Thieves in the Temple.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Yeah, our Senate just put another right-wing stooge on our Supreme Court, which is demoralizing, but we have to be like Nick Foles and just bounce back up -- and when our Senators see us do that, they'll fear us the way they should.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Yeah, our Senate only wants to put another right-wing stooge on our Supreme Court, and we'll get to that, but we still must remind them of their duty to do right by us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning good House bills, working families, and spy drones.

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Our Senators have all kinds of dumb ideas about what's important to good Americans, so we've got to be there to remind them of what's really important to us. And we keep reminding them until they get it. Even if it takes a very, very long time.

Meanwhile, our Department of Labor, apparently confused about its mission and legal mandate, plans to let corporations classify more of their workers as "independent contractors," and you know what that means: it means they won't have to pay minimum wage, obey child labor laws, or pay overtime when workers work more than 40 hours in a week. They always say they do it for "jobs," or for the cleaning worker in Detroit or the Grubhub driver in Pittsburgh or home health aide in Columbus, but that's a load of rubbish: they always do it for their rich cronies who whine about having to pay people in more than dung pellets. And, you know, the whole purpose of overtime is to stop corporations from trying to get by on too few workers (who are no doubt overworked!), so certainly we shouldn't give corporations yet another way out of their responsibility to their workers and to the American people. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell our Department of Labor to scuttle its own proposal that would injure working families further.

Finally, Amazon clearly hasn't had enough of spying on you -- Alexa listens to your private conversations, and Ring enables bad police work, but now Amazon wants to foist upon us the Ring Always Home Cam, a drone that not only flies around your house but spies around your house. Think there might be some domestic abusers who'd use that on their partners? Or homeowners who'd use it on their AirBnB patrons? At this point we're far past if-you've-done-nothing-wrong-you-have-nothing-to-fear. And of course Amazon won't rule out letting the police capture all that drone video; you'd like to think they'd have to get a warrant first, but as you know our politicians haven't been real steadfast about our Fourth Amendment lately. Luckily Amazon has to get permission from our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to sell the drone, and they might find that difficult, since the drone doesn't satisfy FCC privacy protections as mandated by law. Hence Fight for the Future helps you tell our FCC to reject Amazon's proposed sale of its flying spy drones.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, gerrymandering, public water, and public lands.

It's Monday, so it's time to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act. I know, negotiations over a new COVID-19 stimulus bill are supposedly on again (though by the time you read this, they may be off again!), but there's no damn need to "negotiate" a good stimulus bill, because the HEROES Act is already a good stimulus bill, and our House passed it five months ago. Republicans didn't want it, of course, because it didn't include three martini lunch tax breaks and blanket immunity for corporations that injure people during the pandemic. Now some analysts have detected weakness in our President's recent vacillating, and if that's true, now's the time to strike, and tell our Senators to pass a bill that funds COVID-19 testing and tracing, funds enhanced unemployment benefits, funds our Post Office, and cuts another stimulus check for working families. (And if our President's merely playing us, guess what? Now is still the time to strike, because now is always the time to strike.)

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: Fair Districts PA helps you demand that your state Senators vote on SB 1242, the Legislative and Congressional Redistricting Act (or LACRA), which would make redistricting fairer in Pennsylvania. No, it wouldn't establish an independent commission to handle redistricting, but it would prevent redistricting plans from favoring particular candidates or parties and keep newly-redrawn districts from ignoring town and county boundaries, and it would do these things redistricting of both state legislative districts and U.S. House districts. You'll also want to contact Rep. Everett and House Speaker Cutler and demand they hold a vote on HB 2638, the House version of LACRA. The legislature will adjourn in less than two weeks, and it sure looks like they're trying to run out the clock. They may want to consider whether Democrats might reclaim both state Houses after Election Day. Stranger things have happened, after all. Hell, stranger things will have likely happened between the time I've written this sentence and the time you read it.

In other news, the notorious Nestlé is at it again, this time trying to keep paying a pittance to suck up public water from Ruby Mountain Springs in Chaffee County (CO), to the tune of 65 million gallons annually. But county officials will actually hold a public meeting about the matter in less than two weeks, and the good citizens of Chaffee County need to know we've got their back, hence Sum of Us helps you tell Chaffee County officials to keep public water for the public and reject Nestlé's application to keep sucking them dry. Colorado, like much of the West, suffers from increasing drought, which means they can't just keep giving water away to private corporations who then bottle it and resell it at an absurd profit. That ain't "job creation," that's getting played. The good news? Our efforts in other parts of the country to stem the tide of public water giveaways, while they haven't always worked, have called attention to the problem, and have taught people who've forgotten that public water is our water. So let's keep fighting.

Finally, our Administration has lately advanced a final rule proposal that would allow logging in Alaska's Tongass National Forest, so the Sierra Club helps you tell our Administration, one more time, to reject logging in the Tongass. Getting logging corporations into an area that would cut down thousand year-old trees represents some kind of totem to this Administration -- if we can get loggers in here, they think, we can get them in anywhere -- but that kind of short-term thinking will obliterate this country and its good example to the world. We preserve thousand year-old trees because we experience awe at history and nature; this President apparently only experiences awe when he sees a plunging neckline. Also, but the Sierra Club's latest email missive says logging in the Tongass "turn(s) a climate solution into a climate problem," and they're absolutely right -- the more trees we have, the more carbon we capture. And that's just one thing trees do. And how long does money last, anyway?

Around the table: in which politics continues to bring out the worst in some people.

Scientists from Georgetown University and the University of Warwick find the cost of climate change is actually considerably higher than previously thought. Models accounting for average rising temperatures count the cost in the many trillions of dollars over the next few centuries, but a model accounting for fluctuations in temperatures adds to that cost. I will say that even spending $50 trillion over the next 200 years is not something our politicians should be afraid to do, and not just because the alternative may well be annihilation.

Peter Montague at TruthOut reminds us that our President is "trying to scare (us) with the socialism boogeyman." People call you a "socialist" when they can't win the argument on the merits, but they also must hide from themselves all the socialism they take part in. Socialism isn't merely about shopping at Ace Hardware instead of Home Depot or dumping your bankster for a credit union -- when you drive a road, put out the trash, call the fire department, or head out to the local park, you're practicing socialism yourself.

Taliban leader says he hopes our President wins re-election so that he'll withdraw American troops from Afghanistan, though that's an aim we can accomplish without this particular President's involvement. Remember when right-wingers read Osama bin Laden's remarks right before the 2004 election as an "endorsement" of John Kerry even though the plain text said they weren't? Right now all those idiots are either silent or sounding like even bigger idiots trying to explain how "we hope he will win the election" somehow means the opposite of what it says.

Speaking of right-wing idiots, QAnon-supporting U.S. House candidate Marjorie Greene gave her own campaign nearly half a million bucks after getting a loan through the CARES Act's notorious Paycheck Protection Program (or PPP). And though of course she's not the only one -- Darrell Issa, who used to be the richest man in Congress, got a PPP loan himself! -- she is the only one whose nominal Democratic opponent dropped out of the race a few months ago because he decided to move out of the district, an administrative failure that makes you wonder how Democrats ever win races at all.

Commerce Township (MI) employee needs 13 stitches on his fingers after trying to remove a yard sign supporting our President with razor blades on its edges. The sign was too close to the road, thus violating a town ordinance, The homeowner said she had several yard signs "stolen" (did she put the others too close to the road, too?) but of course knew nothing about the razor blades! That just means it can get worse: one day soon a Presidential votary will happily confess that he electrified his yard sign, and not too long from now someone will confess to something similar after it harms a child or a pet.

Finally, Barron County (MI) sheriff says the recent kidnapping plot against Gov. Whitmer could well have been an attempt at a citizen's arrest. For what crime? For "treason," per the would-be kidnappers, but more likely for making them wear face masks or being a Democrat or not making them feel like they're the only people in the world who mean a damn. We have to stop coddling these diaper-loaded brats even if they're armed and even if some of our police officers seem awfully sympathetic to them. Shame still works in America, if we have the guts to do it.

Action: concerning endangered species and immigration.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell our U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to reject its own proposal to make it harder to classify areas as "critical habitats," then Penn Environment still helps you do that. What would this proposal do? Why, undermine the Endangered Species Act, of course -- if there aren't a whole lot of "critical habitats" available, where will we help endangered species recover? I'd call that clever, if I didn't insist that cleverness be, you know, not evil. Reducing critical habitats also increases the amount of land subject to development, which has been this President's unfortunate mania from day one -- and not to stimulate the economy, nor to create jobs, but simply to deliver yet more unearned money into other bosses' wallets. We have long known that this President would eradicate history just to make himself and his cronies richer, so we must stand taller and stronger for a civilization that does not sacrifice itself to mammon. And if that makes us look more conservative than he, I'm not inclined to complain.

Meanwhile, you know our Supreme Court ruled in June that our Administration unlawfully ended the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (or DACA) program, which you would think would mean our Administration would be continuing the program, right? Of course not! They think rules and laws are for "losers," after all. Hence the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell our Administration to start doing its job and start processing DACA applications again. They're not just being big babies, they're also being cruel: folks who came here as children had literally no say in coming here, and they wouldn't recognize the countries to which we'd deport them back. And DACA doesn't even extend the protections of the law to all such immigrants, nor does it offer a path to citizenship. Which proves, maybe, that appeasing racists is a stupid idea. They sure better hope a real liberal never gets elected President.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell big hotel chain corporations like Hilton, Choice, and Best Western to stop letting our Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) use their hotels as de facto concentration camps, then the Daily Kos Liberation League still helps you do that. Well, actually ICE subcontracts this nefarious duty to a contractor called MVM, but that's hair-splitting -- fact is, these big hotel corporations not only enable this Administration's abominable immigration policies (including family separation), but they make money off it, and you really should be making as little money from evil as possible in this world, lest you get a shock when you show up at the Pearly Gates. This Administration thinks very little about the long term, of course, but we don't ever have to be like them. We can choose to be civilized people, and we can use the Big Stick of Bad PR to help big corporations be civilized, too.

Action: concerning masks, whistleblowers, and government lies.

Change.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a national mask mandate. Because wearing a damn mask outside helps slow the spread of COVID-19! And no, right-wingers, it's not about your "freedom," unless by "freedom" you mean "freedom to infect others with a deadly disease." And certainly it's not like Nazis forcing Jews to wear the Star of David! (I mean, we're not all Jews, and if we were, making us wear masks to set us off from other people would be pointless. Right-wingers need to work on their damn similes.) We've coddled these don't-tread-on-me tantrum-throwers for too long, and I, for one, am willing to bring the force of law upon them. Everyone who's thought about the matter knows that masks do what the scientists say they do, and everyone who disagrees merely wishes it weren't true, and they'll latch on to whatever snake oil salesman doesn't sound completely off their rocker. Y'all will let me know if my true feelings aren't coming across here, right? I wouldn't want to be accused of holding back.

Meanwhile, H.R. 4816/S. 2529, the Whistleblower Programs Improvement Act, would (as its title suggests) expand whistleblower protections, which currently only extend to those who blow the whistle on wrongdoing directly to our SEC or CFTC; the bill would extend those protections to those who assist in whistleblower investigations. I can't imagine what objections folks would have to that, unless they're of the DESTROYZ ALLZ REGULASHUNZ!!!! variety, or the FRIVULUZ LAWSUITZ!!!! variety. And, as you know, our government has spent hundreds of billions of dollars in COVID-19 relief lately, which means hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money (i.e., our money) that could be stolen. Some right-wingers use that as an excuse to say all government programs are awful, but I say you need to have the courage to do right, and that includes punishing those who would subvert your efforts. So the National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect taxpayers by passing the Whistleblower Programs Improvement Act.

Finally, our Department of Homeland Security (or DHS) has lately proposed reclassifying complaint records as "temporary," which would give our National Archives and Records Administration (or NARA) the power to destroy any records of those complaints within four years of their filing! Our government destroying records of complaints against it -- why, who could find that suspicious? It's almost like they've got something to hide, like, you know, family separation, forced hysterectomies, wrongful deportation, or murder or sexual abuse at concentration camps! Seriously, if you want to be the greatest nation on Earth, you'd better be able to admit and overcome your mistakes, and you'd better be able to repent for your evil works; otherwise, you're not the greatest nation on Earth, but just another country doomed to get lost in the sands of time, and we'd all like to be remembered for the good we did on Earth, right? So Open the Government helps you tell our DHS to scuttle its proposal to censor complaints about its nefarious works.

Around the table: in which we consider various law-and-order matters in a different manner than our allegedly law-and-order President would.

A ProPublica/Maine Monitor investigation describes the sad state of Maine's public defender program, upon which poor folks depend to get justice. Long story short: the state's program had always been private, which as you know usually makes it more expensive, and then never funded it properly, resulting in (among other evils) the worst lawyers, some with criminal convictions, representing the state's poorest residents. I bet this happens in every state once QAnon candidates start winning -- which they will, if Democrats retake power in Washington and then come up with excuses not to use it, as is their habit.

Contra our President's hysteria, Goldman Sachs analysts tell investors a Democratic victory at the polls this November "would likely prompts us to upgrade our forecasts." Well, they did quite well during the Obama years, so I guess they would know. Seriously, our President is clever enough to hang this around Joe Biden's neck, banksters still being extremely unpopular in America, but, ah, we have reason to doubt that he's vigorous enough to do that at present.

Walker Bragman and David Sirota at Jacobin evaluate Judge Barrett's record at the Seventh Circuit, and find it as wanting as Nathan Robinson did. (She opined correctly in Kanter v. Barr, actually, but even a blind squirrel finds a nut.) Given a slavish devotion to non-interpretation of even obviously unjust laws that would make Neil Gorsuch blush, you have to wonder what Judge Barrett thinks judges are even for.

Dean Baker suggests that our President is "throwing away" our shot at a vaccine by refusing to cooperate with other nations on that task. And, you know, also by valuing a corporation's potential "intellectual property" over sick people getting better. You should suspect the good heart of anyone who consistently puts things over people. No, they're not "smart" if they do that; they're evil if they do that.

Facebook kicks all QAnon and Q-related accounts off its platform, which means, in the short term, that Q-believers will slink off to other platforms, nursing their unearned sense of martyrdom, and await the shit-ton of right-wing money coming their way if Democrats annihilate Republicans this November. Still, Facebook did a good work here, particularly if other platforms take the suggestion and conclude that our First Amendment protects people from our government, not from social media platforms.

Finally, our President breaks off all negotiations with Congress over a COVID-19 relief bill, saying there won't be another one until "after I win." He contradicted himself on Twitter shortly thereafter, but we know folks by their deeds, not their words. And when he says Speaker Pelosi (who shepherded the HEROES Act through the House almost five months ago) isn't "negotiating in good faith," he really means she's not capitulating to all his demands. Just like the rest of them.

Penny Rants for Wednesday, October 7, 2020: in which we confront various Presidential dramas.

Rachel Bade and Paul Kane at the Washington Post find that "the GOP’s predicted Supreme Court bump" from the Barrett nomination "has yet to materialize," either in polling or in campaign donations. But newsflash: there was no Supreme Court bounce in 2018, either! Maybe that's because the Kavanaugh hearings resolved too early in October to be much of a Surprise, whereas the Barrett hearings won't even start until next week, and maybe our President's plan all along was to draw out the Barrett hearings until after the election, so that it'd be fresh in right-wing voters' minds. But how many more votes can Republicans harvest from this stratagem? Seriously, the crowd that lives for right-wing judicial confirmations got into bed with this President a long time ago. And though they might complain about our President's obnoxiousness, they're quite happy there.

Walter Shapiro says that "crippling fear of a primary challenge" from a Presidential votary simply doesn't explain Republican cowardice in the face of our ongoing pandemic, adding that "(i)t is hard to imagine a 2022 primary challenge against Republicans solely for wearing a mask on an airplane or staying home when they feared they would test positive for the coronavirus." Oh, but I think Republicans will absolutely face primary challenges in 2022 for wearing a mask, not being Q-friendly enough, for actually protecting bans on pre-existing conditions, or a dozen other things I can't even imagine because I'm not a soulless prick. After all, once you've abandoned principle, science, logic, even common sense, where can you go? Only deeper and deeper into fantasy, and big corporate money will be there to enable those fantasies, just as it was for the Tea Party. And you know how that story'll end -- unless we act.

Don't make too much of reports that the elder Presidential scion thinks his dad is "acting crazy" and doesn't want to be the only one to tell him, or that the Presidential family is "divided" over our President's most recent "erratic" behavior, because what is that, class? Drama, that's what, and, as usual, not particularly good drama. For decades (not just the last four years!) Republicans have pretended to have "real differences" over policy, or process, or optics, but they don't -- they play out these dramas just to distract you from acting more decisively against their evil. Thus folks who say even Don Jr. thinks his old man's bananas, even if they don't mean to, give you permission to think you don't have to do anything about this sick, immoral, and decadent society. Every day the sun rises, we have to do something about that, and when we soak in drama, we make that task much harder.

Upon hearing that our President left Walter Reed Medical Center with the twittered advice that you should not let COVID-19 "dominate your life," you might well respond that the 200,000-plus folks he's let die from COVID would have something to say about that if they could. But then, "(d)on't let it dominate your life" ain't for those people, nor even for the American people: it's for his votaries, and no one else. Dismiss all reasonable warnings, don't worry about how your friends and neighbors feel, even tear off your mask and wander around indoors if you're infected -- those are the stand-by orders he just gave his votaries, and again, you can't dismiss the possibility that he plans to keep the pandemic going because he can only operate in a climate of chaos. I used to say George W. Bush screwed things up so that you'd cleave to him harder; this President is only the next logical step in that stratagem.

Action: concerning good House bills, sanctions on Iran, and Chad Wolf.

Happy Wednesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Why do we keep doing this? Because we need to establish our will, as we communicate it to our Senators -- and thus also establish how badly they're doing at adhering to our will, which is their sole job, and a job they're doing much worse than our House is. And the more we do it, the closer we get to fulfilling the promise democracy.

Meanwhile, Win Without War helps you tell Treasury Secretary Mnuchin and Secretary of State Pompeo to reject any more sanctions on Iran. We could go on at length about the damage more sanctions would do to good Iranians, who will certainly bear the brunt of sanctions more than their rulers, but all we need say is, well, calling this Administration's policy toward Iran piss-poor would be a grievous insult to piss. The Obama Administration helped craft a successful agreement that kept nuclear weapons out of Iran's hands, but this Administration withdrew from that agreement, apparently as part of a plan to create international chaos that could only be resolved by war with Iran, which is so 1980, you know. You could argue, I suppose, that Mr. Bush's Iraq policy only strengthened Iran in the region, thus tying our current President's hands, but just as two wrongs don't make a right, two stupids don't make a smart. So let's not remain hostage to bad foreign policy, because that would be un-American.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject the nomination of Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf to the permanent Homeland Security Secretary position, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. They'd have plenty of reasons to reject the nomination, including Mr. Wolf's ardent support for family separation and illegal detainment of protestors, as well as his refusal to accept new DACA applications even though our Supreme Court told him to do it. But now that we're less than a month away from Election Day, our Senators would probably just prefer to wait this whole thing out and see how things go, given that voting for Mr. Wolf would be tough to defend to the voters who are about to decide your immediate future. It's funny that none of them have said confirming Mr. Wolf is essential given "the grave threats we face," since you know that's what they would have said in Tha Bush Mobb years. Still, we must remind them that cowardice is evil, and the time to do the right thing is always now.

Action: concerning nuclear waste and corporate investment in police departments.

Our Nuclear Regulatory Commission (or NRC) wants to reclassify some kinds of radioactive nuclear waste so that big corporations can dump it in landfills! Which means it'll eventually wind up in our drinking water and in our crops -- and in our air, if landfills incinerate the stuff! If any of your friends tell you changing this rule will "create jobs," go ahead and ask them how. "By giving executives more money to create jobs" is not an acceptable answer, since we all know by now that when we give executives more money they hoard it, not spend it -- which means they certainly don't spend it on creating jobs! This regulatory effort will kill jobs, in fact -- the disposal operations to which nuclear power corporations currently send their waste do hire people to do jobs, after all. So, in sum: it'll kill jobs, and you won't be able to breathe the air or drink the water or eat the food, but some executive somewhere will be able to gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home! Unless we all send public comments to our NRC opposing their rule change, which Food and Water Watch helps you do.

Meanwhile, on the heels of Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron's charging one already-fired police officer with one charge in the killing of Breonna Taylor, Daily Kos helps you tell big corporations UPS, Ford, and Humana to divest from the Louisville police department. The Louisville police department should be able to do its work on behalf of the good citizens of Louisville with tax money anyway, and the fact that police and jails already eat up almost half of Louisville's budget suggests that we ought to give them less of that work. Seriously, if we followed a treatment model for drug addicts rather than a punitive one, we'd be spending considerably less tax money, wouldn't need corporate money, and Breonna Taylor would be alive today. (The police who killed her were ostensibly conducting a drug investigation, after all.) And there ain't nothing corporations fear like the Big Stick of Bad PR. I wish they feared the law more than that, to be honest, but we're gonna use the tools available to us even as we work on getting better tools.

Around the table: in which we confront many different kinds of corruption, again.

Greg Palast, America's Last Journalist, reminds us that "Wisconsin 'Movers' Didn't Move." You know, just like millionaires didn't "move" out of states with high income tax rates in 2009! (The Great Recession, then underway, turned a lot of millionaires into thousandaires.) Wisconsin is one of those states that pretends you've moved if you haven't returned a junk mail-looking piece of crap to "verify" your address, and then they de-register you from voting and don't tell you! And they send a disproportionate number of these junk mail-looking pieces of crap to voters of color! The good news? Wisconsin allows same-day voter registration, and I think a lot of these voters of color are pissed.

Ho hum, bankster corporation buys hospital chain and its managers make a mint while their hospitals can't even buy basic supplies. They did it by loading up the hospital chain with debt (i.e., by buying up other hospitals), to the point where ambulances can't put gas on the company card and nurses don't have IV fluid on the floor because someone hasn't paid their bills. Meanwhile, Prospect's CEO has made over $125 million over the last few years. Nice work if you can get it! And Prospect Medical Holding's hospitals serve guess who? Mainly low-income working families. Right-wingers, please tell me again how expanding Medicare to include everyone is some unconscionable evil.

It begins: big corporate-funded PACs are funneling money to very far-right QAnon candidates. Expect this funding to increase dramatically (a word I'm using on purpose!) if Joe Biden manages to win this election and Democrats take our Senate while holding our House, because then a do-nothing Biden Administration will make fertile ground for a Republican takeover of Congress led by folks who make stupid Tea Partiers seem like Mensa members. (And no, I'm not impressed that Marjorie Greene opposes "never-ending wars in the Middle East" -- she's either lying or just another blind squirrel who's tripped over a nut.)

Our President has supposedly told his braintrust, such as it is, that he wants to ditch FBI Director Christopher Wray if he wins re-election. So, a far right-wing President wants to oust his somewhat less right-wing FBI director because he doesn't drag his knuckles on the ground enough. Would I be a more or less spiritually-advanced person if I laughed at the thought of our President's votaries squealing how dare Christopher Wray say antifa isn't a terrorist organization?

Finally, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, already facing a five-year-old securities fraud charge, now faces accusations of "improper influence, abuse of office, bribery and other potential crimes." Mr. Paxton is also the asshole who (among so, so many evil works!) constantly squealed about TEH VOTERZ FRAUDZ!!!! in 2018 as he was prosecuting a total of 33 defendants. Yeah, come back when you've got convictions, dude. If you're not in jail yourself by then!

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, social media, and birth control.

Once again we will call our Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act. Doesn't matter that they're not in session right now; doesn't matter that they all think they have more important things to do (like ram a right-wing Supreme Court Justice down our throats before we notice it); doesn't matter that Nancy Pelosi was just trying to pass a slimmed-down HEROES Act in order to "get something done." The HEROES Act is still the best COVID-19 relief bill either House of Congress has passed, and the race ain't even close. The CARES Act gave out over half a trillion dollars in corporate welfare, but the HEROES Act would actually fund COVID testing and tracing, enhanced unemployment benefits, relief for strapped states and municipalities, and relief for a strapped Postal Service (among other good works). Doesn't matter that Ms. Pelosi was negotiating with Treasury Secretary Mnuchin, either -- they should only be negotiating with us. And the more we communicate our will, the more they'll finally get that. Really, they can't see the Mitch McConnell Way as anything but desperate. And where's he been in these negotiations, anyway?

Meanwhile, Facebook has been giving itself high-fives for "cracking down" on noxious Nazi-wannabe content at its platform, but, yeah, that's a crock, and you don't even have to know that Facebook got over 400 warnings about the Nazi wannabe groups organizing their "response" to Kenosha protests (that "response" included the Kyle Rittenhouse shootings) to know that. Whistleblowers have complained to our SEC that Facebook still helps Nazi wannabe groups by using algorithms to auto-generate pages that promote white supremacy; imagine if Random House "auto-generated" hundreds of different Turner Diaries rip-offs and you begin to see the problem. I make the publishing house analogy, again, because our laws should treat Facebook as a publishing house -- albeit one that can publish private utterances that must be exempt from social platform scrutiny -- and people still complain this is a "free speech" issue. But how can it be a free speech issue if some algorithm does the "speaking"? Hence the National Whistleblower Center helps you tell our government to hold Facebook accountable for lying about its "crackdowns."

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1692/S. 758, the EACH Woman Act, which would (finally!) allow federal funding of abortions. Our Supreme Court may soon be so constituted as to strike down Roe v. Wade at the first opportunity, and while no one ever wants to see a fetus aborted, the alternative -- a society that uses women as breeders -- is far worse. No, really, those are our two choices: a society that legalizes abortion, or a society where women can be controlled through pregnancy, this latter option a stated preference of many right-wingers; the former is the lesser evil, and we can mitigate that evil more easily than if (as with Prohibition) we make it illegal and more well-off folks still break the law with impunity. We mitigate the evil with safe and affordable birth control -- which, naturally, our right-wingers also vehemently oppose. But birth control is a civilized option, unless, I guess, you think the 40 million or so sperm from every ejaculation that don't ovulate also deserve more chances.

Penny Rants for Sunday, October 4, 2020: examining our latest Presidential drama.

You know all about Uber and Lyft, those "disruptive" and "innovative" corporations that redistribute the income of unionized taxi drivers upward to undeserving executives by helping good citizens use their own cars as a taxi service? Now ProPublica introduces you to Arise, the corporation that farms out customer service reps who work from home to other big corporations -- customer service reps who must pay thousands of dollars in "startup costs" because of course they're not employees but "independent contractors." But worse, even, than that, or all the corporate outsourcing this encourages, or the less-than-minimum-wage pay you'd get as an Arise "service partner," or the draconian rules about how long your service calls can be or how many refunds you can facilitate, is the former Arise CEO who refers to "lunch, breaks, and training" as wastage. You know, wastage, as in "every moment spent not pleasuring the executive is wasted time." Stupid workers, always needing to work on a full belly and blow off some steam every once in a while! Well, you know what they say: one person's hard-earned rights are another person's wastage. OK, people don't seriously say that, at least not in public, because if they did, they'd out themselves as evil.

Now that our President has COVID-19, Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden says he'll pause attack ads for a while, and (Rep. Omar's understandable criticism aside) that's not just a nice thing to do, it's a politically smart thing to do. Why, it might encourage Mr. Biden to say what he's for rather than merely what he's against (i.e., him losing and our President not losing). And would it be smart to extend that moratorium all the way to Election Day, though our President won't respond in kind? Especially because he won't respond in kind! The Sunday afternoon before Election Day, I watched the Eagles-Giants game and saw three hours of attack ads from both sides, and I knew right then that millions of folks wouldn't vote in two days, and who benefits when good Americans don't vote? Evil Republicans, that's who. So let our President wave his arms like a maniac about crime and protestors and foreigners in all his TV ads, and let Mr. Biden talk about creating jobs by building renewable energy infrastructure and keeping military weapons away from police officers. I know who wins that argument, even if our "liberal" media pundits don't, or pretend they don't.

Buried in paragraph six of this Gabriel Sherman report on how our President's illness has rattled his campaign is an unnamed Presidential ally saying "(i)t's weird that all these Republicans are getting it" and intoning unctuously that "when something major happens thirty days before an election, it usually has to do with the election," a lesson I bet he noted well back in 2016 when James Comey dropped that bomb on Hillary Clinton, amirite? I enjoy a good conspiracy theory as much as the next guy, but I don't enjoy bad ones at all, and I certainly don't enjoy people drunk with power suddenly pretending to be powerless. And anyway, why are "all these Republicans are getting it"? Because they're walking around without masks on and hobnobbing with sick people! Such tough guys, they are, pissing away all their unearned privilege and exposing their cowardice in the process. A real tough guy wears a mask, after all, because he cares about what happens to other people. (As an aside, I wish Sen. Grassley would get off his ass and get tested, not so much because he's about the only Republican left in the Senate who's worth a damn as because he's 87 damn years old.)

Finally, while we're still on the subject, I'll note that I don't wish COVID-19 on anybody, even someone as despicable as our President, and I want him to fight through and get better for his own sake -- while there's life, there's hope, they say, and if our President can use this adversity to transcend his own malignant narcissism, I'll be the first to applaud! But I'll still, ah, wait for the data on that transformation; after all, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson had all those kind things to say about the NHS while it kept him alive, but we all still think he'll gut the NHS first chance he gets. We've seen worse, after all. And not for nothing, but our President will have access to a standard of health care ordinary Americans don't -- they tested him for COVID every day while they did their damnedest to test as few of us regular folks as they could! -- though I guess it's a species of justice that at Walter Reed he'll be getting the socialized medicine he always yells about. And you know what? I don't judge anyone for wishing the man dead. The fuck-your-feelings crowd never seemed to care about such niceties before. And maybe our President should have earned some damn goodwill, instead of using us all like toilet paper these past few years.

Around the table: in which we confront many different kinds of corruption.

From Ella Fassler at TruthOut we learn that "Progressive Groups Are Mobilizing to De-Escalate Far Right Violence at the Polls." Yes, I do think we should go to the polls on Election Day fully expecting caravans of Confederate flag-waving morons to roll through and hurt innocent Americans, but one could do worse than give one of the organizations in the first paragraph a call and see what help you might be able to give. Also, remember that these right-wing caravans are full of the real cowards and may well buckle at the sight of our strength.

Speaking of which, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issues order reducing the number of mail-in ballot drop-off points to one per county, in a state with a lot of huge counties. Imagine thinking maybe the mail won't deliver your ballot on time this year I wonder why and now having to drive hundreds of miles to drop it off, and you see the problem with Gov. Abbott's order. He issued the order yesterday and it takes effect today, like he's afraid Texas's electoral votes might really go to Joe Biden or something; by the time you read this, a federal judge may have issued an injunction staying the order, and definitely thousands more voters will, in the words of one local official, resolve to "crawl through broken glass to vote these cheaters out of office."

On the occasion of the New York Times's latest exposé of our President's tax shenanigans, Matthew Gardner at ITEP reminds us that Congress has been starving our IRS of funding to the point that it now investigates poor people as much as it does rich folks, even though common sense tells us that most of the tax fraud happens at upper incomes. This unfortunate state of affairs also explains how an audit of a 2009 tax return -- one which sure looks like it would rather easily uncover fraud -- can still be unresolved after over a decade. It should be easy to justify more funding for our IRS. You want to catch people taking food out of your mouth? is pretty much how I'd begin and end.

In a peripherally-related note, Jared Kushner's corporation appears to have secured unusually favorable terms on $850 million in Freddie Mac-backed loans -- and the taxpayer (i.e., you and I) might be on the hook for all that if Mr. Kushner et al default on the loan. Dig the Freddie Mac spokeshack claiming that they pay their bills on time, without mentioning that the first 10 years of the loan are interest-only, meaning a huge chunk of principal will be due at the end of that time -- and I wonder who'll pay for that! Time was people would avoid even the appearance of corruption, but no longer, it seems.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), the man who gives empty suits a bad name, becomes the latest politician to pretend to care about how awful the other night's debate was. Jesus Mary and Joseph how does a fucking teabagger have the gall to talk about how "we’re all talking at each other and over each other, but not to each other"? And, actually, we're not all doing it -- some of us don't talk to the other side, because we actually did try our damnedest to listen to and understand the other side, but you can only take being told you're a traitor and you hate America and you're with the terrorists so many times before you understand that the other side is sick, immoral, and decadent. Losers like Marco Rubio only whine about how "nobody gets along any more" when nobody wants to get along with them.

Around the table: in which our government pretends to fear the "star chamber of public opinion."

Surprise, surprise, this most recent pandemic-inspired recession has hit poorer working families and folks of color harder than anyone else. Know why our President hasn't bragged about TEH LOWESTZ BLACKZ UNEMPLOYMENTZ EVAHZ!!!! lately? Because black folks ain't getting work again nearly as fast as whites are! Last hired, first fired, amirite? And why did the 1990, 2001, and 2008 recessions hit rich and poor more equally? Probably because the rich just don't care anymore.

Fresh off a shout-out from their President on Tuesday night, Portland police arrest a so-called "Proud Boy" on 12 charges, six of them felonies. If "Proud Boys" are so inclusive, then why do they just so happen to fight protestors against racist police brutality? It can't solely be because they just want the attention. There are a lot of ways to get attention.

Internal DHS documents advise federal law enforcement to tell media that Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse was just trying to help out small businesses when he shot three protestors dead. They also directed officials to say the Patriot Prayer group IZ NOTZ TEH RACISTZ!!!!! And seriously, "the star chamber of public opinion"? As if! These clowns spend all their time laughing at us, so they don't get to pretend to be afraid of us.

Unlike much of the rest of the world that can think for itself, our President thinks he won that first debate "big" (should I count it as restraint that he didn't say "bigly"?) and offers as evidence an unnamed "compilation of polls etc." I presume by "etc." he meant "my own opinion which is of course superior to all others, especially those that don't agree with mine." I mean, I don't know how else to read it.

Ho hum, alleged moderate/votary of "bipartisanship" Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) says of the first Presidential debate that "(t)here was fault on both sides," which will come as a surprise to any sentient life that actually watched it. And then she said "on both sides" again in the very next sentence, which does speak to a certain sense of desperation. Well, when your sorry act is exposed after so many years, I guess desperation is natural.

Finally, what is there to say about the recent New York Times expose of our President's debt and tax shenanigans that we haven't already said? I mean, yes, it's always good to have more data, but between the 2018 Times report exposing his utter dependence on his father's fortune and earlier reports that he received almost $900 million in tax breaks just from the city of New York alone over 40 years, well, gosh, I can't imagine how he'd ever win an election. Except for, you know, the persistent weakness of his Democratic opponents.