Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning war on Iran, actually rehabilitating prisoners, and sane energy policy.

As you know, the House passed a War Powers resolution last week aimed at keeping our President from launching any more military attacks on Iran -- and now word on the street is that it has the votes to pass in the Senate as well. But don't get complacent! The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you call your Senators and tell them to restrain our President's war-happy ways. Yes, our President can veto this resolution, but let's make him do that! And let's not get caught up in exactly how many Republicans will vote the right way this time, not after Sen. Tillis (R-NC) made all that noise about voting for the resolution of disapproval aiming to overturn our President's "national emergency" declaration and then voted against it. Let's also not get caught up in which Republicans (cough Rand Paul cough!) will vote for this resolution precisely because our President will veto it. The whole point of America is not to sit around the TV and game out outcomes like this is Draft Kings or something -- the whole point of America is that citizens must act.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell American county sheriffs to stop eliminating in-person visits between prisoners and their families. Sheriffs like to tell you we don't have the staff (and here you thought privatization would have solved that!) and we're afraid they'll pass drugs to each other (actual translation: we'll find out how many of our staff are peddling drugs) and, perhaps most importantly, we've got this fancy new video service that lets prisoners essentially Face-Time their loved ones at exorbitant expense! When big telecom corporations offer monetary incentives to use their service, you're right to suspect all their excuses, and when you recall that real live contact from family helps prisoners stay out of jail once their sentence is over a lot more than "video conferencing" does, you'll suspect all their excuses even more. I must say when private prisons claim they just can't have real live family visits, they're not exactly conjuring up the Genius of the Free Market. Where's their can-do spirit?

Finally, you no doubt know by now that Australia is on freaking fire -- so much so that normally recalcitrant koala bears will come gulp down any bottled water you bring to them! -- and yet they're still trying to build coal mines there, most notably in central Queensland, where German chemical corporation Siemens plans to provide rail signaling equipment for the proposed Adani coal mine. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell Siemens to end its involvement in the Adani coal project. Here you would add your voice to the voices of climate activists in Germany who've been striking every Friday for months; they've been wielding the Big Stick of Bad PR effectively enough that Siemens's CEO has sounded a bit rueful about his involvement in the Adani project -- but he could be jiving us, you know. And yet, if he really is counting on another coal project to get him his 19th vacation home, he should remember that cheap gas is killing coal, and the falling cost of renewables sure ain't helping, either. We can help him get with the times by telling him to abandon coal mining in a burning country.

Action: concerning religious freedom, health care, and pollution.

Avaaz helps you tell big pension fund corporations to divest from China's long-term effort to oppress its Muslim Uyghur population. What do the big pension funds have to do with the Uyghurs? They invest in big tech corporations that provide China with surveillance tools including (sigh) facial recognition software and DNA testing. And what do the Chinese do to the Uyghurs? Oh, you know, imprison them in internment camps, ahem, re-education camps, and inflict torture, rape, forced sterilization, and forced labor, among other things, all as part of a "people's war on terror," a phrase I hope dies a horrible and humiliating death one day. Investing in anything China does is dicey enough -- China's government is really the worst of capitalism and the worst of Communism rolled up into one monstrous entity -- but investing in detainment of citizens for religious reasons should make pension funds run away in horror. And they will, if enough of us speak out -- and if we can help cut off this money-flow, China will have a tougher time keeping them going, and we will save lives.

Meanwhile, H.R. 4996, the Helping Medicaid Offer Maternity Services (or Helping MOMS) Act, would give states the option to offer one year of post-birth Medicaid coverage to both mother and child; the bill has 11 Democratic House sponsors and 8 Republican ones, which might make it actually bipartisan! Of course Medicare-for-All would make this problem moot, but this bill will still do a lot of folks a lot of good, and if a few Republicans get re-elected because they're able to tout their support for expanding health care coverage for poor mothers and children -- and doing so effectively, too, since most health complications relating to pregnancy occur within the first 100 days after childbirth -- that's not too high a price to pay for progress. Of course, a state could just say no and say 60 days of coverage (which current law mandates) is just fine, and if state-level politicians want to run on denying health care to poor mothers and children, I say let 'em. So Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand health care to poor mothers and children by passing the Helping MOMS Act.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: the state Assembly still plans to take up the notorious SB 790, which would commit all manner of foul deeds against our clean air and clean water, even though we've told them many times to reject the bill, so Penn Environment helps you tell your state Assemblyfolks to protect our air and water by rejecting SB 790. SB 790 would, among other nefarious acts, prevent localities from protecting themselves from gas and oil drillers (now there's small-government conservatism for you!), let oil and gas corporations replace any water they pollute with unsafe drinking water, weaken state standards for reporting oil and gas spills, and allow the state to spray drilling wastewater on state roads to keep dust down. They're not trying to help corporations pollute because of "burdensome regulations" -- they're trying to help them pollute because they care more about big donors than their bosses, i.e., you. That only means we have to remind them, again and again and again if we have to.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence, Mississippi prisons, and impeachment.

Happy Monday! Today you can call your Senators and ask them to pass the following bills: H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; and H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act. These bills have all passed the House, and would (among other things!) protect voting rights, fight discrimination, raise the minimum wage, protect immigrants, protect our public lands, reinstate real internet freedom, and help good Americans get better health care -- but Mob Boss Mitch won't let any of them come to a vote, because (and I quote) "I get to decide what we vote on." He's wrong -- we tell our Senators what they want, and if we tell them enough times, they do it.

Meanwhile, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell our Department of Justice to investigate prison conditions in Mississippi. It's so bad in Mississippi prisons that it's even made the news! Our "liberal" media, of course, would rather talk about celebrities than about brown drinking water and no air conditioning in prisons, but human beings are suffering and dying, and no it doesn't matter that they're criminals! Jesus Mary and Joseph rights are for all people, and mercy is for all people, and a civilization that treats its prisoners well is a strong one, and a civilization that treats them badly is a weak one. Yes, that is the opposite of what the "tough on crime" crowd has been telling you all these years, but they were always weaklings, preying on our various insecurities. Hate to pile on, but no "rehabilitation" will happen if you can't breathe or eat healthy food or drink clean water. And folks who would call that "prisoners living the high life" really need to start with the man in the mirror.

Finally, Moms Rising helps you tell your Senators to conduct a fair impeachment trial. That would include documents and witnesses, of course, and you'll never guess what then-Rep./now-Sen. Lindsey Graham said back in 1999, when he was anxious to remove a Democratic President: "in every trial that there's ever been in the Senate, regarding impeachment, witnesses were called," and not calling them against President Clinton would have "basically chang(ed) impeachment." But wait, there's more! "You can have three days of lawyers talking to each other on both sides...but when you have a witness who was there, who was engaged in it, who was in the middle of it telling you about what they were doing and why, that's a totally different case, and it's the difference between getting the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." Maybe he'll explain this flip-flop -- or, after the manner of his new Personal Lord and Savior, he'll say you're an idiot for noticing it.

Action: concerning Social Security and PFAS chemicals.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 860/S. 269, the Social Security 2100 Act, then Social Security Works still helps you do that. The Social Security 2100 Act would increase benefits, shield more Social Security income from taxation, and start taxing income above $400,000 into the system. If you want, though, you could tell your Congressfolk to improve the bill -- there's no reason income above $137,700 and below $400,000 should be untaxed, and there's no reason we should tax anyone's Social Security income at all. You might also mention (there's a "comments" section for this at the above link) that you oppose bills like the so-called TRUST Act, which would let Congressfolk fast-track Social Security cuts "behind closed doors" (in Sen. Ernst's words, which I sincerely hope she regrets after Election Day). We might as well demand the most, or else we'll have to live with the least.

Meanwhile, H.R. 535/S. 618, the PFAS Action Act, would require our EPA to designate all PFAS substances as hazardous; this shouldn't be a tough lift for our EPA, not just because a) PFAS chemicals hardly degrade over time and b) scientists have linked them to cancer, immunity disorders, birth defects, and liver problems, but because our EPA has long acknowledged the need for action on PFAS chemicals -- in fact, they announced a plan to deal with PFAS chemicals just last year, a plan widely derided as too-little-too-late, but it's not like they're going around calling PFAS chemicals "safe." You know, like our President goes around calling climate change a "Chinese hoax" and wind power "dirty"! So Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our health by passing the PFAS Action Act. If it's in everything (and it is), and it doesn't break down naturally, then it's in our water, too -- at least, it is in 43 states, that's 43 of 50 -- and if we don't have clean water, we don't have health care, period.

Around the table: with more horrible truths about American politics.

The incomparable Nathan Robinson at Current Affairs advises us on "How to Avoid Swallowing War Propaganda." I hope by now it'll all be reminder more than revelation, but reminders sure ain't useless, and I'm glad we're getting this particular reminder before we get too engrossed in yet another Middle East quagmire. I can't resist highlighting the part where Ben Shapiro says TEH OBAMA DRONED TEH TERRURIZTZ TOO!!!! and Mr. Robinson reminds us that such statements "prove() exactly nothing about whether (our President)’s actions were legitimate." Always they talk about what great debaters they are, and then they resort to personal attacks when they're on their heels, which means they're not great debaters.

The incomparable Dean Baker tells us -- because apparently our "liberal" media, at least, needs telling! -- that maybe "College Presidents Aren’t Who We Should Consult About Free Higher Education," since, you know, they all stand to lose money from taxpayer-funded higher ed. They may not have been (as Mr. Baker says) the worst people to ask about it, though -- I bet the worst people to ask about it would be the Vice-Presidents and Deans and Vice-Deans who don't do any useful work and whose mere existence is a major driver of the high cost of education.

Ho hum, another provocative act against a foreign power by our government, another litany of TV and radio "pundits" who all work for defense contractors without proper disclosure of their conflicts of interest. You can contact NPR's public editor about Mr. Keane's appearance on Morning Edition without disclosing his past defense contractor employment here, but as for the rest of them, this is yet another reason we need, and deserve, a la carte cable packaging -- we may not watch this rubbish, but we still pay for it if we have cable, which most of us do. (Don't believe the excuse that disclosure would scare "knowledgeable people" off of television and there'd be dead air all the time -- I mean, this is America we're talking about, full of folks who actually have something to say and hungry to get it heard.)

At last, someone (namely Noah Feldman at Bloomberg) shows skepticism that John Bolton's statement expressing willingness to testify at our President's impeachment trial means a damn thing. Why is saying you'll testify if subpoenaed some gift to America? And if Senate Republicans don't even want witnesses, why would they subpoena him? And have no Congressional Democrats considered the possibility that the Mustache of Evil is running a con game on them? And why can't Democratic politicians stop hoping for some Great Republican Savior? (Also, too, as Mr. Feldman points out, Mr. Bolton's reasoning is not exactly cogent.)

HuffPost/YouGov poll finds that while a mere 43% of Americans supported our President's decision to kill Gen. Soleimani, 30% of Americans "strongly supported" the decision, and this finding, for once, does not map that well onto my long-held belief that 25% of the electorate is bat-guano insane -- and suggests that maybe poking Iran more will get our President more votes on Election Day. It is all about the margins with this guy, after all. I suppose it's possible the poll came out too quickly after the assassination to tell us very much of anything, but I guess time will tell, or at least suggest.

Action: concerning war with Iran, child labor, and endangered species.

Now that Iran has apparently taken its "fierce revenge" on two American bases in Iraq -- an attack our Administration knew about beforehand because this has all been one big drama, people! -- House Democrats will bring a War Powers resolution to a vote today, a resolution that would restrict our President from taking future military action against Iran without the Congressional approval our Constitution demands. Hence both the Friends Committee on National Legislation and Win Without War help you tell your Congressfolk to support a War Powers resolution that would restrain our President. Also, if you want to take to the streets today to protest war with Iran, then No War With Iran! helps you find a demonstration near you. Don't believe the hype that we shouldn't "hamstring our President" from "protecting Americans," because "protecting Americans" is nowhere near as important to this President as pretending to be tough before the cameras, and also because if any President demands hamstringing, it's this one. And if any President demands it, then all Presidents must get it.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell the CEOs of chocolate-producing corporations Mars, Hershey, and Nestlé to stop using child labor to make their candy bars. Some two million kids in West Africa (you have to go where the cocoa grows, after all) work on growing and harvesting cocoa, which involves using heavy instruments and spraying pesticides; some of them are as young as 10 years old, and they might make very little money or they might make no money. Once again we must ask ourselves: is this the world we would have made? A world where we force kids to do hard labor to make candy bars? I know someone is going to pipe up with well you don't want your candy bars to cost ten dollars each, do you? I would advise that person to do three things: 1) slap themselves, 2) contemplate how little effect the $20 fast-food worker wage in Denmark has on the price of a Big Mac there, and 3) slap themselves again, because "cheap goods" does not excuse evil.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4348/S. 2491, the PAW and FIN Act, then Environmental Action still helps you do that. The PAW and FIN Act would (and this is becoming a sad refrain!) roll back Administration rules that make it easier for polluters to kill off endangered and/or threatened animal species. For example, our Administration would force our policymakers to consider the "economic costs" of listing a species as threatened, and by "economic costs" you know they mean the cost to some executive or other who now won't be able to gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home? They sure don't mean "jobs"; why, they don't even say jobs! Big thinkers in the Administration don't consider that money always goes away, but a species we protect from extinction can live forever. This focus on short-term executive pay rather than the things that last -- why, it's like this Administration isn't conservative at all.

Action: concerning voting rights, health care, discrimination, internet freedom, and a host of other issues.

Happy New Year, good peoples! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; and H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act. All you need do in your phone call is tell your Senators to pass these bills -- you need not explain your will, you only need deliver it, and in my experience Congressional staffers don't make a habit of challenging your will; it's their job to pass your will to your Senators. Nonetheless, I'll explain in some detail why we should pass these bills, since (also in my experience) we feel better when we call if we have more to say than we have to.

H.R. 1, the For the People Act, would allow national automatic voter registration, require disclosure of large campaign contributions, create a public campaign financing system, make Election Day a national holiday, and mandate that states use nonpartisan commissions to draw up districts -- all things we've been fighting for in other bills over the years. Automatic voter registration, in particular, would automatically register a lot of folks when they move, since they'll have to change their driver's license (if they have one) when they move, and that will help counter state efforts to de-register people they "suspect" have moved. Not too many Americans actually favor "more big money campaign ads" or "more secret corporate involvement in political campaigns" -- most Americans, in fact, will tell you these things are evil. It often seems like the only people who don't think they're evil, in fact, are the ones who rely on secret corporate campaign donations to survive at the polls. But why should they get all the say about everything? Is that the world we would have made?

H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Act, isn't perfect, but our agitation for a better bill prompted some members of Congress to demand (and get) improvements; H.R. 3, as passed by the House, would allow Medicare to negotiate prices and upwards of 25 brand-name drugs that don't have any competition from generic drugs. H.R. 3 would also cap such drug prices at either the average drug price of six other developed nations or (if that info isn't available, i.e., because a drug is only available in America) 85% of the current American drug prices. If the Senate wants to amend the bill so that it lets Medicare negotiate for all drugs on the market, well, I won't complain -- indeed, bills from Sens. Sanders (I-VT) and Warren (D-MA) would be considerably more comprehensive than H.R. 3. But I don't let the perfect murder the good, either, so H.R. 3 deserves your support. Remember that when Senators say the "free market" should be allowed to work its will, it's OK to remind them that the market's "will" is apparently for good Americans to die because they can't afford insulin for their diabetes or an EpiPen for anaphylactic shock.

H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act, would plug the hole our Supreme Court blew in the Voting Rights Act in its Shelby County v. Holder ruling. Our Court said that singling out Southern states for pre-clearance of state-level voting law changes was unfair to them, but our Court also said that a different pre-clearance formula that didn't single out Southern states would likely pass their muster. Hence H.R. 4 would subject any state or locality with a demonstrated history of voting rights violations to federal pre-clearance, which would only "single out" Southern states if they're the ones doing the most vote suppression! Sadly, vote suppression is a national sport now, reaching as far north as Wisconsin (where folks of color somehow get targeted by de-registration efforts far more than white folks) and Michigan (where Interstate Crosscheck may have delivered that state's electoral votes to our President in 2016). Luckily, the Voting Rights Advancement Act would give us the tools to stop it.

H.R. 5, the Equality Act, would amend the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act (among other laws) to extend civil rights protections to gay and transgender folk -- who can still get fired, denied housing, and denied credit just because of who they are and whom they love. You may be pleased to know that a lot of folks who don't like gays and don't have gay friends aren't necessarily in favor of firing them, denying them housing, and denying them credit just because they're gay or transgender! And that includes some of our President's most devoted supporters! Really, it's only the proverbial loudest wagons of our political discourse who insist that gay and transgender folk should remain second-class citizens forever; most Americans really are live-and-let-live types who don't want to get too involved with regulating other folks' genitals and what they do with them. Our laws should honor our best natures as Americans, and the Equality Act would do that, by giving gay and transgender folks the same tools to redress grievances that other historically-aggrieved classes have.

H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act, would reverse our President's executive order revoking the DACA (or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program which allows immigrants brought here as children (and therefore against their will) can continue to stay here if they contribute to American society. Seems like a fairly uncontroversial idea, right? Not for our President or his most nativist votaries, who would happily send immigrants back to countries they don't recognize, as long as it gives them an opportunity to stay enraged at something. Rage is a hell of a drug, as I'm sure you've figured out by now -- you can never get enough of it, and thus the worst of Our Glorious Elites move the rage-addled around from one manufactured outrage to another. Raging against childhood arrivals by saying THEY'RE TEH ILLEGULZ AND TEH ILLEGULZ MUST TEH GOEZ!!!! is not actually very "law and order" of them -- childhood arrivals, as I've said, had literally no choice in coming to America, and removing them just so you can indulge in rage is cruel. It'll bite you in the ass, too, but that won't help any of these immigrants in the meantime.

H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act would give women more tools to fight pay discrimination. H.R. 7 would outlaw clauses in employment contracts that prevent workers from talking about their pay, and would prevent retaliation against employees who do talk about their pay -- and these are important, since talking about your pay is usually how you find out you're being shafted. The bill would still allow employers to pay men and women differently based on bona fide factors like, you know, skill levels and qualifications, but would restrict employers' ability to manufacture a "bona fide factor" after the fact. And the bill would also stiffen penalties for discriminating against women workers. It's hard to actually argue against these things, since no one wants to be called "objectively pro-paycheck discrimination," so its opponents yell about "trial lawyers" -- how hysterically lazy! -- and "what about when men are more qualified than women?", which, hey, re-read the third sentence of this paragraph if that's you or someone you know. When someone yells something like that about a bill, you're right to question whether they've read it or understood it.

H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act, would raise our minimum wage from $7.25/hour to $15/hour gradually over the next six years -- yeah, I made sure to put those last six words there, for all the haters who say IT'S TOO TEH FASTZ!!!!! -- and would increase that minimum wage every year thereafter in accordance with the rise in the median hourly wage. The bill would also hike the minimum wages for tipped workers and disabled workers gradually and close the gap between these and the regular minimum wage. The arguments against this bill might give a lot of people pause, but they fall apart upon closer (or, indeed, any) analysis. Fast food workers make $20/hour in Denmark, but that hasn't resulted in $20 Big Macs there -- Big Macs cost around $5.50 there, which ain't that much more than they cost here. And that CBO study that said a higher minimum wage would kill half a million jobs? Actually, that study said job losses could range from zero to a million jobs lost, that range represents jobs lost over 10 years, and the economy already needs to make a million jobs roughly every seven months just to keep up with population growth, so let's not go in for hysteria.

H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act, would roll back an Administration guidance issued in October of 2018 which actually weakened the Affordable Care Act's guarantee that health insurance corporations couldn't deny you health insurance (and therefore health care) because of your pre-existing health conditions. The Administration's guidance allows sub-standard health insurance programs to operate legally in the United States, even if they discriminate against folks with pre-existing conditions, a nefarious practice the Affordable Care Act would have ended (even if the ACA has dozens of other flaws which we have already discussed at length). The Administration's guidance was never about delivering "really great health care" to Americans; it's about letting health insurance corporations flout the law, and of course it's also about taking a crap over a Barack Obama legislative achievement because Mr. Obama made fun of the President that one time. Really, I'm pretty sure that's what it was -- and if it's not, it's likely something about as petty, and Americans deserve better than to be held hostage to a President's pettiness.

H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, would keep oil and gas drilling corporations out of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR) by repealing that part of the 2017 tax "reform" that authorized oil and gas drilling in the Arctic. H.R. 1146 would also impose inspection fees on corporations that drill offshore so that our government can actually fund these inspections. You know all the good reasons we shouldn't drill in the Arctic: because there's not that much oil to be drilled there, because it would threaten Alaska's salmon industry, because it would threaten local indigenous populations and wildlife, and because cleaning up a spill in the frigid Arctic is many times harder than cleaning up one in a more temperate region. What's the reason we would drill up there (aside from getting Sen. Murkowski of Alaska to vote on a tax "reform" bill she might have voted against)? Oh, you know, to make some crony oil or gas CEO rich. That's really all of it -- they'll say it's "jobs," but what of the actual jobs in the salmon industry that'll go away after the next oil spill?

H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act, would permanently withdraw over a million acres of Grand Canyon-area land from any drilling or mining considerations. It's a bit stunning that we would even consider drilling around the Grand Canyon -- I mean, you've been to the Grand Canyon, right? -- but uranium mining corporations have had a jones to do that for decades, and our President of course has a jones to give them whatever they want, since public lands exist merely for exploitation in his mind. This, even though uranium mining would inevitably pollute the Colorado River upon which citizens of five American states depend for clean water! The bill would also protect any additional land in the Grand Canyon area that our government acquires after the bill becomes law. So, to sum: we could preserve a national treasure and protect the drinking water used by tens of millions of Americans -- orwe could make a few corporate CEOs even richer. It's not much of a choice, really, though Our Glorious Elites do keep choosing wrong.

H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act, would reverse the FCC's 2017 net neutrality repeal and reinstate the FCC's 2015 Open Internet Order, which originally encoded the principle of net neutrality in law. All the bills I've listed have earned a lot of popular support, but none more so than the Save the Internet Act -- which makes this Administration's (and Mr. McConnell's) flouting of the popular will all the more offensive. Net neutrality guarantees that internet service-providing corporations deliver all files to your computer at the same speed and with the same priority, which does not amount to TEH BIG GUMMINT CONTROLZ TEH INTERNETZ!!!!, but our government preventing big corporations from controlling the internet, so that you can determine where you want to go and what you want to see on the internet, rather than having big corporations force you to watch Miley Cyrus twerking videos before visiting your favorite weblogs (ahem!). Yeah, they haven't tried that yet, but they will; they're not stupid enough to make your freedoms disappear all at once. And this is about your freedom, which will always be more important than some corporation's "freedom" to make more money doing less work.

H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act, would force corporations to disclose their "beneficial owners" -- that is, the folks who create the corporations and, presumably, benefit financially from their existence -- and that would force banksters, terrorists, tax-evaders, sex traffickers, drug money launderers, and big campaign donors (who all use shell corporations to hide their wrongdoing) out into the light, and if they can't stand the light, well, that's the price of operating too long in the dark. According to a Global Financial Integrity study from 2014, America is the second-easiest nation on Earth to start an anonymous corporation -- behind only Kenya, where there just ain't as much money. Right-wingers will tell you that forcing such transparency would be Big Gummint spying on people -- and where are they when our government actually spies on us? Being outraged at football players kneeling, probably! -- but they would have to explain why revealing the beneficiaries of corporate crime should be guarded by the law.

H.R. 2722, the Securing America's Federal Elections (or SAFE) Act, would mandate voter-verified paper ballots for federal elections, which is a big deal, since (as we saw in Mississippi earlier this year) a lot of electronic voting machines don't let you vote for the candidate for whom you want to vote! H.R. 2722 would also fund state efforts to update their voting systems, which you know some states "forget" to do in their black and brown neighborhoods. And H.R. 2722 would prohibit states and localities from connecting their voting machines to our internet, and that's also a big deal! After all, any fool can see that connecting voting machines to the internet is a profoundly stupid idea. I would say connecting your thermostat or your house lights to the internet is also a profoundly stupid idea, but as bad having your house hacked would be, having our democracy hacked would be even worse. Hacking our democracy has been in the news a lot the past few years, after all -- and not as much as it should have been in the years before that! A lot of times the most advanced technology is not at all the best technology.

Finally (cue cheers from convention crowd!), H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act, incorporates most of the TRUE Fees Act, which would not only force big telecom corporations to reveal all the fees they like to hide in your cable or cellphone bill, but would force them to give you formal notice of these fees and would give you the right to cancel your contract with these big telecoms if you don't like the fees they give you. H.R. 5035 would not outlaw forced arbitration agreements in big telecom contracts, as the actual TRUE Fees Act would have done, and that's a backward step, but, as I've said, I don't let the perfect murder the good, and H.R. 5035 is good, because it will keep big telecom corporations from giving you surprises in your cable and cellphone bills. And we will one day bring about comprehensive arbitration reform, because just as the only people standing in the way of fee transparency are the big telecoms that no one likes, the only people standing in our way or arbitration reform are the corporate flunkies whom no one likes. Yeah, weakling politicians "like" them, I suppose, but all I want is a fighting chance.

If you've been reading with an open mind, you probably see that all of these bills would do good things that would improve our laws and our civilization -- and if you attend the ludicrous arguments opposing them, some of which I've touched on above, you'll likely be more convinced of that, not less. Most ludicrous, perhaps, is the reflexive smearing of many or all of these bills as "socialism." You know that words mean things, and you may also suspect that a lot of folks throw the word "socialism" at anything they don't like and hope it sticks because they can't win the argument on the merits. Nonetheless, ask yourself: is securing the vote, and protecting the vote, "socialism" -- or is it merely common sense? Is preventing cruelty to gay, transgender, and immigrant folk "socialism," or is it common sense? Are protecting internet freedom, lowering drug prices, and protecting good Americans with pre-existing health conditions "socialism," or are they merely common sense? I think all of these things are common sense, and I hope that knowledge will steel your spine as you talk to your Senators today.

Good luck, and God bless.

Action: concerning war with Iran.

You've no doubt heard by now that our President ordered the assassination of Iranian Gen. Soleimani over the weekend, which has left many of us wondering if we're going to be involved in World War III just a few days into a new decade. But let's take wondering out of the equation by telling our Reps and Senators to prevent war with Iran -- you know, like they should have done in the defense authorization bill last month but were too chicken to do. Only Congress has the Constitutional power to declare war, after all, even if they've spent the last 60-plus years deferring to our Presidents in exactly the manner our Founders aimed to prevent. Demand Progress, Win Without War, and the Friends Committee on National Legislation all help you write your Congressfolk telling them to stop the march to war with Iran, but I advise you to call your Reps and Senators, too, because we need to clog up their phone lines, or they'll just pretend they didn't hear us.

Folks on the right will tell you that if you oppose our President's unconstitutional action, you don't know anything about the situation, but we're not schmucks and we don't need to taste dung just to make sure it's not really meatloaf. The House impeaches a President, then he goes after a Middle Eastern bogeyman -- gosh, where have we heard this tale before? But those of us who may be more charitably-inclined also may observe plenty of other signs this is all typical Presidential drama -- that our President just couldn't help but drop broad hints about the attack to fellow elites at Mar-a-Lago, that our Administration has absurdly tried to link Mr. Soleimani to the 9.11 attacks, that the Fredo Corleone aspirant who also happens to be our President's middle child actually told Twitter last week that his dad was about to "open a big ol' can of whoop ass," and that virtually every right-winger in America who has spent the last several days lecturing us about Gen. Soleimani never mentioned him before.

Of course, yelling about your supposed "ignorance" in failing to support our President's vanity military attack will only be the beginning -- next they'll tell us we're "weak," and that we're "objectively pro-Iran," and that we're "traitors." We're none of those things, of course -- we're Americans who love our country and hate what Our Glorious Elites constantly do to it. Seriously, they use America like toilet paper and then call you a "traitor" when you point that out. So let's make sure we let our Reps and Senators know how we feel, by using one of the action tools in the first paragraph above, or calling them, or both.

Around the table: concerning swordfighting, immaturity, "moderates," and the things that are more important than all of them.

Mike Ludwig at TruthOut suspects that the dominant story of 2019 won't be our President's impeachment, but movements of resistance around the world. And in a just history, that would be true! Our President loves to make everything about himself, but popular uprisings in Hong Kong, Chile, and Haiti -- not to mention Oakland and Hawaii! -- aren't so much about him but the rampant rot in Our Glorious Elites that he merely epitomizes. Bad leaders die, but civilizations live on -- if we keep them.

Ex-Republican slams right-wing gun worship, calling it "conservative virtue-signaling." Having guns is one thing, enjoying guns another, but throwing folks who don't fight every conceivable gun-control proposal to the death out of Conservative Nation is another thing entirely. "Virtue signaling" is too long and obscure a phrase, though -- I call it "swordfighting," and yes, when I say "sword," I kinda mean "penis."

Apparently our Administration went to great lengths back in 2017 to discover which employee of our office of the ambassador to the European Union liked a Chelsea Clinton tweet that responded to something bad our President said about Ms. Clinton. We'll never know for sure if our President knew about all of that, but that of course he knew about all of that, acting as he does like a diaper-loaded brat every time someone criticizes him (or answers his obnoxiousness without backing down). Of course he does it for "his people," who have so thoroughly internalized his "battles" as their own.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) gets it right, for once, in criticizing both sides for demanding a particular conclusion to our President's impeachment trial in the Senate. Yes, it is bad that Mr. McConnell seems to think our President should have so much of a say in how he gets tried in the Senate, but Ms. Warren shouldn't be declaring him guilty, either, given that she'll be one of 100 jurors. So am I ready to say "moderates" have some utility after all? I kid, of course -- even a blind squirrel stumbles over a nut every once in a while.

And on cue, Joe Biden says he'd be "open" to running with a Republican on a "unity" ticket, which as usual will unify right and center-right and guess who that leaves out? Seriously, he must never talk to regular Americans anymore -- no one but a Beltway insider would be impressed with such a pronouncement, and more Americans would run through a wall for that obnoxious turd of a President than for a politician promising another round of let's-all-get-along-with-the-people-who-constantly-set-our-house-on-fire.

Finally, Lauren Gambino at The Guardian wonders whether any of the Democratic Presidential candidates will "excite voters." I've said this before and I'm sure I'll say it again, but trying to game out Who Can Beat the Beast is a fool's game -- it makes the election All About Him, which is how he wants it, and not about us, which is the way all elections should be. And hearing people try to play 13-dimensional chess while apparently forgetting that they all have votes is a persistent annoyance. And, seriously, letting freaking John Delaney's campaign strategist have the last word?

Penny Rants for Saturday, December 28, 2019: lies, damned lies, and "winning" arguments with liberals.

Our President has put up a website called "Snowflake Victory" -- hope or fear, I can't tell! -- which purports to tell you how to win arguments with your liberal relatives over the holidays. But clearly he's not trying to win arguments with liberals, who will not be won over by all the childishness, cherry-picking, baiting-and-switching, scare numbers, and outright lies -- he's looking to convert less politically-aligned folks who might be overhearing. After all, everyone agrees that it's possible to "have a strong economy and a clean environment at the same time," but not everyone knows that it's more possible when a) your predecessor's clean air and clean water regulations are starting to have a positive effect right as you take office and b) federal courts strike down most of your attempts to roll back those very same regulations! And I do find it highly amusing to see these folks talk about "winning arguments with facts and reason," when they're the first ones who tell you facts and reason don't matter after you confront them with actual facts and reason. It's almost as amusing as hearing the "Fuck Your Feelings" crowd constantly whine about their own feelings.

From the "Wrong Headline" file: an Economist/YouGov poll finds, according to Newsweek, that "Almost 50% of Americans Say Donald Trump Will Go Down in History as (a) 'Poor' or 'Below Average' President,", but add up the 40% who said "poor" and the 9% who said "below average" and that still leaves a majority (51%) of Americans who don't agree. Eight percent said history would regard him as "average" (I bet that verdict would really stick in his craw!) and nine percent had no discernible opinion, leaving 12 percent who voted "above average" and 22 percent who voted "outstanding," that last figure mapping quite well onto my long-expressed suspicion that a quarter of our electorate is insane. These figures won't predict the 2020 election very well, of course -- people who think he's "average" or have no opinion of the man certainly don't seem likely to vote against him because he got impeached, do they? They're more likely to get "sick of all the partisan bickering" and stay home, especially after our President runs the most negative campaign in American history regardless of how "spotless" his do-nothing, please-everyone opponent supposedly is.

Light posting notice of death and doom and horror and terror and probably fury also.

So it looks like I won't post anything new until after the New Year, when we'll start (of course!) with the ever-longer list of good House-passed bills the Senate won't touch.

In the meantime, this blog does have a Facebook page (it's right here), and if I find any good memes over the next two weeks, I'll share them with you there.

We've done a lot of good work in 2019, but we've got a lot more to do in 2020, and I hope you will keep coming to this site and keep using the action alerts here to tell your Congressfolk (and state legislators, and corporate leaders, and maybe even our President) to do the right thing. Thank you for all your efforts -- even during the bleakest times, these efforts help us move forward, even if we don't see that right away.

Action: concerning payday lenders, pollution, and food safety.

CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to crack down on payday lenders. Part of the crackdown you would ask for would be a 15% cap on interest rates, and that would be a major reform -- and not even one that's "never been tried," either! After all, our soldiers already get this protection from the law, and they surely do deserve it (and are especially vulnerable to payday lenders), but so do we all. Of course, our Administration, flush in campaign contributions from payday lenders, has glommed on to this extremely unpopular sector of the economy just like they glommed on to the extremely small and entirely corporate anti-net neutrality crowd. Sometimes it's like they're trying to screw everything up, and sadly our "liberal" media won't ask our President a simple question: why does he think payday lenders need more welfare handouts from our government? Maybe they're afraid the answer will be rock stupid, but that's all the more reason we need to hear it. In the meantime, let's communicate our superior wisdom to our Congressfolk.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: despite the enduring unpopularity of pollution, and the enduring popularity of clean water, Pennsylvania legislators are actually trying to pass SB 790, even though it would let oil and gas corporations replace water they've ruined with unsafe water, even though it would let the state pre-empt local and municipal ordinances aimed at protecting clean water (now there's some small-government conservatism for you!), and even though it would let municipalities spray drilling wastewater on roads to keep dust down (that's a zombie that never seems to die no matter how many headshots it gets!). These corporate welfare proponents like to say it's a choice between creating jobs and creating no jobs, but you know what we call that, right? A manufactured hostage situation ("put up with corporate welfare handouts, or you'll all be out of work!"), and as Americans we should never tolerate that. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your PA state assemblyfolk to protect us from pollution by rejecting SB 790.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation giving our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) the power to investigate food poisoning outbreaks -- you know, like the fifth E.coli outbreak in Romaine lettuce of the past two years -- then Penn PIRG still helps you do that. The bill in question would be S. 2958, the Expanded Food Safety Investigation Act, which would, in its own words, give our FDA the "authority to conduct microbial sampling on concentrated animal feeding operations as necessary to facilitate a foodborne illness outbreak investigation, determine the root cause of an outbreak of foodborne illness, or address other public health needs." You might better know the "concentrated animal feeding operation," or CAFO, as a factory farm, and you likely know that factory farms are justifiably prime suspects in food poisoning outbreaks. And small farmers don't run factory farms, so don't let anyone tell you this bill is "anti-small farmer" without asking them if they're pro-food poisoning.

Action: concerning impeachment, government spying, and discrimination.

The full House votes on impeaching our President today or tomorrow, so call your House Reps and tell them to vote yea to send formal impeachment charges to the Senate. The charges are abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, and Senate Republicans are eager to receive these charges so they can carefully and thoroughly refute them! I kid, of course -- Messrs. McConnell and Graham have both said they want to get this over with as soon as possible, truth and duty be damned. But don't be swayed by them -- if Republicans ever had a case in defense of our President, we'd have heard it by now, instead of endless whining about "process" and "politics." Don't be swayed by the long odds of ever getting a conviction, either. And certainly don't be swayed by reports suggesting that our President is really sweating the indignity of getting impeached. How likely is it that he's ever sweated any indignity? No, the man loves drama, and he loves playing the victim, too, so a short Senate trial ending in "vindication" won't necessarily be a boon to him.

Meanwhile, the Democratic House, in a fit of year-end budgetary capitulation that you'd think they'd know how to prevent by now, extended the notorious Section 215 of the notorious USA PATRIOT Act through March, so CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to curtail government spying by repealing Section 215. I've been promoting the "even our NSA says it doesn't need Section 215" line for a while now, and it is significant that even our big spying agency doesn't want that particular spying power, but we also must remember that a) we have a President who openly tries to use our government to spy on his political enemies, like we should care about his problems or something, and b) we also have a President who loves calling people traitors and encouraging his votaries to call for the deportation of some of his political enemies, and surely we don't think a man like that deserves the power to collect email and phone data without a warrant. And certainly not in the name of "national security"! I keep saying he is not America, and maybe he'll never hear it, but mainly I say it so you do.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Administration to scuttle its own proposal to allow "religious" organizations to take part in government grants and still discriminate against people in violation of the law, then the ACLU still helps you do that. The ACLU sure does give some good examples of what might happen if our Administration gets its way: "Meals on Wheels and other HHS-funded community meal programs designed to support older adults could refuse to deliver food to older Americans who are LGBTQ. Federally funded foster care agencies could refuse to place children with families because of the prospective families' sexual orientation or religion, regardless of the children's needs. Head Start grant recipients and other federally funded childcare facilities could refuse to serve children with same-sex parents. They could also refuse to provide services to transgender youth." Ain't none of that ish cool, so let's make sure our Administration knows that -- because even if they defy us, we might help them lose in court.

Action: concerning online privacy, flavored e-cigarettes, and shareholder power.

You recall that Congress went to great lengths in 2017 to repeal FCC regulations that would have protected your online privacy? Well, S. 2968, the Consumer Online Privacy Rights Act, would help make up for that notorious act, and if you read it online, you'll be able to imagine right-wing heads exploding at some of the bill's subtitles. A "Right to Data Security"? A "Right to Delete"? A "Right to Controls"? Gosh, they'll say, don't rights come with responsibilities? It would be strange for them to say that, since the big telecom corporations actually act irresponsibly, by selling your data willy-nilly, failing to be transparent about it, losing your data to hackers, and not letting you just say no to their sale of your data. But the Consumer Online Privacy Rights Act would help fix a lot of that -- yes, I'd make the big telecoms ask you to "opt in" to data sales, rather than force consumers to "opt out" of them, but this bill will do a lot of good. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect your private data by passing the Consumer Online Privacy Rights Act.

Meanwhile, you recall that our President announced he was going to ban flavored e-cigarettes, so he could help prevent children from becoming addicted to them? Well, the tobacco lobby got to him, and he backed down. So courageous! So resolute! So masculine! Of course, his votaries probably figure he already did the deed just because he said so, but those of us in what Karl Rove once derisively called the "reality-based community" remember what really happened, and we're all about helping people do the right thing, so Penn PIRG helps you tell our President to restart his effort to ban flavored e-cigarettes. But wait! you might be saying, you also advocate for the legalization of marijuana? Isn't that hypocritical? Well, no -- the key word in all of the above is children. The law doesn't allow children to drink beer or smoke regular cigarettes, so why would we allow them to smoke highly-addictive e-cigarettes? And why would we allow the existence of cigarettes specially flavored to draw children into that habit? Civilized people wouldn't.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to reject its own proposal to take power away from shareholders, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. The SEC's proposal, as you may recall, would require you to own ten times more in shares before you could even introduce a shareholder resolution, and if you're the kind of person who flinches at the idea of buying into a democratic process, no doubt you also flinch at the SEC's proposal. But in an era where our government has largely abdicated its responsibility to govern on the people's behalf, shareholder resolutions are too often that one tool that might induce a corporation to change its behavior, whether that means getting a corporation to adopt more climate-friendly practices or stop discriminatory hiring practices. So naturally the Crony-in-Chief's SEC wants to put a stop to all of that! This Administration hates progress, of any kind, with a passion bordering on insanity. But they don't get all the say in America. We do.

Around the table: why our media ignores the Afghanistan papers, and other hard truths.

Alex Shephard at The New Republic wonders "Why the Media Is Ignoring the Afghanistan Papers." Short answer: "everyone is to blame, which means no one has much of an interest in keeping the story alive." Somewhat longer answer: our media's thirst for partisan conflict makes coverage of "bipartisan failure" harder. Also, too, our President spews forth so much drama that "more complex stories, like the situation in Afghanistan, are often buried in favor of the political equivalent of sports sideline reporting." Mr. Shephard may be too nice to spell it out, but I also think we've become so cynical, all of us, that when we hear evidence that our government knew it was bollocksing up Afghanistan, we're proud of saying "and you're surprised?" As Americans, we deserve a better government than that, meaning we deserve actual surprise at such things.

This is really good news: the ACLU of Kansas has managed to shut down that state's notorious Interstate Crosscheck program, meaning it won't operate in the 2020 elections. That doesn't mean the ACLU has killed it dead, since it used a rather arcane argument to do so (that Interstate Crosscheck didn't keep voter data secure, of all things), and a lot of states still have previous Interstate Crosscheck databases and might use them to purge more voters. And the notorious Kris Kobach might create new purge lists himself -- though he's also running for Senate in 2020, and running a vote suppression operation while running for Senate might actually make him lose. Yes, even to a Democrat! Hell, he did it a year ago.

Ho hum, the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy studies corporate tax avoidance during the first year after the 2017 tax "reform" that dramatically cut the corporate tax rate, and finds over 350 Fortune 500 corporations paying, on average, a little over half the new 21% rate. That tax "reform" cut the tax rate (from 35% to 21%) without closing corporate tax loopholes, but that shouldn't surprise us when our nominally "liberal" politicians' position is "cut the tax rate, but close the loopholes." An actual liberal position would be "tax the corporations harder and stop giving them welfare handouts." And then you might have actual compromise in America again. Maybe even actual bipartisanship!

Scientists point to another driver of climate change: inefficient energy grids. These energy losses -- caused by (among other things) bad wiring, poor and/or corrupt management, or natural disasters -- emit almost as much carbon as heavy trucks do, which is saying something. Getting energy corporations to upgrade their infrastructure, of course, is like pulling teeth -- they always want a welfare handout or six just to do the thing they should already be doing, the thing we would simply make them do if our lawmakers didn't all have spines of jelly.

Finally, Republicans are jumping up and down about New Jersey House Rep. Jeff Van Drew's announcement that he'll switch to the Republican party shortly, but the part of America not responding to that news with "Jeff Van Who?" is probably responding "he was a Democrat?" And how precious he is, complaining that impeachment isn't "bipartisan" enough -- has he been awake the last couple of decades? I suspect he'll lose the 2020 Republican primary in New Jersey's 2nd -- he may not even come in second! -- and then a year or two later he'll imagine the Democrats are desperate enough to take him back, and he'll be wrong, all of which will make him (as Mario Cuomo might say) just another walnut in the batter of eternity.

Action: concerning voting rights, health care, and pollution (among other issues).

Happy Monday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. And this week we add H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act -- a better bill now, thanks in large part to your pressure -- and H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act, which would shine a light on those big telecom fees and taxes you find in your cable and cellphone bills. These are all good bills, advancing (among other causes) voting rights, consumer protections, and better health care policy, and your Senators have no excuse for rejecting them. No, TEH CREEPINGZ SOSHULIZMZ!!!!! is not an excuse.

Color of Change helps you tell Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards (D) to reject attempts by Formosa Plastics to build a giant petrochemical plant in an almost-50% black community. Why? Because Formosa's plants tend to pollute more than virtually every other plant in America. Because this particular Formosa plant would emit ethylene oxide, which a 2016 EPA study found causes cancer even with "limited" exposure. Because big corporations have this nasty habit of plopping down their dirtiest plants in neighborhoods of color. Because the area where they'd build is already well-known as "Cancer Alley." Because Formosa has already paid Texas residents $50 million for illegally dumping pollutants in their communities. And because Gov. Bel Edwards -- fresh off a re-election more improbable than his first election in 2015 -- has demonstrated a willingness in the past to reward big polluting corporations even whey they don't follow the law. Hey, he doesn't have to run again, so maybe he should try not enabling big polluting corporations, particularly when they practice environmental racism.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to reject its own proposal to weaken coal ash storage regulations, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. Our President's votaries like to think he's "gotten rid of burdensome regulations," though we know he really hasn't -- courts keep striking his regulatory changes down, because you can't just do whatever you feel like doing when you run a government! But the next time your War on Terror/Tea Party deficit hawk/Regulation Nation/Blue Lives Matter/anti-immigration-but-not-a-white-supremacist-I-swear uncle says our President has "gotten rid of burdensome regulations," feel free to ask if allowing big coal corporations to avoid closing their unlined coal-ash ponds that leak into our water tables is more "burdensome" to big coal corporations than water pollution is to, you know, the rest of us. I know the good citizens of Roane County, TN and Eden, NC -- to name the scenes of two infamous coal ash pond spills -- would tell you which is more of a burden.

Around the table: important lessons from the week, including yet another lesson from our President in How Not to Be.

Bad news: as we feared, and despite our best efforts, the House passed a defense authorization bill without any of the amendments limiting our involvement in the war on Yemen, preventing unilateral war with Iran, or stopping defense spending on our President's vanity border wall. The bill would grant federal employees parental leave, and it would curtail our military's use of PFAS chemicals, but the bill also doesn't go far enough in keeping them out of our drinking water, and doesn't even have an amendment (which had actual bipartisan support) helping military families on food stamps. In the words of one antiwar activist, Democrats got "completely rolled" on this bill. The good news is that we don't trust them to do the right thing; we trust ourselves to do the right thing, and if we don't get the results we deserve, we work harder.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (E-KY) tells Fox News (sic) that he and our President's counsel will be in "total coordination" during his impeachment trial. As Rep. Jeffries keenly points out, imagine a jury saying it will be in "total coordination" with a defendant during a criminal case and you'll understand how utterly corrupt that statement is. In past years, a politician would never have said this out loud, and yet the fact that Mr. McConnell said it on Fox News (which, ah, has a rather selective viewership) rather than, say, your local nightly newscast (which will more likely attract a broader cross-section of your community) hints at how corrupt our politicians might yet become.

I would caution against viewing the Conservative Party's resounding victory in this week's British elections as a 2020 harbinger, except that the Tories, at least, could convincingly identify themselves with one side or the other in the Brexit debate, while Labour seemed to be try to have it both ways -- and, how about that, our Republican incumbent will most assuredly campaign against "free" trade in 2020, while most of his possible Democratic challengers will most assuredly try to have it both ways. As for the sheer size of the loss, I suppose it's possible Labour just threw it, in the belief that the Tories will likely bollocks up Brexit again either by exiting wrong or just failing to exit, but we all know by now the dangers of assuming a nominally liberal party is playing 13-dimensional chess. (However, for those who think the elections are a resounding rebuke of "socialism": how well, exactly, did those center-right Labour leaders do in 2010 and 2015?)

Our "liberal" media is still trying to puff up the Pete Buttigieg candidacy, hastening, even, to (in Joshua Cho's words) "portray() a lack of voter support as an obstacle to their preferred centrists’ ascent, rather than evidence of a problem with the centrists for not supporting a progressive political agenda representative of most voters." In other words, Pete Buttigieg could be President, if not for those pesky voters! But I don't think Bernie Sanders would get "liberal" media plaudits for flip-flopping on Medicare for All, as Mr. Buttigieg has done, because the rules for moderates and right-wingers are always different for actual liberals. And the sooner we realize that, the sooner we'll fight the way we need to, and the sooner we'll win.

Hate to pile on the Buttigieg Boom -- OK, I don't -- but former health care executive Wendell Potter tells us that Mr. Buttigieg's work at McKinsey entailed, in part (and in Mr. Buttigieg's words), "performing analytical work...identifying savings in administration and overhead costs," which Mr. Potter suggests is code for "laying off workers, offshoring, and hiking rates." I guess Mr. Potter would know, and since I take the Parable of the Prodigal Son seriously, I also think he's courageous for saying so. You'll want to remember that if Mr. Buttigieg were the nominee, our President would never shut up about "why Pete Buttigieg wants to keep his work at McKinsey so secret," as if he himself hasn't spent the last couple of years trying to keep everyone away from his tax returns, but that hypocrisy won't elect Mr. Buttigieg, since he has nothing to offer voters except elite fever dreams about his "electability." I'd call all that ironic, but I demand more from irony than yet another stomach ache.

Finally, I try to avoid discussing the Drama-King-in-Chief as often as possible, but him telling Time's new Person of the Year, Greta Thunberg, that she has "anger management" issues is beyond disgusting. The man who shouts at everyone all the time doesn't get to lecture anyone about "anger management" -- particularly not, you know, folks angry that the adults are going to make their planet uninhabitable. This may be a cue to our "liberal" media that it shouldn't assume that if the President says it, it must be news -- and that if this President says it, it's more likely a lesson for America in How Not to Be.

Action: concerning social media, corruption, and shareholder power.

In the wake of the news that Facebook has resisted pulling obviously untruthful political ads from our President, the news that CEO Mark Zuckerberg has met with far right-wingers (including our President!) on several occasions recently, and, of course, our collective memory of how much obnoxious and just-plain-wrong stuff has been spread around on Facebook over the years, Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate Facebook's role in the right-wing propaganda effort. Because what if it isn't mere incompetence and "unintended consequences"? What if it isn't jes' folks connecting with each other and "being the media"? What if it's malice? What if Mr. Zuckerberg is just another billionaire who thinks his perceived superiority preordained his success, and the rest of us are just trash who should've worked harder? Most of Our Glorious Elites feel that way, as you know, and the ones who ascend to that level may feel that way more acutely than those who were born there. But letting them have all the say about everything, well, that's not democracy, is it?

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell Republican Senators to return any campaign contributions arranged by our President, and reject any future contributions from him as well. Regardless of how you may feel about the "overuse" or the "process" or the "political nature" of impeachment, how can you fail to see our President suddenly arranging campaign contributions for Republican Senators up for re-election in 2020 as anything but bribery? Time was Republican Senators would have rejected such contributions for fear of merely appearing corrupt, but not now -- as too many of Our Glorious Elites still yammer on about the "damage to our values" allegedly caused by abortion and gay marriage and transgender folk in our public restrooms, they continue to inflict real and lasting damage to our values by supposing that "everyone does it" or "everyone would do it" whenever we shine a light on fairly obvious corruption. But "everyone does it" is not the same as saying "it's right," is it? The folks who decry situational ethics the most too often practice it the most. And they don't get all the say around here.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to reject its proposal to weaken shareholder power, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. As always, you have to ask: what are big corporations afraid of? That those who invest their hard-earned money will tell them to run things differently than they're inclined to do? That shareholders will make them treat gays better, treat workers better, prepare for climate change better? That shareholders will demonstrate further that money isn't the only reason to make a decision about how to run a corporation? Or are executives afraid of anyone other than themselves making those decisions? I mean, I like to think the best of people, I really do, but big corporate executives make that so, so difficult. It's like they only value shareholders for the money they bring in! Myself, I prefer democracies to set-ups you have to buy into, but our SEC exists pretty much to protect shareholders from corporate tyranny, so let's remind them not to enable the tyrants.

Action: concerning Social Security, public housing, and our Post Office.

S. 2733, the so-called TRUST Act, would of course create a fast-track process to cut Social Security "behind closed doors," as Sen. Ernst might put it. Because how else can you cut Social Security? The politicians pretend Social Security is going to go belly-up any minute -- I'm old enough to remember when they said it would go belly-up in 2016! -- when actually it'll pay out full benefits until 2037 and we could put it on sounder footing (with expanded benefits!) if we merely taxed income above $132,000 into the system. But that's just impossible, says the "bipartisan" "consensus" among our elected officials, which has little to do with reality as ordinary Americans experience it, and sadly the TRUST Act has four co-sponsors among the Democratic caucus. They keep using that word "bipartisan", but I do not think it means what they think it means. So Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject secret Social Security cuts by rejecting the TRUST Act. (Those four Senators are Messrs. Manchin, Sinema, Angus King, and Doug Jones, if you're looking to do more.)

Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the infamous Faircloth Amendment, which has stymied the building of public housing for the last two decades. The Faircloth Amendment represents yet another capitulation by nominal Democrat Bill Clinton to the far right; we said Republican moderates were useless the other day, but that's no less true of Democratic ones. And guess what's happened in the meantime? A major housing bubble burst, throwing millions of good Americans out of their homes, and several major American cities (and minor ones -- hello, Berkeley, California, where the $400,000 listings are all empty lots) have become too expensive for folks to live in. Oh, and America has 50 million more people now, and they can't live in tents. Republicans used to say that when the "free" market failed us, government had to step in; now they say "oh, the free market failed you? Well, tough toodles for yoodles!" But we don't need to take that.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors to reject any Postmaster General appointee who aims to privatize the service, then Progress America still helps you do that. Too many right-wingers say PRIVATIZE TEH POST OFFICEZ!!!! as if it will cure all of America's ails; these folks seem unaware (do I mean "unaware"? Perhaps I do!) that our Post Office has taken exactly zero dollars in taxpayer money for operating expenses since 1982 -- or that our Constitution literally mandates the creation and Congressional oversight of a national post office. But, if anything, we should bring our Post Office more under the American people's control. If we did that, we could more easily reinstitute the postal banking service that was a regular feature of our Post Offices until the late 1960s, and that would better serve urban and rural folks banksters don't bother to serve -- certainly it would serve them better than check-cashing joints! But if we privatize our Post Office, that won't ever happen -- and good Americans won't get the services they pay for and deserve.

Action: concerning transparency, privatization, and robocalls.

Our Treasury Department plans to change campaign finance rules so that big political organizations can keep their big-money donors secret! Specifically, Treasury wants to make such campaign finance disclosure mandatory only if the IRS is auditing that particular group. What one has to do with the other I'll never know -- the whole point of disclosure is to shine sunlight on who's trying to buy our democracy, and no it's not about privacy rights, because money isn't speech -- folks who exercise their free speech rights need protection from our government more than folks who exercise an imagined "right" to either bribe elected officials or ensure more bribable people get elected. (My app isn't flagging the word "bribable," and further investigation reveals that it is, in fact, a real word. The more you know!) Anyway, Public Citizen helps you tell our Treasury Department not to change the rules to protect the identity of big money campaign donors. They don't need our government's protection -- we need our government's protection, from them.

Meanwhile, are you using an .org domain for your website? You know, like virtually every good-government website helping you express your will to your Congressfolk? Well, the Internet Society (or ISOC) plans to sell the Public Interest Registry (or PIR) -- which contains the names of all .org domains -- to Ethos Capital, a damn venture capital firm. It's bad enough that they want to privatize the part of the internet where people get together to cooperate on positive change, but to sell it to a damn investment firm, which we have every right to expect will charge usurious rates for .org domains until they all go out of business? I said it a long time ago and it's still true: Our Glorious Elites know they're evil, and they know we know they're evil, so they're going to try to take everything from us, including, apparently, .org domains. After all, banksters won't manage them in our interest -- they'll manage it in theirs. This is why we don't privatize everything! So Save .ORG helps you tell ISOC to abandon its plans to sell off the .org domain name database to vulture capitalists.

Finally, S. 151, the TRACED Act, would enact strong protections against robocalls and call-spoofing; the bill passed the Senate in May, but an improved version passed the House last week, so now it goes back to the Senate for approval -- and since both versions of the bill passed their respective houses nearly unanimously, we might be optimistic about its final passage. Still, duty is duty and complacency is anathema, so Consumer Reports helps you tell your Senators to help protect good Americans from scam artists by passing the TRACED Act. If you're like most Americans, you've lately stopped answering calls from phone numbers you don't recognize because they might be trying to trick you into giving up your Social Security number or a big wad of cash (or both!). The TRACED Act would force big telecom corporations to authenticate phone calls and block scam phone calls, and would also prevent big telecoms from imposing additional fees on good Americans for providing such services. These would be good works, so we should encourage them -- and not just because Congress so rarely does good works.

Action: concerning good policy, the war on Yemen, and torture.

The list is back! It's time once again to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. And this week we're proud to add H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act, which passed the full House on Friday afternoon. Why have all these good bills piled up? Because Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (E-KY) won't bring them up for a vote; didn't know we elected Mitch McConnell Dictator-for-Life, did you? So let's tell our Senators to fight for voting rights, equal rights, public lands, internet freedom, and so much more -- and let's stay in their grills until they bend to our will.

Meanwhile, word on the street is that Democrats will abandon efforts to pass a defense spending bill amendment that would end our involvement in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. Sigh. And I bet Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), Chair of the House Armed Services Committee, runs on proposing the amendment, even as he prevents its passage so it can actually do some damn good! And it would do a considerable amount of good -- it would get us out of yet another undeclared war, it would bring more good Yemeni back from the brink of starvation, and it would save more Houthi rebels for the fight against al-Qaeda that they're good at. Sometimes you think we get involved in these messes just so we can make everything worse. Ah, who am I kidding -- of course we're in Yemen to create chaos, just like Iraq! Rep. Smith's office number is 202.225.8901; his Armed Service Committee office number is 202.225.4151. These numbers are courtesy Just Foreign Policy; good luck finding phone numbers at his own House website, because they seem pretty well-hidden.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to release the full 7,000-page torture report to the American people, then Win Without War still helps you do that. There's no "looking forward, not backward" (in Mr. Obama's infamous phrase) when our CIA tortured at least 100 men in "black site" operations, and though Congress has released a 500-page summary of the report, they haven't released the whole enchilada, which hamstrings our effort to ensure this never happens again. The cynical will ask whom among our good Americans will read the full 7,000-page report -- and sadly, too many of our "liberal" media will ask the very same question, though the answer should be that they will read it, and report on its contents and its meaning. That is journalism, after all, and if too many contemporary "journalists" call it a day after they've trolled through Twitter for cruel and obnoxious crap uttered by fools who deserve their anonymity, that doesn't change their obligations to our Republic and our civilization.

Penny Rants for Sunday, December 8, 2019: concerning internet policy, tough-on-crime posturing, and impeachment.

Sen. Sanders releases his broadband plan, a plan big telecom executives won't like, according to Karl Bode at Vice. Sen. Sanders would restore net neutrality and break up big telecom monopolies, of course, but he'd also prevent big telecoms from imposing hidden and onerous fees -- which anyone who has ever paid a cable bill will like! -- plus he'd invest $150 billion (over how many years, his proposal doesn't say) in community broadband, which anyone who has ever paid a cable bill will also like. I'm not sure Mr. Sanders's plan is "Comcast's Worst Nightmare," though -- maybe Ben Tarnoff's "Socialist Plan to Fix the Internet" is. (No, I won't recoil from the word "socialist" just because idiots use the word to describe anything they don't like.) Mr. Tarnoff's plan is more a "sketch," containing a range of proposals including turning our internet into a free, publicly-owned utility and regulating corporations differently based on their size and function; you would think Comcast would rather deal with Mr. Sanders than Mr. Tarnoff.

Chris Calton at the Foundation for Economic Education writes about how asset forfeiture laws have mushroomed over the last half century -- with a vital assist from then-Senator/now Democratic Presidential contender Joe Biden. And also, sigh, with a vital assist from then-Assistant Attorney General/now Republican Presidential contender William Weld, which should (again) instruct us about the general uselessness of moderate Republicans. At first, RICO only went after the assets of convicted criminals, but within a decade Congress changed the law so they could go after indicted criminals -- and then Messrs. Biden and Weld stepped in, allowing law enforcement to take "substitute" property (like houses) without even demonstrating probable cause, let alone getting an indictment. Thus we now have a state of affairs that outrages liberals and conservatives alike -- not to mention good Americans who've lost their homes not because they broke the law, but because their local police department got hungry.

Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Inquirer reminds us that the Iran-Contra affair might predict what'll happen with the current impeachment effort better than the one against Richard Nixon. Mr. Reagan got away with that one, after all, and most Americans today look at the makeup of the Senate and conclude that our current President will, too. I recall that the Iran-Contra investigation essentially ended when NSA head John Poindexter told Congress that "the buck stops here with me," i.e., that he had decided to go ahead with the whole arms-for-hostages-plus-money-for-Contras deal and had actively kept President Reagan out of the loop. But that doesn't excuse our media's collective amnesia over that time a President committed an impeachable offense and Congress didn't impeach him. And while our current President ought to remember that he's a lot less popular than Mr. Reagan was back then, no matter what he says to screaming crowds at rallies, the rest of us should remember that he's not that unpopular -- at least not yet.

Around the table: concerning our economy, our public lands and water, and several far more trifling matters.

Your right-wing uncle telling you about wages going up under our President? Well, Dean Baker reminds us that state minimum wage hikes and our Federal Reserve's low interest rates are actually driving recent wage increases. You know that high minimum wages cause wage hikes at the low end, but you may not know that low interest rates have helped drive unemployment down -- and Mr. Baker says that "low rates of unemployment give workers the bargaining power necessary to secure real wage gains." Naturally our President says minimum wages should be lower, though, admittedly, he also thinks interest rates should be lower. But low interest rates have been Fed orthodoxy since 2008, so we can safety say he deserves very little (if any!) of the credit for what gains we're making in this economy.

If you've been following Nestlé's attempts to gobble up as much public water as it can and then sell it as bottled water at an absurdly high profit, you'll be interested to hear that the Michigan state court of appeals has ruled that Osceola Township can block Nestlé from expanding its bottled-water operation within town limits, because bottled water is most emphatically not an "essential public service" or a "public water supply." I was a little surprised that any legal eagles at Nestlé would make such ludicrous claims -- even as part of a see-what-sticks effort -- until I learned that a lower Michigan court had approved them, and I note that the court of appeals also said that a bottled water operation might be "essential" in a place with no water, which I'm pretty sure could be stretched by some judicial activist to mean any of the many areas of desert in America.

Big pharma executives tell OHSU researchers that prices for MS drugs go up so damn much go up purely for profit-making reasons. Also, you can only gouge patients in America, since (to quote one exec) "(i)n the rest of the world, prices decline with duration in the marketplace," and prices never go down because then people would think "we're less effective, (that) we think less of our product." You do hear the quiet part out loud more than you used to even 10 years ago, when it seemed (to me, at least!) we heard the quiet part out loud all the time. Maybe big pharma execs are tired of pretending they're anything but thieves, not that I expect their behavior to change.

From the "How Do They Always Find Someone Even Worse?" file: Interior Secretary David Bernhardt wants to reduce fees oil and gas drilling corporations pay to drill in shallow Gulf of Mexico waters. It's not just the stench of an Interior Secretary lowering fees on corporations for which he used to lobby, or the horror that we could have another Spillageddon in the Gulf like we had in 2010 -- it's the fact that these are our waters and we, the public, deserve to make more money if our government is going to be so foolish as to allow more drilling in the Gulf. It's like they have literally no idea that they're supposed to serve the American people.

U.S. House Rep. Steve Watkins (R-KS) apparently listed a UPS store as his official residence, which just so happens to have had the effect of allowing him to vote in a different Topeka City Council district than the one in which he otherwise would have voted. Has the Fox News Channel "accidentally" identified him as a Democrat yet? After all, ONLY TEH LIBRULZ COMMITZ TEH VOTER FRAUDZ!!!!!

Finally, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) has suspended her campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination, citing a lack of money to keep campaigning. I don't actually think it's correct to say that "she struggled to define a clear rationale for her candidacy" -- actually, I think she was completely successful in "defin(ing) a clear rationale for her candidacy," since that rationale was "I'm here to trick the liberals into thinking I'm going to run this country the way they'd want me to when I'm really going to run it however my big donors tell me to." If I'm right, then it's heartening that Democratic voters have rejected that rationale, at least as far it manifested in her -- and almost two months before the Iowa caucuses, no less!

UPDATE. An alert reader pointed out that I'd gotten our President's position on interest rate cuts entirely wrong; I've corrected the first paragraph above as a result.

Action: concerning voting rights, arbitration fairness, and our Post Office.

H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act, may receive a vote in the House as early as today, so 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 call your House Reps and tell them to pass it. As you may recall, our Supreme Court, in Shelby County v. Holder, invalidated Sec. 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act, saying that forcing Southern states to pre-clear changes in their voting laws with our federal government constituted an undue burden on those states given narrowly-perceived advancements in voting rights in the South. But the Voting Rights Advancement Act would institute a new pre-clearance formula into the Voting Rights Act that would subject any state or locality with a long record of voting rights violations to federal scrutiny. It would, essentially, revive the Voting Rights Act, so let's ensure our House Reps pass the Voting Rights Advancement Act.

Meanwhile, Amtrak has recently inserted a forced arbitration agreement into its tickets, meaning that you wouldn't be able to take Amtrak to court if they crash your train, but you'd have to go before a private arbitrator, and you know how that tends to go. (Remember not to believe the right-wing BS about "average" awards from arbitration cases being higher than class action awards, because the average of all awards to people who lose in arbitration is zero.) Amtrak sure has some chutzpah pushing this on its riders, because its riders are also its owners -- our government still controls Amtrak, and gives Amtrak $2 billion in taxpayer money annually; given the public stake in Amtrak, I wonder if this clause could actually survive in court, particularly given that we can learn the results of a court case, but not a privately-arbitrated case. In the meantime, Public Citizen helps you tell Amtrak to remove forced arbitration clauses from its customer agreements.

Finally, our U.S. Postmaster General will leave office next month, which means our President will get to appoint a new one, and he might decide to appoint someone who favors privatizing our Post Office -- but the USPS Board of Governors can reject such a nominee if they choose, so Progress America helps you tell our USPS Board of Governors to reject any attempt to put a privatizer in charge of our Post Office. A lot of right-wingers have a jones for privatizing our Post Office, but we already know why that's a bad idea -- because any privatized Post Office won't operate for our benefit, but for the benefit of some Presidential crony or other. But our Post Office is supposed to serve us, and, not incidentally, our Constitution explicitly mandates that our government ensure mail delivery -- so let's help ensure a Post Office that belongs to us fulfills that mandate.

Action: concerning worker safety, food safety, and endangered species.

Many major clothing corporations have signed on to the Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety so we don't have more Rana Plaza garment factory fires that kill thousands of garment factory workers -- but our work ain't done here, because Amazon hasn't signed on, and Amazon is close to being America's top clothing seller now, and sells plenty of clothing made in a few dozen Bangladeshi factories that the other big retailers won't touch. If you're still hung up on "free markets" always being right, consider the case of the woman who was trapped in the Rana Plaza rubble for three days and had to saw half her arm off just to get out. And then let Demand Progress help you tell Amazon to help ensure garment workers don't work in deathtraps by signing onto the Bangladesh Accord. Don't take any guff about how we should really talk to their "third-party" suppliers about that -- as if they don't use these suppliers to escape accountability in the first place.

Meanwhile, in the wake of yet another contaminated Romaine lettuce outbreak, Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to give our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) the power to investigate how these food poisoning outbreaks come about. Food poisoning is one of those things that still makes the evening news programs even despite these programs' ongoing effort to say nothing of importance to their viewers, so maybe we should empower our government to get to the bottom of E. coli outbreaks, maybe? Yes, even this government, which ain't gonna be with us forever. And if our FDA finds that irrigation water contaminated with feces was the cause, as most observers think, and if this finding shames the FDA that, you may recall, delayed implementing irrigation water-testing rules not that long ago, well, confronting the shame you cause yourself is a character-building opportunity, and I would never want to deprive government agencies of such opportunities.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Reps to protect endangered and threatened species by passing H.R. 4348, the PAW and Fin Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. Our Administration has lately issued regulations that would make it considerably harder to protect endangered and threatened species from encroaching fossil fuel corporations, but the PAW and FIN Act would nullify these changes, and would also prevent our Administration from using "economic factors" in considering how to enforce the Endangered Species Act. By "economic factors," of course, our Administration means "money lost by bosses." No, that's all they mean -- bosses are all they care about. Oh, our President can go on TV and claim people fight him because he's "fighting for you," but his record shows he only fights for other bosses who think, as he does, that they're on top because they belong there. They don't. This is America. We do.

Action: concerning corporate spying, government-funded discrimination, and onerous research fees.

CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate Amazon's relentless data-collection and stop it from extending its surveillance tentacles into all areas of our lives. That is the job of a Congressperson, after all -- not to "protect free markets" by letting monopolists do whatever they like but to protect freedom by restraining such monopolists. And Amazon doesn't just do streaming and same-day delivery -- it also listens in on your conversations through Alexa, tracks your every public move through Rekognition, and hands police another surveillance tool through Ring. Is streaming and same-day delivery really worth all that? I mean, I'm old enough to remember when I had to wait for TV shows to come on; the only aspects of our data-at-your-fingertips future we should accept are the ones we drive -- because free people control their destinies; this is, indeed, the promise of America, and we must work to keep that promise.

Our Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) wants to let adoption and foster care programs receive government grants and discriminate against gay folks who want to be parents and foster parents. And this is why the religious right thinks of our selfish, adulterous, and thoroughly corrupt President as "the chosen one"! The rest of us, of course, care more for putting kids in good, safe homes than we do for ensuring they're in straight homes, and no one who's ever watched hetero parents yell at their kids at the mall thinks gay folks are automatically bad parents. I would imagine the distribution of good and bad parents is the same, actually, but that still means a lot more potential good parents out there would like to give kids good homes, if we remove the mote in our eyes. Hence both CREDO and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to block this Administration's attempt to discriminate against gay would-be parents.

Do you enjoy researching your family history? Then you'll be appalled to learn that our United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has proposed raising fees for getting copies of certain historical records more than ninefold. That's right, instead of a $65 fee (itself far too high, and I wish I'd known three years ago that the USCIS had tripled it!) to retrieve a copy of a visa file or a naturalization file, they'll now charge you $625! (Or "only" $385, if you happen to know the exact file number you want to retrieve, which nobody does.) A lot of bad immigration policy in this Administration is straight-up racist, and so is this -- by focusing on alien and naturalization files, they're making mostly non-WASP folks (ahem!) pay money they don't have just to learn about people they love. So Records Not Revenue helps you tell our USCIS to reject its ridiculous plan to charge absurdly high fees to folks for the unforgivable sin of wanting to find out about their history.

Action: concerning facial recognition, immigration, and shareholder power.

The more we fight facial recognition, the more our politicians try to protect it -- while pretending they're protecting us from it. Case in point: S. 2878, the so-called Facial Recognition Technology Warrant Act, which would allow police to use facial recognition tech to track people without a warrant. Our police would never abuse that power on, say, political protestors! And of course the bill would also exempt from its meager restrictions all the "foreign" surveillance that just-so-happens to catch good Americans in its web. Facial recognition is, as you know, crap technology that seems to think all black people look alike and also (in a recently-documented experiment) thinks it can spot Roy Orbison in a crowd. I mean, we wish! But, alas, Mr. Orbison passed over 30 years ago. Hence Ban Facial Recognition helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a real ban on facial recognition technology.

Our Administration now wants to send park rangers and park police to do border patrol work, and even if you believe in "caravans," you have to wonder why we'd send people out to do a job they're plainly not trained to do. Of course, reasoning is not a strong suit with our Administration's votaries, who lap up every lousy idea about immigration as evidence that this President is "finally doing something" about immigration -- this, after President Obama earned his reputation as the "deporter-in-chief," and our current President wishes he were deporting as many immigrants as Mr. Obama! Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell our Administration to stop misusing park rangers and park police as border control agents. Which also happens to leave our public parks understaffed, not that our Administration cares -- they would sell all our public parks to their cronies if they could! Of course, we care, and that's why we fight.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to stop trying to undermine shareholder activism, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. Shareholders using resolutions to curb carbon emissions, stop discriminating against gays, or fight excessive executive pay -- all will be much harder to propose and enact if our SEC gets its way and makes you have to own 10 times more stock merely to propose such a resolution and make a resolution get more support before being reconsidered again. This is another occasion where you must ask: what are big corporations afraid of? Of course, we know what they're afraid of: they're afraid of anyone having a different opinion about how our world should be, and they're afraid of anyone getting their hands on their unearned moneypots. In other words, they're just like our President! But being like our President is something we must discourage.

Action: concerning abortion rights, the war on Yemen, and Presidential corruption.

First things first. Hot on the heels of a "heartbeat" bill designed to test whether our Supreme Court will continue to uphold Roe v. Wade, Ohio state legislators have introduced HB 413, which would force doctors to reimplant an ectopic pregnancy inside a woman's uterus or face "abortion murder" charges, even though scientists tell us that such reimplantation is medically impossible. I guess they'll call that an "unintended consequence" of the bill, but the hell it is -- today's "conservatives" care nothing about good policy, and they certainly don't care about reducing abortions; they only care about swordfighting over who's more "conservative." You can reach House Speaker Larry Householder (R-72) at 614.466.2500, and Senate Majority Leader Larry Obhof (R-22) at 614.466.7505, and Gov. Mike DeWine (R) at 614.644.4375, so you can tell them you want Ohio to stop playing politics with women's lives and reject HB 413.

Meanwhile, our government continues to enable the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen, a continuing humanitarian disaster, and our government also talks of revoking Temporary Protected Status (or TPS) for every refugee it can, hence Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure that Yemeni refugees can still get TPS status in America. I mean, if we're going to help create the conditions from which refugees try to flee, it would be hypocritical for us to shut our doors to those same refugees, would it not? And don't let anyone try to tell you that giving TPS to Yemeni refugees would "cause terrorism," not just because refugees flee terror, but because Jesus Mary and Joseph the war on Yemen causes more terrorism! Yes, by targeting the Houthi rebels in Yemen, we are helping decimate the ranks of some of the best al-Qaeda fighters on Earth. So no one gets to play the "terror" card when discussing TPS status for Yemeni refugees -- at least, not if they don't want to be the stupidest people on Earth.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to investigate the flow of our taxpayer money into our President's pockets, then Americans for Tax Fairness still helps you do that. And if your Tea Party uncle tells you that all politicians do it, ask him: does that make it right? Seriously, this is the question we must always ask! Every day we must battle the cynicism of which far too many Americans are proud! And it is most pointedly not beside the point that a President (even one who got only 46% of the popular vote!) might use the power of his office to fill his coffers with taxpayer money. I'm old enough to remember when politicians avoided even strictly-speaking-legal diversions of taxpayer money into their properties, so worried were they about the appearance of corruption. And that's an America we ought to bring back, regardless of whether or not it hurts the feelings of our President's most devoted supporters.

Around the table: concerning health care, student loan debt, Astroturf protests, and bad leadership.

When I hear that our Administration spent $11 million to redesign a Medicare plan-finding tool that gives seniors inaccurate info, I'm gobsmacked that seniors can still support this President. I mean, of course I know the real reasons they still support him, but I do wonder how many more times the mustache-twirling villain can tie the girl to the train tracks before the girl stops voting for him. And, not for nothing, but a single Medicare-for-All program that covers everything would obviate the need to distinguish between plans in the first place.

Economists say that cancelling all student loan debt would boost the economy -- mainly by freeing people to spend money buying homes and starting families instead of paying debt installments. Economists may also overstate the effect that the resulting taxes would have on economic growth, forgetting, perhaps, that tax hikes on the rich don't hurt (and I'd say help) economic growth. In any case, I guess this is where the right "remembers" its "morals" and says we can't forgive debts just because it would be good for the economy. We could forgive the loans because they were extortionate to begin with, but no right-wing "moral" ever leads to criticism of big money.

Nathan Robinson warns that Sen. Warren talks a good game about slamming the rich, but "her campaign seems suspiciously designed to stave off revolution." I think he made the case better here back in September, but all I'll say is this: Sen. Warren did help build the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and it's not her fault this Administration has gutted it, but she's never really passed any legislation, and Sen. Sanders has passed a lot of it -- mostly amendments to other bills, but that's still legislation.

Hamilton Nolan warns that "Billionaire-Funded Protest is Rearing Its Head in America," although of course we all remember that billionaires funded the Tea Party "movement." Sadly, where billionaires may not be able to find a whole lot of pro-war, pro-pollution, or pro-racism protestors, they will find a sizable number of pro-charter school protestors, since charter schools purport to help poor folks, particularly from areas where public schools aren't funded well enough -- though that does suggest that funding our public schools properly would be a better solution.

Great Moderate/Billionaire Hope Michael Bloomberg said back in January that legalizing pot would be "perhaps the stupidest thing anybody has ever done." He actually had a sympathetic message buried in that dung nugget -- that addicting substances curtail freedom and thus shouldn't be legal, though I would argue that pot's a lot less addictive than heroin, and I wonder what he'd do about the legality of tobacco, alcohol, and caffeine -- but saying "stupidest thing anybody has ever done" just about insures that message will never get heard. I mean, George W. Bush did far, far stupider things nearly every day of his Presidency.

Finally, we learn from S.V. Date at the Huffington Post that our President has spent $115 million on security and travel expenses just on his weekend golf excursions. Yeah, $115 million ain't a whole lot in the context of a $4 trillion federal budget, but corruption is corruption, and the next time our President goes on about how the Mueller investigation cost TEH 35 MILLYUNZ OFZ TEH DOLLARZ!!!!!, you can mention that he's spent more than three times that in taxpayer money just playing golf. Oh, and that some of that money has gone into his own pocket. Oh, and he kicked transgender folks out of our military because their health care costs would have amounted to about one-fifth the cost of his golf trips.

Light posting notice.

Posting will be light this week, which I suppose isn't a surprise, since it's a holiday week, but I've received fewer action alerts than normal these past few days, which, actually, is a surprise, to me, at least.

So perhaps we should take this opportunity to take a few deep breaths and gather up our strength, for though the finish line of 2019 may be in sight, 2020 is right behind it, promising an order of magnitude more drama than even the last three years -- or the last 15, or 20, or 40 -- have done.

Action: concerning Medicare for All and PFAS chemicals.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to enact Medicare for All health insurance, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. Public Citizen also encourages you to share with your Congressfolk any stories of outrageous medical bills you've received, like the folks who've received bills for tens of thousands of dollars for a mere colonoscopy or close to a million dollars for the surgeries resulting from a surgeon's error. I really don't like to persuade with mere anecdotes, but surely these weigh at least as much as the desperate rubbish coming from right-wingers about how Obamacare oppresses them, or someone they know, or someone they heard about, or someone they made up. No one has any standing to whine about patients left to die by Big Gummint health care when big health insurance corporations leave patients to die all the time -- and sometimes try to extort them when they don't leave them to die. Seriously, our government can't possibly do a worse job than private corporations have done.

Meanwhile, both the Sierra Club and the Union for Concerned Scientists help you tell your Congressfolk to pass a defense spending bill that curtails military use of ubiquitous and dangerous PFAS chemicals. You've probably heard that Congressional Democrats are getting a bit wobbly about including defense bill amendments curbing use of PFAS-laden firefighting foam, so you might be thinking it's no use telling them to have some courage. But this is exactly the time to communicate your will to your Reps and Senators! Particularly over something that has actually attracted bipartisan support! But then, Democrats generally wouldn't recognize real bipartisanship if it slapped them across the face, though they sure seem to understand the fake "bipartisanship" of both parties coming together to do whatever their big donors want, which, apparently, is more PFAS and more health problems for our soldiers and their families. And this is why our Congressfolk need us to get in their grills -- someone needs to put the steel in their spines.

Action: concerning shareholder power, torture, and government spying.

Our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) -- which, like our President, cares only about bosses -- would like to make it harder for shareholders to propose resolutions aiming to restrain corporate misbehavior. Our SEC would make you own more stock before introducing a resolution about anything that goes on at the corporation in which you invest, and they would also make shareholder resolutions meet higher support levels before ever being considered again; these changes seem like transparent attempts to stop shareholders from telling executives what they think they ought to do. Gosh, if resolutions concerning climate change and racial diversity and sexual harassment are so bad, why not just advance winning arguments against them? I kid, of course -- the answer is they can't. Because they're losers. CREDO helps you tell our SEC to work for us, not banksters, and reject its proposed changes to SEC Rule 14a-8.

Meanwhile, Open the Government helps you tell your Congressfolk to release the full Torture Report. Our Senate investigated CIA torture of terror suspects starting in 2009, approved a final report in 2012, and released an executive summary in 2014, but has never released the full, 6,000-page report. If you're thinking we might as well leave enough alone and everyone pretty much knows the story (which is, per the report and per common sense, that CIA torture never produced any significant intel on terror attacks), consider that a woman who oversaw torture at detention sites now runs the CIA, and that another State Department nominee advocated using torture on terror suspects while serving with Tha Bush Mobb. And we now have a President who has embraced torture as a terror-fighting tool, again, though this position opposes both science and common sense. Not to mention morality! But he doesn't get all the say around here.

Finally, Sum of Us helps you tell big tech corporation Microsoft to divest from AnyVision's facial recognition technology, which several foreign governments use to track down and oppress citizens who protest these governments' actions. Israel, in particular, has used AnyVision to track down Palestinians who've said something bad about Israel on Facebook and then refused them passage across the Israel/Palestine border; you see the slippery slope there, I trust. Microsoft has actually developed standards for supporting facial recognition software that include "non-discrimination, fairness, and consent," but governments use AnyVision to spy on their citizens in a discriminatory manner and without their consent; you have to wonder if Microsoft came up with their standards simply as an intellectual exercise. Still, Microsoft said all of these words out loud, for anyone to hear, so why not make Microsoft live up to them?

Action: concerning government spying, big telecom fees, and children's online privacy.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject efforts to reauthorize the notorious Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, which allows our government to hoover up all sorts of data without establishing probable cause or getting a warrant, then Free Press still helps you do that. And Section 215 doesn't just allow the data-vacuuming program even the NSA says it doesn't need anymore -- it also allows our government to collect location data and execute "backdoor searches" on Americans without a warrant. That means, not incidentally, that our government can now spy on political protestors a lot more easily. Why, it's almost like that was the whole idea of the USA PATRIOT Act to begin with! It was a Bush Mobb production, after all, and Mr. Bush famously once said "there should be limits to freedom" after being criticized particularly trenchantly. And now the most thin-skinned human being ever is President.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to force big telecom corporations to be more transparent in their pricing by passing H.R. 1220/S. 510, the TRUE Fees Act, then Consumer Reports still helps you do that. The bill would do a lot of good things: it would force big telecom corporations to include most of their fees in their advertised price and ensure that good Americans can see all the fees and taxes in their bill. The bill would also make big telecom corporations give us at least 21 days' notice before jacking up any fees, and if we don't like it, we can end our contract with those big telecoms without any penalties. The bill would even void forced arbitration clauses in customer contracts! The bad news? Big telecom corporations hate the TRUE Fees Act, and they still hold a lot of sway with politicians. The good news? Most Americans hate big telecom corporations! And it's well past time we got more say about things in America.

Finally, our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) is still mulling whether to weaken the landmark child privacy law, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA. COPPA prevents corporations from targeting ads at children under 13 without parental consent, and big telecom corporations tell you that "technology" has "advanced" to the point where such controls are "quaint." But what they really want, of course, is to be able to hoover up children's data so they can target kids online as quickly as possible, without parental rights as an "obstacle." But parental rights are only an obstacle to big corporations siphoning more money from them, and no big corporation has a "right" to make more money more quickly -- and even if they did, that "right" wouldn't supersede a parent's right to protect their children from mass marketing. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell our FTC to reject any plans it might have to weaken children's online privacy laws.

Action: concerning health care, animal abuse, and paid family leave.

H.R. 3815/S. 1926, the PrEP Access and Coverage Act, would expand good Americans' access to pre-exposure prophylaxis (or PrEP) anti-viral pills, and thus reduce incidence of HIV. The bill would ensure that all private and public health insurance plans cover PrEP without copays (the drug can run as much as $2,000/month in out-of-pocket costs), and it would also prevent health insurance corporations from charging people higher premiums if they're using PrEP, which essentially insulates Americans from their insurers using PrEP as a pre-existing condition. I guess the "religious" "conscience" crowd will whine about it, but if you know folks are born gay, and that drug addicts and couples of mixed status (i.e., one has HIV, the other doesn't) don't deserve to die of AIDS, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect good Americans from HIV by passing the PrEP Access and Coverage Act.

Meanwhile, you may have heard that over a dozen states still use sodium cyanide bombs to kill coyotes and foxes -- and you may also have heard that these cyanide bombs don't just kill and injure the predators for whom they're intended, but also other animals, family pets, and even people. Hence H.R. 2471/S. 1301, the Chemical Poisons Reduction Act, would outlaw sodium cyanide and sodium fluoroacetate in animal control devices nationwide. The bill is also known as "Canyon's Law," after the 14-year-old Idaho boy who lost his family dog to a sodium cyanide bomb, and who suffered injuries himself from the bomb. It sure seems commonsensical to demand that animal control devices do no harm to animals who aren't hurting anyone -- in fact, one might well say it sounds conservative. Hence Wild Earth Guardians helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect Americans and animals from the unintended consequences of sodium cyanide bombs by passing Canyon's Law.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Pennsylvania state legislators to pass HB 1739/SB 580, the Family Care Act, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. Much like the FAMILY Act at the federal level, the Family Care Act would establish a paid family leave insurance program in the state of Pennsylvania, and would pay for it by instituting a small payroll tax, and by "small" I mean a little over half of one percent. Per the bill, workers would get 90% of "the portion of a covered individual's average weekly wage that is equal to or less than 50% of the Statewide average weekly wage," and then 50% of the portion above that; the benefits are a little low for my taste, but lower-income workers would wind up getting most of their paychecks, and they're the ones who can least afford to take days off to take care of sick family members (or sick selves). So let's get these working families some relief and some peace of mind for once.

Action: concerning voting rights, "free" trade, Social Security, and the Equal Rights Amendment.

Happy Monday, good peoples! Now go ahead and call your Senators and tell them to pass the following bills: H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Don't worry that it's a long list; your Senators could always have prevented our phone calls by passing the bills! Especially since they're good bills strengthening voting rights, fighting discrimination, raising the minimum wage, protecting good Americans from predatory health insurance corporations, protecting public lands, and insuring internet freedom -- among other good works. And don't worry that our President would veto these bills, because we ought to make him veto them.

Meanwhile, you may have heard that Democrats are almost ready to come to agreement with our President on his USMCA trade agreement with Canada and Mexico, which would replace the nefarious NAFTA, and while the USMCA does represent an improvement as it stands -- it would roll back the notorious investor-state dispute (or ISDS) settlement system with Canada and drastically curtail its use with Mexico -- it could be better, in that it could have better labor and clean air/clean water standards, and in that it doesn't need to sacrifice good Americans' health care before the altar of corporate intellectual property by letting big pharma corporations hold onto their exclusive rights for even longer than they do now. Hence Public Citizen helps you call your Congressfolk and tell them not to pass the USMCA until we can fix its problems. Please add, in your phone call, that you will not give up our gains regarding the ISDS system in exchange for better labor/health care/clean air and clean water standards, because the ISDS system nullifies our laws and outsources our jobs.

In other news, remember when Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) -- in a move which suggests she doesn't think she's in any danger of losing her 2020 re-election bid -- told Iowa residents that what we need to let Congress meet "behind closed doors" to "fix" Social Security? Well, S. 2733, the so-called TRUST Act, would let "rescue committees" meet behind closed doors on any federal program the Treasury Secretary deems necessary, and consider any legislation that comes out of these committees in an "expedited" manner, meaning very little debate and very little opportunity to amend. That should sound to you like a way of doing something very bad very quickly, which is how folks who want to do bad things have to do them these days. Hence Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject "secret" legislation considered "behind closed doors" by rejecting the TRUST Act. If a bill can't stand sunlight, it doesn't deserve to become law, period. And I'm old enough to remember when the Social Security trust fund was supposed to run out in 2016, so let's not let hysteria rule our world, OK?

Finally, you remember that when Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment back in the '70s, they put a deadline on its ratification by the states? Well, H.J.Res. 79 would essentially remove that deadline (by stating that the ERA "shall be valid to all intents and purposes as part of the Constitution whenever ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States"). 35 (of the necessary 38) states ratified the ERA before the original 1979 deadline; two more states have passed the ERA since 2017, with Virginia perhaps mulling the issue once Democrats formally take control of both legislative houses early next year. However, five states also rescinded their ratifications before the 1979 deadline, and our courts haven't concluded whether those states could do that under our Constitution or not -- mainly because the deadline had already passed. How this Supreme Court would resolve these questions we don't yet know, but in the meantime, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight for women's rights by removing the deadline on the original passage of the ERA.

Around the table: no one here gets out alive.

Steven Rosenfeld at Salon wonders if the briefly-contested Kentucky gubernatorial election reveals a Republican electoral strategy for 2020 -- i.e., they'll hope it's a close race and then simply throw bogus claims of voter fraud against the wall until Republican-dominated state legislatures take over and re-elect our President. Of course Mr. Bevin did eventually concede the race after his allegations proved, ah, extremely unlikely, but if Democrats really want to beat this nefarious Republican stratagem (and it's not a certainty that they do!), they'd nominate a candidate who doesn't spend all his time kowtowing to rich donors and telling us why we can't fix any of our problems. This is going to come up again.

Surprise, surprise, another one of our President's "opportunity zone" tax cuts went to a superyacht marina in Florida. Superyachts aren't just regular yachts, as they can cost $100 million or more, and "opportunity zones" are supposed to help poor people, not folks who can buy 300-foot yachts. Naturally former Governor/now Senator Rick Scott seems to have hand-picked a lot of areas owned by some of his biggest donors for his "opportunity zones," and he's mute about the matter now. Why? Because fuck you I won, that's why.

Democratic leadership apparently abandons efforts to include amendment in defense spending bill that would force contractors to stop using ubiquitous and carcinogenic PFAS chemicals. Or, to put it another way, they stand ready to sacrifice the health of our soldiers and their families to the whining of defense contractors, all of which either knew or should have known about PFAS's deleterious health effects. Again: if you don't do good works with the power you have, you don't deserve power at all. If that's true for Republicans, why wouldn't it be true for Democrats?

Our Administration begins the process of using its fake national emergency to take control of privately-owned lands in Texas so it can build its vanity border wall. I bet some Texas landowners are rethinking their support for our President because now it's going to hurt them, but I don't blame people very much for only coming to the light when they're affected; after all, people don't learn everything via thought experiment.

Federal budget deficit hits $134 billion for the month of October, which projects out to over $1.6 trillion for fiscal 2020, for no particularly good reason. And the same people who squealed over similarly-sized deficits during those rough first years of the Obama Administration won't complain about it now, and only because Their Personal Lord and Savior is President. Worse, they'll tell lies about it -- probably not that the 2017 tax "reform" stimulated the economy, because no one believes that, but I'm sure they'll talk about all the secret stimulus bills their President passed once he starts talking about them on his magical Twitterphone.

Finally, Barack Obama tells rich liberal donors that we shouldn't move "too far left" in taking on Republicans, though surely he intended for everyone to overhear what he was saying. When he says we should avoid thinking that "the resistance to certain approaches to things is simply because voters haven’t heard a bold enough proposal and if they hear something as bold as possible then immediately that’s going to activate them," he's indulging in straw-man reasoning -- voters abandon the party because Democrats don't do anything for the people when they get power, and if solutions need to be "bold," that's because Democrats didn't solve problems before they became bigger problems. And it's only true that "(t)he average American doesn’t think we have to completely tear down the system and remake it" when you put the question exactly like that -- when you ask said average American about individual fixes like Medicare-for-All, taxing the rich and corporations harder, and keeping banksters from preying upon us, the average American gets on board, and these fixes comprise much of the "big, structural change" that Our Glorious Elites keep warning us will "destroy the system." Of course, if we remember 2008, we already know that Our Glorious Elites can destroy the system very well on their own -- which is precisely why we need "bold enough proposals" and "big, structural change" in the first place.

Around the table: time for another exciting installment of "who's the real snowflake?"

From Carol Anderson at The Guardian we learn about "Five Ways the Republicans Will Crack Down on Voting Rights in 2020," and though I'm annoyed again to hear not one mention of the notorious Interstate Crosscheck database of people with similar names, which I would argue delivered Michigan's electoral votes to our President in 2016, it's good to be reminded of the crap Texas tried to pull earlier this year (ZOMG WE HAVE TEH 95,000 NON-CITIZUNZ WHO ARE TEH REGISTURD TO VOTEZ!!!!), because they (and other states) will certainly try to pull it again. I'd be happier if they made such outlandish allegations after the voters turned them out of office.

We are reminded by Alan McLeod at FAIR that for our "liberal" media, "The Bolivian Coup Is Not a Coup -- Because US Wanted It to Happen." Generally when the military forces you out, that's a coup, but as you recall from our "liberal" media's absurdly horrible coverage of the Venezuelan "coup" that actually failed to force out Mr. Maduro, a "coup" only happens to folks we like; if protestors manage to bring down Chile's President Piñera, they'll call that a coup. It brings back memories of the Obama Administration pondering, Hamlet-like, over the definition of the word "coup" back when the Honduran military orchestrated a coup against President Zelaya in 2009.

As amusing as it is to hear right-wingers wonder why anyone would think Administration Senior Advisor Stephen Miller is a white nationalist merely because he wouldn't shut up about being a white nationalist in hundreds of emails to Breitbart, it's even more amusing to hear Breitbart try to gaslight everyone into thinking this is all about politicos pitching ideas to journalists. It happens all the time, they say -- but I bet not very many politicos go on about their deep appreciation of Mein Kampf. (Seriously, ever try reading that? It's almost absurdly turgid -- get from one end of a sentence to the other without re-reading and you'll be halfway to Catholic sainthood.)

After alleging vague "irregularities" in Election Day voting that he said were "corroborated" (though he didn't say by whom), Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin finally concedes his Election Day loss to his opponent, Attorney General Andy Beshear. Kentucky state law doesn't allow gubernatorial candidates to call for a recount, but does allow them to call for a recanvass (or a recount of the vote total); the recanvass conducted by the state yesterday found exactly one additional vote, which is kind of hilarious. And thus we are reminded that you can't just be an asshole to everyone forever and never suffer any consequences. One hopes we are reminded of this lesson again this time next year.

However, about that: former two-term Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick has changed his mind and has decided he wants to run for President in 2020 after all. Oh, splendid, another Democrat who'd lose. I said this before, but it bears repeating: Mr. Patrick imagines his background as a prosecutor and a businessman insulates him from Republican criticism, but nothing insulates you from Republican criticism. If Jesus H. Christ himself ran for President, today's Republicans would call him a dirty hippie and a swarthy foreigner.

Finally, from the "Somehow Not a 'Kids in the Hall' sketch" file: our President's like-named son writes a book called Triggered about how liberals are supposedly triggered by everything, then won't answer questions about it at a California book-signing event, and winds up running away from right-wing hecklers who want to ask him questions about immigration. All together now: what a snowflake. And, you know, if you're afraid to take questions because "the left" will "twist your words," why not, oh, I don't know, articulate your points well enough to be plainly understood by anyone who will listen honestly?

Action: concerning payday lenders, welfare for the rich, and immigrant soldiers.

Still sick of payday lenders charging 400% interest on their never-ending cycles of debt? Did you know that the Military Lending Act caps all payday and car title loans at 36% for active duty soldiers? Well, the Veterans and Consumers Fair Credit Act (I can find no bill numbers at this writing) would expand this and other protections to all Americans. The bill would also let state laws stand if they offer stronger protections than the bill does. Hence Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect working families from predatory lenders by passing the Veterans and Consumers Fair Credit Act. And the payday loan "industry" won't even be able to complain about being forced to "figure out" how to comply with the law, because they've already been offering loans to active duty soldiers under these rules! Oh, they'll cry a river anyway about market disruption, but to be frank, any "market" that relies on trapping working families in a cycle of skyrocketing debt demands disruption, if not obliteration.

Meanwhile, in the wake of the news that the 2017 tax bill's "opportunity zones" have delivered taxpayer money to far too many uber-wealthy developers who are not actually using it to boost depressed neighborhoods, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to end these "opportunity zones" and thus close off at least one avenue through which the wealthy get handouts. Actually, there's another news hook: our Treasury Secretary, Steve "the Foreclosure King" Mnuchin, apparently intervened personally so his buddy Michael Milken (who once did two years' jail time for insider trading and was apparently the inspiration for Wall Street's Gordon Gekko) could get a windfall from an "opportunity zone." "Opportunity zones" supposedly give out tax breaks to developers who help uplift poorer areas, but in practice they just deliver more of your hard-earned taxpayer money to the already-rich who are more likely to gentrify areas than they are to create real jobs and livelihoods. "Creating wealth" in the form of higher real estate prices is fool's gold -- and too often the fools get all the gold.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell your Senators to protect our immigrant soldiers from deportation. If you're looking for a good-guy litmus test to determine who gets to come here and stay here, volunteering to give up your life for your country is a real good place to start. And if you're annoyed that we don't have enough volunteers in our Army to keep it, ah, home-grown, you may want to wonder if that's because of all the stupid wars we fight! Surely we don't want a country where we throw out active-duty soldiers because of their immigration status but allow folks with equally-rickety immigration status continue to work for dung pellets on our President's vineyards, because that's the kind of country he's bringing us -- a world full of flamboyant nativism, but also a world no less full of undocumented immigrants. Why, you have to wonder if that's the whole idea. (Full disclosure: you do not actually have to wonder. It is the whole idea. You can't keep people in a state of rage if you don't keep the objects of their rage around.)

Action: concerning a financial transaction tax, unsafe baby sleepers, and campaign finance disclosure.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a financial transaction tax, also known as a Robin Hood tax or a Wall Street sales tax. We used to have a financial transaction tax in America, but that was 50 years ago; now banksters use the internet to trade like they're all on speed, but don't pay a tax per trade that might actually fund some good things for good Americans. H.R. 2923/S. 1587, the Inclusive Prosperity Act, would impose at most a $5 tax on every $1,000 in trades, while H.R. 1516/S. 647, the Wall Street Tax Act, would tax $1 every $1,000 in trades; I'd go higher and do a full one percent tax, but at the lowest tax rate in the Wall Street Tax Act, we could raise over $70 billion annually. How do right-wingers respond? By taking your pension hostage, of course! As if your pension relies exclusively on the lightning-fast trades speculators conduct -- or as if a less-than-one-percent tax is somehow onerous! But most sane people support a financial transaction tax, and it's well past time most sane people got to make most of the decisions.

Meanwhile, infant inclined sleepers have now killed 73 infants, but you can still buy them! That's right, no manufacture has recalled these sleepers, nor has our government forced them to do so even after our own Consumer Product Safety Commission declared them unsafe. This sorry state of affairs goes on even though every pediatrician worth the title will tell you babies should sleep on their backs on flat and firm surfaces, and even though infant deaths do tend to be all over the news for good reason. Hence Consumer Reports helps you tell the nine corporations that manufacture infant inclined sleepers to recall them immediately. Our current Administration hates telling other bosses what to do, but if we want to remain a civilized society, we have to tell them what to do, and there's a good chance they'll do our will, if for no other reason than that they want the bad publicity to stop. Of course, anyone who builds a device that suffocates helpless infants deserves all that bad publicity. But if they do the right thing, they can make it stop.

Finally, H.R. 2592/S. 1356, the Honest Ads Act, would amend the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 -- our seminal campaign finance law -- so that it would be able to require disclosure for online political ads as well as TV, radio, and newspaper ads, and the bill would also extend that law's prohibition on foreign nationals buying campaign ads to internet ads. I remain one of those folks who think we wouldn't even be talking about Russian interference in the 2016 campaign if Democrats had nominated a better candidate, but it's fairly obvious that more and more Americans (ahem!) look to the internet for their news, and thus deserve the same protections from noxious campaign ads that other folks get. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand campaign finance disclosure to internet ads by passing the Honest Ads Act. I'm sure the right has its lies about preachers being silenced and politicians being able to silence opponents all lined up, but this bill is about disclosure; what do they have to be afraid of?

Action: concerning various forms of Executive branch corruption.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate how much taxpayer money (i.e., our money) is flowing right into our President's pockets. You'll recall how he planned to hold the next G20 summit at one of his own hotels, until popular outcry forced him to do differently, and you may also recall him saying that he's not "supposed to hate" the Saudi Arabian citizens who drop buku bucks at his hotels; even from these two examples, we can see the necessity of determining exactly how corrupt this President might be. The more cynical among us will no doubt chortle that we shouldn't be "surprised" he would do that, but remember that people who say "and you're surprised?" are advertising their own cynicism, and cynicism is evil. (They're also trying to tell you how much better they are than you, and you certainly don't have to take that.) We take it as gospel that politicians shouldn't profit from public service, because that warps the service they give to the public, and we shouldn't carve out an exception for arrogant billionaires.

In a peripherally-related note, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect the Ukraine whistleblower's identity from our President and his cronies. Our President has repeatedly demanded that the public know the identity of the individual who first reported on that infamous phone call to the Ukraine President, but our first job as civilized people is to protect the whistleblower's identity from folks who might decide to threaten or kill said whistleblower. And no, this has literally nothing to do with our President's habeus corpus rights -- he has the right, as an American citizen, to confront his accuser in a court of law, but he has no right to out his accuser so his votaries can take matters into their own hands. This is exactly the risk every whistleblower takes when they confront the abuse of power, whether in government or the private sector. And as civilized people, we either protect those who confront the abuse of power, or we lose the right to call ourselves civilized. It's that simple.

Our Nuclear Regulatory Commission (or NRC) would loosen regulations governing storage of radioactive waste, because what stimulates an economy more than letting some corporation bury nuclear waste in a shallow pit near an aquifer providing drinking water to good Americans? Sadly, too many Americans agree with big corporations that regulations are for LOOZERZ!!!!!, and when their loved ones get cancer from drinking the local water, they just blame Black Lives Matter or something. But the best part of all this? Our NRC is apparently considering changing the rules just so one waste management corporation in Texas can accept the most radioactive materials even though they don't have a license to handle them! Corruption isn't just about abusing the process to harass your potential opponents, or about redirecting taxpayer money to corporations you own, it's also about deforming the rules so your cronies can benefit. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell our NRC to reject its plan to loosen nuclear waste storage regulations.

Action: concerning good bills, good labor law, and good agricultural practice.

Let's see how our list is coming! Call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Don't worry that you're putting out your Senators' staffers by asking them to pass a long list of bills they have no intention of passing, because, hey, they're paid to listen to you, and if they don't like getting a long list from you, they can find another job. Hey, they're already well-connected! And, of course, if your Senators don't like it, they can, you know, pass good bills that protect and strengthen things like voting rights, equal rights, public lands, worker wages, and internet freedom.

Our National Labor Relations Board (or NLRB) has proposed a rule change that would deny graduate school teaching assistants of their right to organize and collectively bargain! What's their rationale behind this -- you know, besides ALWAYZ HURT TEH WURKURZ!!!!!? They're saying that letting TAs organize would "hurt academic freedom"! Always the right wing whines that you Americans will always let self-interest destroy everything, which is, of course, exactly how the right-wing is! And I guess our Administration has not properly considered all the union laborers in the South who vote Republican because at least they're against abortion. The more pertinent issue, of course, is that our institutions of higher learning exploit grad students, and just because they pay to go there doesn't give them a "right" to use them like wet dishrags. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell our NLRB to reject its plan to prevent grad students from organizing for better pay and better working conditions.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would help farmers reduce their dependence on chemicals like Dicamba, the notorious Monsanto creation that drifts into neighboring farms and hurts other farmers' crops. They'll complain that they just passed a big Farm Bill in 2018, but I suspect the folks who get cancer because of Dicamba-infused crops over the next five years won't find that very sympathetic. We have totally given over food production in America to large corporations that only care about growing crops more "efficiently," by which they mean "they efficiently deliver unearned income to executives." But we all know ways of doing agriculture better, including rotating a diverse set of crops; big ag won't do that, because it doesn't enable them to spray tons of chemical crap on crops, which is, after all, cheaper than doing it right. But "it's cheaper" shouldn't be the number one reason we do things -- and it should never be the reason we avoid doing the right thing. I know, it sounds quaint.

Around the table: now with even more rich people whining!

Ari Paul wonders if Deadspin "Can Live Again as a Worker-Owned Website." Long story short: of course it can! Long story somewhat longer: "(t)he cost of paying writers a living wage, never mind hosting a major website and retaining a media attorney (a must if you’re going to be doing daring journalism), isn’t pocket change," and "anyone interested in this will have to pound the pavement looking for funders, people or groups with money that want, deep within their hearts, for independent media to survive." And the money might not be there, because how do folks get rich these days? By sucking up to the already-powerful! This theme's going to come up again shortly.

Like, now: JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon says Sen. Warren "uses some pretty harsh words" that "vilif(y) "successful people," presumably people like himself. And all over our great land good Americans say why, he should hear the words I use! And, seriously, he calls people like himself "successful people" because he can't just say "we shouldn't vilify people who redistribute income from people who work to executives who don't." Or "we shouldn't vilify people who prey financially on other people." You know?

In a peripherally-related note, Microsoft founder Bill Gates says of Ms. Warren's proposed wealth tax that "(i)f I had to pay $20 billion in taxes, it's fine" but "when you say I should pay $100 billion, O.K., then I’m starting to do a little math about what I have left over." Ms. Warren's proposed 3% rate on Mr. Gates's estimated fortune of $106 billion would, of course, not result in a "$100 billion tax bill," but a $3.18 billion tax bill. Also, Mr. Gates added $16 billion to his net worth last year, and, seriously, is there a worse sound on Earth than the sound of the ultra-rich whining?

Billionaire, ahem, successful person Michael Bloomberg has begun to take steps to run for the Democratic Presidential nomination, having apparently identified a shortage of candidates anxious to tell the American people why we shouldn't get anything we want from our government. Kudos to the University of Iowa professor who sees Mr. Bloomberg as someone who would further divide the "center" currently occupied by Messrs. Biden, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar. I mean, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have the left to themselves; I suppose it's still possible they'll split the left enough that one of the other four aforementioned candidates can break through, but, frankly, the math favors the left here. You know what else favors the left? So many of us are so out of fucks to give.

Finally, former Administration Attorney General/long-time former Senator Jeff Sessions has declared that he'll try again for his old seat in 2020, where the punditocracy considers incumbent Democrat Doug Jones the party's most endangered Democrat. This could certainly be a unique opportunity -- Alabama voters might be able to choose the racist who said the NAACP were Communists, or the guy who put two of the Birmingham bombers in jail. I wouldn't worry too much about our President's supposed hatred of Mr. Sessions hampering his campaign, though, because our President revises history like George Orwell never predicted. (Also, too, "I was there to serve his agenda, not mine" -- uh, you weren't our Attorney General to serve our agenda?)

Action: concerning war in Syria, pregnant workers, and fossil fuel advertising.

Rep. Gabbard (D-HI) has introduced H.Con.Res. 70, which invokes the War Powers Act and Article I, Section 8 of our Constitution to force our Administration to remove our soldiers from Syria unless and until Congress passes a resolution authorizing war there, so Just Foreign Policy joins with Change.org to help you tell House Speaker Pelosi to give H.Con.Res. 70, a.k.a. the "Syrian War Powers Resolution," a clean floor vote. You'll recall that the last House Speaker, Paul Ryan, prevented the Yemen War Powers Resolution from coming to a vote by attaching an amendment to the freaking Farm Bill that prevented a vote on it! I'd call that clever, if I didn't insist on cleverness being, you know, not evil. But if enough of us speak out, we can overcome the noise of defense contractors and lobbyists and haters. And by the way, passing H.Con.Res. 70 wouldn't "let the Kurds die" per se -- rather, it would force Congress to authorize military action that would help the Kurds, which is how our Constitution and the War Powers Act want us to do it.

Meanwhile, H.R. 2694, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, is back, and though it is actually already illegal for bosses to discriminate against their pregnant workers, the law also doesn't punish these bosses enough. But this bill would force bosses to make "reasonable accommodations" to their pregnant employees -- recall that word "reasonable," so that you're ready when right-wingers start making up shit about what this bill would allow -- and would also prevent bosses from forcing pregnant workers to accept unnecessary workplace accommodations. The bill would also prevent bosses from simply refusing to hire pregnant workers merely because they don't want to make these accommodations -- I mention that, of course, to forestall right-wing whining that ZOMG WE WILLZ BE FORCEDZ ONLY TO HIREZ TEH PREGGURZ!!!!! Ah, but I kid -- I know just as well as you do that literally nothing forestalls right-wing whining anymore, certainly not shame. In any case, CREDO helps you tell your House Rep to fight discrimination by passing the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell big media outlets not to take any more fossil fuel corporation advertising. No, this is not a "free speech" issue -- partly because free speech is for real people, not corporate "people," and partly because buying ads is more a money issue. But it's not a "free speech" issue mainly because our First Amendment does not guarantee you the right to advertise on big media outlets, and certainly "free speech" isn't an issue of who can pay for more of it -- once a right can be bought, it ain't a right anymore, is it? It's a privilege. And gosh, you don't need TV ads to tell you where to buy gas or how to power your house, so the point of fossil fuel advertising must be something else -- like advertising how "green" they are, when they're really not. Generally, as civilized people, we should be reducing the amount of useless information broadcast on media outlets. I know how square that sounds, but nobody said the work of civilization is sexy -- only that it is necessary.

Action: concerning social media, antibiotic abuse, and pollution.

Twitter has lately declared it won't take money for political advertising, which is interesting, I suppose, but Free Press helps you tell Twitter that they might be better off banning white supremacists from their website. Thanks to our First Amendment, our government can't put you in jail merely for being a racist (though it can if you, you know, beat up black folks), but nothing in our First Amendment says "social media must allow Nazi wannabes to spew filth in public," just as our First Amendment doesn't force publishing houses to accept every single manuscript they receive, or force shopping centers to allow everyone who wants to set up shop there to do so. I would actually be perfectly OK with them using Twitter to get together in private, but Twitter doesn't really differentiate between "public" and "private" very well, and that's Twitter's fault, not theirs, mine, or our First Amendment's. Certainly Nazi wannabes don't need a damn megaphone going off in everyone's ears all the damn time. It's not as if only one person can have First Amendment rights at a time, after all.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Federal Drug Administration (or FDA) to stop factory farms from using antibiotics on feed animals for any purpose other than illness, then Penn PIRG still helps you do that. In recent years, our FDA has mandated more veterinary oversight over antibiotic use on factory farms, which is better, but the stakes really are life-or-death for the rest of us here -- when factory farms use antibiotics on nominally healthy feed animals in order to a) fatten them up and b) allow them to endure squalid conditions more easily, then the end result might well be superbugs that resist any antibiotics, and thus a world where the next cut on your finger could kill you. None of that is alarmism, and all of that is simple logic. And if you're that worried that big factory farm corporations will collapse and we won't be able to buy any meat, find a small farmer to fill that need. They still exist, and if you find them, you can help other people find them, too -- and you can help them find more customers.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Administration to stop its efforts to rescind California's stronger car emissions standards, then Penn Environment still helps you do that. This ain't that damn deep: the only benefits anyone will get from rolling back California's standards are a) big auto CEOs won't have to spend more money making their cars run more efficiently and b) you might -- I said might! -- pay less for a car when you buy it. Now let's list the benefits we get from the California standards: more efficient cars, less gas burnt up, fewer emissions befouling our air, and lower gas bills. (Since California is a big market, automakers tend to avoid building separate cars for different states.) Does "paying a little less for a car" outweigh "paying less for gas the entire time you own that car"? I say it does not, and that's before we reconsider the other benefits listed above. And memo to right-wingers: what happened to "states' rights" as a conservative value? Or was that only ever about slavery?

Action: concerning public lands, phone price gouging, and school lunch shaming.

CREDO helps you tell our Department of the Interior to reject any plans to privatize our national parks. Because they belong to us, that's why! This is typically where right-wingers change the subject and howl WHEREZ DOESEZ TEH MONEYZ COMES TEH FROMZ!!!!, and the correct answer is "from all the taxes you've been cutting on rich people for 40 years," but let's stay focused on the point, which is that public lands belong to us and our government administers them on our behalf. When we sell them to private corporations -- which we can only do once, so it's not actually fiscally-responsible! -- they manage the parks on behalf of their shareholders, or (if they're particularly corrupt) their executives, which means you don't get a say in what happens to our public lands. Oh, sure, governments say they're going to hold private corporations accountable for their wrongdoings, but then they don't, almost like that was the whole idea. So let's keep the meddling middleman out of our public lands by keeping them public -- and thus keeping them ours.

Meanwhile, S. 1764, the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, still awaits consideration; the bill would mandate that our FCC regulate phone calls to America's prisoners so that big telecom corporations don't gouge them, or their families. I mean, really, $25 for a 15-minute phone call? Just because prisoners can't do anything about it doesn't mean we can do anything to them, but sadly, our Congressfolk only think of prisoners when they're trying to whip up hysteria over crime, or deliver taxpayer money to their crony private prison corporations. Is that harsh? Too bad! Too many politicians want to be cruel without anyone calling them cruel, and when they whine about it, they're acting exactly like all those "politically correct" people they also love to whine about. I'm not sure I can even call that irony; I feel like irony shouldn't lead directly to disgust. Anyway, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass s. 1764 and prevent big telecom corporations from gouging prisoners.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3366/S. 1907, the No Shame at School Act, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. School administrators all over America are shaming kids whose parents haven't squared away their school lunch bills -- by making them wear wristbands like this is freaking Nazi Germany, or serving them coal meals when everyone else gets hot meals, or making them throw out their meals, or preventing kids from graduating -- and though they're getting the appropriate amount of shaming from the American people for what they're doing, the fact that they even tried it in the first place means there's no harm in passing a law from preventing them from doing it again. I have long hoped that since so many Americans have experienced debt and poverty since the 2008 financial Armageddon, that experience would make us all a lot more empathetic about each other's experiences. I suppose I still have to wait. But I don't wait for such things quietly, and you don't have to, either.

Our annual Election Day exhortation.

Today is Election Day, which means you ought to go out and vote, if you haven't done so already. If you have any trouble voting, of course, you should call 1.866.OUR.VOTE (or if, like me, you hate mnemonic devices for remembering phone numbers, 1.866.687.8683). (You can also text "Our Vote" to 97779, or visit 1.866.OUR.VOTE's website here.)

What would be a good reason to call 1.866.OUR.VOTE? Being told you can't vote if you have unpaid parking tickets or child support, or getting challenged by official-looking people (or people with guns, even!) who don't have any actual authority to challenge voters, or getting a flyer on your windshield telling you Election Day is on Wednesday for people like you wink-wink. But what if you show up at the polls and the election worker says they can't find your registration? Well, you might be a victim of lousy recordkeeping, or you might be a victim of the notorious Interstate Crosscheck database, which, as you know, helps nefarious state governments deregister voters with the same name as voters in other states, though most names are, as you know, quite common (and Interstate Crosscheck doesn't check middle names or Social Security numbers!) That'd be a damn good reason to call 1.866.OUR.VOTE. Now, if you find yourself deregistered when you know you've done nothing wrong, your disgust will be palpable and righteous, and you may just want to throw up your hands and say to hell with these clowns and then go home. But before you do that, remember that this is exactly what they want you to do. It's the same reason they saturate the airwaves with negative ads the days before Election Day: because they want you to stay home out of disgust, so you won't vote against their cronies. Don't let them manipulate you, and don't let them win. Make the call to 1.866.OUR.VOTE, describe your problem to them, and let them help you take the next step.

Remember, also, that if the corporatists and the racists and the woman-haters win, they'll be just as unpopular tomorrow as they were today -- they will have no mandate, and they will have us to deal with! We'll be calling and writing our Reps and Senators every day, and challenging them at the few townhalls they'll hold, and bird-dogging them at the few public events at which they'll show their faces, because we know that our duty to our country doesn't end today, but begins today. Voting happens one day out of the year, and then Our Glorious Elites want us to sit on our hands the rest of the time, but we can confound their expectations, and their nefarious aims, by expressing our will to our representatives every day after today. And this blog will continue to help you do that, as it has done since 2005.

So good luck today, and God bless.

Action: concerning health care, worker safety, and defense spending.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1384, the Medicare for All Act, now's as good a time as any to call your House Reps and Senators. H.R. 1384 doesn't tell you how it's going to fund Medicare for All, a matter our "liberal" media have been doing a lot of hand-wringing and pearl-clutching about, but Sen. Warren (D-MA) -- you may have heard of her, she's running for President -- has described how she'd fund it, and her plan would do what needs to be done: it would capture the money employers are already spending on private health insurers and redirect it toward funding Medicare for All. She would tax employers (except for small businesses with fewer than 50 employees who aren't providing health insurance) at 98% of the average rate they've been paying private health insurers for employee insurance over several previous years, which would make it useless for big corporations to suddenly convert themselves into franchises or convert their employees into independent contractors. So now we have a weapon against all the how-will-you-pay-for-it hysteria.

Meanwhile, in the wake of Amazon warehouse worker Billy Foister's death -- he had a heart attack at work, but lay on the ground for 20 minutes before anyone noticed, and once the ambulance took him away, his bosses told his co-workers to get back to work -- Demand Progress helps you tell Amazon to stop putting its work quotas above human life. Six Amazon workers have died in the last year, with many more injured, and it ain't for nothing that the National Council for Occupational Health and Safety lists Amazon as one of the 12 worst places to work, because Amazon puts productivity ahead of people, such that folks pee in a bottle lest they get a demerit, and some folks even try to kill themselves. Like this is Foxconn or something! Seriously, bosses don't just redistribute wealth upward to their bosses, they redistribute health -- folks push themselves to the brink trying to meet quotas while Jeff Bezos gets plenty of decompression time as he looks for a new mountain to buy. As they say, next-day shipping might be free, but it comes at a price.

Finally, Joe Biden has apparently told reporters it would be "outrageous" if our government were to attach any conditions to the military aid we give to Israel -- conditions that might include not expanding more settlements into Palestine. So he's beating his chest about being more pro-Israel than anyone else, and we could reasonably question whether it's actually "pro-Israel" to enable their uncivilized behavior, but the more interesting thing is that many of Mr. Biden's favorite Republican Presidents, including Messrs. Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Bush the Better, did exactly the same thing! You'd think a man who yammers on about "bipartisanship" all the time would know it when he sees it -- or that a man who boasts about his "relationships" with Republicans would find some actual common ground with them. Anyway, Just Foreign Policy joins with Change.org to help you tell Mr. Biden that conditioning military aid to Israel is not "outrageous". He doesn't care what we think, but we still tell him, because it's our duty.

Action: concerning voting rights, public lands, and immigration.

Monday is list day! So call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Today we add H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act, passed by our House last week, and I'm pleased to see that Moms Rising has provided a contact tool so you can tell Senate Majority Leader McConnell to hold votes on good House-passed bills. Moms Rising adds H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act (which will help out immigrants who moved here as children) and H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act (which would roll back Administration attempts to weaken protections for folks with pre-existing health conditions), and you can add these in your phone call, too. Plus you can add H.R. 1146, H.R. 1644, and H.R. 2513 in the comment section of Moms Rising's contact tool. Seriously, if we do this enough, we can get these bills passed, and we might even give our President pause before he vetoes them.

Meanwhile, our Administration still has this jones for logging and mining in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, so CREDO helps you leave a public comment with our U.S. Forest Service opposing the construction of more roads in the Forest that would allow more logging and mining there. The Tongass, as you probably know, has thousand-year-old trees in it; how many more times in our history will we be able to hold onto thousand-year-old trees, let alone learn the lessons they have to teach us? You may not find that argument persuasive if you think everything exists to be turned into money, as our President does, or if you think everything exists to be ruled over and used by humans, as our Vice-President does. If you're a civilized person, on the other hand, you might actually find it conservative to hold onto some thousand-year-old trees, not to mention the unique wildlife and indigenous humans that also live in the Tongass National Forest. Conservatism isn't all about making some crony money, after all. Or, at least, it shouldn't be.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2415/S. 1243, the Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. This bill wouldn't get rid of private prisons or punish corporations that import immigrants in order to drive worker wages down, but it would do a lot of positive, necessary, and reasonable things, like force our government to adopt good standards for detention, permit our government to break contracts with private prison corporations that repeatedly violate such standards, and mandate inspections of detainee facilities and investigations of detainee deaths in custody. Show me the person who would oppose such things and I'll show you a flabby thinker who shouldn't get all the say about anything in America. I mean, really, who else would support "no standards for housing detainees" or "holding to private prison contracts even when detainees die" or "sweeping egregious mistakes under the rug"? Because those are the alternatives. And they're not really alternatives -- at least, not to civilized people.

Around the table: concerning Democrat weakness, Presidential misbehavior, and rich folks whining.

Oh, look at this BS: super-rich folks in England whine about how they'll leave the country if Labour wins the national elections next month. And over some piddling changes proposed by the Labour leader Mr. Corbyn, which include raising the top 45% marginal tax rate all the way to (drumroll, please) 50%. Boy, it sure is a good thing for these super-rich that they're all completely indispensable and there are literally no hungry people in all of England looking to take their place.

Speaker Pelosi thinks "Medicare for All" doesn't play well in the Midwest, and issues a general warning that taking up too many "far-left" proposals will doom Democrats with the Great American Center. Strange that running as far right as possible never seems to bite Republicans in their collective backside! Also, she's wrong -- Medicare for All does actually play well in the Midwest, particularly with the rural voters Democrats constantly write off as unreachable. Of course, if you don't actually try to do the right thing, it's a lot easier to convince yourself that doing the right thing never works.

In a related note, Colorado Senator/somehow-still-running Democratic Presidential candidate Michael Bennet says, of Ms. Warren's now fully- and realistically-funded Medicare-for-All plan, that "(r)egardless of whether it's $21 trillion or $31 trillion, this isn't going to happen, and the American people need health care." Yeah, that'll move the needle on his Presidential bid, since history shows that if there's one rallying cry voters can't resist, it's it can't be done! Also, too, we're going to spend $47 trillion over the next decade on health care, so if Ms. Warren can capture that money, as her plan would, then "the American people need health care" is an utterly nonsensical statement. I know, that's a surprise.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) -- the man who gives the Citizen Legislator a bad name -- demands that our National Archives produce email correspondence between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and not at all because he, of all Senators, is uniquely enmeshed in this whole sordid business with the Ukraine. Mr. Johnson's letter doesn't really explain why he needs to look at the emails, except that the law says he can and that Peter Strozk says they exist. I guess BUT HER EMAILS!!!! is all the reason he needs.

Our President, at a Mississippi rally, not only declares that the Democrats' impeachment vote is "an attack on democracy itself" but also an effort to "nullify the votes of 63 million Americans," i.e., those of his supporters. How he feels about the over 73 million Americans who voted against him he did not say, so we are not only compelled to note, once again, that the President is not America, but also that the President's supporters are not the only participants in a democracy. (He also told his audience that he "can't believe" the Mississippi gubernatorial race is "competitive." Does he not think he might have something to do with that?)

Finally, our President says, out loud, in a fundraising email, that his supporters should contribute bigly to the campaigns of three Republican Senators who have supported a resolution condemning the impeachment inquiry. Perhaps not coincidentally, these three Senators are members of the very same body who will be trying this impeachment inquiry in the Senate. When a Bush Mobb ethics chief calls such a thing "criminal" and "a bribe," well, I'm not sure what else one has to say about the matter.

Action: concerning methane emissions, pollution fines, forced child labor, and the Grand Canyon.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to reject its own plan to roll back methane emissions limits, then the Environmental Defense Fund still helps you do that. Literally no one but gas drilling corporations want to prevent gas drilling corporations from venting methane into the atmosphere! Not only does methane pack a bigger climate change punch than coal emissions, not only has an entire methane-mitigation industry risen up around the problem, not only is methane a totally usable energy source, but when gas drilling corporations leak methane off public lands, they're depriving we-the-people of royalties we deserve for even allowing them to drill on our lands. I guess it's something that Congress couldn't nullify the EPA's previous methane limits (thanks to the late Sen. McCain's anger about an unrelated subject) and that the courts have struck down previous attempts to gut the limits, but I won't be happy until we slap this Administration down and it stops getting up. We deserve better from those who work for us, after all.

Meanwhile, you know all about inflation, right? The thing that right-wingers forget about whenever they talk about how $2/hour was good enough for them in 1969, never mind that $2 in 1969 dollars is worth about $14 in 2019 dollars? Well, fines for big polluters in Pennsylvania have remained pretty much stagnant over the last 50 years, which means that what might have been a big bite in 1969 is a slap on the wrist in 2019, so Penn Environment helps you tell your PA state legislators to pass HB 1752, which would increase fines corporations pay for befouling our air and water. Don't let the haters talk about the cost to small businesses, because small businesses ain't the ones polluting. And if you confront them with that, and they respond that big corporations will pass on the costs of the fines to small businesses, ask them if they approve of such behavior, and if they say no (which they'll likely say whether they mean it or not!), ask them why they don't do something about it. After all, this is America, where we do something about big problems, right?

In other news, CREDO helps you tell chocolate manufacturing corporations Hershey, Mars, Nestlé to root the child labor out of its supply chain. Yes, kids still work in cocoa farms so you can have your Nestlé Crunch bar -- a mere 20 years after these chocolate makers pledged to stop using cocoa if children harvested it! -- and they don't do it because they like it, or because they're trying to learn a trade; they do it because they're forced to do it. Please do not tolerate the fool who says I did child labor and it didn't hurt me! The kids who've died doing hard labor don't get to testify about how child labor ruined them, and besides, folks who'd say I did child labor and it didn't hurt me are probably lying to themselves about how much hurt it did them. Nobody just walks away from slavery and torture, after all. And, to answer a common and banal objection: slipping your 12-year-old nephew a ten-spot for reformatting your hard drive doesn't mean we should tolerate forced child labor so we can get M&Ms more cheaply -- not if we want to call ourselves civilized.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act, then Environmental Action still helps you do that. The Grand Canyon has become something of a political football over the last few years, as uranium mining corporations want to befoul both the Canyon and the Colorado River that made it, and I can't understand why any sane and reasonable person would want to spoil the Grand Canyon or pollute the Colorado River, which gives drinking water to nearly 40 million Americans. Note I said "sane and reasonable" there -- folks who'd want to mine for uranium there are not sane and reasonable, as far as I'm concerned. Gosh, aren't there any other ways to make money in America? I mean, come on, best and brightest and boldest entrepreneurs, stop with all the pollution already and go to work. That's what your forebears did, and they helped create the greatest middle class ever. Our current entrepreneurial class just wants to make that middle class their debt slaves.