Thieves in the Temple.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long story short: tell your state's Governor to distribute eviction assistance funds immediately, and tell your Congressfolk to stop listening to corporate lobbyists, raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, enact paid family/medical leave, make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, expand Medicare, and enable Medicare to negotiate drug prices. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. Daily Kos helps you tell your state's Governor to get to stepping about distributing federal rental assistance funds. With only 11% of these funds distributed so far, and with the federal eviction moratorium ending, I trust the urgency is clear. But it wasn't clear enough to certain American states, which contracted with private corporations to distribute the money, and these corporations, guess what, haven't done a very good job of it, which may have been the whole idea. When governments contract with private corporations that screw up, it's still government's fault. Of course, they're not just screwing over tenants, they're also screwing over the landlords who are trying to get paid, so let your Governor know your will today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Regarding Medicare drug price negotiation.

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

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

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

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

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

As always, use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's contact info. Good luck and God bless.

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

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2001 and 2002 Authorizations to Use Military Force (or AUMFs), protect utility grid whistleblowers, demilitarize our police, and end qualified immunity, and tell Pennsylvania state legislators to stop whining about the 2020 election and reject any proposed "fraudit" thereof. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally, both The Juggernaut Project and Daily Kos help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. The PRO Act would repeal state-level "right-to-work" laws all over America -- the PRO Act's opponents act like that's a bad thing to do or something -- and would also protect workers from their bosses dragging them away from their important work and forcing them to watch anti-union propaganda. Because if you were treating your workers right, you wouldn't need to propagandize them against unions! One good thing about this pandemic? We demand more from our jobs than the back of our boss's hand. If we pass the PRO Act, we can get more of what we want from our jobs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Women's Health Protection Act and the Veterans and Consumers Fair Credit Act, fund the budget reconciliation bill with higher taxes on the rich and on corporations, allow Medicare to negotiate its own drug prices, expand Medicare coverage to include dental, vision, and hearing care, and make the EITC and CTC expansions permanent. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. Daily Kos, Ultraviolet, and Moms Rising all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women's Health Protection Act. You hate how Texas has basically outlawed abortions, and how our Supreme Court has done nothing to stop them? Then we need to pass the Women's Health Protection Act, which would stop abortion bans at the state level, not to mention all the other roadblocks (the finding of "heartbeats," forced ultrasounds, forced bad medical advice) states love putting up so that women can't take care of themselves. If we don't want our civilization to turn women into breeders again, if we don't want women to be forced to carry fetuses without organs or fetuses that develop problems that threaten the mothers' lives or the fetuses of rapists or abusive partners, then we need to pass the Women's Health Protection Act.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: more thoughts about Afghanistan and Trumpholes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: what looks large from a distance, close up ain't never that big.

Mother Jones reminds us that right-wing assholes don't just stumble over each other on Facebook -- Facebook actively aids and abets their meeting. I'm old enough to remember when you had to work to find like-minded folks on social media! Now Facebook's algorithms, here likened to "a speed-reading robot that curates everything you see," are not only "biased in favor of inflammatory content," but also biased in favor of right-wing news sources. Add in their "recommendation" tools like "Groups You Should Join" -- literally responsible for almost two out of every three folks who join some group of Nazi wannabes -- and you have a complete shitshow. I've been contemplating deleting my blog's Facebook page and doing all my promotion over email; this is why. I mean, I won't become an obnoxious right-wing prick, not least because I'm an obnoxious left-wing prick.

Spencer Snyder at FAIR tells us why "MSNBC Can't Look Back" on its origins in celebrating 25 years on the air. I've never thought they were all that liberal, and I rather vividly remember when they tried their damnedest to ape Fox News, but their history is so, so much worse than that -- they gave Laura Ingraham her big cable news break, they provided a soft landing to Tucker Carlson after Jon Stewart shamed Crossfire into oblivion, and even Keith Olbermann, now fondly remembered for being just about the only cable news personality who'd take on George W. Bush during his second term, wouldn't STFU about Monica Lewinsky during the late '90s. Of course, we should remember that they're a freaking cable news channel, which guarantees a certain level of suckitude. They clearly lucked into having Ed Schultz, God rest him, and naturally they fired him for no good reason.

You remember that ProPublica report about how awful asset forfeiture has gotten in Massachusetts? Well, now Massachusetts state legislators are making noises about overhauling the entire asset forfeiture system there, so that maybe fewer DAs can just hang on to your money and/or property for years after they decided not to charge you with anything. So, yeah, good journalism can lead to good works -- maybe folks who only watch cable news don't know that! -- and even if Massachusetts state legislators are only playing their constituents now, the good citizens of that state have something to say about that. Many things, I would think. And now all they need do is say them until they get the justice they deserve.

Ho hum, defense contracting corporation whines that the end of the Afghanistan War is costing it money, but will fund a pro-war think tank nonetheless. You see the inherent contradiction, I trust -- gosh, why not go into, oh, I don't know, renewable energy? There's a lot of call for that now, and nobody with any real work to do remembers the name of big defense contracting corporations anymore. Oh, and yeah, there's a "feedback loop," where big defense contractors fund think tanks which employ "experts" to go on the TV and tell us why we need to go to war all the time. And no "liberal" media outlet that gives them airtime will force them to disclose their potential conflicts of interest. I am, strangely, more than a little annoyed this zombie won't fall. I say "strangely" because I see apparently unkillable zombies all the time in politics.

Patrick Cockburn predicts -- quite accurately, I think -- that the Taliban will "Escape Pariah Status By Posing as the Enemy of ISIS." Isis, you may have heard, has made quite the return in Afghanistan. I've long thought that ISIS gave al-Qaeda a huge opening to claim legitimacy -- you can, I trust, imagine al-Qaeda terrorists saying hey, we did what we had to do, but we're not total barbarians like ISIS! -- but apparently it falls to the Taliban to seize that opportunity, and the better relations with other countries that could come with it. Yes, even with the U.S. -- you think the Taliban might have a few things we want? And you think maybe Joe Biden calculated all of this ahead of withdrawal? I'd be surprised if he didn't, frankly.

Finally, Jonathan Chait says "we have no idea what the rationale is" for "moderate" Democrats slashing President Biden's proposals to hike corporate taxes and tax hikes on the rich. Maybe he's too polite to say it, but I sure as shit ain't: Democrats plan to piss all over yet another slab of extremely popular legislation so that they completely demoralize their base and lose our House and Senate in 2022, thus keeping us in the same absurd and perverse hostage crisis that has yielded the Contract on America and Tha Bush Mobb and the Tea Party and Donald Trump. Maybe the Josh Gottheimers of America should consider they'll never win another election if Congress is full of open fascists, as it will be if they get their way this time. If superior arguments clearly don't move "moderate" Democrats, I won't be above appealing to their self-interest.

Action: concerning voting rights, clean water, saving our Post Office, pollution, corruption, and bad nominations.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, remove all lead water pipes in America, pass the Postal Service Reform Act, bring back the "Polluter Pays" tax, pass the Ban Conflicted Trading Act, and reject Rahm Emanuel's nomination as Ambassador to Japan. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Our House passed H.R. 4 last week; now our Senate needs to follow suit, so that the Voting Rights Act can have some teeth again, after our Supreme Court knocked them out in Shelby County v. Holder. Our Court ruled, in that case, that the Voting Rights Act discriminated against Southern states in its pre-clearance formula (solely because more Black folks vote now than they did before the law, a line of reasoning the late Justice Ginsberg likened to throwing out your umbrella merely because it's stopped raining). Our Court also ruled that a pre-clearance formula that didn't discriminate against the South would pass their muster; hence H.R. 4 would subject any state or locality with a record of vote suppression to submit its voting law changes for Justice Department pre-clearance. Republicans will argue we don't need it, but the evidence of your own eyes will say otherwise.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your Congressfolk to replace all lead water pipes in America. Just so happens the budget reconciliation blueprint passed by both House and Senate this month could do just that! And that's what we should demand from our Congressfolk -- the removal of all lead pipes. LCV estimates that $45 billion would get it done, and that's, frankly, not much higher than other bills (most famously the WATER Act) have aimed to allot. And when "moderate" Democrats come at you with "we're afraid to tax corporations more due to international competitiveness," you can come right back with so we should tolerate brain damage from lead pipes anywhere in America? Because that is what these irredeemable weaklings really stand for. And it's about time all Americans understood this dark calculus.

Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3076/S. 1720, the Postal Service Reform Act. The Postal Service Reform Act would address the real cause of our Postal Service's recent financial troubles -- namely, the mandate to pre-fund retirement benefits for the next 85 years, like literally no other entity, governmental or corporate, has to do. If you had to pre-fund 85 years of retirement funds, hopefully you wouldn't go around wondering why your pockets are empty all the time. Get rid of that absurd mandate, and most of our Postal Service's financial problems will fix themselves, and we won't have to cut services or hike prices (as Postmaster General DeJoy would do) or close Post Offices (as Congressfolk occasionally propose). Why should only stupid ideas get implemented in America?

US PIRG helps you tell your House Reps to reinstate the "polluter pays" tax, so that big polluting corporations have to pay to clean up their messes. You'll recognize the principle, no doubt, from childhood discussions/arguments with your parents: you make the mess, you clean it up. We all accept that as axiomatic these days, yet we don't make corporations pay to clean up their messes, even though their messes are bigger than any pile of dirty clothes you ever left sitting around. We don't make them clean up their messes, I guess, because of "international competitiveness," but seriously, we should tolerate pollution just so a corporation can "compete"? If that's the price of competition, give me cooperation. And maybe these corporations should talk to your mother about cleaning up their messes. If they're lucky, she won't be holding her wooden spoon.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1579/S. 564, the Ban Conflicted Trading Act. The Ban Conflicted Trading Act would prevent Congressfolk from trading in stocks and securities while they're in office. Because doing such a thing would be a conflict of interest the minute you did it, given that you'll likely be voting on issues that would affect your trading, whether you sat on a finance-related Congressional committee or not. Really, that is the standard to which we should hold ourselves -- even the stink of corruption should send us running in the other direction. Some people argue against passing such laws because they're "common sense." In doing so, they ignore the mountains of evidence that trading corrupts politicians, but they also miss the point -- laws like this wouldn't "insult common sense" so much as fight malice.

Finally, Roots Action helps you tell your Senators to reject the nomination of Rahm Emanuel to be Ambassador to Japan. What is this, a "lifetime achievement" award? If so, Mr. Emanuel's hardly earned it on the merits! He's been pushing corporatism on the Democratic Party for decades, and he marred his tenure as Mayor of Chicago with (among other things!) his aggression toward the city's education system, his cover-up of the Laquan McDonald shooting, and his privatization of city parking services. And after that record of "accomplishment," we'd put him in charge of relating to a nation with over 100 military bases and the third-biggest economy on Earth. Wasn't Michael Jordan available? He's more accomplished, after all.

Around the table: in which corporations come up with totally non-novel objections to whistleblower law reform.

When I read that some big banksters are simply "opting out" of a process to forgive Paycheck Protection Program (or PPP) loans, leaving some of those borrowers with no recourse for relief, I asked myself who the hell greenlighted that? And I was not surprised to learn that, though the Trump Administration's PPP was a pile of dung that delivered half a trillion dollars of your money mostly to big corporations, the Biden Small Business Administration created a program for smaller borrowers to get relief directly from the agency -- but allowed the big banksters to opt in to participating in that program, which means if said bankster facilitated your loan, they can still block you from getting relief from our SBA! Still, let's remember that banksters are evil -- Chase's hack response to The Intercept made sure to mention that their loan-relief application process takes less than 10 minutes, which will mean nothing when they say no.

Ana Popovich at Whistleblower Network News details how actual false claims by big corporations derailed the inclusion of amendments to the False Claims Act in the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" earlier this month. Even though, as I mentioned yesterday, the amendments would actually have raised revenue, and the amendments have actual bipartisan support in the Senate! What were those false claims? Oh, you know -- targeting corruption would "raise health care costs," the kind of excuse they pull out whenever we contemplate doing the right thing, and that "the burden of proof would shift to the defendant," which I can assure you is nowhere in the False Claims Amendments Act, where those amendments now sit, awaiting Congressional action. Greed, like rage, is a hell of a drug.

I'm just not that impressed anymore when conservatives notice that banning mask mandates isn't a conservative thing to do. Even Charlie Sykes's most salient point -- that states aren't being "conservative" when they prevent smaller governmental bodies and private corporations from mandating mask-wearing -- is essentially the same argument I've made for damn near 20 years now. I guess it's possible I'm being too hard on him, though I would also ask Mr. Sykes how he squares his conservatism with his support for former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, whose own notorious addiction to corporate welfare is also quite anti-conservative.

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is probably right to declare (before a meeting of evangelists, how dramatic) that his fate will be one of three things: "being arrested, killed or victory," although I'd caution against the notion that it only has to be one of the three -- he could get arrested and get back into politics a few years down the line, as Silvio Berlusconi could tell him, amirite? I'd be miserable with the third option, perfectly happy with the first, and though of course I endeavor never to wish death on another human being -- even a 66-year-old billionaire asshole can redeem himself through good works! -- folks like Mr. Bolsonaro sure do test my patience on this matter.

Speaking of redemption and the difficulty thereof, Proud Boys leader Henry "Enrique" Tarrio, who proudly burned a Black Lives Matter flag in late December and cheered on the January 6 attempted coup from afar, now says he's sorry he did the things for which he's going to jail for five months. But even if you're not cursed with a close attention to diction -- you can apologize "profusely," but you can't be "profusely" sorry! That's not how words work! -- you'll still wonder if Mr. Tarrio's "remorse" is more because he got caught and he knows now there'll be consequences. He shouldn't fret, though -- he'll meet a lot of like-minded people in jail, and not all of them will be prisoners.

Finally, as Republicans loudly shriek about the "border crisis," and happily hand you a pile of "facts" that really require context -- if you think 2021 is bad, check out almost every year between 1983 and 2001! -- we should really let this whole concept of a "border crisis" rest in a deep, deep grave. Any "gang" of immigrants take over Laredo, Sierra Blanca, Tombstone, or San Clemente? Have we had to dispatch soldiers to retake these or any other towns so we can reinstall duly-elected local governments? No? Then people need to STFU about a "border crisis," just as they need to remember that 9.11 didn't lead to the installation of President bin Laden and thus also didn't represent an "existential threat." Contrary to what you've heard, Americans generally aren't soft -- but the folks who whine about immigration sure are!

Action: concerning evictions, Democrats, Medicare, taxes, whistleblowers, and prisons.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to enact an eviction moratorium, tell "Wall Street Democrats" to stop trying to kill the reconciliation bill, tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices, make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, pass the False Claims Amendments Act, and end slavery in American prisons. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Now that our Supreme Court (by the expected 6-3 margin) has ruled the most recent Biden eviction ban unconstitutional, the Center for Popular Democracy helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact an eviction ban at least through December. Right-wingers will continue to shriek about TEH LANDLORDZ!!!!!, but landlords can weather bad times better than renters, and anyway that's beside the point -- the point is that our government enacted renter relief in the American Rescue Plan Act that hasn't gotten to renters yet, so it would be evil of us to let people get thrown out in the streets before we've made sure they got all the help they could get. That won't convince right-wingers, but nothing does anymore, except DIDDLEZ MY RAGEZ GLANDZ!!!!!

Now that our House has passed the $3.5 trillion budget blueprint, the National Campaign for Transit Justice helps you tell the notorious "Wall Street Democrats" to stop trying to sabotage it. Remember: when they say "the price tag's too high," what they really mean is "we don't want rich people and corporations to pay more taxes," even though wanting rich people and corporations to pay more taxes is the majority position in poll after poll after poll and it ain't even close. We could have better Medicare, lower drug prices, paid family/medical leave, better jobs for care workers, and real tax relief for real American working families, except that for some Democrats, big donors are more important than anything. They need us to remind them whom they actually work for.

Speaking of lower drug prices, the aptly-named Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to give Medicare the power to negotiate its own drug prices. It isn't just a good idea, it's a funding mechanism! Seriously, even the right-wing Mercatus Institute told us a few years ago that letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices would save the taxpayer over $80 billion annually; times that by ten and you've got $800 billion, which all by itself is more than one-fifth of the aforementioned reconciliation bill's $3.5 trillion price tag. Also, it is a really good idea, since Medicare is the biggest buyer of prescription drugs in America and can use its leverage to reduce drug prices for everyone. We deserve good things from our government, but we won't get them unless we speak out.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion permanent. The American Rescue Plan Act helped deliver $250 or $300 monthly checks to mailboxes and bank accounts all over America, so of course some right-wing Democrats want to end it; I guess they're just more comfortable going hat-in-hand to some big donor who didn't earn his millions or billions than they are running on, you know, actual accomplishments. If they really want to choose the guy who gilds the plumbing in his 19th vacation home over the kid who got lifted out of poverty, they can go right ahead. But we have to speak out so that if they choose unwisely, they'll get hurt at the polls. And anyone who puts big donors over poor children deserves that hurt.

The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2428, the False Claims Amendments Act. The original False Claims Act helps our government go after federal contractors (among others) who defraud the taxpayer; and the qui tam provision (literally hundreds of years old, don't let anyone tell you any differently!) has helped numerous whistleblowers get a part of what our government is able to recover; S. 2428 would strengthen anti-retaliation provisions and prevent judges from setting an arbitrarily higher standard for proof in fraud cases. Despite this bill's bipartisan sponsor list, the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" didn't include it, even though it would raise revenue. But that suggests that we need to be more vocal about it.

Finally, Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to end slavery in American prisons. Specifically, you'd ask Congress to amend the 13th Amendment -- which allows slavery "as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted" -- and then apply our minimum wage laws to prisoners. We'll see how lucrative private prisons are after that! If you're thinking if they didn't want to be slaves they shouldn't have committed crimes, you're making a number of errors in your thinking: one, that any slavery is tolerable, anywhere, at any time; two, that anyone who commits a crime thinks like that; and three (and perhaps most important), that we're only supposed to punish prisoners, not rehabilitate them. So let's not hold ourselves hostage to cruelty.

Around the table: in which the whole concept of negotiation seems to perplex some Democrats.

Sen. Sanders (I-VT), upon being told "moderate" Democrats might try to shrink the proposed $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, says "I already negotiated," adding that "(t)he truth is we need more" and "(t)his is, in my view, the minimum of what we should be spending." It's good to be reminded that when you ask for more than you want, you get more of what you want, even if Democrats like Sen. Kaine seem befuddled at how all of that is supposed to work. Now all we need to do is clog up our Reps' and Senators' phone lines so that the Manchin/Sinema/Gottheimer/Cuellar axis doesn't move the goalposts again.

Steven Rosenfeld, about as good a writer on voting rights issues as we have, notes that a lot of Republicans are starting to come out against the Arizona "fraudit" of Maricopa County votes. More important, though, is Mr. Rosenfeld's speculation that when the Cyber Ninjas finally release their report -- which they were supposed to do this week but couldn't, reportedly because three of the "fraudit" leaders got COVID -- the "fraudit" will not merely "revive debunked conspiracy theories" but "find small administrative problems 'that could be twisted into appearing to be evidence...of voter wrongdoing or voting irregularities,'" in the words of an American Oversight report. I sure am looking forward to another few months of people who never knew anything about how we count votes in 2019 breathlessly sharing every single report of a suitcase moving somewhere they didn't expect in 2020.

With our Supreme Court striking down President Biden's attempt to extend the eviction moratorium, we learn that state and local governments have distributed a mere 11% of the money the American Rescue Plan Act allotted for helping folks withstand getting evicted. State and local officials cite the possibility of fraud as a reason to go slowly, but that's a little like saying you didn't pull the baby out of the fire fast enough because you were afraid you'd break its arm. Anyway, I think state and local officials aren't going fast enough because Republicans run most states, and they want the eviction assistance program to fail, so that Joe Biden gets blamed for it right before the 2022 midterms. Hey, it's not like Republicans can run on their superior ideas!

Republicans are already trying to make the Afghanistan withdrawal and all its problems "Matter in the Midterms,", but what is the "biggest hurdle" in them accomplishing this aim? The calendar currently says 2021, that's what! Which leads one to suspect that Mr. Biden -- who thus far hasn't budged on his August 31 deadline for getting the hell out, and if a Republican was similarly unmoved by circumstances, you know they'd be calling you "traitor" for criticizing him! -- is the real political animal here. Or maybe we shouldn't give him too much credit, since he really only had a choice of two different calendar years to withdraw from Afghanistan in the first place.

Yes, that was Donald Trump's former spokeshack going on Fox News to say that "when President Trump was President, you didn't see crisis after crisis. You just didn't see it." She adds, "I shudder to think about what COVID would have been like under Joe Biden," though Joe Biden's worst day for COVID cases is still January 20, and that was still only two-thirds as bad as Donald Trump's worst day. Anyway, remember when Bush Mobbers went on TV in 2009 and said you never had a terrorist attack while George W. Bush was President, no, sir? Well, this is even worse gaslighting. But I don't think Americans have forgotten how awful the Trump Administration was, or how he did actually have "crisis after crisis," most of which he manufactured, whether through his incompetence or through his insatiable thirst for drama.

Finally, notorious former Blackwater/Xe CEO Erik Prince offers to evacuate folks out of Afghanistan -- for $6,500 a pop! You've heard by now that around half of all Americans can't scrounge together $400 in an emergency; now consider that the poverty line in Afghanistan is around $700 annually, and that a little less than half (in the Asian Development Bank's conservative estimate) of Afghans sit below that line, and you'll start to think that Mr. Prince is only trying to get two kinds of people out: 1) rich people and 2) people he can make into slave workers. No wonder people say he has no soul!

Around the table: the drama, it burns!

FDA formally approves the Pfizer COVID vaccine, which likely means more vaccine mandates from businesses and local governments. It might also mean that a few folks who've hit upon "it's not fully-approved" as a reason not to get the vaccine will get it now. But the right-wing punditoids who've been yelling about full FDA approval will just give the Lazy Susan of Bad Arguments a spin and start mouthing off about something else -- at which point it should be clear, if it's not already, that right-wingers are stirring things up (and enabling the death of tens of thousands) solely so they can get power back in 2022. What, they're going to win with their policy proposals? (In the unlikely event you're on the fence about FDA approval processes, Nicole Karlis at Salon should assuage your fears with her detailed description of how FDA approvals work. It's certainly better than watching Fox News pull its "some critics say" crap.)

Clinical psychologist Doreen Dodgen-Magee writes extensively about the problems we face fighting social media misinformation, including social media algorithms that reward drama over sobriety, the "commitment bias" that leads folks to believe noxious crap for years just because (as Bruce Bartlett might say) it's hard to turn around a cruise ship, and the illusion of "stardom" social media too often affords. I agree that "more private messages and fewer elevated comments in social media spaces, quieter conversations, and, possibly offers of voice-to-voice conversations" would work better for friends and neighbors than public shaming, but I still think we ought to shame professional jerks and their most devoted followers -- not so much for their benefit, but for the benefit of others who may not be thinking clearly enough.

Because sometimes you need to confront Teh Stupid head-on, Marissa Higgins at Daily Kos does us all a public service in discussing the Virginia elementary school teacher who quit, in a public meeting, over being told to refer to trans students by their correct pronouns. Naturally she cites her "Christian" "values," and not, say, whether kids can really know whether they're trans or not -- I don't think boys just up and say they're really girls (and vice versa) in a world where peer pressure is even worse than it used to be, but even if I'm wrong, what the fuck harm does it do to call people what they want to be called? Too often the adults create all the drama when they're supposed to be modeling a better way.

Ho hum, the Trump Administration suppressed an EPA report stating that formaldehyde causes leukemia. You'd think all the hospital environmental workers in America would want to know that! How big a deal is this? A 30-year-old EPA assessment blamed formaldehyde for more than half of all cancers caused by industrial pollutants; the suppressed 2018 report says formaldehyde is three times more carcinogenic than that. Nonetheless, the unpublished findings somehow made their way to big chemical corporate lobbies, and then got suppressed, ostensibly because it was in the "wrong format." But people hate politicians who use arcane reasons to do nothing almost as much as they hate the nakedly corrupt.

Lo and behold, the right-wing New York Post institutes a mask mandate for its employees, after spending months slamming mask mandates in general, and while you wish the Post's readers would have a V8 moment over this -- they've been telling me to do one thing, and now they're doing another! They must never have meant anything they told me! -- you know as well as I do that the Lazy Susan of Bad Arguments sure is hypnotic when it spins. Maybe a "caravan" is coming to the border! Maybe Afghan refugees are moving in next door! Maybe there are transgender folks in my bathroom! There's always something when rage is all you care about.

Finally, Democrats struck a deal on the reconciliation bill, passing the budget framework immediately while promising to schedule a vote on the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" by September 27. "Moderate" Democrats should know by now the value of promises, and I guess it's nice to see Nancy Pelosi school them in it, rather than Mitch McConnell. But they'll have to finish both bills up by September 30 thanks to budget reconciliation rules, and how hilarious it will be to see Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema or Josh Gottheimer or Henry Cuellar come up with stupid reasons to scuttle everything. At which point Democrats would doom themselves to the minority in Congress in 2022, which is dangerous, since they'd be losing the majority to avowed fascists.

Action: concerning privacy, monopolies, student loan debt, Arctic drilling, refugees, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell Apple to withdraw its plan to scan every piece of data on folks' iPhones, and tell the Biden Administration to suspend big pharma monopolies, cancel student loan debt, scuttle the ConocoPhillips Willow project, reverse its Title 42 refugee ban, and fire Postmaster General DeJoy. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Both No Spy Phone and the Electronic Frontier Foundation help you tell Apple to scuttle its plan to scan every piece of data on our phones. Which makes a mockery of their oft-stated commitment to user privacy! They say it's to protect kids from sex traffickers, but does scanning every piece of data on every iPhone really do that? Apple's plan would compare photos of children to a national database of "child abuse images," but this is a species of facial recognition software, which we already know isn't very good at its stated purpose. And Apple's plan would also use, you guessed it, an algorithm to inspect kids' phones for sexually explicit messages, but this'll more likely put more gay kids at the mercy of abusive parents, since algorithms tend to regard any gay content as "sexually explicit." So, in sum: you don't want to give up privacy for security, but you certainly don't want to give it up for bad security.

Rethink Trade helps you tell President Biden to suspend big pharma monopolies so that everyone across the planet can get the vaccines. So we can end the pandemic! It sickens me that our leaders place "corporate intellectual property" above ending the pandemic; as long as we try to "do both," COVID will keep getting more opportunities to mutate and kill people. President Biden did say he favored a temporary WTO waiver on intellectual property matters, but saying you support something and actually doing something are two entirely different things, and the 150,000-plus cases we're getting every day now tell us it's well past time to do something.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell President Biden to cancel federally-held student loan debt. This should be a conservative initiative! Our government would get less revenue, and the money would go back to good Americans so they can decide what to do with it -- yikes, it sounds like a tax cut! Of course, today's "conservatives" don't traffic in ideas; they traffic in rage, hence all that whispering in your ear about how you didn't get to have your student loan debt cancelled, so why should they? As too often happens with "conservatives" today, that kind of argument is utterly childish -- not letting someone else get a benefit merely because you didn't get it? What are we, 12? We have a heritage and traditions to uphold, and that demands maturity.

The Alaska Wilderness League helps you tell President Biden to "walk away" from the proposed ConocoPhillips Willow oil drilling project in Alaska's western Arctic area. Arctic drilling has numerous intractable problems -- chiefly, the near-impossibility of remediating oil spills and our lack of knowledge about the ecosystems we'd disrupt -- but last week an Alaska District Court judge revoked the permit ConocoPhillips got from the Trump Administration, on the grounds that the Trump Administration (and stop me if you've heard this one before!) didn't adhere to federal law in analyzing the environmental impact of the Willow project. Seems like a good opportunity for the Biden Administration to simply wash its hands of the whole thing! And you can help them reach that decision.

NETWORK helps you tell President Biden to reverse his decision extending the notorious Title 42 ban on refugees, a ban based on the tenuous proposition that refugees might make the COVID pandemic worse. Governors DeSantis, Abbott, and Noem are already doing a bang-up job of that, amirite? The Trump Administration's decision to impose a Title 42 ban came from none other than advisor/man with a face even a mother could punch Stephen Miller, and loathe as I am to use ad hominem arguments, that fact alone should indicate that this Title 42 ban ain't about health care but about racism -- and about using any conceivable tool in the toolbox to slow emigration to the United States. You know what would slow emigration to the United States? If we stopped using the world as our litter box, that's what! So let's demand that our leaders do the right thing, in the right way.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell our USPS Board of Governors to fire Postmaster General DeJoy already. Not just for trying to throw the 2020 election to Donald Trump, not just for raising prices and cutting services which is such a bold way of fixing problems, but for our USPS giving contracts to his old employer and for him investing in a fund run by one of our USPS Governors, Ron Bloom -- who not long ago said he thought Mr. DeJoy was doing a great job! If I pulled all this crap at any of my jobs, I'd be out on my ass. But in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, having money means never having to say you're sorry, or being held accountable for your actions. Let's work to change that, shall we?

Action: concerning jobs, war, refugees, voting rights, police violence, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell your House Reps to pass the reconciliation budget blueprint, tell your Congressfolk to repeal the "war on terror"-era AUMFs, tell President Biden to raise the refugee cap on Afghan refugees, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, eliminate qualified immunity for police officers, and pass the Postal Service Reform Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first: call your House Reps and tell them to vote in favor of the $3.5 trillion budget blueprint the Senate passed a few weeks ago, the budget blueprint that will enable all sorts of good things to happen in America -- higher taxes on the rich and on corporations, a stronger care-based economy, and paid family/medical leave for all workers, just to name a few. A few "moderate" Democrats are trying to take the bill hostage, but theirs is the calculus of cowardice -- the result of their actions, which may also be the aim of their actions, will be to scuttle both the reconciliation bill and the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" at whose altar they kneel. If they do that, they will lose not only their own seats, but the House and Senate -- and this time, they'll lose them to Republicans who openly identify as fascists. So brook no silliness from your House Reps about "the difficulty of raising taxes in an election." You know what's harder than raising taxes in an election? Winning elections in a fascist state when you're not a fascist.

Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Authorizations to Use Military Force (or AUMFs) that started the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and thus end our "forever war." Some people, and by some people I mainly mean people on the right side of the political spectrum, just aren't happy unless we're at war. Put six beers in them and they'll say war is the way to remake the world! Helluva job they did in Afghanistan, if so. War isn't the way to "remake the world," it's the way to redistribute income from taxpayers into defense contracting CEOs' pockets. You may note that Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) has sponsored these AUMF repeals, as she has done in the past, and you may remember that Rep. Lee was literally the only "nay" vote against the Afghanistan AUMF. If I were her, I'd wear an "I WAS RIGHT" baseball cap from now until the day they put me in the ground. But first, let's have her being right about that count for something.

In a related note, Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to raise the refugee cap for Afghans fleeing from the Taliban, so that more of the 300,000-plus Afghans who helped our military during the war effort can get out. You've already heard famous right-wing blowhards warn us about the coming "invasion" of Afghans, but this should be pretty simple to figure out from a moral perspective -- we did this to them, by invading their country, toppling their government, and promising them we would make their lives better. Now the government we toppled is back in power like the last 20 years didn't happen, and right-wingers expect we'll put racism above letting the Taliban murder the folks who helped us? So much for being the "guardians of morality." Let's not let them make all the damn decisions around here.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Remember when our Supreme Court knocked the teeth out of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder? H.R. 4 would put those teeth back. In the aforementioned Shelby County v. Holder, our Court held that the Voting Rights Act discriminated against Southern states by forcing them to pre-clear their voting law changes with our Justice Department -- but our Court also held that a pre-clearance formula that didn't discriminate against the South would pass Constitutional muster. God only knows if that's true anymore, what with Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and Barrett on the Court now, but H.R. 4 would subject any state or locality with a record of voting rights violations to Justice Department pre-clearance. And with so many states trying to suppress the vote as we speak, we need H.R. 4. So brook no silliness about "how the South has changed," because this is about America.

Black Lives Matter helps you tell your Congressfolk and the Biden Administration to prioritize ending "qualified immunity" for police officers when they execute Black folks without even charging them with a crime. I put that last phrase in there because it gives some people pause -- folks will "support the police" without thinking very hard about what it means, but they generally will not support "killing people without charge." A few will, believe it or not, but then every generation has had to deal with crazy people. Without getting too inside-baseball (I've done that in other posts about this matter!), "qualified immunity" restricts your ability to sue a police officer for a wrongful death, and restricts that ability way, way beyond the bounds of common sense -- to the point where parents of teenage kids shot by police can't get the justice they deserve. So let's get our government to do the right thing here.

Finally, Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3076/S. 1720, the Postal Service Reform Act. Postmaster General DeJoy's response to USPS funding shortfalls? Raise prices and lower services. The Postal Service Reform Act's response? Stop forcing our USPS to pre-fund retiree benefits for employees who ain't even born, get postal retirees into Medicare, and allow our USPS to offer additional services like postal banking -- though the bill doesn't specify postal banking, so you may want to say that you want that in the bill when you talk to (or write) your Congressperson. Virtually all of our USPS's problems can be traced to the pre-funding of retiree benefits, and in my experience, our Post Office continues to deliver exemplary service even with all the crap they have to put up with, and services that work you want to keep working. So let's keep our Postal Service, and let's help it thrive.

Around the table: concerning tax cuts for the rich, asset forfeiture, stupid COVID ideas, and Afghanistan.

ProPublica finds yet another reason to hate the Trump tax "reform": it widened a loophole allowing CEOs who also own their own businesses essentially reclassify salaries as profits so they can pay less in taxes. Thus an effective top tax rate falls from 40.8% to 29.6%, which adds up at a CEO's income level. CEOs would have to justify the decrease in their salaries to our IRS -- if our IRS audits them, which hardly happens to rich folks anymore thanks to over a decade of our Congress defunding our IRS. WeatherTech CEO David MacNeil will probably regret taking ProPublica on a tour of his floor-mat empire, since he comes off like a self-centered jerk, to put it mildly.

ProPublica also tackles assert forfeiture laws in Massachusetts -- specifically, how hard it is to get your property back there even several years after the state decided not to charge you with whatever suspicion prompted them to confiscate your property in the first place. Seriously, the lengths the state goes to just to avoid giving you your property back (waiting years, putting your name in fine print along with a hundred others, demanding that you respond in court when you did nothing wrong) would be comic, if it weren't unconstitutional. If you still think drug charges are a serious enough reason to violate our Fourth Amendment protections against unlawful searches and seizures, note that Massachusetts will seize your property without a drug charge. Also, how well has that strategy worked in reducing drug addiction? By the evidence, not well at all.

Ho hum, Gov. Ron DeSantis (E-FL) pushes Regeneron treatments ahead of vaccinations as a hedge fund CEO invests millions in Regeneron and millions more in Mr. DeSantis's campaign. And when one of the few remaining Democratic state legislators points out that Mr. DeSantis is "not a full-blown anti-vaxxer" but also someone who "doesn't want to upset those who support the vaccine," you start to think he might actually be a pretty good politician. You will not, however, think he's a very good Governor, or a very good leader. The only reason Florida's seven-day moving average of new cases is under 20,000 is that Florida doesn't report every day, which would lead you to think Mr. DeSantis has something to hide.

Heard that the horse-dewormer drug ivermectin might be a "miracule cure" for COVID? Nicole Karlis at Salon explains why you should be, ah, skeptical. And when your Trumphole aunt says "but I read about it in the Wall Street Journal," you can reply that the Journal op-ed piece they read (or, more likely, heard about) was co-written by a drug industry "consultant" who worked for the corporation that created ivermectin. Also, the studies that "prove" ivermectin's effectiveness were almost absurdly small, or took place in test tubes which aren't human bodies, or retracted due to data manipulation. And I'd just leave it at that -- even Trumpholes who used to carry The Pill Book around at their jobs will go la-la-la-la when you tell them about side effects and drugs you should never mix ivermectin with.

Why oh why are we allowing the folks who started the Afghanistan War offer their opinions on its ending? There are plenty of astute observers our "liberal" media could use instead -- why, there are even folks who don't say one thing in public and another thing in private, as Gen. Petraeus and Gen. Lute have done. There is, of course, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA), the only House Rep to vote against the Afghanistan War to begin with! Think she might have something interesting to say about all of that? To most of our "liberal" media's preferred voices on Afghanistan I would simply say: thank you for your input, but I think you've done enough.

Finally, Jon Schwarz at The Intercept reminds us who really "won" the Afghanistan War: big American defense contracting corporations. The biggest five defense contracting corporations in America have seen their stock returns go up almost 900 percent since 2001, while stocks generally have gone up by a bit over 500 percent, meaning the big five defense stocks did about 58% better than the stock market as a whole. All that, to put the same right-wing extremist government back in power that we were supposedly trying to dislodge when we went in almost two decades ago. Nice work if you can get it!

Action: concerning voting rights, taxes, working families, the right to repair, and worker rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, raise taxes on the rich, expand the Child Tax Credit permanently, and pass the Fair Repair Act and the PRO Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. As Senate Democrats whittle down the For the People Act into uselessness -- apparently because Joe Manchin doesn't have anyone on his staff who actually reads bills -- the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act becomes the gold standard of voting rights legislation, as it would put the teeth back into the Voting Rights Act after our Supreme Court knocked them out in Shelby County v. Holder. This would be a big deal, as so many American state legislators, still wondering how a nice guy like Donald Trump could lose, are trying to restrict voting rights so that next time he (or some similarly nice person!) doesn't lose. So let's get this done.

Both Americans for Tax Fairness and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich already. Sometimes we need to send the message simply and plainly, and this is one of those times, as our House comes back early next week to vote on the $3.5 trillion budget blueprint the Senate passed earlier this month, and as several "moderate" Democrats have threatened to vote against that blueprint if they don't get to vote on the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" first, which, like, waaaaaaaaaaah. Could they be trying to scuttle both? They sure could! Should it matter? No, it should not! The popular will should matter, and polling has told us for years that large majorities of Americans want to tax the rich harder.

More Perfect Union helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion permanent. The second monthly $250 or $300 check has just arrived in the mailboxes or bank accounts of millions of good American families, and there'll be at least four more of those, reminding everyone that maybe your government can actually do some good on your behalf! But why shouldn't there be approximately infinity more of those monthly checks? Because TEH FISKULZ RESPONSIBILITIEZ!!!!!? Rubbish -- no deficit peacock ever cared about blowing over $2 trillion in Afghanistan just to return extremists to power after 20 years. So, yeah, how about we spend money helping kids stay out of poverty?

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4006, the Fair Repair Act. You remember watching your dad or granddad fix his car in the driveway? That's largely a thing of the past now, thanks to a society that believes we should never corporations what to do. So now corporations throw up endless roadblocks in front of the good Americans who want to fix their phones and computers, or hire someone who can. The Fair Repair Act would help change that, by forcing corporations to provide manuals, parts, and tools to anyone who wants to fix their products, and not just yowl TEH TRADEZ SECRETZ!!!!! anymore. Don't we value our independence as Americans? Then we ought to pass the Fair Repair Act.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842/S. 420, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. The bill would override state-level "right to work" (for less!) laws, and would also prevent big corporations from forcing their employees to sit through anti-union propaganda while they're on the clock; the bill would even allow workers to use card-check to organize rather than a secret ballot election (which employers tend to manipulate, right, Amazon?). I'm old enough to remember when Senate Democrats took turns joining a Republican filibuster against the Employee Free Choice Act, but now we've got it embedded in a larger bill. And if we get in our Senators' grills, we can make it law.

Action: concerning worker safety, health care, corporate spying, facial recognition, postal banking, and clean water.

Long story short: tell OSHA to issue emergency extreme heat standards to protect workers, tell the Biden Administration to enact strong regulations fighting surprise medical bills, tell Apple to scrap its plan to put a "backdoor" into its next iPhone operating system, tell big corporations to ban facial recognition in their stores, tell our USPS Board of Governors to reintroduce postal banking at our Post Offices, and tell our EPA to protect Bristol Bay, Alaska, from the notorious Pebble Mine project. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Public Citizen helps you tell our Occupational Health and Safety Administration (or OSHA) to institute emergency standards to protect workers from extreme heat. There's been a lot of it this summer, as you know, and there'll be a lot more of it in future summers, and don't let your Republican uncle convince you that this is BIG GUMMINT RUN AMOKZ!!!, because the Occupational Safety and Health Act has authorized such emergency standards since its passage in 1970. OSHA has lately issued an emergency COVID-19 standard for health care workers, so issuing one for farmworkers and construction workers and landscapers ain't exactly a stretch.

US PIRG helps you tell the Biden Administration to restrict surprise medical bills in the most vigorous manner possible. The No Surprises Act made it into the massive stimulus bill Congress passed at the end of 2020, and it authorizes our Departments of Labor and Treasury to issue regulations implementing it; big health insurance corporations, as you might expect, would like a lot of loopholes in said regulations, so they can continue to slam you with unforeseen "out-of-network" charges (your doctor was in-network, but his assistant wasn't! Or the anesthesiologist wasn't!). Damn exploitative, that is, and they'll have quite the conversation about their nefarious works at the Pearly Gates. In the meantime, let's prevent them from robbing us blind.

Fight for the Future helps you tell Apple to scuttle plans to build a spyware backdoor into its iPhone operating system. Apple's iOS 15 update will be able to scan messages and photos from any phone; they say they're doing it to stop child sex trafficking, but that's like firing a nuclear missile at a deadly pathogen or using a sledgehammer to destroy a wasps' nest, and I wouldn't blame you if you thought they always take your rights away by saying it's for the kids. I imagine Apple knows this is a dumb idea -- it's a way for evil people to get even more info from your phone than they already do -- but wants the good PR from "helping kids." They're going to get even more bad PR from "turning your cellphone into a spying device." Let's help them avoid that if we can.

Fight for the Future also helps you tell big retail corporations not to use facial recognition software in their stores. Because facial recognition software often "catches" the wrong person, more often if they're Black -- and because anytime you collect a boatload of data the way facial recognition software does, you're all but telling hackers to come and get it. When you speak out about this, you stand a very good chance of getting big corporations to listen and comply with your will -- a lot of very large corporations, like WalMart, Home Depot, Target, and Starbucks, have already committed not to use this software. But others, like Apple Stores (!) and Albertson's, are using it, so we beat them back with the Big Stick of Bad PR.

The ACLU helps you tell our USPS Board of Governors to reinstitute postal banking program at our Post Offices. Post Offices often go where the big banks won't (Post Offices kinda have to!), so they're ideal for those rural and urban areas where your banking choices are this check-cashing joint or that pawn shop or that payday lender. And it's not like it's some nutty, out of the blue idea, because our Post Office offered basic banking services until 1967. And, not for nothing, but the banks you do find in underbanked areas love charging you fees out the wazoo; we can make our Post Office not do that, because our Post Office belongs to us. Or, at least, it should, if we but claim it.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell our EPA to reject the proposed Pebble Mine project using its authority under the Clean Water Act. Even former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, who never saw a grift he didn't like, wouldn't touch this project with a ten-foot pole -- knowing, perhaps, that the bad PR from permanently polluting the famous and bounteous Bristol Bay salmon fisheries would follow him to the grave -- but his successor showed a disquieting willingness to entertain the project; the Army Corps of Engineers rejected Pebble Mine's permit application, but what do we know about modern life in America? Bad ideas just keep getting back up like zombies, until we deliver the head shot of the popular will.

Around the table: more thoughts on the end of empire.

Patrick Cockburn at Counterpunch -- possibly the world's best reporter on the Middle East -- says "It is Government Weakness, Not Taliban Strength, That Condemns Afghanistan" -- as in the Afghan government's "weakness and unpopularity," which his Afghani contacts describe as "no better than a gang of racketeers gorging themselves on US aid money or on juicy supply and construction contracts." Also, despite the $2 trillion-plus outlay, "Afghan soldiers were often short of food, ammunition, fuel and could not even get defective weapons replaced," in large part because "the American aid money never made it past the sticky fingers of US consultants and security companies." The story won't end here, though, because Afghans don't like the Taliban any better than they like the Americans.

Philippa Rizopoulos at TruthOut reminds us that privatization of Medicaid and Medicare also stands in the way of getting to Medicare-for-All. Medicare Advantage, an "innovation" of George W. Bush, now has over 40 percent of American seniors in its grip, and worse, nearly 70 percent of Medicaid recipients get their care, such as it is, from Medicaid Managed Care Organizations (or MCOs), and these developments don't lead to better care, or even cheaper care. They do lead to shifting networks, reduced benefits, and rejected claims, and they also lead to public programs bearing the burden of private corporations, just like with charter schools. Best to expand Medicare to include everyone, and all care, not least because we'd save money.

Does the fall of Afghanistan into Taliban hands again make you wish we'd "done more"? Here's a reminder from Alice Speri at The Intercept that "(t)he biggest al-Qaeda plot the FBI claimed to have foiled in the years following the 9/11 attacks involved no weapons, no plot, and no al-Qaeda." You say that's not precisely relevant? Perhaps not, but consider that we "did more" for 20 years in Afghanistan, throwing away over $2 trillion to get no further than the status quo, and consider, also, that "doing more" in Iraq helped al-Qaeda establish a presence there they didn't have before, and then helped birth ISIS. Maybe "doing more" shouldn't be our first impulse, particularly at those times we're trying to prove we're "right" about terrorist threats.

Uh oh: Minnesota GOP Chair Jennifer Carnahan faces calls to resign after one of the state party's big donors (and a close friend and fellow podcaster of hers!) gets indicted for sex trafficking. And just as the folks who squeal about "voter fraud" ignore all the Republicans who get caught committing it, the QAnon crowd will promptly ignore this scandal precisely because it implicates Republicans. In each case, you'd think right-wingers would take an opportunity to appear "independent," but they don't -- blunt force is their only strategy, in both argument and action. (And just like the rest of them, Ms. Carnahan issues a statement that's 60% about how badly she thinks she's been treated. That's how you know she's a Trumphole -- everything's a drama, and they're always the star.

In case you were wondering how Fox News's biggest stars were spinning our defeat in Afghanistan, both Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham focus on Afghan refugees, with Mr. Carlson calling them "invaders" coming to "your neighborhood." "Fuck you" was my immediate reaction to this news, but after I'd given the matter more thought, I found myself saying is this the best they can do? America may have stopped being a great power today, and all these clowns can think to do is bash immigrants who ain't even here yet? That'll be a hell of a footnote to the history of this war, if anyone's around to write it.

Finally, I read President Biden's Monday remarks about our withdrawal from Afghanistan, and I note that while his repeated insistence that "one more year, five more years or 20 more years" wouldn't make a difference is absolutely correct, it's also absolutely calculated to impress independent voters (as is his relentless blaming of the Afghan government and military), which might just make up for "the buck stops with me" most emphatically not impressing them. I don't want to bash the guy who actually got us out of a war, but I do also wonder how he didn't get heard about this matter during those eight years he was Vice President.

Action: concerning social media, Social Security, human rights, corruption, immigration, and spying on children.

Long story short: tell Facebook to stop trying to obstruct research on the ill effects of social media, tell your Congressfolk to fund Social Security more fairly and pass the Stop Arming Human Rights Abusers Act and the Ban Conflicted Trading Act, tell President Biden to end notorious Title 42 expulsions, and tell schools to ban biometric surveillance of our children. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Free Press helps you tell Facebook to reinstate accounts relating to NYU Ad Observer research. You may remember this story from last week: NYU researchers were looking into how ads on social media spreads bad information, but suddenly found their accounts locked out, with Facebook telling them that an FTC rule protecting consumer privacy compelled them to act. Of course, an FTC official quickly said that was bunkum -- NYU researchers weren't prying into normal Facebook user accounts, but were looking at advertising accounts, which suggests Facebook was actually just trying to scuttle their research, because it might tell us things Facebook didn't want us to hear. That's a look Facebook would want to avoid, I would think. They can't avoid it now, but they can at least rectify their error; some good could come of it, after all.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security by making millionaires and billionaires pay more into the system. Specifically, you'd ask your Congressfolk to start applying the 12.4% payroll tax to income over $400,000, so if that's not you (and I'd bet it's not, since that income level describes a mere four-tenths of one percent of all Americans), then you won't pay any more into the system -- but folks with money might, and thus enable the rest of us to live more comfortably on Social Security into old age. Reports of Social Security's "insolvency" are of course hysterical -- I'm old enough to remember when it was supposed to run out of money in 2016! -- but if we can make it run better and do more for good Americans, why wouldn't we do it? After all, you worked for it, you paid into it, you fought for it, and when you retire, you deserve to enjoy it.

World Beyond War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4718, the Stop Arming Human Rights Abusers Act. H.R. 4718 would empower our President to impose sanctions on nations that commit genocide, crimes against humanity (the bill enumerates 11 of these), or war crimes (36 of these), and would also prevent our government from selling weapons to a nation that commits any of the aforementioned crimes. The bill would even prevent such things as intelligence sharing and security training, except in the context of maintaining embassies and evacuating American citizens. The bill would also create a Commission on Atrocity Accountability and Human Rights who would recommend policies that would help us fulfill our duties under the bill. So this bill isn't just a moral bill, it's a smart bill. And we need more of those!

Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1579/S. 564, the Ban Conflicted Trading Act, which would simply ban Congressfolk from investing in stocks, except for T-bonds and for certain "widely-held investment funds"; a Congressperson wouldn't have to divest of their holdings before taking office for the first time, but wouldn't be able to make new investments. We just learned that Sen. Rand Paul bought Gilead stock right before the pandemic, after receiving a briefing about the pandemic, and since Gilead makes a famous COVID treatment drug, we must ask, once again, why Congressfolk should ever get to "play the stock market" when they're inevitably going to vote on legislation concerning investments? Money prejudices everything, after all.

Amnesty International helps you tell President Biden to end Title 42 restrictions on immigrants and asylum-seekers. Title 42 allows our government to deport folks when "there is serious danger of the introduction of [a communicable] disease into the United States," but why do that and then utterly fail to restrict international travel? Because racism, that's why. Because chest-puffing over immigration, that's why. The Biden Administration has lately announced it would continue the policy, which made all the right-wingers yelling and screaming about immigrants bringing COVID with them cluck-cluck in approval, right? No? They just kept yelling and screaming about immigrants bringing COVID with them? What a surprise! Seems to me we're keeping the COVID pandemic going well enough without imaginary help from border-crossers.

Finally, End Child Surveillance helps you, guess what, tell schools to stop spying on their kids using facial recognition technology. Which sucks! Which tends to racially profile people! Which is supposedly a "bonus feature" of temperature scanners designed to identify students who might have a fever! Which also sucks! I mean, you've had your temperature taken by a remote infrared thermometer, right? Then you know it sucks! This sure all sounds like a scam designed to herd kids around, and I wouldn't put it past the corporations that manufacture them to also have their hands in the school-to-prison pipeline! Hey, if I thought of it, they thought of it. And prison is big business now. So let's not let money or convenience rule all of our decisions. And certainly let's not let our schools do that.

Action: concerning jobs, taxes, drug prices, government spying, gerrymandering, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell "moderate" Democrats to abandon their plan to scuttle the reconciliation bill, tell your House Reps to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations in said bill, let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices, and pass the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act, tell state mapmakers not to gerrymander legislative districts, and tell our USPS Board of Governors to fire Postmaster General DeJoy already. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. Nine "moderate" House Democrats have threatened to vote down the reconciliation budget bill if our House doesn't pass the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" first. Know why? Their letter contains the five emptiest paragraphs you will ever read, and if they really believe the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" is a "once-in-a-century" thing, that is to laugh. And doing it their way, of course, puts the much better reconciliation budget bill at risk, almost like that's the whole idea. If any of these nine House Reps "represent" you, you can call them and tell them this ain't the hill they want to die on. And no, we shouldn't be "cautious" because we'll need most of those nine Reps to pass the reconciliation bill, or for Democrats to keep the majority in 2022. Democrats don't lose elections in spite of such "caution"; they lose elections because of it.

Peripherally-related to the above goal, you can call your own House Reps and tell them to jack up taxes on the rich and on corporations to pay for the budget reconciliation bill. Such taxes could include: a 55% corporate tax rate on profits over $1 million just like we had in the 1950s, a 91% tax bracket on income over $1 million just like we also had in the 1950s, treating capital gains and dividends as regular income like we did until George W. Bush, a financial transaction tax of 1% like we had until the late 1960s -- beginning to see a pattern? These taxes didn't "cripple economies," but helped build the greatest middle class in world history, so they're not "impossible" so much as they're proven. Too many of these "moderate" Democrats claim tax hikes like these are too "radical" -- how something we used to do all the time could be "radical" is anyone's guess -- and they won't abandon their cowardice until enough of their constituents (i.e., us) get in their grills.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower drug prices by letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices. Medicare is the biggest buyer of drugs in America by far, after all, so if we let Medicare negotiate drug prices, we'll all have better drug prices. And even the right-wing Mercatus Center instructs us that Medicare drug price negotiation can save the taxpayer over $80 billion annually, which makes that a pay-for. We really can make this world a place where we don't reflexively cast morality and pragmatism as enemies! And no, Medicare drug price negotiation isn't BIG GUMMINT CONTROLZ TEH DRUGZ YOUZ GETZ!!!!!! Big pharma corporations control what drugs you can get by charging $900 a month for insulin, or $350 for a single dose of EpiPen. Fight the real enemy!

The Project on Government Oversight helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3907/S. 2052, the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act. As its name suggest, the bill would prevent our federal and state governments from using facial recognition technology on their citizens, unless future Congressional legislation specifically authorizes it; facial recognition technology sucks, as any number of Black folks wrongly accused of crimes could tell you, so governments certainly shouldn't be using it. If the bill becomes law, then anyone wronged by a government entity breaking the law could sue that government entity; accountability is important, after all. The bill doesn't prevent local governments from using the technology, but would prevent them from getting government grants unless and until they do so. You don't want to be put in jail because you barely look like someone else, right? Then you want to get this bill passed.

Common Cause helps you tell state mapmakers not to gerrymander districts for the benefit of incumbents and/or political parties. As you know, the census data mapmakers will use to redraw districts came out last week, so that process will begin soon, and historically that process has benefited politicians, not regular Americans. Take Wisconsin, where Republican state legislative candidates typically get fewer votes than their Democratic counterparts, but somehow win almost two-thirds of the state's lower house! How does that happen? It happens when mapmakers draw Rorschach-blot-shaped districts that exclude sides of streets and even individual houses. It's the biggest reason our representatives give us nothing but the back of their hand, and we have to stop it. We begin to stop it by putting them on notice, and by making gerrymandering toxic to them, for once.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our USPS Board of Governors to fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy already. It ain't just his naked attempt to deliver the 2020 election to his Personal Lord and Savior Donald Trump, nor is it his determination to make our Postal Service run badly -- it's also the corruption! A week and a half ago we learned that our USPS awarded a $120 million contract to the corporation he used to run, XPO Logistics, which still pays the DeJoy family over $2 million annually by renting office space. But wait, there's more! Last week we learned that Mr. DeJoy spent a few hundred Gs on bonds from Brookfield Asset Management, and guess who's a managing partner at Brookfield? Why, USPS Governor Ron Bloom, of course! I'm old enough to remember when even the appearance of evil could cause people to resign; how about we bring those days back?

Around the table: from PR hackery to dumb wars.

PR hacks look for "normal, everyday" Arizona residents to write letters-to-the-editor supporting binding arbitration -- and when they can't find any, even in Arizona, they offer $2,000 a pop! Nice work if you have no soul! It's like even Arizona right-wingers know that binding arbitration is the way corporations keep customers and workers out of our courts, and ensure that customers and workers lose more of the cases against them than they would in our courts. Next time you hear about "crisis actors" and "paid protestors" on the left, remember that PR hacks paying people to write pro-corporate screeds is the evil that actually happens. I'm not sure why they're targeting Arizona, though -- maybe Mark Kelly's not the easiest get, but they'd probably have Kyrsten Sinema at hello.

When I read that Donald Trump has "politicized the most basic of pandemic safety measures," and that it's "as if he named Band-Aids un-American, and demanded that we bleed to show our heedless fealty," I'm tempted to respond let's not give the man any more ideas! I can all too easily imagine him saying why do we drink water anyway? Only losers drink water! Own the libs by refusing to drink any more water! And then his votaries would not only stop drinking water but demand that we gut the clean water standards that are the main reason we have any decent health care in America at all. I wish this were harder to imagine.

Ari Paul reminds us that "Right-Wing Cop-Bashing Didn't Start With Trump." You'll be reminded of the white supremacist stand-off at Ruby Ridge and the FBI raid on the Branch Davidian compound at Waco -- both of which prompted right-wingers to yell about federal cops -- and G. Gordon Liddy's repeated admonitions to his listeners to shoot federal agents in the head. All that's just from the '90s. But, yeah, everyone who proudly brandishes their I SUPPORTZ TEH POLICEZ!!!! sign has a line that can't be crossed, one that will turn them into the kind of folks who try to impale Capitol police with flagpoles. And they'll yell at you when you point out their hypocrisy, which is a hell of a thing to take to the Pearly Gates.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who has spouted more unscientific nonsense about COVID than most Republicans and that's saying something, didn't bother reporting his wife's investment in a corporation producing a drug to fight COVID until 16 months after our laws required. Right at the beginning of the pandemic, too, which sure makes one suspect he had, you know, insider information. I wouldn't want to go into a re-election fight with this baggage; indeed, Richard Burr decided it wasn't worth it, and Kelly Loeffler lost in 2020. Then again, if the Democratic establishment forces another Amy McGrath-type candidate on the good citizens of Kentucky, then Rand Paul will get away with it.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (S-GA) responds to news that hospitals are filling up with COVID patients by saying "(e)veryone needs to get back down to common sense and needs to remember, we're human, we can't live forever." I'm old enough to remember when politicians ended careers by saying such things, but we live a sick, immoral, and decadent era in which a quarter of our electorate can only feel one emotion: rage. Also, her district is so gerrymandered she probably couldn't even lose to Jesus H. Christ himself. If only our House had passed a bill that could address this intractable problem! Oh, right, it did, and Joe Manchin won't let it come to a vote because bipartisanship with people like Marjorie Taylor Greene is somehow far more important.

Finally, as we confront the humiliating end to our 20-year presence in Afghanistan, I guess it's good to hear at least one "liberal" media outlet suggest that our whole adventure there was a stupid idea to begin with. $88 billion we threw away on training Afghan soldiers to fight the Taliban, and now we learn about "years of overly optimistic assessments from U.S. officials that obscured -- and in some cases, purposely hid -- evidence of deep-rooted corruption, low morale, and even 'ghost soldiers and police' who existed merely on the payrolls of the Afghan Defense and Interior Ministries." Sadly, none of this is particularly surprising, and if you thought maybe the whole point of the Afghanistan war was to bleed the taxpayers, I wouldn't blame you. And that sure wouldn't bode well for sticking around another two or 20 years to "fix things."

Around the table: concerning big pharma, tax cuts for the rich, sexual harassment, and other evils.

Facebook disables a couple of researchers' accounts (including their data), suggesting their research had violated the privacy of Facebook users -- except that the researchers were studying Facebook advertisers. And when Facebook said a Federal Trade Commission rule about customer privacy necessitated the shutdown, our FTC's acting director called that insinuation "inaccurate," leading us to wonder, again, whether corporate executives really are our "best and brightest," or just have the dumb luck of operating in an economy that rewards failure and stupidity with billions of dollars. The punchline? The researchers were studying how misinformation spreads on Facebook. In that context, one might call their ban suspicious.

President Biden tells Congress to lower drug prices, and specifies letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices as one way to do that. Now that's using the bully pulpit! If only President Obama had done this in 2009 when everyone else wanted to do it, President Biden wouldn't need to do it now. And remember: the right-wing "answer" to Medicare negotiating its own drug prices is Democrats want to control what medicines you get, an argument Democrats should be able to defeat easily if they're willing to get fierce. Of course, if they're not willing to get fierce, then they all deserve to lose all the elections.

ProPublica gives us more from their "Secret IRS Files": "How Much the Ultrawealthy Gained by Shaping Trump's 'Big, Beautiful Tax Cut.'" A mere 82 households reaped $1 billion from the 2017 tax "reform" just in the first year, and Ron Johnson's infamous "pass-through" tax cut, though supposedly for small businesses, yielded 60% of its windfalls to the top 1%, which means wealthy folks and big corporations have gotten subtler about using small businesses as a human shield. By the time you get to the notorious corporate welfare-gobbler the Bechtel Corporation and the big real estate interests who got tens of millions in windfalls, you'll be properly incensed.

Soon-to-be-former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo actually blames "cultural behavioral differences" for his misfortune, and his fellow Italian-Americans give him what-for. As one restaurant owner puts it, "We’re very affectionate people. When we do kiss, we kiss family, we kiss good friends. The only difference is I don’t stick my hand up anybody’s blouse." As an Italian-American, I can also assure you that my elders never taught me that groping was just "affection," either. And while many Americans may find "I didn’t realize the extent to which the line has been redrawn" sympathetic, they'll probably have a lot of trouble seeing grabbing a woman's breasts in that softer light.

Dominion Voting Systems files $1.6 billion defamation lawsuits against right-wing news networks Newsmax and One America News (or OAN) and former Overstock CEO/Trump flunky Patrick Byrne, alleging that the news networks "manufactured, endorsed, repeated, and broadcast a series of verifiably false yet devastating lies about Dominion" and that public figures like Mr. Byrne (who seems like he's trying to out-Mike Lindell Mike Lindell, what makes people want to do that?) aided and abetted this effort. If successful, these lawsuits might actually break Newsmax and OAN, which boo-freaking-hoo. Free markets, pimps! Consequences for evil actions! Conservatives used to be about all that, right?

Finally, although potential 2022 Republican Senate candidate/Trump flunky Herschel Walker has made grim noises about "voter fraud," his own wife appears to have broken the law by voting in Georgia in 2020 despite living in Texas. The couple get a homestead tax exemption on their Texas home but not her Georgia home, and her absentee ballot arrived with a Texas postmark; none of this is a good look. I find her attempt to explain herself quite irritating, but in saner times, I might be inclined to call all of this an honest mistake on her part! People have a lot to manage in their lives, after all! Yes, even rich people! But these are not saner times -- after January 6, they have all forfeited the right to benefit of the doubt.

Around the table: featuring vote "fraudits," corrupt bullies, and deficit peacocks.

David Gilbert at Vice profiles one of the ringleaders of the January 6 attempted coup, Amy Kremer, who now wants to conduct an Arizona-style "fraudit" of the Georgia vote. She does get around, I'll give her that -- she does a lot of pro-Trump rallies and events relying on financing of, shall we say, indeterminate source. And she's somehow just "a regular mom who loves (her) country" and a founder of the Tea Party, meaning she's been deeply involved in far-right causes for the last dozen years, including, you guessed it, birtherism. I wonder how her kids are doing.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) announces his intention to resign after a damning sexual harassment investigation and at least one criminal complaint, and Tim Murphy at Mother Jones reminds us that he was "a petty, corrupt bully." He only gives a few examples, but I'm sure the historians will have a much longer story to tell of the man who governed badly and covered it up with bluster and threats, though that's an ever-more familiar story, amirite, Trumpholes? My guess is we'll remember him as a meaner, grabbier Evan Bayh.

Suddenly faced with a mayoral candidate not of their choosing, the Buffalo Democratic party is seriously mulling getting rid of the Mayor's office just so actual liberal India Walton doesn't win. All together now: waaaaaaaaaah! Doesn't anyone have any damn shame anymore? And sadly, their machinations could defeat Ms. Walton -- as those familiar with Upton Sinclair's 1934 run for Governor of California, or Matt Gonzalez's run for Mayor of San Francisco in 2003, or Nina Turner's recent run in the Ohio 11th Democratic House primary, already know. Read the whole thing for some of the truly non-explosive charges against Ms. Walton.

In the wake of Senate passage of a $3.5 trillion budget resolution, Republicans ready their big spender charges against Democrats. The ad is total horseshit, as you would expect -- "record inflation" is to laugh if you're over 40, and without an ounce of shame they call letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices "control(ling) what medicines you can get"! But ooh, ooh! I know what to say in response: my Republican opponent would overthrow the government just because his guy lost and he's a big crybaby; do y'all want to be represented by a big crybaby? You're welcome, Democrats.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D?-WV) voicing "serious reservations" about the budget resolution he'd just voted for is just another dull moment in American politics. Look at his stilted, repetitive diction and you'll see nothing "serious" about his argument, just as you saw nothing serious about his argument against the For the People Act which named exactly zero things he didn't like about the For the People Act. Recall that he also took the American Rescue Plan hostage for 10 hours at the beginning of this year so he could posture about "irresponsible" spending. Maybe Kyrsten Sinema is right, and Joe really does love the attention.

Finally, folks are telling a lot of stupid stories about the "Biden economy" -- folks who complain about gas prices have no memory of gas prices more than doubling under George W. Bush, apparently -- but it does some good to confront Teh Stupid. Case in point: the North Carolina restaurant owner who claims he spends $200 more every week just for mayonnaise, which some Twitter users happily calculated means this clown goes through at least 250 gallons of mayonnaise every week, which sure seems like a lot of chicken salad and Caesar salad dressing. Which reminds us, once again, that the only way to beat scare numbers is to do the math.

Around the table: tabulating yet more right-wing drama.

Jonathan Cohn at the HuffPost describes, in some detail, why vaccine requirements are, in fact, perfectly legal -- and highlights some of the libertarians who agree. I have so little patience for right-wingers these days that I was all ready to nitpick the libertarians' arguments, but that's my failing, because Jessica Flanigan, Jason Brennan, and Ilya Somin all argue their case much better than Ron DeSantis, Ted Cruz, and Elise Stefanik argue theirs. This would make a good Goofus and Gallant strip -- "Goofus runs around shouting about freedom all the time, while Gallant makes sure he doesn't infringe on others' freedoms."

D.C. District Court judge wonders why our Justice Department is letting some January 6 insurrectionists plead down to a misdemeanor. I didn't like the answer, either -- that the intent of a particular defendant can't always be nailed down so neatly, like any of them were there for any other reason than overturning the election. I'll admit I'd have snapped out on the defendant who said he was trying to overturn the election only to have his lawyer say that of course he wasn't there for that. That may be one reason I'm not a judge.

Some "moderate" Democrats are hot to get rid of the Sales and Local Taxes (or SALT) cap, which prevents folks from deducting more than $10,000 in SALT from what they owe on their federal taxes, and I gotta say I find both their priorities and their vehemence quite irritating -- and look how our "liberal" media won't call Reps. Gottheimer and Suozzi "extremists," though they have literally pledged to stop the reconciliation bill dead if they can't get rid of or raise the SALT cap. What a thing to take to the Pearly Gates! They claim rich folks who can't deduct large amounts of SALT taxes take their money to Florida and Texas, but I don't buy that any more than I did when Republicans argued for cutting rich folks' taxes -- it's the same old hostage crisis no matter who's taking the hostages.

Charlie Sykes reminds us that "(e)ven as many Republicans rail against mask mandates and spread skepticism about vaccines, GOP leaders have settled on one place where they take the spread of COVID very seriously -- the border." But of course -- for Republicans, everything is just a tool to be discarded as soon as it's fulfilled its purpose. And again: when liberals get "tough" on immigration; they get exactly zero support from the right -- not least because right-wingers can only get support by doing things like insisting the border is on fire.

When you hear that a "MAGA civil war" may be brewing between Trump's inner circle and Fox News, after Fox edited out yet more "stolen election" claims before uploading an interview with Mr. Trump to YouTube, just remember that it's all drama! It's all distraction! Right-wingers love looking like they're at odds, not just as a big possum game but as a way of deflecting criticism over marching in jackboot lockstep about everything. (You probably also noticed that the Fox host who conducted the interview, Dan Bongino, essentially conceded the point to the MAGA crowd, which tells you who's still the boss.)

Finally, former President Donald Trump opines thusly about the recent COVID spike: "Could you imagine if I were president right now and we had this massive attack from the coronavirus? If that were me, they would say, 'What a horrible thing, what a horrible job.' And I don’t ever hear that." Regardless of what Mr. Trump "hears," President Biden's approvals have fallen since COVID cases spiked, but we don't even need to speculate on what would have happened "if" this had happened while he was President, because every single day between November 10 and the end of Mr. Trump's Presidency saw more COVID cases than the 132,000-plus we saw on Friday, and Mr. Trump spent that whole time filing frivolous lawsuits against the election he lost by seven million votes and inciting an attempted coup. In a sane, moral, and decent society, we'd all be serving Mr. Trump a big glass of STFU; in this insane, immoral, and decadent society, our media will broadcast his less-than-worthless utterances again and again.

Action: concerning the filibuster, service shutoffs, banksters, and law-and-order policy.

Long story short: tell President Biden to actively oppose the Senate filibuster, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Maintaining Access to Essential Services Act, end hedge fund predatory behavior, and pass the Break the Cycle of Violence Act and the MEAL Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Both Public Citizen and The Juggernaut Project help you tell President Biden to lead on filibuster reform. He's used his bully pulpit to argue for the For the People Act -- said he'd "fight like heck" to get it done, in fact -- but if he's not willing to endorse getting rid of the filibuster, it'll all be for nothing. Republicans use the filibuster to stop everything, which not only means no gerrymandering reform, no campaign finance reform, and no end to racist vote suppression practices, it also means Democrats look like they do nothing all day, which guarantees they'll be in the minority in Congress again. People like it when you do stuff, and they hate it when you don't. It's pretty simple, much simpler than the 13-dimensional chess Democrats seem to play most of the time.

Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4979/S. 1783, the Maintaining Access to Essential Services Act, which would prevent utility corporations from shutting off your electricity and water and the like. I can already hear the right-wingers yell WHEN DOEZ IT ENDZ!!!!! Maybe it ends when they get the boards out of their asses and get vaccinated so we can end this pandemic! After all, a person without essential services is a person rather more at risk of getting COVID, and therefore at risk of keeping the pandemic going. There are times -- many times, in fact -- when the compassionate thing to do is also the pragmatic thing to do. This is one of those times. And remember how the Joe Louis Arena didn't get its water shut off in 2014 even after falling over $82,000 behind on its water bill. And I think people are actually more important than sports arenas.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would rein in hedge funds' predatory behavior. Hedge funds love to swoop in, buy corporations, and then suck the wealth out of them like the vampires they are, and as a result, good Americans lose their jobs. How do we put a stop to that? We tell Congress to make hedge funds (and their executives) legally liable for the evil they do, ban the practices that allow banksters to loot other corporations, protect the workers who'd otherwise lose their jobs and pensions (that last part's important!), and close the corporate tax loopholes that make hedge funds absurdly overpaid. No, they don't "rein in bad actors" in our economy. We've got laws and regulations for that, and if we don't, we make the laws and regulations better. Big corporations make very bad cops.

Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4118/S. 2275, the Break the Cycle of Violence Act. Which would do what? Fund community-based violence prevention programs, that's what. Which would be a whole lot better than calling the police every time folks can't solve problems with their family, friends, and neighbors. If you're tempted to call this "defunding the police," consider that a police officer should not be the solution to every conceivable problem -- not just for our sake, but for theirs. And if you're temped to call it a "slush fund" for Black folks, remember that no one will get rich of these government grants. Really, if it were all about grift, they'd be banksters. In fact, you really ought to look to the financial sector first if you're looking for grift.

Finally, the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2837, the Making Essentials Affordable and Lawful (or MEAL) Act. The MEAL Act would repeal the law that bans Americans with drug convictions from ever getting food stamps or other forms of public assistance -- which sure sounds like the kind of thing politicians do to look tough, and thus should be opposed on that basis alone. But, seriously, if we actually do believe in rehabilitation, then lifetime bans for drug convictions is the precise opposite of logic as well as the precise opposite of mercy. And as for the folks who don't believe in rehabilitation, well, maybe there's a police state that'll take them in. I hear things are a lot simpler in police states.

Action: concerning taxes, Medicare, familiy care, and climate change.

Long story short: tell our Senate to raise taxes on rich folks, expand Medicare, make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, enact the centerpieces of the American Families Plan, and ensure climate change action makes it into the upcoming reconciliation bill. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

You can let Sign for Good help you tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the super-rich already -- they need to hear the general message just as much as they need to hear the specific ones! -- or you can make a phone call to your Congressfolk and tell them to raise corporate taxes, tax capital gains and dividend income at regular income rates, tax financial transactions, pass a Wealth Tax, and bring back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income (or pass a Millionaire's Surtax, which would only bring it up to 47%, but that'd be the highest it's been in, like, 36 years). Or you can do both! All of these actions would do this nation a great deal of good -- we'd not only have money to build an America that gives its people the services we deserve, but we'd restrain the rich from running roughshod over the rest of us, as they've been doing since approximately 1980. It's not often you can do unqualified good in this world, so seize the opportunity.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices already, and Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare. Our Senators are mulling both expanding Medicare (both eligibility and services) and letting it negotiate its own drug prices in the upcoming reconciliation bill -- no, not the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" they're still working on now, but the next bill, the one that might actually do some good and which they probably don't really want to pass anyway. You just know some idiot in the Democratic caucus will object to the "cost" of letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices when doing so would actually save the taxpayer some $80 billion annually! But we have a lot to say about whether they pass that bill or not. If we say it, that is.

Both Moms Rising and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion permanent. Hey, there's another thing that could fit into that reconciliation bill -- along with all those tax-hikes-on-the-rich we discussed in the first paragraph. The Child Tax Credit expansion, which delivers $250 or $300 checks into people's bank accounts every month, is such great policy and great politics I can't quite believe Democrats did it, but they did, in the American Rescue Plan Act, the first reconciliation bill of 2021. They're about to blow it with all their talk about "bipartisanship" and "how do we pay for stuff," of course, but, again, we have a lot to say about all of that -- if we say it.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure that the reconciliation bill includes funding for home- and community-based care and paid family/medical leave. These items were the nominal centerpieces of the American Families Plan; now all we have to do is remind how-do-we-pay-for-it Democrats that a) they know damn well how to pay for it and they just have to have the guts to do it and b) if they fail at this, they're all toast in the 2022 midterms anyway. Seriously, you have Congressional Democrats who are all I can't raise taxes before an election. Because cutting taxes sure worked for the Democrats in the 2010 midterms and the Republicans in the 2018 midterms! No use saying we'd be better off without that kind of Democrat in Congress -- I mean of course we would, but we're stuck with them now, so better to communicate our will in numbers they can't ignore or deny.

Finally, both the League of Conservation Voters and the Union of Concerned Scientists help you tell your Congressfolk to ensure the reconciliation bill includes climate change action. I know, climate change, paid family leave, home care, the Child Tax Credit, taxing the rich -- it's all so much! And we've dispensed with it all in five paragraphs, and you can dispense with it all in three phone calls and/or a few minutes with the above links. We're not in maintenance mode with America; we're in pull-the-baby-out-the-damn-fire-now mode, particularly as concerns pollution. All the Millionaire's Surtaxes in the world won't amount to much if we don't have a planet to live on, and we're not getting out of climate change hell without investing in renewable energy technologies, so let's remind our Congressfolks of that, as many times as we need to.

Around the table: fight the real enemy, part 985.

Ho hum, three big banks that "partner" with WalMart made literally all of their 2019 and 2020 profits from overdraft fees extracted from working families. Nice work if you can get it! Seriously, that's not work, and every time a right-winger defends the "free" market, that's what they defend. As an aside, while I don't expect the acting Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to tip his hand in an investigation, his vow to use "the full range" of "our supervisory toolkit" doesn't exactly inspire confidence, either.

When I hear that "the biggest labor rally in Alabama history" last week was also the most racially diverse, I'm reminded that racial diversity hasn't always been a given in the labor movement -- all too often, labor has sided against non-white folks, particularly immigrants. The rally was also politically diverse, with "Trump guy(s)" peacefully coexisting with BLM supporters, reminding us of what we can accomplish together -- as long as the other side doesn't stage coups, try to overturn elections, or keep the pandemic going with their refusal to vaccinate.

The Senate's "debate" on the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" grinds on, briefly interrupted by a desperate right-wing attempt to root out "politically correct virtue-signaling" in the bill, in the words of Sen. Toomey (E-PA). Sen. Toomey's lame joke about "racist escalators" reminds us that he's no "moderate" merely because he doesn't scream at everyone like Donald Trump does. Right-wingers should also know that we hardly use the term "woke" anymore -- basically, we only use it to describe people who make a show of being "woke" without actually doing anything useful about racism, sexism, and fascism.

Did Nancy Pelosi's yammering about how nobody can just cancel student loan debt seem to come out of the blue to you? Well, Ken Klippenstein and Ryan Grim at The Intercept suggest it may have had something to do with a couple of billionaire constituents bending her ear. Just because people think the Bay Area is full of rich tech bros doesn't mean middle-class working people don't live there, and a lot of those folks have massive student loan debt, but their will means little or nothing to Ms. Pelosi, apparently. And thus we are reminded, yet again, that House Democratic leadership really needs to get out of the young bucks' way.

They're calling the results in the Ohio 11th House district Democratic primary a lesson in how Democrat voters want "stability," but Natalie Shure at In These Times sees other lessons to learn. One of them you already know from the last paragraph -- the Democratic House leadership might hate Republicans, but they definitely hate fierce liberals who might actually do some good with the power they have. Another lesson you already know is the power of dark money. But a third lesson? AOC and Cori Bush won by emphasizing the need to make Democrats "live up to their full potential." People would rather be inspired than angered, after all.

Finally, color me unimpressed that Dick Cheney has apparently professed to be "deeply troubled" about the state of the Republican Party, because he played a big role in bringing all of this about! Stupid wars, lawless government spying, collapsed economies, attacking the patriotism of folks who disagree with you, not to mention the accelerated decimation of our manufacturing base -- what part of this does he not recognize? What part of this has he not enabled? And if Bernie Sanders had won the 2020 election, would he have leaped to defend the "peaceful transition of power"?

Around the table: more notes on pollution, racism, and health care.

Sharon Lerner at The Intercept explains how big corporations and weak regulators get dangerous chemicals approved by our government. If a corporation demands that our EPA declare their chemical is safe right-fucking-now, aren't they telling us that it's really not safe? And when more and more chemical approval cases suddenly become high-priority "hair on fire" cases, doesn't that make the word "priority" pretty close to meaningless? If your workplace worked like that, you'd call bullshit. (As an aside, some corporate hacks even threaten EPA workers with lawsuits. Do I dare I call them frivolous lawsuits? Yes, I do dare!)

Surprise, surprise, states that ended enhanced unemployment benefits didn't prompt very many people to get jobs. And you don't live like a king on unemployment benefits, enhanced or not, so gosh, maybe folks really just don't want to go back to bad jobs so they can be paid in dung pellets and suffer endless abuse from bosses and customers. Sure, fear of COVID and caring for relatives with COVID might be factors, but I doubt they're deal-breakers. Wouldn't a free marketeer look at this data and suggest that employers make their jobs more attractive if they want to fill more positions? I kid, of course -- no "free" marketeer ever blames a corporation for not doing enough.

When I read that African asylum seekers have an even tougher time at American concentration camps than other folks do -- and Frances Madeson's report is truly horrifying -- I am reminded that we have a long history of truly awful immigration policy. Remember when we used to give gasoline baths to poor (not well-off) Mexican immigrants at the border? The Nazis picked up on that! I guess right-wingers will call me a purveyor of critical race theory for even noting any of this. And I'll call them a bunch of whiny diaper-loaded brats who are too weak to handle the hard work of maintaining a civilization, so I guess that's at least a draw.

Hey, speaking of critical race theory, Olivia Riggio at FAIR notes that right-wingers have "manufactured" all kinds of meanings of the term. I guess they're not quite as embarrassing as that Alabama lawmaker, but why do we bother telling the difference between the mound of dung the flies have found and the mound of dung they haven't found yet? Even the right-wingers who try harder still basically insist that one counter-example destroys all trends, which is still pretty damn stupid. No, one college professor fantasizing about shooting white people doesn't obliterate the fact of police exterminating Black folks for centuries. No, one Black man getting two doctorates doesn't obliterate the racism that means other Black folks get none. And no, you're certainly not "the real racist" for pointing out the real racism. Gosh, no matter how many head shots you give these zombies, they keep getting back up. It's almost like Our Glorious Elites benefit from that or something.

Did Florida Governor Ron DeSantis really say that his state's "hospitals are open for business"? Yes, he really did say that. Politicians constantly use the phrase "open for business" as if it's an amulet that'll keep them out of trouble; is it too much to ask that Mr. DeSantis has finally put a stake through that phrase's heart? As we speak, Florida routinely leads the nation in daily new cases, and Charlie Crist just led Ron DeSantis in a poll. If Mr. Crist deploys the phrase "our hospitals are open for business" in his ads, he might just win. I hope Mr. Crist isn't too "nice" for that. Perhaps he should ask John Bel Edwards how well being nasty to people who deserve it can work for you.

Finally, New York Attorney General Letitia James issues report finding that Gov. Andrew Cuomo has sexually harassed "multiple" women. Please, please, don't take Andrew Cuomo away from us! said no liberal ever.

Action: concerning evictions, chemical safety, corporate welfare, worker rights, discrimination, and voting rights.

Long story short: tell our government to extend the eviction moratorium, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the PFAS Action Act, the End Polluter Welfare Act, the PRO Act, the Equality Act, the For the People Act, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Moms Rising helps you tell our Congressfolk to extend the eviction moratorium. Thanks largely to pressure from House liberals such as Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO), the Biden Administration did issue an order extending the eviction moratorium for 60 days in high-COVID areas, and even though real estate groups might get our Supreme Court to overturn it rather quickly, that order isn't useless -- if nothing else, it buys a little time for somehow-undistributed COVID relief money to get to the renters who need it. Still, Congress needs to hear from us that they should do something about this -- Republicans would just love to see hundreds of tent cities spring up all over America. And I'm not worried about landlords' well-being. You don't get to be a landlord if you're not well-off. Besides, hardship builds character; isn't that what we always tell renters?

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 2467, the PFAS Action Act, and -- this is critical! -- not weaken it to please their corporate paymasters. H.R. 2467 would, among other things, mandate that our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) set standards for how much PFAS chemicals we can tolerate in our drinking water; the ideal number would be "zero," given how hard it is to break PFAS chemicals down (they don't call them "forever chemicals" for nothing!) and how scientists have linked PFAS chemicals to cancer and birth defects, but given their ubiquity in our products, we are already compromising by setting any non-zero limits at all. And our Senators know this bill should pass, so they'll try to weaken it and then take credit for it. That's a wicked game, and we shouldn't let them play it.

Both the Sierra Club and Food and Water Action help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2102/S. 1167, the End Polluter Welfare Act. This bill would end some $15 billion annually in corporate welfare subsidies to corporations that, frankly, don't need the money, like oil and gas drillers. Literally the only people in America who want to keep that welfare coming are the oil and gas drilling corporations who get it, and, sadly, they contribute big bucks to the politicians who'll vote on this bill. And these corporations don't spend nearly as much in campaign contributions as they collect in corporate welfare! So we the people need to stop that. After all, we're the majority.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. The big story this past week, as you may know, is a National Labor Relations Board (or NLRB) hearing officer determining that Amazon did, in fact, break laws during the April unionization vote at its Bessemer, AL warehouse, and our NLRB may order another election in the coming weeks, but wouldn't it be nice if it didn't even come to that? The PRO Act would stop a lot of big corporate abuse and intimidation -- including the forced anti-union propaganda meetings and the retaliation against pro-union workers -- before it happens. Again, big corporations won't like it, and they will spend to stop it. But I would ask this of our Senators: do you really want to take "I was easily bribed repeatedly by big corporations" to the Pearly Gates?

The Daily Kos Liberation League, People for the American Way, and Ultraviolet all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. Have I mentioned how disgusting I find the arguments against the Equality Act? Why, yes, I believe I have, in some detail. And what's most disgusting about them? None of them are true! Why, those arguments would need to take two buses and a train even to get in the same neighborhood as the truth! The Equality Act prevents bosses, landlords, and banks from discriminating against gay and transgender folks just because they're gay and transgender, end of story. If that offends folks' "religious beliefs," then maybe -- just an idea -- they shouldn't base their religion around who they hate.

Finally, Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. And Common Cause, People for the American Way, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Again: the arguments against these bills all suck. The bills would curtail gerrymandering, enact same-day and automatic voting registration, give all voters 15 days of early voting, force big campaign donors to disclose their donations, give power to stop vote suppression at the state level back to our Justice Department, and end certain racist de-registration practices, so if folks call all that "a Democrat power grab," they may want to consider whether it only looks that way because of actual Republican power-grabs -- like Voter ID, or creating Rorschach-blot legislative districts, or closing polling booths in Black neighborhoods, or using the Interstate Crosscheck database to de-register Black voters without telling them, or any of the several dozen other right-wing tricks you can name.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: once more into the breach.

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

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

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

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

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

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