Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning housing, privacy, and workers' rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to increase affordable housing funding and pass the Protecting Data at the Border Act, and tell your Senators to pass the PRO Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to increase funding for affordable housing in America. Why? Because rents are skyrocketing, because a lot of good Americans face eviction, because too many rich folks block too many working families from buying a good home – and because we were a much, much stronger country when we took affordable housing seriously. Don’t brook any rubbish about how folks just need to bootstrap, because when rents shoot up higher than inflation, ain’t no bootstrapping happening. Don’t brook any dumb jokes about “the projects,” either. Racism looks intractable, but to just throw up your hands about it? That’d be un-American.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5524/S. 2957, the Protecting Data at the Border Act. Typically our government has to get a warrant to see your cellphone, but officials have been searching everyone’s cellphones at the border willy-nilly, our Constitution be damned. The Protecting Data at the Border Act would require our law enforcement to get warrants before searching cellphones at the border, and before you protest but they’re not citizens, please do two things: 1) slap yourself, and 2) consider how easily our government could abuse this loophole to harass American citizens at the border, if they, you know, happen to be the “wrong color.”

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842/S. 420, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. Your right-wing Senators will likely lecture you about giving workers a “choice” to organize, but they ignore the bosses who don’t give them that choice! Bosses make workers’ lives miserable, demanding more for less pay, and then force workers to attend anti-union propaganda meetings and threaten those who organize by telling them they’ll fire them or outsource their job or close their plant. If all that’s OK with your Senator, he’s a monster. If it’s not OK with you, then you’re a decent person, and you ought to give your Senators what-for about it.

Action: concerning Social Security, the filibuster, and marriage equality.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security 2100 Act, and tell your Senators to ditch the filibuster and pass the Respect for Marriage 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.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5723/S. 3071, the Social Security 2100 Act. Republicans sure are getting, ah, courageous about wanting to injure our Social Security benefits – Sen. Ron Johnson (E-WI), running for re-election as we speak, thinks we should make Congress authorize it every year, never mind the promise we made to seniors a lifetime ago, and he also thinks we ought to invest it in index funds, never mind that the stock market goes up and down enough to make you puke. Better to tax the rich harder and invest that money in higher Social Security benefits, as the Social Security 2100 Act would do.

Common Cause helps you tell your Senators to get rid of the damn filibuster already. Yes, that was Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D?-AZ) saying this: “Not only am I committed to the 60 vote threshold, I have an incredibly unpopular view, I actually think we should restore the 60-vote threshold for the areas in which it has been eliminated already.” Indeed, you have “an incredibly unpopular view”! You should be used to that! More to the point, of course, is that it’s an incredibly injurious view – only an aspiring Galaxy Brain would tell us we need even more gridlock, as if Republican filibuster abuse hasn’t been giving the middle finger to the popular will for close to two decades. So, yeah, we need to get in our Senators’ grills about that.

Finally, in a peripherally-related note, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 8404/S. 4556, the Respect for Marriage Act. Our House passed it, it would protect gay and interracial marriage from our Supreme Court, and Justice Thomas has said out loud that our Court should use the Dobbs decision to go after gay marriage, so our Senators need to act, regardless of their “calculations” of Democrat caucus numbers after the midterms. Yeah, it looks good for Senate Democrats, but we’ve heard that before! And the time for justice is always right now, so let’s get in their grills about this, too.

Around the table: the delicate dance of fascism, and other horrors.

Hadas Thier at In These Times provides “A Left Answer to Inflation,” which contains at least two important reminders for Americans: one, that economists have attributed more than half of our current inflation to nothing more and nothing less than corporate greed, and two, that “price controls” may be a right-wing shock word, but they’ve done America a lot of good in the past, and today’s Americans won’t be as offended by the words “price controls” as professional right-wingers pretend to be. I rather think Americans would like price controls, in fact.

Here’s another important reminder: ”People of color are as interested in buying electric cars as white consumers – the biggest obstacle is access to charging.” And you just know the same crowd who chortled at the notion that “highways are racist” (which they are whenever we build them to divide or destroy Black and Brown neighborhoods) will joke that you can’t put electric charging stations in “bad neighborhoods” because “they’ll get destroyed.” That would, of course, be a pretty un-American way of looking at the matter, but that's never stopped self-styled "patriots" before.

When I hear that Republican campaign ad themes are more AMURIKA IZ TEH FALLINGZ APARTZ!!!! while Democratic campaign ads are more I-started-with-nothing-and-here’s-what-I-made-of-myself, I’m reminded that independent voters might respond well to the difference! I remember watching the Eagles-Giants game the Sunday before Election Day in 2016, and I found the sheer negativity of the political ads quite oppressive. Now, it's also possible that some independent voters will respond to Republican negativity as if it’s everyone’s negativity, but I wonder how many of those are even really "independent." And if they are, can you even reach them? They may just be so stupid or rage-addled that we must leave them to God.

Remember when I imagined Newt Gingrich responding to future criticism with his usual hifalutin BS? Apparently I gave him too much credit! When a reporter pressed him about the January 6 Committee, Mr. Gingrich responded “I think you have a learning disability.” Everyone thinks they’re a damn comedian, and so few of them make me laugh. Could be because I know plenty of people who overcame their learning disabilities – and all the abuse inflicted upon them by the Gingriches of the world – and contributed mightily to their communities. When Mr. Gingrich finally shuffles off his mortal coil, no one will remember any contributions he has made to America, because he hasn't made any. No, I don't think "spending your entire life demonstrating how not to be" is very much of a contribution.

When I hear that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton actually fled his own home to avoid being served with a subpoena, all I can say is waaaaaaaaaaah. Well, OK, since the issue behind the subpoena concerns abortion funds trying to avoid getting sued out of existence by anti-abortion vigilantes in Texas, I can say one other thing: our Supreme Court needs to strike down Texas’s anti-abortion law, since it gives people standing to sue someone even when that someone hasn’t injured them. Standing is a pretty basic legal principle – one our Court has spelled out pretty precisely in previous rulings – and I hope they're conservative enough to, you know, conserve it. I fear they won’t, because they’re fascists, not conservatives.

Finally, Pennsylvania Republican Senate candidate Mehmet Oz says that when his Democratic opponent, John Fetterman, wears a hoodie as a “costume,” he’s actually “kicking authority in the balls.” Listen to the whole clip and you’ll realize he’s aiming for Pennsylvania’s fascist vote, appealing to their sense of “authority.” Of course fascists only value authority when they’re the authority, and the rest of the time they wear the costume of rebellion, so maybe Mr. Oz has pandered effectively to the fascist vote, and maybe he’s also helped Mr. Fetterman swing more of those folks to his side. Mr. Fetterman did put those comments up on social media almost as fast as Mr. Oz made them, after all.

Action: concerning voting rights, pregnant workers, and credit reporting.

Long story short: tell your state legislators to create ranked-choice voting in your state, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act and reform our credit reporting system. 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.

Roots Action helps you tell your state legislators to create a ranked choice voting system in your state. Maine and Alaska use it, so now third-party candidates no longer create openings for right-wing ogres (cough Paul LePage cough) to win elections. Right-wingers no doubt cite that as a reason not to use this system, and indeed, I haven’t heard a single coherent argument against it. Ranked-choice voting – in which you have to essentially seed candidates in order of preference – not only ensures that independent candidates can run and win, but also ensures that the two major parties can’t use independents to defeat the other guy. I think that’s something we can all get behind.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1085/S. 1486, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. We’ve gone over how the PWFA doesn’t “make it impossible for bosses to manage their workers,” but I have neglected to mention that the bill would protect all female workers who could get pregnant, by preventing bosses from making workers miserable if they get pregnant after being hired. A woman of child-bearing age could get pregnant at any time, but that doesn’t mean they suddenly lose all the skills and qualifications that got them hired in the first place! Sadly, too many bosses act like it does, because they’re not up to dealing with challenges. But they shouldn’t get all the say about everything.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to overhaul our credit reporting system. Why? So that it doesn’t make so many mistakes, so credit agencies can’t let identity thieves steal your personal data, and so credit reporting doesn’t allow historical racism to keep crushing Black and Brown folks! Our private credit reporting corporations do all of that, and we just put up with it, thinking there’s no other way. Of course, there is another way: a public credit reporting agency, accountable to the American people, competing with the private ones! Now let’s watch the big credit reporting corporations soil their shorts.

Action: concerning overtime pay, drug policy, and offshore drilling.

Long story short: tell the Biden Administration to help more Americans get overtime protections, decriminalize pot at the federal level, and end offshore oil and gas drilling leases. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell President Biden to update our nation’s overtime rules so more good Americans can get overtime pay. You may also want to tell him to do better job than President Obama did; the Obama rule, overturned by a Texas District Court Judge late in 2016, essentially established the difference between workers with executive/administrative duties and workers without only by salary, when the rest of us establish that difference by, you know, looking at a worker’s actual duties. President Biden can avoid this by raising the pay threshold for overtime pay, without overreaching (or sabotaging!).

Progress America helps you tell President Biden to take marijuana off of Schedule I (and not move it to any other Schedule), which would essentially decriminalize pot at the federal level. This is exactly the wrong place to be a “law-and-order” politician – why, many right-wingers who fancy themselves “law-and-order” adherents actually support legalizing pot! And despite his reported misgivings, Mr. Biden promised on the campaign trail to “decriminalize marijuana, period,” “let out” anyone serving time for possession, and “expunge” the crime from everyone’s records; it’s really, really hard to find any wiggle room there. So he can start by descheduling pot.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Bureau (or BOEM) to end offshore oil and gas leases. Again, President Biden said he’d put an end to that, and his attempt to do so got overturned in court, but this public commenting process allows us to establish a body of evidence that might get the next oil/gas drilling lease ban through a court – our laws don’t allow our Executive branch to solicit public opinion and then simply ignore it, after all. Think we should keep drilling for oil and gas in the ocean? Then think of the Spillageddon in the Gulf slamming our shrimp industry in 2010. And think of oil/gas drilling killing our salmon industry in Alaska.

Action: concerning taxes, refugees, and insulin.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion, pass the Afghan Adjustment Act, and cap insulin prices for all Americans. 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.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk “No Tax Breaks for Corporations Without Relief for Families.” You’ll specifically ask for the return of the expanded Child Tax Credit (or CTC) which put $250 and $300 checks every month in working families’ bank accounts through 2021; Congress wants to pass a bunch of corporate welfare tax breaks at the end of the year, just like they do every year in the hope that no one will notice, but certainly we should tell them not to do that if they won’t help working families at the same time. And, frankly, we ought to tell them to stop giving corporations handouts, too. The letter the FCNL helps you write will give you space to say that, if you like.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 8685/S. 4787, the Afghan Adjustment Act. The Afghan Adjustment Act would let allow more good Afghan citizens escape the Taliban, as long as they meet certain requirements, like serving in our military or the former government’s military, and when right-wingers scream at you that THEZE PEEPULZ AREZ NOTZ TEH VETTEDZ!!!!, kindly repeat the bit about “certain requirements” at them. Right-wingers love pretending that nobody screens or vets a refugee in America, when actually that process can take years! So don’t put up with any BS about that, any more than you put up with BS about crime.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to cap insulin prices for all Americans. Republicans stand at the ready to campaign against lower drug prices! Do I have to admire their chutzpah at deciding to die on this completely unpopular hill? No, I do not, because if it works – or, at least, if it doesn’t look like it fails – then all future Republicans will feel even more emboldened to take unpopular positions that hurt good Americans. I don’t know how many more times Republicans have to tie the woman to the train tracks for Republican voters to get it, but we’d better plan on it being a few more times – and we'd better play offense.

Around the table: of dictatorships and monopolies, and the good folks who fight them.

Murtaza Hussain at The Intercept assesses “The Dark Odds Facing Iran’s Brave Protestors.” Protests have followed the state’s murder of a woman for not wearing her hijab in strict accordance with new right-wing government laws, and though we want better for good Iranians, Egyptians and Syrians have failed to capitalize on the Arab Spring because “life under dictatorship had not allowed any alternative institutions to grow that could easily replace the tyrannies now in place”; Iran’s police state has similarly suppressed such institutions. That’s a cautionary tale for those Americans who think crime is the number one issue facing them because they’ve watched the same four or five clips on the TV news for two years now.

Matt Stoller assesses our progress in our fight against monopolies. Long story short: yes, our government loses antitrust cases in court, but has also made progress on right-to-repair, wage-fixing, and price-fixing. Still, “(i)n a highly concentrated economy, losing merger challenges simply shouldn’t happen,” but he also reminds us that we lose before very, very bad judging. Mr. Stoller remains hopeful that lawyers will figure out how to win cases even against bad judges, and that judges aren’t evil per se but “just operating on autopilot with antitrust. And he also reminds us that the “narrative of powerlessness is perhaps the most powerful weapon in the monopolists’ arsenal, because it causes us to give up on self-government itself.” We definitely need to hear that more often! The “phony war” metaphor at the beginning is a bonus.

When I hear that 80% of Americans want a federally-funded paid family/medical leave program, I recall that Newt Gingrich used to say if 70 percent of Americans want something, they should get it, though I bet he would just mouth a bunch of BS about it now and our “liberal” media wouldn’t challenge him on it. I’ll bet most of Joe Manchin’s constituents want a paid family/medical leave program, too, and if he’s scared that his approvals in West Virginia are upside down now that he’s helped bring the Inflation Reduction Act to fruition, I would remind him that his job ain’t just to do his constituents’ will, but to convince them when he’s actually done it.

Ho hum, Nevada’s Republican Secretary of State candidate wants to end mail-in voting because of alleged/nonexistent “voter fraud,” but not only has he voted by mail numerous times, he’s also done it while living in a different state from the one in which he was voting. In a sane, moral, and decent civilization, this news would finish his campaign; in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, he needs only hope he’s worshiped enough at the altar of His Personal Lord and Savior Donald Trump to please the big man’s votaries. Having claimed to be a “victim of election fraud” as the Republican nominee for Nevada’s 4th U.S. House district in 2020 – he lost that race by over 16,000 votes and nearly five percentage points – he may be well on his way toward this goal.

When I hear that Republicans actually plan to campaign on repealing drug-pricing caps passed entirely with Democratic votes – and that they’re using the same horsedoodle arguments about “stifling innovation” and “drug takeover schemes” and “price controls,” phrases that anger far-right partisans and literally no one else – all I can say is that I guess they’re counting on gerrymandering to deliver them the House, because they sure ain’t counting on making winning arguments. The shame of it is that it might work, especially given our well-founded suspicion that Democrats don’t want to win elections as much as they want to raise campaign money.

Finally, how about some good news? Over 270 workers at the Roosevelt Boulevard Home Depot in Philadelphia have filed a petition with our National Labor Relations Board to form a union. Much like Walmart, Home Depot has unusually terrific workers they get to treat like crap because those workers don’t have the opportunity to take their skills somewhere else anymore – which, of course, is because Home Depot has crushed smaller, independent hardware stores everywhere it’s gone. So let’s add “balancing monopoly power” as yet another reason we need more unions.

Action: concerning corruption, drug prices, and campaign finance disclosure.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to ban stock trading by members of Congress, stop trying to prevent Americans from importing prescription drugs from Canada, and pass the DISCLOSE 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.

More Perfect Union helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban stock trading by members of Congress. Yes, you’re telling them to pass laws that would prevent themselves from trading in stock, but hell, if you’re serving in Congress, you ought to be quite familiar with the temptations of power by now – and you should also know that power corrupts. Congressfolk investing in corporations will absolutely make them less willing to take on those corporations when they prey on consumers of pump filth into our air and water, and they’re supposed to take on polluters and financial predators on our behalf. They say we can trust them; I say it’s our duty as Americans not to trust them, and to demand better behavior from them.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to prevent good Americans from importing prescription drugs from Canada. Why do folks do that? Because the drugs cost a lot less, that’s why! And how do they cost less? Because Canada’s government buys drugs on behalf of its citizens, and with the bargaining power of an entire nation, they can get better prices. Hmm, there’s a lesson in there, somewhere. In the meantime, Congress might actually pass a FDA funding bill that would include a provision preventing good Americans from getting cheaper drugs, so we need to tell them to cut that out.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass S. 443, the DISCLOSE Act, which would (among other things!) force disclosure of all big campaign finance donors who give more than $10,000 to campaigns or committees. I know, I know, Senate Republicans blocked it yesterday, but why take that from them? Why assume that we can't express our will because they've expressed theirs? And, let's face it, their will sucks. Money isn't speech, campaign spending is a far, far larger impediment to free speech than making big donors donate in public, and calling campaign finance disclosure "bullying" can just cry into their thousand dollar bills. They really shouldn’t whine about it, though. Nobody except a Trumphole likes whining.

Action: concerning paid family leave, law and order, and credit reporting reform.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass paid family/medical leave legislation, expand our Supreme Court, and reform our credit reporting system. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass paid family/medical leave legislation. Yes, Our One True Great and Real American President Joe Manchin famously vetoed paid family leave almost a year ago during Build Back Better Act deliberations, and perhaps worse, suggested it was a stupid idea! This is the same fellow who thought families were spending their expanded Child Tax Credit on drugs, so we should take what he says with a grain of salt, but folks who can’t take care of their kids or their parents or themselves without fear of losing their jobs wouldn’t think it’s stupid! And unpaid leave isn’t enough! Since it’s, you know, unpaid. Labor unions demand paid family/medical leave in their contracts for good reason.

Demand Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand our Supreme Court already. I suppose the right-wing answer to that would be just win more elections already, but you can’t fill Supreme Court openings that don’t exist, and right-wing hypocrisy on this matter is legendary – they wouldn’t let Barack Obama fill the opening left by Antonin Scalia’s death, because TEH PEEPULZ SHOULDZ DECIDEZ!!!!, but then filled the opening left by Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s death mere weeks before the 2020 election, the people, apparently, be damned. And we have every reason to believe the six-member right-wing majority on the Court’s reign of terror is just beginning – by the time they’re done, nobody will have any rights at all. Unless we get some more liberals up there.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell Congress to reform our credit reporting system in America. They suggest more than a few good reforms, but my favorite one is the public credit scoring entity; that’s bound to work better than the private ones! Remember all those years they said government was stupid and only private corporations knew what they were doing? Yeah, that was a load of horsedoodle – now private credit reporting agencies lie to you about how they’re arriving at their credit scores or simply giving you inaccurate scores, and when private corporations hurt us, our government has to step in on our behalf. Otherwise, why are we paying taxes?

Action: concerning marriage equality, health care, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Respect for Marriage Act, extend the Radiation Exposure and Compensation Act, and stop USPS Postmaster DeJoy’s plan to cut jobs and close down post offices. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Both Daily Kos and Moms Rising help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 8404/S. 4556, the Respect for Marriage Act. Democrats have decided to hold a vote on this bill after the midterms, perhaps figuring that the voters will give them a sort of mandate at the midterms, but they’ve been wrong about that before – not too long ago, in fact! – and anyway our job isn’t to align with Democratic Party aims but to press all of our elected representatives to do our will. And I think it’s pretty clear by now that very few people still have a sad over a gay couple getting married – and even fewer folks still get mad over interracial marriage. And the Respect for Marriage Act would protect both. So let’s not let a tiny, whiny minority have all the say about everything.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend the Radiation Exposure and Compensation Act, which provides compensation and health care to folks exposed to nuclear testing and uranium mining. These folks are disproportionately Native Americans, by the way, in case you thought environmental racism was a recent phenomenon. We stopped testing nuclear bombs in 1992, but that was only 30 years ago, so quite a few of the folks who got sick off that test (and others) are still with us and still need our support. Sadly we’re still mining for uranium, despite all the evidence telling us it pollutes our water and makes us sick, so we’ll need to keep this program around for longer yet. But we won’t, unless we get in our Congressfolks’ grills about it.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell our Congressfolk to stop Postmaster DeJoy’s plan to close post offices and slash jobs. Our Post Office isn’t some corporation for banksters to drain; our Constitution actually mandates that our government run it, and run it well. Also, our Post Office is all some rural and urban folks got, and cutting jobs and services will make it harder for good Americans to get the life-saving medicines they need. Our USPS delivers a lot of that now, and who’ll do it if they don’t? Some private corporation that’ll charge you an arm and a leg? No thank you, I’ll take the Postal Service that belongs to us, not because we’re shareholders or customers, but because we’re Americans.

Action: concerning voting rights, pollution, and pregnant workers.

Long story short: tell state and local legislators to secure voting rights, and tell your Congressfolk to protect us from pollution and make the workplace fairer to pregnant workers. 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.

Common Cause helps you tell your federal and state legislators to stop jailing people for unintentional voting errors. More precisely, the state should not affirm your right to vote and then jail you for exercising that right! Right, Ron DeSantis? His government just arrested 18 folks for “voter fraud,” and then the world learned that Florida county governments had told all of them they were eligible to vote! That’s some drama they got going over there. And frankly, the state shouldn’t take away your right to vote for any reason! But let’s at least protect those who vote in good faith because the state told them they could vote. This just ain’t that damn deep.

Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to abandon efforts to weaken enforcement of the National Environmental Policy Act. This could be the Manchin “side deal” he demanded so we could pass the Inflation Reduction Act, but he should have put it in the bill if he wanted it so badly! I mean, having demanded that President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda be split up into parts that could be “bipartisan” and parts that couldn’t – and having prevented most of the latter from passing at all! – he should know when he’s getting his own medicine. But seriously, we can’t rubber-stamp fossil fuel projects without ensuring they don’t spew filth all over the place, lest we hurt our children, and our children’s children.

Finally, the National Women’s Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1085/S. 1486, the Pregnant Worker’s Fairness Act. Perhaps I haven’t been explicit enough: folks who would tell you that the Pregnant Worker’s Fairness Act would “prevent managers from doing their jobs” are lying. (Does it do any good to assume folks just don’t know what they’re talking about anymore? Nah.) And you don’t need to take my word for it – just read the bill and note that it requires that bosses make “reasonable accommodations” for their pregnant workers. And folks who think it isn’t “reasonable” for bosses to give extra bathroom breaks and not refuse to hire pregnant workers merely because they’re pregnant shouldn’t get all the say about everything.

Action: concerning political prisoners, discrimination in health care, and climate change.

Long story short: tell the government of Egypt to release Alaa Abdel Fattah, tell our HHS Department to prevent discrimination in health care, and tell our DOT to properly measure the climate change emissions caused by our transportation system. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Amnesty International helps you tell the government of Egypt to release Alaa Abdel Fattah from prison. So let’s play “what are the charges?” In 2013 he got 15 years for, dig this, “organizing a political protest without a permit”; any government that’ll give you 15 years for that is a snowflake government which will resort to any tyranny to oppress its people. Eventually they shortened that sentence, but in 2021 gave him five years for “broadcasting false news,” another charge favored by snowflake governments. They even tried a “shooting at soldiers” charge in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, but couldn’t make it stick! They should let him out before they embarrass themselves further.

The National Women’s Law Center helps you tell the Biden Administration to enact the most vigorous anti-discrimination-in-health-care rule possible. The Affordable Care Act authorizes our Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) to enact rules protecting good Americans from discrimination, and a lot of folks experience it, from the person who doesn’t speak English well getting post-surgery instructions only in English to the transgender person not getting care because their doctor doesn’t like them, or the Black woman getting her symptoms dismissed because their doctor doesn’t like them. All of that’s horrible, and nobody’s “religious” “beliefs” should allow them to inflict it on their patients.

Finally, the National Campaign for Justice helps you tell our Department of Transportation to issue the most vigorous greenhouse gas emission tabulation rules possible. So we can better fight climate change! You can guess the Republican response to DOT’s proposed rule – that it would be a “burden” on corporations. They’re so law-and-order about detaining Black folks indefinitely, but not so much about corporations polluting your air and water. Funny how that works; you might almost think the amount of corporate money they get for their campaigns warps their thinking! And that’s why we have to get in their grills about it.

Around the table: drama, snowflakes, and evil, part 773.

The real story of Ron DeSantis’s shipping off of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard so that Teh Libruls can deal with Teh Immigrantz in their own backyard is how well the good folks of Martha’s Vineyard rose to the challenge. Your right-wing friends and neighbors will never admit such a thing, since they think of liberals – and therefore you, and you need to deal with that head-on! – as traitorous snowflakes. At least Gavin Newsom is willing to give Ron DeSantis what he deserves: “you have only one overriding need – attention,” he says, and we should all emulate his example. By “all” I mean you, too, Charlie Crist.

I’ll admit I was actually surprised to hear that Roll Call organized an event enabling a special interest group to give away free donuts to folks who probably didn’t know this group opposes antitrust legislation that would help rein in big tech corporations. I hadn’t thought a nominally objective “liberal” media outlet would do something that brazen. Yet, for all their brazenness, they sure do wilt when real journalists ask where they’re getting their funding. Remember the lesson of the Star Trek story “The Savage Curtain” (yeah, the one with Lincoln flying around in space, you gotta get past that): when good confronts evil, evil runs away. Because evil folks are the real snowflakes.

When I hear that 45% of Pennsylvania voters absolutely will not vote for Doug Mastriano for Governor, but about 28% would never vote for Josh Shapiro and 21% would definitely vote for Mr. Mastriano, I believe we have yet more data suggesting that about 25% of the electorate is bat-shit insane. Another 15% would “probably” vote for Mr. Mastriano; what do you suppose is tamping their enthusiasm? His “no exceptions” anti-abortion stance? That he won’t STFU about the election his Personal Lord and Savior Donald Trump lost? His promise to install a Secretary of State who’ll throw out any vote he doesn’t like? I don’t know how one could be undecided about these things. And 45% “hard no” ain’t 50%-plus-one “hard no.” Just ask Hillary Clinton how that can work out.

Ho hum, Georgia Republican Senatorial hopeful Herschel Walker uses incorrect crime figures to attack his opponent, Sen. Raphael Warnock. I say this not in the hope he’ll feel shame and stop saying crap like TEH CRIMEZ IZ UPZ 47% SINCEZ TEH WARNOCKZ!!!!, but in the hope that you will be more skeptical when you hear crime statistics, because generally, you’re better off erring on the side of they’re fucking lying. Also too, rape in Atlanta (to name just one of Mr. Walker’s cherry-picked concerns) actually went down from 2019-2021.

Jesus Mary and Joseph now Donald Trump says we’ll have “problems” “the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen” if our Justice Department indicts him. “I’m just saying,” or I’m just delivering a terroristic threat? I kid, of course – it’s the latter. And anyone who decides to shoot anyone over a Trump indictment deserves everlasting shame until they die and everlasting Hellfire afterward – yes, I’m willing to blaspheme to make that point! – and in between, they don’t get to say “Trump ordered me to do it,” because that’s what a snowflake would do.

Iranian “morality police” beat a woman to death for not complying closely enough with that state’s new hijab-wearing law, and let me just state for the record that tiny, tiny men did this, and they’ll answer to their god for it. What, you think Allah favors beating women to death over not wearing a hijab? Too many people imagine their god is as small-minded as they are. And yes, this kind of crap absolutely will happen in the United States unless we start shaming the people who would do it. Even in America, there must be a price for being an asshole.

Finally, let’s not do victory laps over Rep. Lauren Boebert (E-CO) saying “wonton attacks” in place of “wanton attacks,” because – as with the helpfully-referenced Marjorie Taylor Green “gaffe” about “gazpacho police” – I’d lay money that Ms. Boebert said “wonton” on purpose, partly to get attention, partly to get liberals to attack her for her “stupidity,” but mainly to tap into stupid right-wing hatred at the Chinese. Once she said “wonton,” she reminded the racists in her district that she’s one of them. How nice for them, that they can feel such kinship with each other, when all they deserve is loneliness.

Action: concerning our media, Social Security, and pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, fully-fund our Social Security Administration, and eliminate fossil fuel subsidies. 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.

Remember that time I told you to tell your Congressfolk to reject the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act? Well, Matt Stoller has convinced me I was wrong, so feel free to call your Congressfolk and tell them to pass it. I said the bill would have “link taxes” in it, and while such a thing could happen, it hasn’t happened in Australia, where a similar bill passed and has revitalized the journalism industry there. The bill would basically allow newspapers to collectively bargain for better ad rates with Google and Facebook; newspapers can’t do that now because it would run afoul of antitrust law, but farmers get this exemption under certain circumstances, and newspapers should, too.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to fulfill President Biden’s request for additional Social Security Administration funding. We’re finally starting to fund our IRS so we can go after rich tax cheats, and Republicans are telling lies about it – the IRS is coming for you, working person, as though that wasn’t all they were already doing! What will Republicans say about funding our Social Security Administration so it can reopen offices and extend hours? I mean, Rick Scott already said any cut to Medicare spending equals a cut to benefits, so the opposite must also apply, right? I kid, of course – they’ll say whatever. But our seniors deserve more help.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to eliminate subsidies for fossil fuel corporations. Joe Manchin made sure the Inflation Reduction Act had some of those, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still tell our Congressfolk that we don’t want to spend any more taxpayer money (i.e., our hard-earned money) on dying industries that pump filth into our air and water. But, as the Inflation Reduction Act also does, we need to subsidize emerging renewable energies more than we subsidize oil, gas, or coal. And the only folks who don’t see that are the folks who make all their money from oil, gas, and coal – and the Congressfolk they buy, of course.

Around the table: Republicans = drama, part 888.

When I read that criminal syndicates in Asia use social media to trap people into running financial scams, I realize I might be more kindly disposed toward those who constantly call me trying to rip me off. And, of course, I’ll be less kindly-disposed toward QAnon lunatics, who have missed yet another real example of human trafficking as they squeal about imaginary ones. Some folks really do deserve life in prison, and the human traffickers running these scams are some of them. (Read this article all the way to the last paragraph, though; it’s a real gut-punch.)

Sen. Lindsey Graham (E-SC), lately heard saying abortion legislation should be left to the states, will soon introduce, guess what, a bill that would ban abortion nationally. But let’s not dwell too much on his hypocrisy; let’s instead note that he’d ban abortion nationally while other Republicans on the ballot this year are scrambling to tone down their past pronouncements on the matter, and let’s not call this “disarray” or “dysfunction” but drama, aiming, as always, to distract us from more important things. You know, like the fact that giving Republicans any power anywhere ever again brings us that much closer to fascism.

Dig this: Republican U.S. House candidate Erik Aadland, running in a winnable district in Colorado, has gone on and on about how the 2020 election was “stolen” and Joe Biden isn’t a “real” President, but has also gone on the record about the necessity of, ah, backgrounding that information when talking to voters. Why, it’s like he knows how little voters want their Rep to whine about an election that’s almost two years old. Anyway, if he thinks he can keep this from the good voters of Colorado’s 7th, well, I think that ship has sailed.

Right-wing Texas District Court judge – famous for ruling that the entire Affordable Care Act was unconstitutional in 2018, a ruling our Supreme Court reversed in 2021 – now rules that the part of the ACA ensuring free preventive health care is itself unconstitutional. In case you were wondering, Judge Reed O’Connor was a George W. Bush appointee, and right-wingers go out of their way to file suits in his district. Among Judge O’Connor’s claims: that covering the HIV-preventative drug PreP violates the religious “freedom” of folks who don’t want to “encourage” homosexuality, drug use, or sex outside of marriage. Or an end to a 40-years-and-counting epidemic, apparently! Besides, if right-wingers don’t want to “encourage” sex, they should stop sending their kids to Bible camp.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Tim Michels – last seen scrubbing the Trump endorsement from his campaign website after his primary victory – says folks should “be ready to get out on the streets with pitchforks and torches with how low the liberal (sic) media has become.” But let’s play offense and focus on how he called for “torches and pitchforks” for accurate reporting about his actual positions, and call him a whiny diaper-loaded brat. Let us remember, also, that Tim Michels once lost a U.S. Senate race by 11 points – to Russ Feingold! In 2004, no less!

Finally, when I hear that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is using “‘full armor of God’ rhetoric” on the campaign trail, I feel compelled to say that it’s well past time to stop fearing the folks who eat this crap up – they’re not a majority, even in Florida! – and start calling this crap what it is: drama. I never want to hear Ron DeSantis’s name in a sentence again without also hearing the word “drama” in it. I wish I thought Charlie Crist was up to that task.

Action: concerning chemical safety, consumer protection, and fuel emissions.

Long story short: tell our EPA to protect communities from chemical pollution, tell our FTC to protect consumers from unscrupulous car dealers, and tell our DOT to protect communities from fuel emissions. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to issue the most vigorous chemical safety disclosure rules possible for industrial polluters. Which will fight them tooth-and-nail, as they did under the Trump Administration, because kill jobs cause inflation nanny state environmental extremists but the real problem, as usual, is that making big polluters pollute less affects executives’ ability to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home, and nothing else. Besides, don’t the (mostly Black, Brown, and poor) communities deserve to know how their air and water gets polluted? It helps them fight for cleaner air and water, that’s for sure, and everyone deserves a fighting chance.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to issue the most vigorous rules possible protecting car buyers from shady practices. And “car buyers” will almost certainly include you sometime in the future! And you may face a car dealer who won’t tell you what’s really wrong with the car you buy or charge you more than the advertised price or even change the terms of your financing after you’ve driven off the lot, and you deserve better than all of that from car dealers. So let’s make sure our FTC hears that we want more disclosure, fewer lies, and stronger penalties for those who won’t do the right thing.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell our Department of Transportation (or DOT) to issue the most vigorous transportation emissions rules possible for our states. Which can then have the freedom to reduce emissions in a manner more consistent with their constituents’ will – such as more bike lanes, more public transit, more electric charging stations, and more walkable streets. And remember: the only people in America who want more pollution are the folks who don’t want to clean up the messes they’ve already made – or the messes they’re planning to make. And they shouldn’t get all the say about everything in America.

Action: concerning voting rights, health care, and prison phone justice.

Long story short: tell your Pennsylvania state legislators to count mail-in ballots when they get them, and tell your Congressfolk to enact insulin price caps and pass 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.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Common Cause helps you tell your state legislators to let vote counters count mail-in ballots when they receive them, instead of waiting until after Election Day to start counting them. That’s what created the illusion of Donald Trump leads in both Pennsylvania and Michigan the day after Election Day – and it helped create the illusion of a “stolen” election, almost like that was the whole idea! And can you imagine legions of Doug Mastriano votaries brandishing guns at vote counters at every location in the Philly/Pittsburgh area so that they don’t count the mail-in votes? If you can, then you see the need for reform, I trust.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to cap insulin prices for all Americans. The Inflation Reduction Act capped insulin prices for Medicare patients, since the Senate Parliamentarian ruled that was all they could get through reconciliation, and therein lies the problem: 10 Senate Republicans won’t vote to keep insulin prices low so good Americans don’t go broke paying for a life-saving medicine. I mean, we can’t be the greatest nation on Earth if we let people die because the medicine that’ll save their life is too expensive. So we have to keep on our Congressfolk, and punish them with losing elections if they keep defying our will.

Finally, Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2489, the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act, which would prevent big telecom corporations from gouging prisoners and their families when they try to call each other. Just because prisoners are literally a captive market doesn’t mean we should let big corporations charge them whatever they want for phone calls, and not just because prisoners who stay in touch with their families go back to prison a whole lot less. It’s also fucking cruel. Too much “free” market ideology still infects our politics; we act like “interfering” with the “free” market is sacrilegious, though that's what sacrilegious. So it’s time to get right with God.

Around the table: our "natural elites" are Upper Class Twits of the Year, part 827.

Nandini Jammi and Claire Atkin at Check My Ads explain “How Proctor & Gamble Ended Up Funding Steve Bannon’s ‘War Room,’” even though Proctor & Gamble’s executives talk a good game about not funding noxious content. Long story short: Proctor & Gamble still places ads on a streaming weather service called WeatherNation, now owned by a right-wing corporation called Performance One, which also owns Real America’s Voice (which distributes Mr. Bannon’s programming, such as it is), meaning that if you buy ad time on WeatherNation, you’re basically funding Steve Bannon. It might be generous to say P&G simply didn’t know all of that, but Performance One does seem to have gone rather far out of its way to hide what it's doing.

Judd Legum at Popular Information finds Republican candidates totally lying about their positions on abortion. OK, I guess the charitable thing to say would be “they’ve heard the popular will and are changing their positions to match it,” but we’re not schmucks: we all know what they’re going to do if they get power – they’re going to “change their positions back” to what they were, the popular will be damned. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, if you attended the George W. Bush Administration at all in the 2000s, none of this is a surprise to you. What Mr. Bush did actually betrayed our democracy and our great people – and no, that’s not the same as Joe Biden failing to get very much of his agenda through narrow House and Senate majorities.

Noah Lanard at Mother Jones reveals that Arizona Republican Senate candidate/man with a face even a mother could punch Blake Masters hated democracy even when he was a member of a vegetarian co-op at Stanford! I bet the other kids loved reading his emails about that, too – especially when he wrote that he was going to reveal some "independent thought." You know how Americans love hearing they're not independent enough! Seriously, if your email list tells you not to send political crap and you do anyway, it just means you don't care about other people. And that will always catch up to you, and make you friendless and loveless. The difference between Blake Masters and other people? When he's friendless and loveless, he might still be able to masturbate into thousand-dollar bills. In a sane and moral society Mark Kelly would bury this dude; in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, I suspect he still doesn't understand that money and reputation only take you so far. Against Martha McSally, it only took him to a 2.4-point victory.

Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph our “liberal” media claims we should oppose student loan debt forgiveness out of fear of inflation going up. Because making all your decisions out of fear is so American! And our “liberal” media apparently think making decisions for moral reasons isn’t, either – we tell people they need to spend an arm and a leg to go to college so they can compete for good jobs, and then we take all the good jobs away that we can; I think that alone is grounds for forgiving student debt. But I guess our “liberal” media don’t think accountability is very American, either. (Also too, even the right-wing think tank flogging this theory found it wouldn’t increase inflation very much. Seriously, 0.3%? If you're scared of that, get out of my foxhole.)

Ho hum, Donald Trump sure did a whole lot of fibbing about our FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago and the 2020 election at his rally in Pennsylvania earlier this month. We could describe them at length, but let’s just note that the Factcheck article starts out with a bulleted list of 10 items. You have to wonder how Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano and Republican Senate candidate Mehmet Oz – the folks the Trump rally was supposed to help out! – felt about being sidelined yet again in favor of Donald Trump’s whining. OK, I actually don’t wonder how Mr. Mastriano feels about that – whatever gets me the power to hurt people is pretty much his only thought – and maybe I just want to believe Mr. Oz is a human being, which I guess is my weakness.

Finally, David Hoffeld at Fast Company reveals “the Scientific Way to Win Any Argument and Not Make Enemies” – and, spoiler alert, it’s to “connect your own position to those beliefs” your opponents hold. OK, so I’ve been doing this for literally 20 years and while it should work – the logic is both impeccable and attractive – it doesn’t work, at least not with about a quarter of the electorate, and that’s because those folks only want to “connect” with their own rage. Yeah, it’s really that bad arguing with them! The good news? Three-quarters of the electorate should be able to outnumber one-quarter any time. And enact policies that help more good Americans make ends meet, which takes care of most of our rage problem.

Action: concerning marriage, pregnant workers, and baby food safety.

Long story short: tell your Senators to pass the Respect for Marriage Act and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, and tell all your Congressfolk to pass the Baby Food Safety 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.

Amnesty International helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 8404/S. 4556, the Respect for Marriage Act, which would protect gay marriage and interracial marriage from future Supreme Court decisions declaring them unconstitutional. Recall that Justice Thomas has told the Supreme Court to do just this, using the logic, such as it is, of the Dobbs ruling. And still Republicans pretend the Respect for Marriage Act is a “stupid waste of time,” in Marco Rubio’s words. You know what’s a stupid waste of time? Marco Rubio. And if we all call our Senators and demand they pass the Respect for Marriage Act, we’ll have to waste much less time on him.

The ACLU helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1085/S. 1486, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which would make it harder for bosses to fire or harass workers for the cardinal sin of getting pregnant. Specifically, the bill would force bosses to make “reasonable accommodations” for pregnant workers – including less strenuous assignments and more bathroom breaks – and would prevent bosses from refusing to hire someone instead of making those accommodations. Let me guess the Republican argument against it: lazy sluts trial lawyers nanny state right to work fuck your feelings. I don’t think a pregnant woman going to the can for the 12th time would find any of that persuasive.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2229/S. 1019, the Baby Food Safety Act, which would limit the amount of certain heavy metals (like mercury, lead, and inorganic arsenic) that could be present in baby food. Since they damage babies’ brains! I guess the Republican argument against this one might be a bit more cogent: more regulations means more baby food shortages and you remember baby food shortages? But n.b. I said “a bit” – a great nation can insure its baby food is safe and plentiful at the same time, and demanding that we sacrifice safety for plenty is the mark of someone who doesn’t believe America is a great nation anymore.

Action: concerning campaign finance disclosure, self-managed abortion, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell President Biden to issue campaign disclosure rules for federal contracting corporations, tell state Attorneys General to protect self-managed abortion, and tell President Biden to appoint two new USPS Board of Governors members who’ll fire Postmaster General DeJoy. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Public Citizen helps you tell President Biden to issue an Executive Order forcing federal contracting corporations to disclose their political campaign spending. They are taking our money, after all, so we deserve to know how they’re spending it! You may recognize that since most corporations contract with our federal government for some reason or other, this Executive Order would, to some degree, get around our Congress’s refusal to pass the DISCLOSE Act. If folks don’t like that, they can try to take away our President’s authority to issue such an Order! Rather than whine about TEH AMURIKAN CAESARZ!!!!, I mean. Whining is so unseemly.

Daily Kos helps you tell your state Attorney General to protect the individual right to self-managed abortion. Thanks to technological advances, self-managed abortion (largely with mifepristone or miferpristol) is now generally safe up to the 12th week of pregnancy, and while states have largely left self-managed abortion alone even in their anti-abortion zeal, some prosecutors still go after self-managed abortions – particularly in poor/Black/Brown neighborhoods. But Attorneys General can (among other things) prioritize resources in different directions. And to stop America from turning women into mere breeders, they should.

Finally, Save the Post Office helps you tell President Biden to nominate two more qualified individuals to our USPS Board of Governors, so they can get rid of Postmaster General DeJoy. Why get rid of Mr. DeJoy? Roll call! He tried to interfere with the 2020 election! He had money in the corporation that provided free COVID tests this past winter! He’s raised prices, cut services, and slashed jobs! And all this drama means good Americans who rely on our Postal Service to get their life-saving medications suffer. And that’s a sin we should definitely punish Mr. DeJoy for committing.

Around the table: right-wingers pretending to be moderates and iconoclasts, part 763.

Politico’s new "contrarian" owner sent out an email to his fellow executives asking them to “pray” for Donald Trump’s re-election in late 2020 – then not only denied he sent it, but once confronted with evidence of the email’s existence said that yeah, he might have meant it “as an ironic, provocative statement.” Because if there’s one thing people love having explained to them, it’s irony! And are his politics “hard to pin down,” really? He loves the Trump tax-cuts-for-the-rich “reform” of 2017, he worries about “cancel culture” and “identity politics,” his response to anti-Semitic attacks is to fly an Israeli flag like there’s literally no other way to show solidarity with Jews – c’mon, I’m not a schmuck.

When I hear that folks experience “crisis fatigue” because of all the news they consume, I feel compelled to ask if we’re experiencing “crisis fatigue” as much as we’re experiencing sensationalism fatigue. I’m sure crisis fatigue is a real thing that real people suffer, but I don’t think the sheer volume of tragedy we read about is the only problem we face when trying to make sense of the world – right-wing news sources, in particular, love ramping up the drama. I’d also like to know if folks who read news experience less crisis fatigue than folks who watch the news.

President Biden endorses a bill in the California state legislature that would help farmworkers organize more easily for better pay and working conditions – a bill California Governor Newsom apparently intends to veto. You’d hate to think Joe Biden endorsed this bill (fairly persuasively, too) merely because he knows Gavin Newsom will veto it, but you can’t rule it out. The good news? It doesn’t matter: when the President endorses a good idea – and letting farmworkers unionize is a good idea, regardless of the cowards who’ll say it’ll “cause inflation” – it makes a difference.

Tamara Pearson at TruthOut charges the corporations building wind farms in Mexico with stealing, dividing, and destroying Indigenous land – in addition to using carbon credits to keep polluting and giving the clean energy they produce to Americans, rather than locals – and, yeah, I’d have to say this is the wrong way to fight climate change. I would also remind everyone (especially certain think tank morons who provide sound bites to the Wall Street Journal) that respecting the rights of Indigenous folks does not mean no one can fight climate change, ever. We need to stop listening to folks who hold such rigid dichotomies, not least because they’re not even being honest about it.

When I hear that Republicans are trying to soften their stances on abortion in the wake of our Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization being unpopular, all I can say is they are too fucking late. Does anyone think that the Democratic Party’s two-year effort to create hard-hat jobs will erase the common stereotype of them as out-of-touch latte-swilling liberals? No, they do not, so Republicans ain’t gonna reinvent themselves as abortion “moderates” in just two months. When you spend four decades screaming at the top of your lungs, you should expect folks’ opinions of you to harden.

Finally, ads about guns featuring Mehmet Oz skeet-shooting sure are funny – go skeet-shooting, and get ready for revolution against the liberal elites! – but Mr. Oz’s apparent endorsement of second-cousin marriage from 2014 should put a couple more nails in the coffin of his Senate campaign. I sure hope John Fetterman – eager to bash Mr. Oz for living in New Jersey or pretending to shop for groceries – bashes him hard for this, because no sane person thinks it’s OK to marry your second or third cousin, even if your resulting children will be much less likely to have hemophilia.

Action: concerning data privacy, worker rights, and drug prices.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the American Data Protection and Privacy Act and the No Tax Breaks for Union Busting Act, and lower prescription drug prices for everyone. 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.

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 8152, the American Data Protection and Privacy Act. This bill would limit the personal data corporations could collect, and make them let you opt out of targeted advertising (though I’d prefer it to force corporations to make you opt in to such advertising). The bill would also prevent corporations from collecting your Social Security number or transferring your data to another corporation without your express consent. Our FCC issued similar privacy rules in 2020, and then Republicans nullified them the following year; our Congressfolk can help correct that mistake by passing this bill.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 8448/S. 4192, the No Tax Breaks for Union Busting Act, which would prevent corporations writing off union-busting activities like forced anti-union meetings and bribing workers not to join unions. While these activities are, strictly speaking, expenses, do normal folks get to write off illegal activities as expenses on their taxes? No, we do not. So corporations shouldn’t get to do it, either. It sure would help if our Senate would also pass H.R. 842/S. 420, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act; Demand Progress helps you tell your Senators to do that.

Finally, Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower drug prices for everyone. The Inflation Reduction Act helps bring down prices for Medicare recipients – that was all they could get through reconciliation; 60 Senators wouldn’t pass an insulin cap for everyone – and while I don’t begrudge Medicare recipients like right-wingers want me to do, really, we should all get lower drug prices. So let’s keep communicating our will to our Senators; if they do nothing, they’ll still go on the record as opposing our will, and then we’ll more easily be able to send them packing on Election Day.

Action: concerning Afghan refugees, credit reporting, and discrimination.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act, reform our nation’s credit reporting system, and pass the Equality 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.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 8685/S. 4787, the Afghan Adjustment Act, which would let more good Afghan citizens escape the Taliban, as long as they meet certain requirements, like serving in our military or the former government’s military. If anyone asks you why we care more for refugees than Americans, just ask: why does it have to be either-or? I mean, are we a great nation or not? A great nation is good to all people, and that includes those who a) have already met fairly stringent requirements to stay here and b) were displaced by our military adventures in the first place. When our leaders won’t be accountable, we have to make them be accountable.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to overhaul our credit reporting system in America. It’s bad enough this three-digit number aims to define us – particularly when it also stands in the way of us getting a good house or a good job – but in America credit scores don’t even define us particularly well! Credit reporting corporations often get those scores wrong – through incompetence or malice, does it really matter? – and about 20% of credit reports have mistakes. One of the things you’ll ask for is a public credit scoring agency; that’s a terrific idea, and I bet the Equifaxes of the world sling a lot of BS about it.

Finally, the Human Rights Campaign helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. The bill passed 18 months ago, and just because we’re trying to get 10 Republicans to vote for the Respect for Marriage Act doesn’t mean we should hold their feet to the fire about this bill, too, because this bill would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 so that “sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity)” would be one of the reasons bankers, landlords, and employers (among others) couldn’t discriminate against you. So if folks come at you with rubbish like TEH BOYZ WILLZ PLAYZ TEH GURLZ SPORTZ!!!!, remind them what the bill’s really about – preventing the powerful from hurting good Americans.

Around the table: featuring *even more* right-wing hostage-taking!

Surprise, surprise, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s little voter “fraud” effort isn’t going so well, with all 18 of its first highly-touted arrests literally having received voter registration cards from their counties of residence. In other words, this is just like every other attempt to convict large numbers of Americans for “voter fraud,” where right-wingers yell ZOMG 1,000 CHARGEZ!!!! but never discuss convictions. And then the handful of voter fraud convictions you do hear about all seem to involve right-wing voters! I’d look forward to Charlie Crist ads about how Ron DeSantis just creates drama to obscure the fact that he can’t govern, but I don’t think he has it in him. I’d be happy to be wrong!

As the Justice Department’s classified-document investigation into Donald Trump develops, Joe Conason at The National Memo reminds us that Hillary Clinton took exactly zero classified documents among all those thousands of but-her-emails. That’s not just Mr. Conason talking – it’s also two Trump Administration Secretaries of State talking. Yet Trumpholes still yell “lock her up” at the big man’s rallies, and though it’s getting harder to explain away how Mr. Trump’s most devoted lieutenants failed to find enough evidence to do so, we’re pretty much at the point where their “explanations” are all shutup you traitorous libtard groomer.

Ho hum, Arizona Republican Senate candidate/man with a face even a mother could punch Blake Masters has hired two of those “electors” who tried to deliver Arizona’s electoral votes to Donald Trump in contravention of the people’s will there. I believe we call this sort of thing “wingnut welfare.” Nice, also, to have the reminder that Mr. Masters indulged in election denialism on his campaign website until scrubbing it a short time ago. But let us also be reminded that Mr. Masters would privatize Social Security, thus exposing your dignified retirement to the greed of banksters and the chaos of our stock market. Naturally the Masters campaign has responded to the Mirror by bringing up child molestation, because it’s not like they’re going to win actual arguments or anything.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (E-SC) threatens us with “riots in the street” if our Justice Department prosecutes Mr. Trump for taking classified documents to Mar-a-Lago. Nice democracy you got here, he’s saying, shame if something happened to it. In later days, of course, he said he was only describing what would happen, which still makes it both rhetorical hostage-taking and an attempt to influence an investigation which he should really be avoiding the appearance of doing, right, Atlanta grand jury? And when police kill yet another unarmed Black man, I doubt Mr. Graham will shrug at any rioting that might occur afterward. Anyway, note to fascists: only inflict violence upon me if you want me to fight you twice as hard afterward.

Finally, holy fucking shit Alaskans just elected Democrat and Native Alaskan Mary Peltola to finish out the late Rep. Don Young’s House term – and she beat former Gov. Sarah Palin by three points! Now Ms. Peltola might lose the November rematch; whatever impression Mrs. Palin tries to give, she’s far from stupid. But the real reason Mrs. Palin hates Alaska’s new ranked-choice voting system isn’t that it’s “weird” or complex, but that it doesn’t let Republicans hold voters hostage at will. Now we just need to keep reminding Democrats that they can’t hold us hostage either.

Action: concerning taxing the rich, prescription drug prices, and marriage equality.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to . 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.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to start taxing billionaire wealth already. Yeah, it sure looks like Congress has already done all they’re going to do about the tax code this year, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still speak out! Especially when billionaires seem to step in it every day! Just a week and a half ago ProPublica reported that a single Chicago businessman somehow funneled $1.6 billion over two years to a right-wing dark money group run by the Federalist Society’s co-chair, all to create even more right-wing judges than Mitch McConnell already has. So yeah, billionaires have too much power, and it’s crippling our civilization.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to do more to lower prescription drug prices for all Americans. Again, Congress may have done all it’s prepared to do about this matter, but again, that doesn’t mean we can’t tell them to do more! Folks on Medicare will pay no more than $35/month for insulin starting in January, and that’s a good thing, but we want insulin prices for everyone to go down. You may recall that most Republicans voted against that plank in the Inflation Reduction Act, so it’s perfectly OK to tell all your friends that they want you and your family to pay more for drugs.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 8404/S. 4556, the Respect for Marriage Act, which would protect gay marriage and interracial marriage from any attempt our Supreme Court might make to overturn previous rulings protecting these rights. Justice Thomas flat-out said our Court ought to reverse those rulings protecting those rights, so our Senators have to act. Brook no absurd claims that those rights aren’t in danger! Republicans said the right to abortion wasn’t in danger, until it was gone; it’s almost like they were trying to lull us into a false sense of security! Hopefully most Americans know better than to trust these people by now.

Around the table: centrists, right-wingers, and liars still suck, part 833.

Factcheck.org issues an expansive report “Correcting Misinformation About Dr. Fauci,” which has unfortunately proven to be an Augean task. Read the whole thing, since he’s going to be a Republican villain in this year’s midterm elections even though he deserves better – and, more importantly, we deserve better. Even when he said (in February 2020) that “right now” COVID infection risk was “low,” he was, strictly speaking, right – and he’s always acted with more honesty and integrity than all his critics who pretend to mishear what he’s saying or cast aspersions upon his motivations with no evidence other than the rage they want to provoke in others.

Had you been thinking that the Sinemanchin axis hasn’t done much to foil President Biden’s appointees in a 50-50 Senate? Turns out they’ve just been picking their spots, with Sen. Sinema, in particular, personally scuttling the appointment of an Elizabeth Warren ally to head up the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Sounds like an unimportant office, right? It’s not: it helps federal regulations get written more quickly and efficiently, so I guess this is another reason corporations call Sen. Sinema “heroic.” Now would be a good time to remind everyone that if she goes into lobbying after her Senate term, as some expect, it won’t be because of her relationships with Democratic Senators, since those are all in flames. It’ll be because of her relationships with Republican Senators. Have you seen her photographed with anyone else? No, you have not. There’s a reason for that.

Ho hum, Arizona Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters has been scrubbing his campaign website of any claims that Democrats stole the 2020 election, even though he’s trafficked in such claims plenty of times. That’s what you’d have to do, I guess, if you know (and if I know, I’m sure he knows) that election denialism turns off independent voters. Still, he said it, so Mark Kelly should run ads about it. Note well, also, that Mr. Masters will have a much tougher time “scrubbing” his remarks about privatizing Social Security, which exist on tape, and therefore the internet, and therefore forever.

BFD that more Pennsylvania Republican politicians have endorsed Democratic gubernatorial nominee Josh Shapiro, because Republican voters don’t listen to their “leaders” anymore, not when Dear Leader Trump (or his Chosen One, Doug Mastriano) speaks. These Republicans know that as surely as I do, and they also know that the more outspoken Republican support Mr. Shapiro gets, the more he’ll feel pressured to move rightward. I don’t even think these Republicans would be unhappy if Mr. Mastriano wins! In any case, I hope Mr. Shapiro understands that his high-profile Republican supporters don’t hold many cards here.

Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph now right-wingers are harassing children’s hospitals in at least five cities for supposedly performing gender-affirming surgery on trans teens which they’re not even doing. I’d say have they no shame?, but really, that ship sailed when they started calling everyone who opposed the Iraq war a “traitor.” Just imagine the worst thing a human being can do, and in a few short years (or months!) you’ll see a right-winger proudly doing it. I’m not even anxious to blame social media for spreading lies about children's hospitals, because assholes only care about setting other people off, and it doesn’t matter with what.

Finally, did I say just two days ago that maybe Mehmet Oz’s Senate campaign isn’t going as badly as we all think? Well, scratch that: Mr. Oz tells a radio interviewer, in re recent attacks on the health of his opponent, John Fetterman, that “(t)he campaign’s saying lots of things. My position is – I can only speak to what I’m saying.” Few Americans care about the difference between what dark money groups say and what candidates say, so they sure ain’t gonna care about the difference between what candidates say and what their own campaigns say. And if there really is a difference, then the candidate doesn’t know what he’s doing! It’s his own campaign! These Trumpholes always strut around when things go well and then act so powerless when they screw up; I’m sick of it.