Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning police brutality, media consolidation, and Arctic drilling.

A new Administration comes to power in January, so Grassroots Law helps you tell the Biden-Harris team to do everything they can to stop racist police brutality. Grassroots Law has a good list of demands, and these include reopening police brutality cases left unsolved, ending the 1033 program that sends military weapons to police departments, repeal the Muslim ban and family separation policies, and getting more public defenders and civil rights attorneys involved in our Justice Department's work. A Biden-Harris Administration can accomplish most of this through executive order, without running to Great and Bounteous Real American President Mitch McConnell (or his trusty sidekick, Saint Joe Manchin of the Golden Age of Bipartisanship) for permission. And though Biden-Harris ran on most of this stuff, you know they really don't want to do it if they don't have to. But that's why we make them have to.

Meanwhile, FCC Chair Ajit Pai, who isn't very long for his job, plans to waive media ownership rules so that Fox can gobble up even more properties in the lucrative New York City media market, where Fox already owns two TV stations and the New York Post. And our FCC will only take public comments on this plan until next Friday, December 4, which is what they all do when they know the public will hate what they do. Media consolidation is one of the few issues in America where liberals and conservatives actually agree (i.e., in that they all hate it), so naturally the nominally "conservative" Mr. Pai would do the exact opposite! There's a lesson in there, somewhere. Until they learn it, Free Press helps you tell our FCC not to give out any more corporate welfare handouts to Fox. Fox will probably tell you it just can't compete with Newsmax, OANN, etc. without more handouts, but if it can't compete with those clowns, it deserves to die.

Finally, just about every big banking corporation in America has declared that it won't fund any drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR) -- except for Bank of America. Sigh. Of course it's Bank of America! And it'll only take one well-funded (as far as we know!) bankster to ruin a stretch of public land the size of South Carolina. (No, really. Alaska is a really, really big place; people don't get how big it is.) And drilling for oil and gas in ANWR will not only ruin land home to the Gwich'in people and unique species of animals, it won't get us anywhere near as much oil as ANWR drilling proponents would like you to think. And once that oil's burned, and all that money gets spent, there really will be nothing left -- unless we fight to keep what's really important. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell Bank of America to abandon plans to fund Arctic drilling.

Around the table: in which we are reminded what we must do to "push Biden left."

Kevin A. Young at TruthOut instructs us that "To Push Biden Left, We Must Build Movements to Challenge His Corporate Backers." The article draws from Mr. Young's book, Levers of Power: How the 1% Rules and What the 99% Can Do About It; historical examples include the civil rights movement boycotting local businesses in the '60s (which prompted them to pressure politicians), while more recent examples include all the massive civil disobedience (and pressuring of investors) that have stopped a lot of fossil fuel projects cold. Conclusion: "the best way to get better electoral outcomes is, ironically, to build strong non-electoral movements." Certainly we'll do better better donating to union strike funds than to center-right Democratic candidates like Amy McGrath who'll just light your money on fire while losing big.

Hard to believe, Harry, but Amazon uses Pinkerton operatives to spy on their workers. Which proves, yet again, that giving corporations more money doesn't magically cause them to "create jobs," but it just gives them more money to light on fire desperately trying to keep their workers from organizing for better pay and better working conditions. (Also, too, Pinkerton? Like we're all in an episode of Deadwood or Boardwalk Empire!)

Isaac Chotiner at The New Yorker talks with Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy, who claims that our soon-to-be-ex-President's "voter fraud" lies are actually good for his channel. This Isaac Chotiner fellow is damn good at his job -- his interrogation of Mr. Ruddy is almost as good as his interrogation of that COVID "contrarian" from March. I can only add that Mr. Ruddy's claim that Newsmax gets "one million people per minute" is a pretty useless statistic if the million people who are watching Newsmax the next minute are, as I suspect, the same damn people. Why, I might even call it a scare number.

Can it possibly be true that our soon-to-be-ex-President really thinks his lawyers arguing so badly before numerous federal courts are "fools" who "are making him look bad"? I mean, that ship has long sailed, has it not? But when you realize that he thinks laws are for us "little people" and he also thinks any fecal argument can be polished into gold if you just inject more money and more red-faced yelling into it, you can sort of see how he can blame everyone but yourself. You may have more trouble seeing how people who call themselves conservative still give their devotion to a man who always chooses chaos over order.

Finally, Carl Bernstein, who helped take down Richard Nixon with his Watergate reporting at the Washington Post, says that no less than 21 Republican Senators have "repeatedly expressed extreme contempt for" our soon-to-be-ex-President, though only a few have expressed that "extreme contempt" publicly. Out of those 21 Senators, I see 12 up for re-election in 2022; I sincerely hope Democrats don't try to ratfuck those races by pointing out these Senators' infidelity to Dear Leader, because that wouldn't be very civil of them, now, would it? (Sadly, I fear I have just explained exactly why Democrats would never do such a thing.)

Action: concerning tax cheats, COVID vaccines, and Social Security.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell our President-elect and our Congressfolk to properly fund our IRS so we can, at long last, hold tax evaders accountable. Some folks will say you want to give more money to the IRS haw haw haw haw, but our government has underfunded our IRS over the last decade to the point that its officers admit they go after low-level tax cheats because they don't have the money to fight wealthy and corporate tax cheats, and while cheating on your taxes is never OK, going after big-money tax cheats means, well, more money, for the good services we expect, demand, and deserve from our government. Put more simply: big tax cheats take more money out of our mouths than the little ones do, and why should tax cheats be shielded from accountability simply because they can hire more lawyers to spin more convoluted tall tales?

Meanwhile, the HERO Action Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to make COVID-19 vaccines free to all Americans. Right-wingers will retort don't the companies that make the drugs deserve to make money? But one can answer that retort in at least four ways: a) these corporations often develop their drugs with taxpayer money, so we deserve more say over what happens afterward; b) only giving it to folks with money violates the rights of folks who don't have money; c) the more folks who get the vaccine, the more likely we'll defeat COVID-19, and d) people who die of COVID-19 because they can't afford a vaccine can't spend money on health care anymore. Plus, you know, e) don't put corporate profits ahead of people. (And since we don't just live in America but on Earth, Avaaz helps you tell all world governments to suspend patents on COVID-19 vaccines so everyone in the world can benefit from them.)

Finally, Social Security Works helps you tell President-elect Biden to undo our soon-to-be-ex-President's attempts to destroy Social Security, namely by rolling back his changes to Social Security Disability and by demanding the resignations of all of our soon-to-be-ex-President's appointees to the Social Security Administration. Yeah, I know, he's going to have a lot on his plate, but that doesn't mean we should lay off him, and getting rid of these injuries to our Social Security is his job. Moreover, exactly zero right-wingers will thank him for making SSDI and SSI recipients to re-prove their eligibility for these programs every six freaking months. That ain't "fighting fraud," it's just harassment -- they're hoping people forget to prove their eligibility! You want to fight fraud? Hire more (and better) investigators -- but don't hurt deserving Americans.

Action: concerning corporate power, law enforcement, and Israel/Palestine policy.

Dig this: Tyson Foods managers at its Waterloo (IA) plant not only "explicitly directed supervisors to ignore symptoms of COVID-19, telling them to show up to work even if they were exhibiting symptoms of the virus," but actually started a pool to bet on how many of their workers would get sick. That's as good a reason as any to remind President-elect Joe Biden that the American voters did give him a mandate this month -- that mandate being "don't run the country like that guy did! -- and thus Public Citizen helps you tell President-elect Biden not to hire big corporate types for key jobs in his Administration, including Agriculture Secretary and OSHA administrator. After all, if they're capable of betting on how many of their workers will get sick, they shouldn't be in charge of anything, let alone "building back better" from a pandemic and a crippled economy.

Meanwhile, H.R. 7848/S. 4360, the Counselors Not Criminalization in Schools Act, would end federal funding for putting police officers in schools, and would replace those police officers with folks actually trained to deal with mental health issues, since we typically don't train police officers to do that. And we shouldn't! Should we train coal miners to write code? No, we shouldn't; mining coal and writing code use entirely different skills sets, and, in a like manner, enforcing our laws and dealing with folks with mental health issues use entirely different skill sets. Some folks used to respond "cops just need more training" when they contemplate these issues -- I used to say the same thing! -- but we'd do much better deploying folks already trained to do the job. Hence Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to help out students and police by passing the Counselors Not Criminalization in Schools Act.

Finally, our Secretary of State plans to formally designate the Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions (or BDS) movement as anti-Semitic -- which also means they'll create a blacklist of groups who support BDS. How many times must I tell these pimps! Opposing Israel's actions against the Palestinian people, and working to change them, does not make you anti-Semitic! It's like these people have no idea what anti-Semitism is like -- nothing from this Administration about assholes threatening American Jews or defacing Jewish graveyards, but they sure have plenty to say about good folks who disagree that keeping your boot on Palestinian throats is either a humane policy or an effective one! And how else do you change behavior of foreign countries, particularly when your own government will never make such an effort? Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell our State Department to abandon this foolish effort to injure free speech.

Around the table: in which our soon-to-be-ex-President can't stop embarrassing himself.

No, our Army did not "seize" a server from a German corporation in Frankfurt that switched enough votes to "throw" the election. Forget that our Army has denied the story, or that the corporation in question is Spanish and doesn't have a server (or an office!) in Frankfurt and that 97% of American counties don't even use their product -- you should know it's all rubbish when the Congressdolt promoting the story says things like "I don't know the truth" and "(t)here are some that believe," let alone that he uses the passive voice ("there was a German tweet" -- Jesus Mary and Joseph he's not even confident enough in his own lies to say "a German tweeted"). But I guess when you see a big map of America on the TV showing our soon-to-be-ex-President "winning" California, you don't have to think anymore.

Ryan Grim at The Intercept reminds us that "Joe Biden Doesn’t Need the Senate to Boost the Economy and Tackle Climate Change." As President, Mr. Biden can a) wipe out $50,000 of student debt, which could free up some $400 per debtor per month to stimulate our economy; b) prevent corporations from designating their workers as "managers" willy-nilly, which would enable more of those workers to collect overtime pay; c) taking pot off Schedule I, which would stimulate a lot of pot-growing businesses around the nation; and d) use the Financial Stability Oversight Council (created by the Dodd-Frank bank reform bill) to stop investment in fossil fuels. And of course, how much of this he'll actually do isn't just up to him: it's also up to us.

I'm generally pleased to see our "liberal" media noting, as our soon-to-be-ex-President formally requests a recount in Georgia, that Georgia just did a damn recount. Perhaps he's thinking that since he cut into Mr. Biden's lead by 1,500 votes during the last recount, he'll win Georgia if he can just get them to do nine more recounts! It sure is a good thing he's laser-focused on his own election loss, rather than something like everyone and their grandmother getting COVID-19.

Don't trouble yourself over the "backlash" against Tucker Carlson's criticism of Sidney Powell's fever-dream "stolen election" narrative that has so far failed in nearly every one of over three dozen court cases. When right-wingers "fight," it's always drama, and bad drama at that. Tucker Carlson will be back in right-wingers' good graces even if OAN, for example, takes over from Fox News as "the" place for right-wingers to run and hide from facts and good arguments. (Also, too, when Rush Limbaugh's spokeshack asks about "the 'evidence' the election was fair," he's displaying an ignorance of how our legal system works -- the burden of proof is always on the folks who accuse unfairness, for reasons we're seeing play out in those aforementioned three dozen court cases -- and I'm sure this display is solely for show.)

Speaking of our Administration's repeated failures in court, District Judge Matthew Brann's dismissal of our soon-to-be-ex-President's complaint aiming to keep Pennsylvania from certifying election results reads rather like a father trying his damnedest to be extremely patient with a toddler having a tantrum. Dig the part where Judge Brann says he's not listening to another damn "amended" filing because it's just going to be the same damn filing! OK, I'm paraphrasing, but Judge Brann's opinion does read rather like Judge Jones's 2005 decision preventing the Dover school district from teaching "intelligent design" in science classes. Either one could have typed "how dare you waste my time with your frivolous lawsuit" over and over for 35 pages and you still would've gotten the jist.

Finally, when you hear our soon-to-be-ex-President whining on Twitter that Mr. Biden is trying to put together a Cabinet "so quickly" "when my investigators have found hundreds of thousands of fraudulent votes," you, again, have to wonder why his legal team hasn't shown evidence of "hundreds of thousands of fraudulent votes" to judges in, again, over three dozen lawsuits. And please understand that by "you have to wonder why" I mean "pimp ain't got no damn evidence, that's why."

Around the table: in which we try to see things a bit more clearly than our pundit class does.

Turns out that planned kidnapping of Michigan's Governor could have been even worse than we thought: militia members had a "Plan B" to take over Michigan's statehouse and execute politicians, as well as a Plan C to burn down the statehouse and kill everyone inside. And over what? Over being told to wear masks so you're less likely to infect other people with COVID-19! Adults, with guns, throwing tantrums worse than any ever thrown by a two-year-old! And yet our "liberal" media implores us to "understand" them, by which they clearly mean excuse their evil.

A few Senate Republicans say they'll back any Biden Cabinet appointments as long as they're "mainstream." They're lying! Recall that right-wingers call anyone to their left a "socialist" anymore, and consider that if we can imagine Mitch McConnell simply refusing to hold hearings on Cabinet appointments, then surely Sens. Collins, Murkowski, and Romney can as well, and I'm sure they're much more comfortable professing "alarm" at Mr. McConnell's shenanigans than actually forcing him to allow Mr. Biden to staff a functioning government. Our soon-to-be-ex-President will leave behind an Augean mess, and Mitch McConnell will bury all the shovels.

I wouldn't even note the news that U.S. trade deficits with other nations, including China, have risen rather dramatically over the last four years, except that our soon-to-be-ex-President has not only acted like he alone could turn around a cruise ship on a dime, but has also acted like he's already done so without even coming close to doing so. Of course I don't expect the math (which shows the trade deficit increasing at a faster rate than it did during Mr. Obama's second term, even!) to penetrate the rage-addled minds of his votaries.

About a week after William Barr's nomination to Attorney General in 2018, our Justice Department told federal investigators to take "no further action" against Caterpillar, a corporation Mr. Barr used to represent. It gets better: we were investigating Caterpillar for tax avoidance, to the tune of $2.3 billion -- in other words, we were investigating them for taking food out of our mouths, since that's what corporations do when they avoid paying their taxes. Presumably our Justice Department thinks it hasn't broken the law because it hasn't actually closed the investigation, but we've seen judges reject similar arguments.

I'm not sure why Joe Biden would consider D.C. Circuit Court Judge/could-have-been Supreme Court Justice Merrick Garland for Attorney General. I'm sure he'd do an excellent job, but such an appointment would also leave a seat open on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals that Mitch McConnell might not let him fill, and if this is Joe Biden's way of trolling Mitch McConnell, then he's got a lot to learn about trolling. Anyway, I hear Doug Jones is available, and I'm sure he'd do an excellent job, too.

Finally, when I hear that Kentucky Senate race loser-by-20-points Amy McGrath has started a Super PAC to help out in those two Georgia Senate runoffs, all I can say is: haven't you done enough? She lit almost $100 million on fire losing to Mitch McConnell by the second-largest margin of his seven Senate races! When will these fools learn that voters don't give one rat's hind-quarter how much money you can raise, but that they only care about what you will do once in office?

Action: concerning health care, debt, and corruption.

You've heard that Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine looks like it might be a winner? Well, Public Citizen reminds us of a few things -- chiefly, that it's not "Moderna's vaccine," since it received close to $2.5 billion in taxpayer money, i.e., our money. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell our President-elect to make this COVID-19 vaccine, if proven safe and effective, available to all Americans, and also to ramp up manufacturing so that vaccine "rationing" doesn't occur. After all, it ain't like COVID is going to pass you by if you don't have access to the vaccine, is it? I know some people will call such a move "socialism," but those people call everything "socialism," so I'm not concerned about that. And if we taxpayers provided a significant amount of funding for a vaccine, don't we get a significant amount of say in what happens afterward? And yes, I know we could say that about most drugs developed in America, where big pharma socialized the cost but privatizes the profit.

Meanwhile, did you know that debt collectors can now come after you on Facebook or Twitter? That's thanks to one of this Administration's worst alphabet agencies, our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB), which did decent work under Director Richard Cordray but not so much since a President who hates all regulations that might actually help people came to power. Hence our CFPB has loosened restrictions on how much debt collectors can harass you, plus our CFPB apparently doesn't care if these debt collectors harass good Americans who don't actually owe them anything! And, as I mentioned, now debt collectors can message you on your social media accounts. Hence Consumer Reports helps you tell our CFPB to rescind regulations allowing debt collectors to hound you more often. Remember: our CFPB doesn't even care if you really owe anyone anything -- they're happy to let debt collectors waste your valuable time even if they're dead wrong. You'd think an actual conservative would be up in arms about that.

Finally, you may have heard that South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham -- who once upon a time was the very first Senator to condemn the abuses at Abu Ghraib, I kid you not -- has continued his long slide into corruption by actually suggesting to Georgia's Secretary of State that maybe he should throw out some mail-in ballots. Mr. Graham has apparently talked to other state officials about similar matters, though his recollections of such conversations are, as they say, evolving. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell Sen. Graham to resign immediately. No, I don't expect him to have such a Damascus moment any time soon, particularly after just winning re-election by 10 points against a guy who raised over $100 million to run against him, but duty is duty, and what should we demand of him after hearing that he's tried to influence the outcome of a Presidential election in his preferred direction after all the votes have all been counted? Should we sit back and take it? Of course we shouldn't.

Around the table: in which liberals did not "almost lose" the election for the 443rd time.

Looks like I spoke too soon: the two Republican Wayne County (MI) officials who certified the vote totals have now changed their minds and want to "rescind" their votes. I should never have underestimated the right wing thirst for drama! And yes, when officials see the same "problems" in suburban districts as in urban ones but only want to certify the results in the suburban ones, that's drama, and it's not good drama, either. And they can sign all the affidavits they want, but they can't "rescind" their votes. Voting is like that.

When I hear that Joe Biden would rather not investigate our soon-to-be-ex-President's many alleged criminal acts, I sympathize to a point -- I do not wish the Biden Administration to be all about our soon-to-be-ex-President; I'd rather it be all about the American people. Still, when you smear feces all over our house, we should hold you accountable for it, through the Administration that replaces you. And I sure hope Mr. Biden isn't thinking of interfering with the state of New York's investigations into our soon-to-be-ex-President.

I was never a big "Green New Deal" fan -- it was a non-binding resolution, and I always preferred bills like the Off Fossil Fuels for a Better Future Act, which would actually do the things the Green New Deal resolution merely aspired to do -- but turns out 92 out of 93 House Green New Deal co-sponsors won re-election in 2020. That includes three out of four in competitive House districts, with the fourth currently leading his race by almost seven points with about 85% of the vote counted. Who thinks "let's create jobs building renewable energy infrastructure" is a loser? Only the long-time Democratic pols who are used to losing.

A Government Accountability Office (or GAO) report documents how big corporations like Walmart and Amazon pay their employees so little that they require public assistance like food stamps and Medicaid -- as in nearly six million Medicaid enrollees and nearly five million food stamp recipients who worked full time. And there's Sen. Bernie Sanders telling Walmart to "get off welfare," which Democratic politicians still can't see is winning messaging that resonates with broad sectors of the electorate.

Another day, another Republican (this time former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, he sure was a big help winning Ohio, wasn't he?) claiming that "the far-left...almost cost" Joe Biden the 2020 election. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez is exactly right in her response, of course (i.e., that the "far left" won Georgia -- Georgia! -- for Mr. Biden), and moderates lose elections not only because they don't excite people, but also because they don't fight for popular things like (hate to beat a dead horse) renewable energy and Medicare-for-All.

Finally, Rebecca Solnit reminds us that we can't "meet Nazis halfway." Yes, her feelings are pretty much my feelings, and I feel compelled to remind folks that you couldn't "meet halfway" with Tha Bush Mobb, either, once they said everyone who disagreed with their palpably stupid case for war with Iraq was a traitor and a weakling. And let's not try too hard to "understand" Nazi wannabes, either, as our "liberal" media outlets are inexplicably still trying to do -- hate doesn't require a whole lot of navel-gazing, and if Nazi wannabes have legitimate grievances, they sure ain't the grievances they're airing.

Action: concerning good House bills, bad bureaucrats, and bad pro-pollution bills.

Happy Thursday, good Americans! Now's as good a time as any to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward 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. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission 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. 2214, the NO BAN 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; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Doesn't matter that they don't want to do it, or would rather confirm more right-wing judges -- all that matters is that we want them to do it, and if we speak out enough, they'll be afraid not to do it. Don't laugh; I've seen it happen.

Meanwhile, Roots Action helps you demand that our government abolish the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. If abolition seems a little extreme to you, I wouldn't blame you -- I'd vastly prefer to reform government agencies before abolishing them myself. But I don't blame the folks who get beaten up by ICE officers for wanting it abolished, either. And, ah, one other thing to consider: our soon-to-be-ex-President used ICE officers this year essentially as a brownshirt force to beat up protestors at otherwise peaceful protests this year, and anytime a President decides to use law enforcement for his own purposes, rather than the ones mandated by our laws and our Constitution, well, that's a tool we've got to take out of the toolbox right quick. Recall, also, that our Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, under which ICE operates, ain't been around that long -- our government created it out of anti-immigrant hysteria during Tha Bush Mobb years, so it ain't like we just don't know how to live without it.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: SB 619 would, and I can't believe anyone thinks this is a good idea, exclude from the Clean Stream Law's definition of pollution any "accidental discharge, spill or release that does not cause a violation of any of the numeric water quality criteria under 25 Pa. Code Chapter 93 (relating to water quality standards)." The kicker there, of course, is that Pennsylvania law doesn't define water quality standards for every conceivable pollutant, so SB 619 would essentially redefine pollution to exclude pollution. And SB 790 would do even more damage, by increasing pollution, lowering clean drinking water standards, and handing out big chunks of corporate welfare to big gas drillers. Always they hand out the welfare to those poor, poor big corporations, and never to the needy, so once again, we must remind our legislators that they work for us, not just their big donors. Hence the Center for Coalfield Justice helps you tell your PA state House reps and your PA state Senators to fight pollution by rejecting SB 619 and SB 790.

Around the table: in which we avert a "voter fraud" tantrum but, sadly, not others.

You have to read this entire article about a Michigan County momentarily balking at certifying election results to suss out the real story: the two Republicans on the Wayne County, MI Board of Canvassers threw a tantrum over "unbalanced absentee ballot polling books" which were no more unbalanced than they were in any previous elections, hoping to create a big "voter fraud" drama -- and only relented when poll workers and voters gave them a big bowl of what-for. So democracy still works -- if we make it work.

Our FBI finds that folks committed more hate crimes in 2019 than in any of the previous 10 years. I've always been a bit suspicious whenever I'm told "hate crimes are on the rise," but the FBI's findings are likely accurate -- we did have a black President for most of that time, which some folks clearly never got over, among them the racist white President who followed. I find this data more useful than, say, comparing hate crimes now to hate crimes in the 1990s, when police departments weren't even convinced of the necessity of reporting hate crimes (let alone the 1930s, when hate crimes were far worse, I'm sure, and also not considered crimes).

How can President-elect Biden "Score a Major Foreign Policy Victory on Day One of His Presidency," per Thomas Knapp at Counterpunch? By re-entering the Iran nuclear deal, that's how -- and he won't need permission from Great and Awesome and Bountiful One True American President Mitch McConnell, because the Iran deal is part of the U.N. Charter and our Senate ratified the Charter long ago. He wants Iran to do more before re-entering, which I guess looks tough, but really isn't -- the Iran deal already has enough accountability mechanisms, and aren't we tired of "looking tough" yet?

Candidates Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro supported or promoted fare badly in Brazil's local elections. As in other nations, mayoral and city council elections represent a sort of midterm referendum on Brazil's President, so I guess these results prove that you can only go so far acting like a complete asshole. I know another asshole who's learning that lesson presently -- well, insofar as he actually learns lessons.

Finally, in a peripherally-related note, our poor wittle baby of a Pwesident is all upset that he won't get the cwedit for the COVID vaccines that may hit the market in a few months. Prick spent four years taking credit for things he never did and now he fumes he won't get credit for the vaccine, which he also didn't do? Jesus Mary and Joseph we can't be rid of him fast enough. Let him soil his diapers at Mar-a-Lago.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act and drilling on public lands.

Today's a good day to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act. Why is today a goodday? Because President-elect Biden said on Monday, at a press conference I would otherwise have ignored, that "Congress should come together and pass a COVID relief package like the HEROES Act that the House passed six months ago." Not even "a COVID relief package like the HEROES Act the House passed two months ago," but the much better one, passed back in May. That's a signal, folks! The May version of the HEROES Act spent more money, to be sure, but that's what you do when your economy's in trouble, you can print your own money, and your government won't fall anytime soon -- and not to beat a dead horse, but our government could also tax the rich a lot harder and not have as much debt. And we do need the May HEROES Act, not just because it'd fund testing and tracing, but because it'd help out states and localities that can't just print their own money (or even go into debt to dig out of trouble!).

Meanwhile, Food and Water Watch helps you tell President-elect Biden to ban all fossil fuel extraction on public lands, which would fulfill one of his campaign promises. Wait, you've heard that Joe Biden wouldn't ban fracking? Well, he wouldn't ban fracking on private land, but said he would on public lands, like our national parks and wilderness areas. You'd think we wouldn't be drilling there now, but we are, and not only are we doing that, we're failing to collect the royalties we deserve as taxpayers. I mean, it's not a "job-creation" strategy to make oil and gas drilling corporations pay a pittance to drill on public lands, it's a "take food out of good Americans' mouths" strategy, since those royalties would pay for services we all need. Best in any case to tax the rich a lot harder and keep fossil fuel drillers from polluting our public lands, which are ours, after all.

Finally, our soon-to-be-ex-President, seeing the writing on the wall, is rushing to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR) to oil drilling. Now that's a hell of a legacy to take to the pearly gates! Yes, Lord, I did ensure that oil drillers polluted a pristine area so that oil executives could make even more money! No, that's really why he's doing it -- it's not for "jobs," and anyway why wouldn't our government create jobs by building out renewable energy infrastructure, so that the workers who helped build it and thus reduced pollution and helped avoid the more calamitous aspects of climate change can tell future generations I helped do that? Because our soon-to-be-ex-President doesn't care about the future and doesn't care about anything but bosses making more money, that's why. The rest of us can tell our Department of Interior to reject lease sales in the Arctic, as the Alaska Wilderness League helps you do.

Action: concerning government staffing, Presidential documents, and the war on Yemen.

Joe Biden will be President on January 20 -- but if Republicans still control our Senate by then, they'll do their damnedest to prevent Mr. Biden from even staffing a functioning government. Hence MoveOn helps you tell President-elect Biden to reject any hostage-taking attempts by The One True and Real and Great American President Mitch McConnell and build a Cabinet that fulfills the mandate the people gave them. (They got a mandate from the people? Yes, they did, and here it is: "don't run the country like that guy did.") How do they fulfill this mandate in the face of Republican obstruction? By making recess appointments and by filling Cabinet positions on an acting basis, a process our soon-to-be-ex-President has abused, surely, but one Mr. Biden can use lawfully. And, really, it's well past time for Democratic politicians to learn that when you can't work with someone, you work around them. And we will do our part, as we have always done, to make our government work for us.

Meanwhile, Open the Government helps you tell our National Archives and Records Administration (or NARA) to make sure our soon-to-be-ex-President preserves all their Presidential records. Shame we have to tell our government to follow the law and do their job, but duty is duty. And you can just imagine this clown car setting records on fire, can't you? Particularly the ones that could expose our soon-to-be-ex-President to legal action? Yes, you can. Bad things happen in this White House! Seriously, though, this may sound a lot like inside baseball, but it's really not -- by taking action, we're not only forcing our government to obey the law, a fine end in itself, but we're also making them preserve our heritage, a heritage of transparency, diligence, and openness, which all remain part of our heritage, even if this particular Administration betrayed it. They act like these records belong to them, but they don't -- they belong to us.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject our Administration's plan to sell over $23 billion worth of weapons and weapons systems to the United Arab Emirates for use in their evil war on Yemen, then Win Without War still helps you do that. By law, Congress gets to review such proposed sales for 30 days after our President informs them of the proposal, so we've now got a little over three weeks to tell our Congressfolk to reject it. As an aside, anyone else find it interesting that our soon-to-be-ex-President has proposed making this particular sale to the UAE and not Saudi Arabia? Why, it's almost like he's figured out that selling weapons to Saudi Arabia is unpopular in America or something. But selling these arms to the UAE will result in just as much murder, just as much mayhem, and just as much misery as selling it to the Saudis -- and the UAE will still be acting in complete lockstep with Saudi Arabia's intentions. So let's make this particular stratagem fail with a quickness.

Action: concerning our election.

So, we're almost two weeks after Election Day, and our current and soon-to-be-ex-President is still trying to stop our federal courts to stop states from certifying their election results over horseshit voter fraud claims and horseshit claims of electioneering impropriety. Pardon my French, but I've no patience for his drama, nor that of his Republican enablers. Sen. McConnell told us the day after Election Day 2016 to "accept the results," but this time he sure was quick to assert our soon-to-be-ex-President's right to file all the frivolous lawsuits he wants after losing by five and a half million votes. And while we'd all love to think he can't just sue his way to victory here -- after all, he's sued plenty of small businesses he's stiffed into just throwing up their hands, but suing Wisconsin into flipping 20,000-plus votes, for example, is a rather bigger lift -- winning lawsuits and flipping votes may not be his goal: his goal, as many keen observers have said, may well be to stall the states from certifying their vote totals so that state legislators will have to take over and select the electors he wants. Everyone's on a deadline, after all, particularly the December 14 deadline when the Electoral College meets. And you know what'll help persuade those legislators to buck the obvious will of the American people? All these rallies where right-wingers demand that our President be re-elected because it's what they want, the rest of us be damned. With rage-filled right-wingers, of course, there'll likely be violence sooner or later, and violence tends to influence legislators far more than we should ever allow.

So here's where things stand now: as the link above reminds us, Republicans control the state legislatures of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, five states Mr. Biden won this election -- and a lot of these politicians were, like our President, telling a bunch of stories about people they know who heard things about dead people voting and the like. Things may be changing: a few days ago, state legislative leaders from four of these states (all save Georgia) said they wouldn't "intervene" in elector selection, although at least one (Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers) has left open the possibility that "some type of fraud -- which I haven't heard of" could change their minds. Suffice it to say that a "box from Alice" full of votes for our soon-to-be-ex-President won't turn up in Arizona -- but the right-wing fever dreams of machines switching millions of votes will continue, and as we approach the Electoral College deadline, the likelihood of Confederate flag-waving caravans of pickup trucks rolling through peaceful neighborhoods and demanding action-or-else will grow.

So our task today is to remind the leaders of these state legislatures of the promises they've made, promises we expect them to keep even when violence hits us. After all, they're getting a lot of phone calls from right-wing crybabies, so we've got to make sure we're heard, too. Here are their phone numbers:

Arizona House Speaker Russell "Rusty" Bowers: 602.926.3128.

Arizona Senate Majority Leader Rick Gray: 602.926.5413.

Georgia House Speaker David Ralston: 404.656.5020.

Georgia Senate Majority Leader Mike Dugan: 404.463.2478.

Michigan House Speaker Lee Chatfield: 517.373.2629.

Michigan Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey: 517.373.5932.

Pennsylvania House Speaker Bryan Cutler: 717.783.6424.

Pennsylvania Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman: 717.787.1377.

Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos: 608.266.9171.

Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald: 608.266.5660.

Your message can go something like this: "I call today to urge you to do your part to ensure that our Electoral College expresses the will of the people in this election, as your own state laws require. I am encouraged to hear less loose talk of so-called fraud and so-called impropriety during this election, but I am also aware that many right-wingers fantasize about doing violence, and may in fact do violence, in support of their preferred candidate, and when that time comes, I urge you to remember to do the job your laws command you to do, regardless of what pressure partisans may exert from the outside."

There is one other thing we must consider when talking to these folks: they all saw what we saw -- our soon-to-be-ex-President outperformed the polling, and did seem to drag a lot of House and Senate candidates upward to victory, against the pundits' expectations. At least in the short term, Republicans may come to different conclusions about that data -- some will say it "proves" that our current President "deserves" re-election regardless of the vote tally saying he doesn't, while others will say it proves that the "movement," such as it is, that our current President has galvanized will endure and requires "respect." I say that people who are wrong about everything and feel nothing but rage deserve no respect regardless of how much they whine in public, but a lot of folks will make different calculations than I will, and we have to prepare ourselves for that, not just today, but every day.

So good luck, and God bless.

UPDATE. Got some full phone mailboxes, so I'm going to add some email addresses here:

Georgia House Speaker David Ralston: david.ralston@house.ga.gov.

Georgia Senate Majority Leader Mike Dugan: mike.dugan@senate.ga.gov.

Michigan House Speaker Lee Chatfield: LeeChatfield@house.mi.gov.

Michigan Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey: SenMShirkey@senate.michigan.gov.

Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald: Sen.Fitzgerald@legis.wisconsin.gov.

I was able to leave a voicemail with everyone else (very few legislative staffers are answering the phone these days due to COVID). Also, the 888 number for Speaker Vos apparently doesn't work outside of his district, so I removed it.

Around the table: in which we contemplate, again, what "law and order" *should* look like.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy runs down some of the tax-related ballot initiatives from the 2020 election. Successes? Arizona voted to raise taxes on the rich to fund education and Louisiana voted to hike taxes on oil corporations through more realistic tax assessments. Failures? Illinois voters rejected a tax hike on richer folks, and California voters rejected better property tax assessments likely leading to higher property taxes and thus better education funding, both showing us that their reputation as liberal states is somewhat unearned. These results remind us, again, that we need to better persuade more economically-minded voters to vote for their own interests -- an effort mainstream Democrats won't help, with their arrogant belief that "just teaching everyone to write code" will solve all our problems.

Another big pharma corporation, Moderna, reports excellent results on its Phase 3 clinical trials. It's easier to store than Pfizer's vaccine (though that doesn't mean it's easy to store!), but Moderna only plans to offer 20 million doses in the U.S., which means, again, that the poor won't get it. These aren't the only two vaccines in progress, though, and the more corporations come forward with good news about their vaccines, the more like a conspiracy nut our President will sound when he whines that THEYZ DELAYEDZ TEH NEWZES TO PREVENTZ MYZ GLORIOUSEZ VICTORIEZ!!!!! (If you're the winner he claims to be, of course, you should overcome whatever anyone does to you pretty easily.)

Uh oh: Pfizer's CEO apparently dumped over $5 million in stock on the very day his corporation gave us the good news in re its COVID vaccine. I mean, I might have held onto that stock if the vaccine is as good as Pfizer says it is -- unless he knows something we don't! Which, of course, would be information he wouldn't be allowed to trade on! I'm old enough to remember when the appearance of immorality would be enough to stop someone from doing something immoral, but please, right-wingers, tell us again how immorality is all about birth control and gay marriage and transgender folk.

Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito sure did work up a lather in his speech before the Federalist Society last week, and his right-wing defenders can't say well nothing he said should come as a surprise to anyone who's attended his rulings, since they've always said their judges don't impose their worldviews on their rulings! I kid, of course -- right-wingers will say whatever they think will shut you up. Could this rant against gay marriage and mask-wearing and the "right" to trample on other people's rights as long as you invoke God's name be a sign that he's getting tired of it all and might retire? He is 71, after all, and maybe he won't want to wait until 2024.

Here's a surprising announcement: Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer revokes a permit allowing Canadian corporation Enbridge's Line 5 fossil fuel pipelines to run underneath the straits connecting two of our Great Lakes, citing "persistent and incurable violations" by Enbridge. Now that's what law and order looks like -- if people think of law and order in terms of "protecting one-fifth of the world's fresh water" rather than "shooting unarmed black folks in the street when they brandish a cellphone," then my work on Earth will be done. And to those who would whine BUTZ WHEREZ WILLZ TEH ENURGEEZ COMEZ FROMZ!!!!, I'd say, hey, this is America, the can-do country, so just do it.

Finally, some other good news: U.S. District Court Judge invalidates our Department of Homeland Security's suspension of new Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (or DACA) applications, on the grounds that current acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf "was not lawfully serving as Acting Secretary of Homeland Security under the HSA (Homeland Security Act) when he issued the Wolf Memorandum." The judge also wrote that "(t)he court wishes the Government well in trying to find its way out of this self-made thicket," which is judgespeak for "how dare you waste my valuable time." (Though this may explain how Mr. Wolf found the "courage" to refuse to fire DHS's cybersecurity chief at our President's behest -- if Mr. Wolf is in his job illegally in the first place, then literally nothing he does means anything anyway.)

Around the table: in which we confront uncomfortable realities about health care and racism.

Republican legislative leaders in four of the five states Joe Biden flipped in this year's election say they won't intervene in their states' selection of electors, even though that's one of the stratagems our President is pursuing to try to "win" the election. They all sounded a little more willing last week, though that was before 16 assistant U.S. attorneys told our Attorney General to stop looking for widespread voter fraud because it's not there and our Department of Homeland Security issued a report finding the 2020 election "the most secure in American history." I'm a little dismayed to hear from Arizona's Republican House leader that folks are clogging up his phone lines begging Arizona Republicans to intervene. Maybe we'll do something about that tomorrow.

As the announcement of a possible COVID-19 vaccine gives us hope, we should remember that Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine, if it works, won't be making its way to the world's poorer nations with any quickness. Pfizer will be able to make 1.3 billion doses in the next calendar year; now remember that the world's population is seven billion, and note that the U.S., E.U., U.K., and Japan have already bought most of those 1.3 billion doses, and you begin to see the problem. Why didn't world governments collaborate on a vaccine on their people's behalf? Oh, because that would have been "socialism." Fear of being a "socialist" sure seems to kill a lot of people.

When you read about "How Government and Private Industry Let the Main Street of a Black Neighborhood Crumble," you will be gobsmacked at the short-sightedness of so much public policy in Chicago's East Garfield Park area, once a thriving, black working-class neighborhood, but no longer. Long story short: local government lit a lot of money on fire trying to "lure" private investment (and got mainly speculators instead), and also tore down a lot of buildings because they were empty and/or drug-infested and where do small businesses go when the buildings are gone? And no, the riots of 1968 didn't permanently destroy the neighborhood -- those riots destroyed 200 buildings, whereas municipal policy destroyed 13 times that many in 1975 alone.

Been hearing that steady drumbeat from our "liberal" media about how more Latinx voted for our President than anyone could have suspected? Then let's relax and remember that 65% more Latinx voted in 2020 than in 2016 and Latinx voters went for Mr. Biden by 30 points. I've seen different reports on Mr. Biden's actual vote share -- some have it between 64% and 66%, rather than the 70% figure trumpeted in the article's headline -- but 64% of more votes means, you know, more votes. Too many so-smart-they're-dumb Democratic politicians think elections are won with percentages or something. They also tend to forget that not every Latinx voter is alike.

Jenice Robinson at ITEP says our "liberal" media should stop predicting that Mr. Biden's tax plan doesn't have a chance in Mitch McConnell's Senate. It's not their job to predict, after all, but report, and it's our job to communicate our will to our Congressfolk and our President. Our current President's 2017 tax "reform" obviously didn't protect the Republican House majority in 2018, and Mr. Biden becomes the second Democratic Presidential candidate out of the last three to talk of raising taxes on the wealthy -- and also the second of the last three to win their election. I sense a pattern.

Finally, perhaps the single worst thing I've read this year: Jonathan Chait at New York magazine says Joe Biden should give Republicans more tax cuts for the rich in exchange for merely passing some more coronavirus legislation. How about fuck no? "Give it to them once and they'll demand more of it in exchange for everything else forever and ever" isn't even the best reason not to do that. The best reason? Because you shouldn't make yourself a hostage to Mitch McConnell; making yourself a hostage injures our democracy and insults everyone who has worked, fought and died to keep it. Jesus Mary and Joseph do these "liberal" media "analysts" have any clue how they come off to regular folks?

Action: concerning war, health care, and voting rights.

The Project on Government Oversight helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal all of the "war on terror"-era authorizations to use military force (or AUMFs). (Say terror-era too fast and you'll likely say "terror-error." Funny how that works.) Congress passed the 2001 AUMF right after 9.11 and the 2002 AUMF in the run-up to the Iraq war, and Presidents from both parties have used these AUMFs as excuses to wage war wherever they like, without the Congressional authorization mandated by our Constitution. Also, too, these AUMFs are not both over 18 years old, which means most of today's Congressfolk weren't in Congress when they became law, and gosh, might they have something interesting and important to say about that? We've spent a lot of blood and treasure in overseas wars the last two decades, and our little adventure in Iraq eventually gave us ISIS, which I'm sure was a completely unintended consequence. We should honor the folks we've lost by repealing the AUMFs that sent them to their deaths, and then maybe we'll learn to value the lives of those we love a bit better.

Meanwhile, you've no doubt heard that big pharma corporation Pfizer has announced that its COVID-19 vaccine (developed with BioNTech) is 90% effective with has minimal side effects, but you also know that means we're not all getting it tomorrow, because Pfizer must submit its data for peer review and to our FDA for approval. And this is something you don't want to get wrong! If Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine isn't nearly as effective as advertised or has side effects they've hidden from us, then we'd be derelict in our duty as a civilization to just hand it out because we're 10 months into a pandemic. A lot of folks don't get that because they're anxious, but a lot of other folks pretend not to get it for the Greater Glory of Our President. Hopefully they're seeing the futility of that strategy now! But Public Citizen helps you tell our FDA not to cut corners in approving any COVID-19 vaccine. Remember: in the old days, conservatives would have said don't make the solution worse than the problem.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to end felony disenfranchisement, then the Hip Hop Caucus still helps you do that. In 11 states, you lose your right to vote even after you've completed your sentence, but if you don't believe in rehabilitation, then what claim do you have to being civilized? And in these states, you'd have to petition your governor to get your rights back; if we leave the restoration of rights up to the whim of a state Executive, then again, what claim do we have to being civilized? You shouldn't lose your right to vote even if you're still serving time, in my view, but it should really be a no-brainer to restore voting rights to folks who have paid their debt to society as mandated by a judge. And not for nothing, but the architects of felony disenfranchisement didn't intend to punish people like Paul Manafort -- they meant to punish the folks of color who might vote them out of office. And if it's all about keeping your job, then again, what claim do you have to being civilized?

Action: concerning immigration, voting rights, and fracking.

Change.org helps you tell President-elect Biden to roll back our current Administration's immigrant child separation policy on day one of his Presidency. I've heard that he plans to do just that (and about a hundred other things that our laws let him write Executive Orders about) on day one, but you never know whether politicians will keep their promises, and you certainly never know what infernal 13-dimensional calculus Democrats will use to justify inaction. Best to tell them what to do in numbers they can't deny! Our current Administration's policy of separating immigrant children from their families at the border -- in the name of "deterrence," which suggests a profound ignorance about what immigrants run from -- is a black mark on our nation's soul, which you can tell by right-wing excuses about President Obama's border policies like any of those justify the worse policies enacted thereafter. Certainly we do not need our politicians to do evil in our names, but they'll keep doing just that, unless we act.

Meanwhile, Sum of Us helps you tell grocery corporation Publix to stop bankrolling vote-suppressing politicians in Florida. Publix runs over 1,250 supermarkets in the South, including over 800 in Florida, where it's also headquartered, and though it claims (because they all do these days!) that it "rejects racism and discrimination of any kind," it also sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to the same right-wing Florida politicians who defanged the 2018 ballot initiative that would have restored voting rights to felons there. These are the politicians who added the condition that ex-felons would have to pay all their fees and fines before getting their voting rights back, which is less "being a stickler for the rule of law" and more "let's find a way to subvert the people's expressed will." If this still seems a little obscure to you, consider how many big corporations dumped the American Legislative Exchange Council over Voter ID and Stand Your Ground. So we use the Big Stick of Bad PR to make Publix's campaign contributions toxic.

Finally, a pair of local fossil fuel corporations want to build a massive port in Gibbstown, NJ, right on the Delaware River, that'll help them export liquefied fracked gas, which they'll receive and process at the port and then send down the River or on highways or trains; anyone else see the multitudinous problems with that? Like sending volatile, polluting fossil fuels down a river or through populated areas on land? And that's not even mentioning the damage fracking does to our air and water before it's on a train or a boat or a truck! The Delaware River Basin Commission (or DRBC) will meet next month to contemplate final approval of this project; the only thing stopping them from such approval so far is our activism against it, and indeed our Army Corps of Engineers and New Jersey's Department of Environmental Protection have already issued permits for the project. But we can still beat it, hence Environmental Action helps you tell the DRBC to protect our air and water by rejecting the proposed fracked gas port in Gibbstown.

Action: concerning corruption, taxing the rich, and the Electoral College.

Because it's never too early to communicate your will, Daily Kos helps you tell President-elect Biden and your Senators not to confirm any corporate lobbyists to the incoming Biden/Harris Administration -- or any future Administrations. You only need think as far as fossil fuel lobbyist Andrew Wheeler's tenure as EPA Administrator to realize that putting corporate lobbyists in our government is fox/henhouse territory. And don't brook any silliness that corporate lobbyists "know their businesses the best." We have got to stop acting like business tycoons are the only "experts" worth listening to. Denying the value of the advice of scientists and scholars and lawyers and engineers and educators (among so many others!) has helped make our national discourse damn stupid. And anyway, tycoons don't know their businesses the best -- they just know how to extract money from them the best. And that's not a skill we can use.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to make the rich pay their fair share of taxes, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. You've heard, no doubt, that our current President (i.e., the one who will be out of office on January 20) paid exactly zero dollars in federal taxes in two-thirds of the years between 2003-2017 and a mere $750 in federal taxes in 2016 and 2017, and you've also heard, no doubt, that billionaires have made an absolute killing from this pandemic, and they already pay too little in taxes. Why, the fact that we have over 600 billionaires proves we don't make the rich pay enough in taxes! Back when we had the greatest middle class in history, and the tax rates were 91% on millionaire income and 55% on corporate profits, we had one billionaire; now we have billionaires who jack up the prices of life-saving drugs just because they can. They do us harm -- but the good we can do if we tax them properly would more than outdo it.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass a Constitutional amendment abolishing the Electoral College, then Change.org still helps you do that. Twice in the last 20 years (2000 and 2016) our Electoral College enabled the election of a patently unqualified candidate rather than stopped it, as our Founders supposed it would do, but the circumstances of the 2020 Presidential election also suggests we should get rid of it, even though the far less-unqualified candidate did eventually win the race. Mr. Biden was beating our current President by two points in the popular vote as of the morning of November 4, but if the counting had stopped then, he'd have lost Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, and thus also the election. And Mr. Biden had more than 50% of the popular vote that morning! Imagine getting more than 50% in an election and somehow still losing. That's what our Electoral College permits, and how is that the "will of the people"?

Around the table: in which we wade through yet more bad Republican drama.

Pfizer announces that its COVID-19 vaccine -- developed in partnership with BioNTech, though not, contra our Vice President, in any sort of collaboration with our President's "Warp Speed" program -- has achieved 90% effectiveness in phase 3 trials, without significant side effects. We're still several months away from actually getting a vaccine under ideal circumstances (i.e., peer review checks out the Pfizer/BioNTech data), but this is cause for hope. (Of course, it's also cause for our President's son speculating that the big pharma corporations withheld this news until after the election, which is to laugh -- our President made those corporations' executives rich beyond their wildest dreams!)

Janine Jackson at FAIR interviews Steven Rosenfeld about our President's numerous lawsuits aiming to expose "voter fraud." Long story short: "(t)hese lawsuits are incredibly rinky-dink," unlikely to move enough votes in their direction to change results, but they do give right-wing rageheads something to scream about and of course that's the entire point. Our "liberal" media maybe ought to congratulate all of us for the biggest turnout ever during a pandemic, but that'd be like celebrating people power or something, and why should our "liberal" media every do that, when there's a horserace to manufacture?

Apparently at our President's behest or with his encouragement, both Georgia Republican Senators, now heading to January runoffs, demand the resignation of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, ostensibly for neglecting his job but more likely for failing to suppress the vote as well as his predecessor, Gov. Brian Kemp. All together now: waaaaaaaaah! It's like they don't remember Mr. Raffensperger announcing back in September that I MIGHTZ CHARGEZ A THOUSANDZ VOTURZ WITHZ TEH DOUBLEZ-VOTINGZ!!!!!, when he knew full well that a) a charge isn't a prosecution, let alone a conviction and b) the vast majority of those "double-voters" very likely followed Georgia law, which among other things allows you to cancel your absentee ballot if you show up at the voting booth.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says he expects "a smooth transition" to a second Administration with our current President. He was joking, of course, or perhaps "joking," and I bet even Bret Baier is getting a little tired of being lectured by him about the "process" of our Constitution. I will say that worries about our Administration sabotaging the transition are a bit overblown -- Mr. Hoover did it to Mr. Roosevelt, after all, and if there's any utility to electing a guy who's spent 36 years as a Senator and eight more as Vice President, it's that he likely needs rather little on-the-job orientation.

Let's not make too much of the complete disappearance of Q, the apparent ring-leader of the QAnon conspiracy theory cult, from the interwebs over the past week, because, as we know, the QAnon "theory" can torture any fact into telling its adherents what they want to hear. If we could produce indisputable documentary evidence that our President molested a 12-year-old girl, the QAnon folks would tell us that he was just going undercover (so to speak!) to bring the entire ring down.

Finally, an unnamed Republican official offers this novel interpretation for why Republicans have said little about our President refusing to concede the election he just lost: "(w)hat is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?" Well, I guess I can't answer that for sure, but I can think of at least 245,000 folks who can no longer testify to the "downside" of humoring this asshole for any length of time.

Action: concerning good House bills, war on Yemen, and racism on social media.

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! Now's as good a time as any to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward 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. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission 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. 2214, the NO BAN 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; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Doesn't matter that an election just happened; duty is duty, and our Senate should at least vote on bills that promote voting rights, internet freedom, justice for immigrants, good health care policy, and job creation, among other good works.

Meanwhile, our current Administration lately told our Congressfolk that it would sell at least four dozen F-35 Lockheed Martin fighter jets to the United Arab Emirates (or UAE) -- which, as you know, is one of the leaders (Saudi Arabia is the other) in the coalition that's been fighting a decade-plus war against Yemen for no particularly good reason. Seriously, I'd say the "reasoning" for this war is total inside baseball, but that would be an insult to all the analytics-heads who populate baseball's front offices, and the bad reasons to fight the war -- that it's putting Yemen on the brink of famine, that it's actually fighting against the folks who've fought al-Qaeda best, that the weapons we sell over there too often wind up in al-Qaeda's hands -- should be more convincing. But there's hope: our Senate Foreign Relations and House Foreign Affairs committees have the power to block the sale, so Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to actually advance the cause of peace by blocking the sale of F-35s to the UAE.

Finally, we asked Facebook to stop letting its algorithms promote fascism, racism, and violence last week, but we were just being nice: today we tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to hold Facebook accountable for its actions, as the National Whistleblower Center helps us do. As I said on Monday, this isn't even about Facebook publishing racist and violent content so much as Facebook promoting racist and violent content, in this case by allowing its own algorithms to collect racist and violent content into "pages" that otherwise wouldn't exist. Algorithms may be a useful tool, in a very general sense, but Facebook uses them so it can avoid having human beings moderate content; after all, you don't have to pay an algorithm, nor does an algorithm use family medical leave. If you grew up dreaming about how cool the future would be, like I did, you'd have to be pretty disappointed with the future as it's unfolded -- we don't have space exploration, a renewable energy grid, or a cure for cancer, but we do have computers repeating racism all over the place.

Around the table: in which we confront "voter fraud" lies and better ways forward in Louisiana and California.

Factcheck.org helpfully provides a primer debunking most of the stories about "voter fraud" and whatnot you've heard on the interwebs. I say "most" because they did put it out a few days ago, and though it seemed pretty comprehensive then (I don't immerse myself in conspiracy theories -- no, really! -- so most of them were new to me), I'm sure the forces of evil have come with new lies in the meantime. But I'd wager they're not coming up with better lies.

Juliet Schor at The Conversation has a better idea than California's Prop 22: platform cooperatives. Frankly, the cooperative is a better idea than the corporation in just about any field of endeavor, but a platform cooperative, run by workers, would better be able to deliver real work schedule flexibility without having to please (or pay!) distant corporate executives and hedge fund managers. (And, seriously, if Uber and Lyft had threatened to leave my state if we didn't remake the law to their liking, I'd say don't let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya. I'm so beyond tired of being some corporation's hostage.)

Good news, folks: our Army Corps of Engineers will suspend a permit for a $9 billion-plus plastics plant in Louisiana's notorious "Chemical Alley," after Louisiana's own Department of Environmental Quality (or LDEQ) found that it would double neighbors' exposure to toxic carcinogens -- or, in the case of St. James, triple it. The good folks of St. James came together to fight the plant, and they deserve our admiration and our thanks for their good works.

I could not care less that Rudy Giuliani's star witness, such as it is, to alleged voter fraud in Philadelphia is a convicted sex offender -- after all, Scott Ritter is also a convicted sex offender, and he was still exactly right about Iraq's lack of WMDs in the run up to the 2003 war. I do care, however, that the "witness" is a gadfly in New Jersey politics, which suggests he's not as devoted to the truth as he is to whatever gets him the most attention. So I guess he's perfect for our President's team, then.

Finally, what's the worst thing about Mob Boss Mitch's recent floor speech to our Senate? None of the things that made the headline or the lede, that's for sure. Here's what's worst: Mr. McConnell refers to "wealthy media corporations" as if he hasn't dedicated his entire political career to making corporations wealthier, and he accuses Democrats of being unwilling to "accept the results" if our President won again without noting that our President has repeatedly suggested he would not "accept the results" if they didn't go his way. Clearly Mr. McConnell imagines he can do and say whatever he wants without accountability, and though his recent electoral results do tend to support such a notion, I wouldn't want to be behind him at the Pearly Gates.

Seven thoughts about the election.

1) I wanted him humiliated, sure. But more than that, I wanted his entire philosophy humiliated. When I say "philosophy," I don't just mean the corporatism and the racism and the gluttony and the arrogant incompetence -- I mean the whining and the drama, the sense of having earned something you never came close to earning, the sense that you should nurse your deserved rejections as profound betrayals rather than wake-up calls, and (of course) the sense that your immediate pleasure is the literally the only thing that should matter to anyone and everyone. Thus I also wanted his votaries humiliated, but I suspect a lot of them will move on from our President more quickly than we're inclined to think. Trouble is they'll move on to things like QAnon and the Proud Boys and obsessing over antifa, just like they moved on to him from the "War on Terror" and the Tea Party and "Regulation Nation" and Blue Lives Matter and so many other outrages manufactured by the right.

How did we fail to humiliate this philosophy? Democrats, again, had a chance to nominate Bernie Sanders, with his popular agenda and incorrigible manner, but settled, again, this time for Joe Biden. Democrats aren't entirely to blame, of course -- plenty of Republicans professed displeasure with our President's obnoxiousness, etc., but were happy to reward him with their vote for all those judges and tax cuts. And Republicans still have a very sophisticated vote suppression operation; Democrats' only strategy against it (though, hey, at least this time they had one!) was to turn out every conceivable vote, though a hammer only does so much against a machine. And Republicans have more than one machine: they also have their ancient con of telling folks they must fend for themselves without their government's help and hey wouldn't everything be easier if black folks didn't get all these "goodies"? It's an easy argument to win -- our government is us, and the main "goody" black folks get is the higher likelihood of getting shot by police for brandishing a cellphone -- but a harder argument to kill.

So why do such arguments persist? Folks can't hold everything in their head at once even under ideal conditions, but we don't even have "ideal conditions," including the ability to provide for a family of four on a single income and the expectation that your children will do better than you thanks to inexpensive higher ed. As a friend of mine often says, we don't agree on what the truth is anymore, and we don't even agree on how we find truth anymore. But we've also become a people who don't shame each other for their bad ideas anymore -- people say "everyone has the right to an opinion" as if merely having an opinion also entitles them to respect for that opinion, which it certainly does not. Now, some folks who feel the same way I do about shaming blame "tolerance" and "political correctness" for that, but they're wrong -- we shouldn't shame people for being transgender or for calling out racism, but we should shame them for lying, for stealing, for arrogance, for ignorance, for cowardice, for gluttony, for unreliability, for all manner of corruption both earthly and spiritual. Before we can reconcile with our wayward countryfolk, they have to be ashamed of what they've done, so we better re-learn the art of shaming, not least because shame is one of the ways civilized people take care of problems so that they don't shoot each other over them.

2) Democrats will likely lose about a dozen House seats, though they'll still retain their majority, so of course center-right Democrats have been whining that all these liberal demands drove away moderate voters and cost them seats! In a land where Medicare-for-All polls about as well in rural areas as it does anywhere else, they might consider whether that all that talk about Medicare-for-All (just as a for-example) might have driven turnout up for Democrats, even in their districts! Naturally they overlook all the real reasons they lost seats: that our President was pretty much the opposite of the "drag" on down-ballot races pollsters said he'd be, and that when a political party wins back seats, they tend to win them back from the other party's more moderate members. Also, too, they're completely wrong about "liberal demands." The six Democratic House Reps who represent Republican-majority districts and who have also co-sponsored Medicare-for-All legislation in the House? They all won on Election Day. There's a solution in there, somewhere.

3) Theresa Greenfield, despite her against-the-odds success in the business world, lost the Iowa Senate race to incumbent Joni Ernst rather decisively. Cal Cunningham proved that infidelity still matters in elections (admittedly a comforting thought!) by losing to Thom Tillis in North Carolina, whose next 50% showing in a Senate race will be his first. Amy McGrath lost to Mitch McConnell by 20 points in Kentucky despite being a soldier once and you know Republicans like soldiers, right?, while Mary Hegar lost by over 10 to John Cornyn in Texas, same notation. Want to know what else all these folks have in common? They've all been unsuccessful candidates before! Amy McGrath and Mary Hegar lost House races in 2018, Ms. Greenfield couldn't get into the Iowa 3rd district primary that year after her campaign manager forged signatures, and Mr. Cunningham lost a Senate primary in 2010, which, admittedly, was 823 years ago. Your star recruits, ladies and gentlemen!

No use complaining that Democrats didn't have better options, because of course they did. Charles Booker, who damn near upset Ms. McGrath in the primary, would have been the better candidate against Mitch McConnell; maybe in 2022, when Rand Paul is up, we can run the experiment my way and see if fighting racial injustice plays well in the state where Breonna Taylor died. North Carolina state Sen. Erica Smith would have been vastly preferable to Mr. Cunningham, and guess what? An open seat looms there in 2022 as well. Royce West (among others!) might have better denied Mr. Cornyn re-election than the woman who made a good three-minute ad once. And you can't tell me there are no liberal economic populists in Iowa, though you can tell me that Democratic pols don't bother looking for them. Meanwhile, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, and Cori Bush have, over the last two cycles, knocked off well-established Democrats to win their primaries. Democratic leadership should ask them how to win, maybe?

4) Barring a pair of victories in the two January runoffs in Georgia, Mitch McConnell will lead a Republican majority in the Senate which will be able to block Joe Biden's Cabinet nominees pretty much at will. This is a given, even if Mr. Biden thinks his bipartisan mojo is better than everyone else's (spoiler alert: it's not). Our President-elect has, as far as I can see, three options: 1) cut deals with Mr. McConnell, which, like, no, because you don't cut deals with evil; 2) run to Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski and Mitt Romney to make deals, which, like, also no, because they'll be tools of Mr. McConnell; or 3) nominate the best people for the various Cabinet jobs, watch them get rejected, and then take a page from our current President's playbook and name them acting Cabinet secretaries. By law, Mr. Biden will have to replace all of them within a few months, but nobody should care about the names; everyone should care if they do good works.

5) I gave $200 to Doug Jones's re-election campaign. This is my first campaign donation in eight years, and I'm proud of it. Now, Doug Jones was no liberal as a Senator, but he was the guy who put two of the Birmingham bombers in jail, and if you do that, you're a damn superhero and of course you should be Senator. Naturally, Alabama voters turned Mr. Jones out in favor of a college football coach who doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground. If that frees up Mr. Jones for Attorney General in a Biden Administration, I suppose I'll deal.

6) Races generally seemed off two or three points from polls in 2016, but this year they seemed five or six points off -- partly because, as I've said, our current President actually boosted turnout down-ballot rather than trampled it -- so now Frank Luntz has said that polling is dead, and all I can say is: not a moment too soon! Of course Mr. Luntz doesn't study public opinion so much as try to shape it in his preferred direction, but that's not even the best reason the Death of the Poll would be a good thing -- all that polling about candidates just induces us to be spectators in our democracy, not actors. Best we help shape public opinion by, you know, communicating with each other and persuading each other, rather than looking around to see which egghead might best have their finger to the wind.

7) Joe Biden has repeatedly said that our current President, and the shit he's stirred up, doesn't represent "who we are." But has the unexpected closeness of this election told us that this is, in fact, who we are? I sympathize with folks who say so. But I won't. I've seen folks at their best and at their worst, and I remain convinced that, as Dr. King said, the arc of history bends toward justice, even though it doesn't look like an arc from underneath so much as a flat plank. And ultimately, in America, "who we are" is aspiration as well as description, and though I don't have the gifts to help about a quarter of this electorate, we certainly don't meet our aspirations in America by assuming we're innately corrupt and irredeemable as a people. So though so many folks I love will drink from that cup, I won't.

Around the table: in which we contemplate *other* election results.

Florida voters approve a $15/hour minimum wage to be phased in over the next six years. Florida voters, of course, also gave our President a four-point margin; it's like there's a lesson in there, somewhere, for Democratic politicians. A lesson they constantly resist, of course -- recall how Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas had nothing to say about the ultimately successful minimum wage initiative on his state's ballot in 2014, and how voters turned him out of office by 20 points, a result which may yet help give the world a President Tom Cotton.

Voters in Oregon substantially reduce criminal penalties for possession of most illegal narcotics -- though not their manufacture or distribution, and that's pretty much exactly how you split that knot. Oregon would also divert much of its tax revenue from cannabis production and sale to addiction treatment; I'm excited to watch this work. Voters in New Jersey, Montana, South Dakota, and Arizona also substantially reduced criminal penalties for possession of pot, and while you can imagine some police in Arizona, for example, fabricating a pretext for arrest or further investigation by miscounting their pot plants (Arizona now allows six per adult per household), you can also imagine a lot of police taking a deep breath that they don't have to go after pot-smokers so much anymore, and maybe go after some real criminals.

In a related note, University of Kentucky researchers adapt the Ryan White Care Act (which helps HIV sufferers get mental health help) to use for some rural patients suffering from drug addiction. Folks in rural areas don't often have easy access to addiction treatment programs, but researchers hope they can improve their options, and working on prevention of future health care issues by treating addiction is a way to be "fiscally-responsible" about reducing health care costs. And you know, this is the kind of problem that Medicare-for-All could help with!

The voters didn't do solid work everywhere on Election Day, of course -- California voters approved a ballot initiative that would exempt corporations like Uber and Lyft from a California law that forces corporations to treat their "independent contractors" more like employees. The forces of evil won here, apparently, partly by making some benefit concessions and partly by convincing people it was all about the employees' "flexibility," though we should all know by now that when we see "flexibility" in a job notice, it sure as hell ain't about our flexibility, as we discover when we need to care for our sick parents or sick children. Is it good news that Silicon Valley lit over $200 million on fire to fool voters into passing this initiative? Maybe, but it's also bad news that those clowns had $200 million to light on fire in the first place. (As an aside, the Uber investor who called AB5's author a "grifter" has exposed himself to charges of libel that I hope Assemblywoman Gonzalez pursues.)

The incomparable Jim Naureckas at FAIR informs us that our notorious punditoids have, as usual, "Miss(ed) the Signal in the Noise" when looking at exit polling data. Our "liberal" media is so quick to bang a gong about a two-point shift in Latinx support for Mr. Biden (or a two-point shift in senior support for our President), but not so much about the nine-point jump in under-30 support for Mr. Biden, and they also yammer on so much about our President's advantage among non-college-educated whites that they fail to see that this "advantage" comes entirely from non-college-educated whites making over $100,000. I guess they're afraid of being called "socialists" or something.

Finally, because we do need reminders like this, Zeynep Tufekci at The Atlantic reminds us that our current President isn't particularly good at being an authoritarian -- and that the next authoritarian who runs for President could be a whole lot better at it. Worse, Republicans entrenched their power in our Senate and in state legislatures, so the machine will be there for the next Republican authoritarian, one who doesn't tweet or have a chain of hotels or brag about assaulting women while the tape's running. One possibility Ms. Tufekci doesn't write about: that our current President will run again in 2024 -- after spending four years controlling some media outlet farther right than Fox News -- and Republicans won't be able to stop him. Of course I'm not sure that's a comfort.

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

So, yeah, posting has been light and may be light for a bit yet until things shake out. At times like this I think of Bob Dylan in "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall" singing "and I'll know my song well before I start singing." I expect I'll know that song at least a little better by the beginning of next week. In the meantime, deep breaths.

Action: Election Day.

Today is Election Day. A huge number of you may have voted already, but after today, this is it. So if you have any problems voting today -- including (but not limited to) finding your polling place, voter intimidation, accessibility issues, voting machine problems, and provisional ballot issues -- call 1.866.687.8683, a.k.a. 1.866.OUR.VOTE. (In Spanish, that phone number is 1.888.839.8682, or 1.888.VE-Y-VOTA. See other phone numbers at the 866.OUR.VOTE website.) You may also call the U.S. Department of Justice's Voting Rights Hotline at 1.800.253.3931; despite our President's best efforts, someone still works there who gives a damn. I worried about pickup trucks with Confederate flags rolling through neighborhoods on Election Day, but if our enemies are smart (and, despite appearances, they are) they'll also try to obstruct the vote-counting wherever it happens, so you may want to go to your state's Secretary of State website, find out where they're counting the votes in your area, and call 1.866.OUR.VOTE if you see anything untoward. Just know that you'll likely see many fewer Brooks Brothers suits and more swastikas. How far we've come, amirite?

Voting, as I've often said, is a citizen's minimum duty in America -- this is our government, no matter how little it resembles a good government, and we citizens must make it a good government, first on Election Day and then on every day thereafter. Our politicians would prefer that you vote for them on Election Day and then just shut your yap, but in the last four years, more and more of us have hounded our elected officials the way we should. So don't let anyone tell you that Senator So-and-so saved the Affordable Care Act, because guess what? We saved the Affordable Care Act, and we did it by getting in their grills until they couldn't ignore us anymore. I wish I could report that we stopped three awful Supreme Court nominees, but we made those votes closer than usual, and while Republicans narrowly passed their tax "reform" in 2017, they barely mentioned it in their 2018 campaigns because we made it toxic. And we helped stop a great many of our President's regulatory rollbacks in court, too -- if we didn't speak out about his pro-pollution agenda, courts would have had less reason to strike them down. I wish I could say America is a more perfect union than it was four years ago, but only we can make it one, and I know for a fact it's a more perfect union than it would have been if we'd all just resigned ourselves to what happened in 2016.

So let's get out there and vote today -- and then tomorrow, let's get back to giving our elected leaders, whomever they may be, the what-for they most definitely deserve.

Action: concerning social media, pollution, and racism.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell Facebook to stop letting its algorithms push racist/violent posts in our faces all the time, then Free Press still helps you do that. It's one thing to let racists spew their filth on Facebook, but it's another thing entirely to help their hateful sputum get a much larger audience than they would otherwise have gained on their own merits. But wait, isn't all this trampling on Facebook's freedom of speech? Short answer is "no," for at least three reasons. One, telling Facebook to do something isn't the same as making them do something. Two, if we regard Facebook as an "information service" (and I'm not saying we should, though the law does), and thus virtually absolve them of responsibility for monitoring the content folks post, we're telling them to stop amplifying certain speech, not censor that speech. Three, Facebook is a corporation, which is to say a thing, and regardless of what corrupt Supreme Court Justices say, things don't have rights; people have rights.

Meanwhile, have you heard of "nurdles"? Nurdles are plastic resin pellets that function basically as a building block for larger plastic products -- but nurdles get lost or unused, so every year some 9,000 truckloads of pellets get dumped into, guess where, our oceans. Does that sound like a good idea? Especially since these nurdles collect into massive trash pits in the ocean and wind up in the digestive systems of marine life? Well, at least one of our Senators (Democrat Tom Udall of New Mexico, who's retiring, unfortunately) has recognized the problem and sponsored S. 4681, the Plastic Pellet-Free Water Act, which would compel our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to issue regulations preventing these nurdles from polluting our waterways. Of course, if our President wins re-election, his EPA will either delay such rules or write bad ones, but if the bill passes, a judge can force them to do their job. Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell your Senators to protect us from pollution by passing the Plastic Pellet-Free Water Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 8178/S. 4533, the Anti-Racism in Public Health Act, then the Daily Kos Liberation League still helps you do that. It's fairly obvious by now -- hell, it was fairly obvious before the pandemic -- that folks of color are less likely to have access to affordable health care, and more likely to have the pre-existing conditions (like diabetes and asthma) that make good health harder to achieve, and no it's not because THOSE PEEPULZ EATZ MOREZ OFZ TEH DINGDONGZ!!!!! It's because they get redlined into worse neighborhoods and are far more likely to have toxic waste dumps put near them! Anyway, the Anti-Racism in Public Health Act would essentially mandate that our Centers for Disease Control (or CDC) do more research on racism in public health, and would also establish a Law Enforcement Violence Prevention Program, since getting shot by police does tend to impact one's health.

Around the table: in which we confront actual tax hikes and stupid number tricks.

Our President's going around saying Joe Biden will raise your taxes, but Joseph Stiglitz at the New York Times reminds us that the tax cuts for working families in the 2017 tax reform are about to go away next year, which means our President is actually the one who's going to raise your taxes! If Democrats do take back the Presidency and capture both Houses of Congress, they'll want to act on this with a quickness, and I wouldn't brook any hand-wringing from "moderate" Democrats about it if I were them.

Our President claims that the pandemic must be getting better because only 3% of E.R. visits are due to COVID now! In other news, whole milk is not at all too fatty because only 4% of it is fat! The punchline? For most of September only 2% of E.R. visits were COVID-related, meaning that the percentage of COVID-related E.R. visits has jumped 50% in just one month! See what I did there? And mine isn't even a stupid number trick.

When I read that Biden campaign aides are worried that, for example, only 25% of registered black voters in Pennsylvania have voted so far, I suspect a little rope-a-dope is happening. Remember when black groups in Alabama complained that they hadn't heard from Doug Jones's campaign in 2017? Remember who then turned out in huge numbers for Doug Jones and propelled him to a most unlikely victory? A little historical context (black voters would generally prefer to go to the polls as they were kept from doing for centuries) is in order -- and so's a little statistical context (roughly 65% of black voters voted in Pennsylvania in 2012 and 2016).

Uh oh: Kansas U.S. House Rep./Senate candidate Roger Marshall, locked in an unexpectedly tight race with Democrat Barbara Bollier, pushed to aid physician-owned hospitals while his wife made at least $190,000 over the last three years from real estate deals involving said hospitals. Even beyond the personal corruption, "physician-owned hospitals" is one of those things that sounds like a good idea (who likes health insurance corporations, after all?), except that they typically turn into boutique hospitals because nobody makes their owner/doctors do any hard work, and civilized people do recognize their obligations to the larger community. Anyway, the timing couldn't be better for this revelation.

Finally, both campaigns have locked in to winning Pennsylvania, for lots of reasons, so it's news that our USPS, recently sabotaged by our President, now takes a looooooong time to deliver first-class mail there, and that includes many of our votes. The amount of first-class mail taking longer than five days to deliver just in Philadelphia has tripled since January, but nothing to see here, people! (In the redder areas of the Commonwealth, are seeing similar problems -- but then blue voters could be doing most of the voting-by-mail there, so, yeah, our President obviously gamed this out.)

Around the table: in which we are reminded, again, how bad it could still get.

Folks feel all kinds of ways about the spread of lies on social media, but Corynne McSherry's primer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation website sets out the issues behind fairly plainly. Long story short: big social media corporations are pretty bad at moderating content, not that it's entirely their fault, the old saw about a lie getting halfway around the world while the truth's still getting its pants on dating at least as far back as Winston Churchill. But "Does It Empower Users?", "Is It Transparent?", and "Is It Consistent With Human Rights Principles?" are all good questions to ask about content moderation policies.

Though we tend to think future Presidents couldn't possibly be any worse than this one, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) rightly warns about the "many" carbon copies of our President "in waiting" once he leaves office, whenever that is. You know what the worst part of the future will be, though? Not the even-worse-than-this-guy Presidential aspirant, but the establishment Republican who pretends it's a chore to try to attract his votaries. Of course, that "establishment" has been getting incrementally crazier over the years anyway, such that conventional wisdom now calls a complete asshole like Tom Cotton "establishment."

We keep hearing that Wall Street favors Mr. Biden like that's a good thing, but Raul Elizalde at Fortune reminds us that "The Stock Market Does Not Care Who Wins the Election." I might have cut that headline off at "The Stock Market Does Not Care," but this article, like a lot of Fortune articles, really sneaks up on you -- if you're not impressed that the stock market "doesn't care" about economic policy between 1990 and now, as differences between the two parties' economic policies have been negligible, get a load of how the stock market didn't care when the top income tax rate was 91% (or took a dive when it went down to 70%). Now's a good time to remind you that our stock market isn't (and shouldn't be) the be-all-end-all of our economy.

Our Department of Education killed development of a website that would have "made the process too easy" for students to get relief from fraudulent student loans. That's fraudulent loans, folks, not "allegedly" fraudulent or merely suspicious loans; if a court already said it was fraudulent, why does it have to be so hard to get relief? And all these people who still whine about the line at the DMV should read "it made the process too easy" and understand that this Administration is objectively pro-bureaucracy, right? I kid, of course.

Uh oh: Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), not a certainty for re-election in three days, apparently said he'd graduated from an Oxford University "Judicial Studies" program, when actually he'd completed a two-week seminar that happened to be held at Oxford. Right-wingers will call that "hair-splitting," but it isn't -- in fact, it's the kind of dishonesty people don't want from their elected leaders. Also, Oxford's statement that "(t)he Faculty of Law is unable to confirm the existence of a Judicial Studies programme" is kind of British for "fuck you."

Finally, as the Dakotas are getting absolutely swamped, so to speak, with COVID-19 cases, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem says in a Rapid City Journal op-ed, among other absurdities, that "those who don’t want to wear a mask shouldn’t be shamed into wearing one." Yes, they should! They're acting like a bunch of whiny brats about something that doesn't curtail their "freedom" and more likely enhance their freedom, since dead people aren't free. What on Earth is shaming for, if not that?

Action: concerning water shutoffs, voting rights, and corruption.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Centers for Disease Control (or CDC) to impose a national moratorium on water shutoffs, then Food and Water Watch still helps you do that. Remember that a moratorium doesn't last forever, and doesn't in and of itself guarantee that no deadbeats will ever be punished again. And when the water company shuts off your water -- which, I feel compelled to point out, it's far more likely to do to individual customers than the big corporations that too often pile up much bigger delinquent bills! -- that means you can't bathe, wash your hands, or drink clean water. Clean water is, as I've often said, the cornerstone of good health care in America, and, ah, can anyone think of why that might be even more important right now? That's right, because we're still in the middle of a pandemic. So it turns out that the compassionate thing to do is also the pragmatic thing to do. It's funny how often that's the case in America. Well, it's not funny so much as it's painfully obvious to anyone with a healthy ego.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to restore full voting rights to all previously-incarcerated folks, then the Daily Kos Liberation League still helps you do that. Do judges sentence convicted criminals to lose their voting rights after they get out of jail? No -- state laws do that, partly so they can appear "tough on crime" (because what says "tough" like punishing people who've already paid for their crimes?), but mainly so they can keep poor folks and folks of color from voting. No, not because THEYZ COMMITZ TEH MOSTESTZ CRIMEZ!!!!, but because we harass and imprison a disproportionate number of them. Just imagine what Brock Turner's life would have been like if he were black: they'd have locked him up and thrown away the key after convicting him of rape, but because he was white, he got six months in jail, of which he served three, and the judge did all this hand-wringing about the poor boy's "future." Better we should concern ourselves with everyone's future.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to ban corporate lobbyists from serving in this Administration or any future ones. This President, after bragging that he'd "drain the swamp" of corruption in Washington, even after issuing an Executive Order purporting to ban lobbyists from our government, has appointed over 280 corporate lobbyists to his Administration, or four times as many as President Obama did in his first six years. Some folks still say that corporate lobbyists best understand the fields our government regulates, but a) that's total horsedoodle and b) that's like saying we should put law-breakers in charge of law enforcement because they really "get" law-breaking, or (and I know this is really far-fetched!) polluters in charge of clean air and clean water enforcement. We're supposed to have an adversarial relationship with the sectors we regulate! And we can't do that if we let corporate cronies infiltrate our government.

Around the table: in which we confront various Useful Idiots.

Remember when Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) insisted that her yea vote for the notorious 2017 tax "reform" only came after winning some important concessions? Yeah, not so much -- she offered an amendment that would have closed that "carried interest" tax loophole, but then quickly withdrew it, voted yea anyway, and now gets buku bucks from banksters in her re-election effort. Hell of a story to drop less than a week before the election, amirite? And typical of her fake devotion to "bipartisanship."

On the 10th anniversary of the release of the Iraq War Logs via Wikileaks, Brett Wilkins at Common Dreams reminds us that while Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning still face abuse for their whistleblowing, the war's planners still escape punishment for their evil deeds. It's funny, except also not funny, how that works. And if Joe Biden gets elected and gets into that "looking forward" mood, we need to get all law-and-order on him.

Next time you hear that it's no use raising taxes on corporations because they know all the ways to dodge them, you can remind them that corporations often take tax breaks they already think are illegal but know they can run the clock out on the statute of limitations because our IRS doesn't have the money to catch them, as ITEP's Matthew Gardiner does here. In other words, instead of throwing up our hands because corruption is so hard to fight, let's fight corruption. That would be law-and-order of us, wouldn't it?

You've heard that our President walked out of his 60 Minutes interview in a huff? Well, wait until you get a load of how tough that interview wasn't, courtesy Julie Hollar at FAIR. Interviews of Messrs. Biden and Harris were, of course, no better, with all their BUT TEH SOSHULIZMZ!!!!! Personal to those who think it's disrepectful to call our President a "toddler": how about he stops acting like one? We do believe in treating people the way they deserve to be treated, right? Or is that too conservative for today's "conservatives"?

Owner of website that spawned the notorious QAnon conspiracy "theory" also controls a corporation that likely hosts actual child porn websites, meaning he's making money from child porn. Q believers no doubt see this as evidence that said owner has infiltrated the child-sex cabal that just so happens to involve every politician who doesn't agree with our President, and is thus using the cabal against them! Please remember that these folks will be the next Useful Idiots who win back the House for Republicans and rubber-stamp the corporate agenda.

Finally, speaking of Useful Idiots, Jared Kushner is also on a Bob Woodward tape saying, out loud, that our President was "getting the country back from the doctors" in mid-April and, further, replacing them with "more thoughtful people who kind of know their place." Which brilliant plan, as you know, has lately resulted in roughly 80,000 new cases and 1,000 deaths daily. There are many kinds of evil in the world, but perhaps none as bad as ignorant people who are arrogant about it. Hey, I think I said this all the time during the Bush years.

Action: concerning police brutality, pollution, and the Electoral College.

We learn from WUSA in Washington, D.C., that the D.C. police have been stockpiling tear gas and pepper spray since late spring, "in preparation for" post-election "civil disturbance." OK, the last phrase is a quotation, but the first phrase is just me being skeptical -- they don't "prepare for" disturbance, they cause disturbance! Who thinks protestors like getting the crap kicked out of them? Only haters think that -- the rest of us assume that protestors are human beings like everyone else, and would prefer to be heard without being shot or having their heads cracked. And not for nothing, but the Geneva Protocols ban tear gas, and we ratified those Protocols, so they're American law. I know Tha Bush Mobb said they weren't, because terrorism, but they were as wrong about that as they were about everything else. Hence Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to prohibit our law enforcement personnel from using tear gas. You know, lest we get in the way of our President deciding to hold up another Bible in front of another church.

Meanwhile, our EPA continues to ignore the science regarding the pesticide chlorpyrifos, which causes brain damage in the children whose mothers get exposed to it while they're pregnant. But H.R. 7940/S. 4406, the Protect America's Children from Toxic Pesticides Act, seems tailor-made to grapple with an Administration that delays doing its job. The bill would prevent our EPA Administrator from making "interim determinations" on pesticides -- which allow harmful pesticides to stay on the market! -- and would also prevent said Administrator from simply running the clock out on review petitions by banning pesticides from market if the Administration doesn't complete said review within 90 days. And it would require our EPA to consider all relevant science, rather than just whatever "science" our EPA's industry flacks cough up. It's a shame we have to tell this Administration how to do its job, but duty is duty, so Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Protect America's Children from Toxic Pesticides Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your state legislators to enact the National Popular Vote Compact, which would allow states within the compact to assign their electors to the winner of the national popular vote, then Progress America still helps you do that. Currently states totaling 196 electoral votes have joined the compact, which leaves 74 more to make 270, which would ensure that the popular vote winner will also win the Electoral vote. One can't argue, at this stage, that the Electoral College has performed as our Founders supposed it would -- it hasn't prevented manifestly unfit candidates from becoming President, but has enabled manifestly unfit candidates to become President, in both 2000 and 2016. That's twice in 16 years; I'm not sure how many more experiments we need to run to confirm that hypothesis. Would the National Popular Vote Compact be better than a Constitutional amendment outlawing the Electoral College? No. But should we let the perfect murder the good? Certainly not.

Around the table: in which we confront our Administration's me-me-me philosophy yet again.

Surprise, surprise, our Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (or CPB) won't tell our Congressfolk how they're managing to track good Americans without getting warrants. Because that would, what, put some undercover agent at risk? Of course not -- though it might put some big telecom corporations at risk of embarrassment, given that our CPB is gobbling up location data. Folks who whine about how being forced to wear masks outside is oppression: no, this is what oppression looks like.

Top Federal Elections Commission official has made no secret of her support of our President, and has close ties to former White House counsel Don McGahn, who used to be an FEC Commissioner. Our FEC hasn't expressly banned such shows of partisanship since 2011 -- because you can trust your government, after all! -- but anyone with a handful of functioning brain cells would tell you this is corruption. And Mr. McGahn's own notorious career at our FEC should remind you that Bush was worse.

Ho hum, White House lists "ending the COVID-19 pandemic" among our President's accomplishments, even as daily case numbers hit record highs. The other four highlights list no substantive accomplishments, either -- no, "eliminating regulations that stifle innovation" doesn't count, since his efforts to eliminate regulations usually die in court. Well, he's tried to take credit for curing AIDS, so why not the pandemic, too? Especially since his votaries will believe anything.

In a development that should surprise no one, University of Gothenberg (Sweden) study finds that the Republican Party "now more closely resembles ruling parties in autocratic societies than its former centre-right equivalents in Europe." You'll know that's true merely by our President saying, out loud, that if so many people vote Republicans will never win elections again -- but you'll also know it's been a long time coming (as the study says) if you remember that Karl Rove started all this Voter ID crap after Republicans lost the 2006 midterms.

Finally, in the wake of an Omaha rally in which our President left hundreds of supporters in near-freezing temperatures for several hours because LOGISTICZ IZ FORZ TEH LOSERZ!!!!, a White House spokeshack goes on CNN, gets asked if our Vice President has "any pause" about doing a big rally in Wisconsin, where hospitals are straining to cope with a spike in COVID cases, and unfurls this flatugasm: "No, it doesn't. The Vice President has the best doctors in the world around him." Of course he acted like the question was all about Mike Pence, and not at all about the numerous would-be Wisconsin ralliers, who don't deserve to die from COVID-19.

Action: concerning violence against protestors, renewable energy, and public water.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: good Nigerian citizens raise their voices in protest of their government's violence against them, only to be met with more violence. While our President must be saying if only that could be me!, sane, moral, and decent people say there ain't nothing a protestor can do that warrants being shot to death on the street or disappeared into a labyrinthine court system. (And when your right-wing friends and neighbors whine BUT TEH LOOTERZ!!!!, you can remind them that a lot of these looters are agents provocateurs like the gas-masked Nazi wannabe who hammered away at the Minneapolis AutoZone.) Naturally the Nigerian government, having studied how bigger countries do it, calls their gang of thugs the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, because who supports robbery? Typical of tyrants, to pretend they're doing it for you when they're doing it to you. Thus CAPPA helps you tell international criminal courts to investigate the violence Nigeria commits against its people.

Meanwhile, the fifth anniversary of the biggest gas blowout in American history, at SoCalGas's Aliso Canyon storage facility in Los Angeles, just passed -- well, the fifth anniversary of its beginning, at least, since SoCal didn't finally plug the leak until almost four months later, meaning good Californians were breathing in all those toxins all that time. California suffers worse droughts and wildfires every year, while still producing two-thirds of our country's fruits and nuts and another third of our country's vegetables, so why does California push more gas production? "Cheap fuel," I guess, but it ain't cheap if you'll have no food, water, or earth in the foreseeable future. Hence Food and Water Action helps you tell California to phase out of fossil fuels and shift toward renewables. And don't tolerate the retorts that "you see more solar panels in Cali than anywhere else" -- the big utility corporations, which make most of Cali's power, won't shift to renewable energy unless we make them.

Finally, notorious public water-mongering corporation Nestlé plans to sell all its North American bottled water operations, which means the Big Stick of Bad PR has worked! But it also means we need to make the Big Stick of Bad PR work against whichever corporation (or corporations!) buy up Nestlé's water operations -- which may include Coke and/or Pepsi -- so Sum of Us helps you tell Nestlé and/or whichever corporations buy up its water operations to give back the public water that really belongs to good folks in Colorado, Florida, Michigan, California, and Ontario. I've said it before and I'll say it again: bottled water is a scam, and in those rare places bottled water is cleaner than public water -- like, say, Flint -- then local governments need to improve their public water delivery systems, not sell them to private corporations that'll jack up the price of water so good folks can't afford it. Clean water is the cornerstone of health care on this planet -- but only if we can keep it.

Around the table: in which we contemplate solutions to contemporary problems, which may include "graphic language."

Since this is a thing we have to deal with now, Daniel Hunter at Waging Nonviolence presents "Seven Tactics to Stop a Coup." Long story short: get out in the streets the day after Election Day and seize the narrative from the coup enablers. Long story somewhat longer: don't worry about stopping interference at every place where votes get counted; just be out, and remember that planning for a coup that never comes is not a waste of time. Read the whole thing for more good advice.

ProPublica describes what happens "When Falling Behind on Rent Leads to Jail Time," i.e., in Arkansas, which allows prosecutors to file criminal-not-civil charges against folks who fall behind even one day on their rent. Then a pandemic came and threw tens of millions of people out of work, and even a national eviction moratorium didn't save everyone. If ever there was a law that dumped on poor people gleefully, this is it. And our Landlord-in-Chief no doubt eyes it jealously.

Julie Hollar at FAIR reminds us that "Journalists Pick Sides When They Call Adding Justices 'Court Packing.'" They don't call it "court-packing" when Republican Senate leaders refuse to consider judicial nominations from Democratic Presidents, after all, even though the end result of that is actual "court-packing" with right-wing judges. Also, too, the real war ain't between Democrats and Republicans, but between "anti-democratic forces and the interests of the vast majority of people in this country," which is why our "liberal" media is happy to go on about abortion in the context of judicial battles but not about, say, voting rights or workplace safety.

Texas Sen. John Cornyn runs an ad hitting his Democratic opponent, MJ Hegar, for her "graphic language," and she responds by slamming him for his "delicate sensibilities" and tells him to "keep clutching (his) pearls." And then, you know, she reminds everyone that Mr. Cornyn tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act. That's some political smarts, right there -- not just because right-wingers from our President on down use "graphic language" far more than we do, not just because anger is the correct response to most of what right-wingers do, but also because a woman is calling a man delicate and telling him to stop clutching his pearls! They deserve some of their own, after all.

Finally, the "law-and-order" crowd no doubt thinks it has its October Surprise with the civil unrest in West Philly following the Walter Wallace, Jr., shooting by police, but we're in the age, now, when any reasonable person would ask if some agent provocateur ignited the looting, like that gas mask-wearing Nazi wannabe at the AutoZone in Minneapolis. It's even possible that some cable TV news viewers have finally noticed that they're showing the same damn footage over and over again! And not for nothing, but back when I was a social worker, a resident pulled a knife on me more than once, and nobody died.

Action: concerning good House bills, clean water, and anti-Semitism.

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward 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. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission 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. 2214, the NO BAN 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; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Yeah, our Senate just put another right-wing stooge on our Supreme Court, which is demoralizing, but we have to be like Nick Foles and just bounce back up -- and when our Senators see us do that, they'll fear us the way they should.

Meanwhile, our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) contemplates updating our Lead and Copper Rule (authorized by the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1991), which limits pipe corrosion as well as the amount of lead and copper at the tap -- and with this EPA, you know which way they want to "update" the rule! That's right, they want to update it so that it allows more lead in your drinking water, even though lead causes brain damage in everyone who ingests it, which (not to give our EPA any ideas!) is why we don't allow lead in gas emissions anymore. Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell our EPA to make the Lead and Copper Rule stronger, not weaker. Like, for example, let's get the lead out of the service lines that connect houses to water mains, since that's usually the biggest source of lead water contamination, and those lead service lines still serve over nine million homes and businesses. And some of those customers are child care centers, so, like, let's do that now. It would create jobs for people who refit the lines, after all. Even though right-wingers will call that "socialism" as they drive roads, call cops, and use libraries.

Finally, Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell our government to stop calling organizations "anti-Semitic" merely because they advocate for Palestinian rights. Why? Well, partly because it's not true, and partly because the resulting PR hit from being called "anti-Semitic" can be very damaging (just ask Jeremy Corbyn!), but also because calling organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International "anti-Semitic" is a profound insult to all those who suffered and died -- and who continue to suffer and die -- from real anti-Semitism. And it is a bit rich to watch this Administration pretend to be concerned about anti-Semitism after openly cultivating supporters from the ranks of America's Nazi wannabes. We are, all of us, friends of Israel, and we are, all of us, fully aware that being a friend doesn't mean blindly supporting whatever our friends do, but calling them out when they do wrong, so that they (and we!) can be better friends. But too many folks call people who don't agree with them "anti-Semitic." We should stop listening to such people, since they act like they don't understand that civilization is actually pretty hard work.

Around the table: in which we find reasons for hope amidst the ruins of our civilization.

From the Heated newsletter comes this relevant bit of research: our "liberal" media tend to accept, without question, our President's framing of climate change stories as how much doing something about it will "hurt industry." And the good news? You don't even have to retort about how much it'll hurt the planet, because it turns out climate change will also be a drag on our economy, to the tune of (per a Brookings Institution study) between 6.7% and 14.3% of GDP annually once it starts running away with our world. Once again, we find a Mack truck-sized opening for the "sensible," "moderate," "fiscally-responsible" Democrat to say that doing nothing about climate change will hurt our economy. Of course, as long as centrist Democrats act like only government spending is "fiscally-irresponsible," they'll pass up all those good opportunities, and eventually get voted out of office.

The latest from Akela Lacy and Ryan Grim at The Intercept describes the many factors that could still deliver Pennsylvania to our President on Election Day despite what polls say -- and also describes the community organizers who plan to fight those factors when establishment Democrats won't. And this is how it should be -- people fighting on their own, without waiting for Democrats to step up! But I'd like to see their good works continue after the election, regardless of the outcome -- too many good Americans declared victory after Barack Obama's election, as if voting were the end of their duty, not the beginning. (Do attend the emphatically bipartisan corruption inherent in the NIZ plan for Allentown, which helps explain why the Democratic party isn't ready to fight for voters in the first place.)

Ho hum, our President insists, incorrectly of course, that the spike in COVID cases is all about how much testing we're doing. Naturally infection rates (up 51% since October 1) are going up much faster than testing rates (up 13% since October 1), but, as a famous philosopher once said, facts are stupid things. Incompetence not actually being difficult, I would ask whether the infection spikes we're seeing might actually be part of some Administration plan to suppress the vote on Election Day -- except that such a plan would backfire if (as we suspect) Democratic voters are outstripping Republican ones in early voting.

Where does one begin with our President's suggestion that media coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic "(s)hould be an election law violation"? With the note that he's whining, once again, about things he doesn't (and shouldn't) have control over? Or with the realization that the folks who would enforce these election laws are the same ones he's driving out of our government? Either way, it's Chapter 183 of This Guy's Completely Unfit for Any Kind of Office. (And "COVID COVID COVID" could easily be this famous plaint from classic TV. And he may even intend that!)

Folks who cover politics for a living might want to consider that if Joe Biden confuses our President with George W. Bush, as he seems to do in this clip, maybe he's doing it on purpose! Seriously, if we imagine our President letting Democrats impeach him so he could keep the Ukraine (and therefore Hunter Biden) in the news, why couldn't we imagine Joe Biden "accidentally" invoking George W. Bush so that you'll be reminded that the last Republican President was also a complete failure? Of course, many folks who used to support Mr. Bush now tell themselves they never really liked him that much, so I can't say how effective that stratagem would be.

Finally, when we hear that our President plans to fire our FBI Director, CIA Director, and Secretary of Defense if he wins re-election, we must wonder what Tea Party/QAnon retreads or right-wing media "personalities" remain out there to replace them. We always feel like Republicans can't get any worse than this, and then they always do, even when our President isn't the kind of person who "likes someone on TV" and automatically calls that a job qualification. Maybe Lou Dobbs -- lately calling for Lindsey Graham's defeat at the polls because he's not loyal enough! -- can fill a few of these roles. Like the President he adores, he probably thinks it'd be easy.

Action: concerning our Supreme Court, the HEROES Act, and worker safety.

Our Senate votes on Amy Coney Barrett's nomination to our Supreme Court today, so if you haven't called your Senators already, now's the time. Our "liberal" media says her ascension is a foregone conclusion -- particularly now that Sen. Murkowski (R-AK) says she'll vote for Ms. Barrett when her nomination actually comes up -- but reading sheep entrails before we act is not how we practice democracy. We practice democracy by communicate our will so loudly they can't deny us, after which the sheep entrail-reading crowd will follow us. Now, I've been saying that Judge Barrett seems like the kind of judge who thinks we'd actually be better off with computers doing all the judging, but of course that's only part of the story: when workers try to get their bosses to do right by them, and when women and folks of color try to get our government to stop pissing on them, I'm sure we'll find her ability to interpret our laws so that they favor the powerful completely unimpaired. And that's why we must tell our Senators to reject her, regardless of what we think "will happen." We have to make things happen.

While you have your Senators on the phone, go ahead and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act, which would, as we know, provide much better pandemic relief than any of the ideas our Senate or our President have floated. When they say Nancy Pelosi doesn't "negotiate in good faith," do they mean she should have asked our Senate and our Administration for permission before passing a pandemic relief bill? Because the only people our House Reps should be "asking for permission" is their constituents, i.e., us. And if Mob Boss Mitch went to good Kentuckians and asked them what they wanted in a COVID-19 pandemic relief bill, they sure as hell didn't say "let's give corporations blanket immunity against lawsuits whenever they hurt good Americans," but Mob Boss Mitch sure fought like hell for that. And did Sen. Scott's constituents in South Carolina demand enhanced tax breaks for three-martini lunches? Because he put his name on that particular slab of absurdity. It's about time our Senators actually listened to us, but we have to make them listen first, and we can't do that if we keep our mouths shut.

Finally, you may know that our farm workers generally don't have basic workplace protections, including protection against working ten-hour days in hundred-degree heat. So along comes H.R. 3668, the Asunción Valdivia Heat Illness and Fatality Prevention Act, named for a farm worker who did die of heatstroke after working a ten-hour shift in hundred-degree heat. H.R. 3668 would mandate that our Department of Labor create a heat exposure workplace standard (under the authority of the Occupational Safety and Health Act), and that standard wouldn't just protect farm workers, but any worker, whether they work indoors or out, who encounters excessive heat at their job. Hence the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect workers from heat exposure by passing the Asunción Valdivia Heat Illness and Fatality Prevention Act. If you're still inclined to reject this bill because you think it'll only protect "those people" work on farms, I would recommend reading about folks who aren't like you, because they you might learn that the person who looks different than you also comes from a land with engineers, healers, and poets.

Around the table: in which we indulge in several necessary reminders, and celebrate the hard work of Bolivians.

Do we need another reminder that after presiding over a sixfold increase in our federal budget deficit (from around half a billion annually to over $3 trillion this year), that Republicans will never STFU about the deficit if Democrats sweep back into power? Why, yes, we do! After all, everyone watched Tha Bush Mobb hand $700 billion over to the banksters but we still had a Tea Party movement all about TEH DEFICITZ!!!! Their real objection to federal spending has to do with spending it on people -- Republicans were OK with the CARES Act squandering half a trillion-plus on corporate welfare and with another three-quarters of a trillion on defense spending, but not with the HEROES Act.

Do we need yet another reminder that "Panic Over 'Cancel Culture' Is Another Example of Right-Wing Projection"? Why, yes, we do! It's not just that our First Amendment protects you from your government and not your job, or even that the right can't win arguments on the merits -- it's also that right-wingers have been doing "cancel culture" themselves for-freaking-ever, if you recall, for example, the numerous battles right-wingers have fought over history textbooks in Texas the last few decades. I do wonder how many folks see some whiny brat on YouTube complaining that they're always getting censored and then say "wait, how am I even seeing you?"

Do we need another reminder that paying our farmworkers better would not result in significantly higher food prices? Why, yes, we do! The EPI analysis says a 40% pay hike would mean 4% in higher prices for fruits and vegetables, which would mean an extra $25 per year in the average household (and, not insignificantly, would mean that farmworkers could afford a better life and contribute more to our economy). This maps on to similar findings about fast food workers and their pay, of course. (As an aside, it shouldn't be that hard, in these times, to ensure farmers and farmworkers get a bigger slice of revenues -- seems to me the biggest obstacle would be all the lobbies of the big ag middlemen.)

From Marco Guzman at ITEP we learn that Arizona, Illinois, and California all have important tax matters on the ballot this year. When I hear that Arizona voters might raise taxes on the rich, Illinois voters might scrap their flat income tax in favor of a progressive one, and California voters might actually tax commercial property based on its (surely absurdly-inflated) value rather than its purchase price, I wonder why more candidates for the U.S. House and Senate aren't supporting these proposals, since they surely affect those who'd vote for them. Hell, Arkansas passed a statewide minimum wage hike the same year Sen. Pryor lost re-election by almost 20 points; think there might have been a lesson in there, somewhere?

Nearly a year after the military forced out Bolivian President Evo Morales right after winning another election, Bolivian voters went back to the polls and promptly put his party back in power. Turns out that when you stage a coup against a popular (and popularly-elected President) and then kill a few dozen of his supporters, people fight back -- by taking to the streets, in a nation where doing that might well get you killed. How about we emulate their example in a week and a half and deliver a similar message to Republicans across the land? You know, before they fulfill their wish to be as bad as the folks who put good Bolivians under their boot for a year.

Finally, a Colorado trailer park landlord sends a letter to his tenants telling them that a Joe Biden victory would ensure that the price of everything will go up -- including their rent, which he says would "most likely" double. "(W)e are not telling you how to vote," he swears, which I hope inspires mirth to anyone who reads it. It'd be nice if people could remember how "taxes, utilities, gasoline, groceries, new permits, fees, and regulations" most emphatically did not shoot up under the Obama Administration. It'd also be nice if people knew "a lot" was two words, not one.

Action: concerning our Supreme Court, pollution, and unconstitutional war-making.

The Amy Coney Barrett nomination goes before the full Senate very soon, so use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to call your Senators and tell them to reject the Barrett nomination. We could belabor Republican hypocrisy in refusing to consider Merrick Garland's nomination in 2016 and then ramming through Ms. Barrett's nomination now, but the best argument against her is her own record. In her three years on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, she has not only demonstrated a pattern of ruling for corporations and against workers, but she has also demonstrated a pattern of refusing to even interpret laws, and that refusal too often manifests as a complete lack of compassion for those times our laws fail our people. Frankly, she acts like we should just put legal matters to justice machines and be done with it. Of course we also know that (in her life before federal court) she stated her opposition to Roe v. Wade publicly more than once and she belongs to a far-right religious group that teaches women to be subservient to their husbands. That might have suited our Court in 1830, but not now.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: our Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) has proposed hiking fines for air polluters in our Commonwealth, which they haven't done in 15 years, but naturally pro-pollution state lawmakers want to put a stop to that -- it's like they don't breathe the air themselves! -- so Penn Environment helps you tell your PA state legislator to reject House Concurrent Regulatory Review Resolution 3, which would cut DEP funding dramatically. Pennsylvania legislators have long had a starve-the-best mentality with regard to punishing polluters (silly legislators, not understanding that the polluters are the beast!), and the result is a DEP that can't do its job the way our laws require. And the hike in air polluter fines would allow our DEP to continue to crack down on polluters. Don't let our legislators fool you: they understand perfectly well that revenues pay for services; they'd just prefer not to perform these services, so that big polluting corporate executives can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. But surely they shouldn't get all the say about everything.

Finally, the notorious 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force, the one they used to attack Iraq, is still on the books in America, but the negotiation of the annual defense appropriation bill presents another opportunity to repeal it, so Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to restore some semblance of the rule of law in America by repealing the 2002 AUMF. The war with Iraq has been over for many, many years -- George W. Bush told us so! -- but future Presidents, of both parties, invoked the 2002 AUMF for all kinds of unconstitutional adventures, from President Obama's adventure in Syria in 2015 to our current President's ordering of Gen. Soleimani's assassination earlier this year. Yeah, Mr. Obama didn't even go to Congress before bombing Syria, and our current President clearly forgot that Congress never declared war on Iran, which would be the only legal basis for killing Mr. Soleimani. And yes, Congress has spent the last 80 years essentially ceding its Constitutional war-making power to the President -- but why do we have to take that?

Action: concerning our Supreme Court, COVID-19 vaccines, and police brutality.

The Senate Judiciary Committee plans to vote on the Amy Coney Barrett Supreme Court nomination today, so you can find contact information for those members right here, on Judiciary's website; just hover over the member's name, and you can navigate to their website, which will have their phone numbers. Be prepared to call more than one number for each Senator; Senatorial staffers haven't liked answering their phones for a few years now. There are many reasons to oppose the Barrett nomination, but today you'll want to address Ms. Barrett's almost pathological refusal to answer questions put to her by the committee. Not just the standard of-course-I-can't-rule-on-that-until-I-see-it sort of refusals, either -- she refused to commit to Supreme Court precedents as settled law, which even previous Republican nominees made a point of doing, and she wouldn't even say that a President who loses an election should transfer power peacefully, which you'd also think is pretty much a layup for a Supreme Court nominee. And if you think conservatism is about preserving traditions, you'd have to conclude that a nominee who won't even say that is no kind of conservative.

Meanwhile, our President has been in the habit of suggesting we're going to have a COVID-19 vaccine ready just in time for Election Day, as if literally no one could possibly see his own self-interest in that, but the corporation supposedly furthest along in developing one (Pfizer) has already said there's no chance of that happening, and of course you know that rushing a vaccine is a really stupid idea, not just because it might be full of poison, but also because if it doesn't work, people will less readily trust the one that does work. With that in mind, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to prevent our President from releasing a bad vaccine before the election just to improve his chances. If you stand ready to accuse me of having a political motivation, then please carefully re-read every single word I've written in this paragraph. Nothing would please me more than to have a good COVID-19 vaccine ready before Election Day, even if it gets this turd of a President re-elected. But passing off a bad one as a good one would be evil.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reform the notorious 1033 program which lets local police departments get masses of surplus military weapons, then the Project on Government Oversight still helps you do that. Why do police need bazookas? Not to make arrests, that's for sure! No, police "need" bazookas so they can put down peaceful protestors who oppose their executions of black folks without even charging them with a crime. And studies inform us that police kill more civilians they get massive amounts of military weapons, which would, I hope, make sense to you. I've said for a while now that we need to stop using police officers as the Swiss Army knives of our civilization, that we need to stop making them respond to every conceivable request for assistance a citizen can make, and if we can do that, we certainly won't need to keep supplying them with rocket launchers and the like. If you're still of the mind that all of that is insufficiently "supportive" of our police, please just navigate away from this blog, because only God can give you the instruction you need, and I don't take God's tasks on my shoulders.

Around the table: from the "black tax" to Mr. Biden's "dimensia."

MIT study finds that black homeowners pay over $13,000 more on their mortgages than their white counterparts, amounting to a "black tax" on those homeowners. Why? Because of "risk-based pricing," which saddles black homeowners (who have lower credit scores and smaller down payments, for reasons I trust I don't have to enumerate) with higher interest rates and higher incidence of mortgage insurance. If you're still saying well, no duh, one of the study's authors will remind you that risk-based pricing has only been around for two decades, and if we can insist on preexisting condition protections in health insurance, we can do it here, too.

Speaking of health care, Facebook and Google ads constantly advertise for a certain named-after-our-President health care product that does not exist, but is merely a bait-and-switch for suspect health insurance plans. Facebook and Google have no shortage of excuses for letting the ads go up, but really, stamping out inaccurate ads is their job. Remember when it was conservative to protect consumers from misleading ads? I guess it's not "conservative" anymore to hire the people who would properly scrutinize the ads, though one might reasonably call that job creation.

You've no doubt seen all the photos of long voting lines in black neighborhoods, but you know vote suppression is even worse than that, as this article about a Tennessee poll worker who turned away voters with Black Lives Matter slogans on their T-shirts demonstrates. Of course I don't buy that this poll worker was merely confused about the law against expressing a preference for a candidate on a T-shirt, and I would say it's a good thing that his bosses didn't buy it, either, but his actions still managed to suppress some votes from "those people," so we can't discount the possibility that his bosses are saying job well done! to him when no one's looking.

Ho hum, right-wing "patriot" who used to yell RESPECTZ OURZ LAWZ!!!! at supposedly criminal immigrants now faces a felony identity theft charge, after allegedly using her former father-in-law's reward points to get herself a room at a California music festival, which suggests she's not even particularly good at identity theft. Also, she threw a tantrum when arrested, and now blames a "jealous" ex-husband, which isn't exactly a way to deny the charge. Ladies and gentlemen, your law-and-order right-wingers!

We tend to imagine that he's some kind of evil genius, but Mitch McConnell telling the White House not to pass any COVID-19 stimulus legislation because it'll interfere with getting Amy Coney Barrett on our Supreme Court sure looks like an unforced error of the first kind, which should remind you how you ought to feel about "evil geniuses" (i.e., they're so not geniuses -- if they were, they'd do something else with their lives!). Now the question is: will Amy McGrath run ads about this? Or would she find that too "uncivil"?

Finally, I was today years old when I remembered that criticizing some billboard operator's apparent inability to spell "dementia" (as "dimensia") when accusing Joe Biden of having it is not "elitist"! Yeah, I've ignored misspellings in emails and comments because I don't like giving my opponents an opening, but you know what? Evil people pretend anything is an opening anyway, and really, if you want to say things in public, you ought to observe basic rules of spelling, grammar, and syntax. And if being told that feels like a violation of your free speech rights, well, fuck your feelings.

Action: concerning voting rights, pollution, and "independent contractors."

Hip Hop Caucus helps you tell your Congressfolk to outlaw felony disenfranchisement. Felony disenfranchisement is, sadly, a story almost as old as America, and governments have always sought to take the vote away from the very same people those governments target with law enforcement. No, really, it's that simple: our governments go out of their way to fill our prisons with as many folks of color as they can, and then they try to take the vote away from them when they get out. (In the early 19th century, felony disenfranchisement also targeted white folks our government didn't find white enough.) Now 48 out of 50 states don't let prisoners vote at all -- while letting governments stash prisoners in largely red areas precisely to enhance the power of those red area voters! -- and now over six million Americans can't vote even though they've paid their debt to society as determined by our legal system, the one that's already treating folks of color unfairly to begin with. And if states won't do right by their citizens, our federal government has to step in.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: SB 619, which barely passed the state Senate a year ago, will suddenly get a House committee vote this week, and SB 619 is a noxious piece of crud that would virtually cripple our state's ability to keep pollution out of our rivers and streams. SB 619 would narrow our state clean water law's definition of "pollution" to exclude most kinds of pollution, plus it would let corporations determine if they should report their spills to our Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP), which is like letting burglars off the hook if they decide to keep quiet about their burglaries, and would prevent our DEP from requiring that said corporations clean up their spill or prevent future, similar spills, which I guess means our legislators think it's all right that kids don't clean up their messes. Which don't harm good Pennsylvanians as much as water pollution does! Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your state House Reps to protect our clean water by rejecting SB 619. Don't brook any foolishness about how SB 619 "creates jobs" -- if we're all dead from poisoned drinking water, ain't no jobs gonna help us.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Department of Labor to reject its own proposal to let more employers reclassify workers as "independent contractors" so they can avoid their obligations under the law to treat those workers fairly, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Among these many, many obligations corporations wouldn't have to meet if this Administration gets its way? They wouldn't have to pay workers a minimum wage, they wouldn't have to pay workers overtime when they work more than 40 hours a week or 8 hours a day -- and they wouldn't have to collect Social Security and Medicare taxes for their workers! Yes, that's right, this proposal is yet another way our Administration attacks Social Security and Medicare, and if corporations are afraid of taking advantage of our President's notorious payroll tax "holiday," they'll be far less afraid of calling their workers "independent contractors," and our Administration will kill Social Security and Medicare that way. So let's stop that, shall we?

Action: concerning good House bills, internet privacy, and methane emissions.

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward 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. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission 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. 2214, the NO BAN 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; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Yeah, our Senate only wants to put another right-wing stooge on our Supreme Court, and we'll get to that, but we still must remind them of their duty to do right by us.

Meanwhile, if you're wary of how much personal data big tech corporations like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple collect from you, and you should be wary, then Consumer Reports helps you tell your legislators and regulators to do a much better job protecting our personal data. You'll recall that our FCC actually issued pretty good regulations that protected consumer privacy on the internet, but the last Congress couldn't crap all over that effort fast enough, moving quickly to repeal those regulations via the notorious "resolution of disapproval" process. The Consumer Reports petition asks that consumers get more control over their personal data, that corporations be more transparent about their use of that data, and that corporations don't get monopoly control over our internet. Our FCC may not be able to issue new regulations about the matter (yet another unfortunate aspect of the "resolution of disapproval" process), but nothing prevents our Congressfolk from passing bills about the matter. Well, nothing but their own cowardice or avarice, but what else is new?

Finally, our EPA just rolled back Obama-era regulations preventing big oil and gas drilling corporations from leaking methane into the air, and this rollback offends on so many levels -- it causes more pollution, it makes climate change worse, it wastes usable energy, and it deprives good Americans of royalties when it occurs on public lands. But, hey, some bossman somewhere gets to gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home, so it's another round of "screw the people" for this Administration. And you know how right-wingers always say they'll just pass the costs of regulations on to the little guy? Well, the "little guy" winds up bearing the costs of methane emissions in all the ways described in the first sentence -- we lose royalties, we pay more for health care because of pollution, and we eventually don't get a livable planet to inhabit because methane emissions pack a much, much higher climate change punch than even coal emissions. That never makes it into the right's "cost-benefit analysis"; as I've said, they only care about the "cost" or "benefit" to executive paychecks. Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to do whatever it takes to roll back yet another Administration rollback.

Around the table: from corporate welfare to right-wing drama.

Remember that big LED manufacturing plant Foxconn was supposed to build in Wisconsin after securing $3 billion in corporate welfare? Well, three years later, there's no factory and no jobs, and it sure doesn't seem likely there ever will be. The folks who did work there for a time expressed confusion (and worse!) about exactly what they were doing there; the answer, of course, is that they were all props for a big corporation to suck out billions in taxpayer money. Thus another reminder that former Gov. Scott Walker was always about the corporate welfare and nothing else.

We learn "Why These Voters Rejected Hillary Clinton but Are Backing Joe Biden": because he has a penis! I mean, voters who made those choices won't say that, and I wouldn't even posit that they're so sexist they'd notice it in other people, but yeah, pretty much -- ZOMG TEH 20 YEARZ OFZ TEH ATTACKZ!!!! I don't buy, because Republicans act like all their opponents are the anti-Christ anymore. I've heard some of our President's ads attacking Hillary Clinton, and all I can say is you just can't get her name out your mouth, can you?

Our President is going on a regulation-killing spree just in case he loses in November. A lot of these regulatory rollbacks will die in court, like most of his other ones, since he's doing them even faster than usual, but you can't necessarily tell when that'll be (or which ones). And if Democrats sweep back into power in the Senate and the White House, will they use the "resolution of disapproval" process to repeal these regulatory abuses -- or will they prize "civility" over fighting for the American people? We know what the pattern's been.

Upon learning that Steve Bannon told an Australian newspaper that if our President loses in 2020, he'll be back in 2024, my immediate response is well, no shit, Sherlock. But I wouldn't retort to this statement with sure, he will, if he's not in jail! People like our President generally don't wind up in jail, not even when they punch a cop. (As an aside, Mr. Bannon is sure working this our-President-can't-lose angle pretty vigorously, which may explain why no one asked his opinion about anything before 2016.)

Finally, when we hear that the writer of that "smoking gun" New York Post article about Hunter Biden's laptop didn't want his byline on it and also that Fox News passed on the story first apparently because they didn't quite believe it, we must remember that the Rupert Murdoch-owned News Corporation owns both the Post and Fox News, so more likely Mr. Murdoch or someone else high-up decided which news organ would take the hit, so as to perpetuate the absurd notion that Republicans disagree with each other a lot about important stuff. Remember, folks: it's not just drama, it's bad drama.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, voting rights, and pollution.

You've heard that Senate Republicans want to pass a half-trillion dollar "skinny" COVID-19 relief bill this week? Well, who cares what they want? They should be doing what we want! So let's call them and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act. Our House passed the HEROES Act five months ago, and that bill would (among other good works) fund COVID-19 testing and tracing, fund struggling states and localities, fund enhanced unemployment benefits, and issue another round of stimulus checks to good Americans. The Senate Republican bill, of course, would fund rather less-enhanced unemployment benefits and refill the so-called Paycheck Protection Program, which should call the Corporate Welfare Slush Fund given how little it's helped small businesses (its reason for being!) and how much it's helped certain entities pretend they employ people only to spend our money on things like yachts, strippers, and Gucci jewelry. Seriously, Senators, it's well past time to stop pretending to do right by working families and actually do right by working families.

Meanwhile, a private security corporation named Atlas Aegis is actually trying to get military veterans to "guard" Minnesota polling places, which I must presume means they want to "guard" voting booths from voters and their democracy cooties. Of course, even though the consent decree keeping the political parties from "monitoring" polling places expired before the 2018 elections, our state governments, working on their citizens' behalf, still get more say about what you can do at a polling place than any group of wannabe Proud Boys. Minnesota's Attorney General, to his credit, has already told Atlas Aegis to cut out this scheme, but wouldn't it be better if we all said something about it? After all, a politician's statement, no matter how agreeable, really means nothing without the people's backing. Hence Win Without War helps you tell your state government to enforce its laws and keep private security forces away from our polling places. After all, if folks wear official-looking (and military-looking) uniforms around our polling places, some voters will be confused -- and intimidated. And that's evil.

In other news, we're having a lot of trouble getting our Senate to pass, well, any good legislation, but in particular our Senate has not taken up H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act, which would limit our exposure to the toxic "forever chemical" PFAS, which is, like, everywhere. So it might be time to go pressure some private corporations to rely less on PFAS chemicals. Would that the Big Stick of Bad PR affected our elected officials the way it affects big corporations! Anyway, Penn PIRG helps you tell big fast food chain corporation McDonald's to stop using PFAS chemicals in their packaging. Because when folks throw away a million Big Mac containers a day, that's a lot of PFAS that can leech into our water, or get into our air if it's incinerated. Don't suffer the fools who complain that Big Macs will cost 80 bazillion dollars if we make them use better packaging, or that the already-suffering McDonald's workers will suffer more. Making your workers suffer, after all, is a choice. And where's that American can-do spirit that says McDonald's can find a way to use food packaging that doesn't pollute our air and water?

Finally, as many big banks divest from fossil fuel development projects, TD Bank still shovels billions of dollars into them, including the notoriously foul tar sands pipelines. But we were just talking about the Big Stick of Bad PR, right? So Sum of Us helps you tell TD Bank to stop investing in polluting fossil fuel projects. It's really well past time for the big banks to fund renewable energy projects, and don't suffer the fool who says that stuff doesn't make any money or that stuff isn't reliable, and not just because our taxpayer money subsidizes fossil fuel development. Think about it: if you were going to design an energy source from scratch, why would you design one that churns the ground and pumps filth into our air and water? You would design systems that cause the least amount of trouble, wouldn't you? And when you consider that renewable energy sources cause far less pollution and earth-churning than fossil fuels, wouldn't they seem more reliable? The only reason fossil fuels are "reliable" is we've chosen to do things that way. Why can't we choose better once we learn better?

Around our table: from surprise medical bills to an "October surprise" falling flat.

Why do good Americans keep getting slammed with surprise medical bills, although preventing them is apparently a bipartisan wish? According to this New York Times account of a woman billed over $50,000 to get airlifted to a hospital that could properly treat her life-threatening COVID-19, the answer is banksters had a tantrum over being told to stop screwing people over. Anyway, read the whole story, even though it'll piss you off, because the details are important -- big corporations know where all the loopholes in the law are, and how can we close them if we don't know where they are?

Joshua Cho at FAIR finds that our "liberal" media "Worr(y) About a Fracking Ban's 'Risk' to Democrats -- Not Fracking's Threat to Planet." Just what you need from our "liberal" media: more horserace coverage, and stupid horserace coverage at that -- polling tells us that regular Americans simply wouldn't run through a wall to keep hydrofracturing. If they were, Heidi Heidtkamp would still be the junior Senator from North Dakota, and John Hickenlooper would be having a lot less trouble burying Cory Gardner in Colorado's Senate race this year.

Tina Nguyen at Politico warns us that some Republicans are starting to court QAnon conspiracy nuts. This may be our next Tea Party, folks -- and if Democrats get all the power back and spend two years pretending their hands are tied as they have a habit of doing, then we'll see a crap-ton of QAnon Reps take back the House for Republicans in 2022. The good news? All Democrats need do to stop this unconscionable stupidity is do the job the people elect them to do. If it seems like they're not taking that advice, I'll be happy to repeat it until they do.

Folks who think Hunter Biden's alleged corruption should kill Joe Biden's Presidential campaign really should get a load of the checkered career of Eric Branstad, son of six-term (!) Iowa Governor and until lately Ambassador to China Terry Branstad, because his story also has nepotism, substance abuse, and making a crap-ton of money under suspicious circumstances. And to those who'd say that's not a good analogy because Eric Branstad isn't the son of our President, I would first direct them to better contemplate the palpable corruption of our President's daughter and son-in-law, and second direct them to stop being pedants.

Ho hum, our President asserts that Joe Biden must be "corrupt as hell" to "live() in these beautiful houses all over the place" on a politician's salary. Set aside that two houses ain't exactly "houses all over the place" -- again, our President is like a man covered in shit complaining about everyone else's body odor. Also, too, the they-didn't-send-their-best-wishes-when-I-got-sick complaint had sure better sound like whining to everyone with listening skills by now.

Finally, numerous analysts have, in recent days, cast reasonable doubt on the New York Post's "smoking gun" story alleging Hunter Biden's corruption. It sure doesn't help that the Delaware computer repair-store owner can't get his damn story straight. And in the words of one former U.S. Attorney, "(w)hat are the chances that an anonymous person abandons a laptop that contains evidence about the very same conspiracy theory" our President's cronies have been flogging all this time? Call it drama, call it junk news, just don't call it a reason to re-elect our President.

Action: concerning water shutoffs, corruption, and the census.

As our President and our Senate Majority Leader fiddle on a new COVID-19 relief package, folks now face water shutoffs all over America -- you know, because they haven't been working, and it's hard enough to pay the bills when you are working? -- so Food and Water Action helps you tell our Centers for Disease Control (or CDC) to issue a nationwide moratorium on water shutoffs. How does our CDC have the authority to issue this moratorium? Well, the short answer is "because the law allows it" -- specifically, the Public Health Service Act. The long answer is that our CDC can issue such a moratorium if public health demands it, and just so happens it does, since we can't actually expect people to wash their hands repeatedly for 20 seconds at a time if they don't have, you know, access to clean water. Furthermore, folks who don't have access to clean water are more likely to get COVID-19 than folks who do -- but as long as we have folks who don't have access to clean water, then the folks who do are also more likely to get it. And, yeah, we don't expect this Congress to do their job, so our CDC must do theirs.

Meanwhile, given the litany of news reports about our President's taxes lately -- ranging from the revelation that he paid $750 in taxes in 2017 and 2018 to $21 million in "highly unusual payments" which may have broken our few remaining campaign finance laws -- Americans for Tax Fairness helps you demand that our IRS and our FEC investigate our President's tax maneuverings. Our President may have borrowed multi-million dollar sums, funneled it through a shell corporation, and then not only donated it to his 2016 campaign, but wrote it off as a business expense! He calls such maneuverings "smart," but the rest of us call them corrupt. No one expects, at this late stage, any of his multitudinous votaries to renounce him -- that would involve admitting you're wrong, a task the best of us have trouble with. But our IRS and our FEC belong to us and work for us, and regardless of how many Presidential appointees they have, or how many career employees our President has driven away, they still have legally-mandated jobs to do.

Finally, now that our Supreme Court has said our Administration can end the 2020 census early and thus leave many good Americans uncounted, Public Citizen helps you tell our Administration to keep working at the census until everyone's counted. Because, as Public Citizen's latest email missive instructs us, "public outcry may be our best hope for compelling" our Administration to count everyone; yeah, I know, they've never demonstrated that they care very much about what we think, but duty is duty. Everyone knows the COVID-19 pandemic has made conducting our census harder than ever -- so much of our census depends on door-knocking, after all -- but we also know that our President wants to use that as an excuse not to count undocumented immigrants, even though they are people who live here and who thus must be counted so federal dollars can be budgeted appropriately. I mean, do people really think that starving areas with undocumented immigrants will induce them to leave? No, it'll make things harder for everyone, which I'm sure is our Administration's aim. Remember: they only need you for your pain.

Action: concerning the Electoral College, "stalkerware," and nuclear waste storage.

Feel like abolishing the Electoral College? I bet you do! And not just because two of the last five Presidential election winners actually lost the popular vote, but because, by the evidence, the Electoral College has plainly failed, twice in the last two decades, to do what our Founders intended -- to keep someone completely unfit for office out of office. You'll no doubt hear from folks who say they think the states should have more of a say in politics, but I say you got two Senators. Wyoming gets two Senators, and California gets two Senators, though California has 50 times the population, so why isn't that enough? And you've no doubt heard of all the machinations that could happen if someone doesn't feel like leaving office -- that they could, for example, get sympathetic legislatures to simply declare the results invalid and appoint their own electors, for example. I'll admit this is feeling a lot less like a contested election than it did six months ago, or even one month ago, but let's make this right anyway. Change.org helps you tell Congress to abolish the Electoral College.

Meanwhile, with so much schooling now taking place remotely, thanks to this pandemic and our government's incompetence in handling it, a lot of schools have hastily resorted to test-taking apps that, well, have a lot of problems, like flagging kids for cheating if they look around or talk to themselves, or if the app's facial recognition software misidentifies them. And these apps are surprisingly hungry for your private information -- they want access to all data on your computer and listen in on all your communications. No wonder they call it "stalkerware"! And, hate to pile on, but who gets the shaft from facial recognition software the most? Folks of color, that's who! Yeah, we all know it's tough enough to teach 30 kids in the same room with you, let alone 30 kids from all over town at the same time, but "first, do no harm" ain't just for the Hippocratic Oath, and you can't help but wonder which app developing corporations saw a way into hoovering up all kinds of personal data you wouldn't otherwise let them touch. Hence Fight for the Future helps you tell schools and colleges to ban "stalkerware."

Finally, our Nuclear Regulatory Commission (or NRC) wants to "temporarily" dump radioactive nuclear waste in West Texas, a plan so unpopular that even Texas's far-right Governor opposes it. Possibly he just wants it dumped in some blue state's backyard, but dumping ain't even half the problem -- transporting it from all over the country could expose virtually everyone who lives near ports and train tracks, trains and ships being susceptible to leaks, accidents, and sabotage. Not to pile on, but the area our NRC wants to use is a heavily-Latino neighborhood, and don't folks of color get the shaft enough already? Hence Public Citizen helps you tell our NRC to scuttle its proposal to allow "temporary" nuclear waste storage in West Texas. "Temporary" nuclear waste storage, by the way, is already illegal; chances are this scheme, if our NRC goes through with it, will be struck down in court, but you might not find much comfort in that if you've already had your water table poisoned by an accident in the meantime.

Around the table: in which we confront rather relentless Republican hypocrisy.

Right-wing, pro-President group pays travel expenses for folks to attend a Presidential rally at the White House, including a "peaceful protest() for law and order." Thus once again we confront the fact that the right constantly accuses liberals of being "professional protestors" when the right hires actual professional protestors. And they kind of need them, too -- our President has never been all that popular, getting only 46% of the popular vote in 2016 and rarely cresting that in his approval ratings since then. And folks are sick of "law and order" meaning only "filling jails with black folks."

COVID-19 cases in rural areas jump 16% in one week, representing the biggest weekly increase since the start of the pandemic. Remember right-wingers bellowing that "red states manage the pandemic so much better than New York and New Jersey" back in the spring? Of course that was mostly about the relative lack of population density in "red states," which those governments had very little to do with. So what do you suppose they say now, particularly when New York and New Jersey are doing rather better than North Dakota and Iowa? I kid, of course -- they say some iteration of TEH FAKE NEWZ!!!!!, because what else can you say when you've been wrong about everything?

Back in 2016, the same Republicans who are now trying to ram through Judge Barrett's Supreme Court nomination argued just as vehemently for leaving Justice Scalia's seat open for another four or eight years if Hillary Clinton won the election. And thus we are reminded that Republicans don't care about norms or laws, or better arguments, or even more persuasive arguments -- they only care about bullying their way to more power, and at least a quarter of our electorate likes them that way. We can only hope the rest of the electorate have had it up to here with all that.

Right-wing trolls get nearly all the facts about a Denver shooting wrong, and then won't retract their numerous idiotic statements. You could say expecting them to admit they were wrong is like expecting a mound of dung in the middle of the sidewalk to magically transform into meatloaf -- or you could say expecting them to admit they were wrong is merely expecting human beings to act civilized, and surely even the most cynical among us wouldn't fault folks for expecting civilized behavior from nominally civilized people. I kid, of course -- cynical people are no better than right-wing trolls.

I've long said our President is unfit for office, but that doesn't mean I agree that U.S. Trade Rep Robert Lighthizer, easily the best of our President's Cabinet appointees, has done a bad job, and neither does this ProPublica article, not really. Sometimes, when you hear that "we've lost all this expertise," you have to ask expertise at what? And with trade, it sure does seem like we've only "lost expertise" at putting corporations before people. I don't know that our President has addressed our trade deficits with any particular skill, but the USMCA is a marked improvement over NAFTA, not least because it drastically curtails the use of "investor-state dispute settlement" systems that outsource our jobs and nullify our laws.

Finally, no, the New York Post did not find a "smoking gun" on a computer with data belonging to Hunter Biden. While the "smoking gun" email quoted in the article suggests (and doesn't state) that a Ukrainian businessman met with Joe Biden while he was Vice President, it's a long, long way from there to the right's long and winding tale of Vice Presidential corruption, and of course the 12-minute video that "appears" to have sex and crack on it is irrelevant even if it exists. And anyway, Presidential votaries who yell about "the privilege of being a Biden" are like a shit-covered man who comes into your living room and complains about your body odor.

Action: concerning taxing the rich, public health research, and the right to repair.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure the rich pay their fair share of taxes, by enacting a wealth tax and fully funding our IRS. You'll note several news hooks there: billionaires are making a killing (so to speak) during this pandemic while over 60 million Americans have filed for unemployment at some point over the last seven months, while the New York Times reported that our President paid literally $750 in taxes in 2017 and 2018. But there's one other news hook you might have missed: Congress has been defunding our IRS for the last decade, to the point where our IRS admits it goes after poorer tax cheat suspects because they don't have the money to fight rich ones in court. That's a despicable state of affairs, beloved only by those who hate all taxes and who have no apparent idea how many of the services they enjoy only exist because of taxes. Congress literally takes food out of our mouths by defunding the IRS, because if you can't stamp out tax avoidance by the rich, someone's still got to pay for roads and bridges and libraries and cops.

Meanwhile, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 8178/S. 4533, the Anti-Racism in Public Health Act. The bill would establish a "National Center for Anti-Racism and Health" within our Centers for Disease Control (or CDC) and would also mandate that our CDC researches how structural racism (including police brutality) impacts public health. You may find all of that less useful than bills that would actually punish police brutality, curtail redlining, or deliver aid to minority neighborhoods ravaged by COVID-19, but conducting research on these matters is also important, not least because our government really hasn't done that research with this much vigor before. Folks say they always put the landfill next to the black neighborhood, but such arguments need to rise above anecdotes and get backing from scientific research. And we also haven't really confronted police brutality as a public health issue yet. If we did these things, we'd do good works, so this bill merits our support.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Apple to respect our right-to-repair with its products, then Penn PIRG still helps you do that. Apple has long been notorious for making their products almost impossible to upgrade and repair on your own, but Apple has also done its share of greenwashing, and has pledged to be completely carbon-neutral in 10 years. If it doesn't make its products easier to reuse, though, how can it do that? If our landfills are overflowing with "obsolete" hardware, how are we going to kick climate change's ass? The U.S. PIRG Education Fund has lately informed us that if we could all get another year out of our cellphones, the climate change impact would be like taking over 600,000 cars off the road! Granted, we have almost 275 million cars on the road right now, but now imagine what getting another year out of your desktops and laptops and iPads would be like. If we had more power to repair and upgrade our own stuff, we would do a lot of good. After all, people still like saving money. Some folks still even pride themselves on their thrift.