Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning book banning, health care, monopolies, campaign funding, and pollution.

Long story short: tell the McMinn County School Board to stop banning books about the Holocaust, tell the Joint Commission to help ensure proper staffing levels at health care facilities, tell our CFPB to keep big tech's grubby mitts off payment systems, tell Pepsi to stop funding anti-abortion politicians in Texas, and tell FERC to stop big energy corporations from charging its customers for trade association dues. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

First things first. MoveOn helps you tell the now-notorious McMinn County School Board in Tennessee not to ban books about the Holocaust. Oh, sure, they claim they banned Art Spiegelman's Maus from an eighth-grade language arts class because of its eight cuss words and all the "nudity" (i.e., one nude frame, of a mouse, after she's killed herself!), but we know from all their super-dramatic speeches at the school board meeting that it's all about waving their power in your face, and we also know they'll only use that power against books that might make them uncomfortable, even though any great book, really, should make folks uncomfortable. That's part of learning, after all. Thus the usual remedy: shame and shunning from more civilized folks like us. (Also too, I bet a hundred rock bands adopt the name Nude Maus this year.)

Change.org helps you tell the Joint Commission (which accredits health care organizations, including hospitals) to require safe staffing ratios as a condition for accreditation and certification. If the Joint Commission were to agree, that would be a big deal, because right now far too many hospitals -- even during this pandemic, or perhaps I mean especially during this pandemic -- are trying to provide care with too few workers. Workers make money after all, and that's money that the CEO could be using to gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home! But more nurses and doctors and therapists and social workers and technicians means less fatigue, fewer mistakes, and better care for patients. You don't want one nurse to handle the entire ER, right? No, because soon enough it'll be you or someone you love who needs it.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to ban big tech corporations like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google from owning payment systems. Because then they'll have all your financial data! Does that sound like a good idea? It'll also result in monopolization of those payment systems, to which right-wingers would normally reply well, that's a matter for the FTC, ha ha ha snicker short, but now they won't, since ardent anti-monopolist Lina Khan now runs the FTC. And it's not just about "finer targeting of ads," either (which isn't even happening, given how many right-wing ads I get on my Facebook news feed!) -- it's also about more big corporations holding more treasure-troves of data that eventually get hacked, so that some crook can steal money from you. So, you know, let's fight that.

UltraViolet helps you tell Pepsi to stop funding anti-abortion politicians in Texas. Texas, you may recall, passed an anti-abortion law that not only outlaws the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy (before most women even know they're pregnant!), but empowered citizens to sue abortion providers for performing the procedure -- because what is standing to sue, anyway? We just don't know! And Pepsi is yet another corporation that makes noises about "diversity" and "supporting women" but then turns around and forks over $15,000 to the Texas GOP. They claim they support Democratic and Republican politicians, but that isn't the point at-fucking-all: the point is when politicians pass anti-woman legislation, you don't reward them with campaign donations; you shame and shun them. I'll keep explaining this until people with money finally get it.

Finally, the Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell our Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (or FERC) to ban big energy corporations from charging you for the money they shovel to trade associations. This means your electric provider can charge you for the money it uses to join some anti-clean air or anti-clean water trade group, rather than charge their shareholders for those membership dues. You wouldn't want to contribute money to some group that advocates for more pollution, right? No, you would not. But big energy corporations make you do that! And with all the monopolization happening today, you can't switch to an energy provider that doesn't do that as easily as you deserve to. So, no, we shouldn't allow them to do that -- we should empower the consumer to make more decisions that affect them.

Around the table: how we got on the brink of war yet again, and other sad tales.

Puzzled about the buzz over the Ukraine? Bryce Greene at FAIR explains the relevant issues, as well as our "liberal" media's failure to cover them. You won't be surprised to learn that "(t)he backdrop to the 2014 coup (in the Ukraine) and annexation (by Russia, of Crimea) cannot be understood without looking at the U.S. strategy to open Ukrainian markets to foreign investors and give control of its economy to giant multinational corporations." And, guess what, we backed that coup in 2014, and when has doing such a thing ever backfired on us? (Spoiler alert: it's still backfiring on us in Iran!) So, yeah, we helped bollocks all that up, too, and in such a way that our "assistance" would be needed later; couple that with Vladimir Putin's (admittedly quite deserved) unpopularity, and you not only have a "justification" for war, but a stick right-wingers can use to beat Mr. Biden with if he doesn't take us to war. Admittedly the right's love of Mr. Putin is actually getting in the way of them using that stick at present, but in the end, consistency isn't that important to the right.

Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court strikes down state's mail-in voting law as "unconstitutional," though the law will stay in place until the state Supreme Court can hear an appeal. So no, this doesn't mean Donald Trump will be reinstated as President, not just because if he somehow got 20 more electoral votes he still wouldn't have enough to have won the 2020 election, but also because (as our state Supreme Court has already noted) nobody sued and won about this when it would have made a difference. Hilariously, more than a few state legislators who voted for the mail-in law are now suing against its constitutionality! It's like something happened over the last year and a half or so to change their minds so dramatically. (And I do mean "dramatically.")

When I hear that TikTok is a "Time Bomb" "Feeding Us Junk News Non-Stop," I'm reminded that "junk news" is a phrase I've been hearing for at least two decades (and describes a phenomenon that's existed twice as long as that), and that a lot of local newscasts have just given up and paraded a collection of viral videos for years now. I agree that TikTok has so, so much more potential for good, but then again YouTube used to be a lot better for us than it is now, and Twitter certainly never fulfilled its potential. Even Tiktok's algorithms don't seem to be substantially different from other harmful social media (or mainstream media) organs. I guess I was hoping for some new insight, and probably that's my fault.

The headline "Kyrsten Sinema Would Lose 2024 Primary in a Landslide: Poll" actually understates the case a bit. You remember Scott Walker being down five to 10 points in polls to various Democratic challengers less than a year before he won his 2012 recall election? Well, this sure ain't that -- a Data for Progress poll finds her down 58 points, by 74-16, in a hypothetical primary match-up against Rep. Ruben Gallego. Granted, her numbers ain't down that far from just a few months ago, and Ms. Sinema has over a year to recover in the eyes of Arizona Democrats -- if Democrats lose the Senate in 2022, she can make a more compelling case for sticking with her, think that's the plan? -- but a 58-point deficit in a poll like this suggests she'll far more likely be the Joe Lieberman of 2022. She'd appreciate that.

Finally, some good news: our Interior Department has cancelled two mining leases near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, on the grounds that the previous Administration (and stop me if you've heard this one before) didn't do the environmental review required by law and cut our Forest Service out of the decision-making process entirely, also in contravention of the law. The phrase "law and order" leap to mind? It should, or else my life's work has been for nothing. None of this guarantees that the Biden Administration will protect the Boundary Waters on a more permanent basis, but it gives us more of a fighting chance, which is all I ever want. (Only read the whole thing if you're prepared for a mining corporation spokeshack to sound even more moronic than usual.)

Around the table: more thoughts on inflation, monopolies, and entitlement.

On the occasion of Stephen Breyer's retirement from our Supreme Court, Matt Stoller describes just how awful Justice Breyer has been on antitrust issues, which reminds us, if nothing else does, that we esteem Supreme Court Justices perhaps too highly for the harm they don't do. If President Biden (who criticized Justice Breyer's antitrust leanings as "presumptuous and elitist" while in the Senate mulling his nomination) nominates a strong anti-monopolist to replace him, I guess we'll see under what circumstances Manchinema will oppose a Democratic Supreme Court nominee. Not that Mr. Biden shouldn't do it anyway! Exposing those two to daylight again and again and again is far better in the long run than capitulating to them, even in a 50-50 Senate.

Robert Reich also says corporate power plays a huge role in inflation. Perhaps imprecisely, he says supply chain problems cause "most" of the recent price increases, but then says corporations don't have to pass those increases on to customers: "(i)f corporations were competing vigorously against each other, they’d swallow these cost increases in order to keep their prices as low as possible." Too many people throw up their hands and say things like they'll just pass on the increases to the consumer without asking "is that moral, or even practical in the long term?" Mr. Reich goes on to point to specific monopolists causing price hikes, and if you think you spot actual collusion in some of his examples, well, all I can say is Joe Biden appointed antitrust crusaders to key positions and then monopolies raised prices when they didn't really have to.

Amanda Marcotte at Salon blames Trumpism, anti-vax activism, and the crypto crash on "an overblown sense of entitlement" largely on the part of white American men, a sense of entitlement that "leads them to believe they are above having to live with the same social contract that binds the rest of us." And they say liberals can't talk about values! She also explains the real reason people cling to the Big Lie even though it's hardly rational: "(l)ike cryptocurrency or ivermectin, the Big Lie is viewed as a kind of cheat code, a way for Republicans to get their way without having to play by the same rules that constrain everyone else." That's a profound insight, one that builds upon another profound insight of hers, that right-wingers simply don't believe all the BS they spew. Being something of a literalist, I'm still getting my head around that.

Surprise, surprise, Glenn Youngkin begins his term as Virginia Governor pandering to the far-right, barring school mask mandates, workplace vaccine requirements, and critical race theory even though no one teaches that to elementary school kids. I guess today's "conservatives" really don't care about empowering local governments or businesses! This is yet another lesson not to trust a Republican who tries to come off as "moderate" and "reasonable," though really, we shouldn't have needed any more of those lessons after the George W. Bush ascension. I do wonder, though, how many Republican candidates for office in 2022 will bother trying to come off as moderate or reasonable. I mean, I would try to come off like that, if I were evil, but these folks might be bold thinkers.

After Neil Young asks his label and management to remove all his music from Spotify in protest of Joe Rogan's continued presence there, Spotify goes ahead and scrubs his music from their platform. And their spokeshack really spokeshacks it up, claiming they've "removed over 20,000 podcast episodes related to COVID since the start of the pandemic," without noting how many of those episodes actually contained COVID misinfo or noting how many of them have Joe Rogan's market share. Anyway, good for Neil Young! And if you really want to hear Neil Young without/before buying his records, you can always go to YouTube. I hear the new album's pretty outstanding. And the future ain't about making everything easy.

Finally, after President Biden called Fox News's Peter Doocy a "stupid son of a bitch" for asking whether he thought inflation was a "political liability" -- hey, I've called Mr. Doocy worse! -- Rep. Jim Banks (E-IN) actually asked "(h)ave we ever seen a President attack and malign the free press like Joe Biden has?" Ah, yeah, Sherlock, we just saw President Donald Trump attack and malign the press as the "enemy of the people," usually at the top of his lungs, for four fucking years. I haven't banished anyone to oblivion in a while, so how about we never speak of Jim Banks again after today?

Action: concerning whistleblowers, drugs, privacy, police, and our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reform the Espionage Act and pass the Mainstreaming Addiction Treatment Act, the Protecting Data at the Border Act, the People's Response Act, and the Postal Service Reform Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to reform the Espionage Act, so our government can't use it to oppress reporters and whistleblowers. Like him or not, that's what our government is doing to Julian Assange right now, who has hid out in the British Embassy in London for the last dozen years after publishing a slew of government documents that made our government look idiotic, which admittedly isn't very difficult. (The British High Court ruled that our government could extradite him, but he's appealing.) And Mr. Assange ain't the only one: our government convicted drone whistleblower Daniel Hale under the Espionage Act. More than 20 years after the "war on terror" began, we continue to let our government oppress those good citizens who expose governmental wrongdoing. And we must stop that.

Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1384/S. 445, the Mainstreaming Addiction Treatment Act. Currently the FDA-approved drug buprenorphine can cut opioid-related deaths in half, but folks who need it face obstacles they can't do anything about, because our laws limit how many patients a doctor can treat and force them to jump through unnecessary bureaucratic hoops; the Mainstreaming Addiction Treatment Act would remove these barriers. Buprenorphine is itself a narcotic, which is why our government put these obstacles up in the first place, and folks do get high with it, but the bill doesn't hand the drug out on the corner, but allows doctors to dispense it more easily. Seems to me I'd put up with the small potential for abuse if I knew I could keep more good Americans from dying, and give them a chance at a better life.

Restore the Fourth helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5524/S. 2957, the Protecting Our Data at the Border Act, which would, as its title suggests, limit our government's ability to access your personal data at the border. The bill would require that our government get a warrant for that info -- warrants, how quaint! -- and it would also prevent our government from simply denying you entry (or delaying your entry for more than four hours) simply because you've refused to hand over your personal data without a warrant. Plus our government would have to destroy any data seized in violation of the bill (and your rights). The bill provides other protections as well, and we deserve them. It's simple: if they want to investigate us, they have to get a warrant. That's only worked for hundreds of years.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4194, the People's Response Act. If you've heard this is a "defund the police" bill, tell folks it's not -- it's a bill that stops using police like Swiss Army knives, demanding anything and everything of them rather than sending people to deal with problems (like mental health and drug addiction issues) that they're actually trained to deal with. The bill would establish grants so that local governments can create better approaches to these issues, and it would give the folks most impacted by these issues a bigger voice in the creation of these approaches. Police shootings went down 13% in 2021, and cities like Orlando that stopped sending police to deal with mental health issues helped drive that change. It's the kind of change we could make happen all over America, if we but have the will.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3076, the Postal Service Reform Act. You may have heard that our USPS Board of Governors held an "emergency meeting" to install a pro-DeJoy Chair, not long after postal workers demanded Mr. DeJoy's removal as Postmaster General. Frankly I suspect a lawsuit will discover that the Board can't produce the "emergent" situation that "required" the meeting, but in the meantime, how about we pass a bill that'll actually solve the service issues Mr. DeJoy is making worse? All of our Postal Service's financial problems stem from being forced to prepay retirement benefits 80 years in advance; the Postal Service Reform Act would repeal that mandate. And then, to quote a famous philosopher, problem solved! If we have the will, that is.

Around the table: when the ox climbs to the palace, he does not become a king, but the palace becomes a barn.

Turkish government arrests journalist Sedef Kabas for the heinous crime of insulting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, apparently for citing a proverb that goes like this: "(w)hen the ox climbs to the palace, he does not become a king, but the palace becomes a barn." I've said far worse about Mr. Erdogan, though nothing nearly as clever. As you contemplate the fact that Turkey has jailed over 12,000 good Turks for "insulting the President," remember that Donald Trump admired Mr. Erdogan and wished he could be more like him. What a pair of snowflakes.

When I hear that a health care corporation actually went to court to keep seven workers from taking a job at another hospital -- and actually succeeded for a few days! -- I am tempted to respond, where are all the free marketeers now? I mean, these workers were at-will workers, meaning they had no contract stipulating an end date for employment, plus their employer could fire them whenever it liked, but I've heard nothing from the "free" market crowd about how if you want workers to stay at your hospital, maybe you should treat them better. I kid, of course -- "free" marketeers only care about corporations, not people.

"It's Quite a Country When Mark Cuban, Not Congress, Will Give Americans Cheaper Prescription Drugs," announces Grace McDermott at Deadspin. Mr. Cuban's effort -- which will buy 100 generic drugs straight from manufacturers and offer them directly to the public at a 15% markup over cost -- won't take insurance, and if a drug doesn't have a generic yet you're still SOL, and let's be clear that Mr. Cuban's operation is a pharmacy benefit manager (or PBM), and though it may be cutting better deals now it could one day be exactly as corrupt as all the others. But yeah, Mark Cuban is better than Kyrsten Sinema and Bob Menendez and 50 Senate Republicans, though this is not a high bar to clear.

How does one react to the news that right-wing podcaster Joe Rogan has attacked right-wing Twitter wannabe Gettr for artificially boosting his follower count? That right-wingers fighting each other equals drama, and the point of drama is always to distract us from fighting them. Every once in a while we need to remind each other of that; in the meantime, this particular clown car can ride straight to hell.

Ho hum, big corporations criticize vote suppression laws at the state level, but still donate to the politicians who make these laws. I've just thought of another reason why "we support these politicians for economic reasons" is a ridiculous argument: because America is full of people who want more fame/status/power/money, and it shouldn't be that hard for these corporations to find different politicians to support -- especially in the South, where right-wingers grow on trees.

Finally, former President Trump whines about the House January 6 panel after they ask to question his daughter, saying "(t)hey're using these things to try and get people's minds off how incompetently our country is being run. And they don't care. They'll go after children." Last I looked, Ivanka Trump was not actually a child, but a 40-year-old woman. Of course, Mr. Trump doesn't say or do anything without having a purpose, and his purpose here, I think, is to deploy the phrase "(t)hey'll go after children" so he can remind QAnon votaries to love him.

Action: concerning Congressional intransigence, bad media, free tax preparation, and pollution.

Long story short: tell President Biden to get with the Executive Orders already, tell all the other cable corporations to keep OAN out of their lineups, tell Spotify to eject Joe Rogan from its service, tell our IRS to make tax filing free for all Americans, and tell the Biden Administration to protect the Chaco Canyon area from fossil fuel drilling. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell President Biden to make 2022 "the year of Executive actions." Sure, right-wingers will cry tyranny whenever he does something the law already allows him to do, but right-wingers cry tyranny every time a liberal disagrees with them, and do they remember our last President? The one who openly admired dictators and constantly joked about how he wished he had their powers? Anyway, the federal firefighters now making $15/hour won't consider their raises an example of "tyranny," and if good Americans can get cheaper prescription drugs and cleaner air and less student loan debt, they won't bemoan that we didn't wait until we got permission from Joe Manchin to get it done, either. Seriously, do good works and people will appreciate it.

You've heard that DirecTV is kicking the nefarious One America News Network (or OAN, or OANN, who cares?) off its lineup this spring, so now MoveOn helps you call Verizon at 1.844.329.6087 and tell them to do the same, and MoveOn also helps you find phone numbers for corporations like Xfinity, Dish, and Spectrum at this website, so you can tell them to keep OAN out of their lineups. OAN doesn't have a constitutional right to a place in cable corporation offerings, for many reasons: 1) it's a thing, and things don't have rights, 2) if OAN were a person, our First Amendment would only protect it from our government -- not from employers, not from customers, and not from activists. When we hear that OAN might not be able to promulgate more 2020 election lies without DirecTV's support, all we can say is: we can only hope!

UltraViolet helps you tell Spotify to get rid of the so-called "Joe Rogan Experience" already. Mr. Rogan's anti-vax nonsense no doubt violates Spotify's own ban on COVID misinformation, but he's also a franchise dealer of other kinds of bullshit, among them white supremacy, xenophobia, and transphobia. Mr. Rogan no doubt imagines himself a free speech martyr, all while trying to deflect criticism by suggesting you shouldn't really take him all that seriously, and no doubt he also imagines that anyone who disagrees with him is trying to censor him; all I can say about all of that is, yes, I also remember being a hormone-addled 15-year-old boy who aspired to the purest cynicism. But I became a man, and put away childish things. And we have no obligation, as a civilization, to enable those who don't -- let alone pay them $100 million a year.

Demand Progress helps you tell our government to offer tax-filing services for free, for everyone. It does seem more than a little absurd that in the richest nation on Earth you generally pay someone to do your taxes, does it not? Actually, our laws obligate our IRS to provide a free tax filing option -- but for the last 20 years our IRS has, er, partnered with private tax prep corporations Intel (which owns TurboTax) and H&R Block, which have, for their part, gone very far out of their way to obscure their free tax prep services even from Google searches. Both corporations have lately dropped out of this program, so what's the holdup? Is our IRS looking for yet another private tax prep corporation to do their job for them? Don't they get that privatization, including "public-private partnerships," means higher prices?

Finally, Pew Environmental Trusts helps you tell Interior Secretary Haaland to protect New Mexico's Chaco Canyon area from gas and oil drilling. The Biden Administration has lately advanced a fairly solid proposal for the Chaco area that would ban new oil and gas drilling leases on all public lands within a ten-mile radius of the Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico for the next 20 years, a ban praised by the All Pueblo Council of Governors, which represents 20 Pueblo nations in Texas and New Mexico. Of course, at my age, 20-year bans don't seem so imposing anymore -- the 20-year moratorium former Interior Secretary Salazar imposed on uranium mining in the Grand Canyon area is now more than halfway over -- but a 20-year ban can more easily turn into a permanent ban than, say, a zero-year ban. And renewables have gotten a lot cheaper over the last 20 years.

UPDATE. Common Cause also helps you tell AT&T to cut all ties with One America News. AT&T owns about two-thirds of DirecTV, but AT&T money put OAN on the map in the first place, so let's, as they say, starve the beast.

Around the table: Joe Manchin is wrong, wrong, wrong! And other, less obvious observations.

The Lancet says the COVID-19 pandemic may end as soon as March -- given that by then a "large proportion of the world will have been infected with the omicron variant" -- and though of course the coronavirus will stay with us, it won't wreck our lives as badly. "The impacts of future SARS-CoV-2 transmission on health," they write, "will be less because of broad previous exposure to the virus, regularly adapted vaccines to new antigens or variants, the advent of antivirals, and the knowledge that the vulnerable can protect themselves during future waves when needed by using high-quality masks and physical distancing." I figure a two hundred year-old medical journal probably knows better than I do, and definitely knows better than any five dozen internet "influencers" one could name.

The Kansas government wants state legislators to approve a $4 billion slab of corporate welfare so it doesn't lose out on a big project -- but offers scant details. A lot of state legislators are acting like they have no choice but to pass the legislation, so that Kansas doesn't "lose out" on big corporate facilities, but if they're acting like hostages, that's a sign they can't win the argument on the merits. Also, too, if it looks like dung, and it smells like dung, you don't have to taste it just because the Kansas state government says it's meatloaf. Looking for a more politically pragmatic argument? Look up "Foxconn" and "the end of Scott Walker's career as Wisconsin Governor."

When I hear that a supermajority of Americans do not want our Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, I'm reminded that I think the American people are actually pretty wise -- just like I am whenever I confront polling about Medicare-for-All and raising taxes on the rich. I know a lot of smart folks who disagree with me about that, and I don't really blame them, since our media constantly push the worst people in America in our faces until we forget all the good folks we know. It's really our media's fault that people watch Tucker Carlson and listen to Joe Rogan; the notion that they're somehow the best American civilization has to offer is a profoundly offensive notion.

When I hear that Joe Manchin says he's ready to start a big spending bill from scratch and will talk with anyone who'll listen, I wonder how many good Americans still want to talk to Joe Manchin. I mean, he led us on for eight months on Build Back Better, so I don't know why any sane and rational person would trust him now. Is he going to spend another eight or ten months making demand after demand and then, after Democrats give in to all of them, suddenly throw up his hands at some imagined slight and say I've tried but I just can't get to yes? It's a question worth asking! And it's also a question worth answering in the affirmative, so we don't waste all of 2022 like we wasted all of 2021. He needs to be shamed and shunned, just like Kyrsten Sinema does, and that's true even though we can all count to 50.

I've also got a bone to pick with Mr. Manchin's suggestion that he does what he does because the rural folks he represents are so much different from urban folks. I mean, even if his constituents would rather hold hands and pitch woo than make a party out of loving, that doesn't mean they turn up their nose at paid family leave and a Child Tax Credit expansion like he does. Polling also tells us that rural folks, even the ones who identify as conservative, like a lot of liberal policy initiatives, like Medicare-for-all, taxpayer-funded community college, and treating-not-imprisoning drug addicts. So folks like Joe Manchin are just pretending they're speaking for them, and what is that, class? Drama, that's what, and not particularly good drama at that.

Finally, suggesting Black folks aren't American wasn't actually the stupidest thing Mitch McConnell's said lately -- the stupidest thing he's said lately was when he responded to a question about what a Republican majority would prioritize with "(t)hat is a very good question, and I'll let you know when we take (the majority) back.". So the party that makes such a drama about hating post-modernism acts awfully post-modern; what a surprise! Look, here's what they're going to do: they're going to yell and scream about crime and vaccine mandates and critical race theory, and while you're watch that, they're going to try to cut taxes on the rich, outlaw class-action lawsuits, cripple Medicaid, privatize Medicare and Social Security, and defund all the parts of government that still help good Americans. They're sure as hell not going to run that ad! Sadly, Democrats won't, either, because it'd be uncivil.

Action: concerning gerrymandering, public water, tax cuts for working families, the war on Yemen, and women's health.

Long story short: tell your Pennsylvania state legislators to reject pro-gerrymandering bills and pass an anti-privatization bill, tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion, tell President Biden to get us out of the war on Yemen for-real for-real, and tell your Senators to pass the Women's Health Protection Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. Pennsylvania residents, take note: Fair Districts PA advises that you call your state legislators and tell them to reject both HB 38 and HB 2207. We've dealt with HB 38 before; it would make state judicial elections regional, which is essentially a way of gerrymandering state judicial elections, and given that our state Supreme Court consists of mostly Democrats at this moment, it wouldn't be untoward to call HB 38 a sore loser bill. For that matter, calling HB 2207 the same wouldn't be untoward; HB 2207 would replace the state's current, relatively objective redistricting commission with a brand new commission more beholden to the political party in control of the state legislature, which just so happens to be the Republicans. I call this a sore loser bill because Republicans lost to the express will of virtually every good Pennsylvanian that gerrymandering sucks and the politicians need to stop doing it. That's why we need to keep communicating our will.

Staying in the Keystone State, Sum of Us helps you tell your PA state legislator to vote "yea" on HB 527, a bill that would make privatizing public water in Pennsylvania much, much harder. Let me be the bajillionth person to tell you that my water bill has gone up noticeably since I went from a public water system to a privatized one. They say privatizing public works saves the public money, but no one who actually pays a bill believes that rubbish. Mainly privatization allows certain corporate executives to make more money without getting the necessary oversight by our government, which means it's what? That's right, it's yet another scheme that redistributes your hard-earned money upward. The politicians will keep doing that again and again and again, unless we step up and say no. It's that simple.

Today's also as good a day as any to call your Congressfolk and tell them to reinstate the expired Child Tax Credit expansion, which put $250 and $300 checks in the bank accounts of working families for the last six months of 2021. I haven't said this enough, but those checks were per child, meaning a single mom with four children could get as much as $1200 extra per month. So what do people use that money for? According to its recipients, they used it to buy groceries, pay the bills, buy clothes, buy school supplies, and the like. But according to the Penguin, who helped Republicans kill the expansion last month, they used it on drugs! Maybe some moms should show up at Joe Manchin's yacht with their kids in tow so he can explain to them why he blocked extending the CTC expansion!

Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to end all American support for the ongoing Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. Mr. Biden has made a lot of positive noises about ending our involvement in Yemen, but hasn't taken a whole lot of positive action, which is a lot more important. We're still giving the effort our intelligence and our logistical support, which shouldn't ease the conscience of anyone who's taking part in these efforts, and we're still selling weapons which wind up getting used there. This war, you'll recall, has pushed Yemen to the brink of famine and deprived us of some of the world's best fighters against al-Qaeda, and Congress has authorized none of that. And can you understand the arcane reasons the Saudi/UAE coalition is waging war on Yemen in the first place? If so, you may be the only one!

Finally, Moms Rising helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women's Health Protection Act. You may have noticed that not one but two cases currently before our Supreme Court could result in our Court overturning the Roe v. Wade ruling that prevents states from making abortion illegal. No, don't count on Chief Justice Roberts to swing enough justices in the direction of "precedent" and "settled law"; he's more likely been waiting for a big enough right-wing majority on the Court to come along so he can get his way and still look like a precedent-respecting jurist. We can avoid all this drama if our Senate passes the Women's Health Protection Act and enshrines abortion protections in federal law. Nobody wants to see a fetus aborted, but the alternative is turning women into breeders again, and we can't accept that.

Around the table: the stupid, it burns!

Good news, everyone! President Biden signs executive order raising the minimum wage to $15/hour for around 70,000 federal workers. This should be an easy sell for President Biden; the workers affected include firefighters and Veterans Administration housekeepers and food service workers. Then again, giving tens of millions more good Americans $15/hour should have been an easy sell for Congressional Democrats; instead, the enduring image we'll have of that effort is that of the Joker's giddy thumbs-down.

The Biden Administration has also put out an unexpectedly strong rule clamping down on surprise medical bills -- but Democrats and Republicans are joining together to try to undermine it. Bipartisanship! It still sucks! They're acting like the Biden Administration overstepped its legal authority in mandating that insurance corporations and health care providers use median in-network rates for procedures to settle billing disputes, but really they're just mad that TEH GUBMINT IZ SETTINGZ TEH PRICEZ!!!!! Some people say the words "price controls" like they're cuss words, but I bet a lot of Americans would be perfectly happy with our government forcing big corporations to lower health care prices.

Students have been walking out of their abjectly unsafe schools all over America the past few weeks, and I applaud these kids' courage, but I wish it weren't necessary. It's one thing to justify President Biden's relative inaction by pointing to "American individualism" or even the tantrums right-wingers have thrown about masks and vaccine mandates, but fact is he hasn't used all the tools the law already grants him -- you'd think he'd at least use the Defense Production Act to make masks and tests, and while I know Joe Manchin killed both expanded unemployment benefits and paid sick leave, Joe Biden could have argued for them as part of a real pandemic response. He'll wind up having done better at this than Donald Trump, but that sure ain't worth writing home about.

When I hear that the big car corporations are trying to delay Massachusetts' new right-to-repair law for a few years -- a law which would, among other things, keep the big automakers from essentially dictating to you where you can get your car fixed -- all I can say is the law already gave the big automakers two years to start complying with it, and I have to assume that the problem isn't that it's so hard to comply with the law (this is America, the can-do country, after all), but that the big corporations sat on their asses for two years and didn't even try to get ready to comply with the law, and that's something no law-and-order adherent should abide.

Senate Republicans filibustered voting rights legislation last week -- with the critical assistance of the Penguin and the Joker, who wouldn't even force Republicans to earn their filibuster by talking through it like they did in the old days -- but you wouldn't know it from all the passive voice our "liberal" media uses in its headlines. But I'll be honest: when I see our "liberal" media deciding to focus on "Democratic infighting" as if literally half of our Senate didn't block the bill, I realize that I need this reminder, too. Yeah, Manchinema is a persistent annoyance, and their careers as Senators will suffer for it, but I'll try to do a better job not simply ignoring the obstruction of Republicans, since, you know, they could just do their constituents' will and vote for the damn bills.

Finally, of course Mitch McConnell knew exactly what he was saying when he said we don't need voting rights reforms because "African-American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans." He meant for Trumpholes to hear him say Black folks aren't "real" Americans, and he also knew a lot of folks would defend him on the basis of what he obviously "meant." At some point, though, you can really only trust what folks actually say. And not for nothing, but his subsequent defenses have been lame -- anyone can say they've got Black friends, too.

Around the table: blows against monopoly power! And other developments.

It's a pretty crap moment for good Americans right now, but Matt Stoller sees hope in eight developments against monopoly power in America. Maybe you won't think it's all that impressive that a judge failed to dismiss an antitrust case against Facebook or that a judge found an individual (the hated Martin Shkreli) guilty of violating antitrust laws or that the Biden Administration has made more progress against hated pharmacy benefit managers than any other Administration, but these are all big deals, and not just because we've been banging our heads against a wall for so long. (If you ask me, not that you would, big corporations have been stoking the flames of inflation as a retaliation against the Biden Administration's anti-monopoly push. I can't prove that, of course, but I'd feel like a schmuck if I didn't at least think it probable.)

Surprise, surprise, many nurses tell us that hospitals are so short on staff these days because for-profit health care corporations deliberately keep their staffing levels low, so as to redistribute more worker income upward to executives. Strangely, they do not typically report that staffing levels are low because of TEH VACCINEZ MANDATEZ!!!!, like Tucker Carlson said many months ago. But then, right-wingers only listen to nurses when they tell them what they want to hear. (As for California's single-payer health insurance push: no one would be happier than I to see that happen, but they've done this dance before. Perhaps the good folks of California can help rectify that situation.)

When I hear that a peer-reviewed study has found that upwards of three compounds in the marijuana plant have stopped COVID molecules from entering human cells in the lab, my first thought was that of course we would have known this sooner if it weren't so infernally difficult to research marijuana in the first place! Those of you who are able to toke without going to jail should know that smoking it is about the worst way to get these helpful effects -- the three compounds in question degrade at high temperatures, so better to take them in pills. More study will be needed, and Joe Biden could help that along by removing marijuana from Schedule I, but he won't do that, though I'll be damned if he ever explains why.

Excavations in Peru have suggested that an ancient indigenous people called the Wari actually spiked their beer with hallucinogens in order to make peace with neighboring communities. The Wari appear to have enjoyed several centuries of peace and prosperity while doing this; meanwhile, America has a serious problem with rage-filled right-wingers bollocksing up everything good we try to do, and perhaps these points taken in tandem should compel us to conclude that the "war on drugs" is lousy idea. Also, as Sam Kinison used to say, give us the pot, and we won't want the crack.

When I hear that Mitch McConnell has threatened the Democrats with retaliation if they even try to reform the filibuster so they can pass voting rights legislation, all I can say is waaaaaaaaaah. Republicans will always throw a tantrum about something, and it doesn't matter what it is. But this is what happens, Democrats, when you constantly give in to bullies -- the bullies keep taking and taking and taking, and any action becomes a slight, and thus a reason to keep taking. Meanwhile the American people only get more and more hurt. I do not know what will make Democrats learn. Defeat at the polls certainly doesn't.

Finally, the Penguin says he won't support a Democratic proposal to make the filibuster a "talking filibuster" -- you know, where you'd actually have to hold the floor and read the phone book to keep it going -- to get voting rights bills passed. This may come as a surprise to you if you recall the Penguin himself floating the idea of making the filibuster a "talking filibuster" early last year -- but it will not come as a surprise to you if you've come to regard him as a bad-faith negotiator, whether that's because he's simply a drama hound or because he's a vital part of a Democrat plan to throw the 2022 Congressional elections in the hopes Joe Biden will be re-elected more easily in 2024. Right about now would be a good time for me to say that, in the end, they don't matter, we matter.

Action: concerning drug prices, clean water, animal abuse, public lands, and family separation.

Long story short: tell our Department of Health and Human Services to allow generic manufacturing of an overly-expensive cancer drug, tell our EPA to get the lead out of our drinking water, tell Facebook to stop allowing illegal endangered wildlife sales, tell our government to keep copper miners out of the Boundary Waters Wilderness, and tell our Department of Homeland Security to reunite families separated at the border. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Social Security Works helps you tell HHS Secretary Becerra to permit generic manufacturing of Xtandi, which its manufacturer currently sells for $400 a pill -- in America, at least! In other nations (including Japan, where Xtandi's manufacturer, Astellas Pharma, has its headquarters), it "only" charges about one-fifth of that, and I put "only" in quotation marks because that's still $80 a pill; allowing a generic of Xtandi would likely cut that price to $3. And our HHS can do that, using the "march-in" rights granted by the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act; most of us would say that our government should take control of a drug if the corporation that manufactures it is charging us an arm and a leg for it. I think we would say that even if Mitch McConnell calls it "socialism" or "communism." So let's do it.

Penn PIRG helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to get the lead out of our drinking water. Just so happens our EPA is mulling this very thing, and for good reason -- basically any exposure to lead also exposes you to brain damage (and the developmental problems that come with it), and the American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended a standard of less than one part lead per billion. Yes, that infrastructure bill provides a lot of funding for removing lead pipes, but you would hate for that money to get wasted in the wrong places just because some Congressperson or other had an outsized influence on the matter; if our EPA can contribute solid research telling us where the most lead pipes are, for example, that would help forestall such a tragedy. Wasted money here will be wasted life.

Avaaz helps you tell Facebook to ban sales of illegal endangered wildlife species on its platform. Or, as they put it, "make the illegal wildlife trade extinct" -- which spells MIWTE, so we won't think of putting that on a red hat, but still, it's a worthwhile goal for a civilized people. As we speak, only 7,000 cheetas exist in the wild, but unsavory types have sold over 4,000 more on Facebook! Don't succumb to the temptation to feel sorry for Facebook -- just like most evil people, their whole M.O. is to stoke drama, and if they can get attention for promising to make it better just like every wife-beater does when they're cornered, all the better. Still, the Big Stick of Bad PR can save lives here -- if we but wield it against Facebook. Saying most people oppose animal abuse wouldn't be a reach.

Both Environmental Action and MoveOn help you tell our Bureau of Land Management to protect the famous Boundary Waters Wilderness from copper mining. Copper's an intensely useful mineral -- if our hospital tabletops were still made of copper, we might have had a much easier time with this pandemic! -- but if you get a finite amount of a useful material by permanently damaging an otherwise renewable resource, then you're doing resource management wrong. And the Boundary Waters Wilderness -- so named because it straddles the border between Ontario and Minnesota -- contains over a thousand lakes and over a thousand miles of rivers and streams, and covering as it does around 1,700 square miles (an area bigger than Rhode Island), when pollution gets in one area, it's going to get to the others. We'd want to prevent that.

Finally, the ACLU helps you tell our Department of Homeland Security to reunite families separated at the border. You can amend the ACLU's comment tool as you see fit, but certainly we should demand that the Biden Administration reunify separated families and give them the due process they deserve -- which includes counseling for their suffering and accountability for those who caused it. Family separation was Trump Administration policy, but it's now the Biden Administration's problem to fix, and they ain't going as fast as justice demands. Luckily they're asking the American people to fix it for them, and I'm sure a few rage-heads will write comments I'd prefer not to contemplate, but I suspect the vast majority of Americans don't want families separated no matter where they're from. We were all from somewhere else once, after all.

Action: concerning voting rights, tax cuts for working families, saving our Post Office, worker safety, and gouging prisoners.

Long story short: tell your Senators to pass voting rights legislation and extend the Child Tax Credit expansion, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Postal Service Reform Act, the Asunción Valdivia Heat Illness and Fatality Prevention Act, and the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Today's as good a day as any to call your Senators and tell them to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Yeah, we know how they're going to vote -- the Penguin and the Joker won't let Democrats modify the filibuster so Republicans can't just stamp their feet and say no, and then Republicans will filibuster the bills -- even though they'll actually vote to keep debate going and then promptly end debate, because that's how the filibuster has worked for over 40 years -- but duty is duty, and putting them on the record as opposing the people's will multiple times has utility. If you can reach a live person at your Senators' offices, you can ask how many calls they've gotten about this matter and how they break down. The results may be interesting!

Citizens for Tax Justice helps you tell your Senators to extend the Child Tax Credit expansion. This'll be a phone call, so you can piggyback this alert onto the back of the voting rights alert above. January 15 just went by with no $250 or $300 checks for working families for the first time in six months, and I can't imagine working families all over America didn't notice. We've got the Penguin to blame for this one -- he didn't want to extend it in the Build Back Better Act, because, according to him -- or, more likely, his CEO pals -- people use those checks to buy drugs. Drugs! Not, you know, food or clothing or back to school supplies. Anyway, what happened to conservatives trusting people? You might conclude that when right-wingers say they "trust people," they actually mean they only trust rich bosses.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3076, the Postal Service Reform Act. You recall how virtually all of our Postal Service's financial troubles stem from a 2006 Congressional mandate to pre-fund its retiree benefits 80 years in advance? When you consider literally no other private or public entity has to follow such a mandate, you might almost think Congress sabotaged our Postal Service -- which meant it was just a matter of time someone like Louis DeJoy came along and said emergency! We have to cut services and raise prices just to stay alive! The Postal Service Reform Act would repeal this mandate, and therefore also the rationale for making our Postal Service run badly. Hey, it's our Postal Service, so we deserve better.

The Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2193/S. 1068, the Asunción Valdivia Heat Illness and Fatality Prevention Act. This bill -- named for a farmworker who died after working 10 hours in 105-degree heat -- would mandate that our Occupational Safety and Health Administration (or OSHA) create a worker safety standard that would protect our workers from heat-related illnesses and injuries, meaning folks who work outside would get access to rest and shade. Don't brook any nonsense about how we don't have to care because it's only Those People who work in conditions like that, not just because that would be cruel, but also because in a few short years it won't even be true if climate change keeps working its will. Welcome to Chapter 244 of "Compassion Is Pragmatic."

Finally, Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2489, the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act. As you know, big telecoms charge prisoners and their families a lot of money just so they can stay in contact, which means a lot of folks just give up because of the expense, which also means these prisoners are more likely to go back to jail. The Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act would authorize our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to cap phone rates for prisoners (more than they're currently doing, surely!) and would also outlaw "site commissions," which are basically kickbacks big telecoms pay to prisons (and which some states actually mandate by law, if you can believe it). And remember: civilized people aren't cruel to the weak, and we certainly don't gouge prisoners.

Around the table: in which we contemplate the *real* Dr. King, among other matters.

On this, the day after we celebrate the birth of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., we should consider, as Michael Harriot does at The Guardian, how the real Dr. King would be received by today's America. Of course, Dr. King's approval ratings with whites were underwater every day of his life, and a lot of folks who venerate him today would have claimed the Fair Housing Act "went too far" in the '60s, but Dr. King also vocally fought police brutality whereas too many of today's Americans respond to yet another police killing of a Black man for brandishing a cellphone with I SUPPORTZ TEH POLICEZ!!!! He also railed against poverty and the Vietnam War, to which too many folks back then responded we gave them the vote; what more do they want? And they'd respond the same way today.

And now perhaps the best headline of 2022 so far, from Janine Jackson at FAIR: "Elite Media Remember Lani Guinier as 'Embattled' — and Forget How They Battled Her." You may remember Ms. Guinier, who passed on January 8, as the Clinton nominee who voiced "extreme" opinions about voting, redistricting, and affirmative action; if you do not remember her as the first Black woman to get tenure at Harvard, for example, that may be because our "liberal" media repeated all the right-wing whining about her 1993 nomination to head our Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division, only evaluating her writings more honestly after the drama prompted President Clinton to withdraw the nomination. (And I suspect he nominated her more to help create all that drama than solve problems in America, but Ms. Guinier would probably disagree with me.)

I've blamed the unvaccinated in America for most of the problems we're facing today, but Sarah Lazare at In These Times suggests that blaming the unvaccinated may be a way of failing to blame the Biden Administration for its leadership failures, such as failing to overcome intellectual property barriers in getting vaccines out to the rest of the world, which will allow new COVID variants to flourish, and failing to extend safety net programs (like hazard pay for those we all call "essential" workers!) that help a civilization endure a pandemic. And yet I can't stop blaming those folks who remain unvaccinated because they're still throwing their tantrums about Joe Biden winning the 2020 election. I remember how many vaccine slots were open in red states this past summer, and while I wouldn't expect poor folks from blue states to be able to scarf those up, I still think we should expend some effort blaming and shaming those close to us who have failed us.

Good news: DirecTV will stop carrying the so-called One America News (or OAN) network when their contract expires in April. AT&T is still OAN's sugar daddy, and Verizon FIOS still carries OAN, and all the cable corporations still carry the Fox News Channel, so we have more work to do to Make America Less Toxic Again (hey, that spells an actual word! Ring my promoter!), but we should celebrate our successes as we achieve them, and even though we hear that DirecTV wants to provide fewer offerings as a way to offer lower prices and compete with streaming services, this success definitely belongs to us.

Did Mike Pence really compare Democratic efforts to end the filibuster with the January 6 attempted coup? Yes, Virginia, he did, in that they are both "tragic." For Mr. Pence, of course, voter fraud is a real thing, and not just a slab of racist booga-booga Republicans always trot out because they don't have any ideas worth sharing. Even worse, state efforts to curb mail-in ballots are, for Mr. Pence, "common sense" reforms, even if they're not the "common sense" reforms he'll actually enumerate -- or, indeed, are not actually "common sense" in a world where Colorado has run its elections entirely through the mail for years.

Finally, swing-district Democrats want to break up the Build Back Better Act into elements that might pass because they're so popular, and that's not a bad strategy! They mention "curbing prescription drug costs and extending the child tax credit," and though they didn't say "let Medicare negotiate drug prices" and "extend the CTC expansion that was plopping $250 checks in millions of bank accounts every month," I would find it profoundly useful to force votes on these individual initiatives -- plus paid family medical leave, though the swingsters didn't mention that, apparently. And even though all of these bills will die in our Senate (unless they decide to pass them under reconciliation rules), at least then we can all see, once again, exactly which Senators are creating all the drama. Put these folks on the spot again and again and again until they yield, that's what I say.

Action: concerning solar power, voting rights, protecting democracy, corruption, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell Florida's legislators to reject an anti-solar power bill, tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Vote Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and the Protecting Our Democracy Act, tell your Congressfolk to ban stock trading by members of Congress, and tell your Senators to confirm nominees to our MSPB and our FCC. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. The Florida state legislature is mulling a bill that would cut rebates by utility corporations to solar power users, which would slow solar development in Florida, almost like that's the whole idea. And apparently it is, in fact, the idea of Florida Power and Light, which stands with state legislators against just about the entire rest of the state in favor of this absurd policy. Seriously, when only one corporation benefits from a bill, isn't that enough reason to oppose it? Let's help put a stake through this bill's heart, by calling House Speaker Chris Sprowls at (850) 717-5065, Senate President Wilton Simpson at (850) 487-5010, and Gov. Ron DeSantis at (850) 717-9337. Yeah, I know, he doesn't care what you think. Tell him anyway.

Hazmat America helps you tell your Senators to end the filibuster and pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Why? Because they'd deal body-blows to gerrymandering, campaign finance bribery, and racist vote suppression, that's why. And yeah, I know the Penguin and the Joker said they wouldn't kill the filibuster in order to pass bills they supposedly both support very fervently, but Common Cause helps you call voters in West Virginia and Arizona and urge them to call Sens. Manchin and Sinema to tell them to kill the filibuster in order to pass these bills. Yeah, I know Sen. Sinema gave this big, long speech on the Senate floor that professed her deep and abiding love for these bills she won't nix the filibuster to pass, but as a famous philosopher once said, everything before the "but" is bullshit. If we can't move them, we have to humiliate them.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5314, the Protecting Our Democracy Act. The bill would, as you know, keep future Presidents from profiting from their office, abusing their pardon power, declaring "national emergencies" whenever they feel a sad, and firing Inspectors General for actually stopping corruption, and if this all seems a little like closing the barn door after the horses have run out, it's not, because the guy who did all those things stands a good chance of running again and winning in 2024, and if he does he'll do all of this again, and worse. If Republicans are shouting in your ear that this is a "Democrat bill," read that list of things the bill would do again. Those aren't "Democrat things," they're American things.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban stock trading. The bill currently before Congress -- H.R. 1579/S. 564, the Ban Conflicted Trading Act -- would mostly prohibit stock trading by members of Congress, but Sen. Ossoff (D-GA) plans to introduce a bill that would prohibit stock trading by members of Congress and their spouses, since a lot of Congressfolk just so happen to have husbands and wives who make a lot of money trading stock. Think these couples never discuss Congressional oversight? Don't be like Nancy Pelosi and retort that this is a free market, because Congressfolk oversee big corporations as part of their job, and should avoid not just corruption, but the appearance of corruption. And so should their spouses! Hey, no one put a gun to their heads and told them to get married.

The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Senators to confirm three qualified nominees to the Merit Systems Protection Board, which helps protect federal employees from retaliation by their bosses. Or it would, if it had any members! That's right, the Trump Administration let the MSPB function without a quorum during its entire tenure, virtually guaranteeing that any federal employee who, say, dimed out corruption by their higher-ups would have virtually no recourse against retaliation by those higher-ups. Like, say, President Trump himself! Remember that when the Steve Bannon-types talk about "dismantling the administrative state," they mean to dismantle that part of the administrative state that fights corruption and protects good Americans from being stomped on by powerful people.

Finally, upon hearing that big telecom corporations are actively trying to sink the Gigi Sohn nomination to our FCC -- couldn't be because she fights for net neutrality, could it? -- Free Press suggests we call Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell (D-WA) at 202.224.3441 and tell her to call a vote on Ms. Sohn's nomination before the end of the month. Free Press also helps you tell your Senators to support the Sohn nomination. Sadly, the reason that vote hasn't happened yet may well be Kyrsten Sinema, who has come out against net neutrality in the past, because bipartisanship maverick independent streak getting to yes. Of course the whole point of democracy isn't getting Republican bullies to yes, but getting Americans to yes, which Ms. Sohn -- through her support of internet freedom for you, not for big corporations -- has already done. Odd how politicians burnish their "bipartisan" bona fides by opposing things Americans actually want -- things that actually prove that real bipartisanship is possible in America. And when I say "odd" I mean "so stupid it's boring."

Around the table: why have COVID guidelines become so confusing? The answer may surprise you!

Matt Stoller breaks down the price-fixing lawsuit against 16 elite American hedge funds with universities attached universities. The suit's key allegation: these universities (which include a lot of Ivy League schools) violated "need-blind" admission policies by considering admission for children of rich folks who might have donated to them if they accepted their kids, which surely ain't a "need-blind" process, since those slots going to rich kids are, each of them, keeping someone less financially secure (but probably more talented!) out. Also, "when universities move away from the consensus methodology for calculating the cost of college" -- a methodology you might also call "price-fixing," and maybe even collusion -- "the price they charge goes down." And folks who whine about affirmative action when it helps Black and Brown folks might want to train more of their ire on "legacy admissions," i.e., rich kids getting into their dad's school. You know, like George W. Bush.

I'm a bit puzzled to read that "COVID's Latest Surge Spreads an Epidemic of Confusion," because all the "conflicting advice and clashing guidelines coming from government, science, health, media and other institutions" has one obvious cause: big corporations want their workers back to work. That's why we quarantine for five days instead of two weeks and schools rush to re-open -- if parents are home with their kids, they can't make money for the bossman. Anyway, it's not like the information we had at the beginning didn't shift. And no, I feel no solidarity with right-wingers who have been imbibing bad information, or pushing it on the rest of us, for the better part of two years.

Paul Rogat Loeb at Op-Ed News says that opposing Build Back Better could well end the political careers of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, and I, too, have been thinking a lot lately about how all the shenanigans Messrs. Nelson and Lieberman pulled in 2010 led directly to their retirements in 2012. Lesson: doing the bidding of corporatists isn't a recipe for longevity, except for the corporations, of course. Don't feel sad, though -- Mr. Manchin is well-off enough that he doesn't need to work after he retires/gets blown out in 2024, and the ever-adaptable Ms. Sinema will surely consult on some scam designed to separate venture capitalists from their money. No, not crypto; she'd find that gauche.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) says he'll kick Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell and Ilhan Omar off a few committees if he becomes Speaker after November, and maybe he will and maybe he won't, but his saying so aims squarely at the Primary of One, not so much to get Mr. Trump's endorsement per se (he's in trouble if he needs that in his district!), but to get the endorsements of all the Trumpholes who'd make him the Speaker of a new House majority. But yeah, knock yourself out explaining why you'd kick Ilhan Omar off Foreign Affairs -- people might actually discover they like her better than the chattering class does, since unlike Marjorie Taylor Greene, she makes sense.

Peter Doocy asks Biden Administration Press Secretary Jen Psaki that since he and Ms. Psaki were both triple-vaxxed and still got COVID, how Mr. Biden can call this stretch of the pandemic a "pandemic of the unvaccinated." It's a good thing you only need two counter-examples to obliterate any broad trend! Seriously, she handled that so easily -- "(y)ou are 17 times more likely to go to the hospital if you’re unvaccinated, 20 times more likely to die" -- that I'd say generally he ought to keep that mask on, lest someone want to punch him in the face.

Finally, Future Crunch gives us "99 Good News Stories You Probably Didn’t Hear About in 2021," and if the news is a bit overwhelming, well, gosh, let's have good news be overwhelming, for once. The Mississippi River is much less polluted than it was 30 years ago! The European Parliament banned predictive policing! Malaria and ebola vaccines came out this past year! I didn't hear about most of these, but perhaps signing up for every-two-weeks emails will change that. I'll certainly pass along as much good news as I can! It'll be just another way Thieves in the Temple differs from the Fox News Channel.

Action: concerning gerrymandering, pollution, landmines, and Guantánamo.

Long story short: tell your Pennsylvania state legislators to reject a fake gerrymandering reform bill, tell our EPA to enact the most vigorous methane emissions regulations possible and start monitoring factory farm pollution, tell President Biden to keep his promise to outlaw certain landmines and close Guantánamo Bay, and tell our USDA to stop oil trains from rumbling through Utah. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Fair Districts PA informs us that the recently-introduced HB 2207 only pretends to create a citizens' commission for redistricting, in that it give the political parties far too much power over its composition and direction and would actually amend our state constitution to let one party have complete control over the process. They'll call that the voters' will, when gerrymandering Rorschach-blot districts that excise sides of streets and individual houses is the perfect way to subvert the voters' will! They got some cojones, these clowns, but that's all they got. You can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom, if you're on a cellphone) to find your state legislator's phone number so you can tell them to reject this bill -- unless it includes the Samuelson amendment that would at least give good Pennsylvanians a real independent citizens commission, which would negate all the bill's horrors.

Penn Environment helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous methane emission rules possible. Best to get to stepping, though, since their deadline for comments is Friday. Methane packs a bigger climate change punch than coal, and when big corporations let it leak from their oil or gas drilling facilities, they're not just moving the coastlines uncomfortably closer to you, they're wasting perfectly good energy -- and if they're drilling on public lands, they're also cheating you, the taxpayer, out of royalties. In short, nobody likes methane leaks -- except the big gas and oil corporations that don't want to do their part to keep our planet livable because it means the CEO can't gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home. And they shouldn't get their way about that.

US PIRG helps you tell our EPA to start monitoring factory farm pollution. Which cause the most water pollution in America, and which our EPA pledged to start monitoring 17 years ago; what's the holdup? The holdup, I suspect, is that big ag corporations get even more deference from our government than all the other big corporations to which our government defers -- all these big corporations have to do is dangle the spectre of high food prices and they get whatever they like. Well, we're not hostages in America -- we're free people. And asking our EPA to start monitoring (not even stopping!) factory farm pollution is not so damn much to ask. Rivers of hog poop have a lot of methane in them, too, and too much hog poop makes people sick. Don't people count for anything?

Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to re-ban anti-personnel landmines. Donald Trump lifted this ban during his deleterious four years as President, and President Biden promised he'd undo it, but he hasn't, yet, and it's not like he hasn't had the time -- a stroke of a pen is all it'll take. Put five beers into Donald Trump and I'm sure he'll tell you other countries get to do it so we should too, but the whole point of America is to be the best possible example to other countries. It's like none of these folks in politics remember that -- or, more likely, they think they don't have to earn it anymore. But we must always earn America. And landmines have been known to blow people's legs off 50 years after the war's over, so let's not let cruelty be the example we set for the rest of the world.

Amnesty International helps you tell President Biden to close Guantánamo Bay already. Again, he promised to do this, and it's not like he can't get something done if he puts his mind to it -- like, you know, our withdrawal from Afghanistan, which he should have done a lot better but at least he did it; get us out of this now 20-years-going-on humiliation and he might actually start stacking up some accomplishments. Guantánamo still has almost 40 detainees, held without charge or trial, and if they'd really done something so bad you'd think our government could charge them with something. That tells you they didn't do a damn thing! Someone already stands ready to say if even one terrorist was there it was all worth it, but they'd never say that if they were detained at Guantánamo for years on end. So we can blow them off.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell our U.S. Department of Agriculture (or USDA) to revoke permits for an oil railway running through the Ashley National Forest in Utah. Jesus Mary and Joseph what is it about Utah that makes big corporations want to screw with it? Utah has some of the most beautiful country in the world! And this railway won't even dig out the minerals that big corporations often covet in Utah -- but it will ruin wildlife habitat and wetlands there, and for what? If we don't move past oil -- which is more than possible in a world where solar and wind now cost less in some places than fossil fuels -- then we're not going to have a planet left. Why, even those jerks at Fox News who spend all their time laughing at people who want more solar and wind won't have a place to go.

Action: concerning January 6, voting rights, crypto, wastewater, glyphosate, and conservation.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expel those members who helped plan the January 6 attempted coup, tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, tell our SEC to start regulating crypto, tell Pennsylvania to stop using oil and gas wastewater to tamp down dust on state roads, tell the President of France to keep his promise to fight glyphosate’s EU licence, and tell our USDA to reinstate Roadless Rule protections for the Tongass National Forest. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

GOP Coup helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.Res. 25, which would investigate whether certain members of Congress should be expelled for their role in the January 6 attempted coup. Not just Paul Gosar or Andy Biggs, either -- also Lauren Boebert, who gave that suspicious tour of the Capitol the day before the attempted coup, and Lindsey Graham, who suggested right after the election that Georgia's Secretary of State toss legal ballots (per said Secretary of State's own testimony). If you were trying to nullify the will of the American voters -- and, to review, 81 million of us voted for Joe Biden, while 74 million of us voted for Donald Trump -- then you don't deserve a seat in Congress. I hate it when politicians tell 81 million people they should just fuck off and die, and that's what the above-named politicians have told us. So get 'em out.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act -- and kill the filibuster to do it if they have to. Which they do, because Republicans all oppose gerrymandering reform, campaign finance reform, and racist vote suppression, for some reason. (Spoiler alert: the reason is that they can't win without gerrymandering, big corporate donors, and keeping Black and Brown folks away from the polls.) And when they tell you voting reform has to be "bipartisan," remind them (as Rep. Clyburn did the other day) that amending the Constitution to end slavery and give ex-slaves the right to vote were not bipartisan. We don't care about "bipartisanship" -- we care about our government doing right by us.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to start regulating crypto. No, I'm not going to call it "cryptocurrency," because it is not currency -- it is a speculative investment, and our SEC's job is to protect investors from criminals, and boy oh boy does crypto look like an area rife for criminal activity; after all, if they call something money but can't explain how it works in terms regular folks can understand, it's BS. And a "currency" that seeks to bypass banks and governments ain't a good idea -- if you get screwed over in a crypto scheme, you're going to need a gun to get relief, and civilization's whole purpose is to stop you from doing that. I don't want banks and governments off the planet; I want them to be civilized.

MoveOn helps you tell the state of Pennsylvania to stop using oil and gas drilling wastewater to tamp down dust on state roads. Yeah, they still appear to be doing that, even though that stuff is full of toxic and carcinogenic chemicals, and even though our state Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) put a moratorium on this practice four years ago. Apparently fossil fuel corporations found a loophole in the moratorium allowing wastewater use on unpaved roads, and you'd hate to think the state put out that moratorium knowing they weren't going to effectively enforce it! The best part? A Penn State study found last summer that fracking wastewater does a bad job keeping down the dust; why, doing nothing at all was better than using wastewater in some cases! So, yeah, let's stop doing that.

Sum of Us helps you tell French Presiden Macron to oppose any re-approval for glyphosate in Europe. Mr. Macron had pledged to phase out French use of glyphosate by the end of 2021, but he failed in that; soon France will take over the Presidency of the European Union this month, and glyphosate's license expires this year, so with a lot of popular prodding, perhaps he'll keep his promise then. He can't be thinking he's got a tough re-election campaign coming and he needs to be nice to the big carcinogen producers, can he? He's dumb as a bag of hammers if so: Europe has always had a much less corporate attitude toward agriculture than the U.S., and cancer-causing chemicals aren't actually popular anywhere. So we may need to lend the steel in his spine in this matter.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell our Forest Service to restore Roadless Rule protections for the Tongass National Forest. I've told this story a hundred times, not just of thousand year-old trees capturing almost half of all the carbon our national forests capture, but of greedy logging corporations and their Enabler-in-Chief, whose Forest Service took away Roadless Rule protections late in 2020 even though over 95% of us left public comments supporting keeping those protections in place. After all, it's not like we're the boss of government or anything. The Biden Administration is working to restore this rule as we speak, but they've gotten cold feet about doing the right thing before (cough keeping military weapons away from police cough), so we gotta remind them.

Around the table: featuring yet another Pennsylvania Republican Senate candidate!

As Connecticut-based hedge fund manager David McCormick readies a Pennsylvania Senate run as a Republican, the burning question is: will Trump votaries support a bankster for Senate? I kid, of course -- Trump votaries will "hold their nose" at his profession, particularly since he doesn't have a Jewish-sounding last name, and in any case I'm sure Mr. McCormick will quickly disavow his year-old statement blaming Mr. Trump for the January 6 attempted coup. Still, look out for Jeff Bartos, who instigated Sean Parnell's disgrace; he's currently running around 3 percent in polling but is sitting on a lot of money I'm sure he'll deploy the last two weeks of the race. If he wins, Donald Trump will endorse him as if he'd never endorsed anyone else, and then the votaries will be pacified.

Ho hum, JP Morgan Chase has resumed suing its credit card users for falling behind on their payments. What's that, you say? So what? Well, Chase hadn't been doing that for 10 years, after our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found they were filing "flimsy" suits which not only too often said customers owed more than they actually did, but which also relied on actual robo-signed affidavits (rather than billing records!) as "evidence." And now they're doing lawsuits-with-affidavits again. You might almost call these frivolous lawsuits, though the tort "reform" crowd, strangely, never talks about them. If Republicans take back either chamber of Congress in November, you'll never get that crowd to STFU -- and all they care about is stopping lawsuits that help those good Americans wronged by big corporations.

When I hear that folks from 14 to 49 are generally having less consensual sex now than they did a decade ago, and I see that researchers offer a lot of possible reasons, like increased social media use, "rough sex," lower incomes, more drinking, and (even) more binge-watching, I find myself asking about two other possibilities: increased awareness of sexual abuse and more widely-available pornography. Do people have less sex if they're wary of being caught-out as a harasser or an abuser -- or, conversely, are potential partners more wary of such folks than they used to be? Also, does all the porn one can get today help folks satiate their curiosity about other people's bodies -- a curiosity you might have had to resort to actual sex to satiate not too many years ago?

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) slams New York's new Mayor, Eric Adams, for referring to "low-skilled workers" as folks who "don’t have the academic skills to sit in a corner office." "The suggestion that any job is 'low skill' is a myth perpetuated by wealthy interests to justify inhumane working conditions, little/no healthcare, and low wages," she says, and she's absolutely right, and didn't they say Eric Adams would be a "different" kind of Democrat? By putting the guy in the "corner office" above the barista and the waiter, he's revealed he's just like all the others who look down on folks who don't happen to be entrepreneurs. Remember when folks looked down on manufacturing workers? Now that they're gone, we lionize them! And by the time we get to lionize baristas and waiters, there may not be any jobs left.

Chip Gibbons at Jacobin reminds us -- and we shouldn't have needed the reminder! -- that Dick Cheney certainly should not have gotten the warm reception he got from Democrats on January 6. Seriously, you have to do more than just be against attempted coups to be a good guy in America -- and waging war on Iraq, warrantless wiretapping, torture, and unconstitutional detainment (just to cite things he did as Vice President; Mr. Gibbons also tabulates his nefarious works during his decade in Congress) certainly don't make you a good guy. Why, whenever he thinks of how he managed to steal the 2000 election, I bet he looks at those January 6 rioters and says these guys are pikers!

Finally, Sen. Joe Manchin (D?-WV) now apparently doesn't even support his own proposal for restructuring the Build Back Better Act. Not only does he get to explain to those good folks in West Virginia why they can't have paid family leave, lower taxes for working families, and lower prices for drugs and child care, but he has further isolated himself as The Villain of all these proceedings, which could complicate Democrat efforts to throw the 2022 midterms -- voters will less likely blame all Democrats if they can blame one Democrat. If Kyrsten Sinema is the galaxy brain she thinks she is, she'll convince Mr. Manchin to vote for the bill, since he got everything he asked for, but she's not, so she won't.

Action: concerning January 6, tax cuts for working families, raising taxes on the rich, voting rights, and abortion.

Long story short: tell our Justice Department to investigate and prosecute Donald Trump for the January 6 attempted coup, and tell your Congressfolk to extend the Child Tax Credit expansion, tax billionaire wealth, protect our voting rights, and pass the Women's Health Protection Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. The first anniversary of Trump supporters attempting a coup against our government was yesterday, and Attorney General Merrick Garland made a point of addressing the nation about the investigation the day before, but if you're thinking the investigation will ensnare a lot of the folks who paraded through our Capitol with their Confederate flags while letting the coup's planners off, well, I wouldn't blame you. Hence Public Citizen helps you remind our Justice Department to investigate and prosecute Donald Trump for his role in the January 6 attempted coup. He's the top dog, after all, no matter how much he avoids taking any responsibility for his many mistakes. And our House's January 6 committee has been uncovering a whole lot of probable cause for that investigation.

Both Daily Kos and Moms Rising help you demand that our Congress pass the Build Back Better Act and thus extend the Child Tax Credit expansion that has kept millions of kids out of poverty. Yeah, the pundits say the Build Back Better Act is dead, but it ain't dead until we say it's dead. Also, fuck the pundits! And seriously, if Joe Manchin wants to be The Man Who Took Your $300 Checks Away because his CEO buddies told him people just use their CTC expansion on drugs, should we allow that argument to win the day? No, we should not, and that's why we need to tell our Congressfolk to act. Yeah, we've told them a hundred times already. And we may have to tell them a hundred more! Might as well get to it, then. Nobody said democracy was easy. Nobody worth listening to, anyway.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Senators to include a billionaire wealth tax in the Build Back Better Act. Because billionaires are making money hand over fist during this pandemic while you're just scraping by, that's why! They're not more talented than you, and they don't work harder than you, a matter in which I have received a 30-plus-year education. Now, both Joe "the Penguin" Manchin and Kyrsten "the Joker" Sinema have made positive noises lately about taxing billionaire wealth! But don't believe it -- they have thoroughly enjoyed pulling the football back at the last second (OK, that's a lot of childhood comics metaphors in one paragraph), and they'll do it again and again and again, unless we make our will unmistakable.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to do whatever it takes to protect our voting rights, including ditching the filibuster. Because with these Republicans it'll come to that! And when Joe Manchin says changes to the filibuster should be "bipartisan," remind him that you have communicated your will to him and that his entire job is doing the will of his constituents, none of whom give one rat's hind-quarter about whether rules changes are "bipartisan." And when Kyrsten Sinema talks about "changing behavior" rather than "changing rules," remind her that you have communicated your will to her and that her job is doing the will of her constituents, who won't care about her hair-splitting when they get turned away at the voting booth for no good reason.

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women's Health Protection Act. Let's list some of the things states have done in recent years: they've forced women to undergo ultrasounds and state reasons for getting an abortion before getting one, they've allowed entities to disperse lies about abortions to prevent women from getting them, they've held abortion facilities to higher standards than other hospitals for no health-related reason, and they've prevented doctors from giving abortions when the woman's health or life is threatened. The Women's Health Protection Act would sweep all of that (and more) away. Most, if not all, women would appreciate that. Those who get off on telling women what to do won't appreciate, but that's their fault.

Around the table: from climate disasters to media disasters.

Praise the Lord that Bibi van der Zee at The Guardian has compiled a list of all the climate-related disasters we faced in 2021. Surprise: it's not all bad news, and the good news runs the gamut from little victories (dolphins spotted in the East River) to the big (major court decisions in Germany and the Netherlands). The bad news (California drought, Texas power outage, floods in Queensland and Malaysia, et al) can still seem awfully demoralizing, and note well that in several American states you could run over protestors like the Insulate Britain protestors, but then, optimism is really the only sane response to any news, lest you become a Republican, or worse, a cynic.

I'm as hopeful as anyone else that Republicans will pick so many absolutely toxic nominees that they flub their chance to retake Congress, but you have to remember that when they do things like attack Mitch McConnell, all they're doing is creating drama, to distract you from what they really want to do, which is serve their corporate paymasters once they get power. Pretending to hate Mitch McConnell, what a crock. Like we're all stupid! Also remember that the actual number of Republicans who'll withhold their vote from rage-addled assholes is actually very small. The number of independents who might, on the other hand? We'll see.

I'm not sure what to think of Democrats actually taking a (weak 39-37) lead in a USA Today/Suffolk Congressional generic ballot -- Gallup had Republicans up about a dozen in their generic about this time in 2010 (though, weirdly, Rasmussen had the two parties about even at the same time). Anyway, if Dems want to keep this up, they need to do two things: 1) use their power for good, rather than continue to prop up "bipartisan" systems that just hurt us, and 2) remind everyone that the people who threaten the lives of school officials and yell at you for wearing a mask or getting a vaccine are the exact people you will be empowering if you vote Republican. A vote for this is a vote for that! History suggests that Democrats don't have the guts to do these things, but we have the guts to demand that they do.

When I hear that Sen. Ron Johnson (E-WI) wonders "(w)hy...we think that we can create something better than God in terms of combating disease," I feel compelled to respond that, well, God also created viruses that kill people, and also created people who created vaccines to save them. People like Ron Johnson think they can just drop the word "God" into a sentence and end all conversations, but they're as wrong about that as they are about everything else.

When I hear that some Democratic Senators are actually having trouble figuring out how the "talking filibuster" would work, all I can say is gosh, how did they ever do it for the first 130-plus years they did it? And Joe Manchin can't possibly think Republicans would adopt a rule change they've previously favored while Democrats control the Senate. Actually, I'm sure he doesn't -- he's just hoping you do. He's sure going to have a lot of good works to bring to the Pearly Gates.

Finally, those irredeemable assholes at Fox News are telling working Americans to "get tough" and go to work and school amidst a million omicron cases a day all from inside their little remote Zoom boxes. Plus they're still telling you lies about vaccines while they're all vaccinated. "Go to work," "(l)ive with it" -- these clowns will never do one tenth the work I do, but they'll get away with pretending they're the toughest people on Earth as long as we have to pay for Fox News as part of a basic cable package. Hey, maybe we can do something about that.

Oh, I almost forgot: happy Insurrection Day, right-wingers! Don't stay out too late celebrating; some of you have to work tomorrow.

Around the table: concerning social media, law and order, and right-wing whining.

Dean Baker describes how he'd reform the law that protects social media corporations like Facebook from being sued over the noxious crap they allow on their platforms. You may recall that "(n)ewspapers and broadcast outlets do not enjoy this protection for third party content," but Mr. Baker splits all the knots here -- he'd repeal protections against lawsuits only for corporations that accept ads or sell personal info; sites that survive on subscriptions or donations would continue to enjoy those protections. These would include colleges, non-profits, and small businesses, of course, but also sites like WordPress and Blogger and Typepad, and that's where the real free speech happens anyway.

When I read about the state of Arizona going way out of its way to convince our Supreme Court to send a man back to death row despite the lack of evidence (and ineffective defense counsel) behind his conviction, I'm reminded of a hundred annoying ticky-tack arguments I've had with right-wingers about how procedure is so, so much more important than justice -- which, sadly, suggests to me that our Supreme Court, as full of ticky-tack judges as any other, will look favorably upon Arizona's request to send Barry Jones back to death row, even though you will find plenty of reason to doubt that he should ever have been convicted in the first place.

Already the right-wingers are whining about Twitter banning Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (E-GA) for spreading lies about COVID vaccines, even though she entirely deserves her banning. If you're tempted to do the same -- perhaps out of a misguided both-sidesism -- recall that a) there are still plenty of social media platforms for right-wing assholes and b) if some liberal wrote an op-ed full of stupid crap, you would be perfectly right to demand that the newspaper should have exerted some editorial control, just as right-wingers will when some liberal writes an op-ed that's not full of stupid crap but just hurts their fee-fees.

Ho hum, the Trump-appointed Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation chair is resigning, mainly because the other FDIC members forced a vote on bank mergers. By the time you read exactly why she calls the bank merger vote a "hostile takeover" -- basically, she refused to vote on the matter, and claims the vote is thus illegal, now you try that! -- your reaction will most likely be waaaaaaaaaah. And Ms. McWilliams was explicitly trying to protect banksters' "rights" to merge at will, good Americans be damned! So to her I'd just say don't let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya.

California school superintendent investigates students wearing swastikas, then gets death threats. I believe I have already anticipated the right-wing objection: that these eight white kids who painted swastikas on their torsos were just joking. But if it's "just a joke," then why the death threats? You don't threaten to kill someone for taking offense to your gags, do you? Or do we say that's OK behavior now, just because so many rage-addled right-wingers seem to think it's OK?

Finally, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (E-CA) says Democrats are using the January 6 attempted coup as "partisan political weapon.". Well, the attempted coup was itself a partisan political weapon, so what does he expect? Frankly, I suspect Democrats aren't using January 6 as a partisan political weapon enough. And no, Mr. McCarthy you have not all "said from the start, the actions of that day were lawless and as wrong as wrong can be." I hate gaslighters.

Around the table: exploding lies about inflation, law and order, and COVID.

Matt Stoller says about 60% of the inflation hike comes from rising corporate profits. How does he know? Long story short: inflation is five percentage points higher than it was in 2019, and the sharp spike in corporate profits probably accounts for three of those five percentage points -- and n.b. we have investment managers on the record saying that they want to find corporations with "pricing power," a power you don't have unless you also have monopoly power. Thus inflation isn't just a thing that happens, but a thing people with unearned power make happen. You'll also understand "why economists tend to dislike rules against profiteering" -- because "(p)rice gouging, they believe, transmits important information." Well, as long as we have "important information," it must be OK that people get hurt! (And seriously, why do we listen to Larry Summers? Like the proverbial fool who thinks everything's a nail because all he's got is a hammer, Mr. Summers's one solution to every problem is STOP ALLZ TEH GUBMINT SPENDINGZ!!!!)

Missouri Gov. Mike Parson says his administration will prosecute anyone who might have helped the St. Louis Post-Dispatch expose a massive security issue in a state website. Well, waaaaaaaaaah -- I mean, if you don't want to be embarrassed, don't earn embarrassment, and blowing the whistle on a state security issue ain't the same as "attempt(ing) to steal personal information and harm Missourians." Hate to beat a dead horse, but this is what happens when Democrats don't run economic populist candidates -- know-nothing, do-nothing right-wingers like Mike Parson coast to re-election.

Robyn Pennachia at Wonkette describes the mercurial rise of an anti-abortion Missouri state legislator who, our "liberal" media tell us, listens to Lizzo and Beyoncé and watches The West Wing, and I must admit that I, too, have long found it tiresome that our "liberal" media outlets go mining for the "unexpected" personal traits of right-wingers. It has the effect of "normalizing extreme viewpoints," as Ms. Pennachia says, and I wouldn't expect any right-winger to be impressed that "Okie from Muskogee" and "The Fighting Side of Me" are two of my favorite Merle Haggard songs (though neither one is "Branded Man" or "Uncle Lem."

Now an Oklahoma legislator, with obviously no intimate knowledge of Texas's notorious anti-abortion law, not only wants to give parents the "right" to demand that school libraries remove a book, but give them the "right" to "earn" a $10,000 bounty for every day the school doesn't comply. None of these efforts should survive even cursory legal scrutiny -- seriously, have none of them have ever heard of standing to sue? -- but perhaps a few authors will get a boost in their book sales if they get banned in Oklahoma. Why, authors could even try to get their Oklahoma buddies to demand that a book gets banned and then split the bounty! These right-wingers never think anything through.

J. Alexander Navarro at The Conversation reminds us that when folks got tired of wearing masks and social distancing in the 1918 flu pandemic, they paid and paid and paid. Today's lazy, entitled right-wingers won't listen to that, so maybe they'll listen to this: people don't actually want to fuck you as much as you think, so maybe you're not losing out all that much if you cover up that mug of yours.

Finally, Matt Novak at Gizmodo runs down "Fox News' Worst Lies About Covid-19 From 2021." I was actually disappointed to hear that Fox had peddled the BIG GUMMINTZ LYINGZ ABOUTZ TEH DEATHZ!!!! lie (which lie depends on a misunderstanding about the difference between reported deaths and confirmed deaths, not to mention the difference between correlation and causation), because when a relative parroted it to me for the first time I thought maybe it came from some YouTube "celebrity," not plain old rubbish-peddling Fox News. This is why we demand that our cable corporations stop carrying Fox News.