figures who could claim all kinds of "substantial harm" if FOIA requests would require answers from them. Of course, I'd rather not have this revolving door between corporations and our government in the first place, but in the meantime, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Open and Responsive Government Act.

Meanwhile, Sky Gray, of Asheville, NC, has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell online retail corporation Amazon to stop selling "conversion therapy" books. "Conversion therapy" -- which aims to "convert" gay folks (including children!) into straight folks by, among other odious methods, making them re-enact their sexual abuse -- is now illegal in 14 states. Are you feeling a little anxious about whether you're "suppressing free speech" by telling Amazon to do this? Rest assured that you're not -- Amazon can always say "no," after all, if they think they can withstand the bad PR that'll result. But our First Amendment only guarantees writers of "conversion therapy" books the right not to be imprisoned by our government for their speech -- it does not guarantee an audience for your speech, and it does not guarantee you the right to make money off your speech. In a sane and moral society, such books would be available at the gay-hating version of Paladin or Loompanics -- but not necessarily on America's biggest bookseller.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell corporations to stop advertising on Tucker Carlson Tonight and The Ingraham Angle on the Fox News (sic) Channel, then Color of Change helps you do that. Why? Well, because of everything they've ever said and done, really, and why do such terrible people get so many TV shows? It's like our media only care about drama! But both talking heads have also spread around plenty of racist pablum over the last few years, and with so many white supremacists going around shooting people these days, well, it's not a good look. And I wish we lived in an America where simply "changing the channel" was enough, but it's not enough, because even if we're not watching it, we're still paying for it, and corporations are still advertising on it. In the absence of a good a la carte cable packaging law, we can at least wield the Big Stick of Bad PR on their advertisers.

Action: concerning social media and Arctic drilling.

CREDO helps you tell big tech corporations Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to ban white nationalist and other hate groups from their platforms. And again, it's not a matter of "free speech no matter how noxious": our First Amendment guarantees that folks can't be put in prison for the mere fact of their noxious speech, but it does not guarantee a platform for your noxious speech, let alone a living. And let's also bury the suggestion that we merely oppose speech "we don't like" -- nobody should like it when far-right assholes cheer another racist for carrying out a mass murder! Big tech corporations (Facebook especially) act like it's so hard to keep assholes from ruining their platforms, but it really isn't -- they could stop valuing executive salaries like they're the only thing worth preserving in civilization and break off some of that money to hire more people to monitor speech on their platforms. For such powerful people, our big tech CEOs sure do act helpless an awful lot. And we shouldn't tolerate such weakness.

Meanwhile, our Department of Interior plans to push ahead with oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR) this year, but Environmental Action helps you tell our Secretary of the Interior not to allow drilling in the Refuge. We call it a "refuge," after all, because we'd like some part of the old world to keep going, uninterrupted by the churning of the new one. Of course, the folks in charge of our government now, though they call themselves "conservative," don't value the past except insofar as they can convert it into money for some crony or other. And that's all we'll get by drilling in ANWR, scientists having found that we're not going to extract very much oil from the area. There is something truly noxious about converting wild places into nothing more lasting than money, which always gets spent and always cries out for replacement. Of course, such noxiousness is our President's calling card. Might we at least convert his bad example into a warning for future generations?

Around the table: no, every problem is not a Gordian knot! And other insights.

Politico wonders: "How Do You Solve a Problem Like 8chan?" Simple: you do what Dean Baker suggested we do last week -- you hold corporations like Facebook and Twitter accountable for the public postings of their users, in much the same manner you hold book publishers accountable for what they put out. (People who post privately to their friends will have to rely on their friends to tell them when they're full of it.) But you certainly don't throw up your hands and say the First Amendment "protects" hateful speech without specifying exactly how it does that (i.e., that it protects you from your government, and not your publisher).

And now for the WHEREZ TEH DATAZ!!!!!! crowd: researchers using FBI data on 248 active shooter incidents over 17 years, find that semiautomatic weapons "roughly double" victims' chances of getting killed or wounded. My initial reaction: they only double your chances of getting killed or wounded? But the Brigham and Women's Hospital study didn't count incidents with the largest death tolls or with multiple shooters. Headline from the no-gun-control-ever lobby: SEE TEH SEMIZ DON'TZ KILLZ TEH PEEPULZ MORE EFFICIENTLYZ HAHAHAHAHA!!!!! Of course, the more pertinent finding (and the one that aligns with common sense) is that semis do hit more people and thus result in more deaths.

Ben Freeman, Nia Harris, and Cassandra Simpson at TomDispatch explode the myth that military spending creates jobs. You've likely started to suspect that military spending enriches big defense contractor CEOs more than anything else, but it's nice to have some facts behind it. Lockheed's share of taxpayer money went up about 37% between 2012 and 2018, but their total workforce went down almost 13% -- and their CEO's salary went up 32%. Two other big defense contractors also cut jobs over that time, and two more only "gained" jobs because they bought other corporations. Stick that in your Tea Party uncle's hat next time he talks about defense creating jobs -- and then pivot to things that actually create jobs, like infrastructure, renewable energy, and health care spending, and you'll likely find a sympathetic audience. If only Democrats would act on this insight!

Another day, another finding that the 2017 tax "reform" hasn't goosed up capital investment like its supporters said it would, and this finding comes from our Administration's Commerce Department, which you would think would have an interest in saying the exact opposite. Then again, maybe not, as long as our President is willing to say whatever. But cutting the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% did not, in fact, "free" corporations to spend more money on capital projects. Historically, the only thing that does that is a higher tax rate, since corporations will spend more money on capital projects once they realize it's going to get taxed away if they don't. (That's also why corporations don't really need "incentives" to do research and development -- research and development are expenses, and corporate taxes only tax profits.)

Finally, our President voices his apparent belief that his "rhetoric" not only doesn't divide our nation but actually "brings people together." And it is possible that he may be right about that one day -- at that moment where we can all observe his rhetoric bringing people together against him. Sadly, that moment isn't now, because his votaries are still too eager to make excuses for him -- this, even though conservatives always told us conservatism wasn't about making excuses for people!

Action: concerning banksters, pollution, and privacy.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2155, the Stop Wall Street Looting Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. You may well be saying to yourself, self, I'd very much like to stop Wall Street looting, too, but would this bill really do that? The answer is yes, S. 2155 would basically take all the joy banksters feel when they suck all the assets out of a corporation -- it would impose a 100 percent tax on all the fees private equity firms impose on a corporation for two years after they buy it, it would make those firms actually take on more of the debt they've assumed rather than simply transfer it back to the corporation they've bought, it would give workers more of a chance to recover what they've lost after their employer goes bankrupt, and it would make private equity firms' doings more transparent. These firms don't just kill big chain stores like Sears and Payless -- they kill local newspapers all over America, too (the Denver Post being the most famous example). And S. 2155 will help us stop them.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: SB 707, 708, and 709 would give the state Attorney General "concurrent jurisdiction" over certain clean air and clean water laws in the state, and thus give our AG the power to initiate investigations into these matters. Given that our Attorney General is supposed to, you know, enforce the law on behalf of the people of the Commonwealth, you would think our AG would be able to do that on his own, but no -- current law mandates that our AG must first get a referral from the state Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) or a local district attorney. I have to admit I'm at a loss to explain why the state of Pennsylvania does it that way -- it sounds a lot like a decades-old turf battle won in favor of someone who may not even be alive now, frankly. But we don't need to put up with inter-bureaucratic turf battles, because our Attorney General answers to us. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your PA state Senators to help our state government protect us from pollution by passing SB 707, 708, and 709.

Finally, in the wake of yet another data breach exposing the private data of over 100 million good Americans, Fight for Privacy helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass strong legislation that protects the privacy of good Americans' online information. There's no use saying if you still want privacy, don't put your information online, because putting your information online is basically necessary now, unless you pay for everything with cash and never take out a loan. I will say I continue to be disappointed with our Congressfolk's apparent inability to process the fact that we should be able to opt in to corporate attempts to sell our data to third parties. It wouldn't "break the internet" (as Sen. Toomey infamously put it in 2011), and it wouldn't even be very hard to do -- and it would protect a lot more people from a big bank that somehow decides to put all of its sensitive information on a freaking Amazon cloud server. When will folks realize that "cloud computing" doesn't actually make our lives better? It only makes it easier for big corporations to make big money.

Action: concerning Social Security, renewable energy, and Presidential bad behavior.

2020 is coming, which means more fearmongering from the Koch brothers and their like-minded ilk about "runaway" "entitlements," and which likely also means that our President will go back on his promise not to touch Social Security because of TEH DEFICITZ!!!! he made worse with his tax cuts for the rich (probably not until after re-election, though). And it also means that the "liberal" media outlets that supposedly hate our President will be considerably more blunt then he about the "need" to cut "entitlements." So let's head them off, by telling our Congressfolk that we must expand Social Security, not cut it, as Social Security Works helps you do. The haters keep trying to sound "reasonable" and "serious" about cutting Social Security, and they keep failing -- but only because we stand up to them. We worked for it, we paid into it, we fought for it, and when we retire, we deserve to enjoy it. So don't let the haters and their scare numbers take it from us.

Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend funding for clean energy programs. Would it be crass to mention to them that they take big campaign donations from the fossil fuel corporations they still subsidize even though they don't really need it? No, it would not be crass. Would it be crass to mention that we just had the hottest June in recorded history and massive heat waves devastating the country in July, and that using more renewable energy and less fossil fuel energy would help us suffer less of that? Would it be crass to mention the increased health care costs from dirty air and dirty water caused by pollution from fossil fuels (and, ah, not from renewables)? The answers are, in order, "no" and "no." And though renewable energy has grown tremendously across America over the years, it still only provides about 10% of our electricity, and it still needs support from our government -- which really means support from us, the taxpayers. We should get the livable future we pay for, right?

Elyse Marin has begun a petition on Color of Change which helps you tell the Anschutz Entertainment Group (or AEG) to stop hosting our President's rallies. That's right, it's time for the Big Stick of Bad PR again -- if you're a corporate sponsor giving stadium space to our President so he can have his little Nuremberg rallies where his votaries all squeal "lock her up" and "send her back" and other noxious crap, then you deserve to be pointed out and shamed until you change your behavior. I know there are still folks who are so proud of their cynicism that they'll say well how do you say no to the President, huh? Gosh, 54% of the electorate said no to him on Election Day 2016 (though, as you know, he's not a man who takes "no" very easily!), and anyway, saying no to our President is part of our birthright as Americans, a lesson I bet meant a lot more to the cynics when Barack Obama was President. Is it too much to ask that no big arena in America enable our President's obnoxious behavior?

Action: concerning good bills, soldier pensions, and mass shootings.

That stack of good House-passed bills keeps piling up on Mitch McConnell's desk, and he doesn't care what you think about that, but that's OK, because we don't care what he thinks! Go ahead and call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the Securing America's Federal Elections (or SAFE) Act. Mob Boss Mitch ain't the boss of your Senators, after all -- you are. People say I'm naive for thinking we can get Republican Senators to pass bills supporting voting rights, civil rights, internet freedom, better paychecks, and secure elections. But what would they hate even more than passing these bills? Being humiliated and jobless, that's what, and if enough of us speak up, they'll either bow to our will or be humiliated and jobless. Having the better arguments ain't enough -- we also have to deploy them, in force.

Meanwhile, our Supreme Court gave our President the green light to appropriate some Defense Department funds for his vanity border wall, and then the Pentagon announced late last week that it would divert almost $225 million in military pension funds toward the wall. Taking from our troops' retirement to keep drama going -- how utterly despicable! I wonder how our President's votaries will explain it away. Perhaps they'll say it's only $224 million, which I'm sure will comfort our retired soldiers as they make ends meet. Or they'll say they're taking a lot more from real defense spending, so shutup or he's cutting money for weapons we don't even use, and that's a good thing -- but neither of these arguments can magically convert taking pension money into a good thing. Our President's phone number is 1.215.456.2011. He doesn't care what you and I think, but he's also sensitive to bad PR, so doing our duty might actually yield a result here.

Finally, on the heels of yet another mass shooting perpetrated by yet another white supremacist asshole, too many of our politicians are offering "thoughts and prayers" again, apparently having completely forgotten the backlash they got over their "thoughts and prayers" last year. Hence Greyroots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to get to work and pass some common-sense gun control legislation for once. Since I oppose very much control of handguns and hunting rifles, I'm going to use Greyroots' contact tool to specify the common-sense legislation I want -- legislation that would amend the National Firearms Act to make it just as hard for folks to get semi-automatic weapons as it is to get automatic weapons. And all that bill did was get tommy guns off our streets. Our main job as civilized people is to fix problems without resorting to violence; if we don't commit to that, we'll never have enough weapons for the resulting apocalypse anyway.

Around the table: concerning the "liberal" media, Medicare-for-All, taxing the rich, job-killing pollution, and meatless meat.

Julie Hollar at FAIR notes that CNN approached its recent Democratic Presidential debates in a matter "more befitting a football game than an exercise in democracy," which "Shows the Need for Independent Debates." I'd have PBS do the debates, frankly, since they're more accountable to us than cable news networks, which are both the devil and the spawn of the devil. Which is worse, though: relying on far-right talking points for your questions, or turning every debate into a big drama? The answer: they're both wings of the same evil bird.

Marcia Angell at USA Today puts it better than anyone else I've heard: "Not only can we afford Medicare for All, we can’t afford anything else." The article makes other good points, but go ahead and use "not only can we afford Medicare for All, we can't afford anything else" as your meditation object. But since people are still going to ask how we'll pay for it, how about assessing employers a fee per employee? It'd have to be lower than what corporations are paying private insurers per employee now, but with Medicare's low overhead, that shouldn't be difficult. And no corporations won't "just fire people" in order to pay out less money -- though banksters are doing their best to change this, corporations still have to do things to make money, and doing things means having workers.

Steve Wamhoff at the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy informs us that a "wealth tax," such as that proposed by Sen. Warren (D-MA), would be much easier to implement than you think. You can almost dismiss Mr. Delaney's "concerns" merely because he raises them, but I find it quite interesting that the wealth tax's opponents won't tell you it's immoral or counterproductive but "unworkable," when valuing unsold assets actually isn't a complete mystery -- as you'd know if you've ever shopped around for a house. Also, too, don't believe the hype that a wealth tax would be "too complex," and certainly don't believe it from rich folks who seem to spend all their time making our tax code actually too complex.

Surprise, surprise, our EPA fines Koch Industries subsidiary Georgia-Pacific $600,000 for violating the Clean Air Act at its Crosset, AK paper mill, and requires that the mill install $4.9 million in equipment that'll help it comply -- and then Georgia-Pacific partially closes said plant, firing over 500 workers. And now the Kochtopus will point to this occurrence and say SEE? TEH REGULASHUNZ KILLZ TEH JOBZ!!!!! Given that the Crosset plant is polluting so much that a) it's been all over the news and b) even this EPA fined them, you might well conclude that pollution kills jobs, not efforts to stop pollution.

Finally, Rowan Jacobson at Outside explains how alt-meat (i.e., meat from plant-based sources that has both the taste and texture of meat) has risen so quickly that it might be "The Beginning of the End of the Meat Industry." Perhaps not surprisingly, some big meat corporations are suddenly anxious to get Big Gummint help in the form of labeling laws! But others, like Tyson and Perdue, are making noises about going along, and anyway I'd prefer a world where your choices are either alt-meat or meat from small producers. (Warning, though: Impossible burgers use at least one genetically-modified ingredient, and they're apparently the class of alt-meat burgers.)

Action: concerning campaign finance reform, data security, and working families.

S.J.Res. 51 would amend our Constitution so that federal and state governments could regulate campaign finance, as they did before our Supreme Court's notorious Citizens United v. FEC decision, which cited "corporate personhood" in striking down many of our campaign finance laws. I bring up those halcyon days of campaign finance regulation because far too many right-wingers get far too much say in America, and they really get their shovels dirty trying to criticize the amendment. ZOMG TEH INCUMBENTZ WILLZ PREVENTS TEH OPPONENTZ FROM RAIZING TEH MONEYZ!!!! is just one of the many things that never happened back in the day when we regulated campaign finance a lot more stringently than we can now thanks to our Supreme Court. ZOMG TEH PREACHURZ WILL BE TEH SILENCEDZ!!!! is, of course, another. People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to do the people's will on campaign finance reform and pass S.J.Res. 51.

Meanwhile, hot on the heels of yet another reported data breach exposing the personal data of over 100 mullion customers, this one at Capital One, Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass vigorous reforms that would help good Americans protect their personal data from hackers and indifferent corporations. These reforms would include stricter enforcement of our laws and harsher penalties for breaking them, as well as a "credit freeze by default" for all Americans, which would automatically freeze your credit at all three credit reporting bureaus until you ask for a freeze to be lifted. A lot of good folks don't go through the trouble of a credit freeze because it can be tedious and confusing, and instead of complaining that folks are lazy and they should just go ahead and do it because it's important, we should ask why it can't be easier. This is the future, after all.

Finally, you may recall that former Administration Labor Secretary Alex Acosta resigned recently, due to the cush plea deal he appears to have negotiated (as a federal prosecutor in Florida in 2008) over the Jeffrey Epstein sex crime case ("the best people!"), but as you surely know by now, they always find someone worse, and so it goes with our President's new nominee to be Secretary of Labor, Eugene Scalia. Yes, he's the son of the late Supreme Court Justice, but more pertinent to his potential new position is his long career helping corporations screw over their workers and advocate against government regulations -- indeed, given that all of this is right up our President's alley, you have to wonder why he didn't pick Mr. Scalia first, instead of Mr. Acosta, who may not have been anti-worker enough for our President's liking, and who certainly wasn't dramatic enough. So CREDO helps you tell your Senators to reject the Scalia nomination.

Around the table: starring Saint Reagan, the racist! And Rand Paul, the bastard!

Jim Naureckas at FAIR reminds us that "Ronald Reagan's Racism" -- as recently exposed on previously-unscrutinized Nixon tapes -- "Should Come as No Surprise." Nor, I might add, should his cleverness about hiding his racism come as a surprise -- as Mr. Goldwater explained his opposition to the Civil Rights Act by saying "(y)ou can't pass a law that will make me like you or you like me," Mr. Reagan framed his opposition to a successful open housing referendum by saying "I have never believed that majority rule has the right to impose on an individual as to what he does with his property," all of which, of course, distracted us from these initiatives' true aim: to prevent people from taking away the rights of other people on the basis of skin color. It almost makes our current President's artless brutality refreshing. I said "almost."

The incomparable Dean Baker asks a question I haven't heard anyone else ask yet: "Why is Facebook, the World's Largest Publisher, Immune to Publishing Laws?" Long story short: people post a lot of false (and damaging in the legal sense) stuff on Facebook, but if our laws treated Facebook as a publisher, which it is, then Facebook would have to a) remove the false/damaging stuff and b) post prominent corrections so that everyone who saw the false/damaging stuff would see the correction. You know, like every other publisher has to do. That might sound like a lot of work, and might actually require Facebook to hire more workers and pay them well, but I've always believed that work builds character, and that adherence to the values of our civilization is the best job-creator.

Ho hum, more than half of our President's trade-aid-to-farmers went to only one-tenth of the farmers in the program. And our USDA claims that this is how the program is supposed to work! No, really, they said, and I quote, "the more acres they farm and bushels per acre they produce, the more assistance they receive." I guess they no longer believe that economies of scale "reduce costs." (As an aside, I'd be wary of suggesting that this is uniquely "a time when the number of mid-sized family farms is declining," because that's been happening for decades, and it's because our government no longer cares about consolidation or monopolies.)

Rand Paul offers to pay Ilhan Omar's way back to Somalia so she can "appreciate America more." Yeah, let's send people running from people trying to kill them back to the people who were trying to kill them, hardy har har. One more time: trying to improve America does not make you "ungrateful," nor does it mean you "don't love America enough." It's like these people think "a more perfect union" is some kind of magic spell, and not a phrase that actually means something.

Finally, let's address the ubiquitous center-right talking point that you shouldn't support an actual liberal for the Democratic Presidential nomination because Democrats wouldn't have the numbers in Congress to pass the legislation they propose. I was about to say this is something only cowards say -- don't support someone you believe in, it'll all end in tears! -- but it's actually worse than that: the No-We-Can't Caucus aren't cowards themselves, but folks who want you to be cowards. And why? Because they fear what we can do and will do when we stop obsessing about them! Our job as citizens, after all is to communicate our will to our representatives in such frequency and in such numbers that they do our will; our job is not to figure out which nominee is the most likely winner so we can be winners too, because that's playing their game. And history is, as usual, also instructive: the day before Election Day 1980, Democrats held 58 seats in the Senate, and you know what happened after that -- an "unelectable" extremist changed everything about politics for the next several decades.

Action: concerning debt collectors, food safety, and prison privatization.

Because our Administration only works for bosses and not for people, our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) is as we speak planning to allow debt collectors to harass and abuse customers even more than they do, in part by allowing debt collectors to send an unlimited number of texts and emails without customer consent. If you're sitting back thinking well then they shouldn't have run up the debt in the first place!, please do two things: a) slap yourself, b) contemplate that not getting deathly ill or having massive student debt may be a matter of luck rather than superior intellect, and c) consider that debt collectors often have bad information and thus call people who do not actually owe them any money! Now imagine debt collectors calling every damn day to demand payment on an unowed debt. Empathy: it's not actually that hard! Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your CFPB to scrap its plans to let debt collectors harass and abuse good Ameicans even more than they do now.

Meanwhile, Penn PIRG helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to implement a new rule limiting the amount of pathogens like E.coli in the water they spray on our food. Sounds fairly commonsensical, doesn't it? Not to this Administration, where they seem to think that delay, delay, delay is the American way. And they're slow-walking these food safety rules a little over a year after an E.coli breakout among Romaine lettuce killed five folks and sickened another 210 across 36 American states. If "five deaths" doesn't sound that impressive to you, please do four things: 1) slap yourself, 2) consider whether anyone should die from a damn salad, 3) imagine it happening to someone you love, and 4) slap yourself again, because even contemplating 2) and 3) isn't enough to expiate your sin. And if you're tempted to think the FDA's delay saves corporations money and regulatory headaches, think about how rising health care costs might mean more than that. And maybe slap yourself again.

Finally, we've managed to get six big banking corporations to stop giving new loans to private prison corporations, and the commitments from JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, SunTrust Bank, BNP Paribas, and Fifth Third Bancorp represent almost three-quarters of the money private banks currently get -- but that still leaves over a quarter of the money! Hence Moms Rising helps you tell PNC, Barclays, and other banking corporations to stop profiting from our Administration's cruelty. And I don't think I have to tell you stories of kids being torn from their parents and sleeping on concrete floors in detention centers in order to persuade you to join this call. All I need to tell you is that imprisoning folks for whatever reason is something we should be doing, as a civilization and as owners of our government. We should not leave it up to some private corporation that cares first and foremost about their bottom line. And once we fully grasp that our own taxpayer money funds cruelty, we'll be better positioned to stop it, as is our right and our duty.

Action: concerning corporate spying, forest regulations, and immigration.

Have you heard of Sensorvault? Sensorvault is Google's database of location data culled from folks who use Android phones and folks who use iPhones with Google apps installed -- meaning Google has known where you've been at pretty much any time over the last decade. And Sensorvault holds that information indefinitely, meaning that law enforcement can access it at will -- and our legal system has been issuing warrants allowing law enforcement search geographic areas where crimes occurred rather than suspects, which instantly turns those investigations into fishing expeditions. And if you're at a protest just as a crime is occuring a mile away, you could get swept up in that fishing expedition, which would infringe upon your right to free speech. And, ah, you can easily imagine our government concocting "crimes" just to harass a lot of protestors, right? Yes, you can. We need much better laws governing the use of this location data, but for now, CREDO helps you tell Google to shut down Sensorvault, since the Big Stick of Bad PR still works.

Meanwhile, our U.S. Forest Service has proposed rule changes that would allow it to fast-track certain logging projects, and though its supporters cite "analysis paralysis" and "frivolous lawsuits" as obstacles to projects that otherwise wouldn't actually hurt our national forests, I don't think a lawsuit is "frivolous" merely because it might prevent some corporation from making a few million extra dollars, and I also don't think that scientific analysis is really "paralysis." I'm sure some folks can name actual projects that wouldn't cause any damage so-why-make-them-wait, but I would hope we would make such decisions based on the science and not on anecdotes, and in any case we really should be asking the question "what's the rush, then?" There's also the matter of public commenting, which the new rules would curtail and which I consider sacred in a democracy. Hence the Wilderness Society helps you tell our Forest Service to reject its proposal to shield certain projects from public oversight and scientific data.

Finally, in the wake of this Administration's constant hysteria over BS-13 and "caravans" and "people coming to take your jobs" (like the people our President imports to do seasonal workers at his wineries?), Win Without War helps you tell our Department of Defense Inspector General to investigate our Administration's use of soldiers at our Southern border. Just as we shouldn't fear gun violence research, we shouldn't fear an Inspector General investigation into why we need our military when we already have a Border Patrol. And if our Inspector General concludes that we have a military down there in order to spy on activists and journalists and to terrorize people running from another country's catastrophe, well, I hope our Administration is big enough to handle the backlash! (And yes, I made that crack about our President using foreign workers at his own corporations for a reason. If we stop enabling bosses who import workers in order to drive everyone's wages down, we'll be able to help out refugees running from real horrors much better than we do now.)

Action: concerning data security, Arctic drilling, gun research, and cryptocurrency.

Lately our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) has fined Equifax $650-$700 million for failing to secure the private data of almost 150 million Americans, but that's not as big as it sounds -- if you don't believe me, divide the fine by the number of people it hurt! -- and good Americans need more protection than that. Hence H.R. 2545/S. 1336, the Data Breach Prevention and Compensation Act, would establish an Office of Cybersecurity within our FTC which would regulate data security at credit reporting corporations, would set strict notification requirements for data breaches, and would make penalties for losing consumer personal data a lot steeper. If you're one of those who reflexively respond oh great another bureaucracy, I would remind you that "just letting the corporations who know their stuff do it" clearly ain't working, and that's the world we're already in. Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect consumer data by passing the Data Breach Prevention and Compensation Act.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell the CEOs of BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and ConocoPhillips to back out of their apparent plans to drill in the Arctic. Drilling in the Arctic has been a fever dream of big oil since time immemorial, but we all know the reasons we shouldn't drill there -- for one, it's much harder to clean up an oil spill which will happen in the Arctic than it is even in the temperate Gulf of Mexico (and you recall how well BP cleaned up that spill, which is to say "not particularly well"). Here are some more reasons: it'll threaten the famous Alaskan sockeye salmon industry, wreck the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, endanger the Native populations of the region, and it won't even give us very much oil. If I, an hourly-paid schmuck, can recite these reasons off the top of my head, then I bet a lot of other people can, too -- and surely these not-very-popular big oil CEOs are acutely aware that There Is-So Such a Thing as Bad PR. If we need to remind them of that with (wait for it!) the Big Stick of Bad PR, hey, we're here to help.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Senate to fund gun violence research by our Centers for Disease Control and our National Institute of Health, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Congress last year passed a spending bill that explicitly authorized gun violence research by these agencies, but naturally they didn't actually give them a dime to do that research; what are they afraid of? I'm no great fan of keeping people from having handguns and rifles -- though I think it should be just as hard to get semi-automatic weapons as automatic weapons -- but there's no harm in researching gun violence scientifically, and our CDC and NIH have sterling reputations, though I imagine our President's trying to change that as we speak. Even the author of the Dickey Amendment that restricted gun violence research in the first place said before he died that he regretted his amendment's effects. I wish that remorse was more contagious in Congress these days, but hey, that's why we're here.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to block Facebook's efforts to create its own damn currency. Yeah, you read that right, and I'm sure Libra will be even more annoying than bitcoin has been over the years. They're selling cryptocurrency as, get this, a way of reaching the "unbanked" citizens of the world. Setting aside that we should never privatize currency, and setting aside, also, that Libra won't help the "unbanked" if they're also "uncomputered," there's a better way to help the "unbanked": stop treating the world as your personal fuckjar. Seriously, when we keep the world's biggest actors from exploiting good folks from other lands, those good folks will have more power to do the things they want to do with their lives, and they won't need Libra or whatever to do it. And an important step toward restraining the world's biggest actors would be to stop "freeing" obnoxious tech CEOs from "burdensome" regulations because they're such great "innovators." Mostly what they innovate is new ways to separate you from your money.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence, robocalls, copyrights, and immigration.

It's Monday again, so let's call our Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act, and H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act. And this week we add to that list H.R. 2722, the Securing America's Federal Elections (or SAFE) Act, which would (among other good works) mandate paper ballots for federal elections. The House has passed all these bills, but Senate Majority Leader "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell still refuses to hold a vote on any of them. Still, we have a voice, and we believe that secure elections, voting rights, civil rights for gay and transgender folk, paycheck fairness for women, higher wages for working families, and internet freedom for all Americans are all good things that our Senators should support, particularly if they want to remain Senators. You can find tools for finding your Senators' phone numbers in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone).

Meanwhile, both House and Senate have passed anti-robocall bills, but they didn't pass the same bill, so now House and Senate must conference out a bill that can go to our President, and you know how that can go -- for example, a lot of the worst parts in that 2017 tax "reform" bill somehow found their way into that bill during the House/Senate conference! -- so Consumer Reports helps you tell your Reps and Senators to agree upon the most vigorous anti-robocall bill possible. A conference bill should, for example, ensure that big telecom corporations give you free tools to end all those "spoofed" calls that pretend to be from your bank or our IRS or even your own damn number, and it should also crack down on international scam call rings. Remember: our Reps and Senators would be nothing without us, so they had better do our will here, not some big donor's will. I mean, nobody likes robocalls except scam artists and other people nobody wants to talk to on the phone. Surely Congress can hit a bank-shot layup?

In other news, H.R. 2426/S. 1273, the CASE Act, purports to streamline the process by which folks can redress copyright violations, but that ain't as good as it sounds -- by taking copyright-related claims out of our courts and creating a separate office within the U.S. Copyright Office to evaluate them, the CASE Act will open the floodgates for copyright trolls to slap copyrights on everything they can find so they can harvest settlements from the unsuspecting. If you think you won't be affected because you don't violate copyrights, ask yourself: have you ever shared a meme on Facebook or Twitter? If the answer is "yes," then it will affect you, once folks slap copyrights on everything in sight, knowing they'll get a quick hearing from the U.S. Copyright Office rather than letting the wheels of justice in our courts grind slow. Hence the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect us from copyright trolls by rejecting the SAFE Act.

Finally, we've been trying to get Greyhound to stop letting Border Patrol agents on their buses willy-nilly, but they don't care what you think, so the ACLU helps you tell Greyhound's owner, FirstGroup plc, to stop Greyhound from letting Border Patrol agents on their buses unless they have a warrant or are at an actual CBP checkpoint. Of course if CBP or ICE agents have a warrant, or the bus is passing through a CBP checkpoint, agents can get on board and search, but the CBP has been searching buses without warrants and declaring that pretty much anywhere is now a "checkpoint," and they've also taken plenty of folks of color off buses without having any real suspicion that they're undocumented immigrants. Again, Greyhound has demonstrated that it doesn't care about any of that, so we have to alert their owners to what they're doing. In a sane, decent, and moral society I wouldn't ever have to say this, but in this sick, immoral, and decadent society I often have to, so I will: law and order don't exist just to give us whatever results we want.

Around the table: the dark side of mindfulness, explained! Plus the usual "liberal" media foolery.

Zachary Siegel at The Nation interviews Ron Purser, whose new book McMindfulness examines "examines how spiritual practices and self-care became tools for corporate compliance." Well, when corporations place all the emphasis on "how you can deal with stress at your job," they not only erase their own responsibility for the stress they cause at your job through their terrible management, they condition you to "be content with injustice and inequalities that pervade society." Really, you're a lot less stressed when you have sick days, money in your savings account, and access to health care. That's not to say you shouldn't do deep breathing every once in a while -- indeed, I give this advice to my trolls often! -- but all this emphasis on coping keeps us from remaking our world into one that doesn't demand so damn much coping.

You know all those polls that just ask people if they consider themselves conservative, moderate, or liberal? Well, Jim Naureckas at FAIR, in making a larger point about what certain classes of voters want, links to a Pew Research Center poll that actually evaluates whether you're conservative, moderate, or liberal by your actual stands on actual issues. And what do we learn? That "56 percent of self-identified 'moderates' picked mostly liberal policies, as did 30 percent of 'conservatives' and 21 percent of those who said they were 'very conservative.'" I'd have framed Pew's issues differently -- they include no allusion to taxes on the rich, for example, and the liberal position on clean air/clean water regulations is less that the "costs are worth it" and more that they save money in health care costs -- but I think Pew's findings better correlate with our lived experience than the let's-all-get-along-with-evil-corporatists pablum our media generally serves up.

Mike Ludwig at TruthOut reminds us that making folks with felony convictions pay fines before getting their voting rights back is a "modern-day poll tax.". No, saying so does not amount to "letting people off the hook before they've paid their debt to society," because a) your voting rights should never be taken away in the first place and b) the quality of mercy demands that we take ability to pay into account when giving a sentence. Prisoners make absurdly little money while incarcerated, and while they're in prison they get gouged by medical appointments, phone calls, and high-priced goods in commissaries. Lawmakers would understand all of that, if they weren't so preoccupied with swinging their balls in our faces.

Ho hum, MSNBC (or, as Jeffery St. Clair calls it, "MSDNC") makes blatant errors in its apparent zeal to tamp down excitement about the Bernie Sanders campaign. Putting him third in a chart when he ranks second (or fourth when he ranks third) is Fox News-level BS, of course, but when Chuck Todd tells us Mr. Sanders lost five points in a poll when he actually gained five, or another program simply tacks on three points to Mr. Biden's showing in a poll just so it can put him in first, well, that's the kind of thing George Orwell warned us about. So, to sum: the same people who constantly tell us TEH BERNIEZ CAN'TZ TEH WINZ!!!!! have to fudge the data or lie about the data to make it seem like he "can't win," which should raise anyone's suspicions.

Finally, another day, another flatugasm from our President about how Barack Obama should be the one getting investigated, not him, for his "book deal" or something. Here's the thing, though: "(f)rom day one, they've looked into everything we've done" is exactly how democracy is supposed to work! They work for us, and they're supposed to check the power of the Executive branch! Is there no one in his Administration who can tell him how he sounds? Or are they all telling him that since he sounds like his most self-pitying votaries, it's OK? It's certainly enough to make you miss the crude artistry of Mr. Nixon, who famously said that he was OK with the media putting him under a microscope, but not a proctoscope.

Action: concerning banksters, energy efficiency, and marijuana policy.

S. 2155, the Stop Wall Street Looting Act, would restrain the noxious behavior of the private equity firms and hedge funds that buy up corporations, suck the wealth out of them, and leave their workers jobless. You have seen a lot of this in recent years, with the closures of thousands of ToysRUs, Kmart, Sears, and Payless stores, among others -- and in Philadelphia, with the recent closure of Hahnemann Hospital. Over a decade after the banksters almost destroyed this economy for good, they somehow have so much power that they can even dictate whether a corporation can continue! Dare I mention that these banksters are also invested in the private prison industry that's currently making big bucks separating families at the border? Hence Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect working families from vampire banksters by passing the Stop Wall Street Looting Act.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: Penn Environment helps you tell your state legislators to improve energy efficiency standards for almost two dozen appliances sold in the Keystone State. There's really no downside to appliances that use energy more efficiently -- they use less power, cause fewer carbon emissions, emit fewer pollutants, and (this is the one most folks will hear) cost less money on your energy bills. OK, there's one "downside" -- appliance corporation CEOs won't be able to make things as cheaply as possible, and thus make enough money to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home. They won't put it like that, of course -- they'll say your appliances will cost more money. But our post-apocalypse descendants won't be sitting around the campfire saying sure, our planet's almost unlivable now, but at least ovens cost a little less for a few years!

Finally, H.R. 3884/S. 2227, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act, would at long last essentially legalize marijuana at the federal level by removing it from Schedule I, where it's never belonged -- really, pot is as dangerous as heroin? As if! -- and would allow folks who have pot convictions in their past to apply for resentencing and expungment of their record. The MORE Act would also tax pot products and use that money to help communities most ravaged by the "war on drugs," i.e., communities of color. Hence the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to support saner drug policy by passing the MORE Act. Folks may wonder why I advocate for stronger laws protecting good folks from predatory corporations and more relaxed laws about marijuana. The reason is simple: corporations do a lot more damage than pot does, and our laws ought to recognize that.

Around the table: in which we lay the Mueller investigation to rest.

I touched on Charlie Sykes's piece on Politico last week, which argued that Democrats hopeful of recapturing the Presidency should remember 1972 and be cautious, but Josh Marshall does Mr. Sykes's piece more justice than I did. Mr. Sykes's "history is off," Mr. Marshall says, since President Nixon was rather more popular at a similar juncture in his first term than our President is, but one thing that's the same is that both Presidents aimed to divide the country, mainly through endless hammering of hot-button social issues. The one thing that's different? Mr. Nixon indeed had the "larger half" (in Pat Buchanan's words) of our divided country back in 1972, but our President has the smaller half now -- though, of course, we all saw how well that worked out for us in 2016.

You'll get a few paragraphs into this ProPublica story about how Chicago Mayor will (among other reforms) end suspension of licenses for unpaid parking tickets in that city, and you'll likely have the same reaction I did: Jesus Mary and Joseph people actually go into bankruptcy over unpaid tickets? I mean, no, it's not surprising per se, but it is no less appalling. Naturally most of the folks who face this problem are black, and if you're in the mood to say some variation of if you can't do the time don't do the crime, please do three things: 1) slap yourself, 2) note well that Chicago ain't even making very much money off their Draconian ticketing rules, and 3) ask yourself if getting your license suspended or your car repossessed by the city is really a fair punishment for unpaid parking tickets.

Ho hum, our "liberal" media has lost at least some of its "enthusiasm" for the coup in Venezuela that never succeeded, because if there's anything our media hate more than an actual liberal populist, it's a loser. Still, they've moved on to the next possible puppet of power, the former Venezuelan intelligence chief, described by one of our papers of record as "muscular," now there's some journalistic objectivity! I guess it could be worse, in that we could get a whole lot of "soul searching" from our media about "how we got it wrong," because it's tedious to watch people who don't have souls make a show of soul-searching in public.

Hard to believe, Harry, but CBP and ICE just held a Dallas-born brown-skinned person in custody for three weeks and I'll bet the only thing that prevented our government from actually deporting him was the Dallas News reporting on his plight. And CBP wouldn't let him use the phone while he was detained, though ICE did, and I bet that fact goes right into ICE's PR kit. Be prepared for your right-wing uncle to opine that if you're going to make an omelette, you're going to have to break a few eggs. Or deport a few American citizens!

Elizabeth Warren warns that "the odds of another economic downturn are high" "either this year or next year," and though I couldn't tell you whether the New York Fed's recession probability index is particularly edifying or whether our President's grandstanding on trade will actually do our economy any palpable harm, I do agree with Sen. Warren that debt makes every structure less sturdy, and a lot more debt (not just credit card debt and mortgage debt but student loan debt and corporate debt) makes it a lot less sturdy. I also notice that this recovery, such as it's been, has been going on for over 10 years, making it the longest in our history -- and that should prompt us to wonder when the other shoe's going to drop.

Finally, I did not pay attention to former Special Prosecutor Mueller's testimony before the House yesterday, and thus have no comment on it per se. I am surprised, however, that I've only just seriously considered that this whole investigation might have been a drama created by our President! Who better for our President's Deputy Attorney General to appoint to conduct such an investigation, after all, than the lifelong Republican with the by-the-book reputation who would take seriously the Office of Legal Counsel opinion that sitting Presidents can't be indicted? And if a few of the President's friends have to go to jail, well, we all know how he feels about his friends by now. Yeah, I know, our President supposedly said he was "fucked" after Mr. Mueller's appointment, but he says a lot of things, and he doesn't mean a lot of the things he says. Robert Mueller was never going to save us, and if this realization helps us get back to the very serious business of being thorns in our politicians' sides, then I guess the whole thing will have been worth it.

Action: concerning taxes, immigration, government spying, and pollution.

S. 309, the For the 99.8 Percent Act, would make our Estate Tax a lot more progressive, by lowering the threshold at which we start taxing estates, from $10 million to $3.5 million, and by creating 39, 45, 50, 55, and 77% tax brackets, such that if you died with an estate of $5.5 million, your first $3.5 million would face no taxation, the next $750,000 would get taxed at 39 percent, and the last $1.25 million would get taxed at 45%. The Reagan Revolution purported to release constraints on individual accomplishment, but what have we gotten with all these tax cuts for the rich we've enacted since the mid-'60s? A class of elites who have divorced wealth from work and who believe they have a right to insulate themselves from their communities, that's what. With the For the 99.8 Percent Act, we could begin to take our world back from them, and so CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to strengthen the Estate Tax by passing the For the 99.8 Percent Act.

Meanwhile, our Administration might soon deport a lot of Syrians with Temporary Protected Status back to the war zone from which they originally ran. Our Administration would like you to believe that folks with TPS are all terrorists-waiting-to-happen, but even more reasonable folks might well ask why some people get Temporary Protected Status that lasts for years or even decades. After all, it's temporary, right? But folks who get TPS come from countries that haven't resolved the problems that forced them to flee in the first place, which, in this case, include the decade-long military attacks within Syria from the Syrian government, Iran, ISIS, Russia, and the United States. So if none of that's gone away, our Administration sending Syrians with TPS back just to "prove" they're "doing something" would be cruel. We could forestall this cruelty by telling our Congressfolk to protect these good folks with legislation, as Win Without War helps you do.

In other news, ICE personnel have been collecting your driver's license photo without your consent! Do they need your consent, you ask? Well, are you the target of an ICE investigation? If no, then no -- they would need a warrant to get that photo, but you know our government thinks warrants are quaint, and anyway TEH CARAVANZ WILLZ KILLZ USZ ALLZ!!!!!! Have any legislatures authorized ICE to collect driver's license photos willy-nilly? No, they have not -- but too many DMVs have proven too cooperative when ICE "asks" to get these photos. But why do they need photos of your grandmother who's been here 96 years? For their facial recognition technology, of course -- you know, the technology that thinks all black folks look alike. Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to head off this clusterfrack of lawlessness and incompetence by banning ICE from accessing DMV databases.

Finally, the biggest oil leak in American history continues unabated, with the Taylor Energy Corporation still leaking 4,500 gallons daily into the Gulf of Mexico, as it's done for the past 14 years. I don't need to tell you how awful 4,500 gallons of oil a day is for the creatures who live in the Gulf, but I have to say I'm also appalled by the waste. This leak has spewed almost 23 million gallons of oil into the Gulf over the years; maybe that's the proverbial drop in a bucket to a big corporation, but the average American drives 12,000 miles a year, and at 25 miles per gallon, would use around 480 gallons of gas, deriving from about 1,000 gallons of crude, meaning you and about 1,640 of your friends could have been driving around on that oil all these years, instead of it just leaking away and polluting the Gulf. So Environmental Action tell our EPA to stop Taylor Energy from leaking oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Action: concerning working families, immigration, discrimination, and climate change.

H.R. 3590, the Building Our Opportunities to Survive and Thrive (or BOOST) Act, would enact a new tax credit of $3,000 annually for folks making less than $50,000 -- said credit would be higher for heads of household making less than $80,000 and married couples making less than $100,000 -- and the worst thing I can say about the BOOST Act is that it suggests we pay for it by repealing most of the 2017 Republican tax "reform" and enacting a fee on banksters with more than $50 billion in capital, when it should just be doing these things. Naturally the right is hysterical about it -- they're crying WHOZE WILL TEH PAYZ FOR TEH ITZ!!!! (psst: I just told you) and TEH PEEPULZ WILL WORKZ TEH LESSEZ!!!!, to which I have two responses: 1) you say that like it's an unqualified evil and 2) some folks clearly overestimate what folks would do with $3,000. Quit their jobs? C'mon, we all pay bills. CREDO helps you tell your House Reps to support working families by passing the BOOST Act.

Meanwhile, the tech corporation Palantir has become notorious lately for its huge contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (or ICE), and though corporate spokeshacks have long said Palantir software doesn't contribute to our Administration's deportations, internal emails beg to differ. And while I wouldn't be upset at the mere possibility that Palantir helps our government deports undocumented immigrants, fact is they lied about it, instead of making the case that they were helping our government do necessary work. But then again, perhaps they lied about it because they're also helping our Administration tear children from their families, which civilized people generally agree is inhumane. Palantir has already suffered a bit from the Big Stick of Bad PR, but that only means more of us need to wield it! Hence Free Press (among other good government groups) helps you tell Palantir to break off its ties to ICE.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell big corporations like AT&T and Amazon to stop donating big wads of cash to politicians who are pro-discrimination against gay and transgender folks, then CREDO still helps you do that. A lot of big corporations position themselves as gay- and transgender-friendly these days, but they still support candidates who aren't, and we're all tired of excuses like "we support them for the economic issues, not the bigotry." And in and of itself, corporate pro-gay and pro-transgender positioning is of limited utility, and if corporations align with Democrats on social issues, that's all the more incentive for Democrats not to pressure corporations on economic issues. Indeed, it's almost like that's the whole idea! But if corporations cut off monetary support for pro-discrimination politicians, just so happens they'll also starve right-wing economic ideas of oxygen, too.

Finally, our United States Geological Survey (or USGS), upon whose research the National Climate Assessment draws in part, will now use scientific models that can forecast climate change's effects only up until 2040, even though most models forecast through the end of the century, and even though basically everyone knows that the worst effects of climate change will come after 2040. That'll teach the National Climate Assessment to embarrass our President! Clearly this Administration -- currently dueling with Tha Bush Mobb for the dubious honor of "most anti-science government of modern times" -- would rather you didn't know how bad climate change is going to get, lest it affect their plans to help fossil fuel CEOs redistribute ever more income upward to themselves. So Penn Environment helps you tell our USGS to abandon its plans to fudge climate change science for the benefit of big polluting corporations.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence, net neutrality, humane immigration policy, and voting rights.

If you've missed previous opportunities to call your Senators to tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, and H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act, well, it's not too late, because Senate Majority Leader "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell still refuses to hold a vote on any of these House-passed bills, since "I get to decide what we vote on," like the voters made him Sultan-with-Absolute-Power or something. And now you can add H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act, which our House passed late last week. So, we've got bills that promote voting rights, civil rights for gay and transgender folk, paycheck fairness for women who don't get paid the same way men do, internet freedom for all Americans, and a $15/hour minimum wage by 2025; these are all good things, and our Senators should support them. 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. You may have to call local numbers; I've found the D.C. numbers hardly work anymore, for whatever reason.

While you've got your Senators on the phone: the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals may rule this week on our FCC's so-called "Restoring Internet Freedom" rule from 2017 -- the rule that repealed the 2015 Open Internet Order that made net neutrality the law of the land -- and if it strikes the 2017 net neutrality repeal down, the big telecom corporations will be in your Reps' and Senators' ears with a quickness, trying to get bogus "net neutrality" legislation passed so that big telecoms will still be able to block and slow down the websites you want to see. So tell your Senators that, if the D.C. Circuit rules against the 2017 net neutrality repeal, you want them to leave the 2015 Open Internet order as-is and reject any bill the big telecoms push. Big telecoms are among the least popular corporations in America because of their monopolist practices and lousy service -- but our politicians love them, because they give lots of money to political campaigns, so politicians would prefer to do their will, rather than ours. That just means we have to make our will unmistakeable. (Be sure to call your House Reps afterward.)

In other news, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight our Administration's monstrous behavior in re immigrants by passing H.R. 2203, the Homeland Security Improvement Act, and H.R. 3239, the Humanitarian Standards for Individuals in Customs and Border Protection Custody Act. H.R. 2203 would (among other good works) create a National Commission to investigate the inhumane practices conducted by our Administration and would prohibit family separation of would-be immigrants except under extreme circumstances (i.e., if the parents are abusing the children). H.R. 3239 would (among other good works) spell out food/water/shelter requirements for detainees -- you recall that this Administration told the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that no law actually compels them to provide soap to detainee children! -- and would establish procedures for our Homeland Security Inspector General and our Government Accounting Office to oversee our Administration's detainment practices. Our House could vote on both these bills any day now (they both passed out of committee last week), so let's make sure we communicate our will to our Reps.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you demand that state governments restore all voting rights to formerly-incarcerated citizens without making them pay fines or fees. Let's not get stuck in the weeds over whether you should pay all your debts to society in addition to serving your sentence before you get your right to vote back, because you should never lose your right to vote in the first place. I don't care if you're a murderer, a child molester, or a corporate criminal -- you should never lose your right to vote. I put "corporate criminal" in there, of course, just to remind everyone why certain state politicians pressed to force felons to lose their voting rights in the first place -- because of racism! Politicians know that our justice system mainly puts folks of color in prison, at much higher numbers than white folks and usually for much smaller crimes than the kind big corporate executives get away with, hence taking away their voting rights is a way of keeping them down even when they're out of prison. So let's not let racism rule our lives.

Around the table: concerning some of the difficulties we face in pushing the Overton Window leftward.

I sympathize with Alan MacLeod's frustration that "To Media, No Democrat Can Possibly Be Right-Wing" -- after all, it wasn't that long ago that Georgia Democratic Sen. Richard Russell helped found the Conservative Coalition, and that the American Conservative Union ranked the late Georgia Democratic Rep. Larry McDonald behind only Ron Paul as the most conservative House Rep. But I will say it's nice to finally hear our media call folks like Nancy Pelosi "center-left" instead of pretend (as they did for almost two decades!) that no one in America could possibly be further left than she. This is yet another reason I'm glad Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib are in Congress -- and in America.

In a peripherally-related note, the incomparable Duncan Black, a.k.a. Atrios, answers the vexing question "Why Don't Democratic Senate Candidates in Purple States Support Popular Things" (like a higher minimum wage), and he answers it better than anyone else I've heard. Races in purple states, he says, "are generally going to be tough/close races, but the calculation is not 'boy if I support a higher minimum wage then the voters will get mad.' The calculation is 'boy if I support a higher minimum wage then the voters will like that, BUT the Chamber of Commerce types will dump a bunch of money into the race to oppose me and run ads calling me a child molester (or highlighting something else that might be unpopular about me).'" All of that is true, but it also demands a counterpunch from the candidate like "how about that -- I support a minimum wage hike and suddenly my opponents are lying about me! Don't let them take you hostage!"

Dino Grandoni at the Washington Post explains, with the help of a perhaps too-understated headline, how our "EPA's New 'No Surprises' Inspection Policy Has Some Critics Worried." You remember from school how all your surprise quizzes didn't really count if you didn't do well on them? You don't? Of course you don't! It boggles the mind how Republicans can claim to be the "party of personal responsibility" but also ensure that polluters won't have to put up with surprise inspections which is often the only way to catch polluters. Of course, for our President's votaries, "personal responsibility" is only for black people -- "belonging to the club" is what matters to them, and that's what no-surprise-inspections signifies to them. If Democrats had any courage, they'd run attack ads on this basis, and make the moral argument I've described, but you already know what the chances of that are.

In a peripherally-related note, our President opines that wind power "doesn't work" without taxpayer help. Given the price parity wind has achieved with fossil fuels in many parts of our nation, I rather suspect it would work without subsidies, but gauging whether wind power would work without subsidies now really isn't the point -- we're supposed to subsidize good technologies that need more research and more time to develop. Also, too, oil and gas get about the same amount of subsidies annually as wind power, so if our President "(doesn't) want to be subsidizing things that don't need to be subsidized," where's his enthusiasm for ending that slab of corporate welfare? And if he's so hot to stop handing out taxpayer money to energy sources that "don't work," where's his enthusiasm for ending handouts for nuclear power, which has lost money for a much longer period of time? (I notice he didn't tell other heads of state about the "piles and piles of dead birds" no one finds at the base of windmills. Clearly he saves those stories for us rubes.)

Defense contractor apparently leaves voice mail message threatening Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-FL) over her introduction of a bill that would force public schools to ensure all their students are properly-vaccinated. Read the transcript of this phone call in its entirety, and you'll marvel at the continued existence of folks who have clearly never contemplated the benefits of deep breathing. And remember, folks: "I’m gonna kill your ass if you do that bill, I swear" is a terroristic threat, and therefore not protected by our First Amendment! I hope Rep. Wilson responds to this threat by fighting harder for this bill.

Finally, the New York Times reminds us that "Using Race for Gain" is an "Old Tactic" for our President. Yes, his settlement of that 1970s investigation into his apparent refusal to rent to black folks and his emptiest-wagon trumpeting of the "guilt" of the Central Park Five leapt to mind even before I got to paragraph nine. If you accept that race-baiting is a pattern with our President, as I do, then of course you regard reports that he "didn't...fully underst(and) what he was doing when he unleashed last week's racist tweetstorm as utter bullshit. And worse, as drama.

Action: concerning copyright trolls and corporate tax loopholes.

H.R. 2426/S. 1273, the Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement (or CASE) Act, should set off your alarm bells first with the tortured acronym of its title and then with the word "alternative," because guess what "alternative" they're talking about? That's right, an "alternative" to settling small copyright-related claims in a court of law! Why our courts and our laws never seem to be good enough for our politicians I'll never know, but the CASE Act would let "claims officers" in our Copyright Office to hear copyright complaints and assess fines -- which would essentially enable copyright trolls to stamp copyrights on everything that ain't nailed down and then get an expedited hearing about the matter which will almost certainly go in their favor. There's a reason they might not try that in an actual court of law, you know. Thus the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect law and order by rejecting the CASE Act.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to close corporate tax loopholes that benefit for-profit private prison corporations, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. S. 1827, the Ending Tax Breaks for Private Prisons Act, would prevent corporations that operate prisons from being able to call themselves a real estate investment trust (or REIT) subsidiary, which sure sounds like a loophole even if you've never heard of a REIT before. A REIT is, per section 856 of our Internal Revenue Code, "any corporation, trust or association that acts as an investment agent specializing in real estate and real estate mortgages"; mainly that means office complexes, shopping centers, and apartment buildings, but private prison corporations? That sure does seem to violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the law, and we could put "following the spirit of the law" another way: doing the right thing.

Around the table: dancing on the edge of "peak decadence."

Our President's racism is "Not Blundering," announces William Rivers Pitt at TruthOut, but is "Tactically Deliberate." "An instance of horrifying racism becomes merely 'expected' from the president," Mr. Pitt writes, "and then he moves on to another one, and then another, and another after that. He and his administration are laboring to normalize the grotesque." Of course, Tha Bush Mobb also "set() the bar so low it is barely visible," even though Mr. Bush took great pains to avoid saying something actually racist. And Democrats won't win by straining to be "the party of civility"; they need to be the party of changing the damn subject from this awful President's latest flatugasm to what we-the-people want our America to be. At last count, only two Democrats running for President (Sens. Sanders and Warren, in case you hadn't guessed) might be able to do that.

Philadelphia, PA District Attorney Larry Krasner argues that the death penalty violates the state constitution. But though the flesh is willing, the heart asks whether the death penalty "cannot survive the state Constitution’s ban on cruel punishments" merely because his office has found that the state overturned almost three out of every four death sentences between 1978 and 2015; you'd have to at least compare that data to what's gone on in other states over the same time period. Still, to decide that it's constitutional, I would think you'd also have to prove that it could work if the legislature could fix it, and I'm less certain any legislature can do that, and not just because executing the wrong person ain't something you can take back.

Study finds correlation between broadband availability and higher housing values in rural areas, and why not? People like their internet, and people get a lot out of it, too. Interestingly, the higher broadband speeds (250 Mbps and up) seem to have no effect on housing prices; possibly (the authors theorize) because speeds like that are relatively new to rural areas, or because rural folks don't care exactly how fast their broadband is. I incline more to the explanation that once folks get the opportunity to "becom(e) civically-engaged, reduc(e) isolation, and even (improving) income generation," they don't really care about exactly how few nanoseconds it takes to reap these boons.

Sam Pizzigati at the Our Future blog asks: "Have We Hit Peak Decadence?" I'll admit I was tempted to answer in terms of our President's ongoing dramas and what evils we seem willing to tolerate from politicians as long as they're on our "team," but I was pleased to see Mr. Pizzigati pivot immediately to the burgeoning "super-penthouse" phenomenon. As long as I've been alive, the penthouse apartment has been synonymous with decadence, but now you've got super-penthouses with 10,000 square feet, a 360-degree view of the city below, and (oftentimes) more than one floor. And the folks who own them don't own just one of them, either! Sadly, every time you think we've "peaked," there are more peaks to climb. Are billion-dollar, building-sized penthouses that far off? And how many more overworked, underpaid people will they create?

Finally, another day, another Republican warning that if Democrats move too far left, then 2020 could be 1972 all over again. I'd agree with Mr. Sykes that national Democrats shouldn't simply be the mirror opposite of our President on immigration, and I also agree that our President's racist "go back to wherever you came from" flatugasma resonated with a lot of Americans. But here's a major difference between 1972 and 2020: Richard Nixon knew better than to say the proverbial quiet parts out loud. And, as I've suggested above, the best way to counter all these hypothetical attack ads on cherry-picked positions is to run ads about how your actual agenda will help us make a more perfect union. Of course, we have a more compelling reason not to make 2020 a "referendum" on our President: he loves being the center of attention, and people who love being the center of attention like that need to be ignored. (Not a lot of Democratic 2018 campaign ads even mentioned our President, you know. In fact, the only Democrat who did mention him in my media market lost.)