Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning corruption and corporate welfare.

Our President has of course announced that he'll fire the Inspector General who first processed the whistleblower complaint that led to impeachment! On the basis that he's not a "fan" of our President! We're long past the point where we find such honesty refreshing, I hope. And we hear that our President plans to fire a bunch of other Inspectors General, presumably also on the basis that they're not "fans" of his. Of course we don't have Inspectors General to suck up to Our Personal Lord and Savior; we have them to root out corruption in our government -- which should be of keen interest to us, as governmental corruption can only occur with our tax money. Thankfully, the Inspector General Act gives Congress 30 days to stop the firing, so the National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop the firing of Inspector General Michael Atkinson. Don't brook any talk about Presidential "prerogatives," because that pales next to the people's prerogative to expose corruption and punish corrupt public servants.

You've heard, no doubt, that our government wants to pass yet another relief package relating to the pandemic, and with the previous package being full of big corporate payouts, what do you suppose will be different about this one? So naturally our President thinks that we should deal with the problems restaurant workers and owners are currently having making ends meet by bringing back more corporate welfare handouts! Specifically, he wants to jack up the corporate meals deduction back up to 100% (currently they can only deduct 50% of the cost of meals) and bringing back the corporate deduction for entertainment. If you're scratching your head wondering how that's supposed to help a cook pay her water bill, well, you're not alone. I don't know how much more proof folks need that our President only cares about other bosses -- I mean, you'd only come up with that idea by talking to a boss! Hence Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to put people ahead of profiteers and reject yet more tax-cuts-for-the-rich in any future stimulus legislation.

Speaking of which, our President also seems obsessed with giving oil corporations some corporate welfare goodies in the next stimulus bill. First he said gas would be down to 99 cents a gallon in America and that would be like getting a "tax cut," then he praised Saudi Arabia for declaring it would ratchet back oil production, which would pretty much wipe out that "tax cut." Since then he's met with oil corporation executives because as I keep saying he only listens to other bosses. Big oil corporations, frankly, don't need any more handouts, even if people are driving less than they did a month or so ago, so Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any more handouts for big oil corporations in future stimulus legislation. Don't brook any silliness about how "oil corporations only make seven cents per gallon," because they sold over 140 billion gallons in 2015, and banging the SEVEN CENTZ!!! saucepan is like saying CEOs are underpaid because they only make four dollars every time they draw a breath.

Finally, you know who might actually need some financial assistance? Our Post Office, that's who! Our taxes haven't funded our Post Office since the early '80s (take that, would-be Post Office privatizers!), and our Post Office has said it might shut down by June, and not just because of this pandemic: Congress has forced our Post Office to prefund its workers' pensions for the next 40 years, a demand Congress has never made of any other entity and one that costs our Post Office $5 billion annually. Despite all the obstacles our government keeps throwing in its way, our Post Office, in my experience, continues to do a pretty terrific job -- and we'd miss them if they weren't around, that's for damn sure. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to give a hand up to our Post Office in any future stimulus legislation. Go ahead and remind your Congressfolk that we may be doing a lot more voting-by-mail this election, and that they surely don't want to be perceived as anti-voting! And no we're not all just going to switch to UPS or FedEx! They cost a lot more money!

Penny Rants for Tuesday, April 7, 2020: special "our leaders still suck, except for the few who don't!" edition.

From Julia Carrie Wong at The Guardian we learn how hydroxychloroquine became a coronavirus "miracle cure." It began in March with a study out of France that didn't draw treatment and control groups from the same population and didn't ensure that physicians didn't know which treatment they were giving out -- that's basic science, you know -- plus they gave some-but-not-all patients an additional antibiotic (at which point you don't really know whether the drug did its work or not!), plus they used a tabulating loophole to be able to claim a "100% cure rate" that didn't exist. Then a drama king study co-author made a viral social media video, fellow drama king Elon Musk tweeted about it to his 33 million followers, and drama king right-wing news outlets (including Fox News) banged the saucepan about it. And then our drama king President (who, not incidentally, has a small financial interest in a corporation that makes the drug) jumped on the bandwagon. Not for nothing, but not only have folks have killed themselves taking this drug, but other patients who need the drug for its intended purposes have less of it now, proving, again, that it's too short a walk from government stifles the individual to only I matter!

From Eileen Applebaum and Rosemary Batt at Naked Capitalism we learn "What Wall Street Doesn’t Want You to Know About Hospital Emergency Rooms." This will explain -- better than anyone else has, I think -- why you get all those surprise medical bills from your ER visit! A doctor might work in a hospital emergency room, but her employer will be a "physician staffing firm" that the hospital contracts to run the ER -- and that "physician staffing firm" will likely be out of your health insurance corporation's network, hence the surprise bills. Hey, guess what you wouldn't have to worry about if Medicare covered all Americans? Networks, that's what. But if you think BIG GUMMINT!!!1111 shouldn't run health care, you would have to explain why you think hedge fund managers should -- or you'd have to come up with an alternative that isn't "the free market," since "the free market" got us into this mess. In the meantime, you should look at TeamHealth's firing of Dr. Lin (for blowing the whistle on equipment shortages and bad hospital safety practices) as, well, exactly the sort of thing that happens in a totalitarian state. And then ask yourself whether you can vote out, or put popular pressure on, hedge fund managers the way you can do on our elected officials.

From Suze Wilson at The Conversation we learn how New Zealand Prime Minster Jacinda Arderns's handling of the coronavirus pandemic "is giving most Western politicians a masterclass in crisis leadership." As often happens, a lot of leadership is messaging -- "stay home to save lives" puts the action and the goal pretty succinctly -- but it's also about having a plan early, sticking to it, and getting people to buy in without threatening the Heavy Hand of Law Enforcement (that latter tool a favorite of those leaders who don't get it right early). And it's also about being genuinely accessible to your bosses, the people, which for Ms. Arderns happens in daily briefings that don't go completely off the rails, as well as in live Q-and-A sessions on Facebook. And where American punditoids flail about demanding a "date certain" when they can go back to their favorite coffee shop again, New Zealand stands virtually alone among Western nations in setting a goal to eradicate COVID-19, instead of just hoping we get through it. In short, I couldn't blame you for turning this into a big "Goofus and Gallant" strip with Ms. Arderns as Gallant and our President as a diaper-loaded Goofus.

Action: concerning good House bills, good coronavirus policy, and bad media coverage.

Because we don't give up, it's time once again to call your Senators again and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment (and thus, in theory, smooth its entry into our Constitution). When our Congressfolk have other priorities -- like giving away as much taxpayer money they haven't even collected yet amirite? to corporate cronies as possible -- it's time to get them focused on the important things, like voting rights, internet freedom, public lands, and health care. So let's get to it.

Speaking of the important things, the pandemic took the lives of at least seven folks in federal custody last week, and if you think that's no big loss, please do the following things: 1) slap yourself, 2) consider that five of them were there on drug charges, and we should be curing drug addicts, not putting them in jail, 3) consider that at least two of these had high-risk health conditions almost sure to kill them if they got the virus, and 4) prisoners can't freaking practice any form of physical distancing and once one prisoner gets infected, pretty much all of them are at risk -- and that would include all kinds of people the state is detaining without having convicted of a crime. But now H.R. 6400/S. 3579, the Emergency Community Supervision Act, would reduce the kind of overcrowding that leads to mass graves by releasing certain prisoners into community supervision -- not violent prisoners, since right-wingers are no doubt already claiming the bill would do that. So the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to practice both mercy and pragmatic public policy by passing the Emergency Community Supervision Act.

Finally, MoveOn helps you tell the big news corporations to stop covering our President's live coronavirus updates. It's a shame it's come to that, but it has, and when they say but it's news whenever the President says something, they're helping to ensure we live in a society where we all think our President is more important than we are. Well, he's not -- especially this one, amirite? Our news organs will also tell us that we're supposed to treat daily updates from our government about a pandemic with some importance. To which I respond: I wish our President would treat those daily updates about this pandemic with some importance! To him, it's just another opportunity to take all the credit for the good, blame everyone else for the bad, and otherwise act like a damn drama king. And the news already gives us too damn much drama! Our "liberal" media would also do well to learn that their job isn't covering the news passively so much as it's telling us the truth. If covering our President's clown car act gets in the way of the truth, then they need to stop covering it.

Action: concerning Medicare-for-All health insurance, voting by mail, and other excellent ideas.

At the risk of being accused of "using the pandemic as an opportunity to pass my wish list" -- an accusation I usually hear from people actually using the pandemic as an opportunity to pass their wish list! -- I think you should call your Reps and Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1384/S. 1129, the Medicare for All Act. We all can see that the "free market" didn't make enough masks and didn't make enough ventilators -- and we all can see that the "free market" would never have made enough masks and ventilators to withstand a pandemic because there's no money in saving people from the coronavirus; the people who die, after all, are no longer a "burden on the system." That's not me talking; that's every health care CEO after his sixth beer talking. I would also tell your Congressfolk that Sen. Warren's plan to fund Medicare-for-All -- she would convert what corporations are already paying private insurers into a kind of fee that would fund Medicare-for-All -- is the best one. You know, for when they ask HOW WILLZ TEH LIBRULZ PAYZ FOR TEH THINGZ!!!!!

I'm going to put a lot of repeat action alerts at the end today, because this is going to be a busy week, but I want to highlight this one, in which Daily Kos helps you tell your state governments to allow voting-by-mail for the 2020 election. We've told Congress to do it, but getting Congress to do something good for their-bosses-the-people is like pulling teeth, so now we tell state governments to do it -- and they might be more responsive, even in red states, being as they're more likely to run into their constituents than federal-level politicians are. I say "even in red states" because Republicans are saying the same damn thing -- our President suggested to Fox and Friends last week that if too many Americans vote, Republicans won't win any elections, and the Georgia House Speaker echoed those "concerns" shortly afterward. You know what I say to that? It's bootstrap time! If you're afraid no one will vote for you, stop your whining and try persuading them!

Meanwhile, Avaaz helps you call for a global ceasefire as the pandemic rages. I know some idiot will say, again, "you're just using the pandemic to pass your own pet initiatives," but I would a) challenge them to produce the last time I called for a global ceasefire (spoiler alert: never) and b) I would remind them that wars just make pandemics worse -- wars create more destruction and more refugees, and wars take health care workers away from fighting the pandemic, either by killing them or putting them on the front lines where they're just fixing up troops well enough so they can go be cannon fodder again. And, seriously, can we name a war that's worth fighting right now? That war on Yemen, for example, might make Saudi Arabia's government feel safer, but really it does nothing but put good Yemenis on the brink of famine and kill the Houthis who are some of the best fighters of al-Qaeda on Earth. The Syrian civil war has been going on for almost a decade now, and to what end? Too often it seems like everyone's moved on from war except the politicians, so we should bring them to heel.

Finally, as I've said, I've got a lot of action alerts for this week (and it's only Monday!), so I'm going to summarize the ones I've talked about before. The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to contain coronavirus in our nation's concentration camps, since, you know, immigrants and refugees are people, too, even if our President says they're not. Also, the Union for Concerned Scientists helps you tell our President to start using the Defense Production Act to manufacture masks and ventilators already; he still hasn't done it, because GUMMINT BAD!!!!, but such ideology really should wither before the spectre of death. And Penn PIRG helps you tell your state Attorney General to investigate Amazon for price-gouging of medical supplies; they've said they're cracking down on it, but you know they also benefit financially from it, so you'd like to see some action. Last but not least, People for the American Way helps you tell our SEC to investigate any Senator who may have benefited financially from selling their own stock in advance of the pandemic. These ain't big asks, frankly -- and we'll keep asking until they do our will.

Around the table: in which we look corruption and venality in its orange face yet again.

Wondering why South Korea can test so many of its citizens (and thus flatten the coronavirus curve) while America can't? Could be at least in part because our Administration had to have our President's son-in-law benefit financially from it! He had a vested interest in the corporation our HHS contracted to create a website that would supposedly have helped you evaluate your symptoms and find a testing center near you -- and then the website never went live, possibly because they all knew they'd stepped in it. Thus our Administration wasted time and lives trying to figure out how to profit from this pandemic. Nice work if you can get it! (Also, too, our President's votaries should remember that he promised a "national network of drive-through test sites" which has not as of yet materialized. I kid, of course: our President's votaries never remember anything that might reflect badly on their Personal Lord and Savior.)

Suraj K. Sazawal at Defending Rights and Dissent reminds us that we should not allow our government to use physical distancing rules to roll back Constitutional protections. As they're very anxious to do, amirite? And as they like to do to cover up their own incompetence, as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been very slow to impose physical distancing rules in his state, but very quick to blame New Yorkers for coming to Florida with the virus, and almost as quick to sic our National Guard to question New Yorkers when they come down (and even track their movements with an app, though of course I don't suppose he'll necessarily develop a good app). And that's before we get to our Justice Department's recent attempts at power grabs -- or the USA PATRIOT Act.

Hamilton Nolan at In These Times tells us "What a General Strike Would Take." We've never had a general strike larger than an American city, but quantum physicists might tell us that whatever we imagine comes to pass sooner or later -- though nobody wants an "indiscriminate" general strike in which "truly essential" workers would participate. In any case, we'd best not think of so many good Americans now out of work as an opportunity, not just because recasting someone else's misery as your opportunity is what evil people do, but because the West Virginia teacher union's strikes of 2018 and 2019 were not a response to an obvious "opportunity." We shouldn't be waiting for the right landscape so much as creating it.

In a related note, that peach of a Philippine President says police and military will shoot anyone who violates lock-down laws. The Philippine National Police Chief said later that of course they all know he didn't mean what he actually said, but the Philippine President is the same fellow who openly encouraged folks to shoot drug dealers dead -- after all, who better to protect the due process rights of others than a rage addict with a gun? I just know our own President wishes he could have uttered the line "(d)o not intimidate the government. Do not challenge the government. You will lose." Hopefully you noticed as quickly as I did that if he'd said "do not challenge your government," it wouldn't have come off as well.

Ho hum, even Florida's current Administration contends that the state's unemployment website is a "shit sandwich," and its design under previous Governor and now Senator Rick Scott "was about making it harder for people to get benefits or keep benefits so that the unemployment numbers were low to give the governor something to brag about." But note well Mr. Scott has now won three consecutive elections -- with 49, 48, and 50 percent of the vote, to be sure -- because Democrats didn't field candidates who could convince large numbers of Floridians that they would actually do things for their bosses, the people.

Finally, our President insists that we should all show up to the polls in November -- and claims, of course without evidence, that voting-by-mail would cause all kinds of voter fraud -- but he himself has requested a vote-by-mail ballot for the upcoming Florida primary! And that's just another reminder that our President believes rules are for little people, not big people like him.

Action: concerning government spying, racism, and health care.

Our President seems averse to making bad "free" trade deals that nullify our laws, so why is he prepared to make a deal with the United Kingdom that would allow their law enforcement to search through American data without getting a warrant in an American court? It'd work the other way, too -- our police could search through data held in the United Kingdom without following British privacy laws, either. The Cloud Act allows foreign governments to negotiate agreements with our government to get access to data located in the United States, but we shouldn't just give that over willy-nilly -- they should have to respect our laws, just as we should have to respect theirs. That's not jingoism or xenophobia, that's just basic law and order; you can't reach out to other people if you don't stand your ground. So the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop any agreements with foreign governments that allow them to run roughshod over our laws.

Meanwhile, if you've been working from home a lot lately, you've probably used a lot of Zoom, the video conferencing software -- but you may not have heard that "Zoom bombers," or hackers, like to disrupt the calls of black folks and put racial slurs on their screens! I shudder to imagine what it would be like to have nothing better to do than that, but that's some folks' lives. Perhaps as a result of its sudden ubiquity in our lives, Zoom hasn't exactly done a sterling job keeping its lines secure, so the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell Zoom to ramp up its cybersecurity so that racists don't go "Zoom bombing" on its black users. I suspect Zoom might be receptive to the Big Stick of Bad PR here, because it might be the big dog of video conferencing now, but it's also not the only game in town, so they might not be the big dog for long. Hell, more than a few folks are going to take a second look at Skype or Hangouts -- or a first look at Webex, Whereby, or Starleaf.

Finally, a few states (like Massachusetts, New Jersey, Virginia, and Washington) have recognized abortion as an essential health service which can't be closed during a pandemic, but, well, I could make a long list of states that have done the opposite and so could you I bet, so Daily Kos helps you tell your state governments to recognize abortion as an essential health service and stop restricting access thereto during this pandemic. Why? Because our Constitution protects women's rights to birth control, of course, and because abortion actually is an essential service, as you would know if you thought about the fact that a fetus keeps growing in your uterus the longer you don't have access to an abortion. Anything can happen during that time, including an unforeseen risk to the life or health of the mother. So you may have to tell your state governments to stop the grandstanding, though that doesn't make today that much different from any other day.

Action: concerning gas mileage standards and better coronavirus policy.

File this, also, under "evil done under cover of a pandemic": our EPA has announced that it will roll back clean car standards! The same standards that force car manufacturing corporations to give you more miles to the gallon, which saves you money at the pump! And for what? So our President can take yet another dump on one of the Obama Administration's few good works? You've heard it from their own mouths, how "cars will be cheaper" if they pollute more (ah, but higher gas prices will be with you for the entire life of your car) and how "it'll save lives because people will drive more if their gas is cheaper and thus have more accidents" (ah, but more pollution makes people sicker). Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your state Attorney General to fight the rollback, and the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to reverse this rollback. Hate to pile on, but the rollback will cost jobs, since regulations always create jobs for people trying to figure out how to adhere to them, and we'll have more trouble selling cars abroad where the standards are stricter. But as long as some CEO somewhere is redistributing income upward to himself, this Administration doesn't care.

Meanwhile, Iran and Venezuela aren't the only nations suffering under American sanctions during a pandemic -- so is Palestine. You've heard New York Gov. Cuomo talk about how many tens of thousands his state still needs to withstand this pandemic? Well, the Gaza Strip has a mere 56 ventilators, to go with its 40 ICU beds, for two million people, in a region the United Nations has declared would soon be uninhabitable thanks to over a decade of bombings and blockades. If you're inclined to say well that strip is just full of terrorists anyway so whatever, then ask yourself how two million terrorists could be so ground down! After all, it only took 18 terrorists to take down the World Trade Center and drive our government insane. Maybe, just maybe, most people in the Middle East are actually folks like us, and maybe, just maybe, most people don't deserve to be crushed in a pandemic. Hence Jewish Voice for Peace joins with M Power Change to help you tell your Congressfolk to act to end the Israeli blockade of Gaza so that its people might actually survive this pandemic.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our state and federal governments to suspend co-pays for prisoners who need medical attention. We went over this a few years ago: a prisoner who has to pay a $5 co-pay for a medical appointment may be getting a cheaper co-pay than you are, but given that a prisoner might be making 15 cents an hour (if they even have a job!), a $5 co-pay is actually an onerous charge that prevents prisoners from getting the care they need -- and thus putting other prisoners and prison workers at risk. There's also this little thing called a coronavirus pandemic going on, and a single prisoner deciding he can't pay a co-pay could feed the fire of this pandemic, especially in prisons, where "physical distancing" isn't actually possible. I mean, they're not going to set prisoners free (even though most of them haven't been convicted of a crime, but are awaiting trial) and they're going to shake them down for medical appointments, too? That's not how a civilized society conducts itself.

Around the table: now with even *more* dastardly deeds done under cover of a pandemic!

Hoo boy now our Administration is trying to get Venezuela to agree to a "transition plan." Venezuela had an election over a year and a half ago, but that matters little to the President who somehow got into office with only 46% of the vote. I guess this is the "good cop" half of their strategy -- charging President Maduro with drug trafficking being the "bad cop" part -- but dig Elliot Abrams, somehow this Administration's Venezuela "expert," saying he wants people in charge "who can work with the other side," which is always code for "people who can capitulate to right-wingers." And dig Secretary Pompeo's statement that Venezuela's crisis is a "man-made crisis." Indeed, this crisis was, to a large degree, made by the evil men in Washington, D.C. who imposed sanctions upon Venezuela. Maybe the people of Venezuela will have something to say about all of this, as they did when Tha Bush Mobb tried to overthrow his predecessor.

Margaret Flowers at TruthOut reminds us that "The US’s Wave of Hospital Closures Left Us Ill-Equipped for COVID-19." The American population has gone up by about 50% over the last 45 years, but the number of hospital beds has gone down by over 50% over the same period, and "down" is the wrong direction to go in, obviously. And, as you might imagine, rural hospitals tend to close down even faster than urban or suburban ones. What's to blame? Greed, as usual. What would be a good solution to greed? Why, Medicare-for-All, of course, which would push the private health insurance system out and make it more accountable to you, as your government's owner! Don't be the one who complains about "wait times"; folks in rural areas wait until after they die of preventable issues because they have no hospitals. Here, as elsewhere, the "free market" has not provided.

If you've been crushing on New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo because, unlike our President, he projects the image of someone who knows what he's doing, let Ross Barkan at The Nation remind you that Mr. Cuomo helped set his own state up for this mess by letting big corporations close and consolidate hospitals and trying to slash Medicaid funding. Hey, you know what might solve the problem of having "too many people" on Medicaid? Why, Medicare-for-All health insurance, of course! Let me know if you think I'm beating a dead horse here. Not that it'll change what I'm doing.

In the wake of the CNN CEO claiming that he broadcasts all of our President's crapshow briefings because it showcases how "tough" his network's questions are, Neil DeMause at FAIR reminds us that "limiting" our President's time on-screen "Isn't Censorship, It's Journalism." Journalists are supposed to get at the truth, after all, not merely be stenographers to power. And you know, I was about to be generous and say they've simply forgotten the fact that they already don't broadcast every single possible piece of news that could be broadcast, so it's hard to call every single choice not to broadcast something "censorship." But they've got as much or more semiotic training than I do, so I'm going to go ahead and assume they're just pretending to be stupid, so they can better serve evil.

Speaking of how you actually do journalism, Isaac Chotiner at The New Yorker interviews a "contrarian" whose questionable coronavirus theories have informed our Administration's "thinking," and refutes said "contrarian"'s misstatements in italics right after he makes them. Easier to do in print than on TV, I suppose, but then that recommends print over TV, doesn't it? Every damn journalistic outlet should do what The New Yorker did here; we can even call it "doing a New Yorker" if they like. (As an aside, theorizing that viruses "evolve" from strong to weak is only a cut above Todd Akin's insane ramblings about "legitimate rape." Plus, Mr. Epstein does what they all do when someone calls them on their BS: he starts yelling.)

Finally, some news you can use: Markos Moulitsas at Daily Kos helps you "cut the cord" with your cable service provider so you don't subsidize Fox News's disgusting behavior anymore. You may not watch Fox News, but you're still paying for Fox News as part of your cable package; it's $20/year, but that's more than the other sucky cable news channels get, and since at least 93 million households still get cable TV, which means Fox News gets over $1.8 billion just from being part of your cable package, and though their advertisers are deserting them in droves, they're still making all this passive money from you. Don't give it to them! You'll be happier and richer.

Action: concerning big pharma monopolies, coronavirus coverage, and pollution.

Gilead Sciences -- you've heard of them, they're the ones making a killing, so to speak, by charging over $70,000 for their Hep C drug -- has also tried to corner the market on a potential coronavirus treatment, by exploiting a loophole in the law that allows big pharma corporations to enjoy more monopoly rights on drugs that treat "rare" diseases. You're thinking coronavirus ain't rare, since it's all we're talking about, but the law defines "rare" as afflicting fewer than 200,000 people at the time the corporation applies for special treatment, and thus coronavirus is still "rare" at this writing, though maybe not in a few hours. Gilead faced some PR backlash for its naked attempt to monopolize that drug, and has thus decided not to exploit that loophole -- but they still haven't committed to making the drug affordable, which, given their history with their Hep C drug, they might not. Unless and until we bring the Big Stick of Bad PR! Public Citizen helps you tell Gilead Sciences to ensure that everyone can get its coronavirus drug, not just the well-off.

Meanwhile, it ain't just Fox News that's misinforming us during this pandemic crisis -- it's the usually more-estimable Associated Press! The AP's standard "What You Need to Know About the Virus Outbreak" passage it usually inserts into its articles might lull you into a false sense of security, what with "most people" getting "mild to moderate symptoms" "that clear up in two to three weeks," and saying "the vast majority of people recover" is, well, TBD, frankly. And, perhaps more to the point, will be of exactly zero comfort to you if you're one of the ones who die horribly. The Centers for Disease Control puts this matter somewhat differently: "Covid-19 can result in severe disease, including hospitalization, admission to an intensive care unit and death, especially among older adults. Everyone can take actions, such as social distancing, to help slow the spread of Covid-19 and protect older adults from severe illness." So for the AP, "what you need to know" somehow excluded "what you need to do"! FAIR helps you tell AP to get their act together in re informing good Americans about the pandemic.

Finally, our Administration's EPA has just announced its proposal to restrict the science that it can use to make decisions on how to protect our clean air and clean water. The EPA started this process back in 2018, but received some 600,000 comments (including yours, perhaps!) opposing their attempt to a) let it use corporate-backed science to make decisions and b) only use "publicly-available" studies to make decisions, when they know damn well that the reason most good scientific studies aren't "publicly-available" is that they contain good Americans' private health into and medical records. So, confronted with so many Americans telling them they were full of soup, what did they do? They decided to delay their proposal until they thought no one was listening -- you know, like, in the middle of a pandemic. But we are listening! Our Glorious Elites (including Mitch McConnell!) pretend you can only ever do or think or say one thing at a time, we know that's utter bunkum. Hence the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell our EPA to use real science in deciding how to stop pollution.

Around the table: why do they manage the pandemic response to badly? So they can use it to crush us! And other horrible truths.

Hungarian parliament gives its Prime Minister rule-by-decree powers which of course will end once the pandemic is over yeah sure. Our President is looking to give someone a high-five! This would be another good time to remind you that while we're not there yet, we could get there pretty easily -- particularly since fear of dying from a pandemic will likely depress turnout on Election Day.

Not long after General Electric announces it'll lay off 10 percent of its aviation workers in America, GE workers protest, pointing out that all the idle factories could be repurposed to manufacture ventilators for coronavirus patients. "If GE trusts us to build, maintain, and test engines which go on a variety of aircraft where millions of lives are at stake, why wouldn’t they trust us to build ventilators?" says one worker. I'm going to go out on a limb and say the reason is because they're trying to use the pandemic to destroy their unions.

In a related note, big corporation takes taxpayer money to build a ventilator, only sells that ventilator overseas -- and then enters talks with current Administration to build a more complex and more expensive ventilator! Socialize the risk, privatize the profit, as they say. And as one observer reminds us, "(t)he market is not going to give priority to a relatively no-frills but dependable ventilator that’s not expensive." In other words, big corporations have decided there's no money in saving people from a pandemic; we'll see how they feel when there are far fewer of us around to buy their stuff, amirite? And remember when they give you that nobody could have predicted crap that our government has actually been trying to fund inexpensive ventilators since at least 2005.

I wonder whether Fox News (sic) really has to worry very much about legal action after they swore up and down that the coronavirus pandemic was a hoax. Yes, the Murdoch clan was apparently taking steps to protect themselves from the pandemic while their punditoids were calling it a big fat lie, but questions of who-knew-what-when may be more difficult to nail down than we think, and maybe the courts will take the difference between "news" and "opinion" more seriously than they should. I say "more seriously than they should" because media outlets actually don't have an obligation to broadcast every single conceivable opinion under the sun, and if they're pushing denialists to the forefront and people die because they believe them, we should hold them accountable, just as (trigger warning: I'm about to invoke Dean Baker's best-ever analogy again) we hold publishing houses accountable when they hurt people with what they publish.

Finally, because it had to happen sooner or later, Sen. McConnell (E-KY) suggests that our President didn't do so well heading off this pandemic because he was so busy defending himself from impeachment. Well, maybe he shouldn't have tried to bribe the Ukrainian President, then! I was going to add "it's not like every single worker in an Administration has to concentrate on the most important thing happening at any moment" -- particularly just because our media isn't covering anything else, a particularly awful the-map-is-exactly-the-territory argument from Mr. McConnell -- but then I remembered that this President has hardly anyone actually working for him in this Administration. Which is, yes, another reason we should never have elected him.

Action: concerning good House bills, internet freedom, and voting rights.

It's once again time to call your Senators again and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment (and thus, in theory, smooth its entry into our Constitution). Why do I keep harping about these things in the middle of a pandemic? Because protecting voting rights and health care and public lands and internet freedom actually sustain us in pandemics and help us avoid future pandemics! So let's get to it.

Meanwhile, Free Press helps you tell big telecom corporations to provide cheap or free unlimited internet service during this pandemic. You've no doubt been inside a lot during this pandemic, so you've likely been, ah, availing yourself of the various entertainment our internet easily provides, but that's not the only reason to press for super-affordable internet during a pandemic -- you're likely to get most of your information about how to fight the pandemic via our internet, and why would we make such a thing too expensive for some people? Unless we're cruel and heartless, that is. If you've been attending this argument, you'll no doubt wonder why we don't regulate our internet like a public utility! The answer, of course, is that we did -- until this President got elected, and decided that anything the previous President did that actually helped people should be shat upon, and so he put his cronies in at the FCC and they stopped regulating the internet as a utility. In the absence of sound public policy, the people must resort to shame.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your state elected officials to ensure we can all vote by mail during this election season, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. While it's true that voting by mail is a good response to folks' fears that they'll get coronavirus from the voting booth, it's also true that voting by mail solves a number of other vote suppression hurdles people face -- there ain't long lines when you vote by mail, and there ain't no voting machines to "lose" your vote (or switch your vote to some other candidate!) when you vote by mail. Voting by mail doesn't necessarily address gerrymandering or caging, but that's why we're also telling our Senators to pass H.R. 1 (the For the People Act) and H.R. 4 (the Voting Rights Advancement Act). It may be giving them too much credit to say so, but this Administration may have hit on the ultimate vote suppression scheme -- the pandemic that'll scare people into staying home even when it's over! But voting by mail can help defeat such a scheme.

Action: concerning our pandemic, and the various evils our government does under its cover.

We're almost two months after our first coronavirus diagnosis and somehow we still don't have enough tests! And we need them; after all, we can't all just cough on a rich person or shake hands with our President! Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell tell Brent Giroir, our Assistant Secretary for Health in the Department of Health and Human Services and the man who runs coronavirus testing in America, to ensure everyone who needs a coronavirus test can get one. And, like, now -- I'm sick of hearing all the supposed can-do types who run our country shrug and say we can't do this. We can give away hundreds of billions in bailouts under cover of a pandemic, but we can't test our own citizens? Who wants to take that achievement to the pearly gates? They used to say a government that can do anything for you can do anything to you, but they helped create a government that can do anything to you but can't do anything for you. And we deserve better.

Meanwhile, speaking of dastardly things done under cover of a pandemic: you may have heard that our Department of Justice (sic) has asked Congress for the ability to detain Americans indefinitely -- you know, because courts will be closed, or open irregularity, and thus they "can't" grant us our constitutional rights of due process and habeus corpus. Awfully suspicious, eh? Another thing our all-powerful government just "can't" do, and if you don't think this government (or the next one) won't abuse that power, I know a dead Nigerian prince who left you a lot of money. Hence Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt by our Administration to grab the right to detain Americans indefinitely. If you're thinking well, this is just until the pandemic is over, I direct your attention to our NSA's warrantless surveillance of good Americans, which has gone on for almost 20 years after 9.11; when our government abuses its power, it doesn't want to stop.

Remaining on the topic of "dastardly things they do under cover of a pandemic": our EPA has declared that it won't enforce clean air or clean water regulations very vigorously during the pandemic, citing physical distancing. I'm old enough to remember when conservatives routinely said stop complaining about how hard it is to do the right thing and just do it! But today's right-wingers spend an awful lot of time whining about why they can't do the right thing. You think clean air and clean water enforcers couldn't be designated essential personnel? You have to wonder why this Administration hasn't done that! And please understand that when I say that, I mean "because this Administration hates regulations that actually help people, and only likes regulations that let someone push their allegedly religious bigotry on someone else." Too harsh? The truth always is. So the Sierra Club helps you tell our Administration to stop making excuses and protect good Americans from polluters.

Finally, Whole Foods's CEO, John Mackey, has actually said that if some of his workers need paid time off during this pandemic, then their co-workers should be gracious enough to "donate" their paid time off! Gosh, is that all it takes to be a CEO -- to refuse to help your own workers in their time of need? And they say getting rich is hard! Seriously, those of us who aren't rich might actually have a lot to be proud of. And Whole Foods, as you know, is owned by Amazon, whose CEO, Jeff Bezos, is worth over $100 billion, that's "billion" with a "b," and he's echoed Mr. Mackey's suggestion that workers "donate" their paid time off, proving, again, that you don't get to be the boss by being generous or humane. I swear, if I've done one good work before I die, it'll be to make the word "boss" into a cuss word, a matter our President has helped a lot with, amirite? In the meantime, MoveOn helps you tell Messrs. Bezos and Mackey to ensure their workers have the paid time off they need.

Around the table: exposing *even more* bad behavior and bad arguments.

Eric Cortellessa at Yes! magazine writes about "How to Save Elections from a Pandemic," by describing how voting-by-mail goosed up turnout rates in Salt Lake County, Utah. The sanitary effects of voting-by-mail are obvious, but it hadn't occurred to me before that transferring completely to voting-by-mail would not only eliminate the long lines at (certain!) polling places, but it would also create a paper trail that a voting machine couldn't easily obscure. Your state government could still use a voting machine to (mis)count the votes, but stealing an election would be harder -- at least in the long run, as corrupt state governments will no doubt entrust the transition to utter incompetents and hacks in the short run.

Our Justice Department indicts Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro for drug trafficking. Well, if you can't squeeze him out of office by taking a dump on his nation's economy, and you can't pretend a "movement" will topple him even with our "liberal" media's collaboration, I guess you could always indict him! Naturally "(t)he evidence they point to against Maduro is thin," in one observer's words, and six times as much cocaine flows through Guatemala as does Venezuela, but Guatemala's President is a right-wing prick just like ours, so he's not getting indicted! Maybe our President will invade Venezuela to arrest Mr. Maduro, as Bush the Better did to get rid of Gen. Noriega back in the day; admittedly, our President has had a very hard time getting Americans very emotionally-invested in his relentless anti-Maduro saucepan-banging, but then, that's always been a double-edged sword.

With a long line of right-wing blowhards suggesting that we should be forcing retired seniors to go back to work to help us out during the pandemic, Hamilton Nolan at In These Times has a simple suggestion: "Back to Work? You First." Then he imagines a litany of unpopular-and-deservedly-so characters waiting tables, bagging groceries, and running cash registers; not that these are bad jobs, per se, but it would surely humiliate folks like Arthur Laffer and Lloyd Blankfein to have to work them! So zing, as they say. As an aside, it has occurred to me that wishing people would die so the economy could get moving again isn't just cruel and heartless, it's bad economic theory. After all, people can't spend money when they're dead!

Our President's handling-the-pandemic numbers are -- surprise, surprise! -- going down again, and I'd like to think it's because of all his recent bad behavior! Saying our media want to "keep our country closed as long as possible in the hope that it will be detrimental to my election success" reminds you that, like everything else, he thinks this pandemic is all about him. And when you come to grips with the fact that he only started making noise about ending physical distancing after six of his own properties got closed down, you are further reminded that he thinks everything is all about him. And here you thought America was all about us!

In a peripherally-related note, our President all but admits that he's going out of his way to make life harder for good Americans in certain states merely because their Governors have "not (been) appreciative to me." What a big baby! Our President isn't the first to play these games, of course, but that doesn't make it right, and hanging such corruption out for all to see will not only make it easier for the next President to act like a petulant brat, it'll make it easier for all of us to do such things in our lives. He's a role model, whether he likes it or not. And as a role model, well, he's falling short.

Finally, because we need some good news: a federal District Court judge tosses all of the permits our Administration issued for the Dakota Access pipeline, citing all the public comments our Administration ignored in the permitting process. You know, like that "the pipeline’s leak-detection system was unlikely to work, that it was not designed to catch slow spills, that the operator’s serious history of incidents had not been taken into account, and that the worst-case scenario used by the Corps was potentially only a fraction of what a realistic figure would be." See, if you're going to issue permits for a project like this, you actually have to address these things, because it's the law. The ruling doesn't stop the pipeline (which had at least five spills in the first six months of its operation) from operating, but that might be coming. In the meantime, go treat yourself; some restaurants are still open for pick-ups and deliveries, after all.

Action: concerning war on Yemen, debt relief, and humane treatment of detainees.

Just Foreign Policy joins with Change.org to help you tell your House Reps to reintroduce a War Powers resolution to end our unconstitutional involvement in the war on Yemen. As you may recall, both House and Senate passed such a War Powers resolution in 2019, but not by a large enough margin to overcome a Presidential veto, and if you're wondering why we're bothering to try again, remember that a) right is right and duty is duty and b) just as the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen has pushed good Yemeni citizens to the brink of famine, the coronavirus pandemic threatens to wreak even more havoc, and the war has crippled Yemen's ability to respond to the pandemic. Our President will veto it again, and probably complain about having to tear himself away from Fox and Friends to do it, but I always say make him do it -- make him create more bad karma for himself and those who'd follow him off a cliff.

Meanwhile, Avaaz helps you tell G20 world leaders to offer debt relief to the nations of Asia, Africa, and South America. Why? Because the coronavirus pandemic will get there eventually, too, and developing nations sure could use a break. How will good folks packed into slums be able to afford good health care, or any health care, in these lands? If that voice in your head still says but everyone should pay their debts, please consider that the developed nations of the world kinda forced these loans on developing nations so that they could be more like them and less like themselves. All for free markets! And debt relief is not exactly unprecedented in the world, not just if you've heard of the word "jubilee," but if you've attended recent history -- even the IMF forgave $100 million in loans after ebola worked its will. So many of us are being so generous these days, and our leaders should be more like us.

Finally, with the first detainee in an ICE concentration camp recently testing positive for the coronavirus, Amnesty International helps you tell our government to ensure that all immigrants and asylum-seekers in custody get the medical care they need in order to survive this pandemic. Like our prisoners, these detainees also live in conditions that'll make the virus spread a lot faster than normal, plus they don't get very good care there, and they are human beings, after all. So please don't be the fool who says well what about our own people? Literally no one has advocated putting folks in concentration camps ahead of everyone else! We merely demand that America be the great nation we say it is by treating everyone as if they're important. That is the promise of America, after all. Either we mean that promise we make, or we're just another ignorant and arrogant nation about to fall into the ashheap of history.

Action: concerning health care, working families, and humane treatment of prisoners.

Thanks to our President's incompetence, our hospitals won't have enough ventilators to cope with the mass of coronavirus infections we face, which means we're going to be overusing the ventilators we do have, which means more of them will require repair -- and did you know that some ventilator manufacturing corporations don't make their repair manuals easy to use, or even access? Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell ventilator manufacturers to release service info that hospitals will need to fix their ventilators. Worried about hospital techs "fixing them wrong"? Then those techs deserve the best information! Worried about violating "trade secrets"? Not when millions of good Americans might die in the next few weeks! A lot of right-wingers, when they talk about the values to which we must hold even when inconvenient, think "protecting trade secrets" as one of them! And not, for example, telling the truth or not manipulating people. Then again, some right-wingers are really all about preserving profits no matter how inconvenient! But to paraphrase a famous philosopher: if money is all you want, then money is all you'll get.

Meanwhile, Philly sports fans might have heard that our local NBA team, the 76ers, was about to impose a 20 percent pay cut on its at-will employees (who aren't working, as you know, because the NBA ain't playing) until, well, local media covered the story, and then the hedge fund billionaire who owns the Sixers realized he'd stepped into a mountain of dung and reversed himself. (The NHL's New Jersey Devils had announced a similar pay cut scheme; guess which hedge fund billionaire owns the Devils as well as the Sixers?) In this spirit, Color of Change helps you tell NBA teams to pay all their laid-off workers for the duration of the coronavirus pandemic. Thousands of good Americans work in NBA arenas, and when the teams ain't playing, and their cities are in various stages of lockdown, where can they turn for a steady income? Sadly, in their immediate future, they might turn to payday lenders and get trapped in 300% death spirals of debt -- or, they might be forced to make either-or decisions about health care and bill-paying that really aren't either-or. So let's have as little of that in the richest country on the planet as possible.

Finally, we strive to practice good physical distancing (a.k.a., "the artist formerly known as 'social distancing,'") so that we don't get infected with coronavirus, or infect other good Americans with coronavirus, but what of folks who can't see their loved ones incarcerated in prison? They're left with video conferencing, and it's bad enough that video conferencing doesn't help keep folks who've served their time from going back to jail anywhere near as well as live, face-to-face visits with loved ones, but video conferencing tends to be a damn racket, saddling prisoners and their families with absurdly high bills, and why? Because they can. What are prisoners and their families going to do about it? Go find another service provider? Hence Color of Change helps you tell our elected officials to make prisoner/loved one communication free during the coronavirus pandemic and thereafter. Really, just because someone can make money doing something, doesn't mean anyone should make money doing something. Sorry, I forgot who was President for a moment.

Action: concerning voting rights, coronavirus policy, and price-gouging.

Daily Kos helps you tell your state officials they must make voting-by-mail available to all of your state's voters. I've been hesitant to mention voting-by-mail, not just because I fully intend to vote at my local voting booth this November come hell, high water, or pandemic, but because voting-by-mail isn't secret balloting and because the states that have been doing voting-by-mail well over the years have been doing it, well, for years. Still, I've tolerated non-secret balloting in other arenas (I voted absentee in 2004), and it's not like the voting-by-mail wisdom of states like Washington and Oregon just can't be reverse-engineered by folks in other states, and maybe a mandate will provoke your state into seeking and accumulating that wisdom. One thing's for sure: a lot of politicians would just prefer not to face the voters if they don't have to, and the pandemic gives them an excuse. But we don't tolerate excuses around here -- the politicians need to do their damn job and ensure everyone can vote.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos also helps you tell credit card corporations to waive monthly payments and interest while the pandemic is crippling the economy. One might well retort how do you expect them to make money especially when the economy is in the toilet? I expect them to make money by being generous now so that folks will still value their services later! Too many Americans won't think of the long term, and that's because our government and our media have conditioned us that way! But I'm old enough to remember when corporations did think of the long term -- largely because our government actually enacted and enforced regulations that gave them no choice! But if you just lost your low-paying job and can't make ends meet, the last thing you need is your credit card corporation haranguing you about your payments. No, people don't use credit cards for merely frivolous items, not anymore -- too many Americans use credit cards because they have to. Let's give them a hand up.

Finally, you've heard about price-gouging on things like saniwipes and hand sanitizer, and you may have told corporations like Amazon to stamp out that price-gouging on their sites, but, ah, price-gouging is also illegal, and those who jack up prices to absurd levels in a time of crisis deserve punishment for their evil works. Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to stop price-gouging during this pandemic. Our FTC has been warning us that price-gouging could happen -- but that may be the extent of its interest in stopping price-gouging! They might well claim, as right-wingers typically do, that they "trust consumers" more than they trust mandates, but if that really worked, we wouldn't have any monopolies in America, would we? And when we have monopolies (or collusion between corporations), you can "trust consumers" all you want, but they won't have the tools to do something about price-gouging. This is why we have laws, and regulations, and it's why we have law enforcement! Maybe you heard that having law enforcement had something to do with black people, but really it has to do with all of us.

Around the table: our President blusters and blunders on, part 685.

World Health Organization starts using the phrase "physical distancing" in place of "social distancing," and boy is that overdue! "Social distancing" always implied, certainly to me, that you were supposed to completely isolate yourself from other people, and boy wouldn't Our Glorious Elites like it if we were all completely isolated from each other! That has always been the downside of physical distancing -- I discussed this in a little more depth on Monday -- and we still have to beware of it. And let's not get too excited about social media filling in the gaps; yes, if this pandemic had happened in 1979 and we'd practiced physical distancing we'd have suffered much worse for it, but social media can be just as much a distraction as a help. I would hope we all know how to connect with and relate to each other by now.

Katie Bo Williams at DefenseOne explains why our President still isn't using the Defense Production Act to ramp up productions of ventilators and respirators (among other things). I was ready to say the answer was "because you can't prolong the drama by actually solving the problem!" But Ms. Williams's answer -- that our President really believes TEH FREE MARKETZ!!!!! can do the job better than our government, even though it's not doing anywhere near as good a job as he says it is -- is better, even if it leads to the same result, i.e., prolonging the drama.

In a related note, author Max Brooks explains on NPR exactly why our President is wrong not to have invoked the Defense Production Act already. Key statement: our President "is spinning some sort of tale about...black helicopters coming in and taking over factories. That's not how it works at all. What happens is the federal government has the network to identify where the production chain is and how to help the private sector work through this, because the private sector doesn't know. And as an example, I have a World War II rifle made by the Smith Corona typewriter company. Smith Corona worked with the federal government to then partner up with the Winchester Company, to then share resources and to share tools and talent to then produce the rifles that we needed. That's how it works. It's not some sort of KGB coming in and taking over everything. It is guidance and streamlining. And only the federal government has the experience to know how to do that." Of course, it's much easier to claim BIG GUBMINT KNOWS TEH NOTHINGZ!!!! when you populate your Administration with know-nothings. And again, I could have written exactly the same sentence about Tha Bush Mobb.

Nick Sholders at In These Times describes "How White Conservatism Stole Country Music." It ain't a long and winding road from pain to nostalgia to bitterness, of course, but the critical moment seems to have come a little less a hundred years ago, with the segregation of blues and country in the marketplace, even though both musics derive from rich and diverse sources -- if you remember how '80s classic rock stations played virtually no black artists aside from Jimi Hendrix, you'll have a sense of how that worked. We also tend to think of rural America (and therefore country music) as white, even though the slide guitar is a Hawaiian instrument and the banjo originated in West Africa.

Finally, Sasha Abramsky at The Nation provides a decent summary of how His Assholiness, our President, has been "managing" the coronavirus crisis in the last week or so. Spoiler alert: by blaming everyone else for his mistakes and causing bad things to happen. "(T)wo months...that could have been spent building up stockpiles of medical supplies" could be one of his epitaphs, but note well that in addition to ignoring unemployed airline workers as he tries to bail out their bosses and letting the virus fester in overcrowded concentration camps, he recalled all Peace Corps workers from overseas and then fired them -- because some Peace Corps volunteer made a joke at his expense once? I don't know, but it really might be for that small a reason, given that he's that small a man.

Action: concerning good House bills, insider trading, and sanctions against Iran.

It's time to call your Senators again and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment (and thus, in theory, smooth its entry into our Constitution). I know, I know, Congress is too busy working on a bailout, er, stimulus bill to pass all these good bills the House has already passed. Well, tough toodles! If they don't like us telling them what to do, they can always find another job.

Meanwhile, as you no doubt know, Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) dumped over $1.5 million in stocks while getting daily briefs on the threat of a pandemic, well before the U.S. stock market tanked, and after telling the public things were going fine! Nice work if you can get it! And apparently he wasn't not the only one! Sens. Loeffler (R-GA), Inhofe (R-OK), and Feinstein (D-CA) also dumped a crapload of stock at around the same time. Now, none of these four Senators are stupid people, so maybe we can't actually convict them of insider trading in a court of law. Still, I'm old enough to remember when a Senator would rather resign than face the appearance of corruption, and maybe that's a time we need to bring back; we sure would have better Senators if we did. In the meantime, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban government officials from trading in individual stocks while they hold office.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell Treasury Secretary Mnuchin to suspend sanctions against Iran for the next 120 days. Why? Because the pandemic is hitting Iran harder than us right now and economic sanctions tend to prevent things like ventilators from ever getting to Iran. And why else? Because we don't need to be imposing sanctions on Iran at all! Our President reimposed sanctions on Iran after unilaterally pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal which was working I say for the 40th time, all so he could pretend to be tough. There's really nothing deeper at work with this guy; he loves looking tough, though having been a millionaire literally since the age of 8 he's never worked a job in his life that could have actually made him tough. And now innocent Iranians have to die so he can look tough? Yes, Iranians are also suffering because they, too, have a government that likes looking tough when it's actually full of weaklings. But we have more control over our government, and little over theirs -- unless anyone has a time machine we can take back to 1953 to prevent the CIA-aided overthrow of Mr. Mossadegh.

Action: concerning the coronavirus pandemic.

So how do we start fighting the good fight this week? We start by calling our Reps and Senators (using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page, or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) and telling them that job one for them in these times is containing the damn coronavirus pandemic. Seriously, if they can't stop pandemics from killing us, then why are they even there? More specifically, we should demand that this Administration make tests widely available to all Americans now -- not six weeks from now because things like that are hard to do, but now because now is what we need. Then we demand that this Administration help our health care system withstand the onslaught of cases we expect it's going to get; if our government can't help build enough ventilators to help coronavirus victims breathe, then, again, why is it even there? Then we demand (and this is important) that our government assist people with their purported "stimulus" bill, not corporations -- as currently constructed, the McConnell "stimulus" plan is little more than a bailout bill. Sen. Sanders's proposal of paying $2,000 per household per month during the crisis would be a much better starting point for negotiations than the McConnell bailout bill -- people, as you know, will spend money to keep ur economy going, while corporations will just hoard whatever they get.

A lot of folks on both the left and right think the coronavirus pandemic means the end of this Presidency. But I wouldn't lay money on that if I were you. It's true that, as many have said, our President can't just insult the coronavirus into submission on Twitter, but we should consider a few other things about this situation -- that our President thrives on chaos, that our "social distancing" response to the pandemic threatens to harden into an America divided physically as well as politically, and that our President's likely opponent this November is a man the punditry have dubbed "electable" apparently because he's been deeply complicit in virtually all the things Our Glorious Elites have done wrong over the last half-century. For Our Glorious Elites, as you know, every crisis is an opportunity -- not an opportunity to make a better world out of the shell of the old, of course, but merely an opportunity to further entrench themselves in power. They want you to think you can't count on anyone but them to get us through tough times. And if we're not careful, they might actually succeed in convincing us of that this time.

So, in the face of a pandemic like most of us have never experienced, and the almost certain economic Armageddon that'll result, what has our President done in the last week? Well, he's lied about all the stupid things he said and did to put us in this position, plus he's told Congress to "go big" on the "stimulus" bill about to emerge, and what do you know? His poll numbers have dramatically improved -- per a ABC News/Ipsos poll, well over half of Americans now think he's doing a good job managing the crisis, up some 10 points from the previous week. Also, our President has been pumping the old Nobody Could Have Predicted meme from Tha Bush Mobb years, and since the man lies so much that his lies (and the truth) become that much harder to track, we could go into an election not only with our economy in a recession, but a recession people don't blame him for causing. As a politician, how could you do better than that -- to have people pulling for you to get us all through the catastrophe you created? And to think George W. Bush and Scott Walker thought they had that act down!

Of course, in times like these, we would turn to each other for sustenance and strength. But what is the message we're hearing from everyone, even folks we trust? That we should be apart from each other in these times so we don't kill each other! I don't think Our Glorious Elites planned it this way -- too many folks would need to keep quiet about a conspiracy that big -- but it sure works this way. Now I don't mean to assert that you should ignore the six-feet rule or go shake 10,000 hands in a puerile act of defiance. But note well that over a dozen states have already postponed their Democratic Presidential primaries; why wouldn't our government try to postpone the national election, particularly if our President thinks he might lose? And it goes beyond voting -- folks won't be able to take to the streets in protest of some egregious action by our government, out of fear of dying, or fear of transgressing a local government edict. Even as we speak, our Justice Department is trying to back-door its way into getting indefinite detention powers using the fact that courts won't be open (or open as much). When we can't take to the streets, that's when we should fear our government the most.

But then, perhaps you are hoping we can all get through this thing and then just elect a Democrat President in November. I have repeatedly cautioned against hopes such as these, and not merely because they'd be beside the point in a properly-functioning democracy, but it looks like our President's opponent will be former Vice President Joe Biden, who has nothing to recommend him other than an occasionally coarse way of speaking that has fooled many folks into thinking he's a straight-talker. In properly assessing his role in screwing our world up, we don't have to go back as far as his sucking up to segregationists in the '70s or his tough-on-crime posturing all through the following decades -- we need only remember that as Vice President he signed on to giving our economy back to the banksters after the banksters nearly destroyed it, and that as President he's already spelled out his made-up reasons for not signing a Medicare-for-All bill if it should pass. Many folks would tell you our President won in 2016 because he blew his opponent's faults way out of proportion. But how can such a stratagem even succeed in the first place? Only when said opponent gives you no reason to vote for them other than the hope that they'll be less of an ogre. And that's going to be Joe Biden's pitch just as it was Hillary Clinton's pitch, and in a country where too many Americans can't make their bills every month, where surprise medical bills and ballooning college costs cripple our future for no damn good reason, where nearly half of us can't even cough up $400 in an emergency, why should that pitch work this time?

Right about now I feel compelled to say that I hope I'm wrong about most of what I've said in the previous four paragraphs, and that I don't say these things to demoralize you, but so you'll be ready for all the future battles we'll have to fight. And we need to be able to imagine a world where this President's still here a year from now -- but, more importantly, we need to be able to imagine a world where that doesn't matter. If we speak out today about how our government should handle this pandemic, in more or less the manner I prescribed in the first paragraph, we'll be that much closer to being able to imagine a world in which we matter more than Our Glorious Elites do. If we can imagine that world, we can make that world -- but if we let Our Glorious Elites divide us, and if we let ourselves caught up in the drama and the horserace, then we can't even imagine that world, let alone make a new one.

Good luck, and God bless.

Around the table: a closer look at "stimulus" bills and employment statistics.

Remember the EARN IT Act, which we told our Congressfolk to oppose earlier this week? Joe Mullin at the Electronic Frontier Foundation tells us exactly how the EARN IT Act would destroy encryption, even though the bill cleverly doesn't mention encryption. Basically, it'd allow our Attorney General to dominate a commission that would mandate "best practices" for online service corporations to handle data, and one of those "best practices" would be that they are able to screen all messages and reveal their content to law enforcement, and guess what two things they couldn't do with an encrypted message? And not for nothing, but you'd think conservatives would be more up in arms about a bill that would create yet another bureaucracy to deal with matters our laws should deal with more directly.

As our government contemplates a trillion-dollar-plus program to weather the economic devastation we expect the coronavirus pandemic will wreak, Michael Grabell and Paul Kiel at ProPublica remind us that we tried a lot of this stuff in 2008 and a lot of it didn't work. Plus a lot of other things -- expanding food stamps, expanding unemployment insurance, implementing work-sharing programs -- do work. This "stimulus" bill threatens to be just another corporate welfare vehicle, though, even if we get checks from our government, which represent, of course, our government writing checks to us with the tax money we've already given them (or, more precisely, will give them in the future).

In a similar vein, Steve Wamhoff and Meg Wiehe at ITEP find that a Democratic proposal benefits lower- and middle-income Americans a crapload more than the Mitch McConnell plan. The McConnell plan, you may not know, leaves out nearly one-fifth of all Americans in the bottom 20% of income earners -- presumably because they're the same people who "don't pay taxes," though Jesus Mary and Joseph we've slain that zombie lie a thousand times -- while the Booker/Bennet/Brown plan would give more sizable checks to all income earners in the bottom 80% (and nearly all in the bottom 95%). Of course, since Republicans came up with the "let's write everyone a check!" idea first, the Booker/Bennet/Brown plan will get attacked as a Johnny-Come-Lately plan, which would be real high school, but what else would we expect?

"Copper Destroys Viruses and Bacteria," says Shayla Love at VICE. "Why Isn't It Everywhere?" Long story short: because we started using "stainless steel, plastic, and aluminum" in place of "copper beds, copper railings, and copper door knobs." And if you're worried that the problem is the cost of copper, you would be advised to measure that cost against the cost of hospital-acquired infections as well as (of course) pandemics; if you're thinking the problem is the environmental damage wrought by copper mining, that can be mitigated by copper recycling, and anyway what about all the plastic strangling our oceans?

Chris O'Leary explains -- better than I've seen anyone else explain -- why our President is full of soup to claim he's the greatest-ever jobs President for black folks. Long story short: our President is playing with statistics, like they all do -- in terms of real jobs created for black folks, Obama's last three years still outdo our President's first three. And no one can adequately explain how he's done it, either! I've heard people try -- they credit the GREATESTZ ECONOMEEZ EVAHZ!!!!, of course, and the 2017 tax "reform," and even (I'm not lying!) the Executive Order requiring two regulations get killed for every one enacted, which will never survive a court challenge the minute one of our agencies actually tries to execute that swap. How any of this has benefited black folks in particular they can't explain, either.

Finally, an NBC reporter asks our President "what do you say to Americans that are scared?" and our President retorts "I say you're a terrible reporter." I actually think using a reporter as a punching bag resonates with a lot of Americans who are sick of drama and sensationalism, but, ah, not if your "punch" doesn't land! Our President might have waited, at least, until a reporter actually asked a dumb question; instead he came off as someone who simply doesn't know or care that we Americans do occasionally look to our President for reassurance, particularly about a pandemic that threatens us all.

Action: concerning paid sick leave, coronavirus policy, and worker rights.

Congress passed legislation responding to the novel coronavirus threat last night, and it included two weeks of paid sick leave for workers who have either contracted the coronavirus or been told by a doctor to stay home because of their symptoms, and we may well have our foot in the door to get paid sick leave legislation for all workers -- but not if we sit on our hands! Hence the National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass paid sick leave legislation for everyone. Everyone's not going to get the coronavirus, after all, but everyone is going to get sick from something sooner or later, or will need to take care of a sick family member sooner or later, and we all deserve to be able to take a day or two off to take care of ourselves and our families without having to worry about whether we'll lose our jobs or whether we'll be able to pay all the bills. Furthermore, Americans deserve better than having to worry about whether a sick worker will make them sick. See? Paid sick leave protects us all, and protecting us all is our government's job.

Meanwhile, Color of Change (among many other groups) helps you tell our local, state, and federal governments to release as many folks as possible from prisons and detention centers so that they don't all die in a coronavirus outbreak. Don't be the one who squeals YOU CAN'TZ LETZ TEH PRIZONURZ OUTZ INTO TEH STREETZ TEH MURDURZ!!!!!, because you know as well as I do that a) hard criminals comprise a small number of folks in jail, b) "as many folks as possible" would exclude them, and c) most folks being held in jails and detention centers -- without being convicted of a crime, I feel compelled to add -- are there for nuisance crimes. Also consider that prisons are probably the most densely-populated places on Earth; think maybe the virus can spread like lightning under those conditions? Consider, finally, that helping people to live, no matter what they've done, is humane policy. I've seen my fellow Americans have very little trouble being good to each other lately, and it's heartening, though not surprising. But it's well past time our politicians followed suit.

Finally, some time ago we discussed the plight of the Thai seafood workers, who face numerous abuses, ranging from torture, beatings, and executions to forced 20-hour work days and forced ingestion of methamphetamines in order to keep working; sadly, they still face these abuses, so the International Forum for Labor Rights helps you tell the Thai government to do something about the plight of seafood workers. Migrant workers testify that the laws generally favor employers and boat owners, which is not a tremendous surprise, but we should resist the urge to go numb at yet another report of that. And certainly the Thai government should resist the urge to pass a bunch of laws with bite that they don't enforce! This is often the way of things in the developing world -- legislatures will pass good laws, but governments either refuse to enforce them or let utterly corrupt people enforce them. Don't let such observations make you cynical, because your duty remains the same: to confront injustice and, ultimately, to defeat it.

Action: concerning coronavirus policy, solar power, and product safety.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to impose a national moratorium on evictions and foreclosures. You know how this is going to go: too many Americans are going to lose their jobs, either because the economy's about to go in the toilet or because they're sick and can't come to work and have neither paid sick days nor a union to fight for their jobs, and when they lose their jobs, they're not going to be able to make their monthly bills, and rent and mortgage are two of the biggest monthly bills you can pay. Even Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin says we might have to prepare for a 20% unemployment rate! Of course, Steve Mnuchin is also the Foreclosure King, the man who kicked an elderly woman out of her house because she owed 27 cents on her mortgage, and I expect a lot of right-wingers will be like him: all those people thrown out of work will just get lazy if we let them stay in their homes! Yeah, all these "lazy" people needing respirators to help them breathe -- they should just get a job!

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: solar power is a lot less expensive than it used to be -- for many folks it's within the reach of a home equity loan now -- but why not help everyone enjoy the benefits of solar power? HB 531/SB 705 would set guidelines for the creation and operation of community solar organizations, which would enable a group of people to pool their resources together to get solar power if they can't afford it on their own, or if they rent rather than own a home, or if their house gets too much shade to have a proper solar set-up. Some right-wingers would call that "socialism," but not all right-wingers would! Some right-wingers would also say it's more self-reliant to use your own source of power, rather than relying on some distant utility. Too many folks don't understand that our government doesn't automatically cripple freedoms through laws and regulations, but can actually create and secure freedoms this way. If you're as subtle a thinker as that, then let the Sierra Club help you tell your PA state legislator to help spread solar power by passing HB 531/SB 705.

Finally, with a ProPublica investigation finding at least corporation designed its testing so that it's "side-impact-tested" car seat almost couldn't possibly fail it -- which sure doesn't tell you very much about whether your kids would die in a car crash if they were in that seat! -- US PIRG helps you tell our National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (or NHTSA) to enact the most vigorous car seat safety standards possible. Congress only told the NHTSA to accomplish this task 20 years ago, so maybe they should get cracking! And no, this isn't "socialism," either -- our government must step in where private corporations fail to protect us from their own greed and laziness; otherwise, why do we have one? To more effectively deliver corporate welfare to some politician's crony or other? Because that seems to be what today's politicians what our government to be. Luckily, we live in America, and they don't get all the say about everything: we do. But not if we don't use the power that belongs to us. Not if we don't speak out.

Around the table: more horrible truths about our coronavirus response.

Mike Ludwig at TruthOut reminds us that "Years of Austerity Weakened the Public Health Response to Coronavirus." I still hear right-wingers tell us that "a government that can do anything for you can do anything to you," but of course we have a government that can't deliver a coronavirus test (let alone a vaccine!) with the appropriate speed but can still spy on all of us. And no, private sector charity is no match for a government delivering the services we pay for with our taxes -- if it were, why do we have over 30 million uninsured where so many other nations have zero?

The incomparable Rick Perlstein reviews Nicholas Lemann's The Transaction Man, and in doing so explores "how finance broke the modern corporation." Long story short: "(t)he control of corporations has become separated from their ownership" -- which actually worked out well during the post-New Deal boom, as shareholders-without-power mushroomed and executives "could be persuaded to act in socially responsible ways that oligarchs would not," but as the post-New Deal boom ended and executives decided that only profits mattered, they took on ever-more exotic forms of debt, gave banksters more power, and leveled communities. Also, too, Silicon Valley won't save us -- it might be too much to hope that it merely doesn't make everything worse.

I hate talking about our self-absorbed drama king of a President, I really do, but occasionally we should remind ourselves that he's not only a liar, but a liar whose lies can be easily disproven by a few minutes of googling. Case in point: he's lately said he didn't know he'd cut funding for the CDC paramedic team back in 2018, but actual video evidence exists showing him talking about why he'd done just that. This is why our Founders put restraints on Presidential power: because sooner or later you'll get someone who only cares about himself and cares nothing about morals or values or our shared heritage as Americans. (I've a bone to pick with them about the Electoral College, though, since it seems to work in more or less the opposite manner they intended.)

Sarah Anderson and Sam Pizzigati wonder whether why coronavirus crisis must "Result in a Wealthier Wealthy." Listening to our President show such concern for the airline corporations -- who did, after all, spend $45 billion on freaking stock buybacks over the last decade, so why do they need a bailout now? -- and hearing about all the "burdensome" regulations banksters which actually help prevent them from taking our economy down, you no doubt wonder the same thing. Of course, we also call for things like paid family leave and moratoria on evictions and water shutoffs in a time of crisis, but these things would actually help people survive, versus help CEOs guild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home. And why "federal loan guarantees" for corporations but not guarantees of employment for displaced workers? I mean, they're both "socialism," so you might as well do things that work.

Finally, in a related note, Sen. Ron Johnson (E-WI) worries that too much coronavirus stimulus will, get this, "incentiviz(e) people not to show up for work." He seems unworried about folks who soon won't have a work to show up to, let alone the folks who aren't "showing up" because they don't want to kill other people with their illness, and of course he's completely silent on whether all the corporate welfare in the coronavirus stimulus bill will make big corporations lazy! As with our President, morals and values are for little people like us, not big people like him. Ron Johnson: he gives the citizen legislator a bad name.

Action: concerning health care, encryption, banksters, and conservation funding.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to ensure that all Americans will be able to get a coronavirus vaccine if they need it. What does that mean, exactly? It means the coronavirus vaccine can't cost $700 a pop, for one -- in fact, it shouldn't cost the taxpayer any damn money at all, since it's, you know, a life-saving medicine. There's a reason I put "the taxpayer" in that sentence, of course, and that's because taxpayer money funds a lot of drug research and development in America, so certainly no big pharma corporation should have the "right" to charge an arm and a leg for something we all helped pay for. Sound "socialist" to you? Then don't take medicines, don't drive roads, don't call the cops, and don't take books out from the library, because if you do, then you are a socialist, and there are hypocrisies I won't abide. This is life and death, folks, and this everyone-for-themselves-make-all-the-money ideology we have ain't no hill to die on, figuratively or literally.

Meanwhile, Congress is contemplating S. 3398, the Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies (or EARN IT) Act, and if some overpaid and overfed Senator tells you that you have to "earn it," you should be skeptical. And so it goes with the EARN IT Act, which would, in the name of "preventing exploitation of children," destroy encryption in the United States by giving our Attorney General the power to shut down websites and applications if he doesn't like how big tech corporations are moderating the content that crosses their wires -- which, for this Attorney General, definitely means going after encryption. He said so! I think big tech corporations should act more like publishing houses than message board flame wars, but not by taking away a power we're all going to need more of in the future if Our Glorious Elites keep trying to destroy us. Hence the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to preserve our freedoms by rejecting the EARN IT Act.

In other news, our Administration wants to use the coronavirus pandemic to do a great deal of harm to the American people -- not just in their notorious "payroll tax holiday," a way of ending all payroll taxes (and thus Social Security and Medicare) if ever there was one, but also in letting big banksters evade the few requirements they have to prove they can actually survive a serious economic downtown. So Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to shut down any Administration attempt to ease regulations on banksters. It's not like banksters got more popular over the last 12 years, amirite? And it's certainly not like they've ever shown any penitence over what they did in 2008, or have taken steps to make sure it doesn't happen again -- all they've done is put more numbers on the roulette wheel. But, you know, this President thinks rules and regulations are only for little people like us, not big people like him. That's why we have to tell our Congressfolk what to do.

Finally, Congress did permanently reauthorize the existence of the Land and Water Conservation Fund last year, which was actually kind of unexpected -- but they still have to authorize its funding, for even though the Fund nominally gets its money from gas and oil drilling royalties on public lands, not only do certain Administrations think reducing royalties owed to the public is "sound policy," but Congressfolk do like to raid the Fund for other purposes. Also, this Administration's proposed budget would have cut funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund by a staggering 97%. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund so that it can actually, you know, conserve public lands and water sources. We wouldn't have the Grand Canyon, the Delaware Water Gap, or the Appalachian Trail without the Fund, and we should be proud of these things -- and we should be ashamed to steal from the Fund to compensate for our shortsightedness elsewhere.

Action: concerning good House bills and good coronavirus policy.

It's, well, close enough to Monday that it's time to call your Senators again and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment (and thus, in theory, smooth its entry into our Constitution). No, we do not excuse the Senate from doing the right thing because of the pandemic! They use anything as an excuse to ignore the people's will! And they'll continue to do so until we make it impossible for them to do so -- and that means a lot more phone calls.

Meanwhile, you know how they tell us we should wash our hands more frequently now to stop the spread of the coronavirus? It's good advice -- and it's advice people literally can't follow if their water's turned off. Hence Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to mandate that localities can't shut off folks' water service during the coronavirus pandemic. If you're tempted to think of this as a way of coddling people who should have paid their water bills, please do the following things: a) slap yourself; b) contemplate whether death is a suitable punishment for failure to pay your water bill; c) contemplate more fully the absurdity that some folks buy penthouse apartments just to leave them empty for tax purposes while most folks don't make enough money to pay all their bills all the time; and d) contemplate more fully that when some folks can't wash their hands, all of us still face the threat of getting the coronavirus. See? It's not about helping freeloaders; it's about helping all of us. If you still don't see that, repeat steps a) through d) until you do.

Finally, in the wake of the news that New York Governor Andrew "the Lesser" Cuomo (D) would pay prisoners less than a dollar a day to manufacture hand sanitizer, Color of Change helps you tell Gov. Cuomo to try more humane policies in dealing with prisoners at risk of coronavirus. It's not like they can even use hand sanitizer in prisons, since the state's own laws would regard it as "contraband"! (Hand sanitizers contain over 60% alcohol, as you may know.) Hence you would call for Gov. Cuomo to end forced labor in prisons and institute a living wage for prisoners, stop blocking cash bail reform and thus stop artificially boosting prison populations, and grant clemency to the most immunocompromised prisoners (who will not necessarily then come to your door and cough on you, if you're of the paranoid stripe). I know a lot of folks would oppose such moves because they're mean to criminals as a way of feeling less insecure about themselves, but if we can't be humane to those who have injured our civilization and thus been put in prison, then we can't be humane, period. And I would like to think better of us than that.

Around the table: this time with the good news at the end!

Our Administration proposes rolling back "burdensome" regulation mandating that all nursing homes have at least one infection control specialist on staff. Instead, nursing homes would be allowed to have such specialists on-site for a "sufficient" time, whatever that is. Naturally, nursing home CEOs have pressed for this rule change, meaning, I presume, that they could use contract employees instead of actually hiring someone who would require health insurance and other benefits. But this sure is a hell of a corporate welfare handout to contemplate in the middle of a pandemic. Infections claim some 380,000 lives at nursing homes annually, and one nursing home in Washington state has lately lost 13 residents to the coronavirus. So, hella great timing, Administration! (And no, New York Times business page, the regulatory changes won't save the "industry" money; it'll save executives money. It's 2020; learn the damn difference.)

Half a dozen witnesses claim that our President bribed (via middlemen) New York City tax assessors to cut his buildings' taxes during the '80s and '90s. And a spokeshack for our President's businesses even says, out loud, that our President's businesses were "a victim of the scandal"! You see, self-pity is bad for you and me, but it's OK for our betters. Don't hold out hope that Mr. Biden will run campaign ads about this particular corruption, though our President will not STFU about Mr. Biden's brother or son for the next eight months. At least Mr. Biden will have time to polish his civility trophy when he loses.

Speaking of the Democrats' next losing Presidential candidate, Mr. Biden now won't commit to signing a Medicare-for-All bill if it gets through Congress -- because it might "delay() providing the security and the certainty of healthcare being available now." But if he'd read the bill currently before Congress -- reading being, as we know, a good way of understanding issues as they actually exist -- he'd know that Medicare would take four years to cover everyone, giving all those supposedly best-and-brightest health insurance CEOs ample time to wind things down, and giving our government ample time to ensure no one suffers a lapse in insurance. Once that's pointed out to him, I guess he'll pivot back to TEH MEDICAREZ FOR ALLZ WILL BUSTZ ALL TEH BUDGETZ!!!!, although, of course, that's also a load of horsedoodle. (Personal to those who would tell me "don't criticize Joe Biden or you'll cause him to lose": if he wanted to win this election, he shouldn't have spent the last 50 years sucking up to right-wingers.)

Lee Fang at The Intercept notes that Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) has taken paid sick leave from his job as he self-quarantines from possible coronavirus infection -- but of course championed legislation in Florida's legislature that would have prevented counties and municipalities from enacting their own paid sick leave legislation! I guess he figures he "earned" it and you haven't, but, really, anyone can win an election -- the ability to be the biggest asshole in the room not actually being a particularly useful skill -- and anyway it's not so much about whether you can "earn" it as about whether the rest of America deserves to catch what you've got because you couldn't take a day off from work.

Finally, because we deserve some good news, U.S. District Court judge issues an injunction against our President's food stamp rollback, which would prevent the rollback from taking effect until various other lawsuits against the rollback make their way through our courts. The ruling is getting a lot of ink for citing the coronavirus pandemic as a bad time to cut food stamps, which it is, but the meat of the ruling is (get your surprised face ready) that the USDA violated the Administrative Procedures Act by failing to take heed of public comments opposing the rollback, which is, as you know, a line of reasoning Chief Justice Roberts has already accepted in his ruling striking down the Census's proposed citizenship question. I would like to put it past him to simply ignore evidence.

Around the table: special "our President still sucks at leadership" edition!

David Corn at Mother Jones reminds us that "the GOP's war on government paved the way" for our current President's incompetent response to the coronavirus pandemic. Indeed, leadership during a pandemic is one of the things we deserve to get for the taxes we pay, but we've been hearing for so long that government is corrupt and incompetent that we've forgotten that this is our government, and the proper response of a citizen isn't to destroy the government that belongs to you, but to reclaim it. I'm doing my best to teach this lesson.

I never watch our President on TV before bed, but the thing that most struck me about his address to the nation about the coronavirus pandemic is what a masturbatory, narcissistic exercise it is. A leader wouldn't call the things he's doing that other folks have done before and better "unprecedented" or brag about TEH GREATESTZ ECONOMIEZ EVAHZ!!!! in the midst of explaining how he'd lead us through this crisis, but this clown does. And I would invite anyone who tabulated all the "I"s in Barack Obama's State of the Union speeches to explain how our President's actual and constant patting himself on the back isn't far worse.

You know what else a leader doesn't do? Grasp at straws to blame his predecessor for his problems, as our President also did last week. But I suspect calling Mr. Obama's handling of the 2009-2010 H1N1 pandemic a "disaster" won't resonate with folks -- particularly the ones who didn't get sick! That's before we get to the fact that the Obama Administration had H1N1 tests ready within two weeks of the first reported case, whereas this Administration still won't have one for at least six weeks, as our CDC is reporting over 1,600 cases of coronavirus in America.

My first reaction to the sight of Administration Treasury Secretary/man who wears glasses so people don't punch him in the face Steve Mnuchin calling the pandemic "a great investment opportunity" was and they wonder why we hate them! Then I realized that he was saying this on CNBC, an all-business news channel that (like all other cable news channels!) doesn't use all that time it's on the air to report actual business-related news, but spends all its time bloviating about drama and cheerleading some crony or other's business interests, and so my second reaction was: and they wonder why we hate them!

Finally, Peter Wehner at The Atlantic tells us that our President's term is effectively over and that most Americans are now on to his con game. Mr. Wehner's tabulation of our President's multitudinous errors in managing this crisis is edifying, and I would like very much to believe that this is an "inflection point, when everything changed, when the bluster and ignorance and shallowness of America’s 45th president became undeniable, an empirical reality, as indisputable as the laws of science or a mathematical equation," but you know, I've read this obituary so many times now that I won't believe it until we humiliate this President in the manner he deserves. And with right-wing Democrat Joe Biden about to be his anointed challenger in November, he may not get that humiliation for a few more years.

Action: concerning price-gouging, pollution, and internet freedom.

If you've poked around on Amazon lately, you may have found $50 bottles of hand sanitizer and $200 bottles of disinfecting wipes; I wonder why? Amazon has since removed many of these products, but you have to wonder why they didn't seem to see it coming, particularly since, you know, price-gouging in times of crisis is as old as the hills. Or maybe you don't have to wonder why they didn't seem to see it coming -- they make more money off price-gouging than they do off regularly-priced goods, and the only thing that stops the corporation responsible for about half of all online sales from embracing price-gouging with both arms is the Big Stick of Bad PR. Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell Amazon to put safeguards in place before the price gouging starts. And, not for nothing, but price-gouging magically found some of Amazon's own products, too. If only we had antitrust laws to prevent this sort of thing! Of course, we do; our government just doesn't enforce them, because TEH FREE MARKETZ!!!!!!

Meanwhile, factory farms continue to spew their filth into our waterways, creating low-oxygen "dead zones" where nothing can live or grow, and if you find yourself thinking well, that's so we can keep chicken prices down, I would remind you that focusing exclusively on the next pack of cutlets you buy at Shop Rite is short-term thinking, and antithetical to a civilized existence. And if you find yourself thinking well, it's only fish that are dying, remind yourself that civilizations have been eating fish for as long as we can remember and pollution doesn't just go away because we'd prefer not to see it. Factory farms are also guilty of cramming feed animals into ever-smaller pens and pumping them full of antibiotics so they can produce more meat, but if factory farms help cause the destruction of civilization, we probably won't argue too much about whether it was antibiotic abuse or pollution that destroyed us. So let's just avoid future dystopias entirely by letting Penn Environment help us tell our Congressfolk to stop the expansion of factory farms in America.

Finally, federal courts have so far upheld our FCC's nefarious net neutrality repeal, but have struck down our FCC's attempts to prevent states from enacting their own net neutrality legislation, so Daily Kos helps you tell your state legislators to ensure real internet freedom for their constituents by enacting the most vigorous net neutrality legislation possible. Net neutrality, as you know, is the principle that says that you, and not some big corporation, should be able to determine where you want to go on the internet -- that an internet service-providing corporation can't, for example, deliver content from its "partner" corporations before the content you want to see, or block content merely because those content-makers haven't paid the proper tribute, or censor perfectly lawful content. You may well ask: how come Twitter should be able to block abusive speech but Comcast shouldn't? Simple: Twitter is a publishing house, while Comcast is a utility, regardless of what our FCC thinks.

Action: concerning the coronavirus and its effects.

Yesterday I suggested that our Administration's policy responses to the coronavirus would all just make their rich cronies richer, but I have to say I didn't know how bad they truly were -- seriously, letting big airline corporations defer their taxes, when they can already defer their taxes so much that most of them pay no taxes every year? And remember that a "payroll tax holiday" means no money paid into Social Security and Medicare; even Barack Obama signed off on a payroll tax cut, and only on the employee side. Less money for Social Security and Medicare means what else? A manufactured funding "crisis," that's what, one that means they "have" to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits down the road! Don't think this Administration is stupid, no matter how stupid our President acts; they know what they're doing, and they know they're doing evil. So now would be a good time to call your Reps and Senators and tell them you reject all of this Administration's attempts to use the coronavirus to pass bad policy. And don't be afraid to describe those policies as "evil," either.

And while you're got them on the phone, you can suggest better policies that would help us weather bad times a whole lot better than all of our President's attempts to redistribute income upward to his fellow executives. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy identifies five such policies: increase investment in public health spending, including Medicaid and the Centers for Disease Control budget; expand unemployment insurance and offer paid sick leave; reverse the 2017 tax "reform"; actually collect the few corporate taxes we're still supposed to collect; and start taxing the rich considerably harder than we're doing now, by imposing a wealth tax and reforming capital gains taxes so that rich folks don't consistently pay less in taxes from selling property than working families do by, you know, merely existing. As ITEP says at the above link, "(c)rises are inevitable but we have power over our response." Politicians like to pretend we're their hostages, but we're free people, with powers vested in us by our laws and our traditions. So let's use that power; it is our solemn duty as citizens, after all.

Finally, regarding paid sick leave in particular, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation guaranteeing paid sick leave for American workers immediately. I'm sure right-wingers will accuse us of "using a crisis to pass our pet legislative priorities," but paid sick leave would actually help contain the coronavirus threat, by giving workers the option to take some paid time off if they get sick, so they don't go to work and get other people sick. Not everyone has that option, as you know, since taking a day off without pay results in unpaid bills and lost jobs, in a country where almost half of us don't have the financial resources to face a $400 emergency. Surely paid sick leave would help contain the spread of the coronavirus better than more deferred taxes for airline corporations! And starving Social Security and Medicare through a "payroll tax holiday" (which Social Security Works helps you oppose, if you're in a hurry) won't actually help working families very much, though it will result in yet another unearned pile of money for their bosses. But we're not a nation of bosses -- we're a nation of workers, and a nation of citizens, and the politicians should hear us, and obey us.

Action: concerning bankster welfare, slave labor, and school lunch nutrition standards.

You've heard that the "economic stimulus" ideas our Administration is contemplating as a response to the coronavirus are mostly give-rich-people-more-money-they-haven't-earned? Well, banksters think that the coronavirus justifies letting them out of passing "stress tests" that would demonstrate their ability to weather another financial Armageddon. We can go ahead and call that corporate welfare. I guess your kids can use the coronavirus as an excuse to get their cookies before they eat their dinner, too! And burglars can use the coronavirus as an excuse to get off scot-free when they break into your house! More to the point, of course, is that banksters would use the coronavirus as an excuse to shirk their duty not to smear dung all over our economy again. And you know our Administration thinks duty isn't for big people, but only for little people like us. Hence Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Reserve not to use the coronavirus crisis as an excuse to enable banksters. These people really act like diaper-loaded brats, but at least babies are more charming once you change them.

Meanwhile, turns out Apple ain't just providing China with technological help oppressing the Uyghur Muslim population there -- it's also using Uyghurs as slave labor in its supply chain! It's a double-whammy! I'm old enough to remember when the corporatists would scold you for protesting slave labor in supply chains by saying you like your cheap consumer goods? And now we have a corporation using slave labor in its supply chain to make consumer goods that aren't even cheap. You have to wonder if Our Glorious Elites planned to take our outrage hostage to cheap stuff, then replace the cheap stuff with expensive stuff. It is the logic of the drug dealer, after all. But we won't fix it by meditating on our own alleged hypocrisy, or by building our own cellphones, which requires expertise most folks don't have and can't acquire on the fly -- we'll fix it by continuing to wield the Big Stick of Bad PR, and continuing to demand that corporations do right by their employees. So MPower Change helps you tell Apple to stop using slave labor from oppressed Chinese folk in its supply chain.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our USDA to scuttle its own efforts to roll back school lunch nutrition standards, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. If I seem strident about this matter, it's mainly because I've seen so, so many stupid arguments about getting our children to eat less junk food, and more fruits and vegetables, in school. People say some variation of GUBMINTZ DON'TZ TELLZ TEH KIDZ WHAT TO DOZ!!!!, when, actually, we have legally charged our government with this very task for our children while they're in school. And you'd think more people would want more support from our government when they try to get their kids to eat a banana instead of a bag of chips! I also hear that "some kids throw their apples away," as if the behavior of "some kids" means we should do nothing for any kids, or that "some districts are having trouble meeting the standards," when most districts aren't having that trouble and, again, do we stop doing good works because of a few stragglers? And when our USDA decides that french fries can count as fruit, they've all but said they're losing the argument.

Action: concerning paid sick leave, Social Security benefits, and unsafe baby products.

It's a bit rich hearing big corporations like Amazon and Uber telling their workers to stay home if they feel sick, since most of these big corporations don't offer paid sick leave to their employees. So if they don't come to work because they're sick, they don't get paid, and they might get fired! If you still think you shouldn't get paid when you're sick, ask yourself how many of the illnesses you've had were 100% your fault. I swear, some people act like no one else has ever deserved a break. And if you still think getting fired for being sick is "just the free market at work," I would feel compelled to ask if you have ever been in danger of losing your job for being sick. In a world where we now bow out of social gatherings because we fear the coronavirus, we should make sure folks who interact with a lot of customers can take some time off to get well so they don't make those customers sick. And these workers shouldn't face joblessness or destitution because of it! Hence Sum of Us helps you tell big corporations to start granting paid sick leave to their workers.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 860, the Social Security 2100 Act, so that we can increase benefits and ensure Social Security remains on a secure fiscal footing, then Social Security Works still helps you do that. The Social Security 2100 Act would calculate cost-of-living increases in a realistic manner, rather than used the "Chained CPI" that doesn't take into account all the fixed costs seniors have. I mean, if the price of a drug goes up, seniors aren't just going to switch to a cheaper drug, are they? But Chained CPI would assume they would! The Social Security 2100 Act would also tax income over $400,000 into the system -- feel free to tell your Congressfolk that income between $132,700 and $400,000 should also be taxed into the system! -- and would raise the threshold at which Social Security benefits can be taxed. So the Social Security 2100 Act would pay out more money, and would also let you keep more of your hard-earned money. And make no mistake, you earned Social Security.

Finally, with our government a little slow (who'da thunk it?) in getting dangerous and potentially lethal inclined baby sleepers off the market, Consumer Reports helps you tell Facebook and Craigslist to ban the sale of these items on their platforms. Facebook's marketplace is booming, and Craigslist is still a big player in online classifieds no matter how 2000s they seem. And they really have no excuse, since Walmart, Amazon, and eBay have already committed to ridding inclined baby sleepers from their platforms. Please don't be the fool who says but don't folks who have inclined baby sleepers have a right to recoup some of their costs? After all, they didn't know they were buying a product that would be banned! I would answer that question with another question: does any baby deserve to die by accident in a product we all know isn't safe just so someone can get a few bucks back? You could only answer "yes" to the first question if you could also answer "yes" to the second; I suspect more folks would answer "yes" to both than they would have years ago, simply because being uncivilized doesn't seem to be the stigma it used to be. But they're still wrong.

Around the table: Democrats charge headlong into oblivion! And other horrible truths.

From the "Even More Appalling Than I Thought" file: Nathan Robinson at Current Affairs discourse at considerable length about why a Joe Biden nomination would be absolutely disastrous for the Democratic party and for America. Long story short: Mr. Biden has spent almost a half century capitulating to Republicans, and once our President pretends to be a populist again and points out all the times Mr. Biden has disappointed us, then what, exactly, will Mr. Biden do? Also, too, Bernie Sanders is totally electable, for the 219th time. If we all "get behind" Mr. Biden because the alternative is a dramatic bully, what do we get? Another eight or 16 or 24 years of malicious Republicans kicking spineless Democrats in the teeth, and as I've said many times, we need to break that wheel.

Greg Palast at The Guardian notes that California has been making independent voters jump through hoops just to vote for their choice in the Democratic Presidential primary, which could have cost Sen. Sanders over half a million votes (by Mr. Palast's count). Yes, you can vote in a party's primary if you're a California independent, but you actually had to tell them you intended to do so by responding to a postcard that looks pretty much like a piece of junk mail. Ask all those disenfranchised Ohio voters about that! Also, too, two-hour wait times at USC and three-hour wait times at UCLA? If you're wondering why young folks and independents "aren't turning out" for Mr. Sanders, you may want to consider the possibility that governments are preventing them from voting.

New Zealander visits social justice movements in 14 cities and describes "four things that struck me" about them: social welfare programs encourage folks to take risks, racist subjugation in America has virtually obliterated any shared memory of how things used to be different and better for black folks, shutting your mouth to avoid causing harm might seem like a good idea at the time but that's now way to practice really being there for other folks, and you're better off working through your misery when you confront injustice than you are just rolling up your sleeves and pretending you weren't moved. I hope that summary does this article justice; if not, I'll point you to the satirical cartoon shows a left-wing activist cutting down folks and a Nazi wannabe activist actually being more nurturing, and remind you that it ain't good satire if it ain't true.

Ho hum, some Administration officials say Iraq is dangerous for Christians when it suits them politically and then others claim it's not so dangerous when it tries to deport Iraqi Christians, and here we have yet more proof of what I've been saying for years, that different forces within our Administration will appear to be at odds with each other to give the appearance of "vigorous debate," when we know that a) they march together jackboot-lockstep when it matters and b) the "vigorous debate" doesn't even necessarily mean they don't know what they're doing -- when you suck at running things, you create chaos, because chaos creates drama, and drama distracts people. Particularly when the opposition party is doing its damnedest yet-again to present no alternative to the drama.

I'm sure some knucklehead will say that this article explaining how one of the major reasons "Artificial Intelligence is Biased Against Women" is because our whole civilization is biased against women is water-is-wet territory, but the fact is we go to great lengths to hide how sexist (and racist) we are, and then we relentlessly gaslight the folks who figure it out. And when AI workers are overwhelmingly white and male, then the folks who would change things for the better (like Olga Russakovsky's team at Princeton) face an even more uphill battle. Usually I say that while the arc of history bends toward justice, that arc looks awful flat when you're underneath; let me reassure you that there are times that doesn't make me feel better, and this is one of them.

Finally, Masha Gessen at The New Yorker reminds us that the New York Times's reporting about Bernie Sanders's 1988 trip to Russia wrenches that event out of virtually every possible useful context. One could shout ZOMG TEH SOVIETZ TRIEDZ TO PROPAGANDAZ TEH BERNEEZ!!!!! all one wants, but we still wouldn't learn whether that "propaganda" (a word the Soviets used a lot more broadly than we do!) actually worked on Mr. Sanders. Furthermore, President Reagan was encouraging these cultural exchanges with the Soviet Union in the 1980s, but I guess Mr. Reagan isn't conservative enough for today's world.

Action: concerning good House bills, war with Iran, and internet privacy.

Happy Monday, good citizens! It's time to call your Senators and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment (and thus, in theory, smooth its entry into our Constitution). Our House of Representatives has assembled a good record of passing legislation that protects voting rights, health care, worker wages, consumer protection, and real internet freedom, and our Senate has done bupkus about all of that. And they won't do anything until they hear from us, in numbers, again and again and again.

Meanwhile, last month our Senate passed S.J.Res. 68, which would prevent our President from waging war on Iran without Congressional approval, and now the House must pass the bill, so we can send it to our President. He'll veto it, but let's make him veto some legislation, particularly legislation that would make him adhere to our Constitution. I said that the House might pass this bill with a quickness, but clearly I forgot that our Congressfolk hate taking up foreign policy-related legislation that might "hamstring" the President in foreign policy, but how many times must I tell these pimps!. Delegating war-making powers to Congress, not our President, is a feature of our Constitution, not a bug! Our Constitution only gives the President the authority to figure out how to win wars Congress has already declared, not the authority to go off all half-cocked. Hence Peace Action West helps you tell your House Reps to restrain our rogue President from unilaterally starting a war with Iran by passing S.J.Res. 68.

Finally, Clearview AI aims to scrape your photos off your Facebook page so it can create the world's biggest facial recognition database -- which should trouble you, since facial recognition a) generally oppresses activists more than it catches actual criminals and b) can't hardly tell black folks apart and it's almost like that's the idea. Besides, they're your photos! You put them on the internet, but that doesn't mean you give permission for big corporations to make your life hell! Besides, Facebook does have privacy settings, the existence of which signal your own intent as to how you want folks to use your photos, and also signal Facebook's duty in protecting them from folks you don't want to see them. Commonsensical, right? You'll be gratified to learn that Twitter, Google, and LinkedIn have all threatened legal action against Clearview for scraping photos from their sites -- but not Facebook, apparently. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell Facebook to stop Clearview AI from harvesting your private photos for their nefarious ends.

Action: concerning health care, pregnant workers, and discrimination.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to support Medicare-for-All health insurance. The news hook, of course, is the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus, and you may have heard about the fellow in Miami who got slammed with a surprise $3,000-plus medical bill after getting tested to ensure he didn't have it. Since Medicare-for-All would cover everyone, and since even right-wing think tanks say it'll cost substantially less than our current health insurance system, I feel pretty confident in saying that surprise medical bills would be a thing of the past under Medicare-for-All. We live in a nation where we can watch pretty much any TV show we like pretty much any time we like but almost half of us still can't afford even a $400 emergency; I put that first part in there to give today's more libertarian-minded observers some pause. I'm sure in the '40s they were arguing that no social justice movements were necessary because every house has a refrigerator now! But that doesn't help folks who are six feet under because they couldn't pay for health care.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 2694, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, then the National Women's Law Center still helps you do that. Some folks no doubt wonder why discriminating against pregnant workers isn't already illegal, but actually, it is already illegal -- and when you make something illegal, you then have to deal with all the ways big corporations try to get around the law in order to punish workers for getting pregnant. It's sad, but it's true -- as Noam Chomsky said long ago, the corporation is fundamentally anti-family, because caring for families not only doesn't help a corporation make money, it makes the worker "less reliable" as a cog in the corporate machine, since, you know, family members get sick and need to be cared for. So when you're up against corporations, you don't just need laws telling them they can't discriminate; you need laws telling them they can't discriminate in all the ways they've gotten away with since they were told they can't discriminate. But this is our duty.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2214/S. 1123, the NO BAN Act, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Our President issued his Muslim travel ban over three years ago, has lately added six more countries to his ban, and has even mooted using the coronavirus to extend that ban to even more countries -- though even our Supreme Court, which blessed his Muslim ban without evaluating his own statements that he aimed to discriminate against Muslims, might not bless that last extension. See? Give an Executive an inch and he takes a mile! I guess his votaries would squeal NO TERRURIZTZ ATTACKZ SINCEZ TEH GREATESTZ PRESNITZ EVAHZ TOOKZ OFFICEZ!!!!!, but then these are the same folks who blindly supported the Republican President who did allow a major terrorist attack on American soil. And anyway, denying people entry into this country because they're Muslims is profoundly un-American. I try not to use that word "un-American," but some folks leave me no choice.

Action: concerning government spying, nutrition standards, and forced arbitration.

Ban Facial Recognition helps you tell universities across America to (naturally) ban the use of facial recognition technology on campus. Proponents of facial recognition like to tell you that it'll reduce crime, but there are a number of problems with that, and the fact that crime rates are falling faster than we're reducing our own fear of crime is only one of them. Another problem is that facial recognition, like your Tea Party uncle, can't hardly tell black folks apart. Another problem is that you did not consent to be spied upon when someone uses facial recognition technology on you; make consent easy and transparent and you can make that particular problem go away, but of course you can see why law-and-order types don't think very much about consent. Another big part? You know law enforcement will use facial recognition on folks who agitate for peace, for racial equality, for voting rights, for health care, for all manner of good policies -- in other words, liberals! Yes, liberals! And, really, who's more liberal than a college student? Besides me, I mean.

Meanwhile, you've no doubt heard that our Administration wants to roll back the school lunch nutrition standards which are literally the only positive achievement of the Obama USDA. But you may not have heard that our Administration's proposed rule would, get this, count french fries as a fruit and pasta as a vegetable. Because what keeps you more regular than french fries? In other words, our Administration wants to count junk food as a fruit. Think maybe one of the many acting department heads in our Administration decided to curry favor with our President by telling him he's really been eating fruit all this time? Seriously, politicians who think we should count junk food as fruit are objectively pro-childhood obesity. And don't believe the hype that kids don't want to eat healthy -- if we subsidized fruit the way we subsidize high fructose corn syrup, kids would never want anything other than apples. The Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell our USDA to scuttle its own plans to destroy school lunch nutrition standards.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Amtrak to stop forcing arbitration on its customers, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. You already know that forced arbitration clauses keep you from exercising your right to redress grievances in court, and force you into an arbitration hearing that you're not likely to win (meaning whatever you've heard about "average awards being bigger than in class action suits" is rubbish, since the average award to arbitration losers is, well, zero). But you know what stinks even worse about Amtrak forcing you to go to arbitration to punish them for their wrongdoing? Your taxes pay for most of Amtrak's operations! Which means that, in a very real sense, you are Amtrak's boss! And if anything belongs in our courts, it's cases brought against our government by its owners, the American people. Word on the street is that Rep. Lamb (D-PA) and Sen. Blumenthal (D-CT) will introduce a bill on this matter very soon, but you can still let your Congressfolk know how you feel now.

Action: concerning community reinvestment, harmful pesticides, and "conversion therapy."

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell our government to enforce the Community Reinvestment Act. With the news that our current Administration would like to declare banks compliant with the CRA even when they lend less to low- and middle-income borrowers -- which sure does seem like our law-and-order President just ignoring the law, doesn't it? -- you would, at the above link, call for our Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (or FDIC) and our Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (or OCC) to ensure that banks give out loans to small businesses and family farms more than big sports stadiums, and to ensure that banks that create "affordable housing" units actually put low- and middle-income folks in those housing units. Such rules would seem self-evident, but apparently they're not self-evident to a President who thinks rules are only for little people and big people should break all the rules they want. Luckily we have built a civilization to constrain such people, and we must constrain them wherever we can.

Meanwhile, Penn PIRG helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to ban pyrethroid use in pesticides until they can be proven safe. For a long time, we thought they were safe, at least for us; scientists have long known that most vertebrates (cats being a conspicuous exception) produce enough enzymes to break down pyrethroids, but that pyrethroids hurt most invertebrates. Trouble is we use so damn much of the stuff now, for so many purposes -- spraying crops, household pest control, repelling mosquitoes, treating lice outbreaks -- that we're finding that it does make us sick, or, at least, folks who get a lot of exposure to it get sicker than the rest of us. And though our bodies absorb pyrethroids very easily, that's less significant if we're absorbing a lot of them, to the point where studies have linked pyrethroids to chronic diseases including diabetes and Parkinson's. So, yeah, it's time for our best-and-brightest to come up with new ways of controlling pests. Hey, civilization requires maintenance.

Finally, the state of Florida has not yet banned "conversion therapy" for gay folks, even though the American Psychological Association (or APA) declared it a harmful, bogus practice over a decade ago. "Conversion therapy" often involves inducing vomiting while showing homoerotic imagery and forced re-enactment of past sexual abuses and "exercises" involving nudity and intimate touching. Oh, and electric shocks! You won't be surprised to learn that the APA also found that it caused guilt, depression, self-hatred, and increased suicidal ideation, and you certainly won't be surprised to learn that it doesn't turn gay folks hetero! America gets a bad rap, I think, for being bigoted toward folks who are different from the mainstream, but most Americans would just as well leave each other alone, except that Our Glorious Elites need to create drama to distract from their thievery. If you want to strike a blow against that drama, then let Change.org help you tell Florida state legislators to ban "conversion therapy" forever.

Around the table: exposing more child labor, more vote suppression, and more bad arguments about taxes.

British TV channel investigation finds children 13 and younger picking coffee beans used by Starbucks and Nespresso. Let's just let the first sentence of paragraph 2 tell it: "Channel 4’s Dispatches filmed the children working 40-hour weeks in gruelling conditions, picking coffee for a daily wage little more than the price of a latte." Starbucks sure ain't converting low labor cost into lower coffee prices, amirite? And dig Nespresso's CEO asserting that "we’ve launched a thorough investigation" -- "to find out which farms were filmed and whether they supply Nespresso," banking, I guess, that Channel 4 won't be able to expand its investigation to other farms in the future.

Guardian investigation finds Texas closing 750 polling locations since 2012 -- and, guess what, "the overwhelming majority of closures came in areas that saw the largest increase in black and Latino residents." Why, even John Roberts might call that racist! Though he's disappointed me before. Texas replaced a lot of their polling places with "vote centers," which you might suspect they designed to work badly just from the name, which reeks of vagueness. (Do people vote there? Do people count votes there? It's like they don't want you to know!)

What is "The Latest Wildly Misleading Argument Against Taxing the Rich," according to Steve Wamhoff at ITEP? That they already pay a much larger percentage of their income in taxes -- when you leave out things like capital gains and dividends, which comprise most of rich folks' income but generally gets taxed at a considerably lower rate than income. When you add those in, surprise! The top 1% pay a lower percentage of their income in taxes than folks in the 6th to 20th percentiles. Also, too, a Junior Bacon Cheeseburger at Wendy's doesn't cost $199 to a customer who makes a hundred times what you and I make.

In a peripherally-related note, our Congressional Research Service finds that the 2017 tax "reform" did not, in fact, spur business investment or wage growth. Which you already knew, if you know that the way to spur corporations to spend money creating jobs is to threaten to tax their profits a lot harder than we do now, because they'll spend the damn money if they think we're going to tax it, and they're more likely to spend it making stuff and paying people to make the stuff. Still, good to have some data buttressing that knowledge. (And yes, that's Jonathan Chait writing the article. He's really not so bad.)

Finally, Chris Matthews abruptly resigns (or is fired, who knows or cares) from MSNBC's Hardball. And thus ends, for now at least, a long career of blustering on behalf of Our Glorious Elites. Seriously, though, imagine coming to the end of your life and realizing that's who you were -- a pretend "populist" who only showed courage and independence when it didn't matter and sucked up to power the rest of the time. And if you watch the clip of Steve Kornacki coming on right afterward and saying "that was a lot to take in, just now, I'm sure, and I'm sure you're still absorbing that," as if we should all be so emotionally-invested the second highest-rated show (out of three!) on cable news at 7pm, then you know they won't change a thing -- drama is what our media is all about.

Action: concerning statehood for Puerto Rico and D.C., energy investment, and child care.

Change.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to grant statehood to Puerto Rico, and Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to grant statehood to Washington, D.C.. Not because they'll then elect Democrats to Congress! You know how I feel about a lot of the Democrats who serve in Congress, and besides, Republicans might well one day convince enough Puerto Rico and D.C. residents to elect them to represent them. Hey, stranger things have happened -- Hawaii sent a Republican to the U.S. Senate for three terms at the beginning of its tenure as an American state! No, Puerto Rico and D.C. should be states because their citizens have no representation in the Senate and only token representation in the House even though Puerto Rico has over 3.5 million residents and D.C. has over 700,000 residents, that latter figure being about the size of the average House district. Congress also typically strong-arms both Puerto Rico and D.C. -- Puerto Rico far more egregiously in recent years! -- and no Americans have to tolerate that.

Meanwhile, Mitsubishi wants to build a coal plant in the middle of the Ha Tinh province of Vietnam, a community still recovering from the pollution of its coastline by the Formosa Ha Tin Steel plant, which virtually wiped out the local fishing industry. If George W. Bush still ran the world, we'd be hearing about what a wonderful opportunity this disaster would be for another corporation to swoop in, poison a little more of the local air and water, and enrich some executives! But even if Orange George Bush runs the world now, we shouldn't tolerate that state of affairs, hence Sum of Us helps you tell Mitsubishi to abandon its plans to put another coal plant in Ha Tinh province. Mitsubishi might be vulnerable to the Big Stick of Bad PR, not just because several of its financial partners have pulled out of the project, but because the good folks of Ha Tin have fought back other proposed projects, too. Gosh, if they'd just embrace solar and wind, maybe they'd be more amenable to big corporations coming into their backyard. Anyway, let's help them out, and let Mitsubishi know we're watching.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1364/S. 568, the Child Care for Working Families Act, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. Child care costs are one of those costs -- like college, health care, and car loans -- where corporations can pretty much charge whatever they like because, hey, we can't just "choose" not to have these things, not anymore! It'd be nice to live in a world where only one parent in each family has to work, but we don't live in that world anymore, and child care corporations take advantage of that fact by charging out the wazoo. If your Tea Party uncle wonders whether we're going to make government pay for everything in the future, just remind him that a) "government paying for everything" is actually we the people paying for everything and b) we should not measure the effectiveness of a "free market" by how much unnecessary pain it causes working families. You may also remind him that child care almost certainly wasn't an issue for him, either as a child or as a parent, largely because of aggressive government taxation. Hey, truth doesn't have to tickle.

Action: concerning good bills and bad leadership.

Happy Monday, good citizens! It's time to call your Senators and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment (and thus, in theory, smooth its entry into our Constitution). These are excellent bills that would secure our voting rights, protect our public lands, protect us from predatory health insurance corporations, and restore real internet freedom -- among many other good works! But of course our Senate runs on Mitch McConnell time, which is "never." So tell them they need to run on Do the Right Thing time, which is now.

Meanwhile, the notorious Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act -- which authorizes various federal agencies to spy on citizens without offering us the due process of law our Constitution requires -- expires on March 15, and you know what your Congressfolk are like: they're scaredy-cats who would rather let good Americans lose our rights than take a stand that'd be unpopular with the bullies among Our Glorious Elites. This, even though our own NSA shut down its metadata surveillance program last year! And word on the street is that Congressional leaders might use a coronavirus spending bill as the vehicle to ram through an extension or reauthorization of Section 215, which would be an act of unconscionable cowardice. And rather than wait for Rand Paul to stand up for our freedoms -- although, to be fair, he's gotten some of our freedoms back with his machinations in the past -- we should stand up for them. Hence the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to reauthorize Section 215 without reforms that would protect our rights, especially if they try to use the coronavirus as cover. Seriously, no one who would do such a thing should ever be allowed near an elective office ever again. Both Democrats and Republicans should attend that statement.

Finally, The Other 98 helps you tell our Administration to remove Vice President Pence from his position overseeing the American response to the coronavirus. All ye need know about Mr. Pence's ability to manage a crisis is that while Governor of Indiana, he let an HIV mini-epidemic spread in rural Scott County rather than let that county run a needle exchange program, arguing for two years that needle exchange programs encourage drug addiction, which, like, no it does not. And now he goes on Pravda TV and tells everyone what a great job he did for Scott County, since he did ultimately relent and allow needle exchange programs in Scott county two years later, which sure will comfort the families of those who died in the meantime. So we have an executive who knows nothing, thinks he knows everything, and then lies about his record of knowing nothing and thinking he knows everything -- gosh, it's like we learned nothing from George W. Bush. And not for nothing, but maybe, just maybe, if our President really wants to get the coronavirus under control, he should stop whining about how everyone's out to get him. People hate leaders who whine about the jobs they signed up for. They also hate leaders who make everything about themselves all the time, like our lives are their big drama.

Around the table: today with more good news!

Wisconsin state appeals court strikes down ruling mandating that the state election commission remove over 200,000 voters from the rolls on suspicion of having moved. You would think they would want to verify people have moved before removing them from the rolls, but that didn't seem to enter into the court's reasoning (which was, basically, that the "plain language" of the law mandated clerks, not state election commissioners, to remove the voters). The right wing-dominated state Supreme Court has already declined to take up the case in a 3-3 vote; one of the right-wing judges essentially recused himself, saying that his impending re-election effort presents a conflict of interest in this case, but I wonder how quickly he'll pretend he never said that now that it looks like he's the right's last hope on this issue.

Now our Justice Department plans to strip citizenship from naturalized citizens more aggressively. It's not like we've never done this for good reasons before -- like, for naturalized citizens who concealed their work for the Nazis, though our President might regard such people as an oppressed class -- but this Administration would do strip citizenship for minor offenses and minor paperwork errors. Why, they would never be used against their political enemies! Of course, POGO's very thorough history lists many folks we have stripped of their citizenship for wholly political reasons. Our law and order President, ladies and gentlemen!

FAIR examines "NPR's Attempted Takedown of Bernie Sanders," and finds it wanting. The first clue, of course, is that Mara Liasson is involved, but the next time someone tells you Mr. Sanders is "unelectable," you have (by my count) 10 more arguments against that notion. I say "more" because your main argument against a candidate's "electability" is to tell people that they have the power to elect people and that they need to stop imagining how other people are going to think -- or, at the least, stop letting our "liberal" media tell them how other people are going to think.

In a related note, Jonathan Chait has indulged in a lot of Bernie-slam lately, so now he writes about all the things he likes about Mr. Sanders. They're pretty much the same things I would like about him, but I never cared that Mr. Chait was mean to Bernie Sanders; I cared that his arguments against the Sanders candidacy were stupid, particularly the one where he said Mr. Sanders's positions were "deeply unpopular." I count seven arguments against that specific notion at the link in the previous paragraph above. (As an aside, our "liberal" media need to stop with the overblown stories about Mr. Sanders's supporters, and not just because our President has some real peaches supporting him.)

Ho hum, Young Turks founder/U.S. House candidate Cenk Uygur told his staffers not to form a union. You won't be impressed with the reasons, either: because Young Turks is a small outfit, and never could have become as famous as it is if it had unionized workers, and can't keep up with the paperwork Jesus Mary and Joseph he sounds like a damn right-winger. I hope this sinks his Congressional run, and I wish the Young Turks workers the best in their efforts, even if Mr. Uygur folds his organization in response.

Finally, Stephanie Hegarty at the BBC checks in with Gravity Payments, the Seattle corporation whose CEO decided to pay all his workers (including himself!) a $70,000 minimum wage back in 2015. Long story short: in a little less than five years, Gravity has more than doubled its workforce and workload, his workers are having four times more children, employee pension contributions have more than doubled, and a tenth of his workers have actually bought a home -- in Seattle! And workers are happier, healthier, and more productive, though presumably they await a correction from Rush Limbaugh, who predicted Gravity would fall apart if it paid its workers too much. Though other CEOs are pointedly not following CEO Dan Price's lead (as he expected -- but hey, I also like to believe the best about people!), he still does good works, and we should still hold them up as an example to others.

Action: concerning human rights and health care.

Avaaz helps you tell the U.N. Human Rights Council, world governments, and corporations doing business in China to fight that nation's continued oppression of over a million Uyghurs. The U.N. Human Rights Council will meet in Geneva for the next month, so now's an especially good time to get their attention! As you know, China has detained over a million of its ethnic Muslims, and detainment in China also includes torture, rape, and family separation. Of course, earlier this week we were taking Apple to task for failing to provide secure messaging apps on their Apple Store in China, and, well, China's ongoing oppression of the Uyghurs is just one of the things Chinese activists get "disappeared" for talking about with each other. And oppression, in these times, requires a lot of corporate help, particularly in the area of surveillance and DNA databases. But we can wield the Big Stick of Bad PR and get corporations, governments, and the U.N. to respond. Indeed, we already have.

Meanwhile, Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell six fairly famous American corporations to stop enabling Israel's ongoing occupation of Palestinian territory. If you just read that sentence and immediately thought that telling those corporations to pull out would mean the death of Israel, then consider this: just as "being a friend" and "enabling whatever your friend wants to do no matter how harmful it would be" are two entirely different things, supporting Israel's right to exist and thrive and enabling it to wipe out Palestine are two entirely different things. I suspect most Americans understand that, though Our Glorious Elites pretend not to. But if we get Airbnb, Expedia, Trip Advisor, General Mills, Motorola (which provides a lot of the technological backbone for checkpoints and surveillance in the occupied territories), and Booking Holdings to stop doing business in occupied Palestine, we'll get some change.

Finally, both Moms Rising and Public Citizen help you tell our government not to give out exclusive licensing rights for a coronavirus vaccine to big pharma corporations. Sadly, our Health and Human Services Secretary, Alex Azar, has already announced that he can't even guarantee a coronavirus vaccine would be affordable -- dig the can-do American spirit he evokes there! -- since "we need the private sector to invest" and (sigh) "price controls won't get us there." Both of those statements are absolute horsedoodle -- insisting that price controls can't control prices is, of course, a special kind of stupidity long fashionable on the right, but the fact is that we the taxpayers will do most of the investing in any coronavirus vaccine, as we have done since 2002. So, no, we don't actually need private investment -- in fact, we could redirect a very small portion of federal budgetary misspending (cough vanity border wall cough!) to get it done.

Action: concerning bad budgeting, human rights, and gerrymandering.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject our Administration's skewed budget priorities, then Americans for Tax Fairness still helps you do that. Don't believe folks who say our President's budget doesn't cut Medicaid, food stamps, and Social Security disability programs, because his budget does these things, and the fact that neither House of our Congress wants to hold hearings on his budget doesn't matter -- the time to communicate our will to our representatives is always now, and don't think Congress wouldn't pull a bait-and-switch and pass this nefarious budget if we weren't watching, because of course they would. And regarding SSI, don't believe right-wingers when they sling around anecdotes about someone they heard or thought played up their back pain into SSI like that justifies $75 billion in cuts over 10 years. To amend Mark Twain, there are lies, damned lies, and "let me just tell you three stories."

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Apple to stop enabling China's awful human rights abuses, then Sum of Us still helps you do that. You'll want to get cracking on that one, since their annual shareholder meeting is happening as we speak, and you want to make sure they can see us wielding the Big Stick of Bad PR. Apple has garnered plenty of good PR by standing up for encryption in the United States, but they're helping China spy on activists' phone calls and text messages by refusing to sell (encryption) apps on the App store in China. No doubt they'll argue that China will just "disappear" anyone who downloads such apps, but China can't put everyone in a concentration camp at once, though they'll try. Just as South African anti-apartheid activists instructed us that divestment couldn't make their lives any worse, I bet Chinese human rights activists would prefer having the ability to shield their communications from their government.

And finally, Pennsylvania residents, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your state legislators to pass the anti-gerrymandering bills HB 22 and 23, then Fair Districts PA still helps you do that. HB 22 would amend the Pennsylvania state constitution to permit the creation of an eleven-person redistricting commission to handle the drawing of legislative boundaries; this would take the from the the state legislature, which has proven it can't handle it, such Rorschach-blot districts (excluding sides of streets and single houses, even!) do they draw. HB 23 would attend the nuts and bolts of the creation of the commission, the selection of its members (four voters from each of the two major parties, plus three more unaffiliated voters), and the criteria by which it can redraw legislative districts. If we can pass these bills, we'll be closer to a world in which voters actually pick their representatives, instead of representatives picking their voters.

Around the table: more bad behavior exposed, more bad arguments slain.

Our President gives our Secretary of Defense the power to simply dissolve collective bargaining agreements with over 750,000 defense workers because, get this, unionized workers present a threat to national security. A threat to the security of pampered, overfed Chief Executives who've never worked a real job, maybe! What do our President's unionized votaries think about this? That he must be referring to someone-else-and-not-them? Or do they merely care that he gets away with saying stuff they wish they could get away with saying? Bunch of big babies, all of them.

Ho hum, Dean Baker catches our "liberal" media dispensing a whole lot of scare numbers when discussing Democratic candidates' plans. 30 TRILLYUNZ!!!! 40 TRILLYUNZ!!!! 50 TRILLYUNZ!!!! They're awfully big, aren't they? But not necessarily when you consider a) our "liberal" media typically gives 10-year figures and almost as typically never says they're 10-year figures and b) our CBO puts the size of the economy over the next 10 years at $280 trillion. Also, too, you may recall that Ms. Warren's plan for funding Medicare-for-All would replace all spending by large employers on private health insurance, meaning it would cost more in the neighborhood of zero trillions of dollars.

From the "Because We Deserve Some Good News, Dadgummit!" file: Greyhound announces that it won't let Border Patrol agents conduct fishing expeditions on their buses unless they have a warrant. That is literally all we asked for! I do wonder why getting this news from Greyhound was like pulling teeth, though -- could it be they were actually embarrassed about contending that the law makes them let Border Patrol agents on board under pretty much any circumstances even though you don't need to be a Constitutional scholar to see that's utter horsedoodle? But for some folks, embarrassment shows evolution, and I do like to think the best of people.

Media executives gloat over how much money Michael Bloomberg is spending on ads on their stations. And they wonder why we hate them! All they care about is money! None of them care that pitting billionaire against billionaire recalls that point in the Roman Republic's history when you had to be a general to run for Consul, because none of them would know a history book if someone hit them over the head with it. (As an aside, I'm glad Les Moonves fell from grace because he stuck his prick where it wasn't welcome, but I'd have been even happier if he fell from grace simply because he was a prick.)

Finally, I won't tabulate every objection I have to Jonathan Chait's latest piece of Bernie-slam, since they number approximately one per point made, but Jesus Mary and Joseph does Sen. Sanders really have "deeply unpopular policy positions"? Like Medicare-for-All, which routinely gets majority or supermajority support in polling? How does majority or supermajority support equal "deeply unpopular"? Mr. Sanders's policy prescriptions might be "deeply unpopular" with pampered, overfed pundits, and maybe those are the only folks Mr. Chait ever talks to -- I mean, if he'd workshopped that appalling dog catcher metaphor before an audience who didn't care about pleasing him, he might not have inflicted it on his readers.

Action: concerning human rights, land mines, and stupid airline fees.

Yasaman Aryani and her mother Monireh Arabshahi protested Iranian forced veiling laws for women back in 2019, by riding a train without a head covering, so naturally an Iranian judge sentenced them to 16 years in prison for "inciting and facilitating corruption and prostitution." 16 years for not wearing a head covering! I mean, gosh, it's not like they stole the pensions of thousands of workers or something. You naturally recognize "inciting and facilitating corruption and prostitution" as the kind of snowflake charge that snowflake governments concoct when they're trying to keep people down. And though Iran has lately reduced Ms. Aryani's sentence to a little over 9 1/2 years, that's still a little over 9 1/2 years too long to spend in jail because you didn't wear a head covering on a train. Hence Amnesty International helps you tell the government of Iran to free Ms. Aryani and her mother immediately. Because even repressive governments still respond to the Big Stick of Bad PR.

Meanwhile, our Administration has decided to end American prohibitions against military use of land mines. I guess they'll say other nations get to use land mines, so we should, too, which was pretty much our Administration's argument for bowing out of the INF last year. But over 160 nations have joined the Mine Ban Treaty since 1997, and the fact that the United States is pointedly not one of them means we largely leave it up to the Executive branch to voluntarily stop using land mines in war-making. After three-plus years, we are hopefully seeing the value of not leaving so much up to the Executive branch, so Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation banning the use of land mines. And another thing: land mines don't just go away if no one sets them off, but remain a threat for decades, and so they maim and kill people long after all the wars are over. It sure seems to me that civilized people wouldn't allow that to happen.

Finally, Consumer Reports instructs us that the three largest American airline corporations -- American, Delta, and United -- actually charge fees to families if they want to sit together on flights, and are otherwise happy to sit children as young as 1 or 2 next to complete strangers! And here you thought getting government out of our way was going to help make a more family-friendly America! Of course, you don't need to be a Noam Chomsky acolyte to see that a corporate-controlled America must be less family-friendly, because families get in the way of corporate profits (or, more precisely, executive pay), so Consumer Reports helps you tell the three biggest airline corporations to stop separating families on flights. You may wonder why we don't simply tell Congress to pass a law. We may do that in the future! But first, we'll try wielding the Big Stick of Bad PR, which really ought to work on corporate CEOs here, since it concerns family separation.

Action: concerning good House bills, good housing policy, and bad Justice Department behavior.

Happy Monday, good folks! Now call your Senators and ask them to pass the following bills: H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; and H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act, and H.J.Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Don't worry about giving your Senators' staffers too much to write down, because if they truly aimed to do the people's will, they'd have debated and passed these bills already. After all, it's been over a year since all Senate clocks got set to "Mitch McConnell Time" -- i.e., "never" -- and we're on Do the Right Thing Time, which is now, and our Senators should set their clocks like we do.

Meanwhile, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has introduced H.R. 5072, called A Just Society: A Place to Prosper Act. The Place to Prosper Act would institute several necessary housing reforms: it would establish a national rent control program prohibiting landlords from jacking up rent higher than inflation (unless inflation is under three percent, in which case they could increase rent by three percent); it would amend the Fair Housing Act by preventing discrimination on the basis of income; it would fund removal of lead paint from public housing; and it would keep landlords who routinely abuse tenants out of the running for various forms of public funding (including public mortgages and public housing insurance). If you cringe at the words "rent control," just ask yourself: should landlords be allowed to squeeze tenants with virtual impunity? Particularly in areas of the country (cough California New York City cough) where housing prices are absurdly high to begin with? The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect Americans from predatory landlords by passing the Place to Prosper Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Justice Department's Inspector General to investigate the apparently pro-Presidential machinations of Attorney General Barr, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. I mean, we ought to use Inspectors General while we still can -- our President has already tried to get rid of all the Inspectors General in our government, and if he gets re-elected, he'll no doubt feel emboldened to try again. And our Inspectors General have long done good, independent work on our behalf, and the DOJ's IG would have quite a hornet's nest to probe where Mr. Barr is concerned -- he intervened to demand a lower sentence for Presidential crony Roger Stone, which action prompted four DOJ prosecutors to resign; he tried blocking an investigation into a money laundering case apparently at the behest of our President; and he used outside lawyers to review various DOJ actions our President opposed, including the indictment of then-NSA chief Michael Flynn and the non-indictment of former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe. Ain't none of this a good look for the President who constantly yells about "law and order," and we deserve real law and order in America.

Around the table: more bad arguments destroyed, more questionable moves by Our Glorious Elites exposed.

Surprise, surprise, a Guardian investigation reveals that bots produced one out of every four Twitterings about climate change during that period in 2017 where our President was mulling pulling out of the Paris Accords, and surprise, surprise, the vast majority of these bot-tweets promoted climate change denialism. Cue Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey: "but what is a 'bot,' really? Do we really understand the deep epistemological and ontological questions we raise when we say something is a 'bot'?"

I'm not sure I would call the litany of tax ideas our Administration is throwing against the wall in an election year as "pasta policymaking" -- I usually go for a more colorful phrase -- but it is apt. You'd be right to question why we need more tax reforms when we supposedly did a big tax "reform" in 2017, but the tax "reforms" they're floating -- invest your first $10,000 in the stock market tax-free if you make less than $200,000, like we all have money laying around to throw into the national roulette wheel! -- would continue our Administration's efforts to "preside over an upward redistribution of wealth." And if a minimum corporate tax is such a great idea, you have to wonder why they didn't go to bat over it in 2017, when Congress repealed it.

David Swanson puts the absurd hand-wringing over Medicare-for-All's "costs" perfectly: "How Are We Going to Pay for Saving Trillions of Dollars?" You remember, after all, that the Koch brothers-sponsored Mercatus Institute said Medicare-for-All would cost $32 trillion over 10 years, while the Centers for Medicare Services said our total health care spending, using the system we have now, would be $49 trillion over the same period, meaning we'd save $1.7 trillion annually (versus the $450 billion the Lancet study says we'd save, which number Mr. Swanson cites here). He goes on to describe how you might actually fund Medicare-for-All and other "impossible" initiatives, but I trust the point is taken.

Ho hum, our President's choice for acting (of course!) National Director of Intelligence used to work for a Moldovan politician who's now on the run and can't get into the U.S. because of anti-corruption laws. I guess we can't discount the possibility that our President put him there in order to get said Moldovan politician into the country! He only lets the best people in, after all. Naturally, we can find no shortage of qualified observers who will note that the new acting DNI broke the law, has exposed himself to blackmail, and shouldn't even have a security clearance, let alone lead an agency specializing in a field in which he has no experience. Imagine the whining from the right if Mr. Obama had done any of this!

Finally, we learn that a Republican Super PAC spent millions of dollars trying to promote a liberal in North Carolina's upcoming Democratic U.S. Senate primary, in the hopes that it'd help incumbent Republican Senator Thom Tillis. And this liberal asks: are you guys sure that's wise? They say they're taking a page out of Chuck Schumer's playbook, but when Democrats ran ads supporting Todd Akin in the 2012 Missouri Senate Republican primary, they promoted a guy who nattered on about "legitimate rape." On the other hand, Erica Smith is an ordained minister, an engineer, and a math teacher in addition to being a state Senator; Republicans had better hope there's something under that hood -- other than her support of Medicare-for-All, I mean! -- or they might have thrown all that money away, and thus provided yet another argument to those of us who think some folks have too damn much money.

Action: concerning Social Security, pollution, and immigration.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to "scrap the cap" on income that can be taxed into Social Security. The occasion? Folks making a mere $1 million annually have already hit that income cap (about $137,700) as of yesterday, and won't be paying any more money into Social Security this year. Of course, H.R. 860/S. 269, the Social Security 2100 Act, would tax income above $400,000 as well as income below $137,700, and I wonder why that bill has to have a "donut hole" of funding. Of course I have advocated for the bill's passage, and will again, but we now have an opportunity to communicate our will that all income get taxed into the Social Security system, and thus fund benefit increases now and trust fund shortfalls in the future. We worked for it, we paid into it, we fought for it, and we deserve to enjoy it when we retire, so don't let weakling politicians fearmonger you about it, or tell you that it's just not "possible" to demand better stewardship of it. By demanding what we want, and fighting for it, we always widen the palette of the possible.

You know how our Administration always says regulations hurt businesses with all their rules and stuff? Well, now, our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) wants to scuttle rules that require corporations to demonstrate that they're financially able to clean up after their own accidents -- their oil spills, their gas leaks, their coal ash pit leaks, you know. I don't have to explain, I trust, the necessity of making sure big corporations clean up their own messes -- hey, nobody but me cleans up my messes! -- and I'm sure you can also see that this proposal amounts to corporate welfare for the coal industry in particular, an industry about to die at the hands of cheap natural gas and cheaper renewable energy sources. And of course you can also see who's going to pay to clean up their messes if they don't -- we are. You want to be an enabler of bad corporate behavior when they befoul our air and water? If not, let Public Citizen help you tell our EPA to reject its own plan to weaken accountability for polluting corporations.

Finally, our President plans to divert another $3.8 billion of defense spending toward the building of his vanity border wall -- you know the one? The one that a reciprocating saw can cut through, the one a halfway decent climber can scale, the one that an inopportune flood could cause to fall if you don't keep gates open, the one a stiff wind can knock over? I hope we still have historians who will note these ironies -- if, indeed, ironies are what they are! Is it ironic, really, that a drama king who prances and preens about immigration can't actually build a wall that can stand on its own? Do we expect better from drama kings? Do we call it ironic merely because we think so well of our country? We should keep thinking well of our country, of course, and keeping it a country of which we think well means fighting the evils our President perpetrates, so Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to defund our President's vanity border wall. Seriously, "national emergency" my ass.

Around the table: more little victories for good Americans, and more shaking my damn head at the bad ones.

11th Circuit Court of Appeals strikes down Florida law preventing felons from voting until they had paid their court-related fines. If you're tempted to say but they should complete their sentence before they get to vote, and the fine is part of their sentence, just know that I'm going to respond that they never should have lost their right to vote in the first place. Rights are rights; they're not privileges, and they don't only belong to people we like. (And yes, the "wealth" of ex-felons is, in fact, pertinent to the case and "exogenous" to their punishment, even when a fine is not precisely exogenous to their punishment.)

The New York Times looks over our President's recent pardons, and sees a pattern -- they all have "connections" to him. As in, "all 11 recipients had an inside connection or were promoted on Fox News," which almost does sound like they're repeating themselves a bit. Of course they're playing right into his hands by suggesting that "his own scalding encounters with investigations since taking office" (like they weren't deserved or something!) plays a role in his "mercy." Also, I wanted the First STEP Act passed, too, but that was a watered-down version of a watered-down version of what I really wanted, and I suspect a lot of folks that bill has left behind -- who are not lucky enough to get on Fox News or have connections within professional conservative circles -- feel the same.

From the "Wow, They're Actually Trying This?" file: surveillance corporation Clearview AI's CEO claims that his attempts to spy on people are protected by the First Amendment. Apparently, scraping someone's private data from the internet and then selling it to someone else is a speech act. But plenty of law already exists (see the fourth- and third-to-last paragraphs at the link above) to suggest that just because you "say" something, you don't automatically get our First Amendment's protections. You know, if common sense didn't already tell you that.

When I read that "(i)f you're having a hard time falling asleep, that sleep tracker on your wrist might be to blame," the first thing I think is I can totally relate! Having all that data was cool at first -- I never assumed there was an absolute one-to-one relationship between the data and the truth, but the worst thing you can do is try to measure up to previous days, wonder what on Earth you did wrong since you didn't have any caffeine after noon, and let that all build up. I accidentally wore my fitness tracker into the shower once, took it off before it suffered any damage, and then said (suddenly, or so it seemed to me at the time) why put it back on? I haven't looked back -- and I have never again wondered whether the amount of deep sleep I got last night fit snugly into the 12-18% range.

Finally, you all knew William Barr wasn't really going to quit over our President's twitterfarting making it "impossible" to do his job, right? Remember what I said at the beginning of this Administration: when Republicans fight each other in public, they're playing us, trying to lull us into a false sense of security about their unity. It's drama, and it's not even good drama. I suppose we can't discount the possibility that Mr. Barr was actually saying that his job is to protect the President from the consequences of his own actions.

Action: concerning our nation's budget, law and order, and dangerous baby products.

You've no doubt heard by now that our President has put out a budget that would, guess what, cut Medicaid, cut Medicare, cut Social Security, cut food stamps, cut housing assistance, cut job training funding -- but jack up funding for defense, since spending more than the next eight highest-spending countries in the world combined somehow just isn't enough. Even Republicans in Congress act like the President's budget is a dead letter -- retiring Sen. Mike Enzi of Wyoming, who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, announced last week he won't even hold a hearing on the budget, but that doesn't mean we can't weigh in anyway! And we must weigh in -- our President has decided to weigh in, after all, on "his priorities," so the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject our President's budget and fight for our priorities. Mr. Enzi is correct to note that "Congress holds the purse strings, according to the Constitution," but our laws require that our President submit an annual budget proposal; it's a real, legal thing that happens, so we, the American people, must attend to it.

Meanwhile, you've also no doubt heard by now the tantrum our Administration threw over its Justice Department prosecutors recommending seven to nine years in prison for Administration crony Roger Stone, the subsequent hullabaloo resulting in the resignation of four prosecutors in the Stone case (I feel their pain, but I wish they hadn't quit, since now our President will replace them with four new cronies) and over 2,000 former Justice Department officials demanding the resignation of Attorney General Barr for his interference in the matter. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell our House Judiciary Committee and the Department of Justice Inspector General to investigate our Justice Department for possible wrongdoing. Yeah, I know, look how well the impeachment investigation worked out. But this won't go before a Senate full of Administration lapdogs: this will go before a hostile House committee and an Inspector General mandated by law to be independent. Maybe our President will fire all the Inspectors General -- he's already tried! -- but let's at least make him humiliate himself before the people.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Consumer Product Safety Commission (or CPSC) to ban inclined baby sleepers, then Penn PIRG still helps you do that. Do it quickly, though, since our CPSC's comment period ends in eight days. Researchers have linked, at this time, the inclined sleepers to 73 baby deaths and over a thousand baby accidents and injuries to the inclined sleepers, and remember, 73 is the number of babies we know about. Manufacturers touted the sleepers as a way to rock babies to sleep faster and keep them asleep longer, but the sleepers allow babies to roll onto their stomachs while rocking, and then they suffocate because they can't get back on their back. Babies also suffocate when their heads fall forward (their heads tend to be disproportionately heavy) in the sleeper, or when their faces roll into the product's sides and they rebreathe carbon dioxide-filled air. We all know parents are exhausted (indeed, it's almost like our economy wants it that way) but we also need to get rid of products that kill their babies.

Around the table: more lessons about political courage and cowardice.

While you're reminding your Tea Party uncle that if he collects Social Security, uses Medicare, or drives on a road paid for with his taxes that he is also a socialist, you can also remind him, as Ralph Nader reminds us, that those who rail against "socialism" are too often the biggest practitioners of socialism-for-corporations. And it never helps to forget that our government followed the 2008 bankster crash by handing out "trillions of taxpayer dollars" to "reckless bankers and speculators." Maybe your Tea Party uncle was against that, too -- but it's awful hard to overcome decades of political propaganda about how you can only ever succeed on your own, without help from anyone, ever.

From the "It's a Shame We Even Have to Say It" file: no, Mr. President, it's not at all true that "nobody can even define" what Roger Stone did, not when our own Justice Department summed up the whole affair thusly: "Stone was found guilty of obstruction of a congressional investigation, five counts of making false statements to Congress, and tampering with a witness." You'll hear people say that everything that's been going on with Russia is so complex, as a way of saying there's really nothing there, but, ah, it is easier to catch people who commit crimes more straightforwardly, is it not? And do we really think criminals haven't figured that out? Certainly our President has -- the more feces he dramatically flings against the wall, the more likely we are to throw up our hands and walk away.

I can't help but read that our President plans to deploy heavily-armed border patrol agents in so-called "sanctuary cities" and think that I guess this is how he gets his Reichstag Fire. Let us recall why they call them "sanctuary cities" -- not because they actively shield undocumented immigrants, but merely because they will not co-operate with federal immigration authorities without a court order. All these law-and-order types should be able to respect that, but in my experience, the only thing "law-and-order" types really respect is unquenchable rage.

Widely-respected medical journal Lancet says Medicare-for-All health insurance will save Americans $450 billion annually, and that figure might actually be a little low -- taking the cost estimate from the right-wing Mercatus Institute ($32 trillion over 10 years) and the Center for Medicare Services' projected 10-year cost ($47 trillion), I'd say the Lancet figure might be less than a third of the actual figure. Still, it's good PR, as is their finding that struggling hospitals will also benefit from all the stability Medicare-for-All would bring. That's struggling rural hospitals as well as urban ones, of course. Maybe someone should take that message to Middle America?

Joe Biden says Bernie Sanders should "take accountability" for his supporters' egregious actions, and here you have the reason why Democrats constantly lose: they're always blaming the wrong people. Shouldn't Mr. Sanders's supporters take accountability for their own actions? Aren't threats criminal acts subject to punishment by our government? I'm on record as saying you can't bring our President into criminal proceedings against white nationalists just because he's made racists feel good about themselves again, so I don't feel any differently about this. When Mr. Biden talks about "accountability" like this, of course, you can tell he's made a career out of capitulating to the other side. (Sadly, Elizabeth Warren piled on about this matter later -- also to NBC -- and even said "we are all responsible for what our supporters do," which, ah, no.)

Don't look now, but a member of Barack Obama's braintrust has written a very good article suggesting that Democrats shouldn't look to 2016 for lessons so much as 2012, for three main reasons: one, Mitt Romney basically made that election about Mr. Obama rather than himself; two, Mr. Obama completely reframed the economic issues of the time that made Mr. Romney's attacks on him moot; and three, Mr. Romney seemed to lock himself into the right-wing news bubble. I wonder if the third matters as much as the first two, especially given that we have an incumbent President who amplifies the worst aspects of that bubble, but this largely is a trenchant analysis -- particularly given that the eventual Democratic nominee will run against a man who's desperate to make everything about him, and that most of the possible Democratic nominees won't talk enough about the folks this economy has left behind.

Finally, now that Bernie Sanders is kind of the front runner for the Democratic nomination, we confront the notion that the "liberal" media will try to take him down by comparing him to Great Losers from the Past. Chris Hedges's trenchant analysis says that Our Glorious Elites "will do to Sanders what they did to George McGovern" if he becomes the nominee, and I know they will try, but I also know that George McGovern shot himself in the foot plenty in 1972 after he got the nomination, starting with taking Sen. Eagleton as his running mate and then ditching him not even three weeks later (after saying he was behind him "1,000 percent," no less). Meanwhile, Jonathan Freedland at The Guardian speculates that Mr. Sanders could be the next Jeremy Corbyn, but Labour didn't lose the recent national election because they were "too liberal" -- they lost because they weren't pro-Brexit enough! And for no other reason! Plebescites have consequences, after all, and Labour pursued "constructive ambiguity" about Brexit while Boris Johnson pretended to be Super Awesome Pro-Brexit Man, so it's no surprise who won. Ambiguity may be the special sauce of literature, but it's poison to political campaigns. The most analogous situation in America is trade, and guess what? Mr. Sanders is just as anti-"free" trade as our President, if not more so, and all the other remaining candidates save Ms. Warren are as wishy-washy about trade as Mr. Corbyn was about Brexit. I trust the pattern, and the lesson, are unmistakable.