Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: what to do about dystopia, part 869.

Edward Snowden proposes a two-step response to begin dealing with the dystopia promised by the Pegasus Project: "ban the commercial trade in intrusion software," and hold corporations liable for investing or producing it. If you make it illegal, after all, you can hold people liable for making it. If we do these things, we won't eradicate spyware like Pegasus -- which, as you may recall, can turn on your iPhone's microphones remotely and listen in on what you say -- but we will make it a lot harder for spyware to do damage. As Mr. Snowden suggests, this is the same logic that operates behind vaccination.

In a peripherally-related note, Sara Morrison at Vox explains "how police can get your data -- even if you aren't suspected of a crime." Long story short: they can get it from a third-party data broker (the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act would fix that), or they can use "reverse search warrants," which should be illegal. Should we be "happy" that our police don't have access to Pegasus yet? This sorry state of affairs is yet another reason we don't leave important questions to corporations. Trouble is, our legislators think only corporations know anything about anything!

From the "Nobody Could Have Predicted!" file: ISIS supporters have glommed on to the Trump-friendly social network GETTR, posting videos of beheadings and the like. Well, they always said ISIS understood the social media landscape better than anyone! And they'll find plenty of sympathetic souls among the whiners who've left Facebook and Twitter because their friends shame them for saying obnoxious crap. GETTR's guru shrugs off the ISIS influence, but "free speech" still doesn't cover terroristic threats, nor does a private media corporation have any obligation to publish literally anything.

ICU doctor confesses that what her unvaccinated COVID patients tell her leaves her "surprised, disheartened, but most of all, angry," and who can blame her? You risk death taking care of COVID patients, you endure all the loneliness and all the supply chain shortages, you update your own living will, and now some YouTube University graduate lectures you about how intubation is the real killer? I'd slap a pimp if they did that -- which is yet another reason why I'm not a doctor. My patience with the unvaccinated is short, and I don't even encounter very many of them in my travels.

In a related note, Dartmouth University sociology professor Brooke Harrington writes about the "anti-vaccine con job" and reminds us that folks who've been so thoroughly conned can't just switch on a dime. And I would say the con is significantly longer than "anti-vaccine con job" suggests -- almost 20 years ago, for example, the same damn people all fell for the Iraq War Con Job. Apparently only other right-wingers can reach them, which I guess is good in the short run if it helps us get the upper hand on COVID again, but can they even reach them? Or have decades of right-wing yelling and screaming created a group of Americans who won't listen to anything that doesn't diddle their rage gland?/p>

Finally, California restauranteur Tony Roman hangs sign outside restaurant demanding that potential customers show "proof of being unvaccinated." In that spirit, I'd like some proof that Tony Roman hasn't fucked a goat. I mean, I don't want to associate with goat-fuckers, so I'm entitled to demand official documentation about that fact from other people. See how easy this game is? In the meantime, I urge folks to avoid dining at Basilico's Pasta e Vino in Huntington Beach, not least because for all you know you might run into a goat-fucker.

Action: concerning war, privacy, women's health, whistleblowers, and corporate spying.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the National Security Powers Act, the Children and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act, the Women's Health Protection Act, the Pregnant Workers' Fairness Act, the Whistleblower Protection Improvements Act, and the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2391, the National Security Powers Act. S. 2391 would repeal all the authorizations to use military force (or AUMFs) relating to war in the Middle East, give Congress more authority over arms sales to other countries, and reform the National Emergencies Act, presumably so the next dunderhead who wants to build a border wall can't abuse it like the last one did. And if anyone tells you this would hamstring the President's ability to act, tell them that's a feature, not a bug. The President is only supposed to lead armies into battle after Congress declares war, not whenever the President feels like it.

Restore the Fourth helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1628, the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act. S. 1628 would ban targeted advertising to children, require that internet corporations get consent before collecting data from children, allow parents and children to more easily delete personal data from private data brokers, and mandate a whole lot more transparency about this issue than we have now. We have the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, but that became law over 20 years ago, and a lot's happened since then -- it's a lot easier to get targeted ads now, for example. S. 1628 would help update COPPA for modern times. Our kids deserve that, after all.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women's Health Protection Act. The bill would essentially legalize abortion all across the land, in anticipation of our Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, which action would allow the states to regulate abortion again, and would make it illegal for states to restrict access to abortion in the ways they've done it over the last decade. The most recent egregious example? The Texas law that lets literally anyone sue an abortion provider for performing an abortion! Never mind proving standing to sue, or even that harm was done to you! A court will strike that part of the Texas law down for those reasons fairly soon, but why make good Americans wait?

The ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1065/S. 1486, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which would require bosses to make reasonable accommodations for workers who get pregnant -- that means more sit-down assignments wherever possible, more bathroom breaks, no firing of workers just for getting pregnant or refusing to hire workers who are just because they're pregnant. I shudder to think of the "objections" Republicans will throw up against this bill. I suspect they'll mostly be TEH TRIAL LAWYERZ!!!!! and TEH BOSSEZ CAN'TZ DOEZ TEH BOSSINGZ ANYMOREZ!!!!!, both of which will be revealed to be utter horsedoodle to anyone who reads the bill, or to anyone who's ever been fired because their boss wouldn't get them a chair.

The Project on Government Oversight helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2988, the Whistleblower Protection Improvement Act. Folks who blow the whistle on our government's corruption deserve our admiration, because they risk their careers and their personal lives when they do so; people who think they just live off the fat of a huge reward have obviously never blown the whistle on a damn thing in their lives. H.R. 2988 would better protect whistleblowers from retaliation at their jobs -- even if their boss is our President! -- and would give them more access to jury trials and speed up the process of rewarding them (if their whistleblowing merits it), so they can get on with their lives with minimal placing of sharp objects to their wrists after three years of being completely unable to work, just as a for-example. We need their good works, so we need to protect them.

Finally, the Center for Rights and Dissent, Free Press, Restore the Fourth, and the Project on Government Oversight all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. H.R. 2378/S. 1265 would prevent third-party data broker corporations from selling your personal information to law enforcement personnel, because selling that personal data willy-nilly like that may be lucrative for people who really should go get a real job, but it contravenes our Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure. If law enforcement wants to get you, they should get a warrant first, but buying up big chunks of data from brokers lets police work around that. And they shouldn't get to work around it! If you're tempted to get all thin-blue-line about this, just imagine police harassing you because some web search you did in 2009 raised their antennae.

Action: concerning vaccines, jobs legislation, and the filibuster.

Long story short: tell employers to give their workers time off so they can get vaccinated, tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich to pay for the reconciliation bill, ensure that climate change, care economy funding, and paid family/medical leave all get attention in said reconciliation bill, expand Medicare, and get rid of the Senate filibuster already. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell employers to give paid time off to their workers so they can get vaccinated. Some folks won't get the vaccine because they think it Owns the Libs, but others won't get it because they can't get time off from work, so telling employers to give paid time off to workers to get the vaccine should help with that. And if a boss says I can't afford it, ask him if he can afford to train a new worker when the old one dies of COVID because he wouldn't let him go get a damn vaccine. And ask him if he'd like to have a mini-epidemic at the workplace and lose a ton of money because of that. There's a reason we all hate bosses -- they never think of anything but the short term anymore. But they shouldn't get all the say about everything.

As Congress prepares for its wholly unearned vacation this month, you'll want to give them a call and list all the tax hikes on the rich that'd pay for reconciliation bill -- a corporate tax hike, raising the capital gains tax, treating dividends as income, a financial transaction tax, the Millionaire's Surtax, the wealth tax, the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act, a 91% tax bracket on millionaire income, did I miss any? Feel free to add to your list! After all, Joe Manchin is already making his "how are we going to pay for this?" noises. Good folks of West Virginia, tell him this is how we pay for it! He can only pretend he doesn't hear, and that act will get old fast, if it isn't old already. I think it's old.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your Congressfolk to center climate change in the reconciliation bill. You can bet the big polluters will be yelling in your Congressfolk's ears about how stupid solar and wind power are and how we shouldn't be touching big oil's corporate welfare, so we've got to be louder. This has always seemed like a no-brainer to me -- spurring renewable energy production not only creates jobs (and jobs with similar skill sets to those that displaced coal and oil workers would have!), but reduces pollution and slows the ill effects of climate change. The problem, of course, is that our Congressfolk too easily act like they have no brains. Well, you know how it is with people who act stupid -- you just have to tell them again and again and again.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure that the reconciliation bill includes funding for home- and community-based care and paid family/medical leave. These were, after all, stated priorities of Joe Biden's, and we always knew a reconciliation bill would follow the infrastructure bill that Joe Manchin insisted had to be "bipartisan," and we always knew that reconciliation bill would have more so-called Democratic priorities in it. And I say "so-called" because these things are actually popular with the American people broadly, so we should communicate our will to our Congressfolk about them. After all, do we really suppose that the good citizens of Wyoming reflexively oppose paid family/medical leave just because their "representatives" in Congress do? I sure hope not.

The Hero Action Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare, by lowering the eligibility age, giving Medicare the ability to negotiate its own drug prices (which will save the taxpayer money!), and offer hearing, dental, and vision care. You'll hear from right-wingers that "Medicare Advantage already offers hearing, dental, and vision! Ha ha ha another libtard owned!" But Medicare Advantage is a private health insurance plan funded with taxpayer money, and why should hearing, dental, and vision be an "advantage"? It should be a standard. And again, do the citizens of Idaho reflexively oppose letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices just because their "representatives" in Congress will move mountains to prevent it from happening? I sure hope not.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to get rid of the filibuster that Republicans have used to block every good thing Democrats have tried to do over the last dozen years. The "success" of the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" doesn't "prove" that we should hold on to the filibuster. Republicans got just about everything they wanted out of that "deal"; its existence only proves that "bipartisanship" means "Democrats and Republicans coming together to do whatever Republicans want." Politicians should do what the people want, and the people want their politicians to do the right thing and stop making excuses about why they can't. And "because the filibuster" sounds exactly like an excuse.

Around the table: once more into the breach.

Hamilton Nolan at In These Times proposes a national strike fund, like the various GoFundMes that pop up for groups of striking workers. As Gomez Addams would say, capital idea! That fund would have a big target on its back from Day One -- from state and corporate hackers and from frivolous lawsuits -- but anything worth doing is hard. And, as Mr. Nolan says, "If the Frito-Lay workers in Kansas had had a little more money to carry them through, perhaps they could have won something better than, basically, the working conditions of a factory worker a century ago."

Amanda Marcotte says the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" "is likely the last nail in the coffin of any hope that Manchin or Sinema would seriously consider filibuster reform," which would prevent Congress from passing the For the People Act and thus likely doom America to rule by Republicans for the foreseeable future. But I don't imagine Sens. Manchin and Sinema are really "thinking" about whether or not to reform the filibuster; I think they've made up their minds, and the only thing that'll change their minds is relentless public pressure, since even a U.S. Senator will go to great lengths to avoid becoming the most unpopular person in America.

Establishment Democrats start using the Republicans' vote against the American Rescue Plan -- which increased funding to local police departments -- against them in midterms, essentially saying Republicans are the party that actually "defunded the police." Good to see Democrats have some smarts after all! And good, also, to see them tying Republicans to the January 6 attempted coup in this manner! I guess I'd still prefer they use that vote against the American Rescue Plan to run Republicans want to take your Child Tax Credit checks away ads, but hey, if Democrats actually look fierce about something for once, I'll take it.

In case you were actually wondering, Republicans who blame Nancy Pelosi for January 6 are legitimately full of crap. Basically, Republicans have alleged that Ms. Pelosi, as House Speaker, has all kinds of powers she doesn't actually have, or did things they have no evidence she actually did. Even the one person Ms. Pelosi did appoint to his job, the House Sergeant at Arms, was first appointed by John Boehner, then by Paul Ryan. Also, too, you first blame the people who attacked the Capitol for attacking the Capitol! This whole accountability thing seems to trip up nominal conservatives an awful lot.

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) praises Medicare and Medicaid on Medicare's birthday, then promptly calls for Americans to "reject Socialist health care schemes." Elise Stefanik would kill Medicaid and Medicare with her bare hands if she could, but in the meantime wants you to think that programs everyone pays into so that seniors and poor folks can go to the doctor are not at all socialist. ("But I said Socialist, not socialist! See? Big difference! Another libtard owned!") But remember, if you drive roads, call police, visit the local library, or draw a Social Security check, congratulations! You are a socialist.

Finally, Donald Trump has reportedly called the police officers who testified before Congress "pussies" in numerous private conversations over the last few months. Thus continues his upside-down world, not just one in which actual courage is "weakness" and snake oil salesmen are "the best people," but one in which folks who have actually been through hell are "weak" just for admitting it. He must be chomping at the bit to slam Simone Biles -- or complain about how it's not "politically correct" anymore to do so. May a million people poop in his funeral casket.

Action: concerning taxes, drug prices, human rights, chemical safety, national monuments, and lead poisoning.

Long story short: tell Democrats to raise taxes on the rich, tell your Congressfolk to pass the Lower Drug Prices Now Act and stop selling weapons to Egypt, tell your Senators to pass the PFAS Action Act and reject the so-called Protect Utah’s Rural Economy Act, and tell our EPA to get the lead out of our water pipes. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell Democrats to tax the rich big-time in their upcoming budget reconciliation bill. Because you can talk about the Wealth Tax and the Millionaire Surtax and the like, but sometimes you just have to say tax the rich already! Now some Democrats are already like I can't raise taxes going into an election year! They're wrong: you can raise taxes on rich people who aren't paying enough in taxes whenever you like, because people actually like that -- as long as you defend what you're doing with some fierceness. Some of these Democrats don't know from fierceness, but that's why we're here -- where they lack it, we must give it.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices already. Somehow they couldn't get this done along as part of the Affordable Care Act, but letting Medicare negotiate its own prices was popular then, and it's popular now. Plus it's a revenue raiser! Which is not only common sense -- forcing Medicare to pay higher prices for drugs costs more money, after all -- but is also supported by research. By right-wing research! The Koch-funded Mercatus Center infamously said it would save Medicare over $80 billion annually -- and remember, Mercatus wants Medicare dead.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop selling arms to Egypt, as well as to other countries with notorious human rights records. Just this past February, the Biden Administration approved a $197 million missile sale to Egypt only days after Egypt raided the homes of six relatives of an Egyptian-American activist. Imagine your government raiding the homes of your parents, your brother, your sister, your nephew, your aunt and uncle, and your grandmother! And then imagine some even larger country selling our government $200 million in guns the next day. Seem like a good idea? No, it does not. So let's stop enabling that.

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 2467, the PFAS Action Act. The House passed H.R. 2467 last week with 23 Republicans voting for it, some you already know (Brian Fitzpatrick) and some you'd never expect (Matt Gaetz); the bill would direct our EPA to designate PFAS chemicals -- also known as "forever chemicals" because they never seem to break down like other chemicals do! -- as the hazardous substances they clearly are, and would task our EPA with determining whether PFAS chemicals are also toxic pollutants, because that would require regulation under the Clean Water Act, and thus require our EPA to limit their discharge into our water, particularly our drinking water. There had damn well better be 10 Republicans who'll vote for this bill, and I don't want to hear any whining about "nanny states" from any of them.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to reject S. 31, the so-called Protect Utah’s Rural Economy Act. How would S. 31 "protect Utah's rural economy"? By freezing the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante National Monuments at the size to which Donald Trump shrunk them as President. Really, that's all the bill does. If you remember that Mr. Trump shrunk these monuments only so that mining corporations could dig up those lands, then you'll probably be just as puzzled as I am that anyone could call this "protecting Utah's rural economy." It's rather like letting foxes have free reign over the henhouse and calling that "protecting our chickens." So let's kill this particular slab of stupid.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our EPA to get the lead out of our water pipes. Specifically, you'd ask our EPA to update its Lead and Copper Rule so that it gets lead pipes out of our water systems, since any amount of lead in your water can cause brain damage, particularly to children. Some Republicans probably want that, since it's their best show at ensuring future generations vote for them, but, luckily, they get literally no say in this matter. Well, they could pass a resolution of disapproval later on, but how would that make them look? It'd make them look objectively pro-dirty water and objectively pro-brain damage, and those aren't good looks. This should be a layup for our EPA, but we still have to tell them to go to the rim.

Around the table: in which we discover yet another path to dystopia.

Uh oh: Chicago police get caught altering AI-generated data that could have sent a man to jail for a murder he didn't commit. ShotSpotter sensors detected a "percussive sound" they initially classified as fireworks a mile away from a shooting -- but then one analyst changed the classification to "gunshot" and another changed the location so that it would fit a police hypothesis, which anyone will tell you is not how you do science. If analysts can alter data to frame citizens so easily, then the technology that created the data shouldn't exist. Naturally, over a hundred American cities use it, and none of them seem to have vetted the technology. Dystopia: it ain't just about autonomous killer drones.

Surprise, surprise, states that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act saw a sharp drop in medical debt. I suppose right-wingers will respond that TEH DEBTZ WENTZ UNDERZ INZ TEH OTHURZ STATEZ TOOZ!!!!!, but actually it went down only a tiny bit, comparatively. There is a difference between "gone down 44 percent" and "gone down 10 percent," after all, and the folks who worry less about getting necessary but expensive medical care no doubt appreciate it. And remember what we learned in early 2017 -- Trump votaries actually like Medicaid. There's a solution in there, somewhere.

Sen. Sinema (D?-AZ) said the other day that the reconciliation bill's price tag ($3.5 trillion) was too high, but Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo suggests we not put too much stock in that, since she'll still vote to start moving on the bill. I'm old enough to remember how Blanche Lincoln helped Republicans filibuster the Employee Free Choice Act, and how Ben Nelson tried to take the entire Affordable Care Act process hostage in order to get goodies for his home state of Nebraska. How did all that work out? Ben Nelson went from America's Most Popular Senator to "too unpopular to run for re-election" in less than two years, and Blanche Lincoln got absolutely buried in 2010. Maybe the same fate awaits Ms. Sinema in 2024. I mean, people don't actually like drama, in my experience.

Texas Deputy Attorney General Aaron Reitz slams gymnast Simone Biles for pulling out of the Olympics -- until his boss, Ken Paxton, chastises him in public and releases a sympathetic statement supporting Ms. Biles, which eventually provokes an apology from Mr. Reitz. Mr. Paxton's statement supporting Ms. Biles suggests that he actually has a soul, but I don't want to give him too much credit, since it never even occurred to me to be as much of an asshole as Mr. Reitz was about the matter. You can't take sports so damn seriously.

Pennsylvania state Sen. Dan Laughlin (R-49) all but says his party's "fraudit" of the 2020 election results is a clown show. "The current attempt to discredit the 2020 election results runs headlong into an unmistakable truth," he says. "Donald Trump lost Pennsylvania because Donald Trump received fewer votes." You can almost hear the impatience! And it does help to remind everyone that Republicans actually did pretty well in Pennsylvania in 2020 other than in the Presidential race, which Mr. Biden only won 50-49, if memory serves. But if Mr. Laughlin winds up being a crappy governor like Tom Corbett, I'll quickly forget this moment on the side of the angels.

Finally, Capitol police officer Michael Fanone, nearly killed defending our nation from Trumpholes on January 6, received at least one threatening phone call during his Tuesday testimony, and it's a pretty awful call -- the part where the caller said he "wish(ed) they would have killed all you scumbags, 'cause you people are scum" struck me as particularly lame. Seriously, deploying the word "scum" twice in six words! These people need to work harder at their threats. Or, perhaps, they should do some deep breathing, read a good book, go to a public park, travel to a new place, whatever ventilates their heads without hurting other people.

Action: concerning government spying, the debt ceiling, IRS funding, domestic violence, Medicare for All, and discrimination.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop warrantless FBI data searches, abolish the debt ceiling, increase IRS funding, and pass the Safe Connections Act, the Medicare for All Act, and the Equality Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Massie/Lofgren amendment (to the Commerce Department Appropriations bill) that would outlaw warrantless searches by our FBI into the massive data bank of internet communications our NSA collects. Our NSA shouldn't be collecting it, either -- they should get a warrant for every damn thing they want to collect! -- but certainly our FBI shouldn't be digging into that data some three million times a year without a warrant. They're just fishing, and one thing folks both left and right agree on in America is that our government shouldn't investigate us without first going to a judge and convincing that judge they can convict us of a crime. The more people you involve in that process, the less some dictator-wannabe can go off half-cocked and do whatever he likes. It's that simple.

Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to abolish the debt ceiling already. Because why do we have that? Has its presence ever slowed deficit spending? Surely it didn't when Donald Trump passed his tax "reform" and blew up the deficit! The only reason we have a debt ceiling now is so Republicans can act out hostage situations every few years when they're out of power, and that's something we ought to discourage. Don't be tempted to say I gotta budget, why can't our government? Because, as I feel like I've said a thousand times, you don't do that -- otherwise, you'd never have a mortgage, car payment, or student loans! -- and also because you don't have a debt ceiling, which is to say, you may have an idea how much debt spending you can get away with, but you don't send yourself to jail when you go over it.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to increase IRS funding so we can catch more tax cheats. It's not even deficit spending! Our IRS has estimated we lose $1 trillion every year to tax cheats our IRS simply doesn't have the staffing to catch, and how do you increase staffing? You hire more agents, that's how! Even Larry Summers says you'll raise $11 for every $1 you spend on additional IRS funding (assuming we spend $100 billion over the next 10 years). Don't worry that Republicans say no to it, because they're wrong. And don't get discouraged that increased IRS funding is no longer in the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" because Republicans didn't want it. It's still the right thing to do, and if they're too foolish to realize it, tell them so. They've earned it, after all.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 120, the Safe Connections Act, which will help survivors of domestic violence to escape their horrible situations, by enabling them to get their cellphones off their family plans and still keep their phone number without having to pay onerous fees. Maybe that sounds like a small thing, but I hope you don't learn differently because it's you who needs to get out. The bill would also mandate that our FCC create rules that protect good Americans' privacy when they need this kind of protection. Big telecom corporations should already be able to do all this, but they haven't; if the Safe Connections Act passes, then they'll have to, and good Americans will be able to get out of toxic and life-threatening situations more easily. Seems to me that's what government's for, after all.

Demand Progress, MedicareforAllNow.org, Black Lives Matter, and Roots Action all help you tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 1976, the Medicare for All Act. We've been telling them to expand Medicare as part of their infrastructure/jobs machinations, but I'm done with that process and I think we should all be done with that process, since it's now painfully obvious (with Joe Manchin's declaration that there'll be no reconciliation bill without the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" bill) that our leaders used that process to hurt us. So now it's time for us to be hardasses again, and demand that we expand Medicare to everyone -- not just people over 60, and not just ENT care, but all care, for everyone. It won't be as hard or as costly as everyone thinks -- it'll just be one fewer way for the rich to redistribute our income upward to themselves.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League, People for the American Way, and Ultraviolet all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. Because gay and transgender folk deserve not to be hurt by bad leaders and stupid laws, that's why! And because they deserve the same right to freedom and happiness as everyone else! Right-wingers squeal that if banks and landlords and employers can't discriminate against gay and transgender folks anymore, it somehow impinges upon their freedoms. If they really think that, they're the most clueless, self-absorbed people in America, and why should the most clueless and self-absorbed people in America get all the say about everything? If they're just playing, of course, that's even worse, and why should people who lie like that get all the say about everything? These aren't hard questions -- at least not for civilized people.

Around the table: lies, damn lies, and Democrat establishment theories about winning elections.

They're all saying that Jake Ellzey's six-point win over Trump-endorsed Susan Wright in the U.S. House special in Texas's 6th demonstrates the "limits" of a Trump endorsement, but I say it demonstrates nothing of the kind. Both candidates are cut from the same pro-Trump cloth, and Mr. Trump's endorsement of Ms. Wright always seemed half-hearted. And this election was still All About Trump, as Mr. Ellzey proved by reaching out to the district's Democrats at the last minute. My advice? Jana Sanchez has repeatedly proven she can't win that district, so the establishment should get behind Shawn Lassiter in 2022. But establishment Democrats never learn -- you don't win tough races with the "electable"; you win with the fierce.

House Minority Leader/Speaker wannabe Kevin McCarthy says that "(t)he threat of bringing masks back is not a decision based on science, but a decision conjured up by liberal government officials who want to continue to live in a perpetual pandemic state." And once again, this is complete projection! Republicans want a "permanent pandemic state," as they've already shown us by a) trashing vaccines and b) not getting them when it would have made a difference, and Republicans can only win when they foment chaos and drama. Welcome to another exciting edition of "I Never Thought I'd Hate a Republican House Leader More Than That Last One."

Ho hum, our "liberal" media can't get enough of bashing ice cream corporation Ben & Jerry's for refusing to sell their wares on the West Bank. A lot of folks are very pro-boycotting when folks boycott something they hate, but when folks boycott things they like, they're suddenly all WHATZ ABOUTZ TEH FREEDUMZ!!!!!! Which is, naturally, what they say when folks boycott Ben & Jerry's. And, you know, boycotting actually has an honorable history; these idiots probably would have been tut-tutting the Montgomery bus boycott back in the day. And as we learned from Colin Kaepernick, some folks' attraction to non-violence seems very issue-specific. Now please excuse me while I go get some Peanut Butter Fudge Core.

I laughed out loud when I heard that some Missourians are actually wearing disguises when they go to the doctor to get their COVID vaccine! After all, I've got a reputation as an asshole to uphold! All I can say to folks wearing Groucho Marx glasses to their COVID appointments is that if you want to get the vaccine and your friends don't want you to get it, maybe you need new friends. And chances are somebody will want to be your friend! Not everyone is as fed up with Teh Stupid as I am, and plenty of people have more compassion than I do.

George P. Bush, after all that sucking up he did to Donald Trump, has failed to secure the coveted Trump endorsement in the Texas Attorney General race; the winner, such as he is, is incumbent Ken Paxton. One supposes there's only so much sucking up you can do to the Bigly Man before even he gets grossed out by it, as Josh Mandel will find out in Ohio. I'm a little surprised that he's puffed up Mr. Paxton, though, since Mr. Paxton failed to get the election overturned, and you know how well the Bigly Man takes failure. Possibly he finds Mr. Paxton, who's been under federal indictment on securities fraud charges almost since he's been in office, a kindred spirit.

Finally, what did we learn from the first day of the January 6 hearings? "What We Already Know," says William Rivers Pitt at TruthOut, "It Was a GOP Riot." Trigger warning: paragraphs six through 11 describe some of the Capitol police's testimony, which will, among other things, remind us that right-wingers' support of police is very, very issue-specific: they support them when they execute Black folks without even charging them with a crime, but not so much when they oppose Capitol rioters. And they accuse liberals of similar issue-specificity without evidence. For example, anyone who reads my writings on the issue and says "he wants to abolish the police" can't read worth a damn.

Action: concerning Cuba, killer drones, farmworkers, public water, equal pay, and communications policy.

Long story short: tell President Biden to end our trade embargo with Cuba and ban killer drones, tell big agriculture corporations to treat their workers better, tell BlueTriton to stop taking public water from California, tell our U.S. Soccer Federation to pay the Women's team as much as the Men's, and tell President Biden to appoint a fifth FCC Commissioner already. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

With people in Cuba taking to the streets in large numbers to protest, at long last, their oppressive regime, Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to end economic sanctions against Cuba. What's that, you say? That would be like rewarding an oppressive regime? No, actually, it would be like rewarding the Cuban people for their courage! It would also be like reversing a stupid, 60-year-old policy that never had the result it supposedly intended. If you're thinking sanctions did have the intended result -- by driving good Cubans into the streets -- consider why that policy should take 60 years to work. Also consider whether this pandemic, not sanctions, have had more of an effect on what Cubans are doing. Also, really? Starve a nation to hurt its government? That's evil! If we do less evil, we'll see less evil in the world. There's a reason leaders who do evil see crises everywhere years after they take power -- because they make the crises happen!

Win Without War also helps you tell President Biden to ban autonomous killer drones. Those last three words are three of the most chilling words in the English language -- drones that can decide for themselves who to kill? Who thought that was a good idea? Someone who thinks they're very clever, no doubt, but they might well find out differently at the Pearly Gates. You can very easily see, I trust, these "killer robots" making their way to law enforcement via the 1033 program, and killing Black folks with impunity? And eventually killing you "by accident"? You can't hold a drone accountable in a court of law, after all. Banning killer drones now is our only shot at stopping these dystopias. Don't be tempted to think it's like "closing the barn door after the horses have run out." They ain't all run out yet, and do we seriously contemplate doing nothing in the face of evil?

Care2 helps you tell big agriculture corporations to give their workers better benefits, including paid time off. The news hook is that folks have to pick fruits and vegetables in temperatures that are, in some areas of our nation, 25 degrees hotter than normal, and working outside while Western wildfires choke people thousands of miles East ain't easy, either, but big ag doesn't care about anything but money, so the big corporations make tens of billions of dollars in profits while their workers get dung pellets, dehydration, illness, and death. It shouldn't be that hard to break off some of their billions for their workers. Don't worry that "food prices will skyrocket" -- labor costs don't have anywhere near the effect on prices big corporations want you to think they have. And certainly don't be tempted to dismiss the whole issue because mostly immigrants work these jobs. They're people, too, after all.

Environmental Action helps you tell BlueTriton (formerly Nestlé Waters North America) to stop siphoning off public water from the San Bernardino Forest. California is having droughts and wildfires again, so letting some big corporation take water from Strawberry Creek so it can sell it as bottled water at an absurdly-high markup sure seems like a bad idea. Not for nothing, but BlueTriton only has a permit to draw out 2.3 million gallons of water annually -- but took out 58 million gallons last year. So this is also a law and order issue. Unless, you know, law and order is only for Black folks. A lot of people sure do use the phrase like that -- and those same people never use it against a corporation, even one that's obviously flouting the law. I'll keep trying to ensure people use that phrase correctly.

Ultraviolet helps you tell our U.S. Soccer Federation to pay the U.S. Women's Team as much as it pays the U.S. Men's Team. For-real for-real? The Women's Team should make more! I mean, if we believe in paying people on merit! The Women's team has won four World Cups and four Olympic Gold medals in the last 30 years, while the Men's team, well, reached the World Cup quarterfinals in 2002, and not for nothing but I hated how they played that year -- anyone can kick the ball far and run fast! It takes talent to slowly and methodically work your way up the field, precisely the thing a lot of Americans find "boring" about the sport. The USSF will retort that men's soccer is "more competitive" (a difficult statement to justify when men play men and women play women) or that men's soccer "makes more money," which only happens because of sexism in the first place and besides, we're all profoundly tired of arguments based on "more money," right? Our USSF just needs to do the right thing.

Finally, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell President Biden to appoint a fifth FCC Commissioner already. It ain't just about getting net neutrality back, though of course getting net neutrality back would be a big deal -- it's also about ensuring everyone has access to high-speed broadband (particularly during a pandemic!), fighting media consolidation and media monopolies, and helping local media get back up on their feet after years of assuming big corporations know best. Our Federal Communications Commission has a lot of work to do, particularly in a social media-dominated world, and we would not best be served by a series of 2-2 deadlocks resulting in nothing getting done.

Around the table: stupid *is* evil, part 342.

I'd been wondering how jobs legislation would end badly, and now I know: Joe Manchin says he'll basically kill the reconciliation bill by himself if the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" "falls apart." "When one falls apart, how do you move the other one?" he asks, perhaps hoping we won't answer take everything Republicans said "no" to in one and put it in the other one. Surprise, our leaders have been playing us again; Democrats will do nothing with the power they have -- they'll even squander that massive political victory, the monthly CTC expansion check -- and in a year and a half Republicans will take back Congress, this time with candidates who come right out and say they're fascists. All because Democrats are more afraid of losing big corporate campaign donations than losing elections. (I guess you can call Joe Manchin, especially if you're a constituent. And say I know your secret, perhaps.)

Hoo boy, Ohio Republican Senate candidate/bankster/"flip-flop-flipper" J.D. Vance says maybe parents should get more votes than childless adults. And, of course, they would actually get to vote on their children's behalf! I'm actually not convinced that right-wingers are popping out more children than liberals -- everyone ain't the Duggars, after all, and naming several famous Democrats who don't have children doesn't exactly make a strong argument -- but this is the kind of thing desperate people come up with when they know they can't win arguments on the merits, or, perhaps more precisely, when they can't win vote tallies on the merits. I'm old enough to remember hearing "maybe we should only let property owners vote just like in the old days," so I don't want to hear about this bullshit again. One person, one vote, period, end of, done talking.

Wondering how Israeli corporation NSO managed to create such a nefarious slab of spyware like Pegasus? Look first to Israel's occupation of Palestine, as Yousef Munayyer at Jewish Currents does: "(w)ith an occupied and stateless population of Palestinians under its rule, to which it has granted no citizenship rights or civil liberties, Israel is free to develop, test, and perfect its surveillance technology on millions of unwilling subjects." American corporations would have different constraints, obviously -- though, ironically enough, one probable reason NSO's done so well is not only the nearly $4 billion in American taxpayer money Israel gets from our military, but the fact that Israel gets to spend more of that money on its own manufacturers than any other nation receiving American taxpayer assistance.

As Daniel Hale is about to be sentenced to up to 11 years in prison for blowing the whistle on the drone assassination program, I find myself shaking my head at our government's case against him -- he did it out of "vanity"? Seriously? Knowing his government would hunt him down and that more Americans would hate him than admire him? And hilariously, our government claims the leaks "helped ISIS" even though a former CIA official who reviewed the leaked documents said that, actually, they didn't. Mr. Hale's own words chronicle his shame at having participated in drone strikes, and all I can say is thank the Lord someone in America can still feel shame, and would repent of his sins and attempt to repair the harm they caused and continue to cause.

When I heard that Sen. Tommy Tuberville (S-AL) totally broke the law by failing to report over $1 million in stock trades, some involving corporations with business before the committees he serves on, within 45 days, I actually thought for a moment that the answer to the "stupid or evil?" question might actually have been stupid here, since this is Tommy Tuberville, after all. But then I remembered that stupid is how evil people cover themselves. Besides, even if it was stupid, it's also evil -- evil deeds don't require evil intent. Also, too, stupid is evil.

Finally, Tucker Carlson got an earful from a local resident in a Montana fishing shop, but I was most intrigued by Fox News's reaction: "Ambushing Tucker Carlson while he is in a store with his family is totally inexcusable — no public figure should be accosted regardless of their political persuasion or beliefs simply due to the intolerance of another point of view." We'll set aside the idea that we should "tolerate" lies and drama and hatred, let alone consider them just "another point of view" -- Fox News used to send Jesse Watters out to accost public figures repeatedly back in the day, and it never bothered them then. They don't like being held accountable now? What a surprise! Hey, kids: don't be like Fox News.

Action: concerning evictions, big tech, police in schools, women's health, and voting rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to extend the eviction moratorium, break up big tech monopolies, and pass the Counseling Not Criminalization in Schools Act, the Women's Health Protection Act, the Support Through Loss Act, the For the People Act, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Center for Popular Democracy helps you tell our President and your Congressfolk to extend the national eviction moratorium, which could help keep over seven million renters in their homes. President Biden has signaled that he'll let the moratorium lapse -- even though very, very little federal renters' assistance has found its way to renters thus far -- but surely he knows as well as you do that new COVID cases are skyrocketing, so perhaps he'll have a change of heart before the moratorium expires on July 31. Or, more likely, he'll hear from enough of us that he'll have to have a change of heart -- or our Congressfolk will hear from enough of us that they'll force him to have a change of heart. Not every change of heart comes on its own, after all.

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a suite of bills that would help rein in big tech corporations. These bills would, among other good works, prevent big tech corporations from favoring their own products on their own platforms, let customers more easily move their data from one platform to another, prevent them from charging outlandish fees to customers when they try to switch to a competitor, and prevent them from buying up corporations solely for the purpose of ending competition -- plus the bills would provide additional funding to those government agencies that would enforce the bills, if they become law. These are all hard enough to oppose that more than a few Republicans have signed on as co-sponsors. That ought to give us a bit of a head start -- not that we should be complacent! -- so let's get cracking.

The Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2125, the Counseling Not Criminalization in Schools Act. This bill would get police officers out of public schools -- which are not safer because they're there, or else we'd stop hearing stories about how they're not! -- and use the money we'd otherwise spend on them to get more nurses and social workers in schools. Right-wingers say this'll result in "more dead social workers," but I think they underestimate how good social workers are at their jobs. And, really, what a thing to say about people, that they can't "handle" tough times. Here you thought conservatives were all about people being good enough to not need Big Gummint help! Clearly right-wingers only say they're "good enough" if they're the "right people," and only cops are the "right people" for them. But they shouldn't get all the say about everything.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women's Health Protection Act. With Mississippi having asked our Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, and with a majority of our Supreme Court justices looking for the right opportunity to do so, it's good to remember what Roe v. Wade actually does: it prevents states from restricting your right to an abortion if you need it. If our Court overturns Roe v. Wade, a lot of red states will rush to outlaw abortion. The Women's Health Protection Act would prevent that, plus it'd take down a lot of laws at the state level (like "heartbeat laws" and the laws that aim to close down most abortion providers in the name of "public health") that restrict access to abortion. If we pass this bill, we can prevent what right-wingers really want: a country that forces women to be breeders, and nothing more. Seriously, that's what they want. And that's an abomination. So let's prevent that.

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Support Through Loss Act, which would provide paid family/medical leave to anyone who suffers through miscarriage, pregnancy loss, or other barrier to beginning a family (such as an adoption falling through or a medical diagnosis regarding fertility). The bill would also fund miscarriage and pregnancy loss research via our National Institutes of Health (or NIH). This is a big deal, especially since people feel shame over losing a pregnancy -- and since more than a few nations have tried to charge women who have miscarriages with having had abortions. We have a lot to shame people over, but a miscarriage shouldn't be one of those things. Go after the folks who redistributed all your wealth upward to themselves!

Finally, Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. Plus Daily Kos helps you sign up to call West Virginians and urge them to urge their Senator, Joe Manchin, to vote for the For the People Act. And Common Cause, People for the American Way, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. These bills are our best chance to stop racist vote suppression and big corporate domination of our elections -- which is why right-wingers tell so many lies about them. They're afraid of the world we'd make. Why should they be afraid? If you can win arguments, you should win them. Maybe they're afraid they can't! But if you can't win on a fair playing field, then don't play.

Around the table: what they need's a damn good whacking!

Our Centers for Disease Control (or CDC) has produced a very interesting chart mapping the relationship between infection rates and vaccination rates, by county! Spoiler alert: the Republican areas of America have the most correlation between infections and (lack of) vaccines. Ohio is a conspicuous exception, but Republicans there will likely primary Gov. DeWine out of office as a reward for his relative competence. But do you think right-wingers will be pumping the results in Teton County, Wyoming -- where both vaccination and infection rates are high -- as if they're indicative of the entire nation? You betcha!

Democratic politicos fear that Republican voting laws across the country will doom them in 2022. In the meantime, here's what Democrats can do about that: a) do good works with the power they have wherever they have it and b) organize like our lives depend on it, which they kinda do. Seriously, no Republicans should hold office, anywhere -- they just hurt people. I don't know if Democratic candidates will do well or not in 2022, but I do know this: if they don't do well, they might blame the voting laws, but they'll definitely blame the liberals!

Idaho Lieutenant Governor, who's challenging the sitting Governor in the upcoming Republican primary, has paid over $25,000 to an "analyst" who has advocated shooting police officers. Not because they shoot Black folks, but because they arrest people, since, in his book, arrest equals kidnapping. I guess I won't be asking him how he feels about taxation. Attention, Chris Wallace! Maybe Republicans are really the ones who want to shoot the cops!

Donald Trump advises Congressional Republicans to ditch the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" until they take back Congress and thus have more "leverage," and for once I can't tell if he's giving them marching orders or not. After all, the man had two years with Republican majorities to pass an infrastructure bill, and he never came close to producing one, which suggests to me it's not really that important to him. His votaries will protest, but on what evidence? The "evidence" of their own rage, of course.

Matt Lewis at the Daily Beast examines "How Trumpists Prey on Loneliness, and Loneliness Preys on Trumpists," and when you confront the notion that "(p)eople who find purpose and meaning in their religious faith, connection with family, hobbies, and their vocation are less susceptible to finding meaning and community in a cult of personality," you may be reminded that scientists have said the same thing about drug addiction -- and have prescribed more profound interpersonal connections as the solution. I feel compelled to add that this isn't a new problem -- a lot of Trumpholes were Bushholes after 9.11.

Finally, Los Angeles man who gained some notoriety by mocking the COVID vaccine has, guess what, died of COVID. And he said he still wouldn't get vaccinated as he was being intubated -- admittedly, that ship had long sailed -- because his "faith" would "protect" him. And at the Pearly Gates, St. Peter will say to him let me guess: you didn't take the vaccine we sent you. Should we be sad at his death? Yes. But we should be sadder about the deaths his attitude will cause, because that sure didn't die with him.

Action: another exciting edition of "all jobs, all day."

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass better tax policy, better climate change policy, better clean water policy, better broadband policy, and better care economy policy, all so we can get good jobs legislation. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy assures us that Joe Biden's tax proposals would do us all a lot of good, and I agree that they would -- particularly getting rid of the lower tax rate for capital gains and dividends, one of the most grievous injuries inflicted on the American people by the Bush Administration and that's saying something. So go ahead and call your Congressfolk and tell them you want capital gains and dividends taxed like income, since, you know, they are income. It couldn't hurt to remind them that the resulting revenue would help pay for jobs legislation. Don't brook any silliness from your right-wing Congressfolk about "dangerous tax increases." They act like all tax increases are dangerous. Tax increases on the rich aren't -- they help us restrain the rich from running roughshod over the rest of us.

You'll also want to remind your Congressfolk of the other ways we could fund jobs legislation. Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Wealth Tax on millionaire and billionaire estates, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a "millionaire's surtax," and the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the End Polluter Welfare Act. Also, too, Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Lower Drug Prices Now Act, since that would give Medicare the ability to negotiate drug prices, which would save upwards of $80 billion annually, which could also very easily fund jobs legislation. If you want to tell them to bring back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income -- you know, instead of telling them to institute the "millionaire's surtax" -- then go right ahead! If we all demand the 91% tax bracket, we may not get it -- but we'll certainly be more likely to get the millionaire's surtax.

Both Progress America and the League of Conservation Voters help you tell your Congressfolk that they must include better climate change policy in jobs bills. And what do you know? Better climate change policy not only fights pollution, but creates jobs. And prioritizing renewable energy over fossil fuels not only means fewer droughts and wildfires and hurricanes and heatwaves but less filth in our air and water. And we're going to need people to help us build a better way. No, "liberal" media pundits, we're not going to build a better way with robots! Too many people think robots are really far along in development, which is to laugh. But I'm one of those who think people are considerably more advanced than we used to be. Laugh if you like; we will move past you, and your cynicism will be cold comfort in your lonely old age.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your Congressfolk to include funding for getting rid of lead pipes in any upcoming jobs legislation. You'd think Republicans would consider replacing poisonous lead pipes in our sewer systems "real" infrastructure spending, but they don't seem to care very much about that, even though lead poisoning equals brain damage in any child whose drinking water comes from a lead pipe. Maybe they don't care about it because That Only Happens to Those People, but clean water is actually fairly popular among Americans of all races and creeds, and dooming folks to poisoned drinking water should be electoral suicide. It'll only be so if we fight to get the lead out of our drinking water, and Democrats actually follow our lead.

Moms Rising and Social Security Works help you demand paid family/medical leave and better care economy funding, respectively, from upcoming jobs legislation. The United States is approximately last in the world in mandating paid family/medical leave for good Americans, and the care economy will be our future to a large degree, so we might as well ensure that jobs in the care economy are good jobs. Many Americans (and perhaps many more American politicians) still think taking care of the sick and infirm isn't "real work," when it's about the realest work you can imagine, and yes we deserve an America that rewards real work. You know, versus rewarding money machinations that just redistribute worker wealth upward to hedge fund managers. But we won't get that America unless we fight for it.

Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund expanded broadband in upcoming jobs legislation. We all saw how much we need high-speed broadband during this pandemic -- not just to keep working, but also to keep our children learning. Clearly it ain't just for streaming movies and TV shows anymore, and our government needs to start approaching it that way. And we're probably going to need high-speed broadband for work and school again, as roughly half the country continues to throw a tantrum about getting vaccinated. Nearly 70,000 new cases on Friday! Just like it was precisely one year ago, when they were throwing a tantrum about wearing masks. I'd prefer not to have a resurgent pandemic prove to our politicians how badly we need expanded broadband. But we should at least tell them, or they'll continue pretending they don't already know.

Finally, I'd like to say a few words about how I think the Biden Administration might really want this to play out -- not to demoralize you, but to prepare you. I think the Biden Administration split the jobs bill in two to split us in two, much as the Obama Administration held out the public health care option in 2009 in order to forestall any talk of expanding Medicare to include everyone. And just like they yanked the public option back when it came time to pass the Affordable Care Act, I also think the Biden Administration really wants the far more desirable reconciliation bill to fail, which also means they really want to lose both houses of Congress in 2022 so they can keep this interminable (but very lucrative, for some people) drama going between insane Republicans and spineless Democrats. You'd think Democrats would take a different lesson from recent events -- like, that Republicans are far too dangerous to ever have any kind of power again, anywhere. But if they won't, we have to make them learn that lesson, and we'll only do that if we speak out. We are the only people standing between America and oblivion. And we always have been. So let's step up and be heroes, today and every day.

Around the table: welcome to part 878 of "insane Republicans, spineless Democrats."

John Culhane at Slate instructs us that "Fox News Could Be Sued if Its Anti-Vax Statements Caused People to Die." I accept that his entire argument is valid; the hard part, I'd think, would be finding enough unvaccinated folks who get sick from COVID and who would say "I relied on Fox News to tell me the truth." It's true that at least one Trumphole facing prison for his role in the January 6 coup attempt has said, via his lawyer, that TEH TRUMPZ MADEZ MEZ DO TEH THINGZ!!!!, and that's similar enough. But a lot of these folks, when pressed, will simply deny they were relying on Fox News to tell them the truth, because, well, some folks think it's OK to say just anything when they're cornered.

Lost in all the gags about how his rocketship looked like a giant cock is the fact that "Poverty Wages and Tax Dodges" funded Jeff Bezos's trip to the very edge of space. When you contemplate that, in fact, you might begin to think that the penis-shaped rocketship was a deliberate distraction. No, I wouldn't put it past folks like Jeff Bezos to think of that. And, hate to beat on a dead horse, but our government got us to the moon and back six times, whereas a guy with $200 billion couldn't even get himself out of our atmosphere. And, yeah, I'm as much against the privatization of space as the next guy.

Joe Biden may be a relatively new President, but he sure has taken to drone strikes pretty quickly, most recently in Somalia. And yes, "collective self-defense" sure looks like the kind of legal doctrine that Presidents can use to subvert our Constitutional requirement that they get permission from Congress before conducting military operations. Donald Trump probably faced more pushback from Congress on this matter than any President of the last 70 years, and it still wasn't enough. (Also, in my experience, Mike Lee's protest against the drone strikes signals that our Congress will do nothing. I can't recall Mr. Lee ever taking a stand on principle that he's actually had to follow through on.)

Karen Hao at the MIT Technology Review discusses why reporters Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang think "Facebook Can Never Fix Itself." "Facebook’s problems today are not the product of a company that lost its way," she writes, but are "part of its very design," and surely it doesn't help that, as far as Facebook's decision-making, "growth and revenue trump everything else." And when you have gazillions of dollars, you tend to think you know everything and everyone else knows nothing, when all you really know anything about is redistributing everyone else's income upward to you. I hope I live to see an America that shames and shuns such people.

1,500 union workers stand to lose their jobs at the Morgantown, WV plant owned by big pharmaceutical corporation Viatris, and despite the "prime opportunity for the Democratic-controlled federal government to score points in a red state," our Administration has done bupkus. You'll note that Joe Manchin is also the senior Senator from West Virginia, "the Senate's single most powerful member" by virtue of being the Democratic caucus's 50th vote. His relative inaction couldn't be because his own daughter used to run one of the corporations that merged into Viatris, could it? (Hopefully, when you read Viatris's statement about its job-cutting, you'll be offended by all the big words they use. Optimize this, ass-clowns.)

Finally, Sean Hannity, mere days after saying "it absolutely makes sense for many Americans to get vaccinated," now says (after all that positive attention he got from liberals) that "I never told anyone to get a vaccine." Calling those two remarks "completely different" would be the height of pedantry, and though I bet some of his votaries would advance that claim, I also bet most of them don't care -- as William S. Burroughs used to say, junkies only want junk. No, I think he ginned up this whole controversy just to create drama, because what else can you do when you can't win arguments on the merits?

Action: concerning spyware, war on Yemen, cellphone radiation, antibiotics, bankster fees, and qualified immunity.

Long story short: tell world governments to ban NSO-style spyware, tell President Biden to end our involvement in Yemen for-real for-real, tell our FCC to update communications device radiation rules, and tell Congress to pass the PASTEUR Act and the Overdraft Protection Act and end qualified immunity for police officers. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Fight for the Future helps you tell world governments to ban commercial malware like the NSO Group's Pegasus, exposed by The Guardian late last week as the spyware that can infect your apps, capture your emails and texts, and listen in on your calls. NSO says it's only for "terrorists and criminals," but you and I know better, and not just because governments frequently decide today's irritant is tomorrow's terrorist, but because, you know, they're lying -- of course they mean to spy on innocent folks! In order to scare them into being more compliant with our corporatist-run world! But our lives mean nothing if all we get out of them is a few more years of cold comfort -- and if we don't fight evil wherever it rears its noxious head.

Peace Action helps you tell President Biden to end all American support for the Saudi/UAE-led coalition war on Yemen. President Biden did say he would end "offensive military support" for the war, and that sure is better than Donald Trump's I'm-an-independent-but-I-still-do-whatever-the-Saudis-want act, but his Administration hasn't been particularly candid about what "end offensive military support" means, and we have reason to believe that it means "still selling some arms to the Saudis and helping them maintain their aircraft." Good Yemeni are dying from easily-preventable causes like disease and malnutrition, and that's coming from all that hammering that we're enabling. Wouldn't it be nice if we stopped enabling that kind of thing?

The Environmental Working Group helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission to update its regulations concerning wireless radiation. Our FCC hasn't updated those rules for over 25 years; gosh, can you think of anything that might have happened in the meantime? The mass proliferation of wireless internet is one thing, and the mass proliferation of cellphones and tablets is another. Just about everyone has all three of these things now, and so we get a much higher dose of wireless radiation than we used to. Don't brook any nonsense about how "strict rules about radiation will make the whole economy collapse" -- and I guarantee you some corporate hack is writing that comment as we speak! More hacks should say things like "strict rules about radiation will save a lot of money in health care costs." Though if they did, I guess they wouldn't be hacks.

The Pew Environmental Trusts help you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2076, the Pioneering Antimicrobial Subscriptions to End Up Surging Resistance (or PASTEUR) Act. Look past the tortured acronym and see that the PASTEUR Act would spur the development of life-saving antibiotics, a matter of considerable urgency since viruses constantly adapt to the antibiotics we've got, such that some of them become superbugs that antibiotics can't kill. The PASTEUR Act would fund research and development of antibiotics, but it would also vastly improve current drug policy by letting Medicare and our Veterans Administration get the new drugs at cost. And it's a bipartisan bill that would actually represent progress, versus what "bipartisanship" typically represents, which is no progress. So let's encourage better works from Congress wherever we can.

US PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4254, the Overdraft Protection Act. The Overdraft Protection Act would require more transparency about overdraft fees and set a limit of overdraft fees your bank could charge you, to one per month and six per year. That may not sound like a big deal, until you make half a dozen transactions without realizing you're overdrawn, at which point your bank would allow all the transactions and hit you with six overdraft fees, which could amount to over $200. If you're tempted to strut around about "fiscal responsibility" when you hear this, ask yourself whether a bank allowing you to overdraw your account just so it can slam you with fees promotes fiscal responsibility. Then ask yourself if a bank deliberately re-ordering transactions just so it can collect fees promotes fiscal responsibility. I think you will sheathe your sword after that. Or, at least, you should.

Finally, Black Lives Matter helps you tell your Congressfolk to end qualified immunity for police officers. Too many police officers escape accountability for serious crimes because they enjoy "qualified immunity," which keeps them from being punished unless they committed a crime that's exactly the same as a crime a previous police officer committed, and how likely is that? A judge who doesn't want to convict can usually find something different between the two cases, and a literalist judge certainly can. There's innocent-until-proven-guilty, and then there's innocent-only-because-of-a-technicality; everybody knows the latter isn't justice, and Black folks, sadly, feel the pain of that knowledge more acutely than most.

Around the table: welcome to part 488 of "Irredeemable Trumpholes."

"I Tried to Make Claims About Election Fraud So Preposterous Trump Fans Wouldn’t Believe Me," reports Jon Schwarz at The Intercept. "It Was Impossible." Specifically, he "confessed" to destroying Trump ballots, got a lot of angry responses on Twitter, and then made even more absurd assertions (destroying Trump ballots is in the Constitution, then in the Bible, then in Buddhist teachings, etc.) that induced even more angry responses, with no one apparently figuring out it was all a gag. I'll admit I could hardly catch my breath by the point where he says Twitter responses will automatically enroll their authors in a blockchain scam. I'd hoped he might reference the fictional nation of Freedonia or the fictional Duchy of Grand Fenwick, but then Trumpholes would probably just tell us that Duck Soup and The Mouse That Roared (released in 1933 and 1955, respectively) were actually instruction manuals created by the Elders of Zion.

In a peripherally-related note, a Bloomberg investigation unearthed around 200 prosecutions for voter fraud since November 2018, and, though I hate to sound like a broken record, that's not nearly enough to justify all the right-wing hysteria about "voter fraud." Note well, also, that prosecutions aren't convictions! For your reference, at least 155 million votes were cast in the 2020 elections and at least 115 million in 2018. I don't like to accuse everyone and everything of racism, but I feel it's pretty safe to say that "voter fraud" is code for "too many of Those People voted."

Amanda Marcotte reminds us not to put any stock in some Republicans' sudden willingness to get everyone to take the vaccine, and not just because most right-wing media types are still hawking vaccine "skepticism." (Even Mr. Hannity couched his plea to get vaccinated among stories about "vaccine overreach.") I'm glad to be reminded not just that right-wingers don't really care what Mob Boss Mitch says, but also that a lot of these right-wingers fancy themselves as "politically independent," even though they just so happen to independently eat up whatever right-wing slop makes them angriest.

In a related note, Republican politicos don't think the party's apparent desire to "have it both ways" on the vaccine will hurt them in the midterms. And that could be true -- if Democrats spend the next six months doing nothing and/or if some other catastrophe happens in the meantime. One thing that won't be true, though: their Janus face on the vaccine won't impress independent voters (you know, the ones whose votes are actually up for grabs every cycle!), because you don't impress them by trying to "have it both ways." I'd go so far as to say you do the opposite. Democrats could tell you all about that, were they so inclined.

Finally, an Alabama doctor writes at length about dealing with so many dying COVID patients who didn't get vaccinated when they had the chance. "I may walk into the room thinking, 'Okay, this is your fault, you did this to yourself,'" she writes. "When I leave the room, I just see a person that’s really suffering, and that is so regretful for the choice that they made." She has a lot more compassion than I would have, which I suppose is just one reason she's a doctor and I'm not. I'm grateful that we still have good doctors providing health care in America, and I suppose we will until right-wingers start sending them death threats and they decide it's not worth all the aggravation. Hey, that's how it's working with election officials.

Action: concerning the Amazon indigenous, taxes, jobs spending, privatization, chemical safety, and discrimination.

Long story short: tell Brazil's government to protect the rights of indigenous folks from corporate land-rapers, tell your Congressfolk to fund our IRS, fund home and community care, reject the privatization of public assets, and protect us from PFAS chemicals, and tell your Senators to pass the Equality Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first: Sum of Us helps you tell Brazil's Congress to reject a bill that would allow the Brazilian government to force indigenous peoples from their lands in the Amazon rain forest so that big corporations can develop it. It's not just that the Amazon rain forest is the greatest carbon capture machine the world has ever seen, it's that people live there, and people are more important than profits, more important than development, and more important than some politician's "legacy." Besides, the indigenous people of the Amazon have been a thorn in Jair Bolsonaro's side since day one of his ignominous reign, and any enemy of Jair Bolsonaro is a friend of mine. And yours.

Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to fully fund our IRS so it can catch more tax cheats. People who avoid their taxes cheat all of us, after all -- they cheat all of us out of roads, bridges, schools, police officers, firefighters, and libraries. Naturally Republicans have balked at more funding for the IRS as a way of helping to pay for the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" they're continuing to hash out, plus the ProPublica reporting about rich folks' tax evasion has made Republicans more defensive of rich folks than of the rest of us, whom they have cheated. I guess they're objectively pro-crime, then! Why do Democrats not paint them this way every day? Because it would be "uncivil"?

The National Domestic Workers Alliance helps you tell Democratic Senate Majority Leader Schumer to ensure the $400 billion proposal for care infrastructure makes it into the big reconciliation bill Democrats are planning later on this year. Presumably Democrats will pass that without Republican help, so all we need to do now is ensure that Democrats don't eject it from the bill because, oh, gosh, I don't know? Because they like shooting themselves in the foot? Because "bipartisanship"? Because debt and spending and I'M SCARRRREEEEDDDDD!!!!!! OK, maybe I'm being a bit harsh, this time -- our government has never invested this much in home and community care before, prospect of creating a million jobs or not. But if you want to make progress, you have to take big steps. Bigger than Democrats are accustomed to taking, to be sure, but we need to be the spine in their back. At least then they'll have a spine.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk not to let the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" privatize public assets in order to pay for other public assets. President Biden wanted to fund it with higher corporate taxes, but Republicans, being the party of "fiscal responsibility," prefer smoke and mirrors, like "user fees" and selling off some bridges and roads and suchlike in order to pay for others. But we need only look to Chicago's privatized parking meters and Bayonne's privatized water system to see what that bodes for America -- higher prices and worse service. You know, like they're trying to do with our Postal Service. Who voted for that? I don't think even Trump voters voted for that.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3990/S. 2047, the No PFAS in Cosmetics Act. PFAS chemicals, as you may know, are the "forever chemicals" you find in carpeting, cookware, food packaging -- and, eventually, in our drinking water and our bodies, where it might well help give you and/or your loved ones cancer, a weakened immune system, or a learning disability. You also find it in cosmetics, and though you may not wear makeup, someone else does, and they wash it off their face at night, and then guess where it goes? Into your drinking water, and into your body. (Consumer Reports also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2467, the PFAS Action Act, which would do more about PFAS chemicals generally; the former bill has a better chance of passing, but there's no reason you can't say you support both.)

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League, People for the American Way, and Ultraviolet all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. The other side has their people calling their Senators going WAAAAAAAAAAH WHATZ ABOUTZ MY RELIGUZ BELIEFZ!!!!!! and WAAAAAAAAAAAH TEH BOYZ WILLZ BEATZ TEH GURLZ ATZ TEH FIELD HOCKEYZ!!!!!!, so we need to be on the horn with our Senators talking about stopping banks and bosses and landlords from discriminating against gay and transgender folks, which is what the Equality Act is actually about. Republican Senators, in particular, pretend the hysterical opinions count more than yours. But we civilized people must make our will unmistakable.

Around the table: they call themselves leaders, but they don't lead, part 377.

It ain't just governments using facial recognition software to spy on you, it's also big chain stores like Macy's and Albertson's. And they're not just spying on customers so they can better target them with ads, they're also spying on workers so they can make sure they're working, like they have no faith in the supervisors and managers they hire. Oh, and remember, the technology sucks, a matter to which at least one New York student wrongly accused of theft can attest. Would it be asking too much for our state and local governments to regulate this crap? No, it would not.

Missouri starts offering vaccine incentives -- but only 900 of them, worth $10,000 each. Basically that's a lottery, and lotteries haven't been working that well, as Mike DeWine can tell you. Best to spend $50 per head (as Matthew Yglesias has suggested) and give a lot more people the incentive; Missouri has more than 2,000 new COVID cases some days, so 900 prizes probably ain't gonna cut it. (And Gov. Parson is only the latest right-winger to do an abrupt about-face about taking COVID seriously. The families of the dead no doubt appreciate his little Damascus moment very much.)

Mob Boss Mitch says there'll be no Republican votes to raise the debt limit, but surely he remembers how Barack Obama turned his back on Republicans when they made similar threats in 2013 (after he caved to similar threats in 2011, of course). Chances are he already knew what the CBO announced later on in the day -- that our government won't actually have to raise the debt limit until October or November -- but I still think there's a chance Democrats fumble the big reconciliation bill and wind up having to use it to raise the debt limit. Gosh, that would absolutely demoralize the base and send them to ruin in the 2022 midterms, wouldn't it? With Democrats, you always have to wonder if that's the end game. I want to think the best of people, but they make it hard.

David L. Wilson at TruthOut advises that we "Call the 'Border Crisis' What It Is -- Another Big Lie From the Right," and hallelujah that someone else is saying so. We're over one million border apprehensions for the first time since 2006! -- except that, well, we went over a million almost every year between 1983 and 2006, and this year's spike might well be COVID-related. But please, right-wing windbags, keep crying INVASHUN!!!!! on your little border tours like you know what an actual invasion is like.

Finally, did Jeff Bezos, fresh off his 11-minute jaunt to the edge of space, really say in an interview afterward "I also want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this"? Yes, he really did say that. Perhaps he thinks he's being funny, perhaps he thinks he's being candid, or perhaps he simply doesn't talk to regular folks who anymore who might tell him how he really comes off, but he's another walking advertisement for the 91% tax bracket. And, ah, our government sent people to the moon.

Action: concerning unlawful detention, killer drones, internet freedom, pollution, and public water.

Long story short: tell President Biden to close Guantánamo Bay, ban killer drones, appoint a fifth FCC Commissioner, and reject the proposed Twin Metals mine, and tell BlueTriton to stop taking public water from California. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to close the Guantánamo Bay detention center and end the nefarious practice of "indefinite detention." To review: Tha Bush Mobb asserted that these were really, really bad people, the baddest of the bad, the Obama Administration said they were "too difficult to prosecute, but too dangerous to release," and then Donald Trump said WE NEEDZ TO MAKE TEH GUANTANAMOZ BIGGERZ!!!! and suggested sending American COVID patients there. In other words, Guantánamo Bay represents nothing but American shame. If I did something that shameful, I'd stop doing it. Maybe that's the difference between Americans and their leaders, in a nutshell.

Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to ban autonomous killer drones. That's right, killer robots! They're not just for sci-fi dystopias anymore! It's bad enough that we have soldiers remotely controlling drones to kill people, but now we've got AI-powered drones that, ah, don't require orders to kill people. They think they're taking the soldiers, and thus the bodybags, out of the war, but they're just making it easier to be an unfeeling killing machine. Drones have killed tens of thousands of folks nowhere near a battlefield; how long before that happens in your neighborhood? And to think Fox News wants you to worry about Black Lives Matter protestors and antifa! You want something to worry about? Worry about drones doing their own thing -- to you.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell President Biden to appoint a fifth FCC Commissioner who'll help reinstate net neutrality as the law of the land. Currently the FCC has only four Commissioners, which means a 2-2 deadlock whenever they decide to act on net neutrality again, which means that until President Biden appoints the fifth Commissioner, big internet providing corporations will be able to slow traffic, block content, and create the notorious "fast lanes" that you don't have the money to buy into. It also means a world where big corporations, not you, control your internet experience. So let's get our President moving.

Penn Environment helps you tell the Biden Administration to reject the proposed Twin Metals mine abutting the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Our Forest Service said the project would cause "irreparable harm" to the wilderness area, but then, you know, we elected a President who only cares about money -- and bosses' money, at that -- which means every evil project went back on the table. Our Agriculture Secretary, Tom Vilsack, has said the Biden Administration hasn't made a decision yet. But if you think the decision not to pollute the most-visited wilderness in America shouldn't be that hard, go ahead and tell them so.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell BlueTriton to stop hoovering up California's public water just so they can make bottled water from it. There is a drought going on in California, after all. By the way, you could call BlueTriton "the Artist Formerly Known as Nestlé Waters North America." Could it be that it changed its name because it took so, so many PR hits for trying to siphon off public water all over America, such that even its successes backfired on it? Why, yes, it could be, and you have yourself to thank for that, if you've made waves about Nestlé's nefarious works over the last decade. All they did about it was change the name, but we're on to them, and we can't, we won't, and we don't stop.

Around the table: bad people acting badly, part 922.

Massive data leak reveals that authoritarian governments have been using surveillance tech called Pegasus to spy on lawyers, journalists, and human rights activists. Naturally NSO, the corporation that makes Pegasus, insists it's only for terrorists and criminals (like, for example, a recently-murdered Mexican journalist?) and that it thoroughly vets its customers (like, for example, Hungary's ultra right-wing government?). Pegasus can extract emails, photos, and messages, plus it can turn on your microphone and camera and secretly record you; you won't be safe if you have an iPhone, or (even) if you use a good messaging app like Signal. Chances are very good you will be accidentally targeted, and chances are also very good you will be "accidentally" targeted.

Police arrest 100 protestors during the Women's Moral Monday March on Washington (D.C.), demanding, among other good works, the passage of the For the People Act and the restoration of the Voting Rights Act. They arrested them for obstructing First Street; imagine if right-wing governments got their way everywhere and some Trumphole could simply run them over without facing any criminal charges! Next time our "liberal" media insists that the For the People Act is "dead" because of the "politics," remember that people are putting their bodies on the line out there.

Greg Palast, America's Last Journalist, gives us a better history of Haiti in the wake of their President's assassination than our "liberal" media has. Contemporary "liberal" media accounts intone unctuously about Haiti's history of dictatorship and political upheaval, but the Western world (including us!) never forgave Haitians for winning independence from France in the early 1800s, and making Haiti pay French slaveowners for their "loss of property" is an evil we may never repair. Unexpected word choice there, "repair"? Maybe because I meant for you to think of the word reparations.

Matthew Yglesias thinks we should take a couple of steps to get more people vaccinated, like prod our FDA to formally approve the vaccines (right now they have Emergency Use Authorization) and tempt the recalcitrant with cash prizes. I think he's utterly wrong about the first item -- right-wingers aren't sincere when they say they won't get it because it's "not really approved"! -- but giving out cash prizes is an excellent idea. You remember how many banksters could get their workers to go along with all that robosigning just by giving out gift cards? It's demoralizing how easily some people can be bought! But if we can get them to vaccinate just by giving them $50 to blow at Bed, Bath, and Beyond, I won't shake my head too much.

Ho hum, "Shoplifting is Big News" to our "liberal" media but "Stealing Millions From Workers is Not," according to Steven Keehner at FAIR. Specifically, they couldn't get enough of a 21-second video of a guy cramming items from Walgreens into a garbage bag and then biking away, but they couldn't say very much at all about a wage theft lawsuit against, you guessed it, Walgreens resulting in a $4.5 million settlement. Again, we are reminded that stories about "crime waves" aren't just ginned-up drama, but they cover up real crime waves that damage us a lot more. You have to wonder why that is.

Finally, I'm sure some folks look at Sean Hannity suddenly telling everyone they have to get COVID vaccines and say "good on him for getting his people to get vaccinated" or even "I'm glad he's finally seen the light," but I won't do any of those things. "Just like we've been saying, please take COVID seriously"? That's some motherfucking gall, right there, coming from a guy who's been saying the exact opposite of "take COVID seriously" for the better part of a year, all so he could glorify his Personal Lord and Savior, Donald Trump. And most of the rest of his "news" channel has lately been doing the same thing -- telling you to get the vaccine and pretending they've been telling you that all along! They have no shame, and as such they deserve oblivion -- their names forgotten, their deeds unthinkable.

Action: concerning worker rights, taxes, farming, social media, voting rights, and nuclear weapons.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the PRO Act, make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, pass the Farm Systems Reform Act, the Algorithmic Justice and Online Transparency Act, the For the People Act, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and stop funding new nuclear weapons. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. The PRO Act would repeal state-level "right to work" laws, stop employers from requiring workers to attend anti-union meetings or sign forced arbitration agreements, would stop employers from retaliating against employees (including managers) who blow the whistle on labor law violations, and would let employees determine how to conduct a union election. You didn't know that from your right-wing Congressfolk, did you? They'll tell you that the bill would injure "your right not to join a union," but that's not what "right-to-work" laws are all about: they're about employers choosing for you not to join a union! And that's not the same thing.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion permanent. Those $250 or $300 checks have started coming, and since I'm not an evil bastard, I have trouble imagining how the right will portray this as an "evil" -- they could call it "fiscally-irresponsible," but we all know by now that Republicans only care about "fiscal responsibility" when the other party control Congress and the Presidency. But then I realized they could call it "buying votes"! They never call it "buying votes" when Republicans cut corporate taxes and taxes on rich folks -- though, by the evidence of the 2018 elections, that stratagem doesn't buy as many votes as it used to! Anyway, all Democrats need do in response is cut ads portraying fat-cat Republicans taking your $300 checks right out of your hands, and then the "vote-buying" accusation would become irrelevant.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4421/S. 2332, the Farm System Reform Act. One of the biggest problem with farms is how big factory farms are -- they use their outsized influence to make us less safe, thanks to their antibiotic abuse (which helps create superbugs) and the pollution they unleash upon local water tables. But the Farm System Reform Act would ban construction of new factory farms and expansion of existing ones, plus it would close down the existing ones by 2040. How will we get our food, then? Through the multitudinous smaller farmers who will better be able to thrive, now that factory farms aren't in their way. Remember: the "problem" isn't government -- it's the big corporation.

Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3611/S. 1896, the Algorithmic Justice and Online Platform Transparency Act. Even President Biden has lately lamented how easily social media corporations can disseminate lies, but this bill would help put a stop to that -- first by requiring a crap-ton of transparency from social media corporations about their algorithmic processes and their content moderation practices (including whether people or machines do the moderating!), and then by making certain online practices illegal if said practices violate a user's civil rights (including their voting rights). The bill doesn't outlaw algorithms (which I'd happily do! I don't care if it makes cat videos harder to find!), but I bet the social media corporations will whine about being made to disclose exactly how they use them, in plain language. They can cry into all their hundred-dollar bills.

Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. Plus Daily Kos helps you sign up to call West Virginians and urge them to urge their Senator, Joe Manchin, to vote for the For the People Act. Meanwhile, Common Cause, People for the American Way, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. If you want to end gerrymandering, dark money, and racist vote suppression, you want these bills to pass. It doesn't matter that Republicans (and Joe Manchin!) make up stories about the "harms" these bills would do. You're right, and they're wrong. It's that simple.

Finally, Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop funding nuclear weapons. Are we so afraid some other nation will come up with a more efficient way of destroying the planet? Our current stockpile of nuclear weapons dopes that quite well, thank you very much! And once you've got the planet-destroying weapon, you don't really need to tweak it. Defense contracting corporations will claim that you do, but consider what they get out of it if we swallow their line of poop: money. They get money out of it. Lots and lots of money. I'm so old-fashioned I don't think money is a very good reason to do anything -- particularly if it's my hard-earned taxpayer money becoming someone else's corporate welfare. So don't believe the hype. After all, it ain't called "hype" because it's true!

Around the table: Missouri gets crushed by COVID, and other tragedies.

It ain't just Florida and Texas: the even-more-contagious Delta variant of COVID-19 is hitting some parts of Missouri hard -- particularly the unvaccinated parts. Hospital workers report seeing more young people in ICUs now than before, and they're sicker than the folks who got hospitalized last year. The nurse who said "(i)t feels worse this time because I've seen it before" broke my heart, but I can't help but feel angry at the COVID patients who let bad people tell them lies about "the science." Particularly the ones who spit in your eye when you tell them they have COVID.

David Eichenthal, until lately mulling a run in Tennessee's very red 3rd House district, suggests that Democrats could win in places like Tennessee's 3rd if they explicitly woo the "pro-democracy Republicans." Like James Carville, I have been wondering why Democrats don't tie Republicans to the January 6 travesty every day. Mr. Eichenthal indulges in some "no liberal could win here" pablum (to which Matthew Hildreth's report from November of 2018 might provide a corrective), but he also says Democrats have to connect with rural voters (which, like, yeah) and that "poverty is tragically one issue that bridges the urban-rural divide," which sure sounds liberal. I'm also pleased to hear him toss around phrases like "standard 10-point plans" with the vitriol they deserve.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) says he would "go to war for the principles Chick Fil-A stands for." Let me be the first to say: no, he most certainly would not. A man who says "I'll go to war over (insert name of absurd drama)" is a peacock among hawks, and you'll never hear a real warrior brag about his hunger for war. Particularly a war over Chick Fil-A! Everyone does chicken nuggets and waffle fries now, and I can make my own sweet iced tea.

Ho hum, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who lives under threat of impeachment for corruption in awarding vaccine contracts, says he doesn't have faith in the same voting system Brazilians have used for over a quarter century (and which delivered his 2017 victory!) and now says he might not even let that election happen. And in some dank room at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump says why couldn't I do that? I sure hope good Brazilians get rid of this cancer on their soul, and soon.

Abortion providers file suit in federal court to block Texas's new abortion law -- you know, the one that actually empowers anyone to sue anyone who might have helped an abortion happen! -- and I wish them the best of luck. Texas legislators, such as they are, imagined that a million frivolous lawsuits would help them dodge constitutional questions, but they neglected to deal with the issue of standing, as in "how can any of these morons prove they've personally been harmed by an abortion they didn't have?" Even our Supreme Court would agree with me about that, I think.

Finally, a January 6 seditionist whom we will not name unfurls this gem to the Washington Post: "We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government." In her relatively-unventilated mind, "overthrow(ing) the government" is somehow less odious than burglary or property damage, but then, she probably thinks of those latter two things as something Black people do. Perhaps not coincidentally, I usually think of whining and refusing to face the truth as something white people do.

Action: concerning jobs legislation.

Senate Majority Leader Schumer (D-NY) plans to move jobs legislation this week, so now's a good time to tell (or remind) your Senators what you want from jobs legislation. There'll be a lot of links today, so I'll keep this post relatively short, and of course you can simply use this post to make a list to your Senators in a phone call. First, we want to remind our Senators that we want to do the right thing with jobs legislation, so Daily Kos helps you tell Democrats to go big on jobs legislation, while Food and Water Action helps you tell your Senators to reject any privatization of public services in that legislation.

Next, we move to paying for the legislation, since right-wingers pretend to wring their hands over it and moderates pretend that you can pay for everything with "user fees." Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to make rich folks and corporations pay at least $4 trillion more in taxes over the next 10 years, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Wealth Tax on millionaire and billionaire estates, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a "millionaire's surtax," and the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the End Polluter Welfare Act, which would free up some more money to pay for the projects we're going to describe in the next paragraph.

Finally, we move to the things we want jobs legislation to do -- things that will actually create jobs for people, even if they don't meet the Republican definition of "real infrastructure." Both Social Security Works and Public Citizen help you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare so that it covers vision, hearing, and dental care and also so that it covers folks from the age of 60, not 65. Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices -- which, since it would free up an extra $85 billion annually, would also count as a "pay-for." The Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure renewable energy funding is a big part of jobs legislation. And both the League of Conservation Voters and Penn PIRG help you tell your Congressfolk to invest in getting the lead out of our water pipes. Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure that jobs legislation includes funding for home- and community-based care and paid family/medical leave. And Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to include expanded broadband funding.

We should ignore the machinations our politicians have foisted on us -- how much of the legislation should be "bipartisan" and how much not, for example -- and simply communicate our will, in numbers they can't deny. Then we'll start to get what we want. People tell me I'm naive for believing this, but I've seen it happen many times. And when you see it happen even once, you want to see it happen all the time. Certainly as Americans we deserve to have it happen all the time. It's a lot better than politicians selling us out to their big donors like they usually do. But we won't get a thing if we don't speak out, and this is the week we absolutely must speak out, because if we do, we might get the best legislation we've seen in decades.

Good luck, and God bless.

Around the table: the zombies keep coming, but so do the head shots!

COVID cases are on the rise again -- and Florida accounted for 20% of all new COVID cases last week all by itself. Add in just three other states (the article doesn't name them, but Texas and Missouri were two of them every day I looked last week) and that's 40% of all new COVID cases. And surprise, most of the new cases come from heavily-unvaccinated counties. They will not learn until they realize that most Americans have abandoned them as friends and compatriots -- and even then a lot of them will nurse their martyr complex. One of the biggest problems with The Future is folks believe they're martyrs without doing any of the hard work martyrdom entails. You refused a vaccine? You supported sedition? Now show me your actual nail holes!

Ho hum, President Biden's tax plans will not, in fact, harm small businesses or family farms, and I for one have had enough of delivering head shots to these zombies lies as I've been doing for nearly two decades. The only thing I will say is that the folks who tell these zombie lies sure do seem less convinced they'll work than they used to, possibly because good Americans see through them a lot better, as evidenced by the last Trump tax cut doing exactly nothing to stave off Democrats' taking back the House in 2018, and by polling suggesting that nearly three out of every four Americans want big corporations to pay more in taxes. Read the whole thing, though; it demonstrates that right-wingers aren't even any good at inside baseball anymore.

In a related note, Elias Khoury at FAIR reminds us that the Wall Street Journal calls tax cuts that benefit the wealthy "more money in taxpayers' hands," while calling tax cuts that benefit working families as an attempt to "buy votes." I guess that's all right-wingers can say against the Child Tax Credit expansion! That'll only work with two kinds of people: people who already believe whatever right-wingers tell them, and people who don't get $250 or $300 checks every month. And it's funny how right-wingers won't call tax-cuts-for-the-rich an attempt to "buy votes," since, by their own logic, that's what it is.

Surprise, surprise, the fellow who disrupted Rep. Porter's town hall the other day not only has a history of racism and anti-Semitism, but also has a history of using violence to disrupt otherwise peaceful events. "I came here to be purposely provocative," he said after provoking fights at Cal State-Fullerton in 2017, as if anyone should care. This Nick Taurus has already declared his candidacy against Ms. Porter in 2022; I'd like to say I don't see him having a shot, but we have been witnessing, for many years now, Republicans' willingness to "hold their nose" and vote for people like this. And while Ms. Porter could point to her good works in Congress, of course -- more than many other vulnerable House Reps! -- that fact also makes her the kind of person Our Glorious Elites would love to get out of the way.

President Biden moves to reverse Trump-era policy allowing massive corporate logging of old-growth trees in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska. By "old-growth," of course, we mean "those trees are a thousand freaking years old," meaning they were around before the Norman conquest of England in 1066, which (among other things) ushered all those French-rooted words into the English language. See? There is actually a value to preserving history. One might even say there's actually a value to conserving history. It's not some kind of accident that "conservative" and "conservation" have the same damn root.

Finally, Mahnoor Imran and Adam Eichen at In These Times remind us, because we need it, that just because Joe Manchin won't let the For the People Act pass, that doesn't mean it's "dead" -- in fact, the bill is pretty much the opposite of dead, thanks to "the grassroots activism taking place across the country to get this bill passed." Take a gander at the numerous organizations fighting to pass gerrymandering reform, same-day and automatic voter registration, and campaign finance disclosure for big donors (among the For the People Act's many good works!) and never let them tell you your efforts are worthless.

Action: concerning taxes, Medicare, home care, weatherizing, defense spending, and inspectors general.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to make the rich and corporations pay more taxes, expand Medicare, increase funding for home- and community-based care, fund weatherizing for low-income homes, end funding for the notorious F-35 plane, and pass the IG Independence and Empowerment Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk that you want corporations and the rich to pay at least $4 trillion more in taxes over the next 10 years. Their machinations, their dramas, don't matter -- the message they need to hear right now is that we need to tax the rich a lot harder than we're doing, or we won't have clean water, we won't have a livable planet, and we won't have jobs. Taxing the rich and corporations more is actually quite popular in every poll that asks about it, so don't let insane Republicans and "moderate" Democrats kill all progress -- particularly when they're all just going to blame us liberals for their failures later!

Strengthen Medicare Now helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare -- which is to say, expand what Medicare covers (include dental/vision/eye care) and whom Medicare covers (people 60 and older, versus 65 and older). Again, these are all popular things, and frankly, lowering the Medicare age to zero is also pretty popular, so we're not asking for "too much" here. And frankly, let's make the Party of Sedition defend its position that "more people shouldn't get Medicare," or that "folks who get Medicare shouldn't get more out of it." If they say it'll kill Medicare, tell them to explain how. They can't. Of course, if they start yammering on about inflation, feel free to walk away. "Inflation" is the new "socialism."

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to jack up funding for home- and community-based care services. This is a main feature of President Biden's American Families Plan, and this'll be the part of the legislation Democrats will have to pass via budget reconciliation, so hostile is the Party of Sedition toward the kind of services we're all going to need a lot more of as we get older. And a civilization that progresses should make those kinds of services -- for children, for seniors, for folks with disabilities -- part of its, dare I say, infrastructure. And, ah, not for nothing, but the COVID pandemic which ain't over and is getting worse, heckuva job, anti-vaxxers! has, I think, impressed upon us the need for home-based services.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund weatherizing for low-income homes. Remember how much fun Fox News used to make of "Cash for Caulkers"? Well, they were wrong about that, too, and not just because weatherizing homes for working families will save a lot in heating bills, but because, well, we just saw in Texas this past winter what happens when the big utility corporations don't prepare for rough weather -- people die, Senators flee to Cancun and blame their daughters for it, and Governors blame solar and wind power for the problems caused by unregulated utilities. Don't forget the "people die" part, though. There's a reason I put that first.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop trying to build the F-35 fighter jet. Roll call! It flies badly! It puts its pilots at risk of injury and/or death! The Navy doesn't want it and the Marines almost certainly don't want it either! We've thrown billions of dollars away on this plane for the last 20 years! A boondoggle this big, you have to wonder why it happens. It happens for a lot of reasons -- watchdogs have a lot to watch, individual Congressfolk have cronies who benefit from it, Congress generally doesn't have a whole lot of courage when confronting defense spending either in general or in its many particulars. Well, I didn't say they were good reasons. The only good reason they need to stop building them is that we tell them. So let's tell them.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2662, the IG Independence and Empowerment Act. "IG" stands for "inspector general," as in the kind of person who exposes Executive branch waste and fraud -- and, also, the kind of person Donald Trump constantly tried to replace with a crony. H.R. 2662 would make it harder for the next rogue President to do that, plus it would give Inspectors General more power to actually do their job. And I wouldn't declare this one dead on arrival in the Senate as long as Charles Grassley's there. I just worry about the price Mob Boss Mitch would extract in exchange.

Around the table: whiny brats with guns should not get all the say about everything, part 955.

A Washington Post report finds that FEMA doesn't aid a lot of Black families in the deep South because they can't produce deeds and wills to prove they own their land. You should not be surprised to learn that "the long-held tradition of informal land ownership" among Black folks was a necessary response to Jim Crow laws preventing Black folks from even getting wills and deeds to begin with. FEMA's insistence on such documentation doesn't actually come from the law, but from their apparent desire to keep scammers from getting federal assistance. We'd damn well better find another way, though.

University of Chicago neuroscientists find that rats will help their fellow rats escape a trap even when tempted to ignore them with chocolate. They put two rats in a cage, with one roaming freely and one not, and the free-roaming rat was "more agitated" when his cagemate was trapped than when he was in an empty cage, and the free-roaming rat also figured out how to open the trap after a lot of effort. They call it "(t)he first evidence of empathy-driven helping behavior in rodents," but I suspect the only reason we didn't observe this already is that we didn't look for it. You spend a lifetime trying to overcome prejudice only to find you've moved the needle only a little. Still, you do the work, because the work is worth it.

Tennessee fires the state's immunization program director, apparently after she gave completely sound and legal advice that teenagers between the ages of 14 and 17 don't need their parents' permission to get the COVID vaccine. Of course this is the right-wing way -- to act like such drama-addled morons that the best of us throw up our hands and disengage from the fight -- but the best part of her story is the part where unnamed busybodies told her she should have been more "politically aware" that sharing the science after being explicitly told to do so by her superiors would be "pok(ing) the bear." People like that should a) slap themselves and b) contemplate a little more seriously the fact that anything "pokes the bear" as far as right-wingers are concerned. Next up on Fox News: Tucker Carlson comes out against oxygen.

Hard to believe, Harry, but an AT&T PAC gave $100,000 to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott the same day he called a special session to pass more vote suppression bills, even though AT&T has voiced support for improved voting access. You hate to say things like "good words mean nothing," but corporations make it so hard not to say such things. I sure hope they don't say "we gave to Greg Abbott to keep a real monster like Allen West out of office," because Greg Abbott is already a real monster.

Ho hum, Texas's February cold snap may have shut down that state's power grid and killed over 200 good Texans, but at least a couple of gas corporations made record profits. I can already hear right-wingers cluck-clucking that NO SUPPLIEZ PLUS HIGH DEMANDZ EQUALZ TEH HIGHZ PRICEZ DUHZ!!!!!!, and I suppose they are free to inflict their reasoning on the families of the dead. Plus they've always said that TEH FREE MARKUTZ!!!! would always prevent this sort of thing from happening, because people wouldn't stand for it. The Free Marketeers didn't imagine state legislators would simply ignore a cold snap to whine about "voter fraud" and transgender athletes and critical race theory. Or did they?

Finally, we learn that Donald Trump apparently thought whomever leaked the story of him hiding in the White House bunker while George Floyd protests went on outside the White House last year should have been "charged with treason" and "executed." Ever get the sense this is a man who says ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME all the time? Perhaps you have. If we ever get to the point where exposing the Emperor's cowardice is "treason," this democracy is doomed. And about a quarter of the electorate are there right now, actively trying to doom our democracy merely because it doesn't tell them only what they want to hear. But I would much rather die in a nuclear war than die because of whiny brats with guns.

Action: concerning voting rights, jobs, drug prices, the Child Tax Credit, Guantánamo Bay, and our Post Office.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, go big on the American Jobs Plan, lower drug prices, and make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, and tell President Biden to close the notorious Guantánamo Bay detention center and fire Postmaster General DeJoy. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Common Cause, People for the American Way, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Our Supreme Court blew a hole open in the Voting Rights Act, with their, shall we say, sunny claim that vote suppression isn't an issue in the South anymore, but our Court also said the Voting Rights Act's pre-clearance formula (which they struck down) would be OK as long as it didn't "discriminate" against the South. Hence the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would install a formula requiring any state or locality, anywhere, with a history of vote suppression to submit its voting rights law changes in advance to our Justice Department for pre-clearance. That would have stopped a lot of right-wing state legislative efforts to restrict the vote, though not all of them. Anyone who votes against this bill -- or worse, won't let it come to a vote because they don't even have the courage to vote against it -- deserves defeat, dishonor, shame, and shunning. We might as well make them mark themselves off.

Daily Kos helps you tell Congressional Democrats to go big on jobs legislation. We say this as Republicans are pretending they have qualms about a "bipartisan" bill they intend to kill anyway, and as moderate Democrats are trying to reduce the size of the reconciliation bill as close to nothing as they can. You can say to Democrats: why do you think "not doing too much" will save your job? If you have a chance to rebuild broken bridges and replace lead-lined water pipes and your response is well, I wouldn't want to do too much, why do you think voters will respect that? Democrats moved cautiously in the face of the 2008 bankster Armageddon, and over five dozen House Reps and six Senators lost their jobs in 2010. If they don't learn from that this time, they not only deserve to lose, they deserve to be remembered as folks who pretended to be good but were actually evil. Hey, my goodwill only lasts so long. I'm getting old.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to (perhaps not surprisingly) lower drug prices this year. To sum: big pharma charges more for drugs here in America than they do in other countries because they can, socializes the risk but privatizes the profits because they can, charges absurdly high amounts of money for lifesaving drugs because they can, claims their main expense is "research and development" when they spend far more money on stock buybacks because they can -- there's a solution to all these problems in there somewhere, and that solution is to make it so they can't do any of those things. Let right-wingers call all that "socialism." Again, they never whine about "socialism" when taxpayer money funds the entirety of the Moderna vaccine, for example, but if "socialism" makes life-saving drugs more affordable, that'll just make socialism more popular.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion permanent. The first of many monthly $250 or $300 checks for American families will start coming out approximately now, and they'll run until the end of 2021; the expansion itself will run through 2022, but families will get that expansion in one lump sum (that's not very smart of Democrats; wouldn't they want a monthly campaign ad in millions of houses every month until the midterms?) and then in 2023 it'll go away. There's no good reason it shouldn't go away, though. I mean, I guess Mob Boss Mitch will say "raging" inflation is a good reason, though he's old enough to remember what "raging" inflation was really like. But fear-mongering over inflation is a bad reason to put millions of children back into poverty.

Daily Kos also helps you tell President Biden to close the Guantánamo Bay detention center with a quickness. And not to listen to the not-in-my-backyard cowardice from Congressional Democrats this time! Guantánamo doesn't hold "the worst of the worst" -- if it did, they'd all be in jail now! Make no mistake, Guantánamo holds political prisoners, and why would we want the country we love to act like the dictatorships we look down on? Not just by holding them without charge or without access to a fair trial -- and as the greatest country on Earth, we're able to give "the worst of the worst" a fair trial without being afraid, right? -- but by torturing them. Almost 800 folks have passed through Guantánamo; now, 40 remain, and that's 40 too many. Our shame is nearly two decades old now. It's well past time we started to make amends, by closing Guantánamo Bay.

Finally, both Common Cause and Progress America help you tell our USPS Board of Governors and our President, respectively, to fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who first tried to help Donald Trump win re-election by slowing down mail service, and who has lately proposed higher rates and lower service as the solution to all of our Post Office's problems. That's some real bold thinking, there! As usual, the American people have actual bold thinking -- we want to end the crippling pre-payment mandate Congress foisted on our Post Office in 2006 and restart postal banking for the first time in over 50 years long, long before we want to pay higher prices for worse service. I mean, this is America, and we deserve better than Louis DeJoy.

Around the table: quick, short, sharp shocks.

Thom Hartmann reminds us that our Senate has changed the filibuster before at least three times. Thus you can answer the numbnuts who declare that any change to the filibuster now that Republicans use it as routinely as they draw breath would be "unprecedented." I swear, the older I get, the more I think people just torture the word "unprecedented" until it tells them exactly what they want to hear. Sometimes I think people torture that word even more than they torture the word "conservative."

Michael Pollan wonders if maybe we all ought to give up caffeine. Caffeine does have its good points -- apparently it can help you fight cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and depression, among other maladies -- but at least one scientist says you might be giving all that back in lost sleep! Also, too, maybe we're not really wired to do this work-work-work thing all our lives. Certainly our labor seems to benefit our bosses more than it benefits us, and really, is that what caffeine drives us toward? (Full disclosure: I kicked it once, but I like the taste of black tea with sugar too much.)

As I contemplate Ohio Republican Senate candidate J.D. Vance's statement that "I’m not just a flip-flopper, I’m a flip-flop-flipper on Trump," I think Democrats had better use "flip-flop-flipper" in a hundred attack ads if he gets the nomination, and if they don't, they deserve to lose. And if they lose with Tim Ryan as their standard-bearer, then they deserve to lose all the seats. (Also, "most of the people there" on January 6 were "actually super peaceful," Mr. Vance? In other news, most of the air molecules COVID patients breathed in the moment they got infected were super-harmless.)

I'm not surprised to learn that "Just Say We Won" was Rudy Giuliani's entire strategy for convincing people that his client, and not Joe Biden, won the Presidency in 2020. But I'm pleased to see more reporting about our judges reckoning with the absurd weakness of their case. Months after the Big Man himself complained that judges wouldn't let the lawyers see all the affidavits his campaign had collected, we hear that at least one Michigan judge found that "the affidavits filed to support (claims of voter fraud) included obvious errors, speculation and basic misunderstandings of how elections are generally conducted in the state." People do have eyes to see that.

When I hear that Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) tried to intimidate House Democrats into opposing big tech-focused antitrust legislation by reminding them how much of the big tech money she's gotten over the years has found its way to their campaigns, I wondered how many Trump supporters will disrupt any of her town halls like they did Katie Porter's earlier this week. Approximately zero, I suspect, even though Ms. Lofgren is much, much closer to their version of the corrupt, out-of-touch Democrat than Ms. Porter is. Like I said, they're intellectually dishonest.

Finally, just in case I'm not making myself absolutely clear, Dr. Fauci said it was "horrifying" to hear CPAC attendees actually cheer news that we haven't met President Biden's 70-percent vaccination goal, but I didn't react that way. Here's how I reacted: they're assholes, what do you expect? I sometimes fancy myself a fisher of souls, but the older I get, the less I want to cast my line into cesspools.

Action: concerning big pharma, poisonous pesticides, e-proctoring, Alaska drilling, swim cap bans, and polluting pipelines.

Long story short: tell big pharma CEOs you know their excuses for overcharging us for drugs is utter balderdash, tell Bayer to develop a healthy alternative to Roundup, tell school administrators to stop using racist e-proctoring software, tell our Interior Department to reject an Alaska drilling project, tell the International Swimming Federation to lift its ban on larger swim caps, and tell big banks to pull funding for the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Public Citizen helps you tell big pharma CEOs that you know their research-and-development argument for high drug prices is rubbish. There is some value to telling them you're onto their game, after all. Typically, big pharma CEOs tell us they need to charge an arm and a leg, so to speak, for their drugs because that funds research and development of new drugs, but that's a lie! The fact that these same drugs cost a lot less in Canada and Europe should be the first clue, but we now know, thanks to Rep. Carolyn Maloney's office, that big pharma corporations spend a lot more money on stock buybacks and dividends than they do on research and development, and that's before we consider how much they spend on advertising and campaign donations. Why, that's before we consider taxpayer funding! If we want real health care in America, we have to go after big pharma's lies. In my experience, most Americans stand ready to do that.

Penn PIRG helps you tell Bayer to develop a safer alternative to its glyphosate-based weed killer Roundup. Bayer is actually considering doing this as we speak, so bad has been their publicity over its assimilation of the notorious Monsanto and Monsanto's notorious Roundup product, so let's give them a push. And don't worry that we won't be able to eat if we make Bayer do the right thing. This is America, the can-do country; do we really believe that we can't mass-produce food and avoid giving cancer to our people? If we believe that, we make ourselves hostages to evil, and if we do that, we might as well hang it up as a civilization. I won't let us hang it up as a civilization as long as I'm here, and I suspect many people feel the same way. But we have to make our will known.

Ban E-proctoring helps you tell school administrators across America to stop using "eProctoring" software like HonorLock and Proctorio. I bet you already know why! They can't tell black faces apart any better than other facial recognition software, or your Trumphole uncle, can. And yet schools still try to use them! And they're not just racist -- they're also prone to find more cheaters than really exist, by marking virtually any eye movement as "suspicious." Plus these e-proctoring programs collect way, way more data than they really need to do their job (why, it's almost like selling personal data is the whole idea!). Schools would be better off hiring more people to directly monitor more students. Worried where the money would come from? Well, three gazillionaires are trying to go into space as we speak; maybe it could come from one of them?

Environmental Action helps you tell our Interior Department to reject the Trump-era Willow oil drilling project in Alaska's North Slope. President Biden recently declared a moratorium on gas and oil leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but since former President Trump approved the project, the Biden Administration has actually defended it against lawsuits, and you know a future President Trump or President Cotton or President Cruz, wouldn't return the favor! You may not have known that oil drilling projects that far north rely on the stability of permafrost to anchor their equipment. But now that the permafrost is melting at record rates (ah, that would be due to climate change), oil drilling corporations are actually trying to install massive "chillers" to stabilize the ground! They'd be much better off investing in renewables.

Change.org helps you tell the International Swimming Federation to lift its absurd ban on large swim caps. As anyone who's done any competitive swimming will tell you, the large swim cap -- mostly worn by black folks, how about that -- does not confer a competitive advantage when swimming. What would confer a competitive advantage? Shaving your head, that's what! So the notion that a larger cap would benefit a swimmer by containing dreadlocks, weaves, Afros, or just plain lush hair is absurd on its face, so to speak. It's enough to make you think it's just plain racist, a notion the Federation hasn't helped dispel, by claiming the cap doesn't follow "the natural form of the head." Yeah, they said "natural"! Sigh.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell big banks to stop funding the notorious Enbridge Line 3 pipeline. You know the reasons: the tar sands oil it would carry is uniquely dirty, Line 3 would run through several sacred indigenous sites, Enbridge is yet another big fossil fuel corporation that has a lot of pipeline breaches, and of course it runs over the drinking water millions of Americans use. So why tell the big banks to stop funding it? Well, we've told President Biden to stop the project, and since he's indicated that he'll let the project proceed, we'll want to cut off the project at one of its other legs. I mean, if nobody gives Enbridge any money, it can't very well build the pipeline, can it?

Around the table: awww, no one wants to cuddle with a Trumphole! And other cautionary tales.

Surprise, surprise, about half the Republican Senators who signed on to the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" announced by President Biden a few weeks back now have, ah, reservations. Now imagine them having "reservations" -- maybe each week a new Senator comes up with a new one! -- long enough that the deal falls apart, and then Sens. Manchin and Sinema refuse to sign onto the reconciliation bill that would work around Republican intransigence because of the failure of the "bipartisan" bill. Hey, if I thought of it, you know they have. I don't say this to depress you -- I say it to prepare you for the fight.

Dean Baker helps you "com(e) to grips" with the fear-mongering about runaway inflation coming from right-wingers. Long story short: the price hikes we're seeing mostly look like temporary price hikes, versus ones that reveal deeper structural issues (though if oil prices were to surge, that could change), and the bond market, where a lot of rich folks have a lot of money, is presently acting nothing like it would if runaway inflation were coming. Of course, if you were already inclined to see the pandemic as a temporary thing (even though it has gone on for almost a year and a half now), you were probably already immune to the fear-mongering.

Ho hum, our "liberal" media would really, really prefer it if we kept fighting the 20-years-and-counting Afghanistan War we're pulling back from now and really never should have fought in the first place. And they keep thinking war-mongers (whose number has included President Biden for a long time!) are "smarter" than everyone else, or "bolder" than everyone else, when fact is they're actually stupider and more cowardly. Jesus Mary and Joseph it doesn't take "courage" or "brains" to send a bunch of other people's children to die for the benefit of your corporate cronies.

"Protestors" cause violence at a town hall hosted by Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA), with Ms. Porter at one point putting her arms around an elderly constituent to keep her from getting hurt. The only person police arrested was a Porter supporter, which is not at all suspicious. And note well that Trumpholes seem to be protesting the Democrats who actually fight the corruption they always say they hate, and not, say, the Democrats who actually worship big tech and consort with banksters. It's like Trumpholes aren't really honest actors or something.

Virginia Republican gubernatorial nominee Glenn Youngkin has already pulled out of a debate, because the moderator once gave $250 to the Clinton Foundation for earthquake relief in Haiti! And here you thought "helping people survive an earthquake" was a relatively apolitical cause! Of course Mr. Youngkin, merely by creating a big drama using the word "Clinton," has dog-whistled the hell out of the Trumpholes, but it also looks like he can't actually win an argument. If Virginia Democrats don't run a million ads depicting Mr. Youngkin whining in crap-loaded diapers, they deserve to lose this race.

Finally, in a peripherally-related matter, Andi Zeisler writes about "(t)he question keeping Trump-loving men up at night: Why won't women date us?" Of course, this is how civilized society is supposed to work! If you earn shame and shunning, you get shamed and shunned! And yet some right-wing "thinkers" actually argue that the state might best be put to service getting these men partners, which sure is a hifalutin way of saying you don't give a fuck what women want. Seriously, this is an extraordinary article, one that uses the tenets of conservatism itself against the men who whine that no one wants to cuddle with them.

Action: concerning drug policy, worker abuse, law and order, voting rights, and discrimination.

Long story short: tell Mississippi's Governor to free Tameka Drummer, tell your Congressfolk to stop Amazon from abusing its workers, and tell them to pass the MORE Act, the People's Response Act, the For the People Act, and the Equality Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first: Change.org helps you tell Mississippi Gov. Reeves to free Tameka Drummer, who is serving a life sentence for being caught with two ounces of pot. Mississippi lately passed the Earned Parole Eligibility Act, which will get people like Ms. Drummer out of jail for nonviolent offenses, but not Ms. Drummer, because of her two previous convictions for voluntary manslaughter and aggravated assault. But she served her time for those two crimes, and is only getting life-without-parole because of a state three-strikes law. I think it's safe to say she got caught in the cracks here, and mercy demands we let her out. Common sense demands we get rid of these three-strikes laws that virtually ensure that folks who commit crimes can never raise themselves up, and if freeing Ms. Drummer publicizes that, all the better.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would protect workers from Amazon's spying practices. Of course bosses need to know what their workers are doing, but Amazon's workplace spying practices go well beyond that, and into ensuring that more workers get hurt by dictating how long tasks are supposed to take down to fractions of a second. This is why Amazon's warehouse workers try to avoid going to the bathroom! And it's also why Amazon had over 65 serious workplace injuries daily in 2020, or about twice the industry average. If getting your Doctor Who DVDs out the next day is that urgent, they should hire more people to do the work! Surely Jeff Bezos can break a little off his personal space-walking fund to pay for it.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3617, the Marijuana Opportunity, Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act. If the MORE Act were law, people like Tameka Drummer wouldn't find themselves serving life-without-parole for possession in the first place! Also, people like Sha'Carri Richardson wouldn't be disqualified from Olympic competition for pot use, and anyone who thinks pot gives you some kind of "competitive advantage" is mistaken. If anything, it makes you less competitive! The MORE Act would also invest in communities most harmed by the "war on drugs" and expunge pot convictions from a lot of folks' criminal records, and these would also be good works. So let's tell our Congressfolk to do them.

Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4194, the People's Response Act. The People's Response Act would move the federal response to mental health crises from our Department of Justice to our Department of Health and Human Services, which would give grants and coordinate research on getting health care professionals, rather than police officers, to be the first responders to folks with mental health crises. Some folks would reflexively call that "defunding the police," but I would call it taking a burden from police and putting it on folks who can better handle it. I've long said we ask too much of our police, but the People's Response Act can guide us to a system that works better than the one where police are the first responders to everything. And, not for nothing, but sending cops out on these calls too often ends in death.

Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. Plus Daily Kos helps you sign up to call West Virginians and urge them to urge their Senator, Joe Manchin, to vote for the For the People Act. Again: Mr. Manchin's stated refusal to support the For the People Act not only defies logic, it defies the will of his constituents, who actually approve of all the things in the bill, not just the ones he pretended weren't in the bill but would have been in his "less partisan" "compromise" bill. Our leaders might be willing to indulge in all kinds of fantasies about "bipartisanship" and "compromise," but we can't, not when state legislators all across America are trying to prevent people from voting as we speak.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League, People for the American Way, and Ultraviolet all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. Tired of right-wing legislators whining and wailing about the possibility you might be in the same public bathroom as a transgender person? Tired of banks refusing to loan to gays because they're gay, or bosses firing employees because they're gay, or landlords refusing to rent to gay couples? The Equality Act would fix all that, merely by amending the Civil Rights Act so that it includes gay and transgender folk among its protected classes. And if folks complain about the "unprecedented assault on religious freedom" the Equality Act supposedly represents, you have two choices: 1) tell them the Civil Rights Act already grants religious freedom exceptions and the Equality Act doesn't amend that part of it, or 2) ask them why their "religious" "freedom" depends so much on hurting gay folks. Maybe 3) get them to slap themselves, if you can.

Around the table: tabulating yet more right-wing greed, racism, and stupidity.

Frito-Lay workers in Topeka (KS) enter their second week on strike over forced 7-day, 12-hour workweeks and minuscule or nonexistent wage hikes. Frito-Lay used to attract workers in Topeka, but not for the last two decades now, which roughly coincides with the period where accumulating wealth became the only motivation behind any decisions CEOs made (versus the major motivation). But despite empty buses not bringing scab workers and empty trailers not bringing supplies, both cheap ways of trying to intimidate striking workers, strikers report that the good citizens of Topeka have been very supportive. I wish them the best in their drive to make sure their 40-hour work week only has 40 hours in it.

Hey, guess who else avoids a crap-ton of taxes? That's right, big sports team owners, who generally pay a lower tax rate than, you guessed it, their players, and in some cases even stadium workers. So the next time some right-winger whines about some (probably Black!) millionaire athlete and how he shouldn't complain about anything, just remind them that the owner is the real rich man here, and almost certainly the real tax evader. (I wasn't surprised to learn that LeBron James paid almost 36% in federal taxes on nearly $125 million in income in 2018. Obviously I'd subject him to the 91% rate on millionaire income like all the rest of them, but I've always thought him a good egg. I was equally unsurprised, however, to learn that the notorious Bill Veeck came up with "depreciation" as a "gimmick," his word.)

Adele M. Stan at Right Wing Watch writes about "The Cops Who Joined the Insurrection." But someone who, ah, says people complain about racism too much won't like this article. I myself am a little ashamed that I haven't regarded the Big Lie (i.e., that the election was "stolen" from Trump) as a racist notion (i.e., that Black and Brown folks did all the stealing!). I also haven't really regarded the police as a racist institution before, even as I've accepted that police departments have more Nazi wannabes among their numbers than, say, your local Home Depot. (Anyone else feel a decided lack of compassion for Graydon Young, who's now cooperating with authorities and saying the Oath Keepers "duped" him? Sure, we often learn the truth only when the lies bite us in the ass, but I bet he snaps back into Nazi wannabe-mode as soon as he's in the clear. I hope I'm wrong!)

Shara Tibken at CNet informs us of "The broadband gap's dirty secret: Redlining still exists in digital form." Redlining, of course, wasn't just about "not letting black folks buy in this neighborhood," but also about insurers refusing to insure poor neighborhoods and supermarkets and hospitals refusing to build there -- and now big telecoms refusing to provide service there. Of course I don't like hearing that "fiber connections are expensive," like the biggest expense a big telecom has isn't the executive who gilds the plumbing on his 19th vacation home while trying to pay his workers in dung pellets. The article, at least, quotes more than a few observers who'll say the refusal to invest in broadband infrastructure is short-term thinking, and that most corporations would rather make more money faster than invest in something that'll last.

When I read that "Generation Z" could "Free the World From E-mail," I asked why on Earth would we do that? Yes, I also have friends who can't confront the thousands of unread messages in their inboxes (I get about 100 emails a day myself), and I occasionally find necessary stuff in the spam folder, too, but that doesn't mean "email sucks" -- it means the way bosses use email sucks, and bosses who try to get answers over email they should be getting over the phone suck, too. Want to use email better? Use it for necessary communication that doesn't demand an immediate reply and doesn't require immediate action, like policy/procedure changes. Email is best when you get to choose how you use it, and that doesn't exactly argue for its extermination -- particularly when the other choices (texting, handing out your personal phone number) bring other, bigger problems.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) has been in a Twitter spat with Tennessee native/pop music star/general good egg Taylor Swift, lately opining that "a socialistic government" "would have to approve your music" and would "not allow women to dress or sing or be on stage or to entertain." She's confusing "socialistic" with "totalitarian," and on purpose, I would presume. One can tell stories about big telecoms stamping out "edgy" content, I suppose, but the idea that the American people would even tolerate such heavy-handed censorship from a liberal government rather underestimates us -- and on purpose, I would presume. And never mind that Ms. Blackburn has herself been a proponent of policing content on social media -- what of her lifelong commitment to a "limited" government that can't do anything for you but can do anything to you?

Action: concerning monopolies, "fraudits," private militaries, paid family/medical leave, expanding Medicare, and expanding broadband.

Long story short: tell President Biden to enact vigorous anti-monopoly regulations, tell PA state legislators to reject another election "fraudit," and tell your Congressfolk to outlaw government use of private militaries, enact paid family/medical leave, expand Medicare coverage, and build out broadband. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

President Biden, as you may know, issued an Executive Order late last week requiring Executive branch agencies to fight corporate monopolies a lot harder than our government has done for the last 40 years, but, as you know, the devil is always in the details, so Public Citizen helps you tell Biden Administration agencies to enact the most vigorous anti-monopoly regulations possible. Good anti-monopoly regulations wouldn't just mean cheaper hearing aids, though that's no small thing; it could also mean an end to early termination fees that keep you from choosing a different internet provider, an end to cellphone corporations "locking out" independent computer repair stores, and an end to "non-compete agreements" that keep workers in one place forever -- not to mention an end to big pharma price-gouging and big telecom mergers. We should fight for these things, and we should remember that the big corporations and the corrupt politicians who fight against them are evil.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Common Cause helps you tell your state legislators you don't want them to conduct a "fraudit" of the 2020 election like Arizona's doing. Like Arizona, Pennsylvania has already conducted multiple audits of the 2020 election's accuracy, so let's oppose any one Senator's efforts to waste taxpayer money just to do a "fraudit" that might tell sore losers what they want to hear. And don't believe the argument that "people have questions about this election," because they don't. What some people have are the same lies Donald Trump has been feeding them for over eight months, which other Republicans have repeated and amplified. And I'm tired of right-wing rage making all the decisions around here.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban any state or federal government use of private military. The news hook, of course, is South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who really must be completely unworried about re-election, using a Tennessee gazillionaire donation to fund a state National Guard adventure at our Southern border over 1300 miles away. Needless to say, this is a bad idea, regardless of how you might feel about immigration -- an army answerable only to a gazillionaire, rather than the American people who pay the taxes to fund said army? I wish I could say it was unprecedented; the use of mercenaries is as old as the hills, and you likely remember how many Blackwater mercenaries, who were paid much better than our soldiers, operated in Iraq. So this is a cancer we need to cut out.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to put paid leave in the American Jobs Plan. Yeah, I know what President Biden and 20 Senators negotiated, but they're supposed to negotiate with us, not each other. And things like paid family/medical leave, investing in child care programs, and making the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent are actually pretty popular -- a lot more popular than Republicans saying no to everything or insisting on investing in "real" infrastructure or thinking we're going to pay for it with more smoke and mirrors. Seriously, nobody would run through a wall for any of that, which is why Republicans constantly try to enrage and distract people with whining about transgender folks and critical race theory. If we make our voices heard above the din, then the din will lose. It's that simple.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare in the American Jobs Plan. Again: who cares what the politicians want? Lowering the Medicare age to 60 would be a good first step in lowering that age to zero, as we must eventually do, and expanding Medicare to include vision/dental/hearing is also the right thing to do. And you know expanding Medicare coverage also creates jobs. After all, who's going to be providing all that extra care? Robots? At the risk of piling on, the poverty rate of seniors before Medicare was a lot higher than it is now; what a shame that too many seniors continue to vote for the right-wing politicians who would take all of that away from them.

Finally, Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to include the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act in the American Jobs Plan. You recall how much time you had to spend on the internet just to do work this past year? And how much time your kids had to spend on the internet just to go to school this past year? And do you find, every time you get your cable bill, that you're paying more and more for less and less? That's why we need the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act -- it would not only help build out the high-speed broadband we all need more and more, it would help small communities create their own broadband systems that would compete with the big telecoms who constantly overcharge you and give you lousy service. Ask the good folks of Chattanooga, TN how much better off they are with that city's municipal broadband network, and you'd be even more eager to imagine a world without Verizon and Comcast dictating terms to you.

Around the table: with more reminders that right-wingers should never run anything.

President Biden fires Social Security Administration Commissioner Andrew Saul -- who has done a lot of harm to our Social Security program -- and accepts the resignation of Commissioner David Black after asking for it. Just like his Personal Lord and Savior Donald Trump, Mr. Saul called his firing "a bolt of lightning no one expected," which insults our efforts to oust him for the last six months! Now the very same Republicans who argued throughout the Trump years that "the President should be able to hire and fire whomever he likes" are arguing that Mr. Saul should get his job back. If he thinks he's just going to log in this morning, though, he's a fool.

President Biden has also issued a sweeping Executive Order mandating that our government regulate corporate monopolies a lot harder. Matt Stoller is about as good a writer as exists on this topic, and though he says "(i)t feels a bit like I wrote this order," he also points out the potential roadblocks ahead: not just corporate whining like that of the reactionary U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and not just all the folks who have yet to be appointed to those positions within the Executive branch which would carry out the order, but the "deep state" (yes, it's an actual thing, that writers described long before Trump) which resists change of any kind. (All of which Mr. Biden, possibly more experienced in our federal government than any previous President, surely knows, and that may not bode well for the order's effectiveness.)

When I read that the Surfside condo that collapsed in Florida late last month might never have collapsed if a 2008 state law governing condo repairs hadn't been repealed in 2010, I'm reminded of then-Gov. Rick Scott citing President Trump's waiving of certain regulations as a help in getting buildings rebuilt faster after Hurricane Irma, and former actual moderate Republican Rep. Carlos Curbelo saying around the same time that better building standards save money because you don't have to build things again and again if you do them right the first time. Florida, of course, is the state that doesn't care about anything but money, and you know what our Bible says about the love of money.

Speaking of the Sunshine State, south Florida law enforcement have been using facial recognition on peaceful protestors. Warrants, probable cause? Nah, that stuff's for losers! Although all that was good enough for our Founders. A lot of those protestors were black, of course, and I'd lay money that a lot of them (and folks who looked like them, remember how bad facial recognition is at that) got pulled over later for "broken tail-lights" and "suspected car theft," and some of them even died. But hey, this is Florida, the State That Doesn't Give a Shit.

Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) says a Biden-proposed door-to-door vaccine campaign could become a pretext for a door-to-door gun- or Bible-confiscation campaign. Never mind how easy it would be to conduct any kind of door-to-door campaign just based on public records -- they always tell you government actually doing something for its owners, the people, is a "slippery slope" toward totalitarianism, but never do they apply such logic to say "you let corporations police themselves and soon they'll be dumping filth into your drinking water," since that's the more likely thing to happen. As I would think his own constituents have been telling him!

Finally, in a peripherally-related note, Tucker Carlson, who has lately accused the NSA of spying on him, now thinks we should spy on teachers to make sure they're not teaching Critical Race Theory. Saying it's just like putting body cameras on cops won't save him from his own hypocrisy! Never mind that no one gets taught critical race theory until college -- we need the reminder that right-wingers don't oppose government spying, but only government spying on them, and they approve of government spying on you.

Action: concerning taxes, child care, drug approvals, renewable energy, Exxon lobbyists, and racist podcasts.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and invest in child care, tell our FDA to rescind its approval of a controversial Alzheimer's drug, write a letter-to-the-editor supporting renewable energy investment, tell your Congressfolk to shun Exxon lobbyists, and tell Google to get rid of racist podcasts. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact at least $4 trillion over the next decade in tax hikes on the rich. Republicans keep pretending that the point of all these the-rich-don't-pay-taxes stories is TEH IRS IZ TEH EVILZ!!!!, rather than, you know, the rich don't pay enough in taxes. And then they throw up their hands and say "nothing can be done!" when you press them on Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk paying zero dollars for entire calendar years and 55 big corporations paying nothing in 2020. You know what, though? Something can be done -- you can change the law, and then you can enforce the law. What else do we ask of our government, after all?

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to invest in child care. Republicans say that's not "real infrastructure," but what builds a civilization, other than people? They brag about how much more money households have made since Reagan without mentioning that households were one-income households before Reagan and generally two-income households thereafter, and in two-income households, who's doing the child care? Grandma can't do everything, after all, and deserves a break, quite frankly! Investing $700 billion over the next decade in affordable child care every American can get without paying an arm and a leg is investing in the infrastructure of our civilization, no matter how pedantic Republicans want to be about it. And investing in child care also means investing in jobs, done by people. So let's do it.

Public Citizen still helps you tell our FDA to revoke its suspicious approval of the putative Alzheimer's drug, aducanumab. Our FDA has narrowed its recommendations for prescribing aducanumab, after a long and sustained public outcry (of which you may have been a part!) over all the suspicious activity surrounding aducanumab's approval, but that ain't good enough: the drug caused 40% -- 40%! -- of test subjects to get brain bleeding and swelling, and our FDA's own independent advisors urged them not to approve it. Plus, it'll cost over $50,000 annually per patient, which will surely test Medicare's ability to provide other drugs to seniors, since it may not be able to afford them. So, yeah, let's stop this.

Environment America helps you write a letter to the editor of your local paper supporting more investment in renewable energy. I surely don't need to say why by now! But, OK: renewable energy uses the sunlight that's already falling and the wind that's already blowing, pollutes less, and contributes less to climate change, plus it encourages more self-reliance, rather than reliance on electric utilities. That's right, more self-reliance! This is why you occasionally see Tea Party groups jump on the renewable energy bandwagon -- and it's why right-wing opposition to renewable energy so frequently devolves into absurdity. Having your own power source, one that helps conserve the planet -- you see what I did there, I trust.

In a peripherally-related note, 350.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to pledge never to meet with Exxon lobbyists again. You'll know the news hook, of course: Exxon lobbyists got caught on tape bragging about how they've stymied efforts to include climate change-related initiatives in the American Jobs Plan. Yikes, who the hell brags about that? You brag about your kid hitting three home runs in a baseball game, not about slowing down progress so you can make more money. Of course, journalists in 2015 found that Exxon had spent close to 40 years knowing climate change was coming and lying about it so they wouldn't have to change. That's another hell of a thing to take to the Pearly Gates. And that's why our Congressfolk should shun them.

Finally, ParentsTogetherAction helps you tell Google Podcasts to get rid of all the Nazi wannabes, conspiracy theorists, and other nutjobs. Kids listen to this stuff, after all! You have a responsibility not to let your podcasts tell kids to kill the Jews! And the specious "free speech" argument should be losing by now. Do Nazi wannabes have a right to free speech? Of course they do! But they do not have a "right" to have their speech broadcast. In a sane, moral, and decent society, Nazi wannabes would have to fight like dogs to get heard; in our sick, immoral, and decadent society, which cares only about drama, they don't. Let's make Google help us work for the former and against the latter.

Action: concerning health care, corruption, government spying, worker safety, our Supreme Court, and our Post Office.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare in the American Jobs Plan, pass the IG Independence and Empowerment Act and the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act, and investigate Amazon's abuse of its workers, and expand our Supreme Court, and tell our USPS Board of Governors to fire Postmaster General DeJoy. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare in the American Jobs Plan. Because, as they say, "expanding Medicare is human infrastructure," even if Republicans say infrastructure isn't "real" unless it's roads or bridges. I would say investing in senior health care is the infrastructure of a civilization; even if you're of the mind that seniors' lives are almost over and not that important, which I hope you're not, fact is we're all working to be seniors ourselves one day, and we're going to need vision, hearing, and dental care just as much as we do now, if not more. Investing in senior health care also represents an investment in creating American jobs. After all, we don't presume robots will be delivering all that additional care, do we?

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 2662, the IG Independence and Empowerment Act. Inspectors General work in every part of our government's Executive Branch, rooting out waste, fraud, and inefficiency, but we just witnessed the spectacle of President Trump firing IGs left and right and replacing them with cronies wherever he could -- the kind of thing you see in dictatorships, not America, right? But H.R. 2662 would make it a lot harder for rogue Presidents to fire Inspectors General merely for doing their jobs, plus it would also give IGs broader subpoena power -- currently IGs can only subpoena current government employees, and you can see how someone could evade a subpoena by quitting, right? -- and would specifically give Justice Department IGs the authority to investigate Justice Department attorney wrongdoing, which they strangely don't already have. Our House has already passed this bill, and it'll make our government work better, so our Senate should pass it, too.

Presente helps you Send a message to your members of Congress and tell them to support S. 2051, the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act. S. 2051 would, as its title suggests, prevent our government from using facial recognition or biometric surveillance technology, plus it would prevent states from receiving certain law enforcement-related federal grants unless they also ban these technologies. Why? Because they're bad technologies -- they do evil, and they don't even do evil particularly well, which makes them more evil. Facial recognition, as you know, can't tell Black folks apart any better than your Trumphole uncle can, and biometric technology (which includes facial recognition) mainly seems to detect "nervousness," which doesn't help us stop crime so much as it helps us arrest nervous people. So, yeah, how about we not use bad technology, even when its makers say it's great technology?

Sum of Us helps you tell Congress to investigate Amazon's abuse of its workers. There are a lot of them now, after all, and they make at least $15/hour, as Amazon's endless PR campaign tells us repeatedly, never mind that organized activists (including Sen. Sanders!) shamed them into paying their workers more. But they still have a lot of problems at Amazon -- our media has documented the problems Amazon drivers have in finding time to use a rest room or eat a Whopper lest they fail to meet production quotas, but Amazon's warehouse workers face the same problems. If we really need to have that Doctor Who DVD the next day, then Amazon should hire enough people to make that a reality, not work the ones they've got like they're a damn sugar plantation.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand our Supreme Court. It's not like they've never done it before, after all! That's for all those folks who say you can't just expand the Court for political reasons -- actually, yes, we can, and we've done it at least six times in our history (most recently in 1869), and anyway why should Mitch McConnell be the only one who gets to expand his power? I think our Founders would have side-eyed Mr. McConnell's stonewalling of the Garland nomination and a 46% President picking three Supreme Court justices in four years. And, frankly, we have 13 federal Courts of Appeal, so I'd prefer 13 Supreme Court Justices, one to handle appeals coming out of each Court.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell our USPS Board of Governors to fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. For trying to throw the election to Donald Trump, obviously, but also for proposing, in all seriousness, slowdowns in service and rate hikes. Can you think of the private sector executive who would be hailed as a genius for mandating higher prices and worse service? Yet our government stupidly brings in private sector executives all the time like Mr. DeJoy to do exactly that! I feel like there's a double standard there, somewhere. And, not for nothing, but our Postal Service doesn't only deliver junk mail, like a lot of idiots say -- it also delivers life-saving drugs for a lot of Americans, and that's not exactly the kind of thing you can skimp on. So let's fire the guy who would do that.

Action: all jobs, all day.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk you want renewable energy, lead-free water pipes, paid family/medical leave, and Medicare drug price negotiation in the American Jobs Plan -- and no military spending! And then tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the wealthy and on corporations to pay for it. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Today would be a good day to call your Congressfolk and tell them you want renewable energy in the American Jobs Plan that President Biden is inexplicably trying to pass in a "bipartisan" manner. Again, it doesn't matter that he wants the two sides to work together; it only matters that your Congressfolk do your will, and the more we keep our eye on the latter item, the better. You may mention that the OFF Fossil Fuels Act, introduced in previous Congresses but not this one, remains a good blueprint for what the American Jobs Plan needs. It would have mandated 80% renewable electricity and 80% zero-emission cars by 2035, and it would also have funded retraining for fossil fuel workers. And not as computer programmers, either! Jesus Mary and Joseph why insist that everyone learn to code when you can retrain the folks who work in coal mines to install solar panels and wind turbines? Of course, Republicans don't think any of that is "real infrastructure" either. But they're a party full of seditionists and whiners, so why do we listen to them?

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your Congressfolk to invest in getting the lead out of our drinking water. That is literally an investment in our future, since lead from lead pipes causes brain damage in children, and it would be entirely appropriate to put such investment in the American Jobs Plan that President Biden is inexplicably trying to pass in a "bipartisan" manner. If you want to support specific legislation that would reduce lead in our drinking water, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1376, the GET THE LEAD OUT Act (the acronym isn't as bad as it looks), which would fund lead-free pipes all over America by hiking the number of estates subject to the Estate Tax and closing the "carried interest" loophole that allows hedge fund managers to pay a lower tax rate than bus drivers. Hard to imagine people being against those things. Then again, it's hard to imagine people being against clean water!

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a paid family/medical leave bill. It would be entirely appropriate, etc. to put this in the American Jobs Plan, etc., and though our law does grant 12 weeks of unpaid family/medical leave annually, we're just about the only "wealthy" nation on Earth that doesn't grant paid leave, and as I always say, that's not a thing you want to chant WE'RE NUMBER ONE! about. And, you know, our Congressfolk act like they know everything, when all they do is say "that won't work" whenever we tell them what they should do. But that's a damn un-American attitude, if you ask me. Isn't this the can-do nation that always finds a way? And hasn't every bit of progress we've made met with "that won't work" at the beginning? It works just about everywhere on the planet, so it can work here -- if our politicians would just grow a spine.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to include H.R. 3, the Elijah Cummings Lower Drug Costs Now Act, in the American Jobs Plan. Not just because letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices would, well, lower drug prices across the board, but because it would save the taxpayer money, which means it could well help fund all the other good works we've been talking about, like renewable energy, clean water, paid family/medical leave, and the like. What will Republicans say in response? It's not "real" infrastructure? What a weak response -- they're like the kid you knew in junior high who was always correcting the tiniest grammatical errors you'd make. So, yeah, it would help now to think of that kid growing up to be a Republican Senator, just trying to find a reason, any reason, to piss on whatever the American people want.

Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any new military spending in the American Jobs Plan. Because they love to hide defense spending wherever they can! And because we already spend more on "defense" than the next 12 nations on that list combined. Why, you'd never know we had an ocean on either side of us! But spending on defense deprives us of spending on clean water, renewable energy, etc., and not because federal spending is a zero-sum game (just ask the folks who passed the 2017 tax "reform"!), but because politicians always use "defense" as an excuse not to spend on the things we actually need. Seriously, we can already destroy the planet 300 times over; what, we won't be safe until it's 400?

Finally, in case you thought I forgot about funding the American Jobs Plan: Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a wealth tax, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a "millionaire's surtax" that would raise the top tax bracket from 37% to 47%, Inequality.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act, and Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise the corporate tax rate. Does that all sound too tax-the-rich for you? Well, they've spent the last 40 years demonstrating that they deserve to pay higher taxes! And the smoke-and-mirrors pay-fors Republicans prefer -- user fees which always fall on working people, and "asset recycling" that's just a fancy-schmancy name for "selling off public works to build other public works" -- won't get the job done. Why do we listen to Republicans again? I mean, just six months ago they were trying to literally nullify the 2020 election. When will Democrats learn? When we speak in numbers they can't deny.

Action: concerning voting rights, the filibuster, communications policy, and chemical plant safety.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and get rid of the filibuster, tell President Biden to nominate a fifth FCC Commissioner already, and tell our EPA to enact vigorous chemical plant safety regulations. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. Plus Daily Kos helps you sign up to call West Virginians and urge them to urge their Senator, the notorious Joe Manchin, to vote for the For the People Act. Nearly four out of five West Virginians support the For the People Act, so we really ought to help them communicate their will to the man who should be doing their will, rather than sacrificing their will to the Golden Idol of Bipartisanship. Particularly "bipartisanship" with a party that only wants to obstruct the people's will, but which tried to overturn the 2020 election results! Why do we keep having to say this? Why do politicians keep "working with" people who do not work? (I know the answers, of course, but that doesn't make it any less absurd.)

Meanwhile, Common Cause, People for the American Way, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. This bill does one thing the For the People Act does not do: it restores our government's ability to reject voting rights changes at the state level by rewriting the Voting Rights Act's pre-clearance formula so that any state or locality with a record of vote suppression (not just certain Southern ones, per the Voting Rights Act) must submit its voting law changes for federal Justice Department pre-clearance. I would have put that with the For the People Act and thus made it even harder for its opponents to lie about it -- really, from Joe Manchin to Lindsey Graham, they're doing a bad job of it! -- but while they're two bills, we should tell our Congressfolk to support both.

Pursuant to these goals, both Public Citizen and NETWORK help you tell your Senators to get rid of the filibuster. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I've been telling people for 12 years or so that we need to make the filibuster a talking filibuster, so that you at least have to earn your obstruction -- like Strom Thurmond did, not even drinking water for 72 hours so he could filibuster civil rights legislation -- but these Senators don't seem to understand what earning is like, so we have to treat them like the three-year-olds they seem to be too much of the time, and take away the toy they're using to lay waste to the country we love. Seriously, I've tried to be nurturing, but I don't have infinite patience, either.

Demand Progress helps you tell President Biden to nominate a fifth FCC Commissioner. I know he's had a lot to do, but it's been almost six months, and we need a fifth FCC Commissioner to get anything done. Currently our FCC has a 2-2 split between Democrat and Republican appointees; Joe Biden won the Presidency, so he gets to appoint the fifth. And yet he hasn't done it. We don't just need our FCC to reinstate net neutrality; chances are Congress will also approve a massive broadband buildout, and our FCC will need to oversee that -- and you can just imagine the two Republican Commissioners just saying no to everything, in the style of their Personal Lord and Savior, Mitch McConnell? Yes, you can. Get on President Biden's case and we can avert this catastrophe, too.

The Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous chemical plant safety regulations possible. America suffers an accident at a chemical plant more than once every four days, and these accidents can not only kill and injure good Americans, but poison the air and water where good Americans live. And not for nothing, but chemical plants seem to cluster in poor and Black areas of the country and I wonder why? Because folks with means can get all NIMBY and get results, perhaps? Frankly, it's cruel to do that to poor and Black folks. We're all Americans, after all. You wouldn't want a poor Black kid to get asthma he never would have gotten if he'd lived in your neighborhood.

Around the table: do not give corporations taxpayer money as an "incentive," and other lessons that bear repeating.

Headline of the year so far from Vox: "Robots Were Supposed to Take Our Jobs. Instead, They're Making Them Worse." After you read about all the Amazon warehouse workers getting fired for not moving fast enough and the gig workers who get offered $2 delivery jobs, you may come away thinking, as I did, that the "drive for efficiency" at work too often turns into a need for controlling workers and redistributing their hard-earned income upward. Plus delivery drivers no longer get incentives, like more pay, to work harder -- now they get disciplined if they don't work harder. The future, ladies and gentlemen! (As an aside, I am of course quite glad to read that someone else hates automated supermarket checkouts as much as I do.)

The Associated Press assures us, in an excellent report, that Republican gubernatorial nominee Glenn Youngkin's "private equity résumé draws scrutiny in Virginia," as it should -- putting seniors out on the street after your bankster firm buys their mobile home park is an ad that should write itself, and the Carlyle Group's rather intimate involvement in the Iraq war should finish Mr. Youngkin with independents. But, alas, Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe also invested in the Carlyle Group! Literally, that is! To the tune of at least $690,000! Again, this is why Democrats lose -- you catch their fingers in the same cookie jar and people just throw up their hands. Not to say Mr. McAuliffe will lose, but I'd lay money the 2021 election will be as close as the 2013 election, when he barely beat Ken Cuccinelli, arguably the furthest-right individual holding statewide office at the time.

When I heard about the seven House Democrats in Trump-won districts "balking" at the upcoming reconciliation bill, I said to myself, so this is how it begins! But then I read Axios's actual report about the matter, and I think they're dramatically overstating the case. Your first clue is Rep. Cindy Axne (D-IA) saying that broadband and child care actually are infrastructure, and by the end, you may conclude, as I did, that five of these seven House Democrats will vote for the reconciliation bill, whether they can make it more to their liking or not. You may or may not conclude, as I have, that the other two (who didn't say) are probably toast in 2022 anyway.

Ho hum, ProPublica finds that too many corporations took Paycheck Protection Program (or PPP) money in 2020 but still laid off workers. Also, our government opened too many loopholes allowing big corporations and foreign corporations to pretend they were small businesses and get PPP money, and our government made it too easy to get the loans "forgiven," meaning they all essentially became corporate welfare. The lesson, once again: you don't give a corporation taxpayer money as an "incentive" not to fire people, you make them not fire people. The corollary lesson: never let Republicans manage a crisis, because they only take care of bosses.

Ho hum, Paul LePage will run for Governor again in Maine in 2022, despite having actually carried out his threat to move to Florida after Democrats recaptured the Governor's mansion in 2018. Were you just thinking "gosh, I've really missed all his whining about instant runoff voting"? Then you're in luck! Though he's not exactly in luck, not now -- 37% and 48% (his share of the vote in 2010 and 2014, you'd think these facts would have induced more humility) ain't gonna win it now. And hey, speaking of Florida, he's still a registered voter there, which means he'd be exactly the sort of fellow right-wingers whine about when they whine about voter fraud, except, of course, that he's one of them. Plus he may also have broken Florida law by failing to deregister himself when he moved back to Maine. Law and order!

Finally, Texas's Lieutenant Governor orders the cancellation of an event in an Austin history museum where the authors of Forget the Alamo -- a book critically reviewing the facts and myths of Texas's founding -- planned to give a talk. Once again, right-wingers indulge in literal "cancel culture" while decrying it! I don't mean to assert that the Bullock Texas State History Museum had a legal obligation to host the talk, but I do mean to assert that the people who cancelled it are cowards and hypocrites, and that our First Amendment doesn't protect them from me saying so.

Around the table: enough of the damn drama, part 988.

Our Supreme Court just loves to save the best for last: they strike down California's big donor disclosure law, claiming that it exposes said big donors to harassment and intimidation, and they uphold a pair of Arizona voter restrictions, claiming that they don't oppress minority voters the way plaintiffs (and the Ninth Circuit) said they do. Remember when our Court said campaign finance disclosure ought to compensate for the problem of letting people donate whatever they like? That might have been BS, just like it was when Mitch McConnell said it over 20 years ago. And they're apparently prepared to wait until legislators are stupid enough to write down WE HATEZ TEH BLACKZ!!!!! directly into their laws before acting on vote suppression. Or maybe not even then! I guess those unorthodox 6-3 decisions were just to put us off our guard.

Jennifer Rubin, one of the Washington Post's many never-Trumpers, suggests that Republicans want the infrastructure fight to be "all about process" because the actual infrastructure projects are popular with Republican rank-and-file voters. But of course, this could all be drama: Republicans pitch a fit over the "bad faith" of Democrats, and then Joe Biden, to "reassure" them, gives up the reconciliation bill Democrats will pass afterward. Or maybe Kyrsten Sinema steps up to say she just can't in good conscience support whatever reconciliation bill Democrats come up with. No one snatches defeat from the jaws of victory like the Democrats, and there are still a million ways to lose this thing -- unless, of course, we make that impossible for them.

In a related note, Republicans are now fixating on the IRS funding provision as a reason to oppose the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal." After all, no one cares when Republicans go back on their word, but the mere appearance of going back on your word is of course fatal to Democrats! Hilariously, Sen. Graham wonders aloud how much good $40 billion more would do, when the first sentence of the article reminds us that everyone involved in the "deal" (including Sen. Graham) agreed that $40 billion would harvest about $100 billion in otherwise-undetected tax evasion. That's not the kind of stupidity that can stand very much sunlight. Right?

But if you're looking for a sign that Democrats actually do know how to do politics, the House plans to vote on removing Confederate statues from our nation's Capitol early next week. Republicans could be impaled on the horns of a trilemma here: if you want to be the objectively pro-Confederate statue Congressperson, you go right ahead, and if you want to alienate Trumphole voters by voting to remove them, you go right ahead, and if you don't want to take a stand either way but just want to complain about Democrats playing politics, you go right ahead. I'll admit that Kevin McCarthy's response -- "all the statues were Democrats" -- made me laugh.

You may have heard that a certain former President's corporation now faces charges of fraud (and its CFO faces charges of grand larceny) in New York state, and Donald Trump responds in, apparently, the only way he can, by saying that the charges are part of a "political Witch Hunt by the Radical Left Democrats" that is "dividing our Country like never before!" "Never before"? It's like we never fought a Civil War! Could this incessant whining be the reason 54% of the electorate in 2016 and 53% in 2020 voted for someone, anyone, other than him? (Ransom note-style caps, by the way, come from the original text, as always.)

Finally, Bush the Lesser Defense Secretary/Iraq war hawk Donald Rumsfeld has died at the age of 88. You know, I used to be sad when my enemies died -- sad when Ronald Reagan died, sad when William F. Buckley, Jr., died, sad when Antonin Scalia died, even -- but not now. Could it be that my enemies used to be formidable but have gotten so, so much more stupid and venal over the years? Could it be that I became a man and put away childish things like "respecting your enemy"? I suppose it could be both, but I'm pretty sure it's at least the former.

Action: concerning jobs, education, discrimination, corporate spying, and Medicare for All.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal," and pass the Counseling Not Criminalization in Schools Act, the Equality Act, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, and the Medicare for All Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Today's another good day to tell your Congressfolk you oppose the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" struck between Joe Biden and a cadre of 20 Senators from both parties; Food and Water Action helps you do that because the "deal" would privatize a lot of public infrastructure, although, frankly, there's a lot of good reasons to oppose it. And don't brook any whining about "bipartisanship" from your friends and neighbors: it's far less important that "the two parties work together" than that our government govern well, and if that means the Party of Sedition can't get its way, well, maybe they could try going down the no-sedition path next election! If you're feeling especially ornery, ask your "bipartisan" friends and neighbors how Republicans have improved Joe Biden's American Jobs Plan. Because it sure seems to me the Republican plan is to build a lot less of what we need, privatize things we need to keep public, and pay for it with smoke and mirrors. Really, it's not "just another opinion" if that opinion happens to suck.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 4011/S. 2125, the Counseling Not Criminalization in Schools Act. Putting cops in schools hasn't made kids safer -- it certainly hasn't made them safer from cops! -- and this bill would redirect federal funding away from putting cops in schools and toward putting nurses, counselors, and other health professionals in schools so kids can get the help they need, rather than the back of some police officer's hand. Spare the rod, spoil the child, they say, but that doesn't mean only use the rod, either. I sure hope the folks who call this "defunding the police" don't take credit for it we actually make schools get safer because we're actually helping kids do better.

The Daily Kos Liberation League, People for the American Way, and Ultraviolet all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. Let's review: the Equality Act would prevent landlords, banks, and employers from discriminating against gay and transgender folk merely on the basis of being gay or transgender. It would do so by adding gay and transgender folks to the list of protected classes in the Civil Rights Act. Note well, whenever someone calls the Equality Act "an assault on religious freedom," that the Civil Rights Act already has a broad exemption for religious organizations, which the Equality Act does not amend. I would hate to think that right-wingers just see religion as mainly a matter of hating gays, transgender folks, and women. If so, they're really missing out.

The Center for Rights and Dissent, Free Press, Restore the Fourth, and the Project on Government Oversight all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. Your internet service providing corporation can't sell your private data to law enforcement, but it can sell it to a third-party data-hoovering corporation, which can then sell it to law enforcement. Nice work if you can get it! The Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act would close that loophole, and Congress may be anxious to listen to us on this matter, since no one in America is :"objectively pro-handing over your private data to law enforcement without a warrant." No one except the folks who make money from it, that is. But this is America! They don't get all the say about everything!

Finally, Demand Progress, MedicareforAllNow.org, Black Lives Matter, and Roots Action all help you tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 1976, the Medicare for All Act. Even good liberals frequently tell me that paying for all that health insurance is going to be very hard. After all, the Mercatus Center says Medicare for All would cost $32 trillion over the next decade! That's a lot of money! What they don't tell you, of course, is that our Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services has predicted that America will spend $49 trillion on health insurance over the same time period -- which means you just have to capture the money that's going to gild the plumbing on some health care CEO's 19th vacation home and redirect it toward Medicare. We can do that with an employer-side payroll tax, in the amount corporations already pay private health insurers, that wouldn't cost workers a penny more. So what are we waiting for again?

Action: concerning foreign policy, vote suppression, fuel efficiency, clean water, airline refunds, and pipeline pollution.

Long story short: tell our government to stop training Saudi killers, tell big corporations to stop funding ALEC and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, tell our EPA to strengthen fuel efficiency standards and get the lead out of our water pipes, tell the big airlines to refund all those tickets cancelled because of the pandemic, and tell President Biden to stop the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

In light of the news that an American military contractor trained several of journalist Jamal Khasoggi's killers, Win Without War helps you tell Secretary of State Antony Blinken to halt all American training of Saudi paramilitary operatives. I mean, when they turn that training into sawing up a journalist into little pieces, I wouldn't blame you for feeling a little responsible. Of course, you shouldn't feel as responsible as those handling the bone saws, but we shouldn't be enabling the murder of journalists, either. Certainly not because "the world is a dangerous place!" That's a quotation from former President Trump (yes, exclamation point in the original), and it doesn't justify just letting anything happen.

MoveOn helps you tell big corporations to stop funding the American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC), while Daily Kos helps you tell big corporations to cut ties with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Both ALEC and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have pushed reactionary right-wing policies at the state and federal levels for years, but now both organizations have pushed vote suppression in the name of fighting "voter fraud," which no reasonable observer has found in the 2020 election results. You would think big corporations wouldn't want to be associated with the Big Lie, but the truth is they want it both ways -- they want the good press of saying they're against voter fraud but they want to keep ties to organizations that promote it. We're here to tell them they can't have it both ways.

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to roll back Donald Trump's roll back of Barack Obama's clean car standards, while the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell our EPA to restore the waiver they used to grant to California to set stronger fuel efficiency standards than the rest of the nation. Which meant cars generally built their cars to California standards -- rather than have two sets of cars, one for California and one for the rest of the nation -- but so what? The end result is better cars that go farther on a gallon of gas and thus not only pollute our air and water less but also cost good Americans less money at the pump. It takes a special talent like Donald Trump to look at all that and say nah, Americans don't deserve that! But he's gone, for now, and restoring better gas mileage standards is one of the things we need to do to keep him gone.

Daily Kos helps you tell our EPA to require that our government remove all lead pipes from our sewer system. Recall that no amount of lead is safe to drink, that any amount of lead can cause brain damage in children, and that more than half of all Americans still drink water from systems containing lead, and you'll see the urgency of this matter. And, not for nothing, but if you're poor or Black, you have a much higher chance of drinking from contaminated lead pipes. Turns out Donald Trump tried to weaken EPA rules governing lead pipes on his way out of office -- like a mustache-twirling villain who's tied you to the tracks! -- but the Biden Administration paused that effort. Now we need to tell them to do better.

Consumer Reports helps you tell big airline corporations to pay the refunds they owe good Americans for all those trips that the pandemic cancelled. That's some $10 billion, which ain't chump change, and they're doing pretty good at the moment, what with all the reopening and the $50 billion in bailouts they got via the CARES Act, so they don't really have an excuse not to reimburse good Americans for the travel they weren't able to do because of COVID. Hell, I'm old enough to remember when a big corporation would go out of its way to make refunds like this just to look better than anyone else. Corporations have so much power now they don't have to do things like that. But good Americans still deserve their refunds, and we ought to help them get them.

Finally, MoveOn helps you tell President Biden to stop the construction of the notorious Enbridge Line 3 pipeline. You no doubt know the reasons: transporting tar sands oil is fundamentally dirty, pipelines tend to break and pollute everyone's drinking water, pipelines somehow seem to find their way through Native American holy lands. But here's another one: the Trump Administration approved this pipeline without doing a proper environmental review, too, just like he did with the Keystone XL pipeline, a project for which President Biden revoked the permit on the first day of his Presidency. Let's not let him think his work is done here, of course. The work of the righteous is never done.

Around the table: congratulations, you're a socialist! Part 383.

Sonali Kohatkar assures us that "Socialism Has a PR Problem, and It Can Be Solved." She doesn't really say how, though, except to remind Americans that right-wing authoritarian regimes are more prevalent in Latin America than socialist ones, and also to remind us (as India Walton does) that right-wingers are fine with "socialism for the rich." From my perspective, all Americans are socialists already -- unless, you know, they don't pay taxes and don't drive roads and don't call cops and I could go on -- and socialist policy prescriptions (hello, Medicare for All!) are actually quite popular. The PR, I guess, is you tell people that, and you don't back down -- in fact, the more fierce you are, the better. Definitely don't sound like an egghead.

Here's an interesting poll result in Arizona: not only do more Arizonans disapprove of the Cyber Ninjas' "fraudit" than approve, but the "strongly disapprove" numbers are rather higher than the "strongly approves," and independent voters disapprove by an 18-point margin. I used to say you can't win elections just by pointing out how big an ogre your opponent is, but maybe I was wrong -- maybe it just took time for most other liberals to get as angry about right-wing shenanigans as I've been for close to 20 years now. Or maybe it took the biggest ogre of them all.

In a related note, more partisan media outlets are seeing their online traffic numbers circle the toilet now that Donald Trump's out of office. "Left-leaning" outlets are actually suffering a bit less than "mainstream" outlets, and "right-leaning" and "far-right" outlets are tanking harder than "left-leaning" and "far-left" outlets. I'd quarrel with the placement of Fox News as "right-leaning" (they're "far-right," duh) just as I wouldn't call Mother Jones "far left" (have they never heard of Counterpunch or Jacobin?), but basically this is good news to everyone who hates our media's addiction to sensationalism and drama. Or it could be: right-wing podcasts are, unfortunately, picking up steam.

Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) eviscerates Sen. Sinema's case for keeping the filibuster, calling it "essentially an argument of saying, 'Well, why do anything at all, in case something in the future may change it?'" Specifically addressing Ms. Sinema's putative fear of "radical policy shifts" every time one party or the other retakes the majority, she adds, "(w)ouldn't it be better to get people health care and voting rights for three years instead of zero years?" As usual, she said it better than I did, which is, I imagine, why she's in Congress.

Justice Thomas criticizes federal marijuana policy, calling it a "piecemeal approach" and a "half-in, half-out regime that simultaneously tolerates and forbids local use of marijuana," and frankly he's got a point. Granted, I think I know which way he'd go -- two decades ago, he managed to mess up an opinion on behalf of a unanimous court in re federal marijuana law by opining that pot had no medicinal value, a statement irrelevant to the facts of the case (which hinged entirely a matter where federal law superseded local law) and one certainly unsupported by the research of the time, since that research would have been largely illegal.

Finally, Amanda Marcotte at Salon reminds us not to underestimate Donald Trump, as coverage of his recent Ohio rally has tended to do. Key finding: "Trump is popular mainly because his followers believe that, due to his shamelessness and unending aggression, he's their best vehicle for establishing the authoritarian rule that is their only real hope of retaining control over a changing nation," and though "(m)ost of them may not show up at rallies to listen to Trump complain about nonsense for an hour and a half," "they definitely vote." I once said, about Jeb Bush, that you should "never count a bastard out"; maybe "never count an asshole out" should be Donald Trump's 2024 campaign slogan.

Action: concerning voting rights, Medicare expansion, paid family leave, Medicaid expansion, and big telecom cruelty.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, expand Medicare, provide paid family/medical leave, pass a bill that would let individual counties and localities accept the Medicaid expansion where states won't, and pass the Martha Wright Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act; and attend a rally in favor of the For the People Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The Voting Rights Act used to have a list of states that needed to pre-clear their voting law changes with our Justice Department -- until our Supreme Court, in Shelby County v. Holder, ruled that discriminated against Southern states (which comprised most of that list!). The Voting Rights Advancement Act would amend the Voting Rights Act so that any state or locality with a record of suppressing the vote would have to pre-clear their voting law changes. Don't brook any silliness about how "the South has changed" from the likes of Mitch McConnell -- the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would fight vote suppression everywhere, not just the South. So let's get to it.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to improve and expand Medicare, by lowering the eligibility age to 60 and adding hearing, vision, and dental coverage. As they say, seniors have ears, eyes, and teeth just like everyone else, so there's no reason Medicare shouldn't cover them! And though I'd rather lower the eligibility age to zero, lowering it to 60 would be a good first step. I can already hear right-wingers whine how are you going to pay for it? If we pass it as part of the next reconciliation bill, we'd get tax hikes on rich folks and corporations to help pay for it -- plus we could let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices, which even the Mercatus Center has said would save Medicare about $84 billion annually. (Toward that end, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3, which would let Medicare negotiate prices for most of the drugs it buys.)

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk you want our government to provide paid family/medical leave to all our workers. That is supposed to be one of the cornerstones of the American Families Plan, so we might as well tell Congress we want it, lest they think the American people care more about whatever manufactured outrage right-wingers want to flood the zone with today. And though asking HOWZ WILLZ WE PAYZ FOR TEH THINGZ!!!! does get tiresome, just so happens Sen. Gillibrand's previous family/medical leave bills have already answered that: with a payroll tax that would cost workers making $50,000 annually less than $9/month. Nine dollars! And that's not even how I'd do it! See, this is why I get tired of people who whine about paying for things.

Both Daily Kos and Moms Rising help you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would let counties and cities sign on to the Medicaid expansion even if state governments won't do it. What would be the opposing point of view there? That "states' rights" are too important? Gosh, that would be a tired argument! States that have refused the Medicaid expansion didn't do so because of some serious policy disagreement, but merely out of cruelty. No, a desire to "stick it to Obama" counts as cruelty; I mean, the result is the same. And if Congress doesn't have a moral obligation to fight cruelty, then why do we have a democracy to begin with?

Both Color of Change and Free Press help you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1541, the Martha Wright Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, which would stop big telecom corporations from gouging prisoners when they talk to their families on the phone. Is it right that we would take advantage of prisoners and their families in this way? Is any cruelty OK if it makes you look "tough on crime"? And don't be the fool who says well, don't commit a crime, then, since we all know that contact with families helps folks in prison stay out once they get out. Also, too, there's a pandemic on, which means less face-to-face contact with families, which means more phone contact. Like I said, it's cruel, and that means we must change it.

Finally, Deadline for Democracy will be holding rallies all over America this week helping you tell your Senators to pass the For the People Act; here's where to find one. You just enter your zip code and find the event nearest you. Some two out of three Americans support the For the People Act, but Republicans Senators just keep on with their propaganda that an end to gerrymandering, campaign finance disclosure for big donors, 15 days of early voting nationwide, same-day and automatic voting registration, and an end to racist caging practices somehow all constitutes a "Democrat power grab." As usual, Republicans doth project too much -- they're the ones doing all the power-grabbing, and the For the People Act would make it harder for them to do it! So let's get out there, in force, and remind them who they're supposed to serve.

Around the table: Republicans can't quit the drama, part 648.

And now, from the "We Have All Been Here Before" file: Gillian Frank and Adam Laats at Slate tell us about the long, long history of right-wing freakouts over schools teaching our kids unpleasant things about race in America. From Harold Rugg's 1930s textbooks to the 1950s American Nationalist to violent right-wing protestors in 1970s West Virginia to contemporary clowns like the one Kyle Whitmire skewers so well here, a pattern emerges: right-wing critics haven't read any of the books or engaged with any of the theories! Republicans truly are the Party of Drama. I mean, seriously, how many stand up to the drama now?

Damn-near-successful 2020 U.S. House candidate may have used campaign funds to bankroll his trip to the January 6 attempted coup. Seems to me Derrick Van Orden couldn't have been campaigning on January 6, having already lost his election and having not declared for the next one. But this guy damn near beat Ron Kind (D-WI), who's no great shakes; if Mr. Van Orden makes the general election again -- which seems likely, since Trumpholes won't like any "reasonable" Republican candidate in the primary -- we'll know all we need to know about how sick, immoral, and decadent we've become as a society. One would hope Democrats would do something beneficial with their power in the meantime; late returns haven't boded well for that hope.

Fox News's Chris Wallace levels a devastating question at Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN): given his vote against the American Rescue Plan, which provided billions of dollars for local police departments, "(c)an't you make the argument that it's you and the Republicans who defunded the police?" Mr. Banks says no, of course not, because of things Ilhan Omar and Nancy Pelosi said, which, again, is very teenage drama of him. Democrats should have the guts to run ads against their Republican opponents saying that Republicans voted against funding the police, but no one ever went broke betting on Democrat weakness.

When I hear that Bill Barr, Donald Trump's former Attorney General, said that Mr. Trump's assertions that fraud cost him the 2020 election were "bullshit," I remember the time a liberal could say something like Trump's own Attorney General says the notion that Biden stole the election is bullshit, but Trumpholes feed off nothing other than their own self-pity these days. "Why does everyone keep betraying us?" they wonder, and none will answer by saying "well, maybe the problem is me," though you'd think it'd be conservative to pose the question.

Finally, Republicans may have hit upon a "blueprint" to take back Congress in 2022, and you won't be surprised by any of its elements: "Biden Democrats are soft on crime, soft and ineffective on illegal immigration, and reckless and wrong with government spending." The platform doesn't "move beyond Trump" very well, since the Trump platform, such as it is, maps so well onto the first two items at least, and the three items comprise, respectively, something that didn't work in 2020, something that didn't work in 2018, and something that did in 2010. More importantly, they're three saucepans they've been banging for decades now; how hard would it be to run ads talking about Republicans saying the same old thing because they have no idea how to govern? Nah, Democrats will say that's too "uncivil." And then the party that tried to overturn a national election will get back in power.

Action: concerning jobs, drug prices, endless war, broadband access, payday loans, and the filibuster.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the Biden/Republican infrastructure "deal," tell our President to put the brakes on a rule preventing our government from forcibly lowering drug prices, and tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Iraq war authorization, expand broadband, clamp down on payday lenders, and end the filibuster. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs; for the Biden-related alert, see the second paragraph below.

First things first: tell your Congressfolk to reject the "bipartisan" "infrastructure"/"jobs" "deal" negotiated between 20 Senators and President Biden last week -- either call them or let Food and Water Watch help you email them. No one in America should care if this is something our President wants, or moderates want, or Republicans want; all we should care about is if it's what we want, and I would assert that it's not. And that's not just because Republicans are pretending that the separate reconciliation bill even Joe Manchin wants to do is some kind of "betrayal." It's also because the "deal" would privatize public assets to build other public assets -- that's called "asset recycling," which is just a 10-dollar way of saying "privatization." And if Democrats agree not to do a separate reconciliation bill in order to "keep their word" or appease Republicans, then they deserve to lose their majorities in 2022. Of course, we don't deserve the fascist storm that'll follow, so let's try to head all that off by communicating our will to our Congressfolk in an unmistakable manner.

President Biden plans to move forward with a rule that would prevent our government, for the first time in over 40 years, from seizing drug patents when big pharma corporations charge usurious prices. If you remember Mylan charging hundreds of dollars for EpiPens and numerous corporations charging so much for insulin that diabetics now risk death in rationing the drug, you will scratch your head at the idea that our government should not step in and stop that shit cold, but, sadly, when Joe Biden was a Senator, he worked very, very hard to keep our government from "interfering" in absurdly-high drug prices. Maybe he needs a phone call about this matter! 1.202.456.1111 is the number, and here's the White House contact page. (If I get a separate action alert about this matter -- which seems likely, now! -- I'll share it.)

Win Without War helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 256, which would repeal the nefarious authorization to use military force (or AUMF) in Iraq. Our House passed this bill, and not only that, 49 Republicans voted in its favor! Maybe I shouldn't make too much of that -- a lot of our Best and Brightest didn't do the right thing in 2002 when it really, really mattered, and a lot of the folks who just voted yea on H.R. 256 (Boebert, Gaetz, Gohmert, Gosar, Greene, Issa, Jordan, McClintock, Schweikert) are still clowns, but at least now people like Mob Boss Mitch will have much less room to say well, this isn't bipartisan enough for me to permit to get to a vote. Oh, and if you're upset because "they're doing this to a Democratic President," please step away from this blog, because it ain't for you. And your values ain't shit if they don't inconvenience you once in a while.

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1783/S. 745, the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act. And don't brook any nonsense from your Congressfolk about it, either! Broadband internet is an essential service, or does Congress forget how many votes it took or hearings it held over the internet this past year? Certainly you don't forget how much work you did, or how much school your kids did, over the internet this past year! Note well, also, that H.R. 1783/S. 745 would prevent states from pre-empting localities within states from offering their own public broadband! After all, preventing localities from such matters of self-determination has always seemed not particularly conservative to me.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the so-called "Fake Lender" rule promulgated by the Trump Administration. The Senate has already passed a resolution repealing the rule; now the House must follow suit. So what does the "Fake Lender" rule do? It lets payday lenders avoid state caps on interest by letting them essentially launder their loans through out-of-state banks! Woe unto the young buck who came up with that idea! That dude will find himself (do I need to gender-equivocate here? I suspect not!) at the Pearly Gates describing how he helped payday lenders trap even more good Americans in 300% revolving debt, and I think St. Peter's going to give him quite the side-eye. You know what you can take to the Pearly Gates? That you told your Congressfolk to stamp out this idea like the cockroach it is!

Finally, NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby and boy how I have missed saying that! helps you tell your Senators to dump the filibuster into the trash heap of history already. Yes, I supported keeping the filibuster around and making Senators talk through it all the way to the beginning of this year, but I'm done -- our Senators will never do the necessary work of a civilized society until we make them. And they just filibustered the beginning of debate on the For the People Act last week! The beginning of debate! No, I don't want to hear about lessening procedural "choke points" as a "compromise," because the Senate will not do it. If I may borrow a metaphor from Better Call Saul: if a chimp has a machine gun, you don't just hope he'll learn how to use it -- you take it from him.

Around the table: our leaders are irredeemably evil, part 737.

Here's something else you may not have known about the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" President Biden reached with Republicans late last week: it could reduce unemployment benefits in the name of "fighting fraud." I mean, God forbid we pay for an infrastructure bill by taxing some of the unearned hundreds of billions the richest Americans have squeezed out of us during this pandemic. Frankly I don't know how a state can fine people who have merely been accused, not convicted of unemployment fraud, but the ramblings of Sen. Shaheen (D-NH) on the matter don't exactly inspire confidence.

Josmar Trujillo at FAIR reminds us that our "liberal" media love creating fear about crime by hyping individual horrible stories and arguing about shadows. Crime is down since the 1970s, bail hasn't been reformed very much, and police haven't been defunded, but our "liberal" media don't care about the facts -- what are facts, after all, in the face of fear? Just remember: if someone says anything like "crime wave" in a totally unironic way, they're full of soup. (As an aside, I wouldn't use a phrase like "the corrupt poisonous fruits of BLM’s work," as Laura Ingraham does; the plural of "fruit," in this context, is "fruit, but worse, "fruit" really only requires one modifier -- "poisonous" would be the better one, I guess, but using two modifiers there just makes you dramatic.)

ProPublica keeps bringing it with their recent report that billionaire Peter Thiel has somehow stashed some $5 billion in his Roth IRA. Though Roth IRAs have historically limited the income of their holders as well as the contributions they could make, at least a dozen gazillionaires hold at least $20 million each in their Roths, mainly by taking advantage of tricks working families have no access to, like buying startup stock for pennies on the dollar and watching the value of that stock shoot up inside the Roth. Nice work if you can get it! You'll be pleased to know that Bush the Lesser made all of this worse during his second term in office.

Big telecoms have two more days to implement phone number-verification technology that aims to vastly reduce the number of scam calls you get on your phone. But many big telecoms have already implemented the STIR/SHAKEN caller ID technology, so if you haven't seen relief already, you might not. Plus, our FCC gave smaller telecoms (those with under 100,000 subscribers) an additional two years to implement the STIR/SHAKEN technology, and even if our FCC moves that deadline to next year, guess where scammers will be concentrating more of their efforts. You know what might make all this meaningless eventually? All the folks of my generation and younger who now won't answer the phone every time it rings because we're tired of all the scam calls!

Ho hum, Tucker Carlson wants you to think the January 6 coup attempt was an FBI-led "false flag" operation, and he's not only confused federal agents with "unindicted co-conspirators" in right-wing reporting (if you're a federal agent running a sting, you're by definition not conspiring, obviously!) but also cited, as evidence, the FBI stings that entrapped plenty of Muslims during the "war on terror" era. We all worry about law enforcement "creating" terrorists, but I suspect Mr. Carlson's concern about that subject is a relatively recent phenomenon, and though I generally don't blame people for coming to the truth only when it affects them personally, I do blame them for coming to the truth merely to broadcast another self-serving untruth.

Finally, Florida Gov. DeSantis signs a bill that would actually require the state to survey college students and faculty on their political beliefs. I firmly expect this law will die a horrible, humiliating death in court one day, though we may see a lot of fine educational talent abandon the state of Florida over the next few years in the meantime. But I myself have considered possibly going back to college in Florida just so I can be documented saying that Ron DeSantis is an irredeemable asshole.

Action: concerning jobs, taxes, paid leave, and D.C. statehood.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to keep privatization out of the American Jobs Plan, pass a Wealth Tax, make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, enact paid family/medical leave, and make Washington, D.C. our 51st state. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

On the occasion of David Dayen at The American Prospect informing us that a central feature of the "bipartisan" infrastructure bill is the selling off of public services to private corporations in order to build new public services, this would be a good time to call your Congressfolk and tell them no privatization in the American Jobs Plan. When you sell off public works, you get money one time; when you hold on to public works, you get money, in the form of taxes, for as long as you can shepherd them properly. And nobody's still clinging to the notion that the private sector can do public works better, right? I mean, the opposite happens, like, all the time (as Mr. Dayen documents in his article). And once something's private, the people don't own it anymore.

In a related note, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Wealth Tax. We all just witnessed the ProPublica report detailing how little the very richest Americans pay in taxes -- and the Republican response was to say whoever leaked that information to reporters ought to go to jail! That sure is burying the lede! Most of us work a job and get a paycheck, but the very richest individuals don't have to work very hard -- they just let the money they already have do the "work"! But if they have absurd amounts of money, they can buy laws and politicians at will -- and they have! This is why we need to enact a Wealth Tax, and the Wealth Taxes proposed so far raise a lot of money without destroying any estates. Hard to believe, Harry, that anyone would seriously propose selling off public assets to fund new public assets instead of taxing the rich.

In yet another related note, both Americans for Tax Fairness and the Coalition on Human Needs help you tell your Congressfolk to make that Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion permanent. Lots of good American working families will be getting the first of their monthly $250 or $300 checks on July 15, and they're going to like it, even if Republicans don't. Even if Congress (foolishly!) let those expanded checks be annual after that, as they're supposed to be in 2022, good Americans with children will continue to reap the benefits of having more breathing space -- when you can meet the bills, you can be better parents. And, you know, it's hard to believe, Harry, that anyone would seriously consider ending these expanded benefits instead of taxing the rich.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact paid family/medical leave for all Americans. We're about the only civilized nation that doesn't have it as a matter of course, and a mere 21% of American workers get paid family/medical leave via their employers, so we've got to fix that. Just so happens that President Biden's American Families Plan would include paid/family medical leave, but we'd do well for ourselves to tell Congress we want paid family/medical leave in advance. You hear how many Republicans talk about how their constituents are talking to them about the 2020 election? Wouldn't it be nice if they'd talk about how their constituents are talking to them about paid family/medical leave? Yes, it would. And we should help them do that.

Finally, People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to pass S. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act, which would make Washington, D.C. our 51st state. Because they deserve it! They have more residents than either Vermont or Wyoming and almost as many residents as Alaska and North Dakota, but nobody claims that those four states shouldn't be states. But at present, D.C. has one non-voting member of the U.S. House, and must submit to rule by our federal government -- and can I say that didn't help them very much on January 6? If D.C. had their own National Guard, for example, they could have responded to that uprising a lot more quickly than Donald Trump did. I mean, we do still value self-reliance and self-determination, right? Or do we only do that with areas that aren't majority-Black? I mean, I'd rather think better of my opponents, but they make it so hard.

Around the table: fight the real enemy, part 984.

Patrick Cockburn at Counterpunch tells us that "The Republican Party Has Turned Fascist and Is Now the Most Dangerous Threat in the World," and he's not real hopeful that America will reject them, now that too many state election officials have quit (that's what happens when Trumpholes threaten their lives!) and Republican legislators are giving themselves the power to overturn elections on pretexts even flimsier than Donald Trump's. He almost skips over its alliance with big corporate power in his description of how fascism achieves its ends, but then maybe he was depressed enough.

Harsha Panduranga at the Los Angeles Times explains "Why Biden’s strategy for preventing domestic terrorism could do more harm than good." Long story short: because it's largely a rehash of the Obama-era initiatives that didn't work. In any case, connecting would-be right-wing extremists with "mental health and social services" would do a good deal less about right-wing terrorism than, you know, ending the death grip of corporations on our economy. If we're all working, and working happily, and getting ahead, we're a lot less likely to fall for the Proud Boys and Boogaloo Boys of the world. If we're all working for dung pellets and paying extra for privatized water and getting slammed with surprise medical bills, then we're more likely to become right-wing terrorists.

When I read that a single person in Georgia has personally challenged the right to vote of over 30,000 good folks in Georgia that she's never even met, I feel compelled to ask: how is this legal? How can someone like Pamela Reardon prove she has any standing to sue these folks in a court of law? If two liberals in Wisconsin couldn't prove to our Supreme Court they'd personally been harmed enough by state gerrymandering, how can folks like Ms. Reardon prove they've been harmed by nonexistent voter fraud? (And next time someone tells you that "it's regular folks" who have "serious questions" about the 2020 election, just show them a picture of Ms. Reardon, and remind them that of course right-wing organizations like True the Vote want front people who look like "regular folks.")

Las Vegas Raiders defensive end Carl Nassib comes out as gay, and what a shame right-wing talk radio OG Lester Kinsolving isn't with us anymore so he can put unneeded "comic" emphasis on the word "end," as he did when former Washington tight end Jerry Smith came out to discuss his AIDS diagnosis. Of course, Mr. Smith had been retired for many years at that point, and it's a big deal that Mr. Nassib has come out while he's still in his prime. I'm sure right-wingers on social media are saying he's just doing this so the Raiders won't cut him, though, frankly, that wasn't very likely beforehand, and cynicism isn't even charming in a precocious 13-year-old.

Our Supreme Court has issued more famous rulings lately, but they've also ruled that children working as slaves to make chocolate for American candy corporations can't sue those corporations in American court, because (as Justice Thomas suggests) Nestlé and Cargill outsourced all the torture and abuse to Ivory Coast corporations and then said they didn't know what they were doing. One could argue that a leader should know what those who work for him are doing, and one could also argue that outsourcing itself might be evidence that a corporation aims to avoid accountability for what's done in their supply chain. And yeah, I noticed the former Obama official defending Nestlé and Cargill; I wonder how he sleeps at night.

Finally, as New York's mayoral campaign heats up, Julie Hollar at FAIR reminds us that New York's tabloids would rather you be obsessing about crime than, you know, the prospect of being evicted by your landlord because the pandemic forced you out of work and you haven't been able to afford the exorbitant rent. By the time you run down the actual crime statistics in New York -- which are, guess what, generally lower than normal, and much lower than they were 30 years ago! -- you will be reminded that whenever a politician or a media hack talks about a "crime wave," they're gearing up to lie to you. (That's a reminder for President Biden, too, of course.)

Action: concerning surprise medical bills, pollution, and campaign finance.

Long story short: tell our government to fight surprise medical bills, tell our EPA to act more vigorously against chlorpyrifos, tell Boeing to stop donating to politicians who try to overturn elections, and tell our President to appoint a strong anti-pollution Commissioner to the FERC. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will. And good hunting!

Penn PIRG helps you tell President Biden to enact the strongest possible rules against surprise medical bills. The No Surprises Act, which passed last Congress, authorizes our Executive branch to write, enact, and enforce rules preventing big health insurance corporations from foisting surprise medical bills on good Americans, but you know those big health insurance corporations (and the hedge funds, don't forget them!) will be all up in our President's grill, saying if he really kept them from, say, billing people for surgeries in-network with anesthesiologists who just so happened to be out of network, it'd kill jobs, or be a "burden," or something. Never do they think about the actual burdens they foist on us. That's why we remind our President.

In a related alert, Change.org helps you tell our government to stop medical collections from getting reported to credit bureaus and stop corporations from garnishing wages to pay those bills. Because people already are afraid to go to the doctor! And they don't need more reasons to be afraid! I suppose someone will come along and say what's wrong with paying what you owe ha ha ha snort, but as usual they ask the wrong question: why should health insurance cost so damn much, and why should so many medical bills come as a complete surprise to you? You can't just bootstrap your way out of a hostage situation -- you also need the law to help you, as civilized people have a right to expect.

Penn PIRG helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to reconsider its failure to ban chlorpyrifos from use on crops. You haven't been able to use that chemical in household chores for decades now, so why are we still spraying it on food? When scientists have linked chlorpyrifos to brain damage in kids? Naturally our EPA didn't think this was a big deal under the Trump Administration, but a federal court (of course) told them to go back to the drawing board and either ban it or set safety levels for it. Seems like a lot of Donald Trump's bright ideas die in court, and that's to our advantage. So let's take it.

Public Citizen helps you tell Boeing to stop giving campaign contributions to the Republican Congressfolk who helped try to overturn the 2020 election. After January 6, corporate campaign contributions to these clowns became toxic, but you probably always knew that as soon as we stopped looking, they'd restart their sedition-funding ways. Hence, we're reminding them that we're still looking. Jesus Mary and Joseph Donald Trump lost the election by seven million votes, and people who can't accept that are big whiny babies. Do civilized people let big whiny babies make all the decisions all the time? No, we do not. And big corporations need to start realizing their first duty isn't to their shareholders or their executives but to our civilization.

Finally, Food and Water Action helps you tell our President to appoint a new commissioner to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (or FERC) who will fight for energy policy that reduces pollution and helps us avoid the worst effects of climate change. Because we deserve that! FERC regulates the sale and transportation of gas and electricity, plus it also reviews proposed gas pipelines; you can see a whole lot of trouble there, can't you? Trouble in the form of more hurricanes, more wildfires, more floods, more droughts? Generally FERC has tended to rubber-stamp the dirty energy projects that make all these things worse, but a Commission vacancy comes up on June 30 (why, that's next week!), and that means an opportunity to get someone on there who looks a little more skeptically at these projects. But not if we don't speak up.