Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning our Post Office, offshore drilling, "Instagram for kids," fossil fuel drilling, and right-wing news.

Long story short: tell President Biden to reform our Postal Service and end offshore drilling, tell Facebook to abandon its plans to let children use Instagram, tell AXA's CEO to stop insuring fossil fuel projects, and tell AT&T to abandon One America News Network. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to fire USPS Board of Governors member Ron Bloom and USPS Postmaster General Louis DeJoy already. He should have already fired Mr. DeJoy merely for slowing down the mail and charging more for it, because why should we tolerate paying more to get our medicine and ballots and Social Security checks slower? I'm old enough to remember when merely proposing such a thing would get you laughed out of the room. But apparently Mr. Bloom stands in the way of our USPS Board of Governors firing Mr. DeJoy, and even better, Mr. DeJoy has invested with a fund Mr. Bloom runs, which sure smells of corruption even if we never put either man in jail for it. If Mr. Biden replaces Mr. Bloom, we're all one step closer to replacing Mr. DeJoy, at which point hallelujah!

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell President Biden to end offshore drilling. You don't need to stop with the recent spill of the Southern California coast -- you need only remember the Exxon Valdez spill and the BP Spillageddon in the Gulf of Mexico, both of which were avoidable and took forever to clean up because corporations don't like paying to clean up their messes. President Biden wouldn't just be fulfilling a campaign promise by ending offshore drilling -- he'd also open up space for the wind farms he wants to line America's coasts, as I imagine it would be difficult to do both things in the same spot. And if I had to pick, I'd rather have the turbines out there -- no, they won't kill all the birds, and no, they won't make you sick, and no, they won't be so noisy you can't function. And we might get to keep our planet.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell Facebook to abandon its ill-conceived (and ill-concealed!) plans to hook children on Instagram. You no doubt know from multitudinous news reports that Facebook knew that young girls who used Instagram had much worse body images than girls who didn't, and it was still like pulling teeth to get them to "suspend" their plans for an Instagram for Kids app. And don't let anyone justify Instagram-for-Kids by saying "they're just going to find a way to get it anyway," not just because defeatism is unworthy of a civilized people, but because our job, as adults, isn't necessarily to play catch-up with social media so much as to give our kids spiritual nourishment so they don't run to social media for it. Old-fashioned of me, I know.

Sum of Us helps you tell AXA CEO Thomas Buberl to stop insuring new gas and oil projects. He's supposedly going to decide on that matter this week, and AXA (which operates mainly in Europe and the Middle East) was the first big insurance corporation to refuse to insure new coal projects, but we still need to let AXA know we're watching, not least because we also know big oil and gas drilling corporations are also watching, and preparing to drown out our voices with the power of big money. Oh, and also their "expertise," which is mainly expertise in BSing and gaslighting. When that's all they got, we need to oppose them, in numbers they cannot mistake. The only way to beat big money is to fight big money, after all -- and our victories today guarantee more victories in the future, as long as we keep working.

Finally, Color of Change helps you tell AT&T to end financial support for the One America News Network. Just because AT&T might have wanted "its own conservative (sic) news network" years ago doesn't mean we have to put up with all the rage-inducing crap on TV news today -- and since AT&T is apparently OAN's sole funder, the first blow we strike might be the decisive one. OAN are the people who tell you lies about the 2020 election, lies about COVID vaccines, lies about the January 6 attempted coup, lies about Black civil rights activists, and lies about how "oppressed" white folks are. They're also the folks who think that people who "believe" Joe Biden won the 2020 election should be executed for treason. I want the assholes who say such things to get the oblivion they deserve. They sure don't deserve more corporate money.

Action: concerning monopolies, voting rights, data privacy, law and order, and fossil fuel subsidies.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to strike a blow against meat packer monopolies, pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis voting Rights Advancement Act, pass data privacy legislation and the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, and end fossil fuel subsidies. 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 legislators' phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First off, this'll seem a bit inside-baseball, but Matt Stoller writes about monopoly meat-packers causing higher meat prices, and notes that Sens. Grassley (R-IA) and Tester (D-MT) have written a bill with actual bipartisan support, called the 50-14 or "spot market" bill. This bill would require big meat packing corporations to buy half of their meat on the open market -- rather than force all cattle ranchers into contracts that may give ranchers assurance they'll be able to sell their cattle, but also makes it far too easy for meat packers to fix prices. It won't actually break up the monopolies, but it'll give ranchers a lot more breathing space. This bill merits a supportive call to your Congressfolk, and don't be swayed by the arguments against the bill -- as Mr. Stoller demonstrates, they rely on bad arguments and manipulated data.

Both Left Action and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2747, the Freedom to Vote Act. Never mind that Joe Manchin prefers this bill to the For the People Act, because it's not so different that it doesn't deserve our support. The Freedom to Vote Act would expand your access to the voting booth, clamp down on partisan gerrymandering and dark money, restore voting rights to ex-felons, provide 15 days of early voting across America, enact same-day voter registration, and make Election Day a national holiday, plus it'll clamp down on states' recent attempts to gain the power to overrule the will of the voters in their elections. All of this would better secure voting rights in America, and thus merits our work on its behalf. (Also, the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you write a letter to the editor supporting the Freedom to Vote Act.)

Both Daily Kos and People for the American Way help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. This bill would amend the Voting Rights Act so that our Justice Department could clamp down on voting law changes from states and localities that have demonstrated a clear record of vote suppression -- and not just states and localities from the South, which was our Supreme Court's objection in Shelby County v. Holder. And since a lot of the states that have changed their voting laws lately just so happen to have a vote suppression record, one would think our Justice Department could and would do something about them. We'll likely have to nix the filibuster to get any voting rights bills passed -- but first, let's demonstrate, unmistakably, that the people want voting rights reform in America.

How to Stop Facebook helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass real data privacy legislation in America. Our Federal Communications Commission enacted pretty good regulations protecting data privacy, but that was back in 2016 -- and our Congress promptly repealed them, via the notorious resolution of disapproval process. But now, with approximately zero Americans left who think data breaches and targeted ads and enabling Nazi wannabes is just the price you pay for staying in touch with those people you had a few laughs with freshman year, Congress should be more amenable to protecting your data, and protecting you from corporate surveillance. But we still have to tell them. (Oh, and don't fall for the calls for a new bureaucracy just to regulate Facebook; that'll just have our government rubber-stamping what Facebook does, and we've already got that.)

In a peripherally-related matter, Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. This bill would close a Mack truck-sized loophole in the law, which currently prevents your internet service-providing corporation from selling your personal data to law enforcement -- but which does not prevent the third-party data gobblers that buy your data from your ISPs from re-selling it to law enforcement! And you deserve better than that, even if you have committed a crime that law enforcement should be able to discover. We don't have a Fourth Amendment for nothing, after all -- we have it so that we don't send innocent people to jail by accident, and so we don't create a police state that sends its enemies to jail at will. And we're not as far from that as we'd like to think.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to end fossil fuel subsidies forever. That'll be tough, since the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" includes even more fossil fuel subsidies, but we should still communicate our will. And though the recent California oil spill instructs us as to why we might not want to funnel taxpayer money toward corporations that pollute, you can of course make a more conservative argument against fossil fuel subsidies. Not ALL GUBMINT SPENDINGZ BADZ!!!!!, because that's a reactionary argument -- you can merely argue that the fossil fuels are an entrenched technology and hardly need taxpayer help to survive. Yes, they talk about "facing crises" all the time, but they're BSing you. They don't need your money.

Action: concerning, once more, the Build Back Better Act.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations (including enacting a Billionaire's Tax and a stock buyback tax) to pay for the Build Back Better Act, and make sure the Build Back Better Act invests in our care economy, funds paid family/medical leave, lets Medicare negotiate drug prices, expands Medicare, expands our fight against climate change, and permanently expands the Child Tax Credit. 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 raise the full $3.5 trillion for the Build Back Better Act by raising taxes on the rich and on corporations. Americans for Tax Fairness also helps you tell your Congressfolk to include the Billionaire's Income Tax in the Build Back Better Act and assess a 2% tax on corporate stock buybacks. Remember when they said the 2017 tax "reform" would put thousands of dollars in everyone's pockets? What it actually did was let big corporate CEOs buy back stock, so that shareholder power is even more concentrated in executive hands. That used to be illegal, by the way! And it should be again. In the meantime, we should discourage it with taxation, and then use that money to do good works, which we will describe below.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to invest in the care economy in the Build Back Better Act. What do we know about child care and elder care? That we'll all need one or the other one day, and they could both be a damn sight cheaper. And none of that is about "creating an entitlement society," but about relieving real burdens on working families that cripple their ability to contribute more to our society -- burdens that only exist to make corporate executives rich. Yes, that's your bootstrap society for you -- this civilization, such as it is, redistributes our income upward to the undeserving rich, and then harangues us to "just work harder." I want this income-redistribution-upward scheme dead before I leave this Earth. Supporting the care economy is just one way to do that.

Moms Rising also helps you tell your Congressfolk to include paid family/medical leave in the Build Back Better Act. Every other wealthy nation on Earth does it, but our leaders would apparently prefer to churn out corporate executives who buy 18 homes and a hundred classic cars, fly to the edge of our atmosphere and call it "space travel," and build atomic clocks in mountains. You can have one or the other, not both, and I know which one I'll take -- I'll take the society that gives everyone a chance to succeed, rather than worship the folks who've already "succeeded" and indulge their lust for mammon even more. And paid family/medical leave would cost so little! And don't tolerate any whining about "workers abusing the program" -- just catch and punish the ones who do. This ain't rocket science.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make large investments in climate change action. That would include investing in solar and wind power, and it'd also include a methane emissions tax, which would slash carbon emissions from the fossil fuel industry. Yeah, you heard Joe Manchin doesn't want to do this in the Build Back Better Act, either! But he already got his corporate welfare for fossil fuel corporations in that "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" he insisted on having, so where does his greed end? I say "his greed" because of his own large investments in the coal industry, of course. I mean, you'd have to explain his ignorance of his constituents' will somehow! And I think they ought to be heard, for once.

Drug Prices Are Too High, Daily Kos, and Penn PIRG all help you demand that your Congressfolk put Medicare drug price negotiation in the Build Back Better Act, while Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare services for seniors in the Build Back Better Act. Medicare drug price negotiation (which Bob Menendez still opposes, can't someone in New Jersey primary his sorry ass in 2024?) would save tens of billions of dollars annually, and remember what Bernie Sanders said: dental care for seniors isn't an "entitlement." It's more than Medicare covers now, and that has to change.

Finally, the Friends Committee on National Legislation, Moms Rising, and the Juggernaut Project all help you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent in the Build Back Better Act. Working families in America have been getting $250 or $300 checks every month since mid-July, but those will end at the end of this calendar year -- yes, for 2022, working families will still get the expansion in the form of one lump sum at tax time, but why not keep doing it monthly? Families stimulate the economy better with smaller sums of money than they do with large windfalls. And, yeah, it'll be like a political ad every time the check arrives; why on Earth would Democrats refuse such a gift? Oh, right, because they're geniuses at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. And that's why we offer our counsel to them at critical moments like these, when they're about to let big donors crash their entire agenda.

Around the table: from "voter fraud" to voting aginst fascism.

Now this is interesting: four North Carolinians are suing for libel after former Governor Pat McCrory's defense fund accused them of voting illegally in the 2016 gubernatorial election (an election Mr. McCrory lost to Roy Cooper). That should teach right-wingers who lose elections to accuse specific people of "voter fraud," but then, if we keep demanding proof of right-wing "voter fraud" accusations, they'll have to get down to names eventually. And yes, North Carolina was using the notorious Interstate Crosscheck database at the time, so I bet that's how the McCrory group got its names. I sincerely hope the plaintiffs prevail.

Here's some more good news: Dollar General workers at a Barkhamstead, Connecticut store are aiming to unionize. Did we not just discuss how unions should have been going after retail workers all this time? Well, these six workers contacted the United Food and Commercial Workers Union in mid-September, filed for an election just a few days later, and will vote on the matter on October 22. In the meantime Dollar General corporate flacks have descended upon them with anti-union propaganda, and one of the six workers got fired, I wonder why? I wish them the best, and I hope I can continue to believe that the Biden NLRB is way, way better than the Trump NLRB.

Jennifer Rubin wonders why Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema seem to be trying to kill the Build Back Better Act when it would benefit their home states greatly. Pedants would argue that Joe Manchin actually has supported Medicare drug price negotiation, but he sure ain't "out front pushing for this item," as Ms. Rubin says, and (as I've said) maybe he only came out for it because he knew Ms. Sinema would oppose it anyway. He has also favored rolling back the Trump tax-cuts-for-the-rich, but again, he ain't out front on that, and again, he also knows Ms. Sinema opposes that rollback. Ms. Rubin's many other points -- not very many rich folks in West Virginia, big solar job growth in Arizona, lots of Medicare recipients in both states -- withstand more serious scrutiny.

You know I have little patience for folks who say "you can make polls say anything you want"? Well, that doesn't apply to cherry-picking poll data, like the kind David Moore describes at FAIR. In buttressing his absurd claim that Joe Manchin totally gets his constituents, a Washington Post columnist reports that 49% of independents, in one mid-August poll, and not just in West Virginia, think the Build Back Better Act aims to spend too much, which is a little like saying the 1974-75 Washington Capitals were a pretty good team because Tommy Williams scored 22 goals that year. (That team won eight games and had one other 20-goal scorer.) Think the actual West Virginia polling referenced herein occurred to that Post writer?

As Republicans "ramp() up" attacks on giving our IRS more enforcement power, dig Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN) saying "I can’t ever recall anyone saying that they want the IRS to poke into their business more on a day-to-day basis." But has anyone told him I wish the IRS could catch tax cheats who break our laws and make the rest of us pay more? Because I'm pretty sure that's what this is really all about.

Finally, noted conservative Max Boot reiterates that he's going to keep voting for Democrats"until the GOP ceases to pose an existential threat to our freedom," and of course I sympathize, but again -- as with George Will, who has made very similar noises -- I wonder how much sway Mr. Boot has with his brethren on the right. I'd say he has sway with no more than 3% of the electorate -- judging by how well Michael Wood did in the Texas's 6th special, when he leaned hard (and effectively, I thought) into never-Trumpism -- and while 3% ain't nothing, I'd caution against thinking very many of the folks you disagreed with back in the day have now come to their senses, even after the events of January 6.

Action: concerning health care, working families, slaughterhouse emissions, FDA regulation, Israeli occupation, and right-wing news.

Long story short: tell big pharma CEOs to stop putting their own needs ahead of the world's needs, tell Hello Fresh you support its workers' unionization efforts, tell our EPA to issue strong slaughterhouse emissions standards, tell President Biden not to appoint a big pharma CEO and lobbyist to head up our FDA, tell Amazon and Google to end their support for Israel's occupation of Palestine, and tell AT&T to cut all ties with One America News. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Amnesty International helps you tell big pharma CEOs to put people, not their own profits, first, and ensure everyone has access to COVID vaccines. No sense arguing that's not their job or they're only accountable to their shareholders, not when COVID could come back to bite us again and again and again, and overwhelm hospitals again and again and again, because vaccines aren't available in some part of the world. Oh, and putting profits above everyone and everything? Not civilized behavior. Seriously, they ought to be ashamed of themselves. The First Epistle to Timothy instructs us that "the love of money is the root of all evil." Big pharma CEOs putting their own profits above the health of the planet? That certainly qualifies as "the love of money."

Public Citizen helps you tell HelloFresh you support their workers' attempts to unionize and collectively bargain for better pay and better working conditions. HelloFresh has made over $2 billion in profits in the burgeoning meal kit business, but their workers put up with COVID outbreaks in cramped working areas, have their bathroom breaks times, can't hardly get a damn glass of water, and face anti-union propaganda at the workplace disrupting their work because of course they do. The PRO Act would clamp down on all of these things, but until our Senate deigns to pass it, we'll just have to get the Big Stick of Bad PR out for HelloFresh. They ain't been around so long they can just ignore it -- or us.

Penn Environment helps you tell our EPA to enact the most vigorous slaughterhouse pollution regulations possible. Our EPA is mulling these rules as we speak, so if we speak out, we leave a paper trail that the courts can't ignore, if it comes to that. It should come to that less now that Joe Biden is President! Presidential elections do matter for some things, after all. Don't let anyone gaslight you about FOODZ PRICEZ GOINGZ THROUGHZ TEH ROOFZ!!!! if we demand that factory farms pollute less. No one will be sitting around a campfire in a hundred years saying yeah, sure, toxic farm pollution killed off all the fish and made our water undrinkable, but at least food was a little cheaper for a while!

Public Citizen helps you tell President Biden not to appoint a big pharma CEO/lobbyist to run our Food and Drug Administration. We have just seen what happens when our FDA does the bidding of big pharma corporations, in their hasty approval of aducanumab for treating Alzheimer's disease, even though our FDA's own advisory board reviewed the scant evidence of its efficacy and recommended against approval; I would prefer not to have more of that. The particular executive/lobbyist on Mr. Biden's short list, Michelle McMurry-Heath, just so happens to oppose lowering drug prices. We've got enough of those people in our Senate; let's not have them in our FDA as well.

No Tech For Apartheid helps you tell Amazon and Google to pull out of Project Nimbus, which would provide cloud computing services for the Israeli government and military, and thus make them a vital part of occupying and oppressing Palestinians. Almost 800 workers at both corporations have already leveled this demand at their bosses, and their courage demands we join them. And remember: you don't have to unwind the entire history of the region until you figure out who committed the first injury before you decide what you do today. You need only remember that Israel is way, way more powerful than Palestine, and still treats every living Palestinian like a convicted terrorist. And all those nations that hate Israel sure ain't going out of their way to stop them.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell AT&T to cut ties with the fascist news network One America News, which is still pounding the absurd notion that Donald Trump won an election he lost by seven million votes, and whose on-air "personalities" tell us that we who recognize that fact should all be executed for treason. Like any of them have the guts! If AT&T were to withdraw financial backing from OAN, OAN would probably flounder, but hey, that's the genius of capitalism, is it not? If OAN is so great, and the demand for its "news" so undeniable, they ought to be able to survive without a big corporate sugar daddy! And if not, then we wouldn't have to put up with their drama anymore.

UPDATE. Now President Biden is reportedly leaning toward former FDA Administrator Robert Califf as his choice; I remember that being a bad idea at the end of the Obama years, and I can't imagine it's suddenly become a better idea now. Public Citizen has this alert as well.

Action: concerning methane emissions, Oak Flat, war in Yemen, the Hyde Amendment, and the Equality Act.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to keep the methane emissions tax in the Build Back Better Act, pass the Save Oak Flat Act, end our involvement in the war on Yemen, and repeal the Hyde Amendment, 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 legislators' phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Did you know there was a methane emissions tax in the Build Back Better Act? I didn't! So you may want to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to tax methane emissions in the Build Back Better Act. They'll never see it coming! This would be a tax corporations pay, not people, no matter how much corporate cronies tell you "people will just wind up paying for it." Sure, if corporations want to be even less popular than they are now! And seriously, why would civilized people tolerate "just passing on the cost to the consumer"? Possibly because corporatists have gaslit us into believing we can't do any better than letting corporations have whatever they want! But methane emissions pack a massive climate change punch, and it's well past time for us to punch back -- and taxing methane emissions could end methane leaks, which would leave climate change with fewer teeth.

The ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1884/S. 915, the Save Oak Flat Act. Oak Flat is an area within the Tonto National Forest in Arizona that just so happens to be sacred to several Native American nations -- but also the site of a planned copper mining project. The two former Arizona Senators Jeff Flake and the late John McCain snuck the Oak Flat copper mine authorization into a 2014 defense authorization bill, since it would never have survived as a stand-alone bill, not least because the corporation operating the project, Resolution Copper, is owned by Rio Tinto, which used to employ Mr. Flake as a lobbyist. If we pass this bill, we can begin to make amends for treating sacred lands like a used dishrag -- unless we're only going to let white people have religion in America, I guess. That seems to be the Republican preference! But they don't get all the say around here.

Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to end our complicity as a nation in the killing of Yemeni civilians. We've been trying, and jackboot lockstep agreement with Saudi Arabia's aims ain't pervasive in Congress anymore -- as evidenced by the Biden Administration's proposed $500 million sale of "arms maintenance," which is further from "arms" than we used to be -- but when you've got the advantage, you don't sit back, you press it. People who try to argue with you about this try to tell you BUT IRANZ IZ TEH WORSEZ!!!!, which sure ain't a way of saying "Saudi Arabia is awesome!" or even "what we're doing in Yemen is sad, but it has to be done." They may be handing us victory with their bad arguments, but we still have to take victory.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the notorious Hyde Amendment, which prevents any taxpayer money from funding abortion. Yeah, I would never want an abortion to happen either if I could help it, but I'm not about to tell someone carrying a fetus with no organs, or a fetus that could kill or maim her once delivered, to stand on principle. Hell, I'm not about to tell someone with one more uterus than I have to stand on such principles! When men can give birth, we'll reopen that conversation. And I know, Joe Manchin actually insisted the Build Back Better Act include the Hyde Amendment, probably just so he could do the helicopter dance in front of us yet again. Nyah nyah I'm the 50th vote! Suck on this, liberals! But he doesn't get all the say around here; we do. And all we have to do is act like it.

Finally, since Monday was Coming Out Day, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. This bill represents a major civil rights boon for gay and transgender folk -- no longer could banks, employers, and landlords discriminate against gay and transgender folk merely because they're gay and transgender, and no longer could states pass "bathroom bills" that do nothing but enrage the easily-enraged and hurt transgender folk. And right-wingers call all that discrimination "religious freedom"! But one more time: you do not have a "religious" right to abridge other folks' rights. Some people act like citing one's "religious" "conscience" is a get-out-of-being-civilized card, but it ain't. A lot folks claiming religious exemptions because they don't want to get a vaccine are about to find this out.

Action: concerning labor, pollution, immigration, law and order, and campaign finance.

Long story short: tell Kellogg's CEO to treat his workers right, tell our EPA to ban corporate PFAS dumping, tell the Biden Administration to stop all deportations to Haiti, tell our Justice Department to stop Minnesota police form torturing Line 3 protestors, and tell big corporations to stop donating to January 6 coup enablers in Congress. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell Kellogg CEO Steven Cahillane to treat Kellogg's workers right and give them the contract they deserve. That would be a contract which doesn't mandate 12-hour days seven days a week -- if someone made you work that schedule, you'd go on strike, too. Nabisco and Frito-Lay workers have also gone on strike this year, with varying results, but if we make enough noise in the direction of Kellogg's CEO, their workers will more likely get a better contract out of it. It's not like Kellogg's doesn't have the money, either -- like most big corporations (and, ah, almost no small businesses!), Kellogg has cleaned up during the pandemic; maybe its executives ought to reward the folks most responsible for their success, i.e., their workers?

Penn PIRG helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to ban corporate dumping of PFAS chemicals into our air and water. We call PFAS chemicals "forever chemicals" for good reason -- they don't break down and they get into everything, not just our air and water but also our bodies. What happens to them once they get in our bodies? Please refer to the phrase "they don't break down." And scientists link PFAS exposure to cancer, thyroid disease, and liver damage, among other things. Our EPA hasn't yet created any standards for restricting PFAS dumping by big corporations, but they are taking public comments about the matter; now's the time for us to tell our EPA what to do. Remember: if we say nothing, our EPA can ignore us, but if we all speak out, we'll create a paper trail our EPA won't be able to ignore without getting their asses handed to them in court.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell the Biden Administration to stop deporting Haitian immigrants. You no doubt think of Border Patrol agents in cowboy hats on horseback corralling Haitian refugees with whips when you contemplate this matter; why, even Joe Biden denounced it! Yet he continues the same policies that caused that mess -- namely, the Title 42 policy allowing our President to deport pretty much anyone for pandemic-related reasons, though we all know the real threat to our health has lately come from tantrum-throwers in red states. Jesus Mary and Joseph we were down to 9,000 cases a day in June! And immigrants have been coming the whole time, as Fox News will happily tell you, so it ain't them. Not for nothing, but Haitians have just had a Presidential assassination and an earthquake, so mercy ain't weakness here.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our President to nix the notorious Enbridge Line 3 pipeline, and tell our Justice Department to stop police torture of protestors at the pipeline. You should know it's torture just from the phrase police use to describe what they're doing to protestors -- "pain compliance." What, they thought more syllables would disguise their intent? You know the story with Line 3 -- another oil pipeline run by a corporation with a bad pipeline safety record, which means that pipe will eventually crack and contaminate a water table upon which good Americans depend. "Good Americans" here includes the indigenous folks who put their bodies on the line against the pipeline. Hey, the Lakota sure were right about Dakota Access; why do we fail to listen?

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell big corporations like GM and UPS to stop giving campaign donations to the 147 Congressional Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 election and thus helped enable the January 6 attempted coup. Remember when big corporations said they were done giving money to politicians like that? That sure didn't last! Corporations act like they have no choice, when having billions of dollars means nothing but choices. And their campaign largesse could have far more dire consequences this time, as the Republicans who retake Congress in 2022 will learn that trying to overthrow a duly-elected government is no impediment to victory! Corporations have a moderate Democrat as President, and Democratic Congressional majorities are too slim to really rock the corporate boat -- but no, that's not enough for them. It's well past enough for me, I tell you what.

Action: concerning water privatization, voting rights, debt drama, law and order, and credit reports.

Long story short: tell PA state legislators to block Aqua Pennsylvania's attempts to take over the Chester Water Authority, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, get rid of the stupid debt ceiling forever, pass the Counseling Not Criminalization Act, get rid of qualified immunity for police officers, and ensure good Americans can get credit reports easily and for free. 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 legislators' phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. Aqua Pennsylvania, the private water service corporation, wants to take over the publicly-held Chester Water Authority; if they succeed, they'll likely go after the public water services of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh next, which will give them pretty near complete control of Pennsylvania's water. They're basically a monopoly in every municipality they operate, which means what, class? Higher prices for you, that's what! (No, public water isn't a "monopoly," because it belongs to you and thus you have much more control over it.) Pennsylvania's legislature is mulling HB 1936, which would prevent private corporations from buying public water systems unless those systems are in financial distress; I'd prevent it under those circumstances, too, but HB 1936 will improve matters. Thus Sum of Us helps you tell your PA state legislators to support public water.

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2747, the Freedom to Vote Act, and H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Ignore right-wing rubbish about "letting states run elections," because too many states have recently revealed they want to "run" elections that only Republicans can win. The Freedom to Vote Act would expand your access to the voting booth, clamp down on partisan gerrymandering where politicians choose their voters rather than the other way around, and end states' efforts to meddle in their own elections. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would restore the Voting Rights Act so our Justice Department can step in and stop states and localities -- and not just Southern ones -- from suppressing the vote. America needs these bills to become law; I'm not sure I can put it any more simply than that.

Democracy for America helps you tell our government to end the absurd debt ceiling threat once and for all. Politicians only ever complain about our national debt when the other party runs things, and so it goes with today's Republicans, who let Donald Trump run up our national debt by nearly $8 trillion (comprising a nearly 40 percent increase) in just four years, but who now imagine we'll buy their gaslighting about how they're the "fiscally responsible" party. They may also imagine they'll be able to extort concessions (privatizing Social Security, cutting Medicare, etc.) in exchange for graciously raising the debt limit, though they haven't actually mentioned any concessions lately. So we need to neutralize the threat, and end the endless hostage-taking. And no, I don't care if President Biden does it on his own. I think most folks would call that leadership, which is a thing we haven't seen from very many Presidents lately.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 4011/S. 2125, the Counseling Not Criminalization Act, which would mean fewer police officers and more counselors and nurses in our public schools. Because police officers don't have the skills to stop kids from acting out! And we shouldn't expect that of them! And a couple classes in conflict resolution can't match the abilities of folks who have spent years doing exactly that! Police officers are not Swiss Army knives, after all. If that sounds like "defunding the police" to your right-wing neighbors, then I would have to ask if maybe they care a lot more for "funding the police" than, you know, actually reducing crime. Yesterday's conservatives always said you can't just throw money at a problem; today's "conservatives" yell I SUPPORTZ TEH POLICEZ!!!! every time you try to solve a problem. And boy do I hate yellers.

In a related note, Black Lives Matter helps you tell your Congressfolk to end "qualified immunity" for police officers, so that good Americans can finally get justice for the wrongs police have done to them. And police have done wrongs to them! No amount of I SUPPORTZ TEH POLICEZ!!!! will bring back the Black kids killed for having a toy gun or the Black men killed for pulling out their cellphone. And ending "qualified immunity" won't automatically send police officers to jail, it'll just take away the tool that gives them near-absolute protection from accountability; plaintiffs will still have to prove their case, as they always do. And if your right-wing neighbors tell you "cops can't do their job" without having accountability for the wrong they do, well, ask them how that's conservative. I mean, conservatives always said they were all about accountability.

Finally, Consumer Reports helps you tell Congress to ensure you can get your credit reports easily and for free. Yes, our government already does provide free credit reports at annualcreditreport.com, but doesn't that website name strike you as a nefarious compromise? As if they went out of their way to let corporations trick you with websites with the word "free" in them? It's always seemed that way to me, that's for sure. So, yeah, we should publicized the fact that annualcreditreport.com is where you go for free credit reports, but we shouldn't let corporations charge you hundreds of dollars or siphon away your private info so they can resell it, either. That's not "the free market" in action; that's corruption in action, and for too long our politicians have just shrugged at corruption and called it "freedom." But if it makes folks less free, how is it freedom?

Around the table: and now for another exciting chapter of "weak Democrats, insane Republicans."

When I hear that a majority of Americans don't know exactly what's in the Build Back Better plan, I'm inclined to say, no shit, Sherlock! The fact that Democrats allow the discussion to be all about "how much money we're going to spend" leads me to think they're all trying to tank it, not just the Manchin/Sinema/Gottheimer/Cuellar axis. I mean, if they told media outlets and their constituents "we want to lower drug prices, get everyone paid family leave, and cut taxes for working families, and we're going to pay for all of that by raising taxes on the rich and on corporations," people like Joe Manchin and Henry Cuellar would be irrelevant, because their own constituents would be raising hell with them in a way they couldn't avoid. It's sad that Democrats have forgotten how this works -- or, perhaps more precisely, "forgotten."

In a related development, four Senate Democrats say they won't back the Build Back Better Act if Joe Manchin guts all the climate change provisions in the bill. That's as it should be! Of course, no good deed goes unpunished in America, so liberals will get all the blame if this all fails, despite the fact that, again, it's been the Manchin/Sinema/Gottheimer/Cuellar axis saying "no" to things most American people want this whole time. (Also, the gas drilling corporations say we shouldn't enact a methane emissions tax because the cost "would be felt by consumers," as if said corporations have literally nothing to do with passing on that cost, and as if we should merely tolerate corporations doing immoral crap.)

Here's some good news: 20 state Attorneys General have sued to stop the DeJoy plan to cripple our Post Office, and oh boy the suit claims that Mr. DeJoy didn't follow the law in making changes to services and prices. Sound familiar? Of course it does -- it's the thing that tripped up every Trump Administration rule that died in court, which was a lot of them. You can't just do whatever you want in the Executive branch, and our Founders would spin in their graves to observe that, even if none of them could have foreseen a phenomenon such as the Administrative Procedure Act.

When I hear that Terry McAuliffe is hopping mad that the House didn't pass the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal," I feel compelled to wonder why he thinks this is the hill to die on. He knows full well why it didn't pass -- because actual liberals knew if it passed, right-wing Democrats in the Senate would kill the larger Build Back Better Act -- so he indulges in hippie-punching like it's 1993. He deserves to lose -- but more to the point, Democrats deserve to lose as long as they act like cowards. (I say "act like," of course, because, as I've suggested, I think they are acting -- they want to keep things the way they are, and losing their Congressional majorities in 2022 to fascists is part of the plan.)

Lawrence Torcello at The Conversation tells us "How Columbus Day Contributes to the Cultural Erasure of Italian-Americans." You may find that counter-intuitive, particularly if you're sensitive to how badly America's treated Italian immigrants over the years (and if you know that Columbus Day observances began as a sop to ill-treated Italian-Americans), but I'm an Italian-American myself and I'd much rather celebrate Chef Boyardee Day. I'm not kidding -- everyone eats spaghetti now, only because Ettore Boiardi made it seem less foreign to large numbers of Americans. Or how about a day for Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ida Lupino, or Alan Alda?

Finally, Eugene Robinson at the Washington Post wonders "How Dumb Can a Nation Get and Still Survive?" Sympathetic as I am to his frustration over lies about masks and vaccines, I've long said it's not stupidity per se that afflicts us, but rage -- Fox News has been enraging folks en masse since at least 2002, and now they have a lot of imitators, both in media and in politics. Hate to sound like a broken record, but it'd help if Democrats would do good works with their power when they have it, lest we all witness the spectacle of a decisive number of voters actually preferring fascists to weaklings.

Action: concerning, once again, the Build Back Better Act.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations (including enacting a Billionaire's Tax) to pay for the Build Back Better Act, and make sure the Build Back Better Act lets Medicare negotiate drug prices, expands Medicare, funds paid family/medical leave, expands good Americans' access to clean water, and permanently expands the Child Tax Credit. 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 pay for all of the Build Back Better Act by making the rich and corporations pay more taxes and include the "Billionaire's Tax" in the Build Back Better Act. These are not contradictory aims, unless we no longer include billionaires in the "rich," which is a day I hope I never see. Billionaires have made almost $2 trillion more during this pandemic, so while "moderate" Democrats whine about how much to cut the Build Back Better Act, billionaires sit back and laugh. We don't have a merit-based society anymore, not when a catastrophic pandemic actually makes the ultra-rich richer. The first step to rebuilding that merit-based society is restraining the power of the rich, because they run roughshod over our freedoms.

Drug Prices Are Too High, Daily Kos, and Penn PIRG all help you demand that your Congressfolk put Medicare drug price negotiation in the Build Back Better Act. Brook no more excuses or bad arguments from your Congressfolk! No more rubbish about "killing jobs" (don't make me do the right thing, or I'll fire all my workers!) or "price controls are bad" (like people would hate paying less for drugs!) or "it won't do any good" (even a blind infant could see that it will, which is why 80-90% of Americans want it!) or "it's not fiscally responsible" (ah, to let government to pay less taxpayer money for Medicare drugs?). And brook no more silence from certain Congressfolk, either (cough Kyrsten Sinema cough). If they're going to screw us over, we should at least make them explain themselves.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep the Medicare expansion in the Build Back Better Act. I know, it ain't Medicare-for-All, but I don't let the perfect murder the good, and lowering the Medicare age to 60 (which will bring more healthy people into the Medicare pool, and thus save Medicare money!) and giving seniors dental/vision/hearing care are both good works. And let Bernie Sanders teach you how to respond to the Joe Manchins of the world who complain about "everything being an entitlement": "does Senator Manchin really believe that seniors are not entitled to...hear and see properly?" And don't let the Joe Manchins pearl-clutch about "getting Medicare solvent first." Tax the rich harder and we can pay for it. Let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices and we can pay for it. This ain't rocket science.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to include paid family/medical leave in the Build Back Better Act. I'm gobsmacked that Democrats want to do this but don't want to advertise that they're doing it! How afraid can they really be that Republicans will whine WHEREZ TEH MONEYZ COMINGZ FROMZ!!!!! Jesus Mary and Joseph Republicans have been whining that for longer than I've been alive; you have to prepare for those arguments. Paid family/medical leave will help everyone in America, and even big corporate CEOs know that, and have come around to supporting it in recent years, just like most other Americans do. And there are a million ways to pay for it (Sen. Gillibrand's bill originally would have levied a tiny payroll tax amounting to $8 a month for someone making $50,000 a year), but Republicans act like not wanting to do it means it doesn't exist. We need to stop letting them gaslight us.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 1352/S. 916, the WATER Act. Just so happens the best way to do that right now is to get a strong Build Back Better Act passed (which means the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" also passes); the email tool in the link above reflects this reality. Currently the two bills would spend over $30 billion to replace lead water pipes, which is about the amount the WATER Act would require to get the job done. Any amount of lead causes brain damage in children -- it may not be an accident that crime rates have risen and fell with the rise and fall of lead emissions from cars! -- so we can't have lead pipes anywhere in America. Remember what Alexander Cockburn used to say: without clean water, you don't have health in America.

Finally, both the Friends Committee on National Legislation and Moms Rising help you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent in the Build Back Better Act. Just as we demand more from our coddled billionaires, we demand more relief for those of us who work hard at real jobs, raise families, and still have trouble making ends meet. Through no fault of our own, I should add -- what, we should all just become hedge fund managers? It seems like a no-brainer to make the CTC expansion permanent, not least because it's put $250 and $300 checks in good Americans' pockets every month since July of this year, yet some "moderate" Democrats oppose the expansion. Because doing so makes them look "tough"? Yeah, snatching a check out of some overworked, underpaid worker sure is tough. I will work to make such "toughness" dead and dishonored before I leave this world.

Around the table: from bad news about unions to good news about Utah monuments.

Hamilton Nolan at In These Times writes that "In Middle America, Unions and Democrats Are Sleepwalking Into the Grave." At least the latest report finding Democrats losing votes in manufacturing towns, etc., because unions are declining there, etc., comes from Democratic consultants, not in spite of them. Key insight from Mr. Nolan: "the story here is that as traditionally unionized manufacturing jobs disappeared, unions failed to organize the next set of (worse) jobs that rose up to take their place...If the factories leave, and people go work at the Dollar General, then unions need to unionize the Dollar General." Have unions done that? No, they have not. I hope that's not because unions look down on retail workers, but we can't discount the possibility.

William C. Anderson at TruthOut reminds us that "Liberal Pleas for 'Unity' Legitimize the Virulent Politics of the Far Right." "The problem, however, as is always the problem with calls for unity," he writes, "is that unity with white supremacists means death." You no doubt recall all the right-wing cries for "unity" aimed to paper over their role in the January 6 attempted coup? It is funny (and by "funny" I mean "not at all funny") how often calls for "unity" seem to benefit right-wingers. You might go so far as to say you should not trust anyone who calls for "unity," since so many of our fellow Americans really deserve isolation and ostracization more than anything else.

Social scientists find, not surprisingly, that in the wake of Facebook's "mysterious" outage last week, that its users have a love-hate relationship with it -- and reminds us that it was not always this way. Sure was fun in 2008 and 2009 to find all sorts of folks I thought I'd never see or speak to again, but even in the wake of Ms. Haugen's recent testimony, Facebook seems well-nigh essential, particularly to those of us who promote blogs or books against all hope. But I felt like the Golden Age of Connection came well before Facebook -- remember LiveJournal, Tribe, Friendster, Meetup, or, gosh, blogs? -- and quite frankly I wouldn't mind rolling back the clock.

Speaking of Frances Haugen, Matt Stoller reminds us that Ms. Haugen, despite her many good works, doesn't want to break up Facebook, but create a whole new regulatory agency just to handle it, and staff that agency with Silicon Valley types that "know" the industry, which I hope sounds like a terrible idea to you. We need to break up Facebook because, as Mr. Stoller says, "the concentration of power in the hands of a small group is the fundamental political and economic problem with Facebook," and if you're at all familiar with the sites I mentioned in the previous paragraph, then you also know that they only came about because of the "decentralized" internet Facebook has wiped out with its monopoly power. And if a new regulatory agency sounds like "more bureaucracy" to your right-wing friends, know that it also sounds like more bureaucracy to this irredeemable liberal, too. We already have agencies and courts that can slap down monopolies; we don't need to create a whole new agency in order to preserve a monopoly that's hurting our civilization.

You may be surprised to learn that the Pandora Papers have revealed South Dakota as a major tax haven for the "international rich," rivaling places like Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. Why? Because the state has gone way out of its way to shield trust funds from scrutiny by almost anyone, from regulators and foreign governments and even former spouses. You have to wonder where a lot of South Dakota politicians' campaign funding comes from, then! In a sane, moral, and decent society, South Dakota voters would punish their government at the next election, but I suspect they won't, and you know what that means.

Finally, President Biden restores the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante national monuments to their original size, i.e., before Donald Trump cut big swaths of them off so he could hand them to developers. You undoubtedly advocated for the return of these monuments to their original sizes, so good for you. Lawsuits will follow, but as much as I doubted Mr. Trump's authority to make those cuts in the first place, I'm even more skeptical that the state of Utah will succeed in any of its lawsuits to claw them back. And, like the Ute Indian Tribal chair quoted extensively in the article, I'm pretty sure the only "peaceful resolution" Utah wants is the one that gives them everything they want.

Action: concerning COVID relief, drug price negotiation, abusive phone rates, abuses of power, and right-wing news.

Long story short: tell the Biden Administration to stop Alabama from building prisons with COVID relief funds, tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate drug prices, protect prisoners from abusive phone rates, and has the Protecting Our Democracy Act, and tell AT&T to drop OAN from the DirecTV network. 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. Presente helps you tell the Biden Administration to stop Alabama from using COVID relief funds to build new prisons. Yes, you read that right: Alabama actually used $400 million in money for COVID relief to build two megaprisons. Does building a prison sound like "COVID relief" to you? Only if you believe the absurd lie that TEH IMMIGRANTZ AREZ BRINGINGZ TEH COVIDZ!!!! and believe all immigrants should be thrown in prison. And, ah, Alabama has been rocked pretty hard by the Delta wave; maybe some hospitals could use it more than prisons? It's a question worth asking! Anyway, the Biden Administration should get all law-and-order on this effort post-haste -- but they won't, unless we demand it.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate drug prices. Tired of hearing about this? Blame New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez, who says he can't support Medicare drug price negotiation, not at all because New Jersey politicians have been in the death-grip of big pharma corporations forever, no, sir! In his view, the plan "does not guarantee...that the government’s going to save money, doesn’t guarantee that the consumer saves any money." But then he whines that "(w)e’re going to take anywhere between $3 and $400 billion from the industry," which is, basically, a guarantee that "the government" and "the consumer" will, in fact, save money; he's just trying to confuse you by phrasing it differently. Which is the devil's art, and we should never let the devil get all the say.

Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would end abusive prison phone rates. When families go into debt just trying to stay in touch with their loved ones in prison, then big telecom corporations are charging too much! It's that damn simple! It's cruel to them, and it's cruel to prisoners! If your right-wing nephew says then they shouldn't have raised a criminal ha ha ha snort, please tell him to do two things: 1) slap himself, and 2) consider that civilized people use prisons to rehabilitate prisoners, and all the science tells us that prisoners who can talk to their families while they're imprisoned are a lot less likely to go back to prison. If the little turd then tells you that scientists are all corrupt, ask him exactly how a scientist makes money arguing that people should spend less time in prison. Or tell him to go play with himself; I can't ask you to have too much patience.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5314, the Protecting Our Democracy Act, which would rein in the Presidential behavior no one expected from a President until Donald Trump came along. Among the things this bill would do: it would limit a President's ability to declare national emergencies so they can build vanity border walls that can't stand up to a stiff wind, it would prevent Presidents from profiting from their office, and would require candidates to release 10 years of tax returns. The insane, tyrannical behavior of King George III prompted our Founders to create a state that restricts Presidential power; we're all too young to remember King George III, but hopefully we haven't forgotten King George W. Bush or King Donald Trump, both of whom laughed as they hurt hundreds of millions of good Americans.

Finally, MoveOn helps you tell big telecom corporation AT&T to drop the right-wing extremist news network One America News (or OAN) from the DirecTV lineup. We only learned this week that AT&T basically created and funded OAN, a network which has lately suggested that folks who maintain that Joe Biden won the 2020 election by seven million votes should be executed as traitors. Remember opposing the AT&T/DirecTV merger from 2015? Well, this is why -- now AT&T funds OAN and carries it on the TV provider in which it still holds a 70% stake, exactly the kind of "synergy" and "partnership" that has turned those two words into near-cuss words. Apparently AT&T wanted another right-wing news network back in the day! Because who hasn't had enough not just of those, but of the "liberal" media outlets that ape them? Thus it's time for us to brandish the Big Stick of Bad PR.

Around the table: confronting social media culpability and Fox News culpability in our poisonous national discourse.

I'm old enough to remember a time when I would have found Nick Clegg's argument that you should blame Donald Trump and the actual insurrectionists, and not Facebook, for January 6 a lot more sympathetic, but in the old days, you actually had to work to make connections over the internet, and sites like Meetup most pointedly did not use algorithms for the express purpose of stirring up shit. Also, too, Facebook knew it was stirring up shit and did next to nothing about it. (As an aside, I would be amused to learn that Facebook didn't even do the due diligence Parler did before January 6.)

Before we congratulate Merck on that COVID pill, let us recall that the pill cost $17.74 per pill to produce (much of that from the taxpayer!) and now Merck charges our government a staggering $712 to use it. One might call that extortion, and no I don't think the urgency of the task (i.e., beating COVID) justifies handing out taxpayer money to help make a pill and then getting charged 40 times as much for said pill when it's done. When your right-wing nephew says "well, Merck did the work," point him to a) 40 times as much, b) the taxpayers helped fund it, and c) Merck bought the rights to the pill in May of 2020 and thus had less to do with its research and development than their price would suggest.

Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) also doesn't support Medicare drug price negotiation. His rubbish arguments defending his position are just as irrelevant as the cynical observation that WELL NEW JERSEY HAS A LOT OF DRUG COMPANIES HA HA HA SNORT -- he's supposed to do the will of his constituents, i.e., the living, breathing ones, and if New Jersey is like the rest of America, somewhere between 80% and 90% of his constituents want Medicare drug price negotiation. If you live in New Jersey, first off, lucky you! And second off, you may want to call Sen. Menendez and give him what for; here's his contact info.

Zeke Faux at Bloomberg describes the "wild search for the U.S. dollars supposedly backing the stablecoin at the center of the global cryptocurrency trade," and if you read the article and conclude "it's all a scam," I sure wouldn't blame you. Naturally, Tether's first CEO invented pop-up ads and its current lawyer claims all its critics are "jihadists." And dig the, ah, *surreality* of this sentence from paragraph 3: "But in the crypto world, where joke coins with pictures of dogs can be worth billions of dollars and scammers periodically make fortunes with preposterous-sounding schemes, Tether seemed like just another curiosity." "Curiosity" indeed.

Bernie Sanders appears to have had it up to here with Joe Manchin, and confronting Mr. Manchin's nattering about "entitlements" with "does Senator Manchin really believe that seniors are not entitled to digest their food, and that they’re not entitled to (care that could enable them to) hear and see properly?" is exactly how you are supposed to talk about this crap -- turn the word "entitlement" back on its users, like the depleted uranium weapon it is. Sadly, you won't see our "liberal" media do very much of that, so jealous are they of their "access" to people like Joe Manchin, when there are literally hundreds of millions of Americans who are just as good at making their views known as he is, and the enterprising media outlet could have "access" to any of them.

Finally, Fox News celebrates its 25th anniversary, and Melanie McFarland at Salon tabluates a good deal of the damage. You could really do a number on Fox News, more so than, say, Robert Greenwald did with OutFoxed(which I found oddly tame in 2004!), and more so, even, than Ms. McFarland does here, though she's laboring under a word limit. Anyway, the most urgent observation comes late: "How do we move forward from this? Every answer is insufficient and exhausting. Fox News management isn't interested in reining in its prime time hosts because they're the channel's main ratings magnets. De-programming experts have all sorts of suggestions on how to save the rabid Fox addicts in your life, but once again that places the burden on reasonable people to wade into a reservoir of hatred that's been steadily filling for two and a half decades." But only "reasonable people" can do the hard work of maintaining a civilization; we just have to contain the unreasonable people.

Action: concerning taxes, social media, Saudi Arabia, and various forms of pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, tell our government to regulate Facebook more vigorously, tell your Congressfolk to void President Biden's proposed $500 million deal with Saudi Arabia, pass the Preventing Harmful Exposure to Phthalates Act, and ban cyanide bombs from the wild, and tell our Department of Energy to reject uranium mining. 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 raise all Build Back Better Act funding by raising taxes on the rich and on corporations. If you're an Arizona resident, you'll definitely want to call Sen. Sinema, since she seems to be the one Senate Democrat who opposes raising taxes on the rich and on corporations. Stop me if you've heard this before, but over two-thirds of Arizonans support raising taxes on the rich and on corporations to pay for the Build Back Better Act. As usual, the "inscrutable" "iconoclastic" "maverick" "earns" her reputation by simply defying the will of her own constituents, in favor of the big corporate donors she seems to hobnob with every weekend. That's not very mavericky, frankly! And we shouldn't let her get away with it.

Free Press helps you tell our government to regulate Facebook a lot more vigorously than we currently do. Specifically, you'd urge Congress to pass data privacy and algorithmic abuse laws and tax social media advertising, and you'd ask various Executive branch agencies to crack down on abusive data practices. I've thought a lot lately about what the internet was like before Facebook; I visited at least four different social networks regularly in the mid-2000s, and visited half a dozen blogs and websites regularly for my news, but now we go to Facebook for all of that (and more -- remember Flickr?), and why should we? And why should they get to do whatever they like with our data, and why should they get to use algorithms to mindlessly ensure white supremacists feel less alone in the world? They've become a monopoly, and we know what to do with monopolies. Even if our politicians have forgotten.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to block President Biden's proposed $500 million weapons deal with Saudi Arabia. Yeah, I know, the money is supposedly for helicopter maintenance, but the Saudis ain't using those helicopters for humanitarian airdrops! The ongoing war on Yemen is just one reason to starve this particular beast, and using Saudi Arabia as a "hedge" against Iranian power in the region is not only a dumb idea but an immoral one, since the Saudis don't exactly use their power for good. Besides, if we didn't invade Iraq in 2003 for no damn good reason, we wouldn't need such a hedge against Iranian power! You look back over the last 20 years in particular and you begin to think we really have been conducting foreign policy for the express purpose of making the world worse. But we don't have to put up with what they do in our name.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4963/S. 2669, the Preventing Harmful Exposure to Phthalates Act. Much like the "forever chemical" PFAS, scientists have long linked phthalates to cancer, brain damage, and birth defects, plus they're everywhere in our plastic products and they get into our bodies to wreak havoc there. Our Consumer Product Safety Commission banned phthalates from children's toys back in 2017, which will protect kids a bit, but we all need that kind of protection. Hence the Preventing Harmful Exposure to Phthalates Act would ban phthalates in food packaging products outright and instruct our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to review the products our FDA typically regulates to see where else we can ban them. If you're worried that we won't have as many food prep gloves after this, remember that this is America, the can-do country, and we've adapted to worse.

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell Congress to ban our use of cyanide bombs in the wild. You think it's inhumane when land mines planted 50 years ago in a foreign country blow somebody's arm or leg off decades after the war is over? Now consider that cyanide bombs kill pretty indiscriminately as well -- the bombs don't exactly wait until their target animal is near! In fact, the bombs lure animals in with a sweet scent, so they're actually worse than landmines, which don't exactly lure people to them with hundred-dollar bills or promises of free broadband. How we treat animals tells the world what kind of civilization we are. Yes, even if we raise animals for food, we can still treat them in a civilized manner. We should be able to report to future civilizations that we did a pretty good job at it, and getting rid of cyanide bombs is just one way to do that.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell our Department of Energy not to fund uranium mining. Uranium is, as you know, a radioactive element that too easily finds its way into our drinking water and into the bodies of wildlife. And of course we haven't figured out a way to store the waste yet. These days you'll mostly find uranium in nuclear weapons, nuclear-powered submarines, nuclear power plants, and depleted uranium weapons; stop me if you hear anything you like in that list! Yeah, you'll also find it (in much, much smaller amounts) in wool, silk, stage lighting, photo chemicals, and even more rarely in glass, but ain't no mining corporation looking to make a killing in these markets -- they're looking for the big weapon money! And for these reasons we say no to uranium mining.

Action: concerning pollution, social media, campaign finance, immigration, and waste.

Long story short: tell the PA DEP to limit air pollution from trash incinerators, tell Facebook to ditch its drama-enabling algorithms, tell big corporations to stop funding January 6 coup enablers in Congress, tell the Biden Administration to drop the notorious Title 42 immigration policy, tell our Department of Homeland Security Secretary to stop deporting Haitians, and tell Amazon to stop throwing perfectly good products away. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Penn Environment helps you tell our Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) to set more vigorous limits on air pollution. The news hook here is the Covanta trash incinerator in Chester, in Delaware County, which pollutes more than any other trash incinerator of its kind in America. And it takes in trash not just from Pennsylvania, but from New Jersey, Maryland, and New York. That means more mercury, nitrogen oxide, and sulfur dioxide than you should be breathing! Our DEP is looking into Covanta's permit as we speak, and with your help, could do the right thing here. Don't let the right-wingers tell you this is just Big Gummint Destroying Jobs! In America, we do the right thing and we create jobs; they're not mutually exclusive, no matter how much the big polluters want you to think they are.

Daily Kos helps you tell Facebook to ditch its algorithms. Because they cause palpable harm to our civilization, and Facebook knows it! We didn't even need Frances Haugen’s Senate testimony on Tuesday to know this; we need only to listen to Facebook's own words, from a 2018 internal report: "Our algorithms exploit the human brain's attraction to divisiveness." That's why troll farms do so well on good Americans' news feeds, that's how white supremacist assholes find each other so easily on Facebook, and that's how anti-vaxxers get so much damn attention! Meanwhile, actual social justice sites (ahem!) can't get so much as a flare up on Facebook. It's not too far to say Facebook favors evil, and as civilized people, we have no obligation to merely put up with it. In fact, we have a duty to stop it. (Not for nothing, but getting rid of algorithms will force Facebook to create jobs for people who would moderate Facebooks' offerings.)

Common Cause helps you tell big corporations to stop funding the Republican House Reps who enabled the January 6 coup attempt. These big corporations said they were done funding the 147 House Reps who votes against certifying the 2020 election and thus gave aid and comfort to those who tried to overrun our Capitol on January 6 -- but obviously they were lying. No, I won't even give them "credit" for "speaking in the moment" and then "thinking better of it later" -- big corporations have a lot of people on staff who think about these things. Now these big corporations need to hear from us about their enabling of fascism in America, and we need to bring the Big Stick of Bad PR down upon them, lest they "think better" again and ignore us again. They'd probably prefer fascism to democracy, you know -- unless we make it impossible for them to act on that preference.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to end our government's notorious Title 42 deportation policy. Stephen Miller came up with the idea of deporting immigrants en masse because ZOMG THEYZ BRINGZ TEH COVIDZ!!!!!!, and I submit that's reason enough to stop the program. However, most of you will want more from an argument than that, so here it is: the Title 42 policy doesn't even protect us from further illness; after all, wouldn't cases have gone up dramatically this past spring if immigrants were really bringing COVID here? We're keeping this pandemic going all by ourselves, thank you very much! And, not for nothing, but you don't even see our Border Patrol whipping Haitian migrants around without Title 42 giving them license to do their worst. And why would we want to do our worst?

In a related note, Moms Rising helps you tell Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas to stop deporting Haitians. He, like President Biden, has condemned the sight of CBP agents treating Haitian migrants like dogs, but he, like President Biden, doesn't seem to understand that he can do something about that, hence the reminder we will give him at the above link. And, not for nothing, but we do have a process for folks who come here from other nations; maybe process is all "Deep State" to some people, but usually those folks have no clue what a Deep State actually is -- it's a real thing, not just something you blame when you don't get your way! -- and we give immigrants the best chance to come here not because we're weak, or because we're trying to "replace" white people, but because we are confident in our greatness. Maybe right-wingers just aren't as confident about our greatness as we are.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell Amazon to stop throwing out hundreds of thousands of perfectly good products. All those laptops have to go somewhere, after all -- like, in landfills, where they will stay for hundreds of years and leech pollution into our air, water, and soil. But I may be going too fast here; you may still be stuck on Amazon throws away laptops! And I wouldn't blame you. Gosh, Jeff Bezos is really the man who has everything! And "hundreds of thousands" is almost certainly a very low estimate -- one warehouse aims to throw away 130,000 items daily, and Amazon has over 180 warehouses. It hasn't occurred to them to donate all these items? I guess it wouldn't, if you already don't pay any taxes. But at the risk of sounding old-fashioned, tax breaks aren't the only reason in the world to do good works.

Around the table: from the Pandora Papers to Trumphole whining.

When I hear that the "Pandora Papers" reveal the "illicit financial activities of the super-wealthy from 200 countries," I'm tempted to say that this is starting to get repetitive -- not that many years ago the Panama Papers told us the rich cheat on their taxes like mad, and even if these are the "Panama Papers on steroids," I'm starting to feel a little like our "liberal" media has already forgotten about it. Just so happens Joe Biden continues to talk about going after tax evasion, but you still have to get Sens. Manchin and Sinema to sign on, and Sen. Sinema, in particular, seems impervious to outside counsel, even though, you know, taking counsel from your constituents is your job as a Senator.

Not long after Joe Manchin gloated about wanting to means-test everything, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) reminds us that "means testing" really means failing to deliver services for good Americans who need them because they haven't jumped through the right flaming hoops. And good on her for saying it means "more bureaucracy, red tape, and waste," because that's the only argument a lot of independents will hear. She also reminds us that America "doesn’t even measure poverty accurately to use for a means test" -- among other things, we concoct models in which working families all have a spouse who stays home and looks after the kids all the time, which hasn't been the norm for as long as I've been alive.

Surprise, surprise, a Lancet study finds that more than half of all police killings have gone unreported over the last 40 years. The study also finds that Black folks are 3.5 times more likely to die at the hands of police than white folks, which maps pretty well onto that Harvard study from last year finding that Black folks die 3.23 times more often at police hands than white folks do. Still, all some folks have to say about that is I SUPPORTZ TEH POLICEZ!!!!!, which is an illogical response, mainly because folks who criticize the police aren't necessarily being "unsupportive." I'm going to bang that particular saucepan until I die -- "support" does not mean "jackboot lockstep agreement."

You probably already knew that quoting the Bible out of context, or misquoting it, isn't a particularly new phenomenon, but it's still great to have a little historical context -- the next time right-wingers burn down a church that doesn't agree with them because they misheard or misinterpreted something and flew into a rage about it, I guess it'll be of some comfort (though not much!) to know that Protestants did the same thing to Catholic churches in Pennsylvania in 1844 all based on hearsay. The cynical would note the similarity between the two events and throw up their hands, but "cynicism is evil" is another saucepan I'll spend my whole life banging.

Our Department of Justice directs our FBI to address the "disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence" against teachers and school board members, and, well, duh! If you tell a teacher or school board member that you know where they live, you're making a terroristic threat and thus breaking the law! And no, having feelings about politics doesn't alchemically transmute a terroristic threat into "free speech"! (I don't know if I'd go talking about "domestic terrorism," though. Isn't being an asshole lawbreaker enough?)

Finally, former Vice President Mike Pence whines to Fox News that our media keeps focusing on the January 6 attempted coup to attack Trump supporters, to wit: "They want to use that one day to try and demean the character and intentions of 74 million Americans who believed we could be strong again and prosperous again and supported our administration in 2016 and 2020." "(T)hat one day"! Like they weren't shitting the bed every other day, too! Look, if you supported Donald Trump, you enabled this disgusting act with your actions every day, and I don't care if you were honest or peaceful about it, or if you just wanted more judges and tax cuts -- I want nothing to do with you. They tried to destroy our country! We should be hearing about "that one day" every damn day, until they learn how to feel shame again! Seriously, I don't ask for that much.

Action: concerning drugs, evictions, unconstitutional war-making, voting rights, nursing mothers, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell your Senators to pass the EQUAL Act, the Keeping Renters Safe Act, the National Security Reforms and Accountability Act, the Freedom to Vote Act, the PUMP for Nursing Mothers Act, and the Postal Service Reform Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. Late last week our House passed H.R. 1693, the Eliminating a Quantifiably Unjust Application of the Law (or EQUAL) Act -- and by an actual bipartisan margin of 361-66! So what would the EQUAL Act do? It would equalize sentences for crack cocaine and powder cocaine -- a gap the Obama Administration narrowed, but didn't close, in 2010 -- and it would allow judges to resentence crack offenders so they can serve powder time. They always said crack cocaine was more addictive, but that was a lie -- a lie designed to put more Black folks in jail, no less! Our Senate has yet to take up this bill, and a phone call from you telling them to pass it might well encourage them to do so. If we keep quiet about it, that'll make them think they can do nothing, and we sure don't want to enable that sort of behavior!

Eviction Moratorium Now helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5307/S. 2776, the Keeping Renters Safe Act. The Keeping Renters Safe Act would enact the same national eviction moratorium that the Biden Administration had in place, until our Supreme Court struck it down; our Supreme Court would have trouble striking down a moratorium enacted by Congress, though I suppose they're a creative bunch and they're game to try. Why do we still need an eviction moratorium after more than 18 months? Because states have been very, very slow to give out federally-mandated rent assistance; is it fair, really, to put people out on the street because states don't do their job? No, it is not. Don't retort that none of this is "fair to landlords." Landlords can withstand hardship much better than their renters can. And when their renters get paid, they'll get paid. That's how you know the objection is rubbish!

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5410, the National Security Reforms and Accountability Act. What would H.R. 5410 do? It would make it harder to fight "war on terror"-style unconstitutional wars, declare national emergencies, and sell weapons. We should make these things harder! Making them easy, in the name of "not hamstringing our President's ability to act," has caused most of the problems we've had over the last half-century! And hamstringing our President's ability to act is the whole point of giving Congress the power to declare war! You may scrutinize the bill and decide it doesn't go far enough -- you may even prefer the similar S. 2391, the National Security Powers Act -- but if it passed, it would improve our ability to keep our government from fighting stupid wars in our name, and that's a good work to do.

Common Cause, Public Citizen, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2747, the Freedom to Vote Act. The Freedom to Vote Act is basically the For the People Act without its ethics plank (wonder why Joe Manchin would object to that!), plus the Freedom to Vote Act would clamp down on state legislature power to overrule the will of their voters, which is quite necessary now that several states have given their legislatures that power. The Freedom to Vote Act would still clamp down on gerrymandering and dark money, restore voting rights to ex-felons, provide 15 days of early voting, enact same-day voter registration, and make Election Day a national holiday, so it merits your support, even if Manchinian drama created it.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3110/S. 1658, the PUMP for Nursing Mothers Act. This bill would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act (passed in 1938, well before the workforce had many new mothers among its members!) so that women can nurse in private and without being harassed by bosses. The bill would also ensure women can nurse in a workplace better than a closet or a car or a bathroom. Before your right-wing nephew starts wailing about TEH SMALL BIZNIZIZ!!!!!, attend Sec. 2, which exempts businesses employing fewer than 50 people (though you may want to mention the fact that an employer like McDonald's, known to hide behind its "franchises," might try to drive a Mack truck through that loophole). In any case, nursing mothers deserve better than they typically get from their jobs, and the PUMP for Nursing Mothers Act will give them better if it passes.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3076/S. 1720, the Postal Service Reform Act. You've heard that our Postal Service has begun charging more and slowing down deliveries, as part of Postmaster General DeJoy's "bold" "plan" to "save" the Postal Service, but we could solve literally all of our Postal Service's financial problems by simply removing the mandate that it pre-pay retiree benefits 85 years in advance, which the Postal Service Reform Act does. I mused earlier today that President Biden might be waiting until Mr. DeJoy's plan falls flat before firing him, but that waiting will hurt people, and the Postal Service Reform Act presents a solution we can implement now, that will bring us better results now. When you can do the right thing right now, you do it, that's what I say.

Around the table: with more horrible truths about rioters and insurrectionists.

You've heard that the January 6 coup-plotters weren't really that violent (despite what we all saw on TV!) because they "didn't bring guns"? Oh yes they did bring guns to their little coup attempt! That finding jibes with the testimony of DC police, who say their gun recovery units were "working constantly" during the coup attempt, and it also jibes with the testimony of DC rioters, who say there were a lot more folks bearing arms than police have yet found. And again, we all saw what happened on TV. We have no reason to listen to right-wing politicians who themselves enabled by the coup attempt. If they didn't actually take part in it, that is.

Thank God for good Americans like Steven Rosenfeld, who describes at length how right-wingers plunge forward even though their treasured Arizona fraudit didn't tell them exactly what they wanted to hear -- and also dissects all the weasel words in their arguments! Ballots that might have come from inaccurate addresses, ballots that might have come from moved-away voters, or video purporting to show election employees who might have erased computer election records -- I've tried to highlight this to right-wing voter fraud screechers, and they just ignore me. They probably jerk off over provoking me into pointing it out to them, too. Little do they know I don't aim to convince them, but to convince other, more reasonable people who might be listening in. Anyway, I sure hope they wipe their screens off when they're done.

Our Postal Service has begun to slow down deliveries per Postmaster General DeJoy's "bold" plan, and the Postal Regulatory Commission slams it, saying it won't even achieve its own goals by the end of 2022 and that (of course!) it didn't take into account the effect the plan would have on customers (i.e., the American people), particularly those who rely on the mail to get their medicine. Of course, the plan makes sense when you realize that Postmaster General DeJoy's purpose is to destroy the Postal Service so his cronies can privatize it. And I wouldn't be too keen on the idea that President Biden might be waiting until good Americans can't get their life-saving drugs on time to finally sack Mr. DeJoy -- if you know a problem is coming, you have a duty, as a leader, to solve it before it hurts anyone.

When I hear that Wisconsin Republicans want to ban words like "diversity" and "white supremacist" in public schools, all I can say is waaaaaaaaaaah! Diaper-loaded brats, these Republicans, imagining that teachers and students can't handle complex ideas about race relations, in a nation with a long, long history of white supremacy, no less! And here you thought conservatives trusted people. Maybe conservatives still do -- but these reactionaries who call themselves "conservative" certainly don't. They'd rather a real fascist like Donald Trump told everyone what to do and say and think. That's so much easier than working to maintain a civilization, after all.

Ho hum, right-wing asshole admits to pretending to be a Black Lives Matter supporter as he shot up a Minneapolis police station. I said over a year ago that a lot of these "rioters" were actually right-wing agents provocateurs, and I was right! I wonder if this Ivan Harrison Hunter fellow knows the asshole whose buddy filmed him busting up windows at the AutoZone last year, which kick-started riots in Minneapolis. If he doesn't, I bet Facebook can bring them together. Even in jail!

Finally, Sen. Joe Manchin (D?-WV) says he "never knew about" the strategy to pass two spending bills that Democrats have been pursuing for months. Never mind that documentary evidence shows him talking about the two-track strategy in June -- the two-track strategy only exists in the first place because he insisted that infrastructure legislation be "bipartisan" and because Republicans would block most of the Democrats' agenda without reconciliation. Don't think he's dumb, or old, or tired, or just misheard the question -- he's gaslighting you, just like they all do when they can't win the arguments on the merits.

Action: concerning the Build Back Better Act.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations to pay for the Build Back Better Act, and make sure the Build Back Better Act lets Medicare negotiate drug prices, expands Medicare, funds paid family/medical leave, permanently expands the Child Tax Credit, and addresses climate change. 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 raise all $3.5 trillion for the Build Back Better Act by hiking taxes on the rich and on corporations. Virtually everyone in America wants them to do it, so it shouldn't be such a big lift -- even to the "moderate" Democrats facing stupid Club for Growth ads about the tax hikes. If you're a Congressperson, and you can be swayed by big corporate advertising, then you should resign immediately. The number of folks who actually believe taxing the rich will put people out of work or take money from working families is laughably small, and most of them are rageheads anyway. And they shouldn't get all the say about everything in America.

Daily Kos helps you tell Democrats to ensure the Build Back Better Act allows Medicare to negotiate drug prices. Which will save the taxpayer at least $450 billion over the next decade! It's a pay-for, not a service we "just can't find the money for." Providing the service also provides the money! Anyway, what day of the Kyrsten Sinema Hostage Crisis are we in now? Has she explained her objection to letting Medicare negotiate drug prices? I kid, of course -- she'll never tell us, because we're the people at the other end of her fuck-off ring. But word on the street is that her actual constituents in Arizona have been giving her an earful about it, so let's all do that with all of our Congressfolk.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your Congressfolk to include Medicare expansion in the Build Back Better Act. Specifically, you'll tell them to lower the Medicare eligibility age to 60 and give our seniors vision, dental, and hearing care. It's a bit of a surprise they can't get that now, actually -- unless they get Medicare Advantage, which isn't really Medicare but a private health insurance plan that Medicare funds. Why does Medicare fund a private health insurance plan? Because George W. Bush, that's why. Naturally a prominent "moderate" Democrat opposes expanding Medicare in this way, but this time it's the notorious Joe Manchin of West Virginia (who, as recent reports tell us, also doesn't listen to his constituents). How about making sure all seniors get the "advantage"?

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to include paid family/medical leave in the Build Back Better Act. Like everything we've discussed so far, paid family/medical leave is popular with large majorities of Americans -- so why won't Democrats talk about it? If they'd go on TV and say we're trying to expand Medicare, enact paid family/medical leave, and let Medicare help lower drug prices, "moderate" Democrats would feel pressure to change their stupid tunes. Which I guess answers that question -- Democratic politicians act like "unity" is more important than doing the right thing, but if they don't do the right thing -- and, this is very important, take credit for it -- their unity will mean nothing, because they'll be back in the minority. Oh, and fascists will be the majority. So wakey wakey, House and Senate Democrats!

Both the Friends Committee on National Legislation and Moms Rising help you tell your Congressfolk to include a permanent Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion in the Build Back Better Act. The American Rescue Plan Act included a temporary CTC expansion, which delivers $250 or $300 checks into the bank accounts of working families with children every single month, which is rather like a campaign ad every single month. But you just know the Manchin/Sinema axis waits for Just the Right Moment to demand an end to the CTC expansion expire, because "fiscal responsibility" or something. That's why we need to get in our Congressfolk's grills now -- to make such machinations harder to pull off. And seriously, why should we let Democrats constantly snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? Again, the alternative is fascism. And that's no alternative.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make large investments in climate change action. I haven't said enough about this, perhaps, but it's a no-brainer: invest in renewable energy and we'll create jobs and beat back the ill effects of climate change. If Democrats don't do it, because fiscal responsibility job killing international competition unity über alles, then, again, they're Ben Simmons standing right under the basket and failing to dunk. The only people who don't like solar power and wind power are a) big fossil fuel corporations and b) the Americans who let right-wingers propagandize them about wind turbines making people sick and solar panels losing their effectiveness to gamma radiation that the Van Allen belt keeps out anyway. And, again, they shouldn't get all the say about everything.

A final word about this issue: don't get caught up in Democratic "negotiations" over these bills -- simply communicate your will, and often. The only folks they're supposed to negotiate with are us. And every time we hear about media pundits and corporate lobbyists opposing higher taxes, lower drug prices, and better policy generally, our politicians and our media insult us. They're supposed to serve us, after all -- and we Americans aren't anywhere near as divided as our politicians and our media would like us to think. As long as they whine about critical race theory, abortion, Dr. Seuss, etc., we look divided. But on everything I've described above, we're not divided. Only they are divided, by their own corruption and venality. And so we've got to get in their grills until we bring them to heel.

Around the table: from bad politicians and killer robots to health care and tax policy scammers.

Hard to believe, Harry, but the Build Back Better plan is actually quite popular in West Virginia, far more so than the bloviations of Sen. Manchin would have you believe. I had liberals tell me earlier this year that we should all go easy on Sens. Manchin and Sinema because they represent such right-wing states; I hope more liberals have had that myth exploded for them. A lot of folks who call themselves "conservative" really just want a government that gives them more for their taxpayer dollars than the back of its hand. A government that talks like they do -- i.e., plainly -- would also be nice.

Now that "killer robots" have actually taken human life, per a U.N. Security Council report, James Dawes at The Conversation says they could be "more destabilizing than nukes." And now would be a good time to note, as I've done before, that Philip K. Dick predicted this, as well, in the short story "Second Variety," where the killer robots got advanced enough to design more advanced killer robots! It would be a shame to succumb to such a phenomenon, just as folks all over the world are more anti-war than they've ever been.

Umair Haque dissects "What a Massive Ripoff American Life Really Is," and though I suspect the median salary is a better indicator of American life than the average salary, the absurdly high cost of utilities, rent, and health care are quite real, and the monopoly issues that underlie them (with one internet provider in your town, how will we ever get prices down?) are also quite real. Pedants and trolls will latch onto my first observation, of course; pedants will then proceed to a life of self-abuse as they never get their heads above water no matter how hard they work, and trolls will proceed to a life of ease brought about by their willingness to serve corporate power. I have hope for the former, but not the latter. And it's becoming much harder to tell the difference.

From the "It's Not Just Evil Politics, It's Also Big Money!" file: right-wing health care providers are making big bucks prescribing hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin to rage-addled COVID patients. Alas, some folks who paid for such "health care" services never even received them, because a scam just isn't complete until the scammer isn't even working to maintain it. And now, as Merck appears to have developed a COVID treatment drug that might actually reduce your suffering if you get the dread disease, I'm sure America's Frontline Doctors and their nefarious ilk will twist your feelings about big pharma greed into feelings about big pharma results, all while lining their own pockets! George Washington Plunkitt would be proud.

Finally, corporate front groups are lying-ass liars about how much tax hikes on the rich and on corporations will "cost your family." Remember when right-wingers said the 2001 Bush tax cuts would save you "$1,800 annually "on average"? Then you also remember that the "average" between your piddling tax cut and Dick Cheney's tax cut sure didn't put $1,800 in your bank account. You may also remember when the Trump tax "reform" were going to put $4,000 in your bank account; how did that work out? The good news: more Americans see through this rubbish then they used to. The bad news: the ones who don't are now far more likely to shoot those of us who do.

Action: concerning essential services, taxes, credit, divestment, and facial recognition software.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Maintaining Access to Essential Services Act, tell Democrats to stop coddling corporate lobbyists and raise taxes on the rich and corporations already, tell Congress to ensure we can all get good credit reports, tell General Mills to divest from Israel, and tell Uber and Lyft to stop using facial recognition software on drivers and consumers. 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.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4979, the Maintaining Access to Essential Services Act, which would (as its title suggests) provide relief to good Americans behind on their water, electricity, and internet bills. If you read that and think when does it end? -- "it" being "government assistance during a pandemic" -- just remember that a) a lot of them didn't have jobs for a significant period during this pandemic and b) large corporations get to run up considerably larger water/electricity/internet bills without suffering any of the consequences. It can't be only the "little people" who suffer from bills piling up. Not in our America, at least. And yes, internet is an essential service, as evidenced by all the Zoom meetings at our jobs and all the Zoom classes our kids had to do for school this past year-plus.

Daily Kos helps you tell Congressional Democrats to stop listening only to the big corporate lobbyists trying to defend their unearned tax cuts and Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund the Build Back Better Act with higher taxes on the rich and on corporations. Americans for Tax Fairness also helps you tell your Congressfolk to support a "billionaire's income tax." Most of the Democrats have listened to us on these matters, but their majorities in our House and Senate are slim, so it only takes a few (cough Joe Manchin Kyrsten Sinema cough) to stomp their feet and say "no," regardless of what their actual constituents think. No, corporations, and corporate lobbies, are not constituents, not least because they're not people. Call me old-fashioned, but I think people should count more than things. (Oh, and I'm fully aware that the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" didn't get a vote in the House last night, and I have no opinion on that -- rather than get mired in the weeds of Democrat "strategy," we need to press them with our will.)

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure all Americans can get free, accessible, and secure credit reports. What's that, you say? You thought our laws already provided for free annual credit reports from each of the three major credit reporting bureaus? It does, but our laws do not prevent corporations from charging you for that information! Just to illustrate how confusing it all is, the only government-authorized website to get free credit reports is annualcreditreport.com; if a website has the word "free" in it, chances are you'll be forking over money for your "free" reports! Furthermore, some credit reporting corporations -- including two affiliated with two of the big three agencies -- may give you credit scores lenders won't actually use! It's a damn shame we have to use credit reports at all in a civilized society, so let's at least make sure they work for us.

Sum of Us helps you tell General Mills to pull out of Israel over its continued occupation and oppression of Palestine. Hey, divestment worked in South Africa, even though they said it wouldn't! I was one of those who said it wouldn't, that it would hurt the South Africans it intended to help, but actual South African activists put me right: it can't get any worse for us than not having any rights to begin with, they told me. And Palestinians are in the same boat today, as Israel takes their land, tears down their homes, and punishes anyone who speaks out. Sorry, folks, that's apartheid, even though they're doing it out of fear. What, fear should excuse evil? No, it should not. I should also point out that their fear is completely unjustified by the facts -- Palestine can't win a war with Israel, and look at all the other nations in the Middle East totally not coming to Palestine's aid.

Finally, Fight for the Future helps you tell Uber and Lyft to ban facial recognition software for drivers and users. Uber and Lyft have been partnering (Jesus Mary and Joseph "partnering" has got to be one of my least favorite words!) with a corporation called Alfi, which makes tablets for vehicles that scan your face and then show you ads based on what it finds. It even tries to tell how you're feeling to show you ads! You walk in with a "sad face," you might get anti-depressant ads! If you walk in with a scowl, do they show you an ad for Fox News or OANN? And once they've got your face, and all the data that could go with it, what will they do with that information? Anything they want, since very few laws even address biometric data. Maybe, just maybe, you don't want screens in your face guessing what you might buy all the time. It's not so damn much to ask. Hell, I remember when that was everyday life! So tell them no.

Around the table: why insane Republicans keep winning, part 463.

So which monopoly is behind our chronic medical supply shortages, according to the incomparable Matt Stoller? The Group Purchasing Organization (or GPO), "a kind of Costco or Sam’s Club for all sorts of medical supplies and medicines, with hospitals as the members." Sounds like a good idea, right? Not when GPOs can collect fees (i.e., kickbacks) from medical supply producing corporations -- and, more recently, when hospital executies can collect the same kickbacks from the GPOs themselves. Mark Meadows, of all people, wrote a bill in 2017 that probably would have put a stop to all of that; if it had passed, Donald Trump might have gotten re-elected in spite of himself.

In case you were wondering, scientists tell us that the murder rate shot up in 2020 for three main reasons: "(m)ore guns, pandemic stress, and a police legitimacy crisis." I'd include financial stress in "pandemic stress," of course. Getting 2020 figures in 2021, unfortunately, allows right-wing assholes to blame Joe Biden for a phenomenon that happened the year before he became President, and right-wing news sources won't issue corrections about that in any case you might actually see it. I'm perfectly alright with blaming Joe Biden for his own mistakes, but I fucking hate stupidity.

Uh oh: When South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem's daughter didn't qualify for a state real estate appraiser's license, the Governor apparently reamed out the state official in charge of such licenses -- and four months later, her daughter miraculously got the license! Also, the state labor secretary demanded the retirement of said state official a mere week after the meeting with the Governor. Naturally the Governor's spokeshack claims coverage of this matter is about "disparaging the Governor's daughter in order to attack the Governor politically," and if you didn't hear a denial in there, you're not the only one. If any spirited Democrats remained in South Dakota, I'd say that between this and her (likely deliberate) mismanagement of the pandemic, Ms. Noem's career might be over. (Billie Sutton only lost to Ms. Noem by about 3 1/2 points in 2018, but he doesn't strike me as someone who goes for the jugular.)

Of course people who whine about kids "suffocating" with "diapers" (i.e., the same masks surgeons wear for 8-12 hours every day without ill effect) on their faces are diaper-faces themselves, but that phrase "with their pockets full" is exactly why folks confuse right-wingers for populists! And Democrats never talk like this when they're trying to sell their policy prescriptions -- if Democrats would say "you can't let rich folks and corporations sit there with their pockets full while you don't have paid medical leave and pay a thousand dollars a month for insulin," our Reps and Senators' phone lines would crash. We keep telling Democrats how not to be weak, and they keep ignoring us. I guess we'll have to keep telling them.

Speaking of which, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D?-AZ) actually held a fundraiser a few days ago with the exact same corporate lobbying groups trying to kill the Build Back Better Act. Meeting people with their pockets full instead of her constituents -- see how easy that was? Again, that fuck-off ring is for us, and "us" includes, not incidentally, the 80% of good Arizonans who support Medicare drug price negotiation. (Also, New York Times, the word you're looking for to describe Sen. Sinema is not "inscrutable" but corrupt.)

Finally, FedEx driver loses his job -- whether he quit or got fired isn't clear -- after ranting on TikTok that he wouldn't deliver any packages to houses with Biden/Harris or Black Lives Matter signs. When Rosa Parks got arrested for refusing to sit in the back of the bus (I know this FedEx clown thinks he's just like Rosa Parks, so let's get ahead of him), she knew she was breaking the law, but she calculated that breaking the law in that instance would create more opportunities for real justice everywhere. In this, she was right, but all this clown did was spit into the wind. And too many of today's martyrs think they're entitled to all the notoriety of martyrdom but none of the accountability. (But I couldn't let this pass without noting that FedEx treats their drivers like trash, which makes them more likely to go off on these right-wing rants; why, it's almost like that's the whole idea.)

Action: concerning torture, immigration, Palestine, our Postal Service, and women's health.

Long story short: tell our Justice Department to stop police torture of protestors at Line 3, tell the Biden Administration to stop deportation flights to Haiti, and tell Congress to pass the Defending the Human Rights of Palestinian Children and Families Living Under Israeli Military Occupation Act, the Postal Service Reform Act, and the Women's Health Protection Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Justice Department to stop police from torturing protestors at Line 3. Ever heard of "pain compliance"? Sounds a lot like "enhanced interrogation," doesn't it? "Pain compliance" describes the practice (not that you'd want to practice this) of inflicting searing pain on pressure points until the person you're inflicting the pain upon cries uncle. If Enbridge is resorting to torturing protestors, they must be having trouble getting everyone on board with their plan to transport tar sands oil over Midwestern water tables. And if Enbridge has to pay county cops to do it, well, maybe the Line 3 pipeline has become too toxic. So to speak.

Both Amnesty International and Moms Rising help you tell the Biden Administration to stop its deportations of Haitians. The recent news hook, of course, is the Customs and Border Protection (or CBP) officers nearly running down Haitian asylum-seekers on horseback, a sight President Biden condemned -- before resuming flights of said asylum-seekers back to Haiti. Hey, did something happen there a month ago? Oh, right, another earthquake. And has something been happening there for 200 years? Why, yes, Western nations including the United States have been treating Haiti like toilet paper, all for having the gall to win independence from France. All these nations were perfectly OK with forcing Haitians to actually pay reparations to former slave-owners. How's that sound, Larry Elder? How about we not be cruel bastards this one time? It'll make the next time easier.

Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2590, the Defending the Human Rights of Palestinian Children and Families Living Under Israeli Military Occupation Act. It doesn't make a clever acronym, but it would prevent American taxpayer dollars (i.e., your money) from going toward actions that violate international law, such as detaining and maltreating Palestinian children, seizing and destroying Palestinian property (including homes), and annexation of Palestinian territory generally. You really don't have to trace back who-did-what-first in this matter; you only need realize that Israel is a lot more powerful than Palestine, and even worse, acts like they're besieged and beleaguered, which guarantees they'll do a lot worse to Palestine in the future. And that's not something you want to pay for.

Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3076/S. 1720, the Postal Service Reform Act. Can you believe there are folks who have "lost faith" in our Post Office? Such folks are largely unaware that the reason our Post Office has funding issues is that our laws mandate that it pre-fund retiree benefits 85 years in advance, a mandate our laws ask of literally no other federal agency, and certainly of no corporation. That means cut services and cut jobs, almost as if Congress planned it that way back in 2006. Lift the mandate and it'll be like lifting a 300-pound weight off the Post Office's chest. Our Postal Service workers will breathe easier, certainly. We can have more of them, too! And postal banking! But first, let's cut the cancer out.

Finally, People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women's Health Protection Act. Republicans won't vote for it (apparently not even the pro-choice ones like Susan Collins, what a good little drone she is!), because it'll actually get rid of all the heartbeat bills and the forced ultrasound bills and the six-week abortion bans and the forced bad medical advice bills that states have passed in order to make it hard for women to get abortions when they need them. Yes, women do need them, if pregnancy puts their life or health in danger, or if their fetus has no organs. And women should get them when they want them, too, lest the state force women into the role of breeders-and-nothing-else again.

Around the table: against weak Democrats and insane Republicans.

Kiera Butler at Mother Jones takes us "Inside the Private Facebook Groups Where Anti-Vaxxers Plot to Get Religious Exemptions." And all I can say is: this is a long, long way to go just to avoid getting a potentially life-saving vaccine just so you can stamp your feet about Donald Trump losing the election, and the folks objecting on the basis of their "religion of hedonism" ain't nowhere near as funny as they think they are. Also, how do they think their body got to be a temple? All those mandatory vaccines they couldn't go to school without might have had something to do with that. And maybe, just maybe, God actually supports them!

Thought the war in Afghanistan was over? Think again: we're still conducting illegal, immoral, and unconstitutional drone strikes in Afghanistan, including one targeting an "ISIS operative" who was actually an aid worker and "explosives" that were actually water bottles. Oh, that one killed seven civilians, too. Greatest country on Earth! By the time you hear that 90 percent of all drone strikes hit the wrong target, you'll hopefully be reminded that machines don't do nearly as good a job killing people as soldiers do. You may even think that using drones is even more cowardly than sending someone else's kids off to fight a war to enrich your corporate cronies.

Ho hum, scammers now use Facebook Marketplace to target users and you better not expect Facebook to come to your rescue. But, hey, you know, move fast and break things! Creative disruption! Rules are for little people! Spoiler alert: Facebook leaves too much up to algorithms to spot fake listings, just like with everything else, plus also overworked, low-paid contract workers, because the future! "I got some Brazilian rainforest to sell you" would become a cliché if it weren't so sad. And given how Brazil is these days, maybe those guys weren't scammers.

When I read that House Democrats wouldn't roll out dental coverage in Medicare until 2028, my very first thought was that Democrats couldn't really run on the Affordable Care Act's more popular provisions in 2010 because they hadn't gone into effect yet! I am of course tempted to say when will these weaklings ever learn?, but of course they're not weak, they just want you to think so, so that you'll subscribe to their drama, instead of demanding what you want. Hence you would not be rude to call your House Reps and tell them WTF, and F'ing do better.

Brazilian President/irredeemable asshole Jair Bolsonaro now says, after much saying of the opposite, that he'll trust the election results, whatever they'll be. It's a lie! It's a lyin'-ass lie! He wants to lull good Brazilians into a false sense of security so when he does stage a coup, they'll be taken by surprise. Donald Trump not only wishes he could get away with what Jair Bolsonaro does, he wishes he were as good a fascist as Jair Bolsonaro is. In those moments Mr. Trump permits himself to be honest about how he feels, that is. If he has any.

Finally, a University of Chicago study estimates that over 20 million Americans not only think Joe Biden is an "illegitimate President," but would be perfectly OK with the use of force to return Donald Trump to power. I'll probably say this more than once: you should suspect every Republican you know of being a fascist. I said every one! You should act as if there are no good ones. No, not even the one who lives around the block and lent you his hedge trimmer that one time. After all, how do you really know which are the ones who just want judges and tax cuts and which are the assholes who tried to destroy our country on January 6?

Action: concerning evictions, taxes, Medicare, and voting rights.

Long story short: tell your state's Governor to distribute eviction assistance funds immediately, and tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, enable Medicare to negotiate drug prices, expand Medicare, and pass the Freedom to Vote 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 and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Once again, Daily Kos helps you tell your state's Governor to get with the eviction assistance funding already. States have been giving it out very, very slowly, ostensibly to stop fraud, but you won't be "pro-fraud" if you suspect that "stopping fraud," in this case, actually means "we never wanted to do this anyway so we won't." States have also contracted out a lot of the rental assistance to third-party corporations, which always slows down the process. Government should do the job itself, that's what I say, and stop privatizing its duties. You may also want to remind your Governor that getting the rental assistance out also helps landlords get their money, if you think they might only view landlords as their constituents. Hey, it happens.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise all of the funding for the Build Back Better Act from higher taxes on rich folks and on corporations. You probably know that late last week, Sen. Sinema (D?-AZ) suddenly said -- not even four days before the vote on her pet "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" in the House! -- that she wouldn't support higher taxes on the rich or on corporations, demonstrating, once again, that her fuck-off ring is really for us. I had thought we'd have to put up with her for six or seven terms just like Max Baucus, but both Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman pulled similar shenanigans during negotiations over the Affordable Care Act in 2009, and they both retired in 2012 with their tails between their legs. Maybe Ms. Sinema, who is not rich despite being a shill for big corporations, goes the same way. In the meantime, we need to remind our Reps and Senators what we want -- and that what we want is more important than what she wants, 50th vote or no.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate drug prices. Sen. Sinema's opposition figures here, too, but again, what we want matters -- if we communicate it! And People's Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare so that it covers folks older than 60 (vs. the current eligibility age of 65) and covers eye/ear/nose/throat care. Sen. Manchin figures here, of course, saying he can't support Medicare expansion until we can make it more "solvent." But he also supports Medicare drug price negotiation, which he surely knows would save the taxpayer at least $50 billion annually, meaning more money to get Medicare "fiscally solvent," whatever that actually means to Joe Manchin. It sounds more and more like he just doesn't want this to happen, but again, what he wants matters far less than what we want -- if we speak out.

Both Public Citizen and People for the American Way help you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2747, the Freedom to Vote Act. The For the People Act descended into compromised oblivion, and as you may recall Joe Manchin not only failed to spell out what he didn't like about the For the People Act, but then went and listed reforms he wanted that were all in the For the People Act -- but for all this infernal drama, the Freedom to Vote Act is pretty good, and worth your support. It would not only enact same-day voter registration, 15 days of early voting across America, and voting right restoration for ex-felons, it would clamp down on partisan gerrymandering and address state attempts to give their legislatures the power to overrule the voters' will. We need all of that, so we should demand it, and we should get it.

Finally, both Daily Kos and People for the American Way help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. I knew H.R. 4 would essentially restore a big part of the Voting Rights Act by creating a new pre-clearance formula that doesn't "discriminate" against Southern states, but still would clamp down on any state or locality that demonstrates a pattern of vote suppression. But I did not know that H.R. 4 would also give our Justice Department the power to clamp down on gerrymandering, if a court finds that particular gerrymandering act to be racist. Gerrymandering is noxious and ubiquitous enough that we need all the tools our Constitution and our laws can give us to fight it. Even if it makes certain incumbent politicians sad.

Around the table: more about the uselessness of moderates, the venality of contemporary media, and the evil of Republicans.

It continues: Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D?-AZ) says she won't support any tax hikes on corporations and/or the rich in the budget reconciliation bill, while Sen. Joe Manchin (D?-WV) says he won't support the Medicare expansion provisions in the bill. Shades of Joe Lieberman suddenly deciding he didn't support a Medicare buy-in back in 2009, at precisely the moment it looked like it might actually make the Affordable Care Act! And Sen. Manchin tells you he supports Medicare drug price negotiation as we all know Sen. Sinema doesn't, so it won't make it into the final bill! Welcome to another exciting episode of "The Uselessness of Moderates."

And now, another episode! Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) says she won't support the Women's Health Protection Act, just passed by our House. She says it would "severely weaken the conscious (sic) exceptions that are in the current law," exceptions that let health care workers who oppose abortion for reasons of "religious" "conscience" to opt out of abortion-related procedures (how about find another line of work?), plus she finds some of the language in the bill "extreme." I knew she'd find something if she looked hard enough! Oh, and she's endorsing Paul LePage for Maine Governor, because small businesses job creators hard-working families.

Charlie Sykes writes about the "sane Republicans" who are "purging themselves" from the political offices they hold, but are they sane, really? If they ever accused any Iraq war protestor of treason -- I heard that all the time from Republicans back in the day! -- then the answer is no. I know, that was almost 20 years ago already, but that's part of my point: Republicans constantly obliterate their own past as they push right. Why, Mr. Sykes himself was one of Scott Walker's biggest boosters, and the only thing Scott Walker really cared about was handing out corporate welfare, though he also broke public unions and suppressed protestors' free speech. True, Mr. Gonzalez's successor will be worse than him, but I'm more bummed about injury ending his football career than Trump ending his political career.

Dan Froomkin at Press Watch notes that the New York Times has hardly written a word about the Eastman memo that laid out Donald Trump's plan to steal the 2020 election despite losing by seven million votes, and helpfully cites non-coverage of the notorious Downing Street memo as a reminder of our "liberal" media's decided lack of courage. And just as our "liberal" media ultimately concluded that the Downing Street memo was "old news" -- no thanks to the folks who wouldn't make it news at all! -- I'm sure today's "liberal" media will look down on the Eastman memo similarly, particularly since Mr. Eastman now says he was just spitballing there. (Since Mr. Froomkin's article, the Times has published an opinion piece on the Eastman memo by Jamelle Bouie -- which sure doesn't mean they didn't drop the ball before then!)

Tucker Carlson, always looking for a way to convince his audience they're really not assholes, says immigrants, not unvaccinated Americans, are really clogging up our hospitals with COVID cases. I searched in vain for some support to that thesis, but then "supporting your argument" is never the point with people like Mr. Carlson -- the point is "making your viewers diddle their rage glands." Anyway, who are you going to believe -- all your friends and family and neighbors telling you that unvaccinated people are clogging up the hospitals where they work, or Tucker Carlson? (Also, too, folks ain't leaving health care because of vaccine mandates -- they're leaving because a 20-months-and-counting pandemic, one restarted by the immaturity of the unvaccinated, has burned them out.)

Finally, if you were wondering how right-wing crybabies were handling the Arizona "fraudit" report that actually said Maricopa County undercounted Joe Biden's vote count by a few hundred votes, well, they're handling it about as well as you'd expect -- by calling the whole thing "biased" (!) against them from the start, by yelling about problems and hoping you don't notice modifiers like "potentially" and "possible," by pretending that John Smith and Maria Garcia aren't common names but are names of criminals, and, of course, by calling for even more audits. In a sane, moral, and decent society, these people would be too ashamed to show their faces; in this insane, immoral, and decadent society, the Facebook "engagements" will keep on coming.

Action: concerning Medicare, child care, women's health, saving our Post Office, and the filibuster.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate drug prices, pass a robust Build Back Better Act, protect women's health, save our Postal Service, and end the Senate 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 and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate drug prices. Close to 90% of Americans want it, but just enough "moderate" Democrats don't that the whole thing could fall apart, but if Democrats can't do something 90% of Americans want them to do, they don't deserve their power or our support. Seriously, I've been beside myself over this. Scott Peters and Kurt Schrader tell a bunch of lies about Medicare drug negotiation and that's it? Kyrsten Sinema says she won't support it because I've-got-a-ring-that-says-fuck-off and that's it? We should be out in the streets over this, and if I get any news about rallies for Medicare drug price negotiation, I'll pass them along. But at least we can clog up their phone lines so they can't mistake our will.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a robust Build Back Better Act, one that invests in home and community care and permanently expands the Child Tax Credit, among other things, while Moms Rising helps you demand that the Build Back Better Act invests in child care. In a society where most families either have both parents working or only one parent to begin with, child care is becoming essential -- and child care corporations know that, and are charging an arm and a leg for it just because they can, but good Americans deserve better than that. "Moderate" Democrats are trying to kill this bill dead as we speak (and surely Republicans are grabbing the popcorn), but they need to know that they're not exactly representing their constituents right now. They'll ignore us if we keep silent, of course -- so we've got to be loud.

Both the National Women's Law Center and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women's Health Protection Act. Right-wing state legislatures have been screwing around with abortion for the last decade-plus, with their "heartbeat" bills and their ultrasound bills and their outlawing of abortion clinics that don't meet impossible standards and, with Texas's SB 8, a bill that lets literally anyone sue an abortion provider or patient and collect a $10,000 bounty -- never mind if you're having an abortion because your fetus doesn't have any organs, or because it's threatening your own life! Well, the Women's Health Protection Act would put an end to all of that, and if we want a world where women have the freedom they deserve as citizens, we need to put an end to all of that. When men can give birth, I'll be happy to revisit this issue.

Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3076/S. 1720, the Postal Service Reform Act. What's the reason our Postal Service suffers? Is it Big, Bad Gummint? Is it that workers get paid too much and get away with too much? Is it bad management? Is it that "stamps cost too little"? Dear reader, it is none of these things -- it is the crushing mandate Congress imposed upon our Postal Service nearly 15 years ago, which makes our Postal Service pre-fund retiree benefits 85 years in advance. No wonder our Postal Service has to borrow money to make ends meet! Get rid of that onerous mandate, one under which literally no other corporation or government entity suffers, and we'll go a long way toward saving our Post Office. Which its quite excellent workers deserve, by the way, just as much as the rest of us do.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell your Senators to get rid of the filibuster. Seems like every day we get more reasons to get rid of the filibuster, and here's another one: Republicans won't vote to lift the debt limit, even though that's a drama they only create when Democrats hold the power. Democrats can do it on their own (and they should, if for no other reason than to prove they're the Adults in the Room), but Republicans have filibustered, or threatened to filibuster, every damn other thing, too. Why, even putatively pro-choice Susan Collins won't vote for the Women's Health Protection Act! Republicans say no to everything, and Americans can't have nice things as a result. We deserve better; it's well past time Democrats did better, and stopped masturbating over the "sanctity" of the institution.

Action: concerning vaccines, refugees, pollution, "fraudits," and campaign finance.

Long story short: tell our government to loosen trade restraints on vaccine production, admit more Afghan refugees, and deliver the most vigorous Clean Car standards possible; tell Pennsylvania state legislators to end their election "fraudit," and tell big corporations to stop donating to Republican insurrection-supporters. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Rethink Trade helps you tell the Biden Administration to stop dragging its feet on stimulating world-wide vaccine production. Despite our Administration's stated preference for a waiver on intellectual property demands that would stimulate vaccine production worldwide -- which would reduce the chance COVID would come back to bite us again and again and again -- we know from an internal WTO document that our Administration has, in fact, not been pressing in any meaningful way on this matter -- they voted against the South Africa/India proposal to suspend intellectual property rules vis a vis COVID vaccines, and they continue to lament "lost momentum" without actually providing any of that "lost momentum" in negotiations. In sum, their ass is showing, and the best way for them to cover it up is to do their jobs already.

Daily Kos helps you tell the Biden Administration to ensure all the Afghan refugees who helped out our 20-year war effort can get asylum in the United States. Compassion is one good reason to do this; we-broke-it-we-bought-it is another. But you know what's a bad reason to do this? The fact that we still have homeless veterans! Well-meaning people have brought this objection to me recently: we're going to take care of Afghan refugees, but not our homeless veterans? Thing is, we actually do have programs that help homeless veterans, and the fact that some of them aren't getting the help we need is actually not a good reason to deny help to everyone (or anyone!) else. I'd go so far as to say their position is illogical, in fact. So if your nephew brings it up, now you know what to say.

Consumer Reports helps you demand that our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) enact the most vigorous Clean Car standards possible, and ignore the self-interested arguments of big auto manufacturing corporations. I guarantee you our comments will vastly outnumber theirs anyway. But seriously, we have all the winning arguments -- if cars get more miles to the gallon, they'll pollute less, and we'll spend less money on gas for all the years we drive them. What does the other side say? That cars will cost less to buy, which means little if you can't breathe the air or pay more for gas. Yet the EPA's plan, as currently constructed, has more than a few loopholes designed to induce agreement from big automakers -- as if they don't always demand more! But we've got to speak up, not least so we can eventually win in court, as we did all through the Trump years.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: the ACLU helps you tell your state Senators to end their attempts to bring an Arizona-style "fraudit" to Pennsylvania. Arizona's "fraudit" of Maricopa County votes -- conducted by a firm with no experience in election audits but plenty of experience in saying STOP TEH STEAL!!!!! very loudly -- cost the taxpayer money, amplified absurd election fraud claims, damaged Maricopa County's voting machines to the point they need to be replaced (again at taxpayer cost), and (per at least one very rich Trumphole) will shortly report exactly zero "voter fraud" in Maricopa County's 2020 votes. So, yeah, let's bring all that drama to Pennsylvania! If I cared only about politics, I'd say bring on the fraudit and watch Pennsylvania's independent voters all vote Democrat in 2022. But since I care about civilization, and despise drama, I'm going to advocate for better behavior instead.

Common Cause helps you tell big corporations to stop funding the 147 Congressional Republicans who gave aid and comfort to the January 6 coup. They would be the ones who voted not to certify the 2020 election, even though the "allegations" of "fraud" were utter bullshit, and a lot of corporations talked a good game about not giving them money anymore, but they've quietly gone back on their word. We're talking General Motors, American Airlines, UPS, and Tyson -- all household names, giving their blessing (and their cash) to politicians who acted like diaper-loaded brats earlier this year, and enabled the attempted coup at our Capitol on January 6. They deserve all the bad publicity we can give them, and we're good enough at using the Big Stick of Bad PR that we can make their donations toxic. So let's do that.

Around the table: from hidden monopolies to stupid Governor tricks.

Another week, another excellent Matt Stoller article showing how monopolies create shortages. You won't necessarily know the names of the monopolies in question (Shimano and SRAM for bike parts, Thermo Fisher and VMR for plastic lab supplies, Newell Brands for Mason jar lids), but you will get the point. You'll also witness the folly of producing most of our plastic resin in Texas, like no other American states had a shale boom last decade. Seriously, when they talk "market efficiencies," they really mean "efficiency in redistributing income upward to executives," because letting one or two corporations control everything -- even in niche industries -- is damn inefficient, actually.

From ProPublica we learn that landlords use algorithms to rate potential tenants, and surprise, surprise, no federal agency regulates this activity, nor do landlords make it particularly easy to find out what your "score" says about you, despite the fact that the Fair Credit Reporting Act actually mandates that they give you that info. There is literally no reason any of this should be a secret, and that includes how these algorithms work, or, perhaps more precisely, "work." Certainly no one would want us to think the answer to that question might be "it works in whatever way delivers the most money to landlords." (The CFPB also has some good advice in the article.)

Oh, splendid, now Joe Manchin gets to write the climate plank of the Build Back Better Act, which not only means he'll make sure big polluters get their welfare handouts, but that he'll get to seriously injure the bill before he figures out what bullshit reason he'll use to torpedo it completely. Or he'll just tag-team Kyrsten Sinema and she'll torpedo it! The New York Times leads with the fact that Mr. Manchin himself made half a mil last year from "coal production," but making half a mil in dividends from coal stock isn't really "production" per se; how interesting that a clearly dying industry can make so much money for some people, but not for, say, actual coal workers.

Speaking of Ms. Sinema, Tim Murphy at Mother Jones not only runs down the absurdity of "moderate" Democratic opposition to Medicare drug price negotiation generally, but reminds us that Ms. Sinema ran for Senate on lowering drug prices. In case you're thinking AHA TWO DIFFERENTZ THINGZ!!!!!, letting Medicare negotiate lower drug prices will lower drug prices generally, and not just for the more than 60 million Americans on whose behalf Medicare would negotiate drug prices. Once big corporate employers see the deal Medicare gets, they're going to want to get that deal, too. That doesn't mean we should just tolerate the existence of private health insurance; it just means we use the world we're in to get the world we want.

At least President Biden has said he'll negotiate no deals with Republicans in exchange for their voting to raise the debt ceiling; he learned that much from Barack Obama, who famously refused to give in to Republicans over this same matter in 2013, though I thought he learned that lesson rather late himself. Speaking of learning lessons, Democrats ought to lift the debt limit on their own and stop complaining that "both parties increased the debt, so both parties should lift the debt limit." The message they should bring to the midterms is we governed, they whined, and I think lifting the debt limit on their own actually helps spread that message.

Finally, did Gov. Brian Kemp (E-GA) really say that you shouldn't mandate the COVID vaccine because they didn't mandate the AIDS vaccine and that worked out? Yes, he really did say that -- more than once! -- and the only true part of it is that, yes, no one mandated an AIDS vaccine because the AIDS vaccine doesn't exist. So, is he trying to prove he really "cares" about people by suggesting that he supports a nonexistent AIDS vaccine? How 1999 of him. Well, they say right-wingers have trouble catching up with the times.

Action: concerning voting rights, privacy, law and order, defense spending, cyanide bombs, and plastic recycling.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Vote Act, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, and the People's Response Act, and tell your Congressfolk to cut defense spending, ban cyanide bombs, and put responsibility for recycling plastic on its manufacturers, not people. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Both Public Citizen and People for the American Way help you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2747, the Freedom to Vote Act, which would do almost all of what the For the People Act would do -- it would make Election Day a national holiday, enact same-day voter registration and 15 days of early voting across America, give ex-felons back their right to vote, and clamp down on partisan gerrymandering and "dark money" campaign financing, plus it would block states from overriding election results that give them a sad. It's basically the For the People Act minus the ethics reforms, which leads one to wonder if all that drama Joe Manchin put us through really worth it. And he could still move the goalposts, as he's done repeatedly on other bills this year. Still, this is America, and what he wants should matter a whole lot less than what we want.

Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. Our Fourth Amendment, you recall, protects us from unreasonable searches and seizures by law enforcement, but currently law enforcement can grab your personal data if they get it from a third-party data broker -- which buys your data from your internet service providing corporation, which latter corporation cannot hand over your data to law enforcement without a warrant. The law protects you from your ISP, then, but not from the corporations your ISP sells your data to. A certain strain of right-winger loves to point to this loophole as proof that government doesn't work and laws don't work, when all this loophole proves is that real security is a lifelong effort. I guess right-wingers don't like work.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4194, the People's Response Act. This bill would create a Division on Community Safety within our Department of Health and Human Services, and this Division would help states and localities stop using our police officers as the Swiss Army knives of our civilization, and instead implement better approaches to community problems. I think police should be serving warrants and making arrests -- I don't even want them getting kittens out of trees, because we have animal control officers to do that. And that's just one area where we already accept an alternative to policing without yelling about "defunding the police." Pass the People's Response Act and we can get our state and local governments to do better in other areas as well.

Both Win Without War and World Beyond War help you tell your Congressfolk to cut defense spending already. Because we already spend more on our military than the next 12 nations combined do! And how much of that is for defense, really, and how much of it is for enriching some defense contractor crony or other? We should also question, given the long-term effects of our meddling (still think our CIA planning a coup against Mr. Mossadegh in 1954 was a good idea?), whether we're really a positive force in foreign affairs. No, it's not "unpatriotic" to say so; in fact, I'd say it is unpatriotic to simply refuse to question yourself, since America is all about doing better, and if you're not asking yourself the hard questions, I sure as hell don't want you in my foxhole. Or anyone else's, for that matter.

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban our use of cyanide bombs in the wild. You don't like how land mines kill and maim people 50 years after the war's over, right? Now contemplate a capsule that not only lures wildlife in with a sweet smell, but sprays cyanide around indiscriminately when triggered, indiscriminately enough that it kills any and all wildlife in an area, not just the wildlife our government is trying to kill. It sounds like a developer's dream, actually, though I don't imagine unexploded cyanide bombs will just overlook them. Don't be the one who says this is no big deal because "death is always violent." The mere existence of violence doesn't justify perpetrating any and all kinds of violence on other living creatures. And civilization abhors nihilism.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the big plastic-manufacturing corporations, and not taxpayers, take responsibility for recycling their products. They've got more money, after all! You remember when soda manufacturing corporations started advertising their "shatterproof" bottles in the late '70s? You'd see a big bottle of Pepsi bounce on the floor again and again. We sure didn't know what that would bring to our world -- not just dead animals dying of plastic pollution, not just trash islands forming all over our oceans, but good Americans who now ingest about one credit card of plastic every week just by using the plastic products that are now everywhere. So it can't just be your local sanitation department, paid for by your taxes, doing all the work.

Around the table: featuring the usual -- evil politicians, evil tech magnates.

Operation Demoralize the Base has kicked into high gear, with the report that Joe Manchin wants to delay the budget reconciliation bill into 2022 and Kyrsten Sinema won't support Medicare drug price negotiation. What is Sen. Manchin's big-picture strategy? You will search in vain for the answer; perhaps he wants his eventual Republican opponent to run ads about Mr. Manchin's opposition to free community college, paid family leave, and Medicare drug price negotiation, and such ads wouldn't exactly be lies. And what is the basis of Ms. Sinema's opposition to Medicare drug price negotiation? Again, she won't say, so your guess is as good as mine; I suspect both our guesses would be "because she gets big bucks from big pharma corporations." That would mean 90% of the people wanting Medicare drug price negotiation means nothing to her, and if you point that out to her, you might get this reaction.

Hard to believe, Harry, but Facebook was still showing troll farm content to 40% of Americans as late as 2019, which sure leads one to believe that they have never been very emotionally-invested in their vaunted commitment to fix its little fake news problem. "When the content producers that win that system are exploiting communities on our platform rather than building and supporting them," one former Facebook data scientist says, "it becomes clear that the ranking system does not reflect our company values." Facebook cares only about "engagement," never mind if the "engagement" does nothing but diddle your rage gland. They're even putting Rick Scott posts in my newsfeed. They must have high hopes of turning me into an asshole.

Max Chafkin excerpts his book about Peter Thiel, and provides a chilling account of the sociopathic nature of big technology corporations today. "Move fast and break things" sounds cool in certain contexts, I suppose -- sometimes you might be tempted to hope that someone "moves fast and breaks things" in the Democratic Congressional caucus! -- but these clowns move fast and break America. And it's really no comfort that Messrs. Thiel and Zuckerman might one day destroy each other if they destroy all of us in the meantime.

I was surprised to see, in this rundown of Republican candidates' efforts to use the "stolen" 2020 election as a 2022 campaign theme, that notorious Colorado political operative Dick Wadhams -- if you look at his name twice, you know his nickname -- has railed against these absurd theories! They drive independent voters away, he says, and he's right about that. There's some hope for Democrats in 2022, I guess, since they're not going to win their races by doing good works, the way they're going.

Finally, in a related note, Republicans are already running attack ads against Democrats on tax increases. The electorate, by and large, no longer believes Republican BS about taxes -- if they did, they would have rewarded Republican tax-cuts-for-the-rich at the ballot box in 2018! -- but, again, Republican arguments on taxes can still work, if Democrats do nothing for the American people between now and then, which sure looks like the preference of Messrs. Manchin and Sinema, if not the entire party. Why can it work? Because it's an argument. What will the Democrats' argument be? We couldn't stop stepping on our own dicks, but c'mon, our opponents are evil? That has worked exactly once in recent memory, and it worked against a guy who bungled a pandemic response and had 400,000 deaths on his watch; I wouldn't count on making that into a pattern.

Action: concerning evictions, corporate lobbying, taxes, paid family leave, and Medicare.

Long story short: tell your state's Governor to distribute eviction assistance funds immediately, and tell your Congressfolk to stop listening to corporate lobbyists, raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, enact paid family/medical leave, make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, expand Medicare, and enable Medicare to negotiate drug prices. 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. Daily Kos helps you tell your state's Governor to get to stepping about distributing federal rental assistance funds. With only 11% of these funds distributed so far, and with the federal eviction moratorium ending, I trust the urgency is clear. But it wasn't clear enough to certain American states, which contracted with private corporations to distribute the money, and these corporations, guess what, haven't done a very good job of it, which may have been the whole idea. When governments contract with private corporations that screw up, it's still government's fault. Of course, they're not just screwing over tenants, they're also screwing over the landlords who are trying to get paid, so let your Governor know your will today.

Clearly Congressional Democrats have lost their way with the Build Back Better Act, so it's time to remind them of our will. First, Daily Kos helps you remind your Congressfolk that they work for us, not the big corporate lobbyists who are trying to preserve the Trump tax cuts for their paymasters. A lot of Democrats appear to have forgotten that fighting corporate lobbyists is actually quite popular with voters! Instead they're acting like big corporate lobbyists get a million votes each while everyone else gets zero, so we need to make a pointed statement about their continued appeasement of big corporations. Big corporations don't drive our economy; people do. Big corporations don't make the big changes; people do. And big corporations don't have the power; people do -- if we but exercise that power.

Concurrent with the preceding paragraph, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to tax the rich and corporations much harder than we currently do in order to pay for the Build Back Better Act. The American people have pretty much spoken about both of these matters, in poll after poll after poll over the years -- nobody falls for the "corporations need to pay less in taxes to create more jobs," especially considering how poorly the Trump Administration sold it. Also, Barack Obama openly campaigned on raising taxes for the rich in 2012 and won re-election, while Republican tax cuts for the rich and for corporations didn't prevent Democrats from taking back the House in 2018. The American people know the score, better than we did during Tha Bush Mobb's rule. Now we need to take the fight to the politicians.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a paid family/medical leave program in the Build Back Better Act. Again, paid family/medical leave is quite popular with folks who work for a living -- the folks who worry about whether they'll get fired if they take a day off to care for a sick parent or child, or if they get sick themselves and don't want to infect their co-workers, and that latter issue has become a bit more pointed thanks to this pandemic, amirite? Of course, people like our Congressfolk -- who can miss votes at will or pretend their attempts to gin up campaign funding is "work" -- generally don't understand how it is for working people. And that's why we get in their grills until we make them understand.

Both the Friends Committee on National Legislation and Moms Rising help you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion permanent. The Child Tax Credit expansion just started delivering another $250 or $300 check into the bank accounts of working families across America; why would Democrats want that to stop? Out of "fiscal responsibility," no doubt, and why do they feel the need to act like Republicans? Especially when Republicans themselves are just acting? Politicians will say THERE'S NOZ MONEYZ!!!!! whenever we propose doing something good for the American people, but they'll tell us that corporate welfare will "pay for itself." Those Trump tax cuts were supposed to "pay for themselves"; how did that work out? Working families deserve a little breathing space; it sure ain't like their bosses give them that.

Finally, both Daily Kos and Penn PIRG help you tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate drug prices in the Build Back Better Act. It's a pay-for, no matter how much "moderate" Democrats pretend "we can't afford it." If someone asked you if you could "afford" having more money, you'd think they were stupid. I've written extensively about this lately, so I'll just add one more thing: "moderate" Democrats would have no right to accuse people of "failing to compromise" with them over this matter, because H.R. 3 (the model for the Medicare drug price negotiation plank) is already a compromise, since it wouldn't cover every drug. It's like Joe Manchin coming up with new reasons to sink a bill every time he agrees to something. And we can't let that kind of behavior win in America.

Around the table: from the influence of Occupy Wall Street to the failure of the latest right-wing rally.

Michael Levitin at The Atlantic informs us that "Occupy Wall Street Did More Than You Think." Now, the movement didn't "appear to vanish" so much as President Obama used federal law enforcement to break it up, but it did help change the conversation about the rich -- from THEY ARE TEH GREATESTEZ!!!!! to the more-accurate they live off our labor like parasites -- and it spurred a new generation of liberal activists from the Fight for $15 to Black Lives Matter. And if Occupy never materialized into a wave of actual liberal Democrats taking back the House, you can blame that on the fact that (unlike the Tea Party "movement") it never had millions of dollars in corporate support. Gosh, I wonder why that was!

William Rivers Pitt at TruthOut points out the, ah, conflicts of interest of at least two of the three "moderate" Democrats who voted down Medicare drug price negotiation last week. Rep. Peters of California not only takes a crap-ton of big pharma money but is married to a CEO involved with the industry, while Rep. Schrader of Oregon inherited a crap-ton of money from his big pharma bigwig granddad. "It's more than campaign money for these two," Mr. Pitt writes. "It's in the family." The good news? The House Ways and Means Committee also voted on Medicare drug price negotiation, and they passed it, at least. Close to 90% of Americans want Congress to let Medicare negotiate drug prices; if Democrats whiff on this, they deserve to lose Congress next year. They'll deserve it even if we don't.

Mother Jones compiles some stories about "Bad Bosses," and I'd be surprised if the shock of recognition didn't hit most readers, even if you're not an overworked COVID nurse or a gig worker ruled by an algorithm. But I feel compelled to point out that a lot of these bosses are assholes because they're getting pooped on by their bosses, and that's not always easy to see from the perspective of the pooped-upon worker. One could even argue that our entire make-money-now-screw-the-future economic system poops on even the big bosses, but that argument certainly requires more generosity than I possess. I mean, if you have millions of dollars, you're not exactly a prisoner.

Oh, splendid, now France has a right-wing news channel that's winning all the ratings races and ginning up rage in the populace. C News is a network for people who feel like they "can't say anything anymore" because their friends and neighbors have had it up to here with all the filth that comes out of their mouths -- in short, it's for the outcasts who deserve to be outcasts. Now watch right-wingers take over France and completely dismantle their gold-standard health insurance system after promising they-would-never, while doing nothing about crime or immigration or whatever they're supposedly mad about, because you sure don't create the next generation of hotheads by doing good works!

I might not have noted the COVID-related death of yet another right-wing radio host who wouldn't get a COVID vaccine, except that this particular individual -- Bob Enyart, and after this we will never mention him again -- used to celebrate AIDS-related deaths on his show back in the day by playing Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust." Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury, as you likely know, died of AIDS in 1991. You just as likely remember "Under Pressure" and "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" and "We Will Rock You" and a few dozen other terrific songs more than you remember how he died -- unless you're a right-wing asshole, that is.

Finally, in case you were wondering, the "Justice (sic) for J6" rally went considerably more quietly than January 6 itself did, with a mere 200 attendees, not counting reporters and heavily-armored Capitol police. Also, the rally only lasted an hour, instead of an eternity, and did not end with Confederate flags flying through the Capitol, this time. I'd say it's nice that some right-wingers seem to be coming around to the idea that solitary confinement is torture -- remember, I don't blame people for seeing the light only when it affects them, like we're supposed to learn everything through thought experiment! -- but I'm pretty sure they'll put their newfound convictions aside as soon as someone they don't like gets thrown in the SHU.

Regarding Medicare drug price negotiation.

On Wednesday, three "moderate" House Democrats on the Health and Pensions Committee voted with Republicans against a Build Back Better Act provision that would have allowed Medicare to negotiate drug prices, and since the resulting vote was 29-29, the provision didn't advance out of committee. While the arc of history bends toward justice, as Dr. King told us, that arc sure looks flat while we're standing beneath it, so we can't merely dismiss pessimism about the Democrats' efforts to use what power they have to do good works for the American people. And Medicare drug price negotiation is a slam dunk as far as the popular will is concerned -- both the Kaiser Family Foundation and Data for Progress have found close to 90% support for it in recent polls -- which would make the Democrats the Ben Simmons of political parties if they can't get it done.

"Moderate" arguments against Medicare drug price negotiation sure ain't slam dunks, either. One of the three "moderate" Democrats who voted against the bill, Rep. Kathleen Rice (NY-14), floated the suggestion earlier this week that Medicare drug price negotiation was "not fiscally responsible," an argument that offends not just intelligence but sentience. Our Congressional Budget Office (or CBO) estimated the savings on drug prices for Medicare drug price negotiation (as per H.R. 3, which wouldn't even let Medicare negotiate the prices of all drugs) at $456 billion over 10 years; House Democrats have, more informally, estimated the savings at $700 billion, and, as I may have mentioned on occasion, the right-wing Mercatus Center rather unsuccessfully buried their finding that Medicare drug price negotiation would save a whopping $840 billion. The fiscal-irresponsibility argument thus fails under the most cursory scrutiny, but "moderates" stand ready to deploy substitute arguments. Rep. Scott Peters (CA-52), having apparently failed to grasp the literal meaning of the word "negotiation," warned of "government-dictated prices" for drugs, and Rep. Kurt Schrader (OR-5) loosed the zombie lie that Medicare drug price negotiation would "kill() jobs and innovation that drives cures for these rare diseases."

The "fiscal irresponsibility" and "government-dictated prices" lies are evil, of course, but persuading folks of that is much easier than it was a dozen years ago. But the "kills jobs and innovation" lie is worse, because it still gives too many good Americans pause. If drug corporations make less money in profits, they'll have to cut jobs? Sounds cut-and-dried! Except, of course, that it's not, and not just because what a corporation spends on research isn't "profit" by definition. For 40 years Our Glorious Elites have conditioned us to accept that literally any time a corporation loses money it should just fire people. But the big pharma corporations could also pay their CEOs less, enable less CEO stock buy-back activity (since that's what normally happens when you give corporations the kind of "freedom to innovate" we're talking about here!), or spend far, far less money on advertising. Or they could take even more taxpayer funding than they already do. As I've said before, American taxpayers funded the Moderna COVID vaccine in its entirety, and as it happens literally every single drug our FDA approved between 2010 and 2016 received at least some taxpayer funding.

But the innovation lie does more harm than that, and it does harm we can quantify, as the aforementioned Data for Progress study found that support for Medicare drug price negotiation softened somewhat (from 86% to 81%) if you mentioned innovation as a reason to oppose it. The "stifles innovation" argument doesn't admit the nature of innovation as we have understood it for thousands of years. "Necessity is the mother of invention" is a cliché for a reason, after all, and corporations, like people, don't innovate because they have the "freedom" to do so, but because they have. The "freedom to innovate" is a meaningless phrase, because none of us "innovates" unless and until faced with an obstacle or problem of some kind. And that's not all the harm the lie does. Let's say corporations simply said they wouldn't research new drugs unless we let them sell to Medicare for how ever much money they wanted, and damn the cost to the taxpayer. Why would we tolerate that? We're Americans, which means, among so many other things, that we don't think of ourselves as hostages; we think of ourselves as free people. Should free people simply let big corporations charge as much as they'd like for prescription drugs under threat of future painful death due to a willful lack of drug research?

I said earlier that the failure of this vote -- which we can rectify, if we do our jobs and get in our Reps' and Senators' grills about it -- makes the Democrats seem like the Ben Simmons of political parties. But there is always the possibility they just want us to think so -- that they fully intend their big budget reconciliation bill to die by a thousand cuts, of which this Medicare drug price negotiation failure would be one, all so that they can continue the horrible drama of post-Reagan American politics, where Democrats do nothing with the power they get, lose their power to Republicans, fundraise on Republicans' evil behavior, and then only gain power back when Republicans do the unconscionable. And though making "moderate" Democrats vote against a popular legislative initiative has some utility, this bill also has more paths to failure now. Voters won't blame Joe Manchin now if the bill fails; they'll blame all Democrats, which would surely usher in a Republican Congress, and also a fascist one. Regardless of Democrats' good or evil intentions, our task is the same: we tell them to do the right thing, and not the "politically safe" thing that is actually the politically poisonous thing. We tell them, if you can bear another sports metaphor, to stop going into the prevent defense with three minutes left in the fourth quarter, because you know what they say? The prevent defense prevents winning.

As always, 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 contact info. Good luck and God bless.

Action: concerning war, whistleblowers, police, and "fraudits."

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2001 and 2002 Authorizations to Use Military Force (or AUMFs), protect utility grid whistleblowers, demilitarize our police, and end qualified immunity, and tell Pennsylvania state legislators to stop whining about the 2020 election and reject any proposed "fraudit" thereof. 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.

Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Senators to pass S. 2391, the National Security Powers Act. As you know, the last four U.S. Presidents have used the 2001 and 2002 Authorizations to Use Military Force (or AUMFs) as excuses to launch unconstitutional military adventures at will -- but S. 2391 would repeal both those AUMFs, and about damn time, too. S. 2391 would also put more constraints on future AUMFs -- among other things, it would cut off funding for new military adventures after 20 days unless Congress approves them, and it would sunset all future AUMFs after two years. And then, with some diligence and oversight, we can get back to ensuring Congress declares the wars, not the President. Remember: "hamstringing the President's ability to act" is a feature of our Constitution, not a bug!

The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend whistleblower protections to workers who maintain our electric grid. That grid, as you might imagine, is suffering under the weight of climate change weather, and it's also like a big ice cream cone to folks who would want to terrorize good Americans -- and I want you to imagine other Americans, not foreigners, as the folks who would want to terrorize you, since that's likely how it'll be. And yet electric grid workers face retaliation if they report trouble on the grid -- even if they report, say, wildfire-related trouble. You imagine that you go through life doing the right thing, and standing up when the situation calls for it, right? In reality, most of us decide that losing our job and our family suffering isn't worth it. And that's why we need to better protect the people who do stand up.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell our government to demilitarize our police. As I've said before, those right-wingers who think of Nazism whenever they confront a vaccine mandate or a sign telling them to wear a mask inside a store should more closely contemplate the spectre of police officers routinely using grenade launchers on protestors. Of course, many right-wingers have already contemplated this, and have decided that militarizing our police is necessary to the degree they use tear gas and rubber bullets on Those People. But it is entirely possible that, in the near future, our government will start going after the folks who bomb abortion clinics and try to overthrow our government, and it may take time, but I think many right-wingers will then see the utility of maybe not making every cop into a walking time bomb.

The Daily Kos Liberation League also helps you tell your Congressfolk to end "qualified immunity" for police officers. It's very, very hard to bring a bad cop to justice these days, not so much because of unions (even though other liberals say so!), but because our courts make it almost prohibitively difficult via the entirely court-created doctrine of "qualified immunity," whereby you can't bring a bad cop to justice unless your case almost exactly resembles a previous case which brought a bad cop to justice. And how many cases are almost exactly like others? This places the burden of proof rather far above "beyond a reasonable doubt" and into the rarefied air of "ain't never happening." And the good folks who've had their brother or sister or mother or father or son or daughter shot for brandishing a cellphone or a water gun deserve more than that.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: Common Cause helps you tell your state legislators to reject any attempt at a 2020 election "fraudit" like the one they had in Arizona. When they're not whining about the utter absence of evidence pointing to widespread voter fraud that would have, say, wiped out President Biden's eight-million vote lead across the nation, they're saying things like if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to fear! Actually, that's not even true: you have the loss of taxpayer money, for one thing; you have the shame of throwing away that money for bellyaching, for another; and you also have voting machines that have to be decertified and replaced (also at taxpayer cost!) because the people conducting the audit have no fucking clue what they're doing, like the Cyber Ninjas in Maricopa County, Arizona. When will Republicans feel shame over what they've done? When they look around and find no one supports their works. So let's help bring that about. It'll be better for all of us.

Action: concerning Medicare, Guantánamo Bay, vaccines, Arctic drilling, public water, and campaign finance.

Long story short: tell our government to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices, close Guantánamo Bay, prevent big pharma monopolies from stopping worldwide vaccine production, ban Arctic drilling, and stop private corporations from taking water from our public lands, and tell corporations to stop bankrolling the campaigns of Texas state legislators. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

First things first. Word on the street is that the House Energy and Commerce Committee, currently marking up the Build Back Better Act, actually doesn't have the votes to pass Medicare drug pricing reform. Virtually everyone thinks Medicare should be able to negotiate drug prices -- everyone, that is, except big pharma corporations, who appear to be getting all the say about everything, yet again. This is why independents vote Republican in the midterms -- because Democrats are too scared to offend their big donors and do big things. And in 2022, it'll be worse, because most of the Republicans running will be out-and-out fascists. The three members of the Committee most opposed to Medicare drug pricing reform are Rep. Schrader (D?-OR), Rep. Rice (D?-NY) and Rep. Peters (D?-CA). If you're a constituent of any of these three, please call them and tell them to do the right thing, not least because the alternative is fascists taking Congress. Call them even if you're not a constituent, though. It's that important. And big pharma ain't anyone's "constituent," so any Rep who treats them like one has pretty much forfeited the right to nitpick about whether any of their callers are constituents.

Public Citizen helps you tell President Biden to close the Guantánamo Bay detention center already. He promised he would, so he ought to keep that promise! As you know, Saturday marked the 20-year anniversary of 9.11, which means almost 20 years of pretending the "terrorists" we've held in Guantánamo Bay without charge and without trial were "too difficult to prosecute, but too dangerous to release," in the Obama Administration's immortal words. It was all a lie, and we have done our civilization incalculable damage since 9.11 -- and if right-wing crybabies get their way, as they far too often do, we'll continue to suffer the fruits of that damage for years to come. That makes it all the more urgent that we close this self-inflicted wound on our national honor.

Rethink Trade helps you tell the Biden Administration to use every tool at their disposal to ensure vaccines can be produced and administered worldwide. Because the alternative is COVID-19 mutating and coming back to bite us in the ass again and again -- recall that scientists first spotted the Delta variant, currently slicing its way through red states, in India. At the point of life-or-death, things like "big pharma's intellectual property rights" don't matter a whole lot -- or, at least, they shouldn't. And "every tool at their disposal" means pushing for an intellectual property waiver from the WTO, of course, but it also means using already-existing legal authority to force big pharma corporations to produce vaccines worldwide. Taxpayer money invested in them, after all -- taxpayers like you and I paid for the Moderna vaccine in its entirety, in fact -- so we get a say in how they're used.

The Alaska Wilderness League helps you tell our government to stop drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR). Opening up ANWR to oil drilling was a key "achievement" of the Trump Administration, but we all know why we would put "achievement" in quotation marks there -- scientists have long told us we're not getting very much oil out of ANWR, and we know that drilling in the Arctic Ocean presents unique problems, like the near-impossibility of cleaning up the inevitable oil spills in near-freezing water. But you know, the will of the Gwich'in Native Americans who live there, and the Porcupine caribou they depend upon, aren't chopped liver, either. Often, the compassionate thing to do is also the pragmatic thing to do -- but too often, the politicians ignore both in favor of whatever pleases some crony or other. You can fight that by leaving a public comment opposing Arctic drilling.

Environmental Action helps you tell our U.S. Forest Service to deny any permit applications to corporations attempting to draw water from our San Bernardino National Forest in California. BlueTriton, formerly Nestlé Waters North America, drew some 58 million gallons of water from Strawberry Creek in the aforementioned San Bernardino National Forest just last year, but at least California wasn't in a state of drought or anything. Oh, wait, they were! And the drought is even worse this year! This, as farmers struggle to water their crops, to the point where they actually use fracking wastewater on them. Hmm, fracking wastewater on crops, private water siphoning -- could it be that preventing the latter could make the former unnecessary? Why, yes, it could -- but only if we speak out in numbers they can't ignore.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell big corporations to stop bankrolling the campaigns of Texas's most extreme right-wing legislators. These would be the legislators who passed both SB 1, Texas's notorious anti-voting law, and SB 8, Texas's notorious abortion ban, and if corporations want to do something more than issue PR releases sympathetic to the plight of women, they can, you know, stop bankrolling the campaigns of these politicians. Of course, they may not want to do more than issue sympathetic PR releases, which is why we brandish the Big Stick of Bad PR. (As an aside, don't be too impressed that Salesforce has vowed to relocate any Texas employee who wants to leave because of SB 8. If you're an employee who requests that, your boss has just learned a lot about you, and you're much better off keeping yourself to yourself as much as possible at your job.)

UPDATE. And on cue: Rep. Kathleen Rice (D?-NY) says she cannot support Medicare drug price negotiation because it is "not fiscally responsible." Wondering how saving the taxpayers $84 billion every year is "not fiscally responsible"? Yes, I bet you are, as is any sentient life form on Earth. Her D.C. office number is 202.225.5516. She deserves to lose her re-election bid, and the way Republicans are going, she'll lose it to Zombie Adolf Hitler.

Action: concerning paid leave, voting rights, Social Security, consumer protection, women's health, and our Supreme Court.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to enact a paid family/medical leave program, pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and expand Social Security, tell your Senators to confirm Rohit Chopra as Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Women's Health Protection Act and the Judiciary Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a paid family/medical leave program in the upcoming reconciliation bill. Their constituents would actually like this, since they all have families and they all get sick but they rarely get paid time off unless they have a collective bargaining agreement, but these are Democrats we're talking about, and they're as likely as not to say "we just can't afford it right now." Most folks, confronted with that excuse, would respond we can't afford not to do it! And they'd be literally correct -- while politicians say "we can't afford it" based on some nebulous budgetary scheme that gets thrown out the window as soon as corporations want some welfare handouts, too many Americans literally can't afford to miss a day's pay, or lose a job that won't accommodate their family needs. I say go with the people's will, not the politicians' excuses.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. As Congress guts the For the People Act just to appease the West Virginia Senator and his content-free complaints the bill, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act remains a strong response to our Supreme Court's own gutting of the Voting Rights Advancement, as it would reinsert and strengthen the provision our Court hated because it "discriminated against Southern states." Which have rushed to restrict the right to vote much, much more over the last eight years! What a coincidence! H.R. 4 would reestablish federal pre-clearance of voting rights changes, but for any state or locality that has demonstrated a pattern of vote suppression. And if that happens to include Southern ones, then they need to do better! I ask so little.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security. "Conventional" "wisdom" has it that we need to cut Social Security benefits because of some time in the future the Trust Fund will supposedly run out of money, but we've blown past a few of those deadlines! Which means you shouldn't trust the AAAAAAAAAAH ENTITLEMENTZ MUSTZ BE REFORMEDZ!!!!! crowd. Better to trust simple math: if we lift the payroll tax ceiling, currently around $142,000 annually, then income over that can finally be taxed into the Social Security system. And then we can increase benefits, improve cost-of-living increases, and improve benefits for surviving spouses and children, among other things. Will the cost-of-entitlements crowd ever shut up? Probably not -- they tend to be rich folks! But if we improve Social Security, they'll have less credibility, and Social Security will be safer.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Senators to confirm current FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra as our next Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) Director. The Trump Administration tried to turn our CFPB into a lapdog for the financial industry -- the same financial industry that crashed our economy in 2008, like no one remembers basic facts! -- but we have every reason to believe that Mr. Chopra will reverse that weak, sorry mandate and turn our CFPB back into an agency that will protect good Americans from financial predators, as it did during Mr. Corddray's tenure. Mr. Chopra even has experience in the CFPB as the official in charge of cracking down on student loan predators, something the Trump Administration found controversial, for some reason. It's too rare to have good people running our government; let's encourage that wherever we can.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women's Health Protection Act. With Texas having essentially nullified Roe v. Wade (yeah, that's what a six-week abortion ban does, since most women can't even tell they're pregnant until afterward!), Congress needs to step in and ensure that women can get abortions when they need them. And it's not very much about "not wanting children" -- it's more about needing an abortion because it's put your life in danger, or needing an abortion because the fetus isn't viable. Right-wingers strut about how only they care about human life, but they demonstrate again and again they don't care about human health care. This is America, of course, so they shouldn't get all the say about everything. Even when they wave guns in our faces.

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2584, the Judiciary Act, which would expand our Supreme Court from nine Justices to 13. Daily Kos cites our Court's recent refusal to intervene in the aforementioned Texas anti-abortion law as the most pressing reason to expand our Court, but we could cite a host of others. Chiefly, however, we have 13 Courts of Appeals, and having one Supreme Court Justice preside over each one would better ensure every appeal that needs hearing gets heard. Both the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts have avoided hearing a whole lot of cases, but we can at least put pressure on them to do more of the work they're supposed to do. And if Joe Biden gets to appoint four more Justices? Too bad -- Republicans got enough unearned Court appointments over the years.

Around the table: notes on COVID, Afghanistan, monopolies, mandates, and the Senate's biggest drama hound.

Remember all that BS about how Obamacare would create "death panels"? Well, thanks to right-wingers refusing to wear masks and get vaccinated, now we have them at hospitals in northern Idaho, and may soon have them in Washington state, as well, as good Idahoans try to figure out where to get urgent health care. Best quotation, from a guy whose heart surgery keeps getting put off: "My heart is failing without intervention. I can’t walk a block without stopping. But their choice (to not get vaccinated) just negated my urgent need." We should put it more or less like that to everyone who whines about "my personal choice." And given how hard it is for people to change their minds, especially when they're dead wrong, we'll have to do it numerous times.

America's Last Journalist, Greg Palast, makes the most compelling case yet that we shouldn't have left Afghanistan. Of course, he's up against people like Lindsey Graham, who never met a war he didn't like, but I'll admit his argument gave me pause. Long story short: he argues that the Taliban are irredeemable fascists like the Nazis were, and that we kept them at bay in Afghanistan with a mere 3,000 troops. Some things are worth going to war over, and I never assumed Afghans simply didn't want to fight, but I still don't think we would have done enough good there if we had stayed, even if we had stayed another hundred years.

Matt Stoller explains "Why a Monopolized Economy Leads to Inflation and Shortages." If you recall how WalMart has killed small businesses all over America and how Amazon has killed smaller book store chains like B. Dalton's and Encore -- let alone have tried to find toilet paper at the supermarket in the past year! -- you'll already be sympathetic to his argument at the beginning, when he describes how Uber and Lyft killed the D.C. taxi industry. But it goes deeper, not just to economists so obsessed with inflation they're blind to shortages, but to corporations concentrating entire chunks of the supply chain (video tape in Japan, semiconductors in Taiwan) in the name of "efficiency." And it goes deeper than that; reading Mr. Stoller is a real education in how corporations manipulate our economy. (How about a law banning loss-leading from corporations worth over $1 million?)

Maggie Astor at the New York Times reminds us that "Vaccination Mandates Are an American Tradition. So Is the Backlash." At the turn of the 20th century, parents fought smallpox vaccine mandates by burning their own arms to mimic smallpox scars, like a bunch of G. Gordon Liddys, and parents actually did fight the child vaccination mandates of the 1970s that few folks complain about today (though they didn't fight the polio vaccine, partly because a non-profit made it and partly because no government mandated it). Nonetheless, "one thing distinguishes today’s anti-vaccination protesters from those of the past. The opposition was always political. It wasn’t always partisan." That's what makes folks like me so much less sympathetic to the other side.

Finally, it shouldn't be news by now that Joe Manchin is trying so desperately to be the center of the world again, but it might do some good to note that he's incorrect to say, in re the budget reconciliation bill, that "(w)e don't have the need to rush into this and get it done within one week because there's some deadline we're meeting." In point of fact, Congress must pass the reconciliation bill by September 30, per reconciliation bill instructions passed earlier this year, and though that may not literally be "within one week," of course people like Joe Manchin will drag this out to the last damn minute because power is a hell of a drug. And if they cause it to fail, that just affirms their power! But if the bill fails, Joe Manchin will only have that power for another year until Republican fascists take back the Senate and another Republican fascist beats him by 20 points at the polls in 2024, so I hope he enjoys it.

Action: concerning Medicare, home care, taxes, drug prices, and corporate welfare.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the full Build Better Act, raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, enable Medicare to negotiate drug prices, tell Congress to lower drug prices for everyone, and end corporate welfare for fossil fuel corporations. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

With Build Back Better Act text coming within a day or two, now would be a good time to call your Congressfolk and tell them to pass the full bill, with all $3.5 trillion of planned spending. That means (among other things!) expanding Medicare and expanding home- and community-based care services, since these are the two initiatives Congress will most likely drop from the bill. But wait! What about what Joe Manchin wants? Everybody asks that, but not enough of us ask, "what about what we want?" I find it hard to believe that the American people would object to expanding Medicare, since clear majorities in poll after poll find that Americans want everyone on Medicare. I also find it hard to believe that the American people would object to spending on the home- and community-based care that we're all going to need sooner or later. But in order to prove that, we have to speak out.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise all $3.5 trillion for the Build Back Better Act from higher taxes on the rich and on corporations. But wait! What about the Unspeakable Nine in the House Democratic caucus? Again, the correct question is "what about what we want?" The American people have, again, demonstrated in poll after poll that we want to tax the rich and corporations a lot harder than we're currently doing; we have demonstrated this, in poll after poll, despite being relentless propagandized by the politicians and our "liberal" media about the "harm" higher taxes on the rich and corporations would do. And again, we have to speak out in order to prove it -- particularly since the winged monkeys of the right are certainly speaking out.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to close the "stepped-up basis" loophole which enables the rich to avoid taxes on investments. The rich have gamed the system well enough that they never have to sell an investment to get cash -- they can just go get a loan using their investment as collateral for that loan, sheltering their investment from taxation. Don't believe the hype about closing this loophole affecting family farms and small businesses, because the Biden proposal specifically exempts these businesses, as long as the owners hold onto them. "Stepped-up basis" sounds pretty inside baseball, I know, but that doesn't mean your will to close it should count less than the will of some PR hack who makes a living confusing everyone. Your will is your will, and your representatives need to respect that.

Public Citizen still helps you tell your Congressfolk to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices. "Moderate" Democrats stand ready to proclaim that we "can't afford" that, but if Medicare can negotiate drug prices, it will save the taxpayer money. As literally any sentient life form would tell you! Let alone the right-wingers at the Mercatus Center, who told us in 2018 (not that they, ah, foregrounded this information) that Medicare drug price negotiation would save us $84 billion annually, meaning $840 billion over 10 years, meaning about one-fourth of the total price of the Build Back Better Act. Does that mean we should still raise all that money from the rich and from corporations? Of course we should! But we should also enact policy that would make Medicare run better for less money. And if the big pharma corporations don't like it, well, again, we need to stop asking about them, and we need to start asking about us.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower drug prices for everyone in America. Medicare drug price negotiation would do wonders for the drug prices our seniors pay, but we all deserve lower drug prices. Seriously, should we merely tolerate corporations that charge a thousand dollars monthly for life-preserving insulin just because they can? Should we tolerate corporations charging $600 for an EpiPen that cost them far less to produce? No, we are civilized people, so we should not tolerate that. And if any of your friends or family tell you that folks should eat better so they don't become diabetic, remember that if any of them become diabetic, they'll assume they worked hard to avoid it whether they really did or not. Pretty much everyone is like that, and civilized people don't assign blame so much as solve problems.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to end fossil fuel subsidies. If they cost us over $20 billion annually, that's $200 billion over 10 years, or around five percent of the cost of the Build Back Better Act; five percent ain't a lot, but surely every dollar counts, particularly when it's our dollars they're talking about. Fossil fuels hardly need the welfare handouts we give them, not when they monopolize their markets, not when they refuse to embrace renewable energy as any forward-looking entrepreneur ought to do, and certainly not when they make money hand over fist. You've heard them say oil corporations only make seven cents per gallon of gas? Think of all the gas you buy, and multiply that by 300 million Americans, and you'll begin to see that argument is a lot like saying a CEO is underpaid because he only gets $6 every time he draws breath.

Around the table: from "rigged" elections to bad journalism.

Surprise, surprise! Donald Trump says that Democrats have "probably rigged" the California recall vote, because of mail-in ballots and, also, because "I guess you even have a case where you can make your own ballot." "I guess" -- sometimes he can't help but tell you he's full of crap. He's seen how the recall polls have been going lately, and I suppose he could be getting his excuses ready like a manager talking about injuries before the season even starts -- or he could be suggesting folks who would oppose recalling Mr. Newsom (or, more precisely, folks who would oppose a right-wing knucklehead replacing him as Governor) should stay home tomorrow because it's in the bag anyway. (No, I don't think Republicans and independents inclined to recall Mr. Newsom will stay home because the race is "rigged" -- if anything, I think they'll be more inclined to show up.)

U.S. District Court Judge rules that Florida's "anti-riot" law is unconstitutional, because it was "vague and overbroad" and written in crayon. OK, I made that last part up. Or did I? At least one reputable commentator has wondered how a Harvard Law graduate like Gov. DeSantis can keep losing cases in court, but I suspect that for Gov. DeSantis, winning isn't the point -- play-acting the tough guy is the point, as it is for all of his kind now. What are they going to do, point to their good works? Not the Governor of the state still responsible for around one of every 10 new COVID cases daily in America, that's for sure.

When I hear that Donald Trump's cronies are paying high-school age boys to create internet memes, I say of course he got teenage boys to do his work for him! Who else has that much time on their hands, that little responsibility, and that little awareness of how they come off to sane people? OK, pre-teen boys are worse in all those regards, but they're less able to act like adults, which makes them less dangerous. It gets better: the Trump cronies monetize the memes with obscurely-placed links because of course they do. You might think these teenage boys get a decent slice of that money, until you remember that a human soul is beyond price.

When I hear that "Anti-maskers and Anti-vaxxers Now Present a Real Threat of Violence," I do find myself asking then why are these fools not in jail? Particularly if they're going around filming themselves threatening other people's lives, as some of them are doing. I sure hope it's not because our police secretly sympathize with them. (As an aside, I'm so, so glad to see America's Frontline Doctors getting unearned attention again. If they provide any service at all to our civilization, they prove that advanced degrees do not necessarily correlate with knowledge -- even as they use their advanced degrees as a shield with which to attack the actually informed. Irony really sucks sometimes.)

Mike Giglio at The Intercept worries that "The Forever Wars" we used to fight abroad "Are Coming Home." "War, especially interminable war," he writes, "makes people want to claim the sanctity of combat for themselves and to inject the stakes of conflict into their lives," thus now we have right-wingers calling George Floyd protestors "terrorists" and "insurgents." Surely watching dozens of cop shows whose protagonists get into approximately 22 life-or-death shootouts every calendar year doesn't help, but the fact that "a sense of purpose" is too often "missing from American society" hurts us even more. I wonder where we might have lost our sense of purpose. I kid, of course -- we lost it when President Reagan started dismantling the New Deal state that reinforced that purpose and ensured its endurance.

Finally, as we remember the 20th anniversary of 9.11, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting "(l)ook(s) back on two decades of media self-censorship, scapegoating and stenography." And malice, FAIR is perhaps too polite to add -- though some Fox News personalities get covered here, I don't think they did what they did out of weakness or cowardice. Think back now: did you know the Fox News Channel existed before 9.11? Me neither. And now we can't even get our cable corporations to drop them, even as they've lately done much worse than just "get fully behind the war efforts of the George W. Bush White House."

Action: concerning Guantánamo, student loan debt, uranium mining, cleaner cars, monopolies, and clemency

Long story short: tell our government to close Guantánamo already, fix the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, stop funding uranium mining, make cars cleaner, and break up Amazon, and tell the state of Illinois to show Christian Reichert some mercy already. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Both the ACLU and Amnesty International help youtell our government to close the notorious Guantánamo Bay detention center already. Opened by Tha Bush Mobb after 9.11, the Guantánamo Bay detention center has been holding decidedly non-threatening terror "suspects" for close to 20 years now, and if they were as "dangerous" as they were supposed to be, well Jesus Mary and Joseph we would have put some of them in jail, or, at the very least, charged them with something. What is the likelihood that the three dozen most dangerous people in the world are all in one spot? It's been one stupid and offensive lie with Guantánamo after another for two decades. We managed to get ourselves out of Afghanistan, painful and horrible as that was; getting out of Guantánamo should, quite frankly, be much easier. And when Lindsey Graham says this'll lead to another 9.11, he'll be wrong as usual.

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Department of Education to fix the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program. Authorized by Congress in 2007, the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program aimed to forgive the student loans of good Americans who spent 10 years in public service (teaching, soldiering, volunteering in the Peace Corps, etc.) and kept up with their student loan payments all the while -- but only 2% of all applicants have ever gotten any kind of loan forgiveness from the program. And the failure happens for bad reasons, including both bad advice ("consolidate all your loans into one private loan whoops private loans aren't eligible") and the proverbial red tape (that somehow considers rounding up your loan payments to be "noncompliance" with your loan terms!) Could it have been designed to fail? Doesn't matter -- we can demand that it work, and we can make it work.

Penn Environment helps you tell our government to stop funding uranium mining. Why do we need uranium? Mainly to make weapons and nuclear reactors; nuclear power hasn't made money for decades, and we already have enough damn weapons. I know, we also use uranium for silk and wool dye and stage lighting bulb filaments, but gosh, should we pollute our air and water everywhere we mine for uranium so we can have those things? C'mon, this is a can-do country! But our government wants to create, essentially, a massive corporate welfare program for uranium mining corporations; does that seem like a good use of taxpayer money, i.e., your money? No, it does not. A better use of taxpayer money might be, oh, I don't know, creating public utilities that use renewable energy. They'd work, and they'd belong to us.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous fuel efficiency standards possible. What's that, you say? You heard that President Biden already did that? Well, our EPA proposed much tougher fuel efficiency standards than those adopted by the Trump Administration, but a public comment period follows every rule proposal, and our EPA reviews all those comments, and then adopts or adjusts the standards based on the comments. And you don't want all the pro-pollution commenters to drown you out, right? Because the big auto corporations are getting their PR flacks to do just that. Granted, their comments will suck, while our comments will be good -- no, it really will be pretty much like that, don't let big corporate PR hacks bamboozle you! -- but if we don't leave comments, we won't get heard. So let's get heard.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to break up Amazon. Amazon has proposed buying MGM studios for $8.45 billion, and for once, our FTC is investigating the matter. And our FTC has some vocally anti-monopoly Commissioners these days, so this investigation might yield results! Still, if we-the-people don't communicate our will, they might get cold feet, as our leaders so often do these days in the face of corporate power. And we'll have plenty of good reasons to oppose the merger -- not just because it'll allow Amazon to prevent MGM from letting any streaming service other than Amazon Prime carry their content, but because of all the jobs and competition that'll get wiped out, since that happens every time we let big corporations merge. It's well past time our government actually enforced antitrust laws with some vigor.

Finally, Change.org helps you tell the state of Illinois to free Christian Reichert. Mr. Reichert somehow got 23 years in jail for pot possession, after what may have been his first significant encounter with law enforcement; I couldn't tell you how he managed to get such an overblown sentence, but I can tell you that you don't even need to believe he's been a model prisoner for the last seven years to think he should get out -- hell, you don't even need to think pot should be legal for him to get out. You don't even need to suspect his trial wasn't on the up-and-up to think he ought to get out! All you need know is that pot is now legal in Illinois, which makes his absurd predicament even more absurd. So letting Mr. Reichert out is a bank shot as far as doing the right thing is concerned.

Action: concerning taxes, Social Security, Medicare, drug prices, clean water, and workers' rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, expand Social Security, expand Medicare, lower drug prices, get the lead out of our nation's water pipes, and protect workers' rights. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations. You've heard that big corporations have worked their nefarious will on Democrats by shrieking about "international competitiveness"? You've heard that Joe Manchin says he won't support a reconciliation bill over $1.5 trillion? Ain't nothing over until we say it is! If we say, in large enough numbers, that corporations and rich folks need to pay more taxes, then nothing corporate lobbyists or drama-hound Senators will matter. It's that simple! There is no law of physics that says "whatever Joe Manchin says goes." There is no law of physics that says "nothing can be done because there's just too much corporate money in politics." The only law of physics is the popular will. And we have to act like it.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security. Don't believe the hype that TEH SOSHUL SECURITIEZ IZ TEH INSOLVENTZ!!!! Big corporations trot that lie out every few years, in the hopes they will get their grubby hands on what you worked for, paid into, fought for, and deserve. Truth is we can make Social Security by expanding benefits, and we can shore up whatever hole might appear in the Social Security trust fund in 20 or 30 or 70 years' time by raising the ceiling on payroll taxes. Currently Social Security simply doesn't tax income over $142,000, when that's where all the money is! Seriously, lifting the income cap on Social Security's taxes will infuse a lot of life into the greatest pension there ever was. And like I said, Americans deserve to live a dignified retirement.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare in the budget reconciliation bill. Democrats have proposed lowering the Medicare age to 60, expanding coverage to dental, vision, and hearing care, and letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices, which will save the taxpayer enough money to fund all the new coverage. And, frankly, lowering the coverage age to 60 will probably save some money, too, as folks do tend to be healthier at 60 than they are later. Indeed, we could very well apply the same logic to argue that Medicare should include everyone, since folks are also generally healthier when they're 20 or 40 than they are at 65 and up. And we will argue that! For now, we need merely argue that expanding Medicare is actually better, even if Chicken Littles say otherwise.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower drug prices for everyone. Why do big pharma corporations charge us more for the same drugs people get in Canada and England and France? Because they can, that's why! And they don't charge more money in those other nations because they can't. Letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices would be a start -- Medicare buys drugs on behalf of over 60 million Americans, after all -- but we can do other things as well, like empower our government to produce generics of a drug if the manufacturing corporation won't lower the price. Hell, we can enact price controls, too! I don't know where "price controls" became this nasty epithet; a lot of good Americans would like our government to control drug prices.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1352/S. 916, the WATER Act, which would get the lead out of our drinking water pipes all over America. Don't hesitate to support the WATER Act just because you also supported H.R. 1376, the GET THE LEAD OUT Act, which essentially does the same thing -- it's more important right now for our Congressfolk to hear that we want the lead out of our water pipes, since the budget reconciliation blueprint passed by both Houses of Congress aims to do just that. And they need to hear that more than they hear "international competitiveness" or "ZOMG inflation" or "ZOMG the deficit," which is what the forces of evil are pummeling our Congressfolks' ears with as we speak. Like I said in today's earlier post, I hate it when horseshit wins. We are the horseshit killers.

Finally, both The Juggernaut Project and Daily Kos help 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 all over America -- the PRO Act's opponents act like that's a bad thing to do or something -- and would also protect workers from their bosses dragging them away from their important work and forcing them to watch anti-union propaganda. Because if you were treating your workers right, you wouldn't need to propagandize them against unions! One good thing about this pandemic? We demand more from our jobs than the back of our boss's hand. If we pass the PRO Act, we can get more of what we want from our jobs.

Around the table: from the prototypical Trump endorsee to the latest Joe Manchin betrayal.

Pennsylvania Republican Senate candidate Jeff Bartos says rival Sean Parnell, endorsed by Donald Trump mere days ago, is "unelectable" because of past protection-from-abuse orders Mr. Parnell's wife filed against him during their divorce. Mr. Parnell denies everything, despite documents attesting to the existence of these orders (if not their precipitating events), and, more importantly, he shows both rage and self-pity in his denial, and thus you have the two reasons Donald Trump endorsed him and the two reasons his votaries will fight to the death for him. So Mr. Bartos doesn't look "desperate" so much as he looks like an accomplice. If Mr. Parnell winds up facing Conor Lamb in the 2022 Senate race, I bet he wins -- he only lost the PA-17 House race to Mr. Lamb by two points in 2020. I can think of at least one way to avoid that result (cough John Fetterman cough).

Facebook wants to start a digital wallet app, and wants you to know that they know there's a "trust deficit" with our federal regulators, at least, though they don't take any of the blame for that. The 150 million Americans who lost their personal info in the last Facebook data breach might blame Facebook for this "trust deficit"! And Facebook executive David Marcus alternates between sounding like an abusive domestic partner ("this time you can trust me, pinky swear!") and a man who can't stop telling you how much smarter than you he thinks he is ("you may not know you want blockchain, but you do!"). Between all that and his resemblance to Rahm Emanuel, he may have just become my least favorite American. (Hate to pile on, but "if I could redo it all over again" is redundant, and a sign that he knows he's shilling snake oil.)

California Republican gubernatorial candidate Caitlin Jenner says that she "supports a woman's right to choose" but she also supports a state "having the ability to make their own laws," meaning that she's somehow both pro-choice and a supporter of Texas's anti-abortion law SB 8. That argument's so gob-smackingly awful it may have stunned the CNN anchor into failing to ask a follow-up question like "so a state could reinstate Black slavery, then, because it has a right to 'make its own laws'?" California's far right -- which still exists and is still quite obnoxious -- won't be happy with either her "disagreement" with the law or her hedging about it, which may be why California Republicans have turned their attention to Larry Elder in the gubernatorial recall race.

Speaking of which! Larry Elder tells Candace Owens this about reparations: "When people talk about reparations, do they really want to have that conversation? Like it or not, slavery was legal. Their legal property was taken away from them after the Civil War, so you could make an argument that the people that are owed reparations are not only just Black people but also the people whose ‘property’ was taken away after the end of the Civil War." I must say that playing devil's advocate is something you should really grow out of by the time you're, say, 23; but Larry Elder is three times that age now. Let me also say that if (as he suggests) the price of avoiding a Civil War would have been paying off the Southern slaveowners, then give me Civil War, because some things are worth going to war over.

After signing a heinous abortion bill and a heinous vote suppression bill a mere seven months after mismanaging a winter storm about as badly as a Governor can, Texas Governor Greg Abbott's approvals are underwater, for once -- 41% approve and 50% disapprove, the latter number revealing his vulnerability. Sadly, he will get re-elected in 2022, if Democrats once again run a do-nothing candidate who "fits the state" and "can win" but mostly just walks on eggshells around right-wingers. If you must talk to right-wingers at all, you talk to them directly, and if they whine about it afterward, that's their problem.

Finally, not long after returning to West Virginia from a possible plane trip to see Mitch McConnell in Lexington, KY, Joe Manchin has declared that he won't accept a budget reconciliation bill over $1.5 trillion. He already voted for the $3.5 trillion budget blueprint last month; so much for keeping one's word, eh? So yeah, no Medicare expansion, no paid family leave, no care economy expansion, no renewable energy spending, no getting lead pipes out of our water system, all because the One True Great and Real American President Joe Manchin worries about inflation. But if over $5 trillion, in deficit spending, over a mere nine months only hiked the inflation rate to 5% -- and I don't say that it actually did -- how would $4.5 trillion, in paid-for spending, over 10 years, cause inflation to "run away" from us? I hate it when horseshit wins. Obviously we need to be a lot louder.

Action: concerning infrastructure, fracking, police, privacy, endangered species, and campaign finance.

Long story short: tell our FCC to better protect communication infrastructure, tell the DRBC to ban fracking-related activities from the Delaware River Basin, tell President Biden to demilitarize our police, tell our FTC to punish T-Mobile for its latest data breach, tell our Fish and Wildlife Service to do better at saving red wolves, and tell AT&T to stop funding anti-abortion politicians in Texas. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Free Press helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to better protect our communications infrastructure from the effects of climate change. And if that means issuing new regulations that make corporations build better infrastructure, too bad! Where private corporations refuse to do their job, government must step in, and by the looks of New Orleans's power outage, the private corporations that "manage" New Orleans's electricity ain't doing their job: aside from the loss of phone services (many of which are cable-provided now!), 911 calls didn't get answered for over 12 hours after the storm hit, and since AT&T manages that service in New Orleans, you can hang that on AT&T. But you'd rather be able to hang it on your government, since you can better fight them if they screw up. AT&T executives can wipe their asses with hundred-dollar bills, so they're immune to accountability.

Food and Water Action helps you tell the Delaware River Basin Commission (or DRBC) that it should allow no activities related to fracking near the Delaware River. Fracking you can understand, since it would put dangerous chemicals in a river serving citizens of five American states, and indeed the DRBC did ban fracking in the Delaware River watershed last year. But the DRBC might consider letting gas drilling corporations siphon off Delaware River water to use in fracking elsewhere! That's our drinking water, dammit! The DRBC might also decide to let these corporations store or dispose of fracking waste in the Basin, and, again, that's our drinking water, dammit! Calling that a compromise would be like if King Solomon actually split the baby in half, so let's not let that happen.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell President Biden to demilitarize our police. Police don't need tanks and grenade launchers to arrest folks and serve warrants -- they "need" them to put down the good Americans who protest police brutality! I mean, if you want to go by how these military weapons actually get used. President Biden pledged to end the 1033 program that lets local police departments buy surplus weapons from our military -- but then, says word on the street, police unions got in his grill about it and made him back down. That means we have to get in his grill and make him keep his promise to us! Folks who whine that vaccine mandates are "Nazism" really ought to take another look at police officers who walk the streets armed like soldiers.

Free Press helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to punish T-Mobile for its latest data breach, which has potentially exposed the birthdate, driver's license number, and Social Security number of 50 million good Americans to identity thieves. Why, you can rig up a fake identity on one or two of those items, let alone three! And this is the fifth big data breach at T-Mobile in just three years, so we can look forward to another round of apologies and we'll-do-betters from T-Mobile executives -- who will then do nothing, because, as I put it earlier, they can wipe their asses with hundred-dollar bills. But, again, where big corporations won't do their job, our government has to step in and do it, hence we call upon our FTC to hold T-Mobile accountable. Our FTC has good people in charge of it now, but we still must communicate our will.

The Endangered Species Coalition helps you tell our U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to do better at saving red wolves, one of the most endangered species on Earth, given that there are only nine of them at present, where there were 130 as recently as 15 years ago. Our laws mandate that our Fish & Wildlife Service look for a place for them to live in peace (where they won't get hunted or hunt other species into endangerment), but word on the street is that they've let themselves be hamstrung by a single well-connected property developer into abandoning their lawful duty. Federal judges have twice told our Fish & Wildlife Service to do its job, and yet they act like our laws mandate that single property developers get a veto over the law whenever they like. That's not very law and order of them, so we should stop it.

Finally, UltraViolet helps you tell AT&T to speak out against the Texas abortion ban and stop funding anti-abortion politicians there. They'll probably stop at doing the first, which is why we're telling them to do both -- PR releases aren't worthless in and of themselves, but they are worthless without action, and they're certainly worthless if AT&T keeps funding the campaigns of the same politicians who enacted the nefarious abortion ban! AT&T will probably retort that they fund those politicians for "economic" reasons, or even that they won't have enough "access" if they don't fund these clowns. But would that be the can-do attitude of the free market? Because it sounds more like "we've got the power and we're not going to use it." But the Big Stick of Bad PR beats any carefully-worded corporate PR release. And we're not afraid to use that.

Action: concerning abortion, financial predators, taxing the rich, Medicare, and tax cuts for working families.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Women's Health Protection Act and the Veterans and Consumers Fair Credit Act, fund the budget reconciliation bill with higher taxes on the rich and on corporations, allow Medicare to negotiate its own drug prices, expand Medicare coverage to include dental, vision, and hearing care, and make the EITC and CTC expansions permanent. 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. Daily Kos, Ultraviolet, and Moms Rising all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women's Health Protection Act. You hate how Texas has basically outlawed abortions, and how our Supreme Court has done nothing to stop them? Then we need to pass the Women's Health Protection Act, which would stop abortion bans at the state level, not to mention all the other roadblocks (the finding of "heartbeats," forced ultrasounds, forced bad medical advice) states love putting up so that women can't take care of themselves. If we don't want our civilization to turn women into breeders again, if we don't want women to be forced to carry fetuses without organs or fetuses that develop problems that threaten the mothers' lives or the fetuses of rapists or abusive partners, then we need to pass the Women's Health Protection Act.

US PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2508, the Veterans and Consumers Fair Credit Act. Payday lenders can't prey on our soldiers like they used to, because our laws give our soldiers extra protection, via lower interest rate caps and the like; the Veterans and Consumers Fair Credit Act would extend those protections to everyone in America. Because why not? If it helps our soldiers get back on their feet, it can help anyone else get back on their feet. Payday lenders will hate this, but that's OK, because I hate payday lenders and all their evil works. Forcing people into 300% death spiral loans is not a "living." This is America! Payday lenders should do some real work! They should build something, or serve someone, or make people's lives easier. But seriously, this worship of mammon is going to kill us all.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the rich and corporations pay their fair share of taxes to fund the budget reconciliation bill. Corporations and rich folks don't want to pay as much in taxes, so they should just get their way? Nobody would let you or I get away with that! Certainly they shouldn't get more say about that than the American people do -- Representatives are supposed to represent their constituents, after all, and they're not supposed to let the whining of big corporations and rich folks drown out the will of their constituents. Their constituents tell us, in poll after poll after poll, that corporations and rich folks should pay more. We just have to be loud about that.

Pursuant to the aforementioned reconciliation bill, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to allow Medicare to negotiate its own drug prices in the budget reconciliation bill. After all, if they're going to cave on tax hikes, they're going to need money from somewhere, and letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices is a pay-for. Per the right-wing Mercatus Center, Medicare drug price negotiation would save the taxpayer $84 billion annually, working out to $840 billion over 10 years, and thus working out to about a quarter of the reconciliation bill's $3.5 trillion price tag. That doesn't mean we won't hear from "moderate" Democrats that "we can't afford to let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices," but that's stupid, and anyone who repeats it deserves ridicule and shame. And if they're in office, they deserve defeat.

Public Citizen also helps you tell your Congressfolk to include dental, hearing, and vision care in Medicare, and without copays. After all, seniors have ears, eyes, and teeth, too! And they're not all gazillionaires, either! A lot of them live on their Social Security checks, after all! It's unconscionable that we've had Medicare almost 60 years and it's only covered drugs less than 20 years (and, as I said above, we can improve that service dramatically!) and we don't cover ENT care at all. Some fools quickly retort that Medicare Advantage does cover all of that, but Medicare Advantage is private health insurance that sucks taxpayer funding out of Medicare (just as charter schools suck public school funding!), and dental, hearing, and vision care shouldn't be "advantages," they should be services all seniors can get.

Finally, the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the Earned Income Tax Credit (or EITC) and Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansions permanent. Because they help working families at lower incomes make ends meet, that's why! The CTC expansion is delivering $250 or $300 checks into bank accounts every month, and the EITC expansion now delivers almost $1,000 more annually into the pockets of workers who make less than $21,000 a year (the cap used to be $16,000/year). These tax cuts don't help banksters who don't need an ounce of help stealing money from us, they help working families. If you have personal experience deciding whether to feed your children or feed yourself, you might want to describe that to your Congressperson. They all have their stupid ideologies, but their stupid ideologies are no match for your real lives.

Around the table: from corporate electric utilities to Democrat weakness.

Thomas M. Hanna at In These Times argues that New Orleans's loss of electricity after Hurricane Ida proves "We Need Public Control of Our Energy Systems." You know, if that Enron BS in California in 2002, or Texas's utter failure to keep the lights on in a snowstorm in 2021, didn't already prove that! Recall that Greg Palast recently characterized what happened in New Orleans last week as something that wouldn't happen in Bangladesh during a monsoon. Mr. Hanna lists yet more of Entergy's sins in New Orleans, and also informs us that Sacramento's publicly-owned electric utility has functioned well through wildfires and worse. (You may remember that Nebraska is the only state in America which uses entirely publicly-owned electric utilities.)

An AP/Univision/Center for Public Integrity story finds that our USPS managers have been stealing wages from mail carriers for years. You may get that Louis DeJoy stink off this story, but this has been going on at least since at least 2005; managers got "disciplined" with things like more training, which, like, how much "training" do you need not to change your workers' time cards? Just so happens 2006 was the year our government mandated that our Postal Service pre-pay retiree benefits 80-odd years in advance, which has pushed our Postal Service almost $200 billion in debt even as it's cut over 140,000 jobs over the last 13 years; gosh, could all of that have something to do with the wage theft they tolerate? Remember: when something goes wrong, look to the bosses first.

Federal judge grants immunity from further prosecution to the Sackler family -- until recently the owners of Purdue Pharma, now widely-hated as the corporation that got everyone hooked on OxyContin -- as part of a bankruptcy settlement. Naturally the Sacklers admit no wrongdoing -- because settlements can't even get that done anymore! -- and though they'll lose Purdue and $4.3 billion as part of the settlement, they'll still get to hold on to over $5 billion and they'll still be one of America's wealthiest families. Law and order! At least our Justice Department plans to seek a stay on the judge's ruling; how vigorously they'll seek it I can't say, but I'm old enough to remember when a Democratic Administration wouldn't even do that, because looking forward economic crisis free markets.

I'm not a fan of headlines like "John Roberts Has Lost Control of the Supreme Court," because why do we assume this? Why do we assume that he's actually been trying to "control" the Court? Why don't we imagine that the chaos we saw over their non-grant of the ACLU's emergency petition to stop the Texas abortion law from going into effect -- a ruling that doesn't even rate as a conservative argument! -- is the desired end result? Yeah, I know he excoriated the ruling in his own opinion, but that could just be part of the drama: he gets to act all principled about precedent, while he also knows our Court has enough far right-wingers now that it doesn't matter.

Finally, Paul Waldman, in writing that "The Harsh Truth of This Moment" is that "Republicans Understand Power" and "Democrats Do Not," has just about summed up the last 40 years of American politics. It's enough to make you think that even when the Democrats passed a COVID relief bill that was actually as good as the HEROES Act of 2020, they were just playing us -- they have no intention of doing anything else that could actually make America a more perfect union, and that bodes ill for the budget reconciliation bill they have to pass this month. I think the American people have something to say about that -- but we have to actually say it.

Around the table: more thoughts about bad tax arguments and scare numbers.

Greg Palast, America's Last Journalist, reminds us that the Louisiana blackout is "Not an Act of God, But an Act of Entergy." Good New Orleans residents' electric bills keep going up and up, while Entergy's infrastructure loss during Hurricane Ida was, somehow, something far, far worse than a power loss "in Bangladesh after a typhoon." Bangladesh, as you know, is not exactly known for taking care of its citizens very well, so ouch. After that, you won't be surprised by the corruption Mr. Palast details -- though you may be surprised that Entergy has been running this scam for decades. It took Entergy a year to get the lights on after Katrina, but only Kathleen Blanco faced any accountability for that.

Jesus Mary and Joseph "moderate" Democrats are actually saying we can't tax unrealized capital gains because TEH FAMILY FARMZ!!!! It was horseshit 20 years ago, and it's even more horseshit now, since the Biden plan literally exempts family farms and small businesses from its proposed capital gains tax changes, but God forbid we let facts get in the way of yet another rage-addled drama foisted on good Americans by the rich. (As an aside, former Senator Max Baucus, who wrote the Wall Street Journal op-ed foisting this zombie lie upon us once again, was a bankster shill for all of his 36 years in office, yet retired from our Senate as one of its poorest members. You mean he did all that work for banksters because he believed in it? Gosh, I'd have liked him better if he'd lined his pockets!)

Colorado's allegedly Democratic Governor, Jared Polis, told a "conservative" conference (you know they're "conservative" because their event had the word "freedom" in its title!) that he wants to get rid of Colorado's state income tax. Arthur Laffer praises him, which is a kiss of death if ever there's been one. Mr. Polis further said he'd rather tax "things you want to penalize in society," like pollution and cigarettes, and though I'm warm toward the former and cool toward the latter, I have spent almost two decades arguing that excessive, unearned wealth is one of the "things you want to penalize in society." Also, too, a flat income tax is a bad way to penalize excessive, unearned wealth.

No, Virginia, police officers are not quitting in droves due to being told they execute too many Black folks. What's that? You've heard your cop friends say that? Your cop friends rely on stories they heard, but here's the data: local police departments have lost 1% of their employees during the pandemic, versus 6% for the economy as a whole. Our brains may be hardwired for stories, as they say, but collecting stories ain't necessarily the best way to build a civilization. Oh, and not for nothing, but the American Rescue Plan Act, for which precisely zero Republicans voted, sent more money police departments' way; so much for the "defund the police" talking point, amirite?

If you've been hearing about ZOMG TEH 2000 BREAKTHROUGHZ DEATHZ FROMZ TEH COVIDZ!!!!!, Richard Tofel reminds you that 2,000 deaths (if indeed there have been that many!) represents about one in 82,000 Americans, meaning you're more likely to get killed in a dog attack and almost as likely to get killed by lightning. "A Call for More Proportionality in Pandemic Coverage," he entitles his argument, though given how well our "liberal" media does with numbers, they're as likely to say ZOMG 82,000 DEADZ!!!! I'm more inclined to blame said "media" than I'd blame our own national aptitude at math, given how often our media present scare numbers without context. Remember ZOMG 941,000 SMALL BIZNIZZIZ!!!!!!? One could go on.

Finally, when I hear that anti-vax protestors have disrupted, and even shut down, vaccination drives in Georgia, my first reaction is what happened to "it's a personal choice"? Oh, right -- like everything else, it's a personal choice only for them; it's not a personal choice for you, and certainly not if you're going to make a different choice than they would. Which means these protestors aren't "free speech martyrs," they're just fascists. No, really, if they're actually going to prevent you from getting vaccinated, then they're trying to impose their choices upon you, which is what fascists do. I don't just fling that word around.

Action: concerning taxes, Social Security, paid leave, "forever chemicals," and drug policy.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, expand Social Security, enact paid family/medical leave, protect us from "forever chemicals," and pass the Drug Policy Reform Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations in the budget reconciliation bill. You've heard that lobbyists have gutted the tax-raising provisions in the bill? We might have something to say about that! But only if we, you know, actually say something. I mentioned yesterday that I think Democrats are trying to destroy the bill to keep us all in the perverse hostage situation we've long been in, where Democrats do nothing with their power, then Republicans take over, then Democrats try to cleave us to them by saying "we're not ogres like them!" You can tell your Congressfolk you're on to that plan, and if your Congressperson is on the Gottheimer/Cuellar axis, just remind them that their corporate paymasters will desert them for a Republican at the first opportunity.

This month marks the 86th anniversary of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signing the Social Security Act, Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security. You've heard that Social Security will stop paying full benefits by 2037? I'm old enough to remember when that date was supposed to be 2016! So, yeah, it's a load of rubbish -- these hysterical projections never take economic growth into account, for example, when even evil politicians try to grow our economy! -- and we should change the conversation about Social Security from ZOMG IT WON'TZ BE THEREZ!!!! to "if we start taxing income over $142,800, we can strengthen benefits for everyone." People generally prefer optimism to pessimism, in my experience, so we might as well respect human nature in our persuasive efforts.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact paid/family medical leave in America. We're about the only "wealthy" country that doesn't have it, and that's nothing to shout WE'RE NUMBER ONE! about, so let's fix it. And let's not brook any stupidity from "moderate" Democrats that we "just can't pay for it." Why, Joe Biden's a moderate himself, and he'd pay for it by taxing corporations more and taxing rich people more! Of course, the Manchin/Sinema/Gottheimer/Cuellar axis will mumble their excuses at that, so let's just say this: Sen. Gillibrand's paid family medical/leave bill (S. 337, from the 115th Congress) would have paid for it with a payroll tax of one-fifth of one percent, which, for someone making $50,000 annually, would work out to about $8.50 a month. $8.50! So no HOW WILL WE PAYZ FOR TEH THINGZ!!!!! It's damn stupid.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 2467, the PFAS Action Act. They won't be as unwilling as you'd think -- even the most right-wing Senators get regular correspondence on the effect of these "forever chemicals" on soldiers' health, since soldiers use, like, a lot of PFAS chemicals in their work -- but you never know when some right-wing Senator will hold popular legislation hostage to, I don't know, forced ivermectin injections for children (gosh, I wish that sounded a lot less likely!), so it's always best to get out ahead of it and communicate your will. We don't need cancer-causing "forever chemicals" in damn near everything we use. And if the big corporations who make the stuff don't like it, just tell them to find another way! This is America, the can-do country!

Finally, the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 4020, the Drug Policy Reform Act. The Drug Policy Reform Act would start getting us on the long-overdue path to treatment of drug addiction rather than criminalization -- and think about it: how does putting someone in jail for being addicted really help them? The bill would end criminalization of drug possession (though not drug dealing, you'll notice), start expunging and sealing drug convictions, eliminate "collateral consequences" of drug possession offenses (like losing your right to vote!), and start funding treatment programs. You know who'll really, really hate this bill? Private prison corporations, which feast on drug offenders. But they don't get all the say around here.

Around the table: more thoughts about Afghanistan and Trumpholes.

Another lesson in the utter uselessness of moderates: a lot of Congressional Democrats are working hard behind the scenes to scuttle tax hikes on the rich. They have to work behind the scenes, of course, because if they worked in the light of day, they'd burn to a crisp like the vampires they obviously aspire to be. And when you learn that former North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp used to want to repeal a particularly notorious tax-cut-for-the-rich, but now gets paid to advocate exactly the opposite position, you'll remember that money corrupts everything. That's before we get to raising the SALT cap, a cause for which "moderate" Democrats are apparently willing to kill every legislative endeavor.

Patrick Cockburn's excellent analysis about the Taliban's efforts to appear respectable by opposing ISIS deserves further comment. It's quite telling that "ISIS itself has denounced the Taliban as collaborators with the US," and while it may not be true, strictly speaking, that "only an understanding between the two can explain the speed of the Taliban advance and of the Kabul government’s collapse," as ISIS claims, I'm sure it still looks that way to a lot of folks. But in saying so, ISIS also plays into the Taliban's narrative; why, it's almost like that was the whole idea. We may be done pouring gasoline on the flame in Afghanistan, but we're not done seeing "war on terror"-related drama.

If you're scratching your head wondering how Florida Gov. DeSantis can still penalize schools that impose mask mandates even after a Leon County Circuit Judge said he couldn't, you could surmise that the ruling must only apply in Leon County, but your best bet is to consider that Mr. DeSantis makes the same calculation he always makes -- that "the bigger a jerk I am, the more my voters will love me, whether it works or not," and in the absence of a spirited Democratic alternative, it's not a bad political calculation. Maybe Charlie Crist could get some fire in his belly about something people care about for once, rather than simply rely on being the only non-jerk in the race? That would teach Ron DeSantis and his votaries right quick.

At long last Sen. Ron Johnson (E-WI) is taking flack from Trumpholes over his rather tepid statement that there's "nothing obviously skewed about the results" of the 2020 election in Wisconsin, and wouldn't it be something if this was The Last Straw for him? "Sheesh, I shill ivermectin everywhere I go, I say the coup wasn't so bad, I say we need an election audit in Wisconsin, and they're still not satisfied? Where would these clowns be without me?" I won't be particularly sympathetic if he throws up his hands and quits, but I will approve of the result, since he's in better shape to win 2022 than any other Republican who might run. Unless they hire his ad agency, maybe.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo runs down "The Great and Cowardly Press Freakout of August 2021" over our withdrawal from Afghanistan. Long story short: "the great majority of the criticism we’ve seen amounts to ignorance and deflection." Long story somewhat longer: the government fell faster than we anticipated, but we still got over 100,000 good folks out, and our "liberal" media still seems obsessed with optics, when they're the ones taking all the pictures! I don't think our "liberal" media should even be in the meta-commentary business. Historians and social scientists should be, of course, but the folks recording the news shouldn't be manufacturing it as well. Call me old-fashioned. (Also, too, if 20 years of occupation ain't enough to make a supposedly home-grown government last more than a week, then what's another six months going to accomplish?)

Finally, Jonathan Chair argues that Republicans aren't actually trying to hurt Democrats with their anti-vax strategy, but I"m not convinced by his argument. True, "Republican posture toward the coronavirus has not fundamentally changed since Biden’s election" (if not the beginning of the pandemic, I'd say!), but that doesn't rule out the possibility that Republicans have been using the entire pandemic, not just the vaccine, to try to hurt Democrats' political fortunes. And his puzzlement that Republicans would support one thing under Trump and the opposite under Biden can be answered with "gosh, they do that, like, all the time!" I'm not even sure they're "absorbing damage" with their machinations -- yeah, many more of their supporters (and voters) are dying these days, but you can always create new supporters by appealing to their thirst for rage, particularly when Democrats don't appeal to their highest natures, or look down on them.

Action: concerning slavery, vaccines, worker rights, surveillance, public water, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell Hugo Boss to get forced Uyghur labor out of its supply chain, tell our government to get more COVID vaccines out to the rest of the world, protect Amazon workers, and ban neural data exploitation; tell BlueTriton to stop taking Colorado's public water, and tell President Biden to fire USPS Board of Governors member Ron Bloom. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Sum of Us helps you tell luxury clothing corporation Hugo Boss to get the Uyghur forced labor out of its supply chain. Would it be untoward to note that Hugo Boss made its big move in the '30s making and selling Nazi uniforms? Then I guess using half a million Uyghur slaves in East Turkestan is par for the course! Still, the Big Stick of Bad PR works, even against a corporation that used to make Clothing for the Modern Nazi. Personal to those who worry that about the "unintended consequence" of the Uyghurs getting "hurt" by losing their place in the Hugo Boss supply chain: slavery is intolerable everywhere, in every context. I'm reminded of how anti-apartheid South Africans responded to similar arguments about divestment in the '80s: hey, our lives really can't be any worse.

Daily Kos helps you tell the Biden Administration to share COVID vaccine shots all over the world. I mean, if you want to talk about "world leadership," this is where you would focus, right? You'd focus on doing more than everyone else to ensure that we make sure we never have a pandemic like this again, which means making sure everyone on Earth can get a vaccine, since (as we have experienced over the last two months!) newer, deadlier strains of diseases will start among those unprotected by vaccines. "World leadership" has far less to do with protecting intellectual property and ensuring that big pharma corporations make billions of dollars than it has to do with, you know, protecting people. So let's make sure this Administration hears that.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect Amazon workers from all the corporate surveillance their bosses would inflict upon them. Amazon watches its workers' every move, and makes them move ever faster to keep up with production quotas; nobody could have predicted this would result in workplace injuries at double the warehouse industry average! (Let alone delivery drivers peeing in bottles.) There's helping your employees do better, via stick or carrot, and then there's totally subjugating your workers to your absurdly-high expectations, helped along by computer "research," no doubt. Well, let's see a computer lift 40-pound boxes for eight hours. Hell, let's see a boss do it.

Fight for the Future helps you tell our government to ban harvesting of your personal neural data. What on Earth is that, you ask? Some corporations are developing "brain interface technology" that could, one day, do a credible job not only of reading your mind but influencing it; currently corporations have to make do with simply harvesting all the data you leave around on the internet, but I don't want to begin a lot of sentences with "well, at least Facebook and Google didn't" one day. Laws have historically trailed big technological advances -- look how hard it is for them to keep up with social media! -- but there's no particularly good reason for that. If we have the will -- and, of course, if we make our lawmakers have the will -- we can stay ahead.

Environmental Action helps you tell BlueTriton (a.k.a. the Artist Formerly Known as Nestlé Waters North America) to stop siphoning off public waters in Colorado. Public water belongs to the public, after all, and selling it to corporations for a pittance so they can mark it up several thousand percent to sell as bottled water is bad policy. Better to hang on to your public water so the public can use it! You know, by drinking it, or washing with it -- hell, even watering the grass with it would be better! Did I mention that almost half of Colorado currently experiences "extreme" or "exceptional" drought? So giving away public water is an even worse idea in that context. Let's not do that!

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to replace Ron Bloom as USPS Board of Governors Chair. Yes, as a way of firing Postmaster General DeJoy, who would raise prices and cut services and declare that he's done a great job "saving" our Post Office! Problem is, Mr. Bloom is a big DeJoy supporter, which I'm sure has nothing to do with Mr. DeJoy investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in a fund run by Mr. Bloom! I'm old enough to remember when even the appearance of corruption made people resign their jobs. We're not in that America anymore, but if we speak out enough, we might one day bring it back.