Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning financial regulation, tax policy, and pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to keep our CFPB as independent as possible, reject any extension of the Trump tax “cuts,” and pass the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any bill that would subject our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to the annual appropriations progress. Congress has long found this method of funding perfectly acceptable for other agencies, so why not now, with our CFPB? Probably because our CFPB has done a lot of good work for us. You’d think that’d mean something to our House Reps, given that they’re supposed to represent us (that’s why we call them “representatives”), but apparently the whining of big donors means more, hence why right-wingers want to defund our CFPB, which is an awful lot like defunding the police, since our CFPB catches financial predators. I’d hate for America to be a land where all you have to do to get what you want is have a lot of money and whine a lot.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to extend the notorious Trump tax “cuts.” I put “cuts” in quotation marks because most Americans didn’t get nearly as much benefit from them as the rich and corporations did. I’d happily make tax cuts for lower brackets permanent, but I would never be a hostage to letting rich folks pay hundreds of thousands of dollars less every year and corporations paying millions of dollars less every year. One percentage point is a lot more money at higher incomes, after all. Politicians pretend not to get that, but we do.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act. Big corporation (foreign or not, I really don’t care) wants to mine for copper on Native American sacred land that also happens to be public land? Why, no, thank you. And I’m not particularly anti-copper – the health care industry found out during the pandemic that getting rid of all those copper tables years ago was a big mistake – but I am anti-pollution and pro-clean water and pro-clean air and pro-respecting actual religious freedoms. I guess, for some people, religious freedom only counts if you’re white – or if you’re Black or Brown but also a Republican. That’s not the America we want to pass on to our children and our children’s children.

Action: concerning voting rights and government shutdowns.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and stop all the government shutdown drama. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would expand voting rights for all Americans, by restoring our government’s ability to stop vote suppression at the state or local level. Our Supreme Court ended that in 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder, by ruling that the Voting Rights Act (which gave our government the power to stop discriminatory voting rights laws) itself discriminated against Southern states – I know! – but the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would empower our government to stop vote suppression in any state or locality with a documented history of vote suppression. That sounds exactly the kind of thing Congress should be doing instead of indulging in shutdown drama.

Oh, yeah, speaking of that: both the National Women’s Law Center and the Coalition on Human Needs help you tell your Congressfolk to oppose brutal, hateful spending cuts and avert a government shutdown. I trust I don’t have to explain why, oh, but I will anyway: the folks who want to shut down government aren’t just evil, they’re also whiny diaper-loaded brats who act the way they do because they can’t win arguments on the merits. Government shutdowns mean no food inspections, no pollution inspections, no workplace safety inspections, and no soldiers’ pay. Anyone who wants any of that to happen just to prove a point about “spending” is an evil bastard whom we must oppose and defeat.

Penny rants for September 25, 2023.

Here’s some big, good news: our Commodity Futures Trading Commission (or CFTC) has banned corporations from using derivatives to essentially bet on Congressional elections. The CFTC argues that betting on elections is far beyond its purview, and the corporation trying to bet on elections refuted that argument point by point, right? Ha ha ha ha! “It’s a known fact that radical innovation often requires time to be understood and accepted,” its CEO said. As I’ve said before, facts don’t need to announce themselves as facts, let alone “known" facts, and a lot of “radical innovations” do, in fact, suck, like this one does. If you know a lot of folks who bet on sports – which is very easy now, thanks to our internet and smart phones – then you know that almost everyone who bets on sports thinks all the games are rigged now. Now imagine everyone citing organized betting to suggest that “elections are rigged,” and you will know that no corporation should create a betting hall for elections, ever. Hell, I'd go further: I think horserace polls should be illegal.

Donald Trump apparently thinks that his legal troubles make him a sort of honorary Black American – and his campaign thinks it can capitalize! “Paying hush money to a porn star, allegedly mishandling classified documents, and attempting to overturn a free and fair election” are all far worse offenses than “brandishing a cellphone,” “carrying a toy gun,” and “telling a police officer you’re carrying a gun for which you have a permit,” all of which have induced police to execute Black folks in America. But Mr. Trump's strategy is, sadly, not as stupid as it sounds, and not just because of the actual “weaponization of law enforcement” I've just described. Democrats sure don’t reciprocate the love when Blacks routinely give them 90% of their votes, and George W. Bush showed us in 2004 that every little bit helps. He got 11% of the Black vote that year, versus Donald Trump’s 8% in 2020, and though that wasn’t the only reason Mr. Bush won, it sure didn’t hurt.

Dig this: the University of Florida, now headed by former Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, just handed a $4.7 million no-bid contract to McKinsey & Company to “help develop the university’s vision for the future.” It’s a “no-bid” contract not just because of crony corporatism but because everyone knows by now that it’s a stupid idea to contract with the notorious McKinsey about anything, let alone creating a “vision” for your university! And I bet you thought vision was a college President’s job. Of course, that’s what leadership is all about these days: forcing other people to do your work for you, and then saying it’s not your fault when they screw up, and if Mr. Sasse didn’t know that before he was in our Senate, I’m sure he learned it there. Yikes, they could have paid me a lot less to develop a vision for education. Here it is: teach people to detect bullshit well enough that folks would be ashamed to hand out $4.7 million to big corporations to diddle themselves.

Finally, sure it was funny to hear Sen. Collins (R-ME) say that with the disappearance of the Senate dress code she might decide to wear a bikini on the Senate floor, but far less funny is hearing her say “I think there is a certain dignity that we should be maintaining in the Senate, and to do away with the dress code, to me, debases the institution.” Ah, do they think there’s any dignity to serving in the U.S. Senate? Have they looked in the mirror? Ron Johnson debases the institution with his endless stream of noxious, nonsensical crap, but at least he always looks sharp doing it! Meanwhile, Bob Menendez just got indicted, again, and still says I’m not going anywhere like anyone should care. Is it any wonder folks would take the guy in a hoodie and shorts who actually helps people over the guy in a suit who ensures that job-killing corporations get tax breaks?

Action: concerning government oppression, net neutrality, forced arbitration, and political campaigns.

Long story short: tell Iran to free Toomaj Salehi, tell our FCC to reinstate net neutrality protections for internet content, tell our CFPB to end forced arbitration clauses in banking consumer contracts, and tell our FEC to prevent AI-generated falsehoods in political campaigns. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Amnesty International helps you tell the government of Iran to stop detaining hip-hop artist Toomaj Salehi, because that’s what snowflake governments do when people use art to criticize them. Seriously, imagine Richard Nixon putting Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young in jail after “Ohio.” Bet he thought of it! Bet today’s right-wing politicians would say it out loud a lot more easily! (About whom, though? Taylor Swift? Todd Snider?) But I digress: criticizing a government (for killing a woman for wearing a hijab “wrong,” no less) is no reason to put a guy in solitary and beat the stuffing out of him. I’m sorry that even needs explaining.

Free Press helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to reinstate network neutrality protections for internet content post-haste. Our FCC finally has five Commissioners now, so they have no excuse anymore. Probably no issue has united liberals and conservatives like net neutrality – virtually everyone who’s not a big telecom PR hack wants you, not some corporation, to decide where you go on the internet, without big corporations blocking or throttling your favorite websites or forcing websites to pay for faster delivery. Naturally, confronted with this unanimity of public opinion, the Trump FCC told the American people to fuck off and repealed net neutrality. But the battle has been joined again.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to end forced arbitration in banking industry consumer contracts. Arbitration used to be for big corporations so they could fight each other outside of the court system, but now big corporations routinely force arbitration clauses on you just to buy or use their products, and banks are no different. Don’t believe the BS that the “average” arbitration award is much higher than what you’d get out of a class action suit, because if you lose, averages won’t matter – and your opponent may be able to extract a large award out of you. So yeah, you’re much better off relying on your right to a day in court, even if it doesn’t make you rich.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell our Federal Elections Commission (or FEC) to clamp down on AI-generated lies in campaigns. People want to unleash AI all over everything these days, but if you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t do it! And “fraudulent misrepresentation” of a candidate’s words is already illegal, so it shouldn’t be any different if AI enables it. I guess AI’s creators would say if AI did it, and AI isn’t really sentient, then nobody’s to blame! But you see the problem with that argument in the phrase “AI’s creators,” I trust. Yikes, this shouldn’t be that hard.

Readings for September 25, 2023.

We’ve heard enough about how subsidized economic development too frequently turns into corporate welfare for the undeserving rich, but is anyone doing it well? Good Jobs First finds two-count-’em-two American cities who are – Wichita, Kansas, and Grand Rapids, Michigan. Wichita’s Industrial Revenue Bond program is as transparent as they come, meaning that folks can learn whether corporations keep their wage and job promises when they take taxpayer money, while Grand Rapids spends a mere $14,000 per job, versus over $100,000 per job in nearby Lansing, and attracts over $30 in private investment per subsidized dollar. Hey, it’s only two examples, but it’s a beginning. Warning: the Wichita deep take link doesn’t work at this writing.

Sonali Kohatkar explains how the long-standing cooperative arrangement between Kaiser Permanente and its unions is about to fall apart, with the unions voting to strike at the end of this month. Long story short: Kaiser Permanente now acts more like a big corporate health care provider than the Medicare-for-All provider it occasionally seemed to be like, and the COVID pandemic put a strain on all hospital workers, to the point where they’re most definitely not content with half-measures. Will Kaiser Permanente come to its senses in the next few days? Probably not. Will its many satisfied customers ever be so satisfied again if they don’t? Certainly not. There’s a lesson in there, somewhere, admittedly a lesson few corporations know anymore, though all of them used to know it, or they’d face oblivion.

ProPublica reports that Massachusetts has several thousand subsidized apartments vacant despite having a 180,000-plus waitlist for folks who need housing. I’m going to say the big problems are that the state doesn’t tax the rich enough to fund programs like these, and (in a surely related note) they don’t hire enough people to vet applicants and fix apartments. I’m not sure centralizing applications state-wide (versus applying locally) is the root of all problems like some say, but the state should either develop a system that reaps the benefits of both (centralization reduces favoritism, while local authorities know their potential tenants better) or concede that favoritism simply isn’t as bad a problem as, you know, people with cancer living out in the street. If I can identify these problems, I’m sure they can, and they can almost certainly solve them better than I can, too.

Action: concerning big pharma and saving our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell your Senators to stop big pharma drug patent abuse, and tell President Biden to put people on our USPS Board of Governors who will finally fire Postmaster General DeJoy. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

U.S. PIRG helps you tell your Senators to stop big pharma drug patent abuse, one stratagem big pharma corporations use to charge absurd amounts of money on the drugs they develop. They use “patent thickets,” or multiple overlapping patents for the same product, and they also use “product hopping,” where they create new patents even for minor changes to a product, and they also use “pay-for-delay” agreements, where they pay plaintiffs to stop suing them because, hey, they’ve got crap-tons of money they made from all their other anti-competitive tactics which result EpiPens costing $600 and AbbVie charging five figures for Humira more than 20 years later and folks rationing their insulin because they can’t afford it. So our Senators need to hear from us.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to appoint two new members to our USPS Board of Governors who will finally get rid of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. He’s raised prices, cut services, and slashed jobs, all things our executive class calls “bold leadership” but which any reasonable person would call bad leadership. He’s also proposed closing Post Offices in rural areas which not only have no viable mail-delivery alternatives but which have to vote by mail because they don’t have actual polling places. And all of these “bold” moves may well kill good Americans, since so many of us depend on our Postal Service for life-saving medicines. I know, he wants to make our Postal Service run badly so he can privatize it. But why should we allow that?

Around the table: the trials and tribulations of evil, part 989.

I hear that several airline corporations are finding fake parts in their planes, but Jesus Mary and Joseph it’s not a “supplier scandal,” regardless of how badly any particular supplier acts, but an executive pay scandal. I mean, why aren’t airline corporations making their own damn parts? Because that would require them to employ people who do that, and everyone knows slashing jobs is the way to goose up stock prices. Fly the friendly skies!

Ho hum, producer of putatively anti-child trafficking film gets nailed for fondling an underage girl’s breasts. He can say he was going undercover to expose evil and playing a part all he wants, but if he does that, he can’t also say anyway, I thought she was 18! That’s what they all say when they get caught, and saying so means he wasn't confident in your excuses, for some reason. Because they’re lies. That's the reason.

University of Toledo scientists develop method for keeping snow off solar panels, so now would be a good time to mention that when you hear that snow causes a 5 to 15% power loss, keep in mind that’s not a reason to abandon all renewable energy like right-wingers would have you do, but it is a reason to work to make solar panels more effective. We don’t let the perfect murder the good, as right-wingers would have us do, but we still strive for the best.

Judge orders loanshark freed by Donald Trump to repay millions to all the small businesses he bilked. Please don’t let Donald Trump’s follies sour you on the concept of mercy, since that’s almost certainly what he’s trying to do, by being so bad at doling out mercy. I am a little confused as to how going after financial predators could be “partisan.” “Because Letitia James’s doing it” is not a reason.

If I were more (or less) spiritually-advanced I might laugh at the news that several of Rudy Giuliani’s former lawyers are suing him for $14 million in unpaid legal bills, given that Donald Trump appears to have stiffed Mr. Giuliani for similar reasons. As they say, shit rolls downhill. But maybe these clowns can write them off as pro bono hours?

When I hear that Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) might be looking for a gig as a punditoid on CNN, I feel compelled to say that he’s a better Congressman than I ever thought he’d be after his awful Tea-Party-by-the-numbers 2010 Senate campaign, but I also feel compelled to say that all the things he’s been good on (tech monopolies, the Biden impeachment) haven’t yielded actual results. Why, it’s almost like that’s the whole idea, again. I’d be happy to be wrong! But I’m probably not wrong.

Finally, when I hear that now-former Fox News Chair Rupert Murdoch hired Tucker Carlson because he thought he was a moderate who’d balance out Sean Hannity’s rabid Trumpism, all I can say is: pimp, stop lying. Rupert Murdoch knew perfectly well what he was doing, which was continuing to make money off keeping Americans in a feedback loop of masturbatory rage. After all, it beats working for a living!

Action: concerning Social Security and taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to cut Social Security benefits “behind closed doors” or cut IRS funding, and to bring back the 2021 Child Tax Credit expansion. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to create a Social Security commission that would meet “behind closed doors” to cut Social Security benefits for future retirees like us. If they have to “meet behind closed doors,” that means they want to do something we wouldn’t tolerate, and we wouldn’t tolerate cutting the benefits we worked for, fought for, and deserve to enjoy when we retire. Again, all they have to do is the thing they absolutely won’t do because of their rich donors – tax higher incomes. No “behind closed doors” rubbish, though. That’s the mark of a coward, and it’s also the mark of a fascist. But I repeat myself.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to gut increased IRS funding. Because it’s working exactly the way we intended it to work! Our IRS has answered more than two million more calls than in previous years and has already harvested $38 million from rich tax cheats, and given there’s a lot more fraud out there than that, their continued efforts should yield more bounteous results in the future. Don’t fall for the lie that our IRS will use that money to go after poor people, because news flash! They were already doing that precisely because they were underfunded! Jesus Mary and Joseph I hate stupid arguments.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion from 2021, which put $250 or $300 checks every month, per child in working families’ bank accounts. Child poverty more than doubled the year after 50 Republican Senators and Joe Manchin let it expire and let’s make sure we get those villains in the right order, so we should bring that back, so kids can eat and be clothed and other things they have every right to expect of their childhood. Again, brook no lies about “families using those checks to buy drugs,” at least not in the absence of evidence. Any sentence beginning “you just know” is not evidence.

Penny rants for September 19, 2023: special "right-wingers, stop whining!" edition.

In explaining the trouble Joe Biden's having convincing regular Americans that his programs are working for them, Matt Stoller also provides the only analysis I’ve yet read that makes me think Joe Biden might not get re-elected in 2024. Key finding: our government hasn’t counted inflation right for decades, because it doesn’t count hikes in interest rates as inflation even though common sense would tell us that it most assuredly is, plus folks don’t feel inflation’s fall from 9 to 3.7% if they’re writing monthly checks for cars and houses they bought when inflation was 9%, or if today's higher interest rates are ballooning their payments! Somewhat less key finding: Joe Biden may be the most anti-monopoly President since FDR, but the judges he’s appointing, well, aren’t, and they’re kinda arrogant about it – though maybe not as arrogant as antitrust lawyers who, I feel compelled to point out again, commit the heinous sin of asserting that the way things have been during their careers is the way they’ve always been.

Ho hum, Whole Foods goes to court to prove they can prevent workers from wearing Black Lives Matter masks – but not because, you know, our First Amendment protects folks from our government and not necessarily from their employer and because we’ve always assumed corporations can dictate worker uniforms more or less absolutely, but because our Supreme Court provides a “clear roadmap” to let Whole Foods do what it likes. I guess they just want to cement our Supreme Court’s insistence that you can actually discriminate on the basis of a “sincerely-held” “religious” “belief,” which isn’t very libertarian of them. But it sure would be a shame if the facts of the case shined even more light on the non-existent complaint that enabled the 303 Creative LLC ruling. It’d be an even bigger shame if Whole Foods, in attempting to argue the merits of their case, accidentally proved the original ruling was unconstitutional!

Finally, this Fatherly article from late 2022 provides awfully good advice on how to deal with a child’s tantrums -- but not just a child’s tantrums, good peoples! “If a child wants attention, the solution is — as long as it's safe — to literally give them no attention, not even negative attention,” “(i)f a child is demanding a tangible, then the best solution is not to give them what they want,” “(t)he appropriate response to an escape-from-demand tantrum where the child doesn't want to put on their pajamas is to force them to do it with you,” hand-over-hand if necessary – notice any parallels to our current political situation? Because these all sound like tactics we should deploy against Republicans just about all the time! Doesn’t matter if they got elected and thus “deserve respect.” Doesn’t matter if they “have power.” Doesn’t matter if any of their constituents threaten their life, or yours, or mine! If we treat Republicans like tantrum-addled kids even one time, America will be a different country.

Action: concerning taxes and budgets.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations and pass a clean budget bill without poison-pill dramas. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

While House Republicans stage ever-more absurd and obscene dramas about deficits and debt, we can call our Reps and tell them to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations! Hey, if you care about deficits and debt so much, you’d raise taxes on the very folks who can most easily afford it – not regular folks like us who struggle just to make ends meet. The 91% tax bracket on millionaire income and the 55% tax bracket on corporate profits helped create the greatest middle class ever back in the New Deal era, and if we bring them back, we can bring that middle class back again. Worry not that it’ll kill jobs, because bosses do that anyway when we give them too much freedom! They only create jobs when we force them to, and high taxation is one of the best tools we have to force them to do the right thing. So let’s do it.

In the meantime, Public Citizen helps you tell your Reps to pass a clean budget, mercifully free of far right-wing fever dreams and hostage crises. They think they have us over a barrel, because they have to pass something in 12 days or our government shuts down, but that’s never how it is – we have them over a barrel, because a government shutdown sure ain’t gonna reflect well on House Republicans, and neither would a bill larded down with poison pills that would never pass on their own. So let’s exercise our power and make them do the right thing.

Around the table: the stupid, it burns! Part 498.

Now that Mitt Romney’s retiring, we’re hearing from him – through a book written about him – that at least one “top” Republican Senator voted to acquit Donald Trump on January 6-related impeachment charges because he was afraid Trumpholes would come after his family. And I’ve heard this kind of thing before before! Still, in America, we expect better from our leaders than that. Cowing to imagined threats, even threats against your family, means you shouldn’t have any power in the first place.

In a related note, bomb threats “prompt” the city of Chicago to close all of its public libraries this past Thursday, but anyone can threaten to blow a place up! I just want to see one library respond to a bomb threat by saying no more and staying the hell open. I’m tired of the worst people getting all the say about everything, and I’m beyond tired of the politicians who defend them by saying they have legitimate grievances. No grievance excuses terrorism.

Maud Newton at Slate writes an extensive, personal essay about dealing with her mother’s extreme right-wing views – in the process describing a Christian nationalist TV network called the Victory Channel, run, of course, by a super-rich right-wing evangelist. So now you know where folks who say “I don’t get my news from Fox” get their news! I always suspected Fox News would be a gateway drug for far worse things – not to mention far more lucrative scams! – and sadly, I was right.

It's sad that I hardly blink at the news that South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem has apparently been having an affair with Corey Lewandowski for years despite being yet another anti-gay marriage, “family values” politician. Her votaries – and there’ll be more of them if Donald Trump makes her his running mate – not only don’t care about the hypocrisy, they like it when their people get away with being hypocrites; they think they're sticking it to us, but they're just sticking it to themselves. We’re going to come back to this point momentarily.

As promised: Vivek Ramaswamy says he’ll “gut” the H-1B visa program that he just so happened to use 29 times as he was making his fortune in the big pharma biz. One could make a point about how corporations use such programs to drive down wages for everyone, but of course he doesn’t make that point! And I’m sure his votaries would applaud him for using the system to get ahead and then pulling up the ladder before others could. (As an aside, his press hack’s analogy in paragraph 9 is ridiculous. No, it’s not like “using water and electricity” though water and electricity regulations are “broken,” because using water and electricity isn’t the same as trying to get rich. The stupid, it burns!)

Finally, I’m not surprised that all these indictments have only hardened Trump votaries’ support for their Personal Lord and Savior, and not just because I’ve watched it happen at my own job. But when they talk about “the system” being “rigged against him – and, by extension, them,” they are demonstrating their utter ignorance of not just recent American history, where Walking While Black still gets you the death penalty in too many areas, but of distant American history, during which police have spent far more time beating up strikers and protestors than arresting men of means. All of which reminds us, again, that we should only minister to those we can save, and leave the rest to God’s mercy.

Around the table: haters gonna hate, part 822.

Scientists give $7,500 to homeless folks, and find that they don’t blow it on alcohol, drugs, or other “temptation goods,” but do a lot more long-term planning, and not only hold onto jobs and housing better, but actually cost the taxpayer less. Caveats: the study didn’t hand money out to folks with substance abuse or mental health issues or to folks who’ve been homeless more than two years. Still, it suggests that a lot of notions we cling to – that folks just blow the money you hand out to them, that homeless folks can’t plan, that dealing with homelessness like it’s a constant emergency saves us money -- are really dumb. I presume I'll be making this point again, though, since I've made it before.

In a peripherally-related note, let us remember, as we contemplate the child poverty rate more than doubling in the year after the Child Tax Credit expansion expired, that this wasn’t just Joe Manchin’s doing, even though his utterance that those people are just using those $250 and $300 checks every month per child to buy drugs will justifiably live in infamy. No, we must remember, also, that 50 Republican Senators didn't lift a finger to prevent it from happening. Our “liberal” media always forgets the cruelty of Republicans, but we don’t.

These are the days we confront a headline like “School District Asks to Stop Being ‘Robbed’” and we leap to ask how exactly was this school district robbed this time. It’s the Riverhead Central School District in Long Island, NY, and the local Industrial Development Agency – which some center-right state legislature long ago gave the right to divert property tax money away from schools, how democratic of them! – has “robbed” the district of some $15 million over the last decade. On behalf of rich developers, I should add. So, you know, corporate welfare.

In a peripherally-related note, right-wingers in Florida get a book called Christian, the Hugging Lion banned because of the two male characters in it. First right-wingers said gay relationships were always entirely about sex even when the gay couple in question didn’t get sexual in front of anyone, and now they think any same-sex relationship, even a friendship, must be sexual. It’s like you can’t win with them! So don’t play their stupid games. Book banners are always losers! Even if they’re also the neighbors who lent you their leaf blower last year!

No a Republican House Rep is not “calling out” Sen. Tuberville for his several hundred holds on military promotions. I mean, if “I really wish he would reconsider this” is “calling out,” then the phrase “calling out” is virtually meaningless. But then I never liked that phrase anyway, so maybe Rep. McCaul is actually doing us a favor by hastening its journey to the dungheap of history! That’s a small favor, to be sure, and slamming Tommy Tuberville for being a bastard/moron would be a much bigger one.

Finally, Republican Presidential nominee-in-waiting Vivek Ramaswamy wants to “diversify” colleges by adding a physical fitness component to SAT tests, saying “it’s a fact” that people who do well on math/science tests can hardly run a mile, when it is actually not a fact. I guess he was trying to say Black and Brown people can all run faster without actually coming out and saying it! But remember: if someone says “it’s a fact,” they’ve already given you good reason to believe it’s not a fact. Facts speak for themselves, but lies all too frequently announce themselves as “facts.”

Action: concerning voting rights, government funding, and whistleblower protections.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to restore voting rights to ex-felons, pass a clean funding bill, and expand whistleblower protections for federal workers. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Stand Up America helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Democracy Restoration Act, which would restore the right to vote in federal elections to released prisoners. Because they never should have lost their right to vote in the first place! Because continuing to punish someone for a crime for which they’ve already served their sentence is cruel! And, not incidentally, because folks who try to deny voting rights to ex-felons mean to deny rights to Black and Brown folks, not because “they commit all the crime,” but because our justice system tends to target them. So, like, enough already.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk you expect them to pass a clean government funding bill, with no poison pills and no manufactured hostage crises. And no means no! Just because politicians want to do something doesn’t mean anyone else wants to do it! Rep. Greene (E-GA) says she won’t vote for any spending bill if our House doesn’t vote on impeaching President Biden over a whole lot of nothing, and we have to stop coddling people who do that. No means no! And no whining means no whining!

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Expanding Whistleblower Protections for Contractors Act, which would, as its title suggests, strengthen protections for whistleblowers and expand those protections to include federal contractors as well as federal employees. Because contractors can dime out some serious corruption, too! And they don’t do it for the money, because no amount of money can make up for lost jobs, livelihoods, families, or friends, so don’t believe big corporate lobbyists who tell you they do.

Action: concerning workers' rights, Social Security, and school lunches.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the PRO Act, tell Republicans you will not stand for raising the Social Security retirement age, and tell your Congressfolk to make school lunches free for all children in America. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you to tell your Congressfolk to pass the PRO Act, so that corporations won’t be able to walk all over workers trying to organize for better pay and working conditions quite as much as they are now. Folks could only oppose the PRO Act if they think “right-to-work” means something other than “right-to-work-for-less,” or if they think it’s perfectly OK for bosses to simply refuse to negotiate with workers who’ve already voted to organize. And why should such folks get all of the say about everything? Hell, why should they get invites to our cookouts?

Social Security Works helps you tell Republicans we will not permit them to raise the Social Security retirement age. That’s the big solution of “sane” Republicans like Nikki Haley and Tim Scott – none of them will, for example, start to tax income over $160,200 into the system, which would alleviate the shortfalls that are always a few decades off because right-wingers love to cry about “imminent” Social Security “insolvency.” They do it so you’ll be demoralized and fight them less, but don’t let them gaslight you into inaction!

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk that school lunches ought to be free for all children in America. What’s that you say? You mean they’re not already free? By God, what do our taxes pay for, then? Those are all legit questions, but school lunches actually cost money, which fewer Americans have now after half a century of our “leaders” sucking up to big corporate power, so now the especially small minds in government resort to lunch shaming in order to get working families to pony up overdue school lunch bills. No civilization should put up with that – and no civilization should let it get that bad, either.

Around the table: the trials and tribulations of evil, part 988.

When I hear that the entity behind the George W. Bush Presidential library spearheaded the letter (supported by 14 Presidential libraries) warning of dangers to American democracy, I can’t help but remind everyone that Tha Bush Mobb legally engineered a coup in Florida in 2000. And I’ve long thought Liz Cheney’s real problem with Donald Trump was that he was so awful at engineering a coup.

Oh FFS are Democrats really “worried” about Mitch McConnell’s health taking him out of the legislative picture? Have they been awake these last 15 years? Americans gave Barack Obama a mandate in 2008 to run America better than Republicans did, and Mitch McConnell nullified that mandate. Of course, this is how evil works – by making good people think it’s indispensable. Good people should at least remember that Democrats still have a Senate majority.

When I hear that Elon Musk has stiffed Twitter vendors and essentially dared them to sue him (which a lot of them are doing, and good for them), I am reminded that Donald Trump has stiffed more than one contractor. And when I contemplate the World’s Richest Man being so unwilling to pay so many bills, I can only imagine him saying how do you think I got so rich?

No, Republicans aren’t having trouble trying to message their abortion position – they’re having trouble dealing with the reality that the devastatingly effective term “pro-life” turned out to describe a broadly unpopular position, one which’ll only get more unpopular as more women have to deal with the fallout. They can say “pro-baby” or whatever all they want, but they can’t deny their extremism any longer. No, not even when they describe our position – which is, to sum, don’t get between a pregnant woman and her doctor – as “extreme.”

Finally, in case anyone needs a reminder after hearing that Georgia is using its expansive RICO law to go after protestors of the proposed Cop City police facility: no, organizing to protest a government’s actions isn’t the same as trying to overturn an election and nullify the will of the American people. I trust I don’t have to explain further. (Note well, also, that this RICO prosecution will likely fail – a lot of those charged don't even know each other, as you might expect – but it will also intimidate future protesters, which is probably its only goal anyway.)

Action: concerning health care.

Long story short: tell our CMS to enact the most vigorous hospital price transparency rule possible, and tell big pharma corporations to stop trying to stop Medicare drug price negotiation. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

U.S. PIRG helps you tell our Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (or CMS) to enact the most vigorous hospital price transparency rule possible. Because the price of health care is too damn high and none of us have any idea how much things are supposed to cost! Big corporations generally won’t try to argue that point, but they’ll whine about “innovation” and “jobs,” which you can always answer by saying the cost of health care is too damn high and we all think you’re gouging us, and look at you not even lifting a finger to prove you’re not! They’ll try to weaken the rules in other ways (like posting “estimates” or posting prices in computer formats you won’t be able to read); U.S. PIRG lists these, and you’ll oppose them when you sign.

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell big pharma corporations to stop suing our government over Medicare drug price negotiation. Virtually everyone supports Medicare drug price negotiation – which proves that the American people are smarter than professional cynics want us to think – but big pharma still wants to try to kill it in court, or at least hurt us in doing so. That’s right, I said hurt us – you think our government is getting the money to defend Medicare price negotiation from somewhere other than our taxes? Big pharma would hurt us just to preserve their unearned billions; that’s really all we have to say about it.

Around the table: freedom for me, but not for thee, part 297.

Don’t make too much of the Biden Administration cancelling seven Alaska National Wildlife Refuge-area gas and oil leases handed out by the Trump Administration in its late 2020 death throes. The Willow project is still going forward, after all, and the Administration has also proposed protecting a mere 40 percent of Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve, and only from new leases. But seriously, Sen. Sullivan, “(t)his war on Alaska”? Dramatic much?

When I hear that an anti-vaxxer lost a lawsuit against YouTube after it took down his channel, I am reminded that our First Amendment protects us from our government, not media corporations, and that our First Amendment only guarantees free speech, not a platform for that speech, let alone a way to reliably monetize that speech. Also, the plaintiff appears not to have read YouTube’s Terms of Service.

In a peripherally-related note, the notorious One America News network (or OAN) and its “star correspondent” Chanel Rion have settled a defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion executive Eric Coomer, whom they alleged told an “Antifa conference call” that “Trump (was) not going to win.” This is not the only lawsuit they have to worry about, and that’s quite immensely heartening! What a stupid lie to run with, though – imagine instilling fear in your viewers about this mysterious organization called Antifa, and then alleging that they conduct conference calls. Over Zoom, I’ll bet!

Resist the urge to be giddy at the news that fascist Florida’s expansion of school voucher programs has resulted in parents using taxpayer money to buy such educational items as big-screen TVs and Disney passes. This is taxpayer money, as I’ve said, and enabling corruption in the name of “education choice” (Gov. DeSantis’s words, of course) is nothing to celebrate. Didn’t know “21st century approaches to learning” meant nothing so much as a new air hockey table, did you? Maybe we should fund public schools properly, instead of passing off crooked gimmicks as bright ideas. And maybe we should dare to call "school choice" a massive welfare handout.

Finally, looks like Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) has the right idea about how to handle Republican threats of impeaching President Biden: “Go ahead. Do it, I dare you. If you can find the votes, go ahead, because you’re going to lose. It’s a loser.” Really, we should all respond to Republican attempts to create drama this way. We should also call such things “a big circle jerk on the fringe right,” as Mr. Fetterman does. Note well that the case national Republicans have presented for impeaching Joe Biden is even lamer than the case Pennsylvania Republicans presented for impeaching Larry Krasner.

Action: concerning labor, law and order, and cruelty to animals.

Long story short: tell your Senators to confirm Gwynne Wilcox to our NLRB, and tell your Congressfolk to end qualified immunity for police officers and ban cyanide bombs from our public lands. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

More Perfect Union helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gwynne Wilcox to our National Labor Relations Board. Ignore anything right-wingers say about how our NLRB is waging a “war on employers” or something – they’re just shilling for their big corporate donors, as always, and those big corporate donors would vastly prefer to pay their workers in dung pellets and then prevent them from ever organizing for better pay and working conditions. If they stonewall the Wilcox nomination, our NLRB won’t have a quorum of members to get things done. That’s what right-wingers want. Don’t let them have it.

Both the Daily Kos Liberation League and Defending Rights and Dissent help you tell your Congressfolk to end “qualified immunity” for law enforcement officers. “Qualified immunity,” a doctrine born entirely of a Supreme Court decision, gives police officers too much immunity from wrongdoing, by requiring the circumstances of their wrongdoing to be exactly the same as previous instances of wrongdoing before we can do anything about it. That makes them too protected from accountability. Do we want anyone too protected from accountability? Particularly if they have the power to arrest us and shoot us?

Finally, the Endangered Species Coalition helps you tell Congress to outlaw cyanide bombs on public lands. Cyanide bombs supposedly aim to kill predators, but truth is they’re indiscriminate killers – they maim and kill animals that don’t do any harm to the circle of life, plus they maim and kill people, too. Civilized people don’t accept that as the eggs we must break to make an omelette. I trust I don’t have to argue this point any further.

Around the table: judges pimp-slap Alabama again!

11th Circuit three-judge panel again rejects Alabama’s redrawn Congressional maps. Alabama state lawyers actually argued before the judges that they don’t have to follow their ruling (which our Supreme Court famously confirmed earlier this year), and if there’s anything a judge hates hearing, it’s that their rulings mean nothing. Hence a cartographer and a special master will redraw Alabama districts this time.

When I hear that big insurance corporations don’t want to cover damages from natural disasters anymore, I can only say we are not a sane and moral society if we allow this evil to happen. Ultimately our government will have to wind up covering such damages, at which point right-wingers will squeal SOSHULIZM!!!!! and then have a circle-jerk lasting several hours. It would have been nice if the Washington Post had reported profit information for the big insurance corporations its article mentioned.

Please remember that “Iran’s Street Art Shows Defiance, Resistance, and Resilience” even if it takes another 50 years for them to get rid of the mullahs. Too many Americans still think the Middle East has no engineers or doctors or poets, but only has angry people who kill each other, and some of the folks who think that are friends or family of yours.

We can make too much of Gov. DeSantis’s apparent refusal to meet with President Biden following Hurricane Idalia – how much do they have to talk about, really? – but the snub sure doesn’t help Mr. DeSantis, who looks like the diaper-loaded brat he usually is anyway and nobody’s going to remember that he whined about all the security arrangements Florida didn’t have any trouble making after the last hurricane. Maybe Joe Biden isn’t as dumb as right-wingers want you to think!

Finally, when I hear that Democratic voters “can’t get enough of” Chris Christie’s “new Trump-bashing persona,” all I can say is OMG what horseshit. And then when I read about all the “liberal” media personalities who are going along with it, I’m even more sure I’m right. Note well that Democratic voters don’t vote in very many Republican primaries, and Republican voters either want Trump or someone who gives them everything Trump gives them without the baggage.

Allegedly trenchant analysis for September 5, 2023: Vivek Ramaswamy as Republican front-runner.

It’s now a few weeks after the first Republican debate, and I’m still sure the smart play for Republicans is to get behind Vivek Ramaswamy as their nominee and put someone on the ticket with him who might actually be able to run a country. Doesn’t matter that he’s non-white – evangelicals didn’t turn up their nose at Mitt Romney’s Mormonism, the number of liberals caught off-guard by conservative Black and Brown folks is very small now, and right-wingers may not love Black and Brown folks in the abstract or the tangible but they’ll defend their Black and Brown fellow-travelers to the death. Doesn’t matter that he sounds batshit, either. That fool Ron DeSantis actually thinks all his precious oppo research will make a difference? Was he paying attention in 2016? What does matter, though, is that Mr. Ramaswamy helps Republicans get the Trumphole vote without actually having to have Trump on the ticket. How stupid do Republican politicians sound trying to defend Donald Trump these days? Very, very stupid, that’s how. Now imagine a world in which they don’t even have to talk about Donald Trump anymore, let alone defend him, but can run someone who’s pushes all the same emotional buttons without having any of the Trump baggage. Then imagine those Republican politicians reassuring nose-holders that since someone like Tim Scott is on the ticket, things will actually get done. That sure is a better idea than letting Donald Trump run again (and again!), and it’s also a better idea than getting behind the trans-hating, race-baiting, book-banning, COVID-enabling Ron DeSantis.

That doesn’t mean Mr. Ramaswamy will beat Joe Biden. Joe Biden’s done a good job. Doesn’t matter that Mr. Biden’s approvals are low now, or even next year, because I suspect our economy will keep on chooglin’ into Election Day 2024. And it also doesn’t mean Mr. Ramaswamy will have the same coattails Donald Trump obviously had on Election Day 2020, when Republicans picked up 15 House seats and damn near held our Senate. But Republicans need to face facts: they are the party of masturbatory rage now, and nothing else. They can still win elections wherever they can gerrymander districts or suppress voting rights, but that’s a tough thing to do across an entire nation, and the Democratic candidate has won the popular vote in six of the last seven elections – the exception being George W. Bush in 2004, who would never have been able to win re-election in the first place but for the Electoral College. So the best strategy for Republicans, going forward, is to nominate freak candidates for President. It’s not a good strategy. But it is their best one.

At the risk of opening up a hole in space-time, I will devote a small amount of space to understanding the Trumphole a little better. Like Amanda Marcotte, I am enormously tempted to say that Trump supporters are “deplorable bitter clingers” and nothing else, but I really think it’s more than that: just like murderers think of themselves law-and-order adherents facing extenuating and unprecedented circumstances, Trumpholes throw tantrums they feel perfectly justified in throwing – and yet would happily use the word “tantrum” on anyone else on the other side who ever got emotional. A lot of Trumpholes have been provoked, I suppose, but not by liberals, or immigrants, or transgender folks, or public school teachers, or whomever the Enemy of the Week is. Big corporations provoke them, and the politicians who suck up to big corporations – which has, as you know, been a bipartisan attitude for some time – also provoke them.

Many Trumpholes will agree with that analysis; some will even volunteer it – and then support candidates who have enabled their provokers, because Critical Race Theory Cancel Culture Bud Light Trans People Try That in a Small Town. Even this ain’t entirely stupid – everyone knows Democrats have been chasing big campaign donation money as much as Republicans, and Democrats have long pushed so-smart-they’re-stupid solutions to our problems (we’re going to teach construction workers to write code! No, I am never letting that go!) for decades. But Democrats have also come around a bit lately – Joe Biden is the most anti-monopoly President we’ve had since FDR, and it’s not exactly business-as-usual to see large-scale public investment (mainly through the Inflation Reduction Act, but also through the American Rescue Plan Act) that actually moves us forward as a civilization. That dilemma will impale Mr. Ramaswamy; he’s not stupid enough to oppose public investment or support monopolies, but saying “I’ll just do all of that better” won’t win hearts and minds, either. And yet he represents a better bet than hoping the Big Man himself survives all his interlocking indictments with all their interlocking co-defendants. In or out of jail, Mr. Trump could still get the nomination and win, though likely not if the economy’s still humming along. But if you’re a Republican politico, you’d rather not keep drawing to an inside straight.

Action: concerning monopolies, death panels, and robocalls.

Long story short: tell our DOJ and FTC to make corporations account for their aims when they propose mergers, tell our HHS Department to investigate death panel claims against HCA Healthcare, and tell our FCC to crack down on robocalls and robotexts (and tell our Senate to confirm a full slate of FCC Commissioners). Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Our Department of Justice (or DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) have proposed making big corporations account for their actions more precisely when they propose to buy another corporation. Naturally the big corporatists are whining about how much paperwork they already have to do, which may be enough to tell you that you should support the proposed changes. But as Matt Stoller explains further: big corporations don’t even have to answer questions like why they’re merging or who’s on their board of directors or who their competitors are or how much market share they’re proposing to gobble up, even though the answers to most of these questions would reveal that they’re trying eat their competitors alive and make themselves richer at civilization’s expense. We should at least make them commit such answers to paper; you can read the new proposal here, and you can leave a public comment about it here. Don’t believe the hype that these are “radical” changes, because only whiners would tell you that. Certainly don’t believe anyone who says “but we’ve always done things the way I’d prefer we keep doing them,” because anyone who says that commits the unpardonable sin of mistaking their life experiences for the entirety of human history. And, since corporate lawyers aren’t stupid, I’d say they’re committing that sin on purpose, which makes it twice as bad. Don’t let sin rule America, good peoples!

Care2 helps you tell our Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) to investigate allegations that HCA Healthcare has used, guess what, an algorithm to push hospice care on patients who actually stand a decent chance of recovering. Because those patients won’t make them enough money, basically! Right-wingers, that’s what a “death panel” actually looks like! And it’s far, far more likely to come from some private corporation than from our government! Note well that Wall Street banksters love HCA stock, which makes HCA suspicious pretty much automatically, and also that HCA once had to pay a $1.7 billion fine for defrauding Medicaid and Medicare (among other federal health care programs). As if to prove our decadence as a civilization, HCA’s CEO back then is now Florida’s junior Senator, Rick Scott. Let's fight the real evil, gang!

Finally, U.S. PIRG helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to crack down on illegal robocalls/robotexts. I’ve gotten no less than half a dozen of these irritants daily this past week, so I know they’re not doing enough, and so do you, I bet. Aren’t I on a damn do-not-call list? Why, yes, I am! But I guess these crooks just count on doing so much crime that law enforcement can’t catch them all. What a thing to bring to the Pearly Gates when you die! It’d help, of course if our Senate were to confirm a full slate of FCC Commissioners, which Free Press helps you do.

Around the table: the drama, it burns! Part 399.

Here’s some good news: a Leon County circuit judge has struck down Florida’s last gerrymander and told the state legislature it’ll have to do better. Right-wingers will appeal, but they’ll have to come up with something better than “Florida’s state Constitution violates our federal Constitution,” which argument sure doesn’t sound very states’ rights of them, does it?

Don’t get too excited that3M will pay $5.5 billion for selling defective earplugs to our soldiers, because that suit has 300,000 plaintiffs, working out to less than $18,500 each and that’s not counting the lawyers’ cut, and might we say hearing loss (not to mention betrayal!) is worth more than that? Anyway, file that under “Why We Shouldn’t Privatize Shit, Part 2399” and "The Private Sector is So Not Better Than the Public Sector, Part 3884."

It’s heartening to hear that most Americans – even most Republicans – support unions and strikes, but remember that those numbers will go down the minute corporate propagandists go on TV with their they get goodies you don’t get rubbish. The obvious answer to that is well, then organize for more goodies, and also punish bosses who refuse to negotiate.

When I hear that wannabe Nazis marched through a Florida park chanting “we are everywhere,” all I can say is no, you’re not. The article doesn’t note that there were no more than 50 marchers in that “terrifying” video. We shouldn’t turn a blind eye to Nazis, of course, but how about we stop giving them the big dramas they want?

Be careful reading stories telling you that TEH EPA IZ REMOVINGZ PROTEKSHUNZ FORZ TEH WETLANDZ!!!!!, because our EPA is literally only complying with our Supreme Court’s will. That information should be in the headline, not just the lede. It’s not in the headline because our “liberal” media are lazy, stupid, or evil. But I repeat myself.

Finally, billionaires are having trouble building a “new green city” in Northern California because they’ve pissed off all the locals. This article is way, way too credulous, so I’ll say it: they want to build a “new green city”? That is to laugh! Billionaires just want to build a city that redlines Black and Brown out of it. They also want to be able to abuse the help with impunity.

Light posting notice.

Hi all! Posting will be extremely light (if not nonexistent) for the rest of August, as I (once again) work on my next book. A real Dichotomy paradox, this project; it’s felt almost done since I put in 12-hour days on it that week in mid-April, and yet, it is still not done. Soon, perhaps. In the meantime, know that I appreciate the hard work you do for the country we all love.

Action: concerning worker safety, Medicare, and animal abuse.

Long story short: tell our government to better protect workers from extreme heat, tell President Biden to better protect seniors from privatized Medicare, and tell world governments to ban any products that come from octopus farming. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Department of Labor to do more to protect good American workers from extreme heat, while Civic Shout helps you tell our Occupational Safety and Health Administration (or OSHA) to do the same. President Biden has already directed our Department of Labor to issue hazard alerts related to the heat, but our DOL could be doing more. And OSHA has yet to issue a standard protecting workers from extreme heat, even though we’ve told them to do that before. Folks are dropping dead in the Texas heat, and going to burn wards in Arizona just for falling on the sidewalk, so ignore the politicians who seem to be objectively pro-heat death.

Public Citizen helps you tell President Biden to protect our seniors from the greed of private health insurers who have too many grubby hands in Medicare. President Biden has moved a bit slowly on this matter, which is why we’re getting in his grill about it now. Our government has privatized more and more of Medicare over the last 20 years, even though, frankly, anyone who still thinks government couldn’t do better than private corporations in delivering health care is a fool. At least half of all seniors on Medicare Advantage switch back to traditional Medicare in their last year of life, but we don’t want so many seniors to get out of the claws of private health insurers so late.

Finally, Eko helps you tell world governments to ban any and all products that come from farmed octopuses. You don’t need to have seen an octopus squeeze its way off a boat to know that these creatures deserve better – frankly, we shouldn’t wait for animals to impress us with their intelligence before we treat them better! Octopus farms shine a constant light on animals that obviously prefer darkness, plus these farms kill octopi by putting them in freezing water; think you would like that? No, you would not. Doesn’t matter that some corporation thinks they can make a profit doing this, because profit doesn’t justify torture. I can’t believe I still have to say that.

Action: concerning government spying, animal abuse, and taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the Cooper Davis Act and pass Canyon’s Law and the FATCAT Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose the Cooper Davis Act, which would force internet service-providing corporations to report to our Attorney General regarding substance abuse violations. I got a better idea: how about our government get warrants for that information? And I got an even better idea: how about we stop putting drug users in jail and start getting them the help they need instead? Sure, we’d have to start seeing drug users as patients and not criminals, and ending the war on drugs also means less racism. But I’m all for enabling our personal growth as a nation – just not by giving law enforcement more weapons to bludgeon us with.

Care2 helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass Canyon’s Law and outlaw the use of cyanide bombs to kill animals on our public lands. Because cyanide bombs are absolutely heinous! They result in a slow, painful, and torturous death for anyone nearby, and n.b. that pronoun – cyanide bombs don’t just kill animals that prey on livestock, they can also kill any animal who happens to be nearby, and they can also kill any human being who happens to be nearby. In fact, the bill’s authors have named their bill after an Idaho boy who almost died from cyanide bomb exposure. Could it be that just throwing hurt and pain around isn’t the only way to solve problems?

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Fueling Alternative Transportation with a Carbon Aviation Tax (or FATCAT) Act. Again, the acronym isn’t as unwieldy as you might have expected! Believe it or not, folks with their own jets actually pay less in fuel taxes than folks who fly commercial flights (i.e., you and I), but the FATCAT Act would increase that tax eightfold (from 22 cents per gallon to $1.95 per gallon) and end exemptions for oil exploration and logging. Oil and logging CEOs hardly need the handout, after all! And given how oil tax breaks helps foster the right-wing movement that eventually destroyed the New Deal, perhaps we should be more careful about that.

Action: concerning antibiotic abuse, printer ink, and climate change.

Long story short: tell WalMart to get antibiotic abuse out of its meats, tell our FTC to ensure we can get printer ink a lot more cheaply, and tell our EPA to enact the most vigorous carbon emissions rules possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

USPIRG helps you tell WalMart to get antibiotic abuse out of its meat supply chain. Why WalMart? Because it sells about half the groceries in America, that’s why! And getting it to root out the antibiotic abuse from the meat it sells would go a long way toward ending antibiotic abuse in America. Recall that seven out of every 10 antibiotics go, no, not to sick people or sick animals, but to nominally healthy feed animals, partly to fatten them up and partly to help them endure their squalid living conditions, and if we abuse antibiotics like that, we might as well put a welcome mat out for the next generation of superbugs. So how about we make antibiotics effective again?

PennPIRG helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to break the big computer corporations’ iron grip on printer ink. You’d save big bucks using generic printer cartridges rather than the proprietary ones computer corporations bully you into buying, and while their scam certainly operates on a smaller scale than health insurance or cable TV, it’s the same awful principle. Our FTC has done good work, which is why Republicans call FTC Chair Lina Khan a “socialist,” but we should still treat all government agencies as though they’ll only act if we tell them to – because if they don’t, they’ll find (as they did during the Trump years) that it’s actually against the law to simply ignore public comments.

Finally, the League of Conservation Voters helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous carbon emissions rules possible. Our EPA has finally proposed limiting carbon emissions from existing plants as well as new ones, and that is, as a famous philosopher would say, a BFD. But of course the big fossil fuel corporations doing the polluting will get a lot of oxygen, so to speak, for their rubbish arguments. Waaaah it’ll kill jobs! Waaaah it’ll drive prices up! Actually these rules create jobs for folks who help implement them, and raising prices is to a large degree up to the corporation selling the service, but you know, when you can’t win arguments, just cry a river. Hey, right-wingers do it all the time.

Action: concerning voting rights, taxing the rich, and criminal justice reform.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the ACE Act and pass the Freedom to Vote Act, the OLIGARCH Act, and the People’s Response Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called American Confidence in Elections (or ACE) Act, while the Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Vote Act. Again, this should be easy: the ACE Act would make it harder for you to vote, by making you jump through unnecessary hoops and giving billionaires more say than you, while the Freedom to Vote Act would make it easier for you to vote, by expanding early voting and clamping down on gerrymandering. We live in a world where solutions are actually quite simple and politicians are too cowardly or evil to implement them. And that’s why we have to get in their grills all the time.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Oppose Limitless Inequality Growth and Reverse Community Harms (or OLIGARCH) Act, which I have to say is not as clumsy an acronym as I thought it’d be. The OLIGARCH Act would impose a wealth tax that increases as a particular taxpayer’s wealth goes up, from 2% for households with 1,000 to 10,000 times the median household wealth up to 8% for households with 1,000,000 times median household wealth. Thus the OLIGARCH Act obviates the need to adjust tax brackets with inflation, since it bases its tax on median wealth. Rich folks will lie like mad about this bill, so we need to get out in front of them.

Finally, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the People’s Response Act (or the PRA). The PRA would (largely through grants and funded research) encourage different approaches to community policing than the put-cops-everywhere-and-make-them-do-everything-model we now employ. This isn’t just better for the folks who lose their loved ones to police violence, it’s better for the police. We use police like Swiss Army knives, expecting them to jump into any situation and handle it effectively, when virtually no one has the flexibility of mind to go right from confronting a violent assault to talking a man out of jumping off a bridge. That just means we, as a civilization, have to be more flexible.

Action: concerning striking workers, encryption, and free tax filing.

Long story short: tell Hollywood to meet actor/writer demands and end their strike, tell Meta to encrypt Messenger chats already, and tell our IRS to ensure that all good Americans can file their taxes directly for free. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell big Hollywood corporate executives to end the writers/actors strike by meeting their demands. Don’t let the occasional Seth MacFarlane or Adam McKay lead you to believe the life of a Hollywood writer is cush – the vast majority of Hollywood writers have just as much trouble making the bills as you or I, while the vast majority of Hollywood executives make millions of dollars, and want to replace all their writers and actors with AI as we speak. Of course, as Simon Pegg has pointed out, AI only imitates other folks’ work and has nothing of consequence to say on its own. Also too, all workers are important. So let’s get in these bosses’ grills.

UltraViolet helps you tell Meta to install end-to-end encryption for all Messenger chats like it said it would. While Meta fiddles, good Americans go to jail for having abortions or helping their family members get abortions – and Meta enables it all by turning over their data to law enforcement! If Meta had to turn over a bunch of data it couldn’t read and cops couldn’t read, that’d help good Americans struggling against our Supreme Court’s right-wing tyranny. You might say this isn’t particularly a law-and-order stance, but I reserve that phrase largely for banksters, polluters, and fascists, not for folks just trying to muddle through, and certainly not for folks offending right-wing wannabe tyrants. Shouldn’t we get more say than wannabe tyrants?

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell our Internal Revenue Service (or IRS) to support direct, free tax filing for all Americans. Our IRS will start a pilot program for direct, free tax filing next year, but this ain’t rocket science, particularly since our IRS already has all the information it needs to do your taxes and we hardly need all the private, for-profit tax-filing corporations standing between us and our obligations to our civilization. I’m sure right-wingers will get around to saying that private tax-filing corporations are job creators, but I suspect most Americans will find that as unconvincing an attempt at hostage-taking as I do.

Around the table: banksters, billionaires, and other people who ruin everything.

The Lever describes how private equity corporations are ruining health care. Long story short: banksters ruin everything. Long story somewhat longer: no, really, they’re a bunch of damn vampires, seeing every hospital, nursing home, and doctor’s office not as a thing that serves people but as a thing to bleed money from. Long story even longer: I really can’t say enough what evil bastards these folks are; I don’t even feel particularly blasphemous saying they’re going to burn in eternal hellfire. Let me know if I’m not making myself absolutely clear. I have been told I have a propensity to hold back.

Matthew Rosza at Salon reminds us that the heart problems caused by COVID way, way outnumber the heart problems vaccines cause. Remember when that latter item was all over the news a few years ago? Now it’s back, thanks to that fool Elon Musk, who heard about LeBron James’s son having a heart attack in practice and immediately said TEH COVIDZ!!!!! I’m old enough to remember when J.V. Cain dropped dead at an NFL practice due to a heart condition 30-odd years before COVID; in the meantime, COVID causes many more heart problems than vaccines do, and of course some folks exaggerate the problems caused by vaccines by confusing correlation and causation. So maybe some people need to either learn to STFU until they know what they’re talking about or stop running with salacious headlines.

I hate to say it, but I already know how our Supreme Court will rule on whether a disabled woman who has filed over 600 Americans With Disabilities Act lawsuits against various hotels actually has standing to sue -- they’ll rule she doesn’t, even though she’s, you know, disabled. Why? Because they didn’t let alone a First Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that she does have standing, because the hotel chain plaintiff whines incessantly about the “cottage industry” of “self-appointed testers” even though, in the words of her lawyer, “(n)obody complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act until they’re sued,” and because our Justice Department could just step in and enforce the law (although they generally don’t). I also know because they only care about preserving big corporate power – and sadly, that isn’t an exclusively right-wing disease in our federal courts.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (E-CA) now says our House might look into impeachment proceedings against President Biden. I’m not a hundred percent sure there’s nothing there – I do remember thinking Joe Biden’s brother Jim could be an anvil around his neck – but I am certain that all Republican attempts to demonstrate there’s something there have delivered way, way more drama than evidence, and most Americans hate drama, though perhaps not auite as much as I do. Anyway, Republicans always complained that impeaching Donald Trump would result in the opposition party just impeaching Presidents at will – and they were right! They were so right it's like they actually reached back into the past and impeached Bill Clinton!

Because we need the occasional reminder, Laura Clawson at Daily Kos delivers “A Partial List of Things People Screaming About Cancel Culture Want to Cancel.” Mostly it’s about the Barbie movie, which has (among other “sins”) a trans actress playing a doctor, though we could also the cancel-culture crowd wants to cancel the entirety of Black culture and history. I would say the hypocrisy is strong with right-wingers, but of course they don’t care about that, or about making rational arguments, even – slinging shit is their only aim. After all, they don’t have to clean it up – the rest of us do!

Finally, Sen. Tim Scott, running for the Republican nomination for President, confronts the slavery-with-benefits idea coming out of Florida thusly: “There’s no silver lining in slavery. Slavery was really about separating families, about mutilating humans and even raping their wives. It was devastating.” And I wish he’d stopped there! Sadly, he also said, of Mr. DeSantis, that “people have bad days,” even though it took more than a bad day day for the Florida State Board of Education to concoct these “standards,” and even though Gov. DeSantis’s “war on woke” has gone on for much, much longer than a bad day, and really, for most politicians a “bad day” is a day they yell at a reporter, not a day they insist we should teach “both sides” of slavery. If Tim Scott had gone all the way, and then ignored the inevitable right-wing whining about it, he’d be the front-runner for the nomination right now, but he didn’t, so he’s not.

Action: concerning voting rights, price-gouging, and financial predation.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the American Confidence in Elections Act, pass the Freedom to Vote Act, start punishing price-gouging corporations, and reject the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called American Confidence in Elections (or ACE) Act – also known as the “Big Lie” bill – while the Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Vote Act instead. Don’t ever be tempted to demand that your Congressfolk just pass a bill that incorporates the best bits of both! The “Big Lie” bill, which would impose Voter ID nationally and let billionaires spend even more money on elections, doesn’t have any good bits. Meanwhile, the Freedom to Vote Act would give us more early voting, less gerrymandering, and less campaign spending; clearly those are good bits.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to start holding corporations accountable for their price-gouging. It’s simple: when you have high inflation and record corporate profits at the same time, as you did for most of last year, then you have corporate price-gouging. We used to hold corporations accountable for this sort of thing, before the “free” marketeers took hold of our civilization, and we need to get back to that post-haste, or else corporations will just keep hurting us forever and ever. The year-over-year inflation rate may be down to 3% at present, but we still can’t let corporations get away with what they’ve done.

Finally, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act, which would not only give handouts to crypto corporations that deserve their bad reputation, but would require our Federal Trade Commission to consider “innovation” whenever it writes new regulations! To quote a phrase, right-wingers have tortured the word “innovation” so that it tells them whatever they want to hear; if this bill passes, pretty much any bankster will be able to claim their new fraudulent product is “innovative,” and thus escape much-needed government scrutiny. Do we really want to “innovate” on the definition of a “safe investment” until it includes mostly unsafe investments?

Action: concerning worker safety, tenants' rights, and drug prices.

Long story short: tell Texas legislators to repeal a worker-killing bill, tell our FHFA to protect tenants from greedy landlords, and tell big pharma CEOs to stop suing over Medicare drug price negotiation. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Care2 helps you tell the Texas state legislature to repeal its just-passed law forbidding localities from mandating water breaks for workers. In the hundred-degree-plus heat, no less! Some “conservatives” these are, telling the cities of Austin and Dallas they’re not allowed to give workers ten-minute water breaks! What happened to smaller communities doing better for their people? I can’t even say big corporations really wanted something like this – honestly, a ban on local ordinances allowing water breaks looks like nothing more than a way to swing their testicles in front of good Texans’ faces, which I guess is all Republicans are about now. What, they’re going to govern? That is to laugh! Unless we get in their grills, that is.

People’s Action helps you tell our Federal Housing Finance Agency (or FHFA) to insure that anyone who receives federal government-backed loan treats their tenants with dignity and respect. That would mean, among other things, less stupidly-high rents, less evicting people on a whim, less discriminating against tenants due to race or sex, and keeping homes and apartments safe to live in. I know some property-owning corporations (and some property-owning people!) will squeal HOWZ CANZ I MAKEZ TEH MONEYZ!!!!! If they can’t make money without treating people right, they deserve poverty. And, at the risk of blasphemy, eternal hellfire. Hey, I’m no coddler.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell big pharma CEOs to drop their absurd lawsuit aiming to prevent Medicare from being able to negotiate some drug prices. Some drugs, and not until 2026! Since that’s all we could get out of that “maverick,” Kyrsten Sinema. Imagine thinking you’re “independent” because you suck up to big corporations even more! But I digress. We should tell big pharma CEOs to drop their stupid lawsuit because the Big Stick of Bad PR works! We know it works because it’s worked in the past! It works better on corporations than on politicians, I’ll grant, and I wish that weren’t so, but we’ll take what we can get – and then go get more of what we deserve.

Around the table: law and order is for *everyone*, not just us little people! And other truths.

Scientists have recorded water temperatures over 100 degrees off Florida at least twice in the last few days. I’ve been in 80-degree water and that was warm, but 100-degree water is like hot tub water; though silty water does tend to trap light and therefore heat, you would not be audacious to blame climate change for the severity of the problem. I’d tell the citizens of fascist Florida that I hope they’re happy with the razor-wielding clowns they’ve been voting for all these years, except that other creatures actually have to live in that water.

Israeli Knesset passes a judicial “reform” bill, one that will handcuff the nation’s judges from striking down evil laws, despite hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens taking to the streets (and a thousand military reservists boycotting military service). The law the Knesset passed is considerably narrower than the one the ruling far-right coalition wanted to pass in March; you would not be audacious to credit the protests for the coalition’s change of tactics. It’s a damn shame Israel doesn’t even have a second strong political party. But it’s a good thing they have so, so many upstanding citizens. They deserve to win

Bryce Covert at The Intercept details how “(i)n the five years since the start of the #MeToo movement, a quiet but effective legal backlash has swept over those who spoke out about sexual harassment and abuse. The accused have turned around and sued their accusers, effectively silencing them.” Plus, generally the accused have money and their accusers don’t. Right-wingers will claim this difficulty proves all lawsuits are bad, but they’re lying, and even if they weren’t, I wouldn’t want someone who throws up their hands at the slightest difficulty in my foxhole. Anti-SLAPP laws (SLAPP stands for “strategic lawsuit against public participation,” meaning, essentially, its whole purpose is to silence you) would help. Guess which political party generally stomps its feet and refuses to pass them, and guess which other party hasn't worked hard enough to pass them.

Surprise, surprise, a fellow about to become Ron DeSantis’s next deputy campaign manager also worked on that infamous anti-net neutrality campaign from 2017, the one that created millions of fake comments opposing net neutrality. Is there any evil into which Mr. DeSantis won’t dig his fat little fingers? Remember that Our Glorious Elites couldn’t repeal net neutrality – which virtually everyone who has ever thought about it and who also isn’t a cable corporation PR hack supports – without faking comments from dead people. So next time right-wingers argue that dead people delivered the 2020 election to Joe Biden, you can say thou doth protest too much.

Our Senate Judiciary Committee advances a Supreme Court ethics bill without any Republican votes because of course Republicans wouldn’t ever vote for that. Sen. Grassley (R-IA), who used to be pretty good at his job, said the bill was all “about harassing and intimidating the Supreme Court,” while Sen. Graham (R-SC), whose one act of heroism was almost 20 years ago and did no good almost like that was the whole idea, called it an “assault on the Court itself.” Jesus Mary and Joseph what ever happened to “if you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime”? Or is that only for us little people?

Finally, Rudy Giuliani did not contest lawsuit claims from two Georgia poll workers that he smeared them after the 2020 election, but still argued that’s somehow not defamatory. Trigger warning: the whole story is fucking triggering. Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss are still afraid to go out to the grocery store out of fear that diaper-loaded racists will kill them, but don’t expect repentance, let alone shame or self-reflection, from Rudy Giuliani – he’s just saying what he needs to say to get this case moving to the conclusion he somehow thinks he’s going to get! And that’s why our justice system needs to slap his sorry ass down.

Action: concerning education, airline regulation, and legacy admissions.

Long story short: tell Florida Republicans to get rid of stupid teachings about slavery, and tell your Congressfolk to regulate airlines again and end legacy college admissions. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Care2 helps you tell Florida Republicans that Black slaves did not, in fact, “benefit” from slavery by learning “skills” they could use “later in life,” and to repeal educational standards forcing public school teachers to “instruct” their pupils as such. “Later in life,” Gov. DeSantis said! Of course slavery was always for life, and would still be so if we didn’t fight a damn war over it. Yes, we fought a war to end slavery! Don’t believe cynics and BS artists! Just as it’s good to celebrate what we did right, it’s evil to pretend what we did wrong wasn’t so bad, or was somehow “beneficial.” Folks with privilege can turn almost anything to their advantage. Did slaves have privilege? Of course not! And Florida needs to stop pretending otherwise.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk that our government needs to start regulating airline corporations again. We haven’t regulated airlines for about 50 years, and among other things, that means you don’t get a complementary dinner on a two-hour flight anymore, but now on a much longer flight you have to pay through the nose to get a Panini sandwich that looks like it's been in a vending machine for months. Right-wingers will utter the word “regulation” with a sneer like anyone else feels that way about it anymore! More likely good Americans have become tired enough of cancelled flights and stranded families and lousy customer service that they would welcome a little government intervention.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Fair College Admissions for Students Act, which would prevent colleges from giving preferential treatment to children of their donors and alumni. Our Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions, but did nothing about all the failsons of rich donors that elite colleges admit all the time; indeed, those failsons include our last two Republican Presidents. I’m sure right-wingers will pretend to agree with us – but will argue that laws mandating fair treatment aren’t necessary! You’d be within your rights to ask: then what are laws for?

Action: concerning voting rights, tax collection, and public media.

Long story short: tell California to let prisoners vote when they get out of prison, and tell your Congressfolk to reject efforts to defund our IRS or our public media. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Progress America helps you tell California state legislators to pass Assembly Constitutional Amendment 4, so that good Californians can vote on whether to restore voting rights to prisoners once they’ve completed their sentence. No one should ever lose their right to vote, but restoring prisoners’ voting rights once they’ve paid their debt to society would be a good start. And yes denying voting rights to felons after they get out is absolutely racist! Black folks make up one-eighth of the population but comprise almost one-third of folks in prison; why, I’d rather have polluters and financial predators comprise almost one-third of folks in prison! In the meantime, let’s be a lot less cruel.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your House Reps to reject any effort to repeal the IRS funding passed in the Inflation Reduction Act. Between this and their grandstanding about the FBI, Republicans are so hot to get rid of law enforcement funding these days! You might even call them the “defunding the police” party! But the added IRS funding has already started to catch some big-time tax cheats, and I know Republicans target our IRS because “no one likes paying taxes,” but people also don’t like schools and libraries closing or bottoming out over potholes or getting put on hold on 911, so maybe we should encourage Republicans to put their big-boy pants on.

Finally, Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to repeal or reduce public media funding. It seems like Republicans always threaten to cut public media funding and they never do, but that’s only because we speak out, so we need to keep speaking out. And, as with our Postmaster General’s zeal for getting rid of post offices in areas where no private mail-delivery corporation wants to go, a lot of public media work in areas where big private media corporations either don’t operate or put out a lot of cookie-cutter media “product” that doesn’t do a damn thing for the good Americans who live there. Sure I wish public media were less pro-establishment, but the folks who have nothing else likely don’t care.

Action: concerning monopolies, banksters, elections, and immigrants.

Long story short: tell our FTC to fight monopolies as vigorously as possible, tell our CFPB to crack down on predatory medical lenders, tell our CFTC to outlaw betting on elections, and tell our DHS to crack down on law enforcement abuse of immigrants. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

First things first. Our government has issued new antitrust guidelines, and Matt Stoller describes them at some length and helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to adopt the most vigorous anti-monopoly guidelines possible. Maybe if these guidelines were before that Microsoft/Activision judge she wouldn’t have issued such a stupid ruling – or maybe not! But our merger guidelines have been too lenient for too long, and with all the supply chain problems we’ve had lately, we’ve seen that has to stop. And if you want to call your Congressfolk and tell them to stop trying to defund our antitrust efforts in appropriations bills, what can stop you?

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau People to crack down on predatory medical payment products, like high-interest credit cards you can only use to pay medical bills and high-interest installment loans. Banksters who wave high-interest loans in your face at your moment of need are some of the lowest people on Earth; at the risk of blasphemy, I hope most of them have toasty asses after Judgment Day. In the meantime, we have a task on Earth: to prevent people like that from making a killing on other people’s misfortune. And if you want to call your Congressfolk and tell them to pass Medicare-for-All legislation, what can stop you?

Public Citizen helps you tell our Commodity Futures Trading Commission (or CFTC) not to allow betting on elections. Yeah, they’re really considering that. You’ve heard your co-workers talk about how (insert name of sport they’re always betting on) is fixed? Now imagine how that’ll be if we allow betting on elections! And no use arguing that most betting will be on relatively arcane stuff (i.e., how big a lead in the Hispanic vote a candidate has over the other), because an election is not a sporting event. We treat too much of politics like sports, not just in our allegiances, but in our constant hunger for the latest polling; it makes us sick, immoral, and decadent, so we have to stop it.

Finally, our ACLU helps you tell our Department of Homeland Security (or DHS) to stop collaborating with so-called Operation Lone Star, which has inflicted unconscionable cruelty upon would-be immigrants. Imagine running from death squads in one country only to be met by cops literally pushing you back into the Rio Grande, where they just so happened to have installed razor wire; does that sound like something a civilized people would do? Only the most hardened heart can read these details and say BUTZ WE HAVEZ TO DOZ TEH SOMETHINGZ ABOUTZ TEH ILLEGULZ!!!!! I don’t speak to such hardened hearts anymore; I leave them to God.

Around the table: now with *even more* bile!

When I hear that some Republican House Reps claim to be preparing for a “World War III”-level fight against their own Speaker over spending cuts, I have a few reactions. First, none of these clowns would do anything but soil their pants in a real foxhole. Second, too many folks want to be war veterans without doing any of the hard work that comes with being war veterans. Third, when you’re throwing around words like “war” to describe negotiating with your own people, you’re showing your utter contempt for civilization. Not that item three is a surprise; these people hate civilization, because it repeatedly reminds them there are other people in the world who mean a damn.

Alabama state legislature redraws their Congressional maps, but doesn’t include a second majority-Black district “or something quite close to it” as our Supreme Court mandated. Well, that’ll teach people to count their chickens! Folks were salivating over getting another majority-Black district in Louisiana, too, but these states are just going to run out the clock on this matter, knowing our Supreme Court will allow them to use the maps they just made because “it’s too close to the election.” You think our Supreme Court knew that ahead of time? Of course they did!

Now the Florida State Board of Education has adopted “standards” which require public school teachers to tell students that slaves “developed skills” that “could be applied for their personal benefit,” and they deserve all the ridicule they’re going to get. There’s an upside to virtually anything, but generally the bigger the horror, the smaller the upside, and the mere existence of an upside doesn’t make just anything OK, and making slavery OK is of course what Florida fascists want. I eagerly await the first class clown to ask if surviving starvings and lashings from cruel masters was a “skill” that “could be applied for their personal benefit.”

People ask me what I think about Country Music Television (or CMT) yanking that Jason Aldean song about how us city folks shouldn’t try any of our putative shenanigans in a small town off the air. Long story short: my loathing for right-wing weaklings who act tough is bottomless, Republicans sure do have some cojones whining about “censorship” as they’re banning books about racism, and though I have only watched CMT for perhaps an hour out of my life, I’ve only heard terrific songs during that time – good, complex, hummable relationship songs – and I really doubt that’s just my dumb luck.

So Donald Trump is now obliquely threatening “to do things” to Special Prosecutor Jack Smith “that have never been done before” and also suggesting that since he has “a tremendously passionate group of voters” maybe it “would be very dangerous” to put him in prison. So Mr. Trump has become a surrealist, but instead of painting a pipe with the caption “this is not a pipe,” he’s issuing terroristic threats and saying “this is not a terroristic threat.” Anyway, his “tremendously passionate group of voters” are whiny diaper-loaded brats. A lot of them have guns, sure, but they’re about as ready overthrow a government as your average high school football team.

Finally, when I hear that former NBA superstar/current TNT analyst Charles Barkley has become a “role model” after all, I can’t help but think that whole thing’s quite overplayed. A handful of barfights got him negative press as a player, but everyone I know who’s met him say he’s kind, generous, and affable, suggesting, again, that maybe people treat you the way you treat them. The article doesn’t delineate his political transformation, either, from Friend of Rush Limbaugh to supporter-of-affirmative-action-but-also-for-poor-whites to “I was a Republican – until they lost their minds” (that was 2006!) to protector of diversity at Auburn and defender of gay and trans folk. I’m just grateful to know that someone, somewhere, didn’t let all that money make him an asshole.

Action: concerning Medicare, Social Security, worker rights, and abortion rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to increase Medicare and Social Security funding, protect worker rights, and protect abortion rights. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Medicare and Social Security Fair Share Act, which would help improve Medicare and Social Security funding by taxing income over $400,000 into both systems, applying payroll taxes to investment income, and closing a loophole that hedge fund banksters use to avoid paying into the systems. These are all much, much better ideas than “going behind closed doors” and cutting Medicare and Social Security benefits without the people hearing about it. After all, you worked for it, you fought for it, you paid into it, and you deserve to enjoy your benefits when you get older.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act, which would stiffen penalties for corporations that refuse to let their workers collectively bargain for better pay and working conditions. The main problem with labor law in America is corporations can break it without paying for it, but that’d change with the PRO Act, which would make refusing to negotiate with unions, intimidating workers, and propagandizing them in mandatory meetings a lot more costly. And what’s the alternative? Letting corporations get bigger and richer and hoping that wealth will “trickle down” to workers? Hopefully we’ve seen by now that doesn’t work.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to reject a national abortion ban, while UltraViolet helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Abortion Justice Act, which latter bill would keep abortion between a woman and her doctor. Strange how all the right-wingers who demanded that Obamacare stay out of the whole patient-doctor thing are all too ready now to get between women and their doctors. OK, I guess it’s not “strange” per se – the right-wing desire to turn women back into submissive breeders explains the “strangeness” away. It’s still hypocritical, though. Is it too much to ask that hypocrites don’t get all the say about everything?

Action: concerning pollution, apartheid, and cruelty to animals.

Long story short: tell our EPA to limit carbon dioxide pollution from existing power plants, tell President Biden to withhold military assistance from Israel until it stops oppressing Palestine, and tell our BLM to stop using cyanide bombs on animals. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous carbon dioxide pollution standards possible. Our EPA has proposed limiting CO2 pollution from existing plants for the first time – Obama-era limits only addressed new plants, you may recall – and that is, as a famous philosopher once said, a BFD. Of course the big polluting corporations will flood our EPA with comments about KILLINGZ TEH JOBZ and STRANGLINGZ TEH INNOVASHUNZ!!!!, so we’ve got to remind our EPA that fighting pollution reduces health care costs for everyone, creates jobs for folks who implement the new standards, and helps corporations innovate their processes. I think that does it.

Amnesty International helps you tell President Biden to withhold military/security funding to Israel until it dismantles its apartheid system in Palestine. Hey, Jimmy Carter said it almost 20 years ago! And he actually brokered a peace deal between Israel and Egypt back in the day, so he might know what he’s talking about. You don’t have to believe Mr. Carter, of course – you need only note that Israeli forces are bombing a refugee camp in the West Bank as we speak. Who bombs a refugee camp? Two kinds of people: one, someone actually trying to create terrorists, and two, someone whose sense of self-preservation has gone so wrong they commit atrocities. If Israel is the latter, we can work with that.

Finally, the Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management (or BLM) to ban the use of cyanide bombs in animal control. Yes, we really do that, and it’s as awful as it sounds: the notorious M-44 cyanide bomb lures coyotes and foxes in with a sweet aroma and then shoots out a deadly poison leading to a long and painful death. And of course it’s not even as discriminating as all that, for it also lures in other animals and gives them that same painful death sentence. If a coyote attacked your dog or your child, you still wouldn’t be a civilized person if you wished for such an execution. Civilization demands more of us than that, even in our most inconsolable pain.

Action: concerning voting rights, health care, and right-wing dramas.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject anti-voting rights bills and pass pro-voting rights bills, tell our Senators to make sure all Americans can get insulin, and tell our Senators to get rid of holds so drama kings like Tommy Tuberville can’t prevent over a hundred military appointments. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called American Confidence in Elections (or ACE) Act and instead pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The Voting Rights Advancement Act would restore the teeth our Supreme Court punched out of the Voting Rights Act, while the Freedom to Vote Act would enact universal early voting, clamp down on gerrymandering, restore ex-felons' voting rights, and restrict dark money campaign contributions. But the ACE Act would enact strict Voter ID requirements and open the floodgates for even more billionaire spending on elections. It ain’t hard to tell Goofus from Gallant here.

Public Citizen helps you tell our Senators to make sure everyone who needs insulin in America can get it. It’s a life-saving medicine! If our government can’t prevent big pharma corporations from charging an arm and a leg for it, then what is our government for? Right-wingers would answer that our government has no responsibility to ensure diabetics can get insulin, but would also say our government must ensure that bigots can force their bigotry down our throat, though they don’t put it like that. I would hate for any of them, or any of their loved ones, to get diabetes themselves, but sadly, experience teaches us that such a tragedy is the only thing that ever convinces a right-winger to act human.

Finally, Care2 helps you tell Senate Democrats to break through all of Tommy Tuberville’s super-dramatic holds on military promotions, but how about we do even better and call our Senators to tell them to outlaw holds completely? Democrats have 51 Senators, so they can do this, and if Democratic Senators have put a hold on even two bills or nominations over the last two decades, they’ve completely escaped my attention. Mr. Tuberville, all by himself, and just this year, has put a hold on over 150 military nominations, because abortion or something, but Republicans have done this to plenty of bills over the years, and when one side repeatedly abuses the American people with a tool, we’ve got to take the tool away from them.

Around the table: featuring one-third good news! (Unless IRL's shutting down counts; then it's half.)

When I hear that ”Close to 100,000 Voter Registrations Were Challenged in Georgia – Almost All by Just Six Right-Wing Activists,” I am reminded that citizens participating more in democracy is generally a good thing – but citizens trampling on the rights of other citizens just so their preferred candidates can win is a bad thing. If you’ve struggled with homelessness, mental illness, drug addiction, or cancer – or were doing traveling work – you’d be pretty annoyed at some right-winger making you jump through extra hoops just to vote. And if you’ve got time to challenge tens of thousands of voter registrations at once, why aren’t you, I don’t know, feeding the poor?

Harold Meyerson at the American Prospect describes “Biden’s Unheralded War on Poverty,” one in which a few indices of economic inequality have actually reversed themselves by 25 percent. I think the pandemic made a lot of workers think a lot harder about their jobs, but I also agree that spending nearly $2 billion on an actual stimulus bill did a lot of good in just two years, and we’ll find out shortly what the infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act were able to accomplish. And remember: when right-wingers complain that “no one wants to work,” they really mean no one wants to work for dung pellets.

The Progress Action Fund runs one of the greatest political ads ever made, in which a man and a woman about to get it on in their bedroom has their condom stolen by a Republican Congressperson who won’t leave. My description surely doesn’t do it justice, so go see the ad, and then wonder, as I often do, why Democrats don’t run ads like this all the time. OK, I know why they don’t run ads like that – because they still listen to the center-right consultants who tell them that “independent voters are turned off by incivility.” You know what really turns off independent voters? Democrat weakness.

Uh oh: event organizing software corporation IRL shuts down after an internal investigation finds that 19 out of every 20 of its users are fake – in that they’re either “automated or from bots.” Of course IRL raised $200 million and valued itself at almost $1.2 billion, lately laying about a quarter of its workforce a mere year after tripling its size, all of which means a big chunk of our financial sector are either unbelievably stupid or simply don’t care about doing the hard work of maintaining a civilization. Considering how much money banksters have thrown around over a company that’s not terribly innovative, I’m inclined to think it’s the latter.

Florida veterans allege that the state’s recently-revived state guard is becoming a “personal militia” for Gov. Ron DeSantis. Why does an “emergency-focused, civilian defense force” need to be barked at by R. Lee Ermey wannabes? One of the veterans making the allegations thinks thinks Mr. DeSantis doesn’t know what’s going on or would disapprove of what’s going on, both of which I find highly improbable. Again, even though only a quarter of the electorate is bat-guano insane, that’s not the same all over America; I suspect fascism is what a majority of Floridians want. I hope the rest of them get organized.

Finally, speaking of fascist Florida, a Congressional hopeful tells an adoring crowd that what we really need to do in America is “extinguish the left.” I’ve been saying for a long time that right-wingers want to exterminate us, and now even they’re saying it out loud. This Anthony Sabatini fellow – with his stupid COVID “jokes” and his masturbating over a new civil war – is running in Florida’s deep red 11th district; current Rep. Daniel Webster has gone out of his way to court Donald Trump’s support, and while I would enjoy seeing Mr. Webster finish last in his own primary despite/because of his ass-kissing, that’d likely mean we’ll be getting more and more Sabatini drama over the next few years, and that isn’t a good trade.

Action: concerning Medicare, Social Security, drama, and taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Medicare and Social Security Fair Share Act, stop Tommy Tuberville’s big military hold drama, and start taxing billionaires a lot harder. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Medicare and Social Security Fair Share Act, which would, as its title suggests, start taxing income over $400,000 into Medicare and Social Security and start taxing investment income into the system as well. The bill would also close certain loopholes that benefit hedge fund managers and fossil fuel corporations so they start paying more. I’ll never express any alarmism over these programs, because I’ve been hearing hysterical alarms about their "impending" "insolvency" all my damn life, but doing these things would help Medicare and Social Security be even better for good Americans. I know it’s Friday, but let’s get in our Congressfolk’s grills about this.

Care2 helps you tell your Senators to lean on Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville and tell him to stop blocking military nominations. He’s doing it, supposedly, because of our military’s policy to help soldiers who need abortions and who live in anti-abortion states with travel expenses, but Jesus Mary and Joseph how about just winning the argument and getting legislation passed? Could he be pulling this crap because he knows he can’t do these things? I kid, of course – this is exactly the kind of thing evil people do when they can’t coerce good people into doing what they want. Your Senators need to know this is evil. Your Senators also need to know that if they let this appalling drama go on, they never get to call themselves “pro-military” again.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to start taxing billionaires a lot harder than we currently do. Ain’t nobody a billionaire through hard work – after all, you’ve done hard work, and plenty of it I bet, and did it ever get you as far as just sucking up to a bankster? No, it did not. And that’s a sad commentary on our civilization. We can start to fix our civilization by reversing our 60-plus years of cutting rich folks’ taxes and start taxing them again. No, they won’t “move overseas,” because even billionaires don’t just up and move whenever they like. No, they won’t “refuse to create jobs,” because they’re already doing that with all the light taxation they enjoy! Stupidity can’t keep winning in America.

Action: concerning abortion rights, defense spending, and executive pay.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect abortion rights, cut our bloated defense budget, and fight excessive CEO pay. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Republican national abortion ban, while UltraViolet helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Abortion Justice Act, which would protect abortion rights. With six of 10 Americans saying our Supreme court decided the Dobbs wrongly, with 20 of 50 states banning or restricting abortion rights over the last year, with two states putting women in prison for getting an abortion, with women having to get life-saving hysterectomies instead of the medically-necessary abortions that wouldn’t have put their lives at risk in the first place, it shouldn’t be hard for our Congressfolk to do the right thing, but they’ll screw it up if we don’t tell them.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to cut $100 billion from our defense budget. That would still leave around $800 billion for defense, so I don’t think we’ll suffer too badly. We already spend more money on killing machines than the next nine countries combined – their number includes China and Russia, by the way, and we spend 10 times what Russia does – and our Defense Department has itself identified over $100 billion in waste, so you could say that cutting $100 billion from our defense budget is a no-brainer. Of course, it’s not a no-brainer for the no-brain-having-people who represent us in Congress, which is why we have to get in their grills all the time.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act, which would tax corporations at a higher rate when they pay their CEOs more than 50 times more than their average worker. That’s not a whole lot to ask, frankly, when my preference would be to tax millionaire income at 91% and tax corporations at least as hard as regular folks – hey, they want to be “people” so badly! – but the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act would improve our civilization, so we ought to enact it. When CEOs make over $100 million a year, and make 300 times what their lowest-paid workers make, we’ve got to do something about that. Don’t listen to folks who tell you it’s “socialist.” They all drive roads, after all.

Action: concerning taxes, Social Security, and Supreme Court ethics.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject Republican tax “reform” plans, boycott Kevin McCarthy’s Social Security-cutting Commission, and pass Supreme Court ethics legislation. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Both Americans for Tax Fairness and Public Citizen help you tell your Congressfolk to reject the latest tax scam coming out of the House Ways and Means Committee, which, sigh, provides massive tax breaks to foreign investors and maybe $40 a year in tax breaks to you and I. Why, that smells like the first Bush Mobb tax cut, doesn’t it? Aside from that $300 check I kept returning, I pocketed $60 from that in 2001 and in 2002, even though the “average” tax cut was supposedly around $1,800 annually; I wonder who got the rest of it! I kid, of course – Republicans love cutting your taxes a little so they can cut their big donors’ taxes a lot. We don’t have to put up with that, of course, so how about we not?

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to boycott Kevin McCarthy’s Commission to Slash Social Security Behind Closed Doors Without Any Input From the American People. OK, he’s not calling it that, but that’s what it is, and just as we made Social Security and Medicare benefit cuts too toxic for Congress to consider during the debt limit “debate,” we need to make it toxic for any of our Congressfolk to take part in this clown show of a “commission.” Too many politicians pretend they’re “serious” because they’ll cut someone else’s earned benefits, but they’re not. Actual serious people keep their damn promises, and so should our Congressfolk.

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell your Senators to enact new ethics standards for our Supreme Court. We’ve listed plenty of reasons to make our Supreme Court Justices adhere to the same ethics standards every other federal judge has to follow – we’ve lately been reminded of another one, involving the late Justice Ginsburg – but all we need say now is: did you see that shitshow that was the end of their term? If they didn’t pal around with so many rich folks giving them so many gifts, they wouldn’t have issued two of the worst rulings of the new millennium 10 days ago. They claim they’re “incorruptible,” but we know they’re human, so we still need laws to protect us from them.

Around the table: the stupid, it burns!

Remember the Hunter Biden whistleblower Rudy Giuliani said was dead? Apparently he’s not dead, and he now faces a litany of federal criminal charges. That fact doesn’t mean he’s wrong! The fact that he’s been convicted of crimes before doesn’t mean he’s wrong! But the fact that his most ardent Republican supporters can’t describe the case he’s making against President Biden? Yeah, that could mean he’s wrong. All the drama around his appearance doesn’t exactly inspire trust, either.

When you hear that “Right-Wing Websites Connected to Former Trump Lawyer Are Scamming Loyal Followers With Phony Celebrity Pitches,” you may well know what to expect: political operatives whose names you may remember, players who’ve faced criminal charges multiple times, corporations you can’t find at the addresses they give, even the excuse that “(w)e don’t care” about fradulent ads “because we think our readership is smart enough to not be scammed.” Yeah, this article’s got it all, sadly.

Here’s some good news: hedge fund corporation Insight has withdrawn from managing Pennsylvania’s public school pension funds, after Gov. Shapiro applied pressure. Insight has not only returned Pennsylvania pensioners little on their investment, it’s also been fined by our SEC and gotten mixed up in crypto. Mr. Shapiro also fought to get banksters out of Montgomery County pensions during his tenure as county executive a decade ago; why, he might be a good Presidential candidate in 2028! And if right-wing heads explode at the prospect of a Jewish President, that’s not exactly a drawback.

Sonali Kohatkar explains the simple reason we have homelessness in America: because “(t)he rent is too damn high” and “wages are too damn low.” You should still read her article from front to back, though – I should already have known that sexual and domestic assault was a significant factor in homelessness, and giving tenants and community land trusts first and second crack at buying homes (i.e., before hedge funds) is a good idea. But I think higher Fed interest rates, whatever their other merits or drawbacks, will drive down hedge fund involvement in home-buying – hedge funds do more damage when loans are cheap, after all.

When I hear that seven Republican Attorneys General have threatened Target with legal action over pride displays, in the name of “protect(ing) children from harmful content meant to sexualize them,” I feel compelled to respond that only an asshole assumes that pride displays automatically “sexualize” children. If watching cishetero couples kiss doesn’t “sexualize” children, then neither does a pride display showing no one kissing! We have to wonder, of course, whether Republicans’ real problem is that they don’t get to sexualize children the way they want to, by which I mean they don’t get to sexualize girls into permanent submission as breeders.

Finally, some bad news: the Trump-appointed judge overseeing his classified documents trial has taken steps to ensure jury selection will occur in the reddest part of her judicial district. We all worried a jury of 12 would have one secret red hat gumming up the works, and though I’m sure it’s possible to find 12 non-red hats even in an area that went 62% for Trump, it sure ain’t likely. The good news? These aren’t the only charges he’ll face!

Action: concerning airline safety, corporate greed, and Congressional ethics.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk not to weaken airline pilot certification requirements, stop corporate price-gouging, and strengthen the Office of Congressional Ethics. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Progress America helps you tell your Senators to abandon Kyrsten Sinema’s effort to make flying less safe. Apparently Sen. Sinema, galaxy-brain that she is, would like to weaken pilot-certification requirements, specifically by letting pilots count hours spent in simulations as hours actually spent flying in the air! You know, just like you count all the hours you spend playing first-person shooter games as time spent at war! Pilots, of course, want to keep the stronger standards, so who doesn’t? Ah, you already know – airline corporate executives, who just so happen to have given Sen. Sinema six figures. Does that mean they should get what they want? No! But if we don't speak out, they will.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop corporate price-gouging. You’ve heard that even the Wall Street Journal has lately smiled on the theory of “greedflation,” which holds that the main (though not only) driver of inflation is actually just corporations raising prices because they can. Of course, the rest of us observed high inflation and record profits happening at the same time and figured that out, but if your salary depends on you not understanding it, etc. Anyway, hard as it may be to believe, Congress used to actually stop this sort of thing from happening! And Congress needs to stop it from happening again, because we deserve at least that much.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to strengthen the Office of Congressional Ethics, an independent watchdog agency that investigates alleged ethics violations by House Reps. Naturally our House weakened that agency six months ago – George Santos really liked that, which should tell everything you need to know – and now some Congressfolk are making noises about weakening it further, since they’re still having a sad over not getting what they wanted out of the debt limit “deal,” I guess. So we’ve got to get in our Congressfolk’s grills about this. We beat back their efforts before, in 2017; we didn’t do it in 2023, but if you make something good happen once, you can make it happen again.

Action: concerning taxes, energy efficiency, and voting.

Long story short: tell our IRS to make tax filing a lot easier, tell the Biden Administration to strengthen federal building codes, and tell state legislators to abandon any proposed internet-voting scheme. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell our Internal Revenue Service to offer free direct tax-filing software, no matter how much the big tax prep corporations whine about it. Most of us don’t have complex investments designed to evade legal scrutiny, so we ought to be able to just file our tax returns with our government and be done with it. And these corporations have been getting caught red-handed trying to divert people from free filing options even as they claim to promote free filing options, so Jesus Mary and Joseph why should they get all the say about everything? And we’re about the only rich country that makes people jump through these hoops about taxes, so let’s maybe be “number one” only at good stuff.

The Sierra Club helps you tell the Biden Administration to update energy efficiency standards for all federally-financed buildings. Even a conservative would agree that if we’re paying for it, we get to set standards, but today’s right-wingers would reflexively call any energy efficiency standards evil. But what’s wrong with living or working somewhere that doesn’t bleed heat, or gets electricity from the sun? What’s wrong with keeping pollutants out of federal buildings? Maybe all that doesn’t make some executive rich, but we’ve spent the last half-century letting these executives dictate to us how we live our lives, and that is not freedom. I mean, yeah, it’s freedom for them, but not for the rest of us. And that is why we fight.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell state legislators to abandon any thought of forcing internet-based voting on their constituents. Because it’s easier to steal an election conducted over computers than it is to steal an election with a paper trail, that’s why! Gosh, it’s almost like that’s the whole idea. Don’t get tempted to think that we’re the greatest nation on Earth so we should be able to do elections over the internet. A better thing to think is that we’re the greatest nation on Earth so we should be able to conduct free and fair elections! Which easily-hackable internet elections won’t be, no matter how many rich people get in the grills of state legislators. So we’ve got to get in their grills first.

Around the table: the Tulsa massacre *was* racist! And other truths.

When I hear that ”(t)he stock market is not loving Thursday’s job data,” I must ask if we need any more evidence that worshiping the stock market is evil. It’s all big corporations do now, and it hollows out our economy and ensures misery for most of us, so we need to fight it with every breath. (ADP’s job creation data, which reports that our economy gained almost 500,000 jobs in June, reported more than twice as much job growth than the Department of Labor, which reported a hair over 200,000 jobs. Either way, it’s not hard to tell right from wrong here, unless you worship mammon like our corporate CEOs do.)

Thinking maybe North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson was just calling for us to read the works of Hitler and Stalin and Mao more closely in his remarks before Moms for Liberty? Well, when you learn that Mr. Robinson has a history of saying racist and anti-Semitic crap on social media, you won’t think that anymore. Isn’t this about the point where Republicans decide they need to support someone who loves Nazis but isn’t so obvious about it? And who needs to read Mein Kampf just to be sure Hitler was an evil bastard?

When I heard that the New York Times clutched its pearls over Brazilian judges banning Jair Bolsonaro from running for office for the next eight years for the crime of election fraud, the very first thing I thought was: where were they when Brazilian judges were ginning up impeachment charges against one liberal President and throwing another liberal in jail so he couldn’t beat Mr. Bolsonaro in a Presidential race? The answer, of course: spewing forth over three dozen articles sympathizing with the Brazilian justice system. Read the whole thing, because the details are even worse than the summary.

Canadian judge counts a thumbs-up emoji as a contract agreement, meaning the emoji-ing farmer is out over $60,000, and while I might agree that an emoji could constitute a contract agreement in other circumstances, I could not count it as a contract agreement when the questioner merely asked if the emoji-er received the contract. Receiving a contract and approving it are two different things! Sounds like a judge is trying to force a point without adhering to the law or common sense; sound familiar, good Americans?

Donald Trump says he’ll do his next Muslim ban even bigly-er than his last one if he gets re-elected, though I’m not sure that declaration diddles the rage gland of even his most devoted followers; maybe anti-Muslim hate can be reactivated, but more likely they’ve moved on to new hatreds, like anti-racist teaching in schools. But don’t expect that declaration to attract moderates, either – he can talk all he wants about people “blowing up our shopping centers,” but I think everyone knows by now that the face of American terror is white and male, and its heart is right-wing and bigoted.

Finally, Oklahoma’s Superintendent of Schools suggests that we shouldn’t tell kids that the Tulsa massacre of 1921 was racist because “that is Critical Race Theory” and “kids should never be made to feel bad or told they are inferior based on the color of their skin.” He’s tried to backtrack, largely because good Oklahomans seem to protest his every appearance and good for them, but let me just say that when I learned about slavery as a child, I didn’t take it so damn personal because I knew that I didn’t enslave anyone. Sure, I came to understand privilege later, but right-wingers will never get there, because that’s wisdom, and wisdom is their Kryptonite.

Action: concerning child labor and pollution.

Long story short: tell the Biden Administration to enforce child labor laws, and tell our EPA to enact vigorous mercury and tailpipe emissions rules. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell the Biden Administration to enforce federal child labor laws against the states that would destroy them. Iowa’s new law is justly notorious, allowing younger kids to work more hours at more dangerous workplaces, but a lot of states want to do the same thing; I guess right-wingers “blame” higher wages for that, but those wages are the result of millions of Americans taking stock of their lives during the pandemic and deciding they wanted more from their jobs than the back of their bosses’ hands. So naturally they turn to child labor! Their efforts deserve humiliation then oblivion, so let’s get our government to deliver that.

Moms Clean Air Force helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous mercury emissions rules possible. As with lead, no amount of mercury is safe (just ask Zombie Isaac Newton!), but coal power plants still belch it out. No use going all TEH WAR ON COALZ!!!! whenever we contemplate limiting mercury emissions; one would think a coal corporation would constantly refine its processes to deliver energy more efficiently and pollutes less! But one would also realize that coal corporations, like all the others, mainly try to goose up stock prices at the expense of every other aim, and that’s why our government has to step in on our behalf and make them do the right thing.

Finally, the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell our EPA to enact the most vigorous passenger car and truck tailpipe emissions rules possible, so that we pollute the air less and save good American car-drivers money. Passenger cars and trucks account for well over half of all vehicle-caused climate emissions, and if you can go farther with less power, you’ll spend less money as well as pollute less. And why would anyone oppose these things? Are folks really objectively pro-pollution? Well, some are objectively pro-more money for rich folks, and that leads them to be objectively pro-pollution, whether they see that or not. Of course, they don’t get all the say about everything in America – if we speak out.

Thieves in the Temple will be off all next week, so everyone, enjoy your holiday!

Action: concerning health care, medical debt, education, and taxes.

Long story short: tell PA state Senators to keep preventive health care cost-free and help good Pennsylvanians shed their medical debt, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the College for All Act and reject the so-called Tax Cuts for Working Families Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Pennsylvania residents, take note of some good news for once: the state House has passed HB 1050, which would insure that good Pennsylvanians can continue to get preventive health care cost-free, as well as HB 78, which would help good Pennsylvanians get rid of their medical debt. Generally if you don’t get medical treatment, you don’t get well, so don’t listen to anyone who tells you that folks with a lot of medical debt are somehow “deadbeats.” And cost-free preventive health care reduces health care costs down the line, regardless of the bleating of the “religious” “freedom” crowd. Now these bills go to the state Senate, so the Pennsylvania Health Access Network helps you tell your state Senators to keep preventive health care free and ensure that medical debt doesn’t cripple the good citizens of the Commonwealth.

RISE helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the College for All Act, which would make community colleges tuition-free and public colleges tuition-free for families making under $125,000 a year. Some people will never listen to anything about how college shouldn’t cost an arm and a leg, but they should know that public colleges were once, in fact, free in California until the late 1960s. They should also remember that college never cost so damn much as it does now. And if you’re susceptible to propaganda about Starbucks baristas with Gender Studies degrees, note well that public community colleges, which actually do a good job at vocational training, are the freest colleges under this legislation.

Finally, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to vote against the so-called Tax Cuts for Working Families Act, which would extend the Trump tax cuts for the rich. We’ve been trying to get real tax cuts for working families for years – like that massive Child Tax Credit expansion that put $250 or $300 checks in working family bank accounts. That was $250 or $300 per child, too! But the Republican plan is always the same: throw crumbs to working families, but cut rich people’s taxes by tens of thousands of dollars, and that’s what this latest bill would do. The good news is most Americans don’t buy their BS anymore, or else Democrats would have a lot fewer seats in our House and Senate. Still, we’ve got to get in their grills.

Action: concerning voting rights, judicial ethics, and endless war.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Judicial Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act, and to repeal the 2002 Iraq AUMF. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Yes, it’s back, and Congress should keep bringing it back until it passes. The Voting Rights Advancement Act would restore our Justice Department’s ability to reject state voting law changes, and our Justice Department could do that in any state or locality that’s demonstrated a pattern of voting rights abuses. That would close the hole in the Voting Rights Act our Supreme Court blew open in their notorious Shelby County v. Holder ruling. And it would help us restore the voting rights a lot of states have spent the last several years gutting.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Judicial Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act, which would force our Supreme Court Justices to follow the same ethics rules every other federal judge follows. Is there a news hook? You bet there is! Paul Singer apparently paid for Sam Alito to go on a very expensive fishing trip to Alaska in 2008 when Mr. Singer had business before our Supreme Court. Long, long experience has taught us that we should not trust our leaders so much as make them do right by us; hence we do not “trust” Sam Alito that they weren’t really pals or that his First Class plane seat was just sitting there unused, we make sure he never does such a thing again. Why should this be hard?

Finally, the Secure Families Initiative helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) in Iraq. That resolution is almost old enough to get itself blind drunk at a bar without getting carded, and all it’s good for is encouraging Presidents to fling us off into more stupid wars, so getting it wiped from our laws shouldn’t be a big deal. And let me state, at least one more time, that our Constitution mandates that Congress declares wars and Presidents conduct wars. And it doesn’t say Congress declares “police actions” or “authorizes military force”; it says war. There are some old words we’ve got to get back to using, precisely because they’ll make us fly right again. “War” is one of them.