Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning asylum-seekers, clean air, and marijuana legalization.

Long story short: tell our government to stop using aslyum-seekers as a whipping boy, protect air quality as vigorously as possible, and legalize marijuana (rather than just move it from Schedule I to Schedule III). Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

HIAS helps you tell President Biden to abandon his draconian plan to curtail asylum-seeking in America. Exactly zero right-wingers have said way to go, Joe! since he announced his intentions, but what’s even more insane than constantly courting right-wing voters who will always spit in your face? Using asylum-seekers as your whipping boy, that’s what. Folks seeking asylum in the United States aren’t looking for a free ride so much as they’re looking for a life where their own government doesn’t kill them. And anyone who whines about “terrorists” or criminals in the context of asylum-seekers knows neither facts nor common sense. We do still value these things when we make policy decisions, right?

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to protect air quality as vigorously as possible. Right-wingers act like big corporations will do the right thing if we just leave them alone, but the only reason we have clean air and clean water is that we make big corporations pollute less by enacting laws and regulations. In other words, they use our success to justify not doing what makes us successful! Also too, do right-wingers tend to think people will do the right thing if left alone? Hell no! Otherwise you’d have less of them trying to regulate women’s health care and who can get married and what books you can read.

Finally, VERA helps you tell the Biden Administration to fully-decriminalize marijuana, not merely move it from Schedule I to Schedule III. I won’t lie, moving it from Schedule I (where it most certainly does not belong) to Schedule III will do a lot of good, but I think we know enough by now – and that’s pretty impressive, since Schedule I seriously hamstrings marijuana research – to say pot should be as legal as alcohol. One of the reasons we know enough by now, of course, is we know the cotton lobby wanted pot on Schedule I so no one would ever try to grow or use hemp, ever. We also have John Ehrlichman on record saying the “war on drugs” was really a war on “the anti-war left and Black people.”

Action: concerning COVID relief, higher taxes on the rich, and *a la carte* cable packaging.

Our House votes on the COVID relief bill as early as today, so get on the horn with your House Reps and tell them to pass it. You can find your Reps' phone numbers, as always, by using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're viewing this page on a cellphone, the bottom of this page). I've gone over all the good things this bill would do if passed, and I'm not going to give too much space to Republican plaints that they weren't consulted enough on it ("you say that like it's a bad thing!"), or that it's "too big" ("you don't pull a baby out of a fire gradually!") or that it consists of a "progressive wish list" (again, "you say that like it's a bad thing!"). Instead, I'll note that the bill is extremely popular, with a Morning Consult/Politico poll finding that 76% of Americans support it, and -- are you listening, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema? -- 60% of Republicans support it. There's that bipartisanship everyone in Washington says they're looking for! And Congress should follow our lead. (Don't be dispirited by the Senate parliamentarian's ruling against the inclusion of the $15/hour minimum wage hike in the budget reconciliation process. Your will is still your will, and your Reps need to hear from you that you, like most Americans, want that minimum wage hike.)

While you have your House Reps on the phone, you can tell them to stop being "hesitant" about raising taxes on the rich or rolling back the more nefarious parts of the Trump tax "reform." Then call your Senators and tell them the same thing. Seriously, in the article to which I've linked above, Democrats recycle all the stupid and offensive arguments for not raising taxes on the rich and on corporations -- Joe Manchin said it'd be "ridiculous" to raise taxes during a pandemic (though, to be fair, he walked that back somewhat later on), while Jon Tester said it'd be dangerous to do while unemployment is so high -- this just three years after complaining that the Trump tax "reform" would put us in the hole for decades! When is the right time to do the right thing, Sen. Tester? If these clowns don't raise taxes on corporations and the rich, they're going to lose their slim majorities in 2022, end of story. People generally don't love paying taxes, of course, but they also don't love folks who don't pay their fair share.

Finally, Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk you don't want to pay for evil cable channels like Fox News just so you can watch cable channels you like, like the Food Network. Those of you who've attended this blog for the last 16 years know what we're talking about, even if Free Press, for whatever reason, won't spell it out: we're talking about a la carte cable packaging, where you can pay for the channels you like and you don't have to subsidize the channels you don't like. As you know, folks pay about $2 a month for Fox News, which is actually a fairly high monthly price; now imagine what would happen if, say, 10 million Americans decided not to pay for Fox News. There goes Tucker Carlson's and Sean Hannity's annual salaries in a mere two and a half months! Yeah, Fox would fire all their straight news reporters first (however many of those are left!), but the only language evil news corporations understand is the language of money, and hey, I'm all about talking to people in the language they understand. So let's get to it.

Biden won. Now what?

So the worst human being ever to be President is no longer President – and Joe Biden has replaced him. President Biden’s enjoying a bit of goodwill right now, but it’s early, and we must remember that he spent half a century capitulating to Republicans in the name of “bipartisanship.” I feared his election would be a nightmare scenario, a way for Our Glorious Elites to pretend to care about what the people think by getting rid of Mr. Trump but replacing him with a weakling. But, in truth, none of that matters – the best citizenship makes the politicians irrelevant, and we must aim to do that. In that spirit, I offer some advice.

Our ministry takes as sacred the fact that while voting is important, it’s also one day out of the year; what of the other 364 or 365 days? We need to communicate with our representatives about our concerns daily; Thieves in the Temple will help you do that, as it does now. But we also need to know what we’ll be up against. Donald Trump won’t go away quietly; he may not have his Twitterphone at present, but he’s got plenty of right-wing “news” outlets he can dominate, and our “liberal” media will cover whatever he does as if he’s not the outcast he should be. And you may be more sanguine about our media than you were in 2016, but make no mistake: under a President Biden, they’ll ramp up the horserace coverage, they’ll attack Social Security and Medicare, they’ll demand “bipartisanship” with actively evil Republicans, and they’ll air every far-right fever dream as if it’s a mainstream concern. Speaking of which, you’ve seen people embrace ever-stupider conspiracy theories online, and you’ve also seen emboldened Nazi wannabes stir up violence at otherwise peaceful protests; you’ve even seen Trump supporters actually try to take over our government. Now imagine all those clowns with millions of dollars of right-wing corporate and special interest group money behind them. I guarantee it’ll happen, and it’ll make the Tea Party look quaint.

And, last but certainly not least, you’ll also be up against a Democratic Party constantly yammering on about the art of the possible, and fearmongering you about all the seats Democrats will lose in 2022 if we actually speak our minds and hold them accountable – this, even though Democrats get routed in midterms precisely because they don’t do enough for the voters! And as I’ve said, future Republican Congressional majorities will be the worst we’ve ever seen. To think, that in 1994 and 2010, we said, “gosh, I’ve never seen Republicans worse than these clowns!” What will we say in 2022, if Democrats spend two years pretending their hands are tied? We’ll say, “gosh, I didn’t think people who actually called themselves fascists could win elections in America!” But when leaders don’t heed the will of the people – and this is a nasty habit Democratic politicians have! – that’s the kind of thing that happens.

So we need to do the same things we did (and which worked) in 2017: we need to flood our Congressfolks’ phone lines and we need to bird-dog the hell out of them, even though publicly confronting your elected leaders has a bad name right now, because of those assholes who tried to take over our Capitol. But for what will we fight? Will we fight, merely, to keep Republicans from setting more of our house on fire? No. We have to think bigger than that, and we have to change the conversation Our Glorious Elites would want us to have. I know that’s a big thing to ask of people, particularly people who have been waiting four years to simply draw a sigh of relief. But we’re Americans. We do big things. And here are some of the big things we have to do.

We have to get this pandemic under control. 12,000 Americans died from the swine flu pandemic of 2009 and 2010, so we already know that we can do a lot better than 12,000 deaths every couple of days. We need to do a lot more COVID-19 testing, tracing, and vaccination, and we also need to pass real pandemic relief for working families, not just “relief” that funnels taxpayer money to big bankster cronies. And you know what else? We all need to wear a damn mask when we go out! Right-wingers have had too many don’t-tread-on-me tantrums about this, and we need to stop coddling them. It just so happens that President Biden has proposed a new COVID relief bill that would do most of these things; now we just have to remind our Congressfolk that they work for us.

We have to secure voting rights. Voting is the beginning of our duty as citizens, not the end, but vote suppression did more than any other factor to bring us President Donald Trump in 2016, and we’ve had four years to watch what sophisticated vote suppression has wrought. The For the People Act and the Voting Rights Advancement Act would fix that. The For the People Act would (among other things) keep states from deregistering voters whenever they want, curtail the use of felony convictions to disenfranchise good Americans, and require states to use voter-verifiable paper ballots. The Voting Rights Advancement Act would make the Voting Rights Act whole again, at which point states and localities will find it a lot harder to, for example, deregister voters of color simply because they have the same name as someone from another state. I talk a lot about the cowardice of Democratic politicians, but fact is folks would vote even for a cowardly Democrat over an insane Republican – if they’re allowed to vote!

We need real campaign finance reform – that includes disclosure and limits on contributions. Passing the For the People Act would give us disclosure, but we would need to amend our Constitution to get the latter, thanks to our Supreme Court’s disastrous Citizens United v. FEC ruling. The pro-big corporate campaign spending crowd (it’s not a big crowd, but it does exist!) say we can’t limit campaign contributions because campaigns cost money. But why should that fact compel us to let folks with millions of dollars drown out the real free speech, and real grievances, of working families? Our First Amendment has to work for all of us. H.J.Res. 1, introduced in early January, would amend our Constitution so we can regulate campaign finance again.

We have to make taxes fair again. This President did what all the big “tax cutters” do – he cut taxes a little for you, but cut taxes a lot for his rich cronies, particularly for corporations. We can leave most income tax brackets where they are, but we need to tax income over a million dollars at 91%, and we need to tax corporate profits at 55% – because these are the tax rates that built the greatest middle class the world has ever seen. If you don’t tax the rich, they hoard their windfalls, but if you do tax them, they spend the money paying people to make things, and then we build great economies. We also need to tax investment income equally, so that working families don’t pay more taxes out of their paychecks than hedge fund managers do out of theirs. We need to cap the mortgage interest deduction, so that most homeowners can still get relief, but corporate raiders and slumlords can't game the system. We need to stop corporations “paying” their executives in stock options – income is income, after all, and should be counted as such. Finally, we need to stop cold any attempts to enact a national sales tax. The last thing working families need is a new tax that always hits working people harder than wealthy people. Congressfolk rarely introduce bills that would do these things – so we should tell them to do that!

We need to tackle household debt. The biggest drag on American freedom isn’t taxes or regulations or “political correctness.” It’s debt, whether it’s mortgage debt, credit card debt, or student loan debt. We need to cap revolving loans at 6%, installment loans at 4%, and student loans and mortgages at 2%. And if that winds up outlawing payday lenders, too bad! Forcing people into 300% death-spiral loans ain’t exactly “helping a brother out.” Once we cap loan rates, we need to forgive a lot of the debt people accrued before the caps go into effect; that would only be fair, after all. Don’t worry about the banksters; they’ll still be able to make money, they just won’t be able to buy as many legislators as they used to. More importantly, all the good Americans who will be able live without so damn much debt on their backs will be freer to do good works, as is our birthright. The Loan Shark Prevention Act, from the last Congress, would come closest to doing some of things I’ve outlined above.

We need to expand Medicare to include everyone. The second-biggest drag on our freedom is health care costs, especially now that increased hedge fund involvement in health care corporations just so happens to coincide with surprise medical bills being worse than ever. In the middle of a pandemic, no less! It seems invisible because we pay for it indirectly, through our employers and through our taxes, but we spend around $10,000 annually per person on health insurance in America; folks in Canada, which has a single-payer system, pay less than half of that, and folks in the United Kingdom, which has an entirely socialized health care system, pay a little more than a third of that. But we can expand Medicare to include everyone and cover everyone’s health care needs. How? By implementing Sen. Warren’s plan to tax big corporations almost all the money they already pay for private health insurance. We spend more than any other nation on health care, and still leave over 20 million Americans out in the cold; with Medicare-for-All capturing all that money, and with the drop in administrative costs that will result, we’ll be able to cover everyone’s needs. Medicare-for-All bills get introduced every year; this year, we need to tell them to include the funding mechanism.

We need to redefine “law and order,” so that when we say those words, people think “catching polluters and financial predators” rather than “shooting unarmed black folks in the street.” First, we need to stop using our police officers as the Swiss Army knives of our civilization. Police officers should be making arrests and serving warrants, not answering every conceivable request for assistance a citizen makes, and certainly not doing the job of social workers. Second, we need to stop treating drug addicts as criminals and start treating them as patients. Finally, our regulations need to punish polluters and financial predators with jail time, not fines they can simply deduct from their taxes, and not settlements in which no one admits doing anything wrong. If we do these things, we might lay claim to being a “law and order” nation again. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and the MORE Act, from the last Congress, would comprise a good start toward this end.

We need to invest in renewable energy. I don’t mean just with tax credits for solarizing your house – our government needs to get back into the utility business and create 100% renewable energy utilities that’ll compete with the private utilities that overcharge you and won’t change with the times. And we need to retrain coal workers to build out this renewable energy infrastructure, which will be a hell of a lot easier than retraining them to write software, as Democrats too often think we’re going to do. Right-wingers will call all that “socialism,” but I’ll call it “job creation.” You know what else I’ll call it? If I may paraphrase William Lloyd Garrison, I’ll call it “pulling a baby right out of the damn fire,” since our planet is on fire and renewable energy isn’t a “lifestyle choice” so much as a necessity. The Off Fossil Fuels for a Better Future (or OFF) Act, from the 115th Congress, remains a good model for achieving these ends.

We need to reclaim boundaries on media, including social media. Our media remain addicted to sensationalism and drama, and this addiction pushes us away from those values, like patience and temperance, that sustain us as a civilization. So we need to demand the right to purchase cable channels a la carte, so we’re not paying for media outlets (like cable news channels and reality channels) that make us sicker, more immoral, and more decadent. We also need to stop media consolidation, so that we don’t have so many cookie-cutter TV channels with so few owners to begin with. We need to restore net neutrality, so that we, not some corporate gatekeeper, determine where we want to go on the internet. We need to keep pressuring corporate advertisers, so that we can cut off bad media outlets’ other flow of money. And we need to treat social media websites less like “information services” (i.e., your ISP is an "information service") and more like the publishing houses they actually are. If Random House publishes an author who says something libelous, we hold them liable; if Facebook lets a user do the same thing, we flail around wondering what to do about it. Here’s what we do about it: we change the law so we can hold them accountable. Again, our Congressfolk don’t routinely address these matters through legislation, but we can tell them to do that!

That’s a long list (and not an all-inclusive one!), and a lot of folks would call it idealistic or naive. But folks have always said that about big changes. And, frankly, it’s not the attitude that abolished slavery, it’s not the attitude that got women the vote, it’s not the attitude that got us clean water and food safety, it’s not the attitude that created Social Security and Medicare, it’s not the attitude that enacted minimum wage and worker safety laws, and it’s not the attitude that passed the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. And you know what? It’s also not the attitude that stopped this right-wing Congress and right-wing President from repealing the Affordable Care Act in 2017. The people, alone, stopped that from happening, and we didn’t say it was idealistic or naive to do so.

Still, many of your Democratic Congressfolk, when pressed about solutions like the ones we've advanced here, will throw cold water on them and talk about how "politics is the art of the possible." But we don't fight for what's "possible" – we fight for what's right, and in doing so we widen the palette of the possible. And we do that by calling our reps, emailing our reps, writing our reps, demonstrating at their offices, and bird-dogging them at public events – and we never back down. Republicans never back down, after all, and Democrats seem to treat them a lot better than they treat us. And whenever Democrats fail us, never shrug and say “well, at least they’re better than the alternative.” If we do that, we’ll never get the better alternatives we deserve as Americans. But if we stay on them, they'll come around to our way of thinking, because their jobs will depend on it. So let's get to it.

Around the table: in which we confront yet another frivolous lawsuit.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton asks Supreme Court to block Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan from voting in the Electoral College, alleging that pandemic-related voting changes in these states violated federal law. I would expect our Supreme Court to ask why Texas didn't file this lawsuit at the time the laws were changed, but we must also remember that, well, Mr. Paxton has plenty of reasons to distract us right now. Gosh, I wonder why state Solicitor General/fellow Republican Kyle Hawkins isn't arguing this suit before our Court. Please note that by "I wonder why" I mean "because he knows it's a frivolous lawsuit and wants to have a career after 2020."

Upon hearing that South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem has argued that her state is doing quite well handling COVID using "cherry-picked numbers," I kind of expected her to do some sleight-of-hand like saying OUR CASEZ AREZ TEH DECLININGZ!!!! when they're actually still increasing but at a lower rate. But no: her cherry-picked numbers describe how other states, that locked down more than South Dakota did, are handling COVID -- and she doesn't even get those right! When you're justifying your own actions by criticizing others' actions, you're on pretty shaky ground, but sadly, so many Americans are so intimidated by numbers that I don't expect her to experience very much of the shame she deserves.

Right-wing cable news outlet Newsmax beats right-wing cable news outlet Fox News in the ratings -- in one demographic in one hour of one day, to be sure, but the journey of a thousand miles, et cetera. And CNN's average viewership has been higher than Fox's over the last month, but since all cable news networks suck, none of this is really anything to celebrate -- unless schadenfraude is your only pleasure in life, which I hope it's not! After all, Fox might spend some time trying to chase its viewers who are running away to Newsmax and OAN -- or it might position itself as the "sensible conservative" alternative without changing anything it does, which would, you guessed it, help move the center further right, just like they all do. Give us a la carte cable packaging and this would all matter a lot less.

Don't get too excited about Sen. Romney calling a mooted House attempt to challenge the Electoral College vote "madness." His entire comment essentially legitimizes the nearly five dozen frivolous lawsuits our soon-to-be-ex-President has filed, and he knows as well as anyone else that no matter what happens in Georgia, Republicans will be able to obstruct a Biden Administration a great deal, just as they've been doing whenever they lose the upper hand. Also, too, if "(r)ecounts are appropriate," I guess he also thinks demanding a second recount from Georgia, or only recounting Wisconsin counties with a lot of black folks, are also appropriate.

Finally, our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) and 40 U.S. states say Facebook has monopolized social media and should be broken up. I'm old enough to remember when quite a few social networks existed -- I enjoyed Tribe and Orkut an awful lot, and I sometimes wish I'd gotten more into MeetUp, LiveJournal and Flickr -- so breaking up Facebook wouldn't exactly "break the internet." It doesn't sound like they're going to break Facebook up very much, though -- merely taking Instagram and WhatsApp away from them wouldn't exactly destroy their monopoly. But Facebook pointing to the existence of TikTok and Parler as evidence they're not monopolists? That is to laugh.

Around the table: with more horrible truths about American politics.

The incomparable Nathan Robinson at Current Affairs advises us on "How to Avoid Swallowing War Propaganda." I hope by now it'll all be reminder more than revelation, but reminders sure ain't useless, and I'm glad we're getting this particular reminder before we get too engrossed in yet another Middle East quagmire. I can't resist highlighting the part where Ben Shapiro says TEH OBAMA DRONED TEH TERRURIZTZ TOO!!!! and Mr. Robinson reminds us that such statements "prove() exactly nothing about whether (our President)’s actions were legitimate." Always they talk about what great debaters they are, and then they resort to personal attacks when they're on their heels, which means they're not great debaters.

The incomparable Dean Baker tells us -- because apparently our "liberal" media, at least, needs telling! -- that maybe "College Presidents Aren’t Who We Should Consult About Free Higher Education," since, you know, they all stand to lose money from taxpayer-funded higher ed. They may not have been (as Mr. Baker says) the worst people to ask about it, though -- I bet the worst people to ask about it would be the Vice-Presidents and Deans and Vice-Deans who don't do any useful work and whose mere existence is a major driver of the high cost of education.

Ho hum, another provocative act against a foreign power by our government, another litany of TV and radio "pundits" who all work for defense contractors without proper disclosure of their conflicts of interest. You can contact NPR's public editor about Mr. Keane's appearance on Morning Edition without disclosing his past defense contractor employment here, but as for the rest of them, this is yet another reason we need, and deserve, a la carte cable packaging -- we may not watch this rubbish, but we still pay for it if we have cable, which most of us do. (Don't believe the excuse that disclosure would scare "knowledgeable people" off of television and there'd be dead air all the time -- I mean, this is America we're talking about, full of folks who actually have something to say and hungry to get it heard.)

At last, someone (namely Noah Feldman at Bloomberg) shows skepticism that John Bolton's statement expressing willingness to testify at our President's impeachment trial means a damn thing. Why is saying you'll testify if subpoenaed some gift to America? And if Senate Republicans don't even want witnesses, why would they subpoena him? And have no Congressional Democrats considered the possibility that the Mustache of Evil is running a con game on them? And why can't Democratic politicians stop hoping for some Great Republican Savior? (Also, too, as Mr. Feldman points out, Mr. Bolton's reasoning is not exactly cogent.)

HuffPost/YouGov poll finds that while a mere 43% of Americans supported our President's decision to kill Gen. Soleimani, 30% of Americans "strongly supported" the decision, and this finding, for once, does not map that well onto my long-held belief that 25% of the electorate is bat-guano insane -- and suggests that maybe poking Iran more will get our President more votes on Election Day. It is all about the margins with this guy, after all. I suppose it's possible the poll came out too quickly after the assassination to tell us very much of anything, but I guess time will tell, or at least suggest.

Action: concerning trade, food stamps, and evil media.

Public Citizen helps you tell your House Reps not to vote on our President's USMCA trade agreement until he fixes its problems. Those problems include extended intellectual property protections for big pharmaceutical corporations -- which will keep drug prices higher, and drugs less accessible to the public, for longer -- and its relatively weak labor and clean air/clean water standards. If you're thinking big pharma deserves to make more money off what it makes, remember that most drugs don't get to market without a lot of government help, i.e., taxpayer help, i.e., your help. Remember, also, that no one should have monopoly power over life-saving drugs. The USMCA will drastically curtail the use of "investor-state dispute settlement" (or ISDS) systems which nullify our laws and outsource our jobs, and that's no small thing. But the other things aren't small things, either, and we deserve the best trade agreements we can get. So get on the horn to your House Reps and communicate your will.

Meanwhile, our Administration has proposed taking away state options, under the federal food stamps program, to assist working families who have significant child care and shelter bills. Sounds wonky, I know, but the end result will be no more food stamps for three million good Americans who still need it, so the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell our USDA to reject its own proposal to take away food stamps from so many people. No, it's not absurd to tell them to reject their own proposal -- it was absurd for them to propose something that merely injures us. And when I say "us," I do mean us -- we all pay into the food stamps program with our taxes, and any one of us could need it at any time, and we're not "lazy" or "stupid" merely because we need to avail ourselves of it. Hate to pile on -- OK, I don't -- but depriving states of flexibility in administering federal programs sure doesn't sound very conservative.

Finally, Fox News talking head Tucker Carlson called white supremacy a "hoax" a few weeks back, and then promptly went on "vacation," but now he's back, albeit with fewer advertisers, so now's as good a time as any to remind you that Media Matters still helps you tell big corporate advertisers to "drop Fox." Big cable corporations won't let us buy cable channels a la carte, so the next best thing we can do is make Fox toxic to big corporate advertisers, since as long as Fox is making money, they'll never change. At least not for the better! Pressuring Fox advertisers is already working -- Mr. Carlson's program has been hemorrhaging advertisers for a while, and big fast food chain corporation Long John Silver's has lately pulled all its ads from Fox. Still, corporations like Expedia, Allstate, and Applebee's still seem to look at Fox News as just another avenue to hawk their wares. But big corporate CEOs ought to be ashamed of themselves for giving money to Fox News. It's a good thing the Big Stick of Bad PR still works.

Action: concerning good science, bad science, and bad media.

You've heard, no doubt, about our Administration's multitudinous attempts to hide and purge scientific information that good Americans deserve to know. Hence S. 2220, the Open and Responsive Government Act, would amend the Freedom of Information Act so that folks couldn't hide "confidential" information from the public unless it would actually cause them substantial harm. S.2220 would also specify more precisely that you can't withhold a big slab of information from the public merely because a portion of it might meet the "substantial harm" standard. These are good ideas, of course, but why are they urgent now? Because our Administration's EPA has packed its scientific advisory boards with (you guessed it) industry figures who could claim all kinds of "substantial harm" if FOIA requests would require answers from them. Of course, I'd rather not have this revolving door between corporations and our government in the first place, but in the meantime, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Open and Responsive Government Act.

Meanwhile, Sky Gray, of Asheville, NC, has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell online retail corporation Amazon to stop selling "conversion therapy" books. "Conversion therapy" -- which aims to "convert" gay folks (including children!) into straight folks by, among other odious methods, making them re-enact their sexual abuse -- is now illegal in 14 states. Are you feeling a little anxious about whether you're "suppressing free speech" by telling Amazon to do this? Rest assured that you're not -- Amazon can always say "no," after all, if they think they can withstand the bad PR that'll result. But our First Amendment only guarantees writers of "conversion therapy" books the right not to be imprisoned by our government for their speech -- it does not guarantee an audience for your speech, and it does not guarantee you the right to make money off your speech. In a sane and moral society, such books would be available at the gay-hating version of Paladin or Loompanics -- but not necessarily on America's biggest bookseller.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell corporations to stop advertising on Tucker Carlson Tonight and The Ingraham Angle on the Fox News (sic) Channel, then Color of Change helps you do that. Why? Well, because of everything they've ever said and done, really, and why do such terrible people get so many TV shows? It's like our media only care about drama! But both talking heads have also spread around plenty of racist pablum over the last few years, and with so many white supremacists going around shooting people these days, well, it's not a good look. And I wish we lived in an America where simply "changing the channel" was enough, but it's not enough, because even if we're not watching it, we're still paying for it, and corporations are still advertising on it. In the absence of a good a la carte cable packaging law, we can at least wield the Big Stick of Bad PR on their advertisers.

Action: concerning campaign finance reform, violence against women, and evil media.

Our Supreme Court's Citizens United v. FEC ruling -- which used the ancient and nefarious doctrine of corporate "personhood" to expand big corporate campaign financing -- remains a blot on our culture. But H.J.Res. 2 would amend our Constitution to allow Congress to "regulate and set reasonable limits on the raising and spending of money by candidates and others to influence elections," which would include "prohibiting" "artificial entities created by law" "from spending money to influence elections." Big corporate campaign spending is popular with approximately no one -- except the big corporations who buy votes this way! Yes, that's an accurate way of putting it: money isn't speech, it's property, and everyone but a pedant sees that big corporate campaign spending results in corrupt corporate lackeys in office. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to slow the flow of big corporate money into political campaigns.

It's not just the American Dream and Promise Act, the For the People Act, the Equality Act, and the Save the Internet Act that aren't getting the proper attention from our Senate -- it's also H.R. 1585, the Violence Against Women Act Reauthorization Act, passed by our House back in April but still sitting on the Senate's general calendar two months later. I suppose that's an improvement over the aforementioned bills, but your Senators could still use your counsel; hence Amnesty International helps you tell your Senators to pass the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act. Are they refusing to pass it because it would give tribal courts more power to go after sexual violence, child abuse, sex trafficking, and the like? I sure hope not, because that would mark them as pedants -- and also as hostage-takers, since the bill would also help federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement entities communicate with each other about these issues.

CREDO helps you tell advertisers to drop the Fox News program The Ingraham Angle. CREDO cites Laura Ingraham's recent defense of evil white supremacist/anti-Semite Paul Nehlen as the immediate news hook (a simple graphic causes so much trouble these days!), but a better reason to tell advertisers to abandon her is everything she's ever done -- she's been an ambulance chaser for far-right causes for three decades now, and she doesn't obsess over nationalism and xenophobia these days because she's really given all that a lot of thought, but because she thinks that's where the money is. Let's prove her wrong. And while we're talking about it, Media Matters helps you tell advertisers to drop Fox News generally, since they're all pretty terrible. If you want to call your Congressfolk and demand that they pass a law letting you choose your cable channels a la carte so you don't have to pay for this rubbish, well, tools to find your Congressfolks' phone numbers are in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone).

Action: concerning *a la carte* cable packaging, the Muslim ban, and the Electoral College.

Just the other day we discussed, as we do, how awful cable news is and why we need a strong a la carte cable packaging law, one that would allow us to stop paying for cable channels we don't want to support, and though no one has introduced an a la carte bill this session, what prevents us from calling our Congressfolk (using the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page) and demanding one? Nothing, that's what -- and our agitation is likely all that'll ever get us one. It's tempting to think social media and streaming video are reducing our dependence on cable, but most folks still get their news from the TV (despite my best efforts!), so we need tools to ensure we can all get better news from the TV. You can always challenge a license of a a traditional over-the-air TV station, but with cable news channels, you have to go after their moneypot -- and if large numbers of us stop paying for their act, they'll change their act right quick. So let's get to it.

Meanwhile, the soon-to-be-introduced NO BAN Act would not only repeal our President's hated Muslim ban, but make it tougher for him and those who follow him to enact more of these bans. Yeah, I know, our Supreme Court said the Muslim ban didn't violate our Constitution (likely only because our Administration finally had the sense to include a few non-Muslim majority nations in their travel ban), but the credibility of that ruling is strained, to say the least -- the Court utterly ignored that time our President told Rudy Giuliani that he wanted to do a "Muslim ban, but legally" ("I'd like to commit murder/burglary/arson, but legally!"), but went very far out of its way to find some mean thing a Colorado commissioner said about far-right religious folks that apparently justified striking down a ban on discrimination against gays there. Hence Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to support actual religious freedom by passing the NO BAN Act once it's introduced.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to abolish the Electoral College. Why? Because literally entrusting the election of Presidents to an unelected body of 538 folks betrays our democratic ideals, and because two madmen have won the Presidency while losing the popular vote just since 2000. In that order, too -- the latter may have reminded us of the former, but the former is more important. Don't believe that if we abolish the Electoral College that heartland states will have no say in our government, because these states already enjoy disproportionate representation in the Senate. And feel free to detect racism in statements that parties will just turn out the vote in the cities if we dump the Electoral College. And when folks say "I don't want New York and California picking my President," you can say "I don't want the South picking mine." Some people profess to like the popular vote, until their candidate doesn't win. Those people just need to grow up.

Around the table: tragedy doesn't bring out the best in everyone, part 544.

The Center for Media and Democracy has found that the state of Wisconsin has purged over 700,000 voters from its rolls since the 2016 election -- and (get your surprised face ready) purged more of them in Democratic-leaning counties than Republican ones. That still didn't help Republicans in various state special elections in 2018, but note well that Wisconsin has fewer than six million people to begin with. And yes, they used the old respond-to-this-postcard-to-prove-you-haven't-moved trick. If this "blue wave" doesn't materialize, I sure hope our "liberal" media starts covering vote suppression more vigorously. The alternative is hearing pundits say well, I guess Americans just wants to be racist and there's nothing we can do about it.

Straight-ticket voters in six Texas counties report problems with voting machines failing to report or even changing their votes for U.S. Senate. You have to hit two buttons simultaneously to produce the error -- which seems a little like unnecessary effort to me, but it's also should be harder to flummox a voting machine than that, and we didn't have this problem back when we had paper ballots. And of course government officials cry poor when it comes to replacing nine-year-old voting machines. They could tax the rich and corporations a little harder, maybe?

Fox News mistakenly yeah-sure shows a couple of still photos of Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) -- who could, I suppose, be our next President -- during an alert about a shooting suspect/sex offender on the loose in Utah. Because who doesn't get the two mixed up? Fox News ran a correction 45 minutes later, but they know as well as the rest of us that nobody hears the corrections, and their millions of rage-addled viewers all got to associate Kamala Harris with criminal behavior, so mission accomplished! That's why we need to be able to pay for cable channels a la carte -- you may not have liked what Fox News did, but you still paid for it, and they won't stop doing it until they're staring at the possibility of losing lots of money.

Speaking of The Worst of the Very Bad Cable News Networks, a Fox News host claims that the pipe bombs sent to various liberal and pseudo-liberal political figures last week were actually "threatening-looking devices" and thus not "actual threats." Uh, no: if it looks like a threat, it's a threat, and the act of concluding that it only "looks like a threat" does not actually prevent it from going off. Such post-modernists they have at Fox News -- I mean, it's not even the difference between a mound of dung the flies have found and a mound of dung they haven't found yet! (Her right-wing guest disagreed with her, but big whoop -- Fox News loves playing up all the hair-splitting differences between right-wingers so as to help ward off charges of marching in jackboot lockstep agreement about everything.)

Finally, Tucker Carlson wrings his hands on Twitter asking "(h)ow'd we get to a place where it's normal that two parts of the country despise each other?" Gosh, I don't know -- because you and your kind have been complete assholes to everyone who disagrees with you for years? But here's the good news: when right-wingers start whining like this, they're on their heels. Let's keep them there.

Around the table: the need for net neutrality, put more starkly.

Now free from the horrible tether of net neutrality, Verizon throttles California firefighter data in the midst of that state's wildfire -- and then has the cojones to suggest that if Santa Clara County firefighters don't like it, they can switch to a data plan that costs twice as much! I admit I feel a little ashamed for arguing that you should support net neutrality because you support the freedom to go where you want on the internet, and not that you should support net neutrality so that corporations can't hinder firefighters' attempts to talk to each other in the middle of a fucking wildfire.

In case you were wondering how right-wing news hacks were dealing with all those Paul Manafort convictions and Michael Cohen guilty pleas from last week, well, they're dealing with it about as well as you can expect -- saying the convictions are for "non-crimes," they're evidence of a "witch hunt," that further charges are "fake news," that Mr. Cohen was "coerced" into implicating our President, and also too WHAT ABOUTZ TEH DEMON-CRATZ!!!!! Pimps gotta pimp, I guess. (As an aside, I don't really care that some Fox News reporters are apparently leaving out of disgust, since they really should have been disgusted with their employer many, many years ago.)

But the rot has also reached the "liberal" media! No, really, I'm not impressed that a CNN host pointed out on-air that a pro-Trump "analyst" also advises our President's 2020 re-election campaign and is thus contractually obligated not to say anything bad about our President, because a network with actual ethics would never have hired such an individual in the first place. And therefore we can't dismiss the possibility that CNN knew of Mr. Astorino's conflict, and decided outing him on the air would be "great" drama. If only we had an a la carte cable packaging law -- say, one that would force our cable provider to refund us at cost for the channels we wouldn't watch -- we would have a way of punishing channels that make a mockery of American journalism.

Homeless advocate reminds us that simple charity toward the homeless -- by, you know, giving them food -- is against the law in so many areas of our great land. The folks who whine about TEH EIGHTY ZILLYUNZ GUN LAWZ!!!!!! might want to attend all the laws on the books that actually prevent acts of charity, but sadly, I bet a lot of them don't want to see homeless people around, either. Would it be worth it to retort that they ought to work toward some non-awful homeless policy if they don't want to see them around? No, it probably would not be worth it -- hate is a lot easier than love.

D.C. district court judge strikes down most of three Presidential executive orders that supposedly aim to get "underperforming" employees out of our government more quickly, but actually just harass federal workers. I was about to say "don't a lot of these things violate whatever contracts these workers have with our government?" But it's almost beside the point to say so, since we only have a year or so before our Supreme Court gets its grubby mitts on this case and concocts some pretzel logic to justify our President's actions.

Finally, Randolph County (GA) elections board smacks down a proposal to close seven out of nine polling places in the county, after weeks of public agitation against the proposal. But, ah, WSB, there's a better word than "controversial" for a plan to suppress the vote of mostly rural and black folks. And that word is evil. And if we pass the Voting Rights Advancement Act, we can fight this kind of evil a lot better than we can now.

Around the table: what about America don't right-wingers get? And other questions.

Buried deep in this account of the sudden disappearance of a political cartoonist's work from the pages of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is its new editorial director, one Keith Burris, claiming that our activism against this Administration constitutes "a mania, a fever, a hissy fit by the self-anointed guardians of all that is good and enlightened in America." Setting aside that, just as "Bush derangement syndrome" more aptly described the behavior of Bush Mobb supporters, the "mania," "fever," and "hissy fits" all come from the President and his votaries: does Mr. Burris not know that this is America? In America, we are, all of us, in fact, "self-appointed guardians" of civilization. That's how America is supposed to work. It's what separates us from aristocracies, monarchies, and dictatorships. And if you think I look down on you for no good reason, your task, as an American -- as a guardian of civilization! -- is most pointedly not to whine about it. Your task is to prove me wrong, and change my mind. If you can't, you may want to consider whether that's your failing, not mine.

Our President can't stop jerking off to our low unemployment numbers, but we should remember that the "official" unemployment rate doesn't count people who've stopped looking for work, or people who work part-time but would rather work full-time. Worse, the U6 rate that supposedly counts these people -- now at 7.6%, or about twice the official unemployment rate -- may not even be that accurate! Economist Robert Pollin suggests that when you consider that the percentage of adults in the workforce is considerably lower than it was 10 years ago, the real unemployment rate could be as high as 11%. That's before you get to the fact that we don't make the money we used to, for reasons including the decline of unions and the rise of outsourcing. (Mr. Pollin also says our government needs to invest in a "Green New Deal" that creates renewable energy jobs, and of course he's right about that.)

Perhaps sensing he's under fire for avoiding meeting with his Consumer Advisory Board as mandated by law, CFPB acting director Mick Mulvaney fires all 25 members of the Consumer Advisory Board, and tells them they can't reapply, almost certainly as a prelude to packing the Board with banksters. And dig the CFPB spokeshack suggesting that the fired Advisory Board members are upset because they might lose their "taxpayer funded junkets to Washington" where they're supposedly "wined and dined by the Bureau"! I hope most Americans understand that if you cared that much about perks, you'd never go into consumer protection advocacy.

U.S. District Judge rules that our Administration cannot, in fact, deny municipalities certain law enforcement funding because they won't go beyond the law in cooperating with the Administration's efforts to find undocumented immigrants. All the Administration would have to do is get the right warrants, but ball-swingers don't do that -- instead, they tell bald lies about immigrant "crime spikes" and violate the Constitution and the law, particularly the Administrative Procedure Act. Remember the Administrative Procedure Act, because it helps prevent the Executive branch from doing whatever the fuck it likes, and it may hang a few other Executive branch initiatives (like maybe the FCC's net neutrality repeal) before too long.

Finally, we learn that advertisers have been fleeing the Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham programs at the Fox News Channel. Apparently their pro-Administration stance doesn't endear them to advertisers anymore, and I'm sure Mr. Hannity's brain-dead conspiracy theories and Ms. Ingraham's attacks on school shooting survivors don't help. In the absence of a la carte cable packaging, which would allow us to simply not pay for channels that disgust us, shaming advertisers into abandoning shows is about our best tool for bringing morality and sanity back to America.

Action: *a la carte* cable packaging, and postal banking.

So it's 2018 and we still can't buy our cable TV channels a la carte! I know, it sure does seem like social media and streaming video are winning the battle, but cable TV channels still make money from you merely by being part of a cable package you have to buy! And if you don't like, say, cable news channels, you can make your cable corporation block them, but you'll still pay for them, and as long as you're still paying them, they won't change their evil ways. So here's an idea: using the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page (or the bottom, if you're viewing it on a smartphone), call your Reps and Senators and demand a la carte bill that'll force cable corporations to refund the cost of cable channels you won't watch and don't want in your house. A lot of cable channels cost less than a buck a month, but if hundreds of thousands of Americans got their money back, they'd get scared, and with added pressure we could get them to change their behavior.

Meanwhile, S. 2755, the Postal Banking Act, would allow the United States Postal Service (or USPS) to offer basic financial services, including savings and checking accounts, small loans, and debit cards. The USPS used to offer these services until around 50 years ago, so why start it up again? Because the Post Office could fill a niche for working families in rural and urban areas the big banksters don't serve, a niche that currently gets filled far too often by payday lenders trapping those families in a cycle of debt. Restarting postal banking would also help the USPS survive financial troubles that Congress created in 2006, by mandating that the USPS fund over 80 years' worth of pension obligations in advance, a hurdle our laws impose on no other entity. So, basically, it's a win for working families and a win for the Post Office, which kinda makes that two wins for working families. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to help working families in underserved rural and urban areas by supporting the Postal Banking Act.

Around the table: more thoughts about voting rights, media coverage, Presidential power, right-wing messaging, renewable energy, and free speech.

Aaron Sankin at Reveal reminds us of the other problem with the notorious Interstate Crosscheck voter info database: it's vulnerable to hackers, and thus exposes the personal data of millions of voters to identity theft. I wonder if that was a feature, not a bug! Seriously, I'll be happy if this is the reason the twenty-plus states still using Crosscheck to purge voters stop using it, though eight states have apparently stopped using Crosscheck for that purpose but are still sending voter data through an insecure system. (Also, consider that even though these states still sending voter data to Crosscheck may not be using Crosscheck to purge their own voter rolls, other states may be using that info to purge theirs.)

Murtaza Hussain at The Intercept reports that Muslim terror suspects get on average seven times the "liberal" media attention that white terror suspects get, and their sentences are on average four times longer. This is not a terribly surprising development, once you recall how urgently our "liberal" media has rushed to portray various white terror suspects (the Planned Parenthood bomber and the Austin bomber leap to mind) with adjectives like "troubled," a courtesy our "liberal" media most emphatically does not extend to terrorists of the more Muslim persuasion, though surely they're just as human as white people, right? In any case, it sure is nice to have some hard data behind it.

Stan Collender at Forbes suggests that our President might try to get around the most recent appropriations bill by simply refusing to appropriate the money as the law has directed. And then dance around with no pants on, no doubt, while his votaries all squeal HE DID IT FOR US!!!!! If a President refuses to appropriate money as Congress has mandated, Congress gets to pass another bill forcing him to do so -- which means that if this President decides to throw up his hands, we'd be relying on Republican-held Congresses to do more than stamp their feet about it. Like Republicans didn't already think of all of that! It's win-win for them -- they get their cherished spending cuts and they get to blame the President for them!

Dig the balls on Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker, in the wake of Republicans losing yet another election there, saying that the left is the side of "anger and hatred." What recent Republican policy prescription has not been driven by "anger and hatred" -- specifically, the anger and hatred of Our Glorious Elites toward the American people? It's good, at least, to be reminded why Scott Walker is so dangerous -- not just because he remembers to claim that his side is the side of "optimism," but because he'll say up is down like up really is down, and thus persuades people who don't have the time (or the compulsion!) to attend these matters as closely as we do, but who do respond intuitively to "people who seem to know what they're talking about."

Portugal produced just about all of its electrical requirements for the month of March via renewable energy. Now, more than half of March's renewable power yield came from hydroelectricity, and not every nation's borders are nearly half coastline like Portugal's, but Portugal also met over 40 percent of its energy needs with wind power, and I can think of a few well-developed nations that don't do that well. Please, right-wingers, don't squeal that Portugal still had to use some fossil fuels over the month of March due to renewable energy storage issues, because a) it wasn't much and b) that's no justification for handing out corporate welfare to fossil fuel corporations or drilling off every conceivable coast.

Finally, Laura Ingraham just took a week off her Fox News show after being on the blunt end of a massive boycott for ridiculing one of the Parkland school shooting survivors, and some "liberal" media journalists are complaining that boycotts are bad and you should always meet speech with more speech, but Atrios reminds us why that's utter bunk. It isn't just that you and I can't get our speech out there the way a Laura Ingraham can, or that the First Amendment doesn't actually guarantee you a right to a paid gig for your speech, let alone immunity from criticism or adverse action from advertisers and activists -- it's also that people like Laura Ingraham are not actual journalists. They're what the industry calls "talent," and what I call (when I'm feeling very generous) "newsreaders." Journalists do seem awfully upset about the power of boycotts these days; does that mean they'd be even more upset about a la carte cable packaging?

Around the table: the real lesson of the PA-18 special election, and other stories.

Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times reminds us how little the Republican tax "reform" is doing for workers. Mr. Hiltzik reminds us that if corporations were serious about using their tax cut largess to make workers' lives better, they'd have given permanent raises, not bonuses that disappear almost as fast as they appear. And he also reminds us that Pfizer could reap immense rewards (not just of money, but of prestige) if they actually found a good treatment for Alzheimer's and Parkinsons, difficult as that's proven to be. And that's perhaps more emblematic of our times -- Our Best and Brightest corporations, which our laws supposedly need to "set free" from "regulatory burdens," constantly choose the easy way out when given the chance. And the easy way out now tends to be more lucrative, which is not how it should be in a civilized society.

Ho hum, the Treasury Department projects that our budget deficit will go up to nearly $1 trillion this year! And none of the President's votaries, who wouldn't stop whining about the Obama deficits, will complain about this one, because TEH TAX CUTZ!!!!! Which, as demonstrated in the above paragraph, are doing such great work for America.

Also ho hum, we learn that none other than OMB/CFPB director Mick Mulvaney was the one who approved the Labor Department's disastrous decision to bury the study that said their now-abandoned "tip-stealing" rule would actually result in bosses stealing their workers' tips! I presume one day Mr. Mulvaney will realize he's gone all-in on the wrong side, and suffer appropriately for it. I kid, of course -- Mr. Mulvaney will get wingnut welfare from Fox News forever after all the harm he's done our country. (If only we could buy our cable channels a la carte! Then there might not be any media wingnut welfare to give!)

Here's something genuinely surprising: the Senate Intelligence Committee, currently dominated by Republicans, says (among other things) that we should conduct elections with paper ballots. You and I have been saying this for close to 20 years, but I'm not going to be annoyed about that, or about the fact that their concern isn't machines disappearing votes but Russian meddling -- it's the right prescription, and I didn't think they had it in them to even say so. Now let's see if they actually help fund paper ballots at the state level.

Speaking of things you and I have known for 20 years, Paul Krugman at the New York Times instructs us that the entire Republican program is a "bait and switch" -- they promise all kinds of things to voters, but what they deliver is nothing more than "upward redistribution of income" from workers to bosses. But his analysis is valuable, because it confines itself to the PA-18 election, in which the Republicans tried "three different bait-and-switch strategies" -- roll call! Tax cuts are great! Tariffs will bring back the steel jobs! Democrats hate God and America! -- that failed to deliver victory for Mr. Saccone in a district the President won by nearly 20 points. But, you know, it isn't that the voters are "wising up" (the voters are actually plenty wise already!) so much as that Democrats like Conor Lamb -- who ran against the tax cuts and Obamacare repeal, and who ran for expanding Social Security -- are giving voters someone to vote for, and that's a thing that might even overcome whatever war the President plans to start the last week in October.

Finally, a Dane County Circuit Judge tells Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker that he must hold special elections to fill two vacant state legislature seats, even if he's really, really afraid Republicans will lose both, as they lost a Republican-held (and rather grotesquely-gerrymandered) seat less than two months ago. And who was the gay-humping, baby-killing, flag-burning, socialist-loving Governor who appointed this judge? I won't tell you his name, but his initials are "Scott Walker."

Around the table: guns, education, populism, decadence, and strategy.

Zenobia Jeffries at Yes! magazine writes about black folks who have strongly embraced gun ownership in the wake of the "megalomaniac" who's now President. Many years ago, I embraced a very rigid view of Second Amendment rights out of a similar fear that Tha Bush Mobb would haul me away, but I've come to believe that, in a civilized society, that you don't locate the idea of "self-defense" solely in a handgun, but mainly in the values and institutions that neuter megalomaniac Presidents in the first place -- and if those values and institutions, frankly, haven't worked very well for black folks (just ask Philandro Castile!), our task is to make them work well, not abandon them.

Betsy DeVos's Department of Education informs Department workers that they'll no longer negotiate with those workers' chosen representative, the American Federation of Government Employees Council 252, but instead imposes a "collective bargaining agreement" upon them. I can't fathom the circumstances under which this could possibly be legal -- I can imagine even John Roberts saying that if management imposes its will on labor without negotiating, it can't be said to be "collective bargaining," or even "bargaining." But then, this is the Administration way: do what you want, regardless of the law, and dare anyone to stop you.

It really shouldn't surprise us by now that West Virginia's public school teachers don't fit snugly into the red-blue paradigm, nor should it surprise us that socially-conservative-but-pro-union is really a thing. I also don't think West Virginia's particular brand of pro-union populism should be a template for the rest of the country, since West Virginia's economy relies on coal more than any other state. And "bringing jobs back to coal country" might be more about reclaiming used-up coal land for agriculture and renewable energy than recasting REGULASHUNZ BAD!!! as a populist tenet.

If you want a true indicator of how sick, immoral, and decadent our society has become, you need look no further than all the cable news personalities the Administration has either hired or is contemplating hiring. The President has recently hired CNBC's ridiculous Larry Kudlow to replace the almost-as-ridiculous Gary Cohn as his top economic advisor, and one Fox and Friends host (not a famous one) has actually moved up in the State Department. TV news is the worst news, which means cable TV news is the worst of the worst. Hence another reason to demand the ability to buy our cable channels a la carte: so we don't have to financially support these morons as they schmooze their way into our government.

Finally, Republicans are apparently hoping that they can keep their Senate majority by having the President go to states he won and talk about how "Democrats are hindering his agenda." I'm not sure how big the President's "base" is, really, and it sure does seem "counterintuitive" to have him go around the country and whine about how he can't get anything done. On the other hand, since this President isn't a Democrat, the "liberal" media will be much less likely to cover all of his whining as whining. And out of all the Senators up from states the President won, the only two I'd miss are Tammy Baldwin and Sherrod Brown.

Around the table: from real journalism to a real "American Caesar."

Issie Lapowsky at Wired profiles the Syrian journalists who are risking death to spread the word (largely via social media) about how ISIS and the Syrian government are destroying their country. You know, in case you were wondering what real journalism looks like -- the kind of journalism that speaks truth to power and puts the lives of its practitioners at risk, rather than the kind we're used to from the "liberal" media, where journalists suck up to the powerful and pretend they're "cultivating sources."

Bad news for the Trump Administration -- from the Trump Administration! The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services issues report finding, among other things, that the mix of sick and healthy folks on the Obamacare exchanges was about the same last year as it was the year before. Well, that's one hell of a "death spiral" there! And when they get around to evaluating how well the exchanges did in 2017 versus 2016, they run the risk of blaming themselves for any problems! No wonder they're so hot to get rid of Obamacare.

I wouldn't blame you for being skeptical about research indicating that counties where law enforcement receives military equipment from our government have a higher incidence of police violence, although the authors say they controlled for all the factors you might think of (violent crime and citizen wealth in a county, to name two examples). But the finding that police get attacked more when they've got military equipment should give you pause under any circumstance -- if the whole purpose of military equipment is to "protect police," we have to assume that's not working, don't we?

Eric Anthony at Streaming Observer estimates that ESPN makes some $4.5 billion annually from broadband customers who don't actually want to watch it. Which is, you know, more than half of the people who get it in their basic cable package. You know what'd fix this? A la carte cable packaging, that's what! (And the "a la carte" services don't really serve channels up a la carte: Sling TV, which used to tempt me, now carries four ESPN channels in its basic "Orange" package.)

Finally, 18 state Attorneys General sue the Department of Education over its decision to delay enforcing rules protecting students from predators in the financial and for-profit college industries. The Trump Administration obviously thinks they've found a loophole in the law by "delaying" or "pausing" rules, instead of going through the trouble (and it is trouble!) to repeal or rewrite them. But while executive branches may get to set enforcement priorities, they can't just refuse to enforce a law because they don't like it, or even because they believe it's a bad law. Isn't this the kind of behavior the Founders warned us about?

Around the table: when a pro-hearing aid bill becomes an anti-gun bill, and other absurdities.

Surprise, surprise, President Trump's boutique infrastructure plan would include tolls on existing interstate highway lanes and privatizing rest stops on those highways. One more time: the private sector doesn't do things better; it just redistributes income from workers to executives "better." And I bet Congress and the President aren't really "headed for a fight" about this matter -- one Republican Rep says "I don't like paying for a road twice," which, like, hallelujah, but then adds "(e)verything's on the table." Profile in courage!

Dean Baker calls a financial transaction tax (a.k.a. the "Robin Hood tax" or the "Wall Street sales tax") "The Best Solution to Income Inequality." Why? Because the cost will borne entirely by Wall Street, rather than Main Street. Mr. Baker also reminds us that a) folks don't care about the number of trades they make so much as the amount of money they make, and b) banksters can't argue that "more trades makes the market more efficient," as "(s)omeone would be hard pressed to argue that capital was better allocated in the housing bubble years than fifteen or twenty years earlier when volume might have been less than half of its current level."

From the "Nobody Could Have Predicted" file: Oklahoma's state budgeting problems are so awful now that a lot of kids are only going to school four days a week. The good news? Not every kid in Oklahoma likes it -- some of them, for example, don't like all the rushing around you do when you try to cram five days of work into four. Still, I worry that too many of them will remember this as some kind of Golden Age, even after they're grownups and the ill effects of their education take their toll -- how many of them will say "a four-day school week never hurt me" as they suffer through their umpteenth consecutive year without work?

Hoo boy: former Fox News punditoid recalls how that network (among other things!) made the news "like pro wrestling" and "performance art," and how they "fixed" panel debates so that right-wingers always won. Fox News punditoids getting their scripted "last word" 24 hours beforehand, a Fox News "star" telling his guests what to say -- these are, of course, the hallmarks of folks who can't win arguments on the merits. And remember, kids: if we could buy cable channels a la carte, we wouldn't have to put up with this garbage.

Finally, from the "When Do They Feel Shame?" file, gun rights groups contort bill allowing over-the-counter hearing aids into an anti-gun bill, quite likely because Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is one of its sponsors. Go ahead and try to follow their reasoning, if you dare. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) is also one of its sponsors, and has rebutted these groups' talking points, but apparently to no avail. What a shame that some gun rights groups make all gun rights supporters look bad.

Around the table: a coup in the Wyoming Democratic party, and other strange developments.

The Wyoming Democratic Party holds committee elections, and the Berniecrats trounce the Clintonoids. I would be highly amused to discover that the Clintonoid faction warned repeatedly about the "risk" people would be taking if they elected Berniecrats -- I mean, when your party has 12 out of 90 seats in the state legislature, there's very little hostage-taking the establishment can do ("don't vote for those crazy people, or you'll lose!").

Congress is in recess for two weeks, but very few swing-district Republicans will hold live town halls over the next two weeks. Tele-town halls are no substitute (you're not really "facing your constituents" if you get to pick all the questions and do it over computer) and if Republicans are really concerned about live townhalls devolving into "shouting matches," as one Republican spokeshack says, then they may want to consider how they could prevent that. Maybe by managing conflict better -- I mean, they teach courses in that! -- or by, oh, I don't know, withdrawing support for unpopular policies that hurt people.

Jeff Sessions's Department of Justice announces it will curtail efforts to review scientific standards in forensic practices. Not as part of the Trump Administration's "War on Science," perhaps, but certainly because they'd rather leave "guilty" people in jail even if the forensic evidence used to convict them (like bite-mark and firearm tracing) wouldn't pass scientific muster today. Always the Accountability Crowd takes the easy way out! Better crime-fighting isn't just good for our civilization, it builds character.

Ted Rall regales us with "Confessions of a Frequent Guest on Fox News." You'll recognize the things Fox does to its house liberals -- put them in smaller chairs, tamp down their microphones, tell them the show's about one thing only to switch it on them when they showed up to the set -- as the hallmarks of people who can't win arguments on the merits. And without a la carte cable packaging -- under which consumers wouldn't pay for channels they didn't want -- they'll keep getting away with it.

Finally, Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Daily News wonders if "liberal" media applause over Mr. Trump's missile strike will mark "a dangerous turning point" in our history. Maybe! But Americans, by and large, don't like Mr. Trump, and by and large they don't like the "liberal" media, either, so I think it'll take a lot of Democrat enabling to make large numbers of people think he's "Presidential." It did not occur to me before, though, that Mr. Trump has surpassed Mr. Bush in at least one thing: don't wait until a particularly bad day to drop bombs. Of course, since every day is a bad day when you're tripping over your own dick, "waiting until a slightly less bad day" is just about his only option.

Around the table: health care, "liberal" media follies, and Stupid Protesting Tricks.

Senate Republicans begin the process of repealing the Affordable Care Act. They all voted against an amendment to preserve the famous ban on insurers kicking people off policies for pre-existing conditions; think that'll show up in Democrat attack ads come 2018? I kid, of course; these are Democrats we're talking about. For my money, the worst thing any Senator had to say about it came from Mississippi's Roger Wicker: "This is our opportunity to keep our campaign promise...This is our opportunity to help the president-elect and the vice president-elect keep their campaign promises and show to the American people that elections have consequences." The part about "campaign promises" is irrelevant, since we good Americans communicate our will to our representatives regardless of their promises. And the part about "consequences" sounds rather like a threat.

Michael Corcoran calls 2016 "A Bad Year for Democracy" but the "Best Ever" for "Big Media." Why, it's almost like the two phenomena are related! Seriously, though, big media corporations got almost $2.5 billion in campaign ads, CNN demanded "40 times its normal rate" for ads during its September 16 Presidential debate, and even the NFL -- the NFL! -- seemed to lose viewers to cable news channels during the campaign. This is why we need a Constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United and corporate "personhood." It's also why we need to be able to buy cable channels a la carte -- when we can withhold money from these clowns, they'll clean up their act.

Buried in the House rules resolution that failed to deep-six the Office of Congressional Ethics is this dung nugget: the House has forbidden the Congressional Budget Office to estimate the cost of the Affordable Care Act's repeal. What do they have to hide, you wonder? Well, the CBO estimated back in June, before having their hands tied, that Obamacare repeal would cost between $137 billion and $353 billion over the next decade -- and the CBO, having been hamstrung by the Republican House in other ways in recent years, is probably low-balling that figure.

Apparently the so-called Project Veritas group -- a creation of James O'Keefe, who destroyed ACORN and almost destroyed Shirley Sherrod's life with deceptively-edited videos -- has been trying to bribe left-wing activists to riot at Mr. Trump's inaugural. Of course, the "liberal" media won't report this, since they're still embarrassed that they completely fell for Mr. O'Keefe's ACORN scam despite, you know, having had all that post-modernist literary training at major universities that would have alerted them to the presence of suspicious edits in film. Really, some people are so smart, they're dumb.

In a related note, BuzzFeed informs us that a horrible anti-Trump sign at an anti-Trump protest back in November was actually the brainchild of a right-wing activist looking, of course, to discredit protestors. Why can't they play fair, you wonder? Because if they play fair, they'll lose. And why are their protests so witless? I sure hope it isn't because liberals possess the lion's share of wit in America, because I do like to believe the best about people. I mean, Evelyn Waugh is very funny.

Finally, I understand Donald Trump had a, shall we say, spirited exchange with the press on Wednesday, dressing down a reporter in front of his peers. But if you remember wishing Barack Obama would do more than dismiss the "chattering classes" -- that is, if you wished he had offered a cogent critique analyzing how bad the "liberal" media is at its job and why -- you can't get too upset about Mr. Trump's latest tantrum, particularly when the liberal "media"'s response to his abuse is please-sir-may-I-have-another. And I still find all the "liberal" media's handwringing over "fake news" to have a pot-kettle-black problem. They might, you know, want to try doing actual journalism about things that really affect good Americans' lives, instead of pandering to the alleged shallowness of the American people for easy money. They might also want to consider whether the report alleging various "compromising personal and financial information" might have come out shortly before the press conference for a reason.

Around the table: featuring good news from Wisconsin, for once.

"Alt-right (sic) Founder Questions Whether Jews Are People," says a CNN chyron. For the record, the members of the subsequent panel do, in fact, think Jews are people, which will only impress you if you feel you don't hear "water is wet" enough on the news. Meanwhile, Mr. Trump "dresses down" reporters at Trump Tower, while those same reporters are all trying to ask how they're going to get access to a Trump Administration! If CNN reporters want "access" to news, I imagine that more than a few Standing Rock protestors who wouldn't mind talking to them. Folks, this is why we need a la carte cable -- because cable news networks will never not suck until all their sucking starts hurting their pocketbooks.

And of course while the "liberal" media wastes valuable time analyzing some racist dirtbag's utterings, they're also totally bollocksing up their headlines when covering the police attack on Standing Rock protestors from Sunday night. It's no good trying to tell me people shouldn't just read the headlines, when one would more properly castigate news organs for writing misleading headlines -- just as one should avoid complaining that foreclosed-upon homeowners should have known what they were getting into, without blaming banksters for misleading those homeowners. Certain people are awfully blind to corporate evil these days. I wonder why.

Panel of three federal judges rules that Wisconsin's 2011 redistricting is an "unconstitutional political gerrymander, finding that it "was intended to burden the representational rights of Democratic voters throughout the decennial period by impeding their ability to translate their votes into legislative seats." You probably already suspected that, if you noticed that votes for Democratic and Republican state legislature candidates in Wisconsin were fairly even, yet Republicans got a 65-33 majority in the lower house and a 20-13 majority in the Senate. The decision establishes a method with which one could theoretically test whether a particular redistricting effort is too partisan; the Supreme Court has resisted hearing gerrymandering cases before, and if it doesn't take this one, the ruling will stand (and Wisconsin will have to redistrict again prior to the 2018 elections), but if the Court takes it, the ruling might still stand, as Justice Kennedy has expressed openness to establishing a partisan gerrymandering test. And if it does, a lot more redistricting, all over America, will occur before 2018.

Mr. Trump's nominee for CIA Director, Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Koch Brothers), says "use of strong encryption in personal communications may itself be a red flag," i.e., it might tell the CIA you're a terrorist. How strange, that Mr. Pompeo appears not to understand that some people use encryption to keep their governments from finding them and killing them -- and some journalists use encryption to protect their sources from discovery. I don't suspect that anyone can actually tell him these things -- I suspect that, like his boss, he's just happy swinging his dick around.

Mark Joseph Stern at Slate describes how North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory -- who appears to have lost his re-election bid to Democratic Attorney General Roy Cooper by less than 7,500 votes -- is trying to "steal" the election anyway. Here's how that would work: Mr. McCrory would file lawsuit after lawsuit in an attempt to delay Mr. Cooper from being certified the winner -- which would essentially throw the election to the Republican-dominated legislature, which would then, of course, declare Mr. McCrory the winner. You'd hope that all the bad PR from this plan would give a man pause, but Mr. McCrory is, shall we say, a special case. You'd also hope that a man who charges as much voter fraud as he's done would not want to open that particular Pandora's Box in North Carolina, where reports of bad actors suppressing putative Democrat votes are considerably more believable than the "evidence" from the McCrory camp that even Republican-controlled county election boards have rejected.

Finally, you've no doubt heard about the multitudinous conflicts of interest Mr. Trump will have once he takes office, but here's one that really captures the emptiness of his soul: he apparently encouraged British politician/fellow white supremacist Nigel Farage to oppose offshore wind farms that would "mar" the view from Mr. Trump's Scottish golf resorts. A man who stands in the way of progress because it might cost him money (or, perhaps more precisely, pride) -- I'd say "congratulations, Trump supporters, that's what you really voted for," but for all I know they'd respond "hell yeah!"

Around the table: the death of Democratic populism, explained! And other things, also explained.

Matt Stoller at The Atlantic takes us back to the time "Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul" -- specifically, the time the "Watergate babies" that came into Congress in 1975 overthrew a populist anti-bank committee chair who had been in Congress for nearly half a century. Mr. Patman, a Texas House Rep, pretty much exemplifies all the contradictions about populism during the New Deal era -- he, like many populists and progressives of the era, was, at various times, a segregationist and a Vietnam War supporter, but his fierceness against bankster capitalism and corporate monopoly power remains unmatched by any member of Congress today, including Sen. Warren. Of course the whippersnappers who helped overthrow him also helped turn the Democratic party into the party of social liberalism, which essentially meant that economic populists were abandoned by both parties. Read the whole thing, though -- it's a marvelous history lesson, one that (as all great history lessons do) suggests what we can do about it if we only do it en masse.

Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals panel rules unanimously that torture is so unlawful that it's "beyond the power of even the president to declare such conduct lawful." You'd think a lot of right-wingers would applaud this decision, given that it declares the primacy of law and order over any faux-serious debate about military tactics, and restricts Presidential power just as the Founders intended, but instead they'll probably just yammer on about activist judges and that speech Jack Bauer gave on 24.

Dean Baker at TruthOut talks about the need to "retake the English language" when talking about "free" trade. He's made these points before, but he hasn't made them quite so clearly -- that it's literally impossible to call a trade pact a "free" trade deal if it codifies all sorts of policies, like expanding patent and copyright protections, that actually restrict trade, and a trade pact can hardly be a "free" trade when tariffs are already historically low. Also, too, "(t)he real story here is that the TPP is a deal about redistributing more income upward. It's imposing more competition on those at the middle and the bottom while maintaining and increasing forms of protectionism that benefits those at the top."

One more note for those whippersnappers supposedly thinking of voting for Gary Johnson: Gary Johnson doesn't like net neutrality. He can't really tell you why, either: his answer (from a 2011 interview) essentially boils down to government does it, so it's bad. Refuse to do anything because of "unintended consequences" and guess what? You will never do anything, because everything has unintended consequences. I know what the fully-intended consequences of opposing net neutrality are, though: that corporations, not you, will control your internet experience. It's bad enough they control your cable TV experience, though if we passed a strong a la carte cable packaging bill, we could change that.

A former porn star accuses Donald Trump of inappropriately kissing her, with Mr. Trump retorting, "I'm sure she's never been grabbed before." Why he recast her accusation as "grabbing" rather than "kissing" is unclear, unless he thought it made a better zinger, but no porn star deserves to be grabbed or kissed without their permission merely because they've done the deed in a movie -- using what happens under a contract to describe consent is moronic. (As an aside, why is he saying he'll sue all these women if he becomes President? Why not now?)

Finally, notorious cartoonist Jack Chick, purveyor of short, primitively-drawn religious tracts that have inspired mirth and scorn from young folks for decades, has died at the age of 92. Mr. Chick's little pamphlets, which religious folks have often distributed for free, rail against the occult, Catholicism, Communism, Islam, drugs, and homosexuality, among so, so many other things, and though of course I disagree profoundly with his notion that your only choice is either to believe in Jesus or go to hell, I must admit that he had a fierceness about him I can't help but admire -- a fierceness he could turn on himself occasionally, it seems. I'd be glib to say I'd feel differently about him if he'd taken over the world, because that was never going to happen -- he wasn't good enough at disguising his aims, possibly because he never tried. R.I.P.

Action: internet freedom, and cable channel freedom.

Despite our efforts, the House passed H.R. 2666, the so-called No Rate Regulation of Broadband Internet Access Act, which purportedly prevents the FCC from regulating broadband prices but actually blows a hole in the FCC's Open Internet rules, so Free Press helps you tell your Senators to reject the anti-internet freedom bill. H.R. 2666 injures internet freedom by preventing the FCC from regulating broadband pricing, thus allowing broadband corporations to hide their net neutrality circumventions within fees, data caps, and tiers of service, so that the big telecoms could force you to watch junk news and reality show rubbish before taking you to the website you want to visit. Of course, good Americans who are already paying too much for cable are no doubt wondering why Congress opposes rate regulation so much. Thankfully, the House vote was basically a party-line vote that wouldn't be able to overcome a promised Obama veto if repeated. But talk to your Senator anyway. The time to communicate your will is always now; the time to flex your power is always now.

Meanwhile, in a peripherally-related note, the Parents Television Council still helps you tell your Congressfolk to allow people to buy their cable channels a la carte. As we discussed above, the internet is as great as it is because we can visit the sites we want to visit, without having to sit through all the mind-numbing content that big telecom corporations would prefer us to see because it attracts big advertising money. What these corporations want, then, is for the internet to be like cable TV, where you paying for dozens of channels you not only don't want but which you may find offensive -- MTV and FX for my brethren on the right, and any cable news channel for me. Forcing cable corporations to offer their channels a la carte would give you the measure of freedom you deserve as a TV viewer. And to those who say a la carte would hike your cable bills: cable prices rose rather faster than inflation between 1995 and 2011, so what would you be losing with a la carte? I know what you're losing without it -- your freedom.

UPDATE. For whatever reason, the Parents Television Council email tool from the second paragraph above works only with some difficulty. You can always call your House Reps and Senators directly, however, using the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page.

Around the table: the liberal love for George W. Bush, and other absurdities.

Sen. Bernie Sanders delivers a withering Jeremiad denouncing banksters and the chaos and drama they cause in our economy. He's got good policy prescriptions, and he even backs up his statement that "the business model on Wall Street is fraud" pretty well (i.e., he notes that even banksters believe that's true). But I'd go further: why not a 7% cap on credit card rates, versus a 15% cap? And how about a 2% cap on mortgage rates? Believe me, banks will still make money under these conditions -- they just won't make enough to write the tax laws so they can make even more money doing nothing.

And what are Mr. Sanders' potential Republican opponents up to? Running campaign ads in Iowa and New Hampshire about terrorism and ISIS and who'll "chop" their "head" off and who's "serious" about fighting them, that's what. Well, they say talk about what you know, and these guys know fearmongering. Seriously, we could have made these two paragraphs a Goofus and Gallant strip.

Praise the Lord that Amanda Girard reminds us of "Five Taxpayer Handouts the Bundys Receive While Railing Against Government 'Tyranny.'" Not just in subsidies or "animal damage control" or Small Business Administration loans, either -- grazing on federal land costs ranchers less than seven cents on every dollar that private landowners charge, and ranchers also get a massive Big Gummint discount when they lease federal land directly. But you already got all that information from the "liberal" media when that whole Cliven Bundy thing blew up in 2014, right? I kid, of course.

Senate Republicans mull plan to end pre-debate filibusters on the Senate floor. Always the majority party wants to slash away at the filibuster and the minority party wants to keep it, and it doesn't matter which party is which -- Democratic majorities famously ended the filibuster for budget resolutions in the early '90s and also for Presidential judicial appointments a little over two years ago, that last item after minority Democrats decried Republican attempts to do the same in the mid-2000s. I've said it before and I'll say it again: the Senate needs to get rid of holds (which are the real obstruction) and force Senators to sustain filibusters by actually talking for hours on end, rather than signifying their intent to filibuster and then going out to dinner.

Consistently-ignored Republican Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee says that "a lot" of Christian leaders on the right are "scared to death" that a President Huckabee might actually end abortion, because then they "wouldn’t have the ability to do urgent fundraising because if we slay the dragon, what dragon do they continue to fight?" And you know what? He's likely right about that -- you may recall Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) saying something even harsher about certain Tea Party groups. And I can never shake the feeling that Democrats threw the last two midterm elections so they could fundraise off the crazy things all these newly-elected Republicans would say.

Finally, John C. O'Day, writing at FAIR, finds a lot of liberal commentators suddenly pining away for the good old days of George W. Bush, specifically because Mr. Bush didn't publicly demonize Muslims like a lot of today's Republican Presidential candidates do. This is a grim development, but not a surprising one -- I began many sentences during the Bush years with "at least Reagan didn't." But we have to work against thinking Bush-wasn't-so-bad when what's really happening is that our politicians keep getting worse, and will keep doing so until we a) stop the money-flow to their campaigns and b) force big telecom corporations to offer cable channels a la carte.

Action: class action lawsuits, breed-specific bans, and *a la carte* cable packaging.

H.R. 1927, the so-called Fairness in Class Litigation Act, would force folks who join in class-action lawsuits to affirm that every last one of them suffered "the same type and scope of injury as the named class representative or representatives." Sound innocuous? It's not: the law already demands enough such commonality in classes, and no two people are that alike or go through exactly the same circumstances in life leading to the exact same injuries. And the bill's opponents call it the "Volkswagen Bailout Act" for a reason: it would cripple the ability of good citizens who've been damaged by Volkswagen's cheating on emissions controls -- to the point where corporations would be emboldened to do very bad things on a very large scale, knowing they would face no accountability. The House may vote on H.R. 1927 this week, so you may want to call your House Reps (using the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page) and tell them to oppose the "Volkswagen Bailout bill." They'll never see it coming.

Meanwhile, Anna Sanchez has started a petition on Change.org, which helps you demand that the Department of Defense lift breed-specific bans on dogs on military bases. Apparently Ms. Sanchez can't keep her bulldog on military housing, and if that sounds a little strict, note that her military housing officer says the dog's jaws "look very pitbull." A veterinarian has testified to the contrary, but why make decisions based on actual expertise? And for the record, every pitbull I've known has been a loving companion -- they tend to be a bit boisterous and protective of the pack, but the intelligent dog-owner can mitigate these with good training -- and our society's animus toward pitbulls might as well be racism, especially considering that the belief that pitbulls go around biting everyone is anecdotal, not scientific (the CDC can't confirm that any dog breeds are "more likely to bite" than any other). All breed-specific bans do is confirm the prejudices of the ignorant. And we have enough of that in America.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to force cable corporations to offer channels a la carte, so you don't have to pay for cable channels that offend you, then the Parents Television Council still helps you do that. Why? Because if we keep paying for cable channels that offend us (cough all the cable news channels cough), they'll have no incentive to stop doing what offends us. Cable news channels will have no incentive to stop serving up sensationalist and/or rage-inducing crap, no incentive to stop putting on "experts" who are little more than paid shills for polluters, torturers, and usurers, and no incentive to challenge the rank stupidity of our elected officials. Morever, their advertisers will have no incentive to stop advertising with them, since the number of people who watch them will be, theoretically, the same as the number of people who pay for them. Big corporations understand one thing: money. Don't give it to them, and they'll start listening.

Around the table: 'tis the season for getting Jesus's teachings exactly wrong.

Fox News hosts complain that too-sensitive school administrators are not only "sucking the joy out of Christmas," but putting us on the "cusp" of a "purge" of "Christianity from the public marketplace" and its possible replacement with "secular humanism" -- or "the rise of Islam," whatever. I think it's clear who's actually "sucking the joy out of Christmas." And a la carte cable packaging would help put an end to it.

Donald Trump responds to the accusation that his BFF Vlad Putin "kills journalists, political opponents and invades countries" with "well, I think that our country does plenty of killing, also, Joe...There’s a lot of stupidity going on in the world right now, Joe. A lot of killing going on, a lot of stupidity and that’s the way it is." Of course some folks wonder if Mr. Trump was really saying that our government kills journalists, but I don't need to go that far -- Mr. Trump's excusing the evil one person does because other people do it too is offensive enough.

Ho hum, New York tabloids blame Mayor De Blasio for the homelessness on New York streets, though homeless people have been on New York streets for rather longer than two years. Ever hear the media blame Reagan-era housing assistance program cuts for the explosion of homelessness? You could be the first. Or how about New York's absurdly high rents? Or is paying $4,000 a month for a broom closet in the Big Apple just Newton's Fourth Law?

Franklin Graham, declaring his disgust with Republicans, Democrats, and the Tea Party, declares himself an "independent" -- because the Republican-held Congress couldn't defund Planned Parenthood! As usual from right-wing preachers, this is tantrum at best, bullshit at worst -- and the road to hell is paved with the skulls of those who call themselves "independent" yet always support the candidates who stand furthest to the right. (Oh, and "there's no question" that "taxpayers" are, in fact, not "paying for abortions," Mr. Graham, because the Hyde Amendment prevents it.)

Finally, Old Bridge, NJ girl accidentally calls 911 after toppling an Elf from his Shelf, and therefore, apparently, risking the "loss of the magic of Christmas." I guess this'll be a funny family story in a few years, but it's also the kind of thing that makes you ask if we really need all these corporate-created "traditions" (let alone "traditions" that -- yep, I'm going there! -- make government spying seem a lot more normal).

Action: sane budgeting, and *a la carte* cable packaging.

Congress passed a five-day extension late last week to fund the government until this coming Wednesday, with Speaker Ryan suggesting more short extensions are in the offing, since he wants to do a spending bill "right" and not be held captive to an "arbitrary deadline." Running out of money is "arbitrary"? Try telling the clerk at your local grocery store about "arbitrary deadlines" when you can't pay for you food! And why would Mr. Ryan and his comrades have to pass endless piecemeal extensions? Because everything Republicans want is noxious to the American people, and he knows it. The politicians and their "liberal" media enablers can spin it however they like, but that's the damn truth. The American people do not want dirtier water or a crippled EPA; hence Friends of the Earth helps you remind your Congressfolk of this fact. The American people do not want our federal government to cripple state efforts to label GMO foods; hence Food and Water Watch helps you remind your Congressfolk of that fact. And Common Cause, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and Peace Action West also help you tell your Congressfolk you want a clean budget bill, shorn of "poison pill" policy riders including those mentioned above -- and also including those that would infuse even more corporate money into political campaigns, and kill net neutrality so corporations can take control of your internet experience from you.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to force cable corporations to offer their TV channels a la carte, then the Parents Television Council still helps you do that. If you're like me, you have a somewhat different set of concerns than the PTC does, but that doesn't mean they have the wrong solution -- allowing good Americans to pay for their cable channels a la carte would let us vote with our pocketbooks, so to speak, and starve undeserving cable channels of unearned subscription fees and advertising revenue. You can make the cable company come out and block channels you don't like (and it's probably worth it to make them do that!), but you'd still be paying for them. And why pay to watch "journalists" rummage through mass shooters' apartments and play Amateur English Professor about their baby toys? Why pay to watch sensationalist fearmongers on cable news channels fellate Donald Trump all day? Ban all Muslims bomb everyone I'm YUGE you're a LOSER -- people who watch this garbage all day must be bitter and miserable people. Let's enable less of that, shall we?

Action: *a la carte* cable, and campaign spending disclosure.

First up: "liberal" media news coverage of recent mass shootings has been an abomination. A civilized person can only take so much sensationalism and so much emotional manipulation, and there is a point where you have to ask whether saturation coverage actually enables more of these emotional cripples to think they can achieve immortality by shooting up their workplace or some other place they don't like -- and, of course, once you ask that, you also have to ask if maybe that's the whole idea of saturation coverage. I despair that we'll ever get better news coverage out of the "liberal" media merely by demanding it -- but we may get better news coverage by telling Congress to force the big cable corporations to offer their channels a la carte, as the Parents Television Council helps you do. We won't get better behavior out of the "liberal" media until we threaten to cut off their life blood -- the subscription fees cable corporations extract from us for channels we don't watch, and then the advertising largesse that comes along with the forced exposure undeserving channels get.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell President Obama to issue an executive order mandating that federal contractors disclose their political campaign spending, Common Cause still helps you do that. He doesn't need permission from New Ultra-Awesome and Great Real American President Paul Ryan or Super-Fantastic and Great Real American President Mitch McConnell to do it, and this is our money, taxpayer money, being rerouted by federal contractors so they can buy Congressfolk who will enact the corporate welfare policies they prefer, so of course the President has a compelling reason to do this on our behalf. The linked petition above also tells the President to use his bully pulpit to get his appointees at the SEC, the IRS, and the FCC to use their authority to unmask campaign donors, and also tells him to fill five FEC openings with people who'll actually be watchdogs for the public. And if Congress doesn't like it, let them whine about it. Who really wants to be remembered by the American people as the one who threw a tantrum when the President tried to stop the flow of big corporate money to political campaigns?

Around the table: exploding both the "Ferguson effect" and the "businesses dying" myths, among other tasks.

British government prepares to approve massive government spying bill, one that would explicitly allow the government to collect data in bulk, mandate corporate co-operation with that effort, and "severely" restrict citizens' ability to challenge that collection in court. In this, our government has actually outclassed that of the United Kingdom. Speaking of "limits" to data collection/examination powers in this context should not please civil libertarians -- once the government has all the data, it has the ability to examine that data unlawfully.

Ho hum, Fox News cites "the Ferguson effect" in claiming that violence against police officers has gone up, when in fact violence against police officers has gone down. But of course Fox News's main aim is to keep its viewers in a state of rage about something, and who cares what that is? Could be the "war on terror," could be the deficit, could be regulations, could be immigration, could be "Black Lives Matter" -- they don't care, as long as they're making money, which they will continue to do as long as the American people can't have a la carte cable packaging.

Dept. of Education announces "transparency measures" designed to make accreditation agencies do a better job, particularly when evaluating those pesky for-profit colleges where students may not graduate but may well accumulate a lot of debt. If you're wondering why our Dept. of Education doesn't do all the accrediting itself, as I was, note well that the law doesn't appear to allow that. Next time Democrats hold both Houses of Congress and the Presidency, they might want to fix that, instead of spending all their time reaching out to Republicans.

Factcheck.org instructs us that "business deaths" do not, in fact, "outnumber" "business births" -- they did between 2009 and 2011, precisely the time you might have expected that to be true, but not in 2012 or 2013. The Census Bureau has revised the relevant figures for 2012 and 2013 this year, true, but you'd expect Republicans to be on top of that, right? I would further argue that "the number of business deaths" isn't a very telling statistic to begin with -- how many of those "deaths" were because they were bad ideas, or badly run? Also more telling is that the rate of business "births" has fallen rather dramatically, on average, since 1978, a year we had more regulations and more taxation than we have now. But these things don't help Republicans confuse you into voting for them, so we don't hear much about them.

Ain't nothing so bad Ben Carson can't make it worse, and so it goes with the ZOMG MEN IN TEH WIMMINZ BATHROOMZ!!!!! campaign that killed an anti-discrimination ordinance in Houston. How does Mr. Carson slice this particular knot? By declaring that transgendered folks should have their own bathrooms, because "it's not fair for them to make everybody else uncomfortable." Like the rest of them, he fudges the difference between security, which is our government's job to ensure, and comfort, which is not our government's job to ensure. And how do you tell if someone in the bathroom with you is transgendered? Don't you have better things to do while you're there?

Finally, holy crap Louisiana Democratic gubernatorial candidate John Bel Edwards started running an add essentially accusing his opponent, U.S. Senator David Vitter, of skipping a vote honoring veterans to "answer() a prostitute's call." But did the notorious "D.C. madam" really call then-Rep. Vitter "minutes after" the vote on that fateful day in February of 2001? Because, so far, the evidence suggests both events happened the same day, and that's correlation-not-causation territory. I'm fascinated, though, that Mr. Edwards has a big lead in polls right now and he still launched this weapon -- I can't tell if he ran this ad because he thinks he's got it in the bag or because he knows he doesn't.

Around the table: economists catch up to the rest of us about trade-related job losses, and other stories.

Surprise, surprise, economists are starting to find that cheap Chinese exports to the U.S. are killing American factory jobs after all. That's not a surprise to you, no doubt, but it is a surprise to economists who've adhered strictly to the rising-tide-lifts-all-boats supply-side school of economics for decades now. I'm not being sarcastic when I say that perhaps the tide is really turning against supply-side.

Digitalsmiths survey asks folks to pick their dream a la carte cable bundle, and the results may not surprise you: big three over-the-air networks occupy three of top four slots (with Fox coming in seventh), while PBS, Discovery, History, NatGeo, AMC (home of Walking Dead), Animal Planet, and Comedy Central (home of The Daily Show) also finish in the top 20, joined by only one "premium" channel, HBO. The Consumerist suggests this bodes well for Verizon's plan to offer "skinny" TV bundles (a basic set of channels plus two packs of ten similarly-themed channels), but I've looked at these bundles, and they're not really in the spirit of a la carte, the idea that folks would necessarily want to watch both Fox News and al-Jazeera America being more than a little absurd.

Justice Department charges over 240 people with over $700 million in Medicare and Medicaid fraud. Remember that we could catch more of these jerks if Congress would properly fund Medicare and Medicaid fraud efforts, and when Congressfolk say ZOMG TEH MEDICAREZ DOEZN'TZ WORKZ BECUZ FRAUDZ!!!!!, it really means they don't want to do the hard work of citizenship in a democracy.

Buried in this piece about Bernie Sanders wanting to "bring back the 40-hour work week" is Mr. Sanders's announcement that he wants to take back "family values" talk from Republicans. I'm really of two minds about that announcement. I'm not sure you announce you're going to do that so much as you just go ahead and do it, but then the "liberal" media never seems to notice when liberals do that, so perhaps he has to tell everyone he's going to do it so that the nth iteration of Bernie Sanders can just take the language back.

NRA board member claims that if the now-deceased pastor of the Emanuel African Methodist Church in Charleston, SC, had allowed church members to carry guns while in church, he and the eight other victims might still be alive. But what is the likelihood that anyone who happened to be carrying a gun could have gotten off a clear shot in the chaos? People need to stop pretending their lives are action-adventure movies. And I really think living for something other than making yourself rich would make that pretense a lot less attractive.

Finally, in the wake of the many PR hits the Red Cross has taken over failing to deliver good services to Hurricane Sandy sufferers, ProPublica offers "Five Tips for Donating after Disasters." Long story short: do research before giving, use your right as a donor to demand spending disclosure, consider more local groups, consider alternatives to traditional charities, and "think beyond the next disaster" by giving to alleviate the constant problems, like poverty, that make disasters much worse. As we all know, the urge to help fix things can stamp out the urge to help fix things right, but once we admit that, we can work to overcome it.

Action: bankster handouts, school lunch funding, and Arctic oil drilling.

Last week we discussed Sen. Richard Shelby's latest attempt to give Wall Street banksters massive handouts. His bill did pass the Senate Finance Committee before the Memorial Day recess, but only by a 12-10 vote, which suggests that a similar vote in the full Senate could be filibustered -- but only if they know how we feel. Hence CREDO helps you tell Senate Democrats to unite against the Shelby bill. Why Senate Democrats? Because a united Democratic front against the bill is all we need to stop it dead, and because the Democratic leadership hears far too much from Wall Street already about how the bill is actually pro-small bank. "Liberal" media reporting buys this line, too -- here's how The Hill describes the provision that would limit the definition of the "systematically important financial institution," or "too big to fail" bank, so that only six banks, instead of over 30, would be made to keep large amounts of capital around so they (and we) can better withstand their bad decisions: they say the provision would "broaden() the definition of smaller banks eligible for exemptions from Dodd-Frank." Always they say this will help the small banks when they really mean this will help the banksters. That just means we have to be louder.

The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, which funds school lunch programs for kids, expires on September 30, and USAction helps you tell Congress to renew and strengthen child nutrition programs. You might well be thinking, why, only a Scrooge McSmallgovernment would oppose reauthorizing child nutrition programs! But, as Ann Cooper has suggested, the most rightward members of Congress won't kill the program, but they'll hold the reauthorization hostage to the whims of their big donors -- they'll try to weaken fruit and vegetable requirements, reduce or eliminate whole-grain requirements, weaken salt restrictions, or let kids to buy school lunch items a la carte, which would encourage them to buy only the junkiest food options and skip the healthy stuff. A la carte packaging, as you know, is only for adults buying cable channels, not kids we're trying to keep from becoming obese and diabetic. Our opponents may even try to bring back that nefarious opt-out option for schools "struggling" to meet stricter nutrition standards. You'll want to oppose all of that in your letter. And if you want to call our opponents objectively pro-childhood obesity, I won't stand in your way.

Meanwhile, despite our quite reasonable activism against more Shell Oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean, President Obama has granted conditional approval to Shell to drill in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska. The "conditions" apparently have to do with Shell meeting "tougher restrictions on spills and leaks." But how could this happen, after Mr. Obama banned drilling in that area? Because at the time he issued the ban, he signaled his intention to honor previous drilling leases awarded there -- and Shell got its drilling leases back in 2008. Shell will still have to get state and federal permits in order to begin drilling, but I doubt that'll be much of an obstacle -- unless, of course, they screw up again, which we might more reasonably count on, since Arctic oil drilling, as we know, is even more fraught with danger than Gulf of Mexico oil drilling was. An oil spill in the frigid Arctic, for example, will be tougher to clean up than the 2010 Spillageddon in the relatively temperate Gulf was, and why should we presume Shell will be any more prepared for a massive spill than BP was? CREDO helps you tell President Obama to reject any further oil drilling in the Arctic.

Action: an objectively pro-bankster proposal, and *a la carte* cable.

Perhaps he thought you wouldn't notice, but Sen. Shelby (R-AL) has proposed raising the level at which our government deems banks "systematically important," from banks with $50 billion in assets to banks with $500 billion in assets. What does this mean? If our government deems a bank "systematically important," it requires that such a bank have more capital on hand in case of hard times and/or stupid decisions. But Mr. Shelby's proposal would reduce the number of these banks from 31 to six, which (according to Bloomberg) would mean $66 billion more for banks to buy back stocks with. Of course, at least one lobbyist says "these banks are focused" on "meet(ing) more of the credit needs of small and mid-size businesses and consumers,” but that's utter BS -- banks are focused on grabbing all the money for themselves, and Mr. Shelby's proposal would only enable that folly. And enough with the whining about "hyper-regulated, incredibly rigorous supervision process" of banksters already! These are the people who ruined our economy! You may want to call your Senators about this proposal. They'll never see it coming.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities (which, I know, have been few and far between, what with all the other terrible things Congress tries to do to us) to tell your Congressfolk to support legislation allowing cable consumers to buy the channels they want a la carte, then the Parents' Television Council still helps you do that. Now, Sens. McCain (R-AZ) and Blumenthal (D-CT) haven't introduced the Television Consumer Freedom Act in this Congress, perhaps out of a sense that it'd go nowhere, but we don't stop trying to do the right thing because it's harder, do we? I would hope not. And letting consumers pay for only the channels they want is the right thing to do, regardless of how inconvenient it would be for cable and media corporations. As it is now, I can't get the cable news channels to stop being cesspools of corruption and sensationalism, because I'm still paying for them as part of a package, even if I don't watch them. And my conservative brethren who find themselves profoundly offended by, say, MTV or FX are in the same boat. Our Glorious Elites have made this a society that only cares about money, so why not at least respect the power and dignity of withholding your money?

Action: Republicans hate abortion and birth control ho-hum, plus the water situation in California.

Last week the House passed H.R. 36, which bans abortions after 20 weeks, and soon the Senate will take it up. Remember that almost all abortions happen before the 21st week, which means that this ban won't save very many fetuses at all. And though the bill makes exceptions for rape, incest, and the life (though not health) of the mother, the former two exceptions only apply if the rape or incest has been reported to law enforcement before the abortion, and you can easily see why that might not happen. In short, it's bad policy, not least because it won't reduce abortions. If we want to reduce abortions -- and we do -- we should stop being such hardasses about birth control, and we should stop lionizing sex in our media as if it's the Holy Grail of All Experience. And that means making birth control as available as the Obama Administration has tried to do, as well as shaming overly sexualized media programming, supporting a la carte cable packaging and net neutrality, and opposing media consolidation. In the meantime, CREDO helps you tell the Senate to reject the 20-week abortion ban.

In a related note, the Washington, D.C. City Council has lately passed a bill called the Reproductive Health Non-Discrimination Act, which prevents employers from firing workers for using birth control, getting an abortion, or becoming pregnant without being married -- or even having someone in your family who has done these things, all of which are legal. And yet Congress -- which somehow has the ability to essentially nullify laws passed by the D.C. City Council -- has trained its sights on this law, and would like to kill it. House Republicans say the law "unconstitutionally" "violates" the "religious freedom" of employers -- why should they be forced to keep employees who'd do what they would never do? they ask. More to the point is why an employer should care, as long as the employee does a good job. And for the umpteenth time, employers do not have a right to run roughshod over other people's rights! So People for the American Way helps you tell the House of Representatives to keep its hands off Washington, D.C.'s attempts to protect workers from discrimination.

Finally, Food and Water Watch helps you tell California Gov. Jerry Brown to ban fracking in that state and crack down on oil corporations' abuse of the water supply. Why? Because the state has done bupkus to stop oil corporations from soaking up California's water (they use as much as the cities of San Francisco and San Diego combined every year), even as the Governor has mandated reduced water consumption by citizens, and also because we know fracking contaminates drinking water, and as you may have heard, drinking water ain't something California's got a lot of at the present moment. It's gotten so bad there that Chevron has been caught actually selling wastewater to farmers so they can irrigate their crops. And California doesn't test such water very vigorously, even though independent scientists have found carcinogens in it. At the risk of piling on, oil corporations have been dumping their sludge into unlined pits in the Central Valley, where a lot of California's agriculture just so happens to sit. So at least one household ain't eating any California strawberries this year!

Action: domestic violence, and *a la carte* cable.

Change.org helps you tell the state of Ohio to make non-fatal strangulation a felony. Why? Well, partly because it could have saved Monica Weber Jeter's life, since her husband strangled her damn near to death almost a year ago, but since he only got a misdemeanor conviction, he was around to kill her for good nine months later -- all in the presence of their children, I feel compelled to add. Also, more than half of America's states already make non-fatal strangulation a felony, so Ohio's running behind the curve here. And I'm not sure what logical contortions one could possibly invent to suggest that someone trying to strangle a person isn't also trying to kill them. It sure does seem to me that we, as a culture, are too hard on some crimes and not hard enough on others -- we treat first-time drug users like they're the spawn of Satan, but domestic violence abusers, who more closely resemble the spawn of Satan, hardly see the inside of a prison cell. Perhaps the prison industry simply prefers the "repeat business" of folks addicted to drugs. But they don't run things around here; we do. If we act, of course.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to force cable providers to offer their channels to consumers a la carte, then both the Parents Television Council and Free Press still helps you do that. With the influx of new far-right Republicans in both houses, can we trust that an a la carte bill would advance, given that a la carte has historically been a PTC project? Wow, I actually got that question out without spritzing tea all over my laptop. Far-right Republicans have no taste for actually letting religious folks not pay for the channels that offend them, because far-right Republicans mostly care about their corporate paymasters (which include the cable channels, all immovably against offering channels a la carte). And they only care about their furthest-right constituents to the degree they can stoke their rage -- force Republicans to choose between mammon and values, they'll choose mammon every time. But let's make them make that choice. If nothing else, it'll build character for them, and being fishers of souls, we are always interested in helping people build character.

Action: consumer financial protection, and *a la carte* cable.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is taking public comments on its plan to let consumers publicize their stories about how various financial institutions have wronged them, and Public Citizen helps you leave a public comment supporting this plan. Banksters hate it, but what are they afraid of? Sounds like the CFPB is trying to perform a service for the American people, like the Better Business Bureau used to do, and like Angie's List does now -- hell, like almost any website that sells stuff does now! -- except that CFPB's service would be for folks wronged by banks, credit card corporations, and similar entities. And banksters have the resources to gain redress on actual incidents of libel in the CFPB database. More likely they just think they shouldn't have to go through the trouble of filing a lawsuit, even one they're going to win. Or perhaps they think they have the "right" to insert gag clauses into standard customer contracts, like some small-time crooks have done. Or maybe they even think criticism equals "terrorism." Don't laugh -- the last two Administrations have really opened a Pandora's Box there, you know.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support S. 912, the Television Consumer Freedom Act, which would induce cable corporations to offer their channels a la carte, then both the Parents Television Council and Free Press still help you do that. Just because it's cheaper for the cable corporations to offer cable channels in big packages doesn't make it right. There is no reason on Earth you should have to pay for Fox News or MTV just to get the channels you do want. I mean, you don't surf the internet that way, do you? So why should you have to pay for cable channels that profoundly offend your sense of decency, of morality, of civilization? Because you are paying for them -- maybe you're only paying 75¢ a month for Fox News, but multiply that by all the households in America and you see the problem. And the solution -- if a relatively small number of Americans can withhold payment from Fox News, it'll change its behavior with a quickness. No, it will -- big players always overreact to a slight dip in the market. And therein lies some hope for us.

Around the table: fast-food workers, tax evaders, and right-wing lunatics.

On tomorrow, May 15, fast-food workers in 30 countries on six continents will walk off the job to protest low wages. Fast-food workers currently make between $7 and $10/hour, on average, and I can't imagine living on that (let alone raising a family on that!) unless the calendar says 1995. And personal to those who find their call for a $15/hour wage unreasonable: first, Seattle is very likely going to enact a minimum wage of $15/hour for all their workers, and second, you have heard of negotiation, have you not?

At least six Democratic Senators won't vote for the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac "overhaul" bill, casting doubt on whether it'll pass the full Senate. The bill will likely clear the Banking Committee with Republican help, but Harry Reid likely won't allow a vote on it as long as his own caucus isn't united. Which is good news, but only for the short term -- n.b. that most Democrats (Ms. Warren included) sound like they'd support a bill with some changes, rather than reject it entirely, which would be (as Dean Baker has instructed us) the right thing to do.

Billionaire creator of "Beanie Babies" gets 500 hours of community service for tax evasion. No, that's not a mistake: for tax evasion. There's no letting Mr. Warner off for his charitable donations, because tax evasion is a crime. And it's not a victimless crime, either, since that money would have gone to pay for services that help all of us. The worst part? Ty Warner isn't even as well-connected as some folks -- the next time some bankster even gets community service will be the first.

Rep. Devin Nunes (E-CA) calls fellow Republican Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan "al-Qaeda's best friend in Congress," ostensibly because Mr. Amash opposes overweening government surveillance, but more likely because Mr. Amash voted against a Nunes-backed water bill, which sounds more like a sin against Mr. Nunes's big donors than anything else. Other Michigan Republican House Reps have either cut checks to his primary opponent or, ah, stayed neutral, but I wouldn't underestimate Mr. Amash if I were them, given that the Michigan state legislature already tried and failed to redistrict him into oblivion.

Fox News "personality" Eric Bolling says "I don't remember any attacks on American soil" between 2000 and 2008. By his calculus, then, the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and Stonycreek Twp., PA, were all on foreign soil on September 11, 2001. How people like this still have a job when there are so many unemployed folks more deserving of work is beyond me -- though, of course, his fellow panelists were no better, since none of them challenged him. At the risk of beating a dead horse, this is why we need a la carte cable packaging -- so we don't have to pay for stupid-and-arrogant-about-it cable news pundits.

But Eric Bolling is not even the biggest jerk at this morning's table setting: right-wing blogger Jim Hoft is, after actually mocking liberals with the notion that the 300 Nigerian kidnapped girls are already sold into slavery. Because we used social media to help call attention to their plight, instead of talking tough while doing the helicopter dance in front of the mirror, as Mr. Hoft would do. Let's never speak of him again.

Around the table: the Laffer Curve, the "indecency" of atheism, workdays of the super-rich, KKK "rebranding," and the President's "manhood."

"Beyond the Laffer Curve -- the Case for Confiscatory Taxation," headlines this article by Matthew Yglesias. Mr. Yglesias still doesn't make moral cases for policy prescriptions, but at least here he abandons the notion that raising revenue is all we should discuss -- that perhaps "breaking the doom loop of oligarchy" is more important, even an end in itself. And to the prospect that CEOs might all at once retire once we limit their pay, folks who can remember as far back as six years ago will likely respond in only one way: we can only hope!

New Jersey woman sues state Motor Vehicle Commission for rejecting her application for an "8THEIST" license plate. According to her suit, the state said it rejected her vanity plate because it would "carry connotations offensive to good taste and decency." Ah, no: a vanity plate connoting an adult's sexual preference for children would be "offensive to good taste and decency." But some of the people most concerned about "good taste and decency" happen to be atheists. And atheism only "offends" people who want God's kingdom right here, right now, because they're not really secure in their own faith.

Paul Buchheit explodes the myth that the super-rich just work harder than the rest of us by listing no less than 13 ways the super-rich really make their money. I know the list only goes from one through seven, but a couple of them are really packed. Long story short: the super-rich are often born on third base and then they cheat to get to home plate. I mean, when banksters literally hoard food to keep it off the market so it jacks up prices and then "bet" on prices going up, they're not just inverting the American Dream; they're creating a "free" market dependent on failure, not success.

CNN hack asks, after the murder arrest of ex-KKK member Frazier Glenn Cross or Glenn Miller or whatever he calls himself these days, whether the KKK can "rebrand." Well, after nearly 150 years of murdering blacks just because they're black, the KKK might actually be just a few backyard barbecues and Little League uniform donations away from "rebranding," as long as they have the "liberal" media around to enable them. Again, this is why we need a la carte cable packaging.

Finally, David Brooks suggests on TV that people think President Obama has "a manhood problem in the Middle East." Of course David Brooks doesn't really agree that Mr. Obama has a "manhood" problem, but he's putting it out there anyway, because enough other Serious People believe it, I guess, and when do they ever get a voice on Sunday morning news programs? One would think after eight years of Mr. Bush doing the helicopter dance in front of the world, people might get a little tired of that sort of "manhood." But our "liberal" media can't be troubled to connect the dots. I wonder why.

Action: student loan debt, cruel treatment of prisoners, and the Comcast/Time-Warner merger.

H.R. 3892, the Student Loan Borrowers' Bill of Rights Act, would force our laws to treat student loan debt like any other kind of debt. Our laws allow most other kinds of debt to have a statute of limitations, to enjoy bankruptcy protections, and to be safe from wage garnishment and license suspension, so why not student debt? People can discharge their gambling debts through bankruptcy, but the debt citizens accumulates because they're trying to better themselves and contribute more to society is certainly more worthwhile, is it not? Folks who find themselves generally unsympathetic to the idea of free universities or student loan forgiveness should note that this bill provides for neither of these -- but the bill would allow for partial discharge of a student debt after five years of public service. We still value public service, right? We're not convinced it's somehow uncool? MoveOn helps you tell your Congressfolk to support parity for student loan debt.

Meanwhile, the Federal Bureau of Prisons is taking comments about Communications Management Units (or CMUs). CMUs are areas of prisons where prisoners have almost no access to calls or visits. Get it, "communications management"? Right up there with "enhanced interrogation techniques" or the "Healthy Skies Initiative," and like these two rhetorical dung pellets, the CMU is a Bush Mobb invention, presumably intending to house terrorists, yet they mainly wind up housing a) Muslims who may or may not be in prison for terrorism and b) a few non-Muslims for "balance." CMU prisoners get one hour of visitation a month; Supermax inmates get 35. You begin to see the problem, right? Now consider that Tha Bush Mobb started the CMUs without even waiting for the BOP to issue final rules governing their operation, and also that the vast majority of the prisoners there have clean prison records. So the Center for Constitutional Rights helps you tell the FOB to reject the CMU.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the FCC and the Justice Department to reject the proposed Comcast/Time-Warner merger, Consumers Union provides one more. Do big corporations still argue that mergers create jobs, which is the precise opposite of the truth? Do they argue that mergers lower prices for everyone, which is also the precise opposite of the truth? What incentive will Comcast have to lower prices or offer better service if they're the only game in town? Who will stop them from blocking internet sites or slowing them down as they're loading? Who will stop them from shedding jobs? Who will make them offer cable channels a la carte? Now, I hear some Time-Warner customers might be praying for Comcast to take over, so legendarily awful is Time-Warner's customer service. But surely there's more here at stake than just our self-interest -- if we don't oppose concentrated power everywhere, we'll have freedom nowhere.

Action: executive pay and *a la carte* cable.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell the SEC to force publicly-traded corporations to disclose the ratio between their CEO's pay and their median worker's pay, then Americans for Financial Reform still helps you do that. Before writing, you might want to check out this fresh new chart from Bloomberg news, which lists the pay disparity between CEOs and median workers at Standard & Poor's top 250 corporations. Long story short: it ain't pretty. Be sure to check out the "comments" offered by the offending corporations, which include variations of "the pay is in line with other executives" (everyone's doing it, so it must be right!), "the pay is performance-based" (their workers' pay doesn't seem performance-based!), "you're counting our CEO's income incorrectly" (a.k.a. "how dare you count our accounting tricks as income!") and "we must retain top talent" (because the architects of economic Armageddon must be "top talent"!). Best one: Wynn Resorts complains that Bloomberg miscalculates their median worker pay figure, such that Mr. Wynn only makes 251 times what his median worker makes, not 499 times as much. Zing! Seriously, either they have no idea how they come off or they don't care how they come off. My money's on the latter.

Meanwhile, the Parents Television Council helps you tell your Congressfolk to support a la carte cable packaging. You'll of course want to amend the PTC's email tool to reflect the fact that Sens. McCain (R-AZ) introduced an actual a la carte cable bill -- S. 912, the Television Consumer Freedom Act -- back in May. If passed, the bill would make it a whole lot easier for you, the consumer, to buy cable channels a la carte rather than just as a huge package. Many folks think hey, I like buying a whole slew of channels relatively cheaply, but many others think hey, this package offers a whole lot of channels I'm never gonna watch, and still others think we ought to be able to refuse to buy channels of which we disapprove, like, well, any of the cable news channels. And I think breaking the "pack" mentality of cable providers is the only way to bring accountability to TV channels -- when the cable channels, for example, see a whole bunch of folks refusing to pay to get them, they'll get the cue to cut with the sensationalism and the shouting and the corporate propaganda, and maybe provide us with some useful information for once. Is that unduly optimistic? Well, I'm an optimist, then. How else would I get through?

Action: war with Syria, *a la carte* cable, voting rights, and community radio.

Per a Reuters/IPSOS poll taken last week, 60% of Americans don't want to go to war with Syria -- even as we despise what the Syrian government has done to its people -- and only 9% of Americans do. But it looks like a miniscule minority will get all the say about everything again, especially since the "liberal" media have been acting like Mr. Obama "doing something" is a foregone conclusion. It's not -- our Constitution mandates that Congress declares the wars, not the President, and the War Powers Resolution also mandates that the President cannot use military force unless Congress approves. Well, the War Powers Resolution allows the President to retaliate against an imminent threat -- but how many Syrians have been attacking the U.S. lately? So Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you tell your President and your Congress not to attack Syria without Congressional approval.

By now you've no doubt heard that Miley Cyrus's antics at the Video Music Awards Sunday were the talk of CNN all day Monday. Well, that's as good a reason as any to demand that we be able to pay for cable channels a la carte! I mean, I suppose we could write CNN and demand they ask themselves whether some celebrity shaking their butt on stage really constitutes news, let alone something a news channel should obsess about all damn day, but why would they care? You may not be watching CNN, but you're still paying for it, as part of your cable package, so they've still got your money. But S. 912, the Television Consumer Freedom Act of 2013, would (among other things) prevent cable packaging corporations from offering package deals on cable channels if they don't also offer those channels a la carte. The Parents Television Council still helps you tell your Congressfolk to support a la carte cable packaging; you'll likely have to amend their email tool to reflect actual support for an actual bill.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to strengthen the Voting Rights Act so that state and local governments can't keep "the wrong people" from voting, the Sierra Club still helps you do that. As you recall, the Supreme Court, in Shelby County v. Holder, invalidated Section 4(b) of the Act, saying that the conditions that prompted its enactment had changed such that singling out certain states for heightened scrutiny now comprised an unconstitutional burden on those states. Perhaps not coincidentally, several of those states have pursued new avenues of discrimination against "those voters" since the Court's decision. Since the Court didn't strike the whole law down, Congress could come up with a new formula to replace the one the Court struck in 4(b). Some Congressfolk have said they don't see that happening. But recall that 2006's Voting Rights Act reauth looked dicey, too -- until public pressure made Congress do the right thing. We can do that again.

Finally, the Local Community Radio Act passed in late 2010, and the Federal Communications Commission will accept license applications for new community radio stations during the last two full weeks of October. If you want to build a community radio station, then Free Press and the Prometheus Radio Project help you learn what you need to know to get started. It won't be easy, and you'll eventually need to raise some cash, but your community radio station could serve folks that the big corporate radio stations (with their repetitive playlists and right-wing blowhards) don't. If your community doesn't get Spanish-language radio, you could do that. If your community doesn't get to hear a whole lot of local music, you could do that. If your community doesn't get reporting on agricultural wage-slavery, you could do that. The possibilities are endless. And it'll be a lot of work, but so's anything worth doing.

The news is all about cutting Social Security or not cutting Social Security, but Sens. Begich (D-AK) and Harkin (D-IA) have introduced separate-but-similar bills that would actually expand Social Security benefits. I couldn't tell you why they're not throwing their weight behind the same bill or why you should care -- both bills would direct the Department of Labor to create a Consumer Price Index for Elderly Consumers (or CPIEC), so we can measure cost-of-living benefit hikes better than the chained CPI does, and both bills would "scrap the cap" on income Social Security can tax, meaning Social Security could finally tap into millionaire and billionaire (or even $114,000aire) income, and we might never have to hear about Social Security's alleged insolvency ever again. (Mr. Begich's bill is S. 308; Mr. Harkin's bill is S. 567.) Both Bold Progressives and CREDO help you tell your Congressfolk to support the Harkin/Begich effort to increase Social Security benefits. If your Congressfolk respond that WE'RE BROKE!!!!!, kindly point out the part where you already told them how to pay for it.

Meanwhile, Sen. McCain's a la carte cable packaging bill, S. 912, has gained a co-sponsor -- Sen. Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, who says: "The current antiquated, antidemocratic system imposes all-or-nothing cable packages that give consumers no control over their cable bill, and prevent subscribers from voting with their feet when they are unhappy." Hear, hear! Now, with that in mind, note that some of my fellow lefties oppose a la carte cable packaging because they're concerned about diversity in media offerings. I'd remind them that S. 912 doesn't prevent consumers from buying TVOne or BET or Univision as part of a package, that we have other tools (like PBS, legally mandated to serve the underserved) to strengthen diversity on the airwaves, and that taking hostages to oppose a bill ("keep cable packaging the way it is, or I'll blow BET's brains out!") is a right-wing trick. The Parents Television Council still helps you tell your Congressfolk to support a la carte cable; amend the text as you need to, possibly by referring to the McCain/Blumenthal bill by name and/or number.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: SB 739, billed by its supporters as a "natural gas access bill," would take 60% of the state's annual fund helping good folks make their buildings more energy-efficient, and give it to people who want more natural gas. Don't take my word for it -- read the bill yourself (it's so short you can't even pass the time reading it on the toilet) and see that it does, in fact, take $15 million from loans and grants to small businesses and homeowners so they can make their offices and dwellings more energy-efficient, and re-allocate that sum to "schools, hospitals and small businesses to obtain access to natural gas." At first I thought they woke up one morning and decided they hadn't given enough handouts to the gas industry. Then I decided they wrote the bill because they didn't have a hippie to punch that day. The Sierra Club helps you tell your Pennsylvania state Senator to oppose yet more welfare handouts for gas drillers. Like most corporations, they don't need any more damn help. Small businesses and homeowners need the help -- and for them, it's a hand up, not a handout.

Meanwhile, Free Press joins the fight for a la carte cable packaging with an email that begins, "Tired of paying for crappy reality shows like America's Worst Tattoos?" "Maybe you like motocross, surfing and scary movies," it goes on. "Other people like Lifetime, HBO or VH1 Classic. Yet despite their individual preferences, cable subscribers are forced to buy hundreds of channels in a cable 'bundle' to get the few channels they actually want. Does this make any sense?" Of course, it does not, and admittedly America's Worst Tattoos doesn't sound like a concept that could sustain itself for more than one hour. (Let me guess -- it's on TLC? Why, yes, it is!) But we've got bigger fish to fry: because of bundling, we have to pay for cable news channels that prefer sensationalism to information, that spur grown men and women to yell at each other, that never disclose their guests' conflicts of interest -- and we still have to pay for them, and we won't change their behavior until we can hurt them in their pocketbook. So use the Free Press link in the first sentence. You deserve to be free from bad TV.

The Obama Administration's Bureau of Land Management has proposed updated federal regulations regarding fracking on federal lands, and if you find it rather like the third-way let's-all-get-along-with-big-corporations pablum we've been getting from Democrats for decades now, you're not alone. Federal law permits frackers to keep the toxic chemicals they use secret -- because it's a "trade secret," wouldn't you know? -- but the proposed rules would permit disclosure of said chemicals to a private web site in Oklahoma. Sound like much of a fix to you? The proposed rules would also allow fracking corporations to store their fracking waste in open, lined pits -- I guess, for the BLM, the "lined" part represents progress -- versus storing it in solid tanks. CREDO helps you tell the Bureau of Land Management to ban fracking on federal lands -- certainly until they can guarantee the safety of our air and drinking water. I don't care how difficult that is, or even if it's impossible -- some corporation's right to make money doesn't trump anyone's right to clean air and water.

Meanwhile, Sen. McCain (R-AZ) has introduced his a la carte cable bill -- S. 912, the Television Consumer Freedom Act. Too much criticism thereof is about money -- yes, Matthew Yglesias can talk all he wants about why it won't cut your cable bill, but I don't care and never have cared. He also worries that "the channels themselves will lose viewers," when that's the whole point! Consumers should be able to deny their money and their viewership to TV channels purveying shallow, sensationalistic, and decadent crap, or else said channels will never change their ways. Now S. 912 is a mixed bag -- Sec. 3(b)(3) forces channel vendors to provide channels a la carte to cable corporations, which is how you'd have to do it, but 3(a) should say that cable corporations "must provide subscribers with the option" to buy channels a la carte, not "may provide subscribers" -- Mr. McCain's temperamental aversion to our government telling corporations what to do doesn't help there. So Consumers Union helps you contact the Senate Commerce Committee, and the Parents Television Council still provides their email tool.

CREDO helps you tell the EPA to ban neonicotinoids, the pesticides that help kill off honeybees -- while Sum of Us helps you tell Home Depot and Lowe's, America's two largest home-and-garden chains, to stop selling pesticides containing neonicotinoids. We're losing more and more bees all the time, and scientists have linked neonicotinoids to their disappearance; if they all die, you can kiss a lot of fruits and nuts goodbye -- almonds, blueberries, peaches, cherries, and many more. Colony collapse disorder has many causes, but that's certainly no excuse for inaction. At least the bees are trying to save themselves -- scientists have found bees sealing off pesticide-contaminated pollen in their hives. Sadly, scientists found this out by studying dead hives, meaning the bees' efforts are too little, too late. We ought to give them a hand up -- and certainly we'd be giving our world a hand up if we did.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support a la carte cable packaging, the Parents' Television Council still helps you do that. Media outlets get out money whether we watch their channels or not, and will never be accountable to us unless we gain the ability to stop paying for them. And word on the street is that Sen. McCain (R-AZ) plans to introduce an a la carte cable packaging bill soon. The bill reportedly would also prevent over-the-air broadcasters from making their channels cable-only, as some have threatened to do if they can't stop Aereo from broadcasting their content over the internet. The Times suggests that Mr. McCain won't be able to get such a bill passed, as he first proposed such legislation in 2006 and supposedly has less influence over media matters now, since he's no longer on the Senate Commerce Committee. But who cares? If we speak out loudly enough, none of that will matter.

SignOn helps you tell the Bureau of Land Management to stop leasing federal lands for fracking. Why? You know, besides the damage fracking causes to our water table? Well, California has over 80,000 farms; chances are pretty good that even if you don't live in California, you buy a lot of food that gets grown there, particularly organic produce. Think fracking underneath all of that is a good idea? Now a U.S. District Court judge ruled earlier this month that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) violated the National Environmental Policy Act by auctioning off some 1,750 square miles of the Monterey Shale without doing the review the Act requires (in fact, BLM simply declared any "hard look" at fracking to be "outside its jurisdiction," which is odd, since it was selling off oil and gas leases). The judge wouldn't invalidate the leases, but ordered both plaintiff and defendant to submit a remedy. But we got their remedy right here!

Meanwhile, the Parents Television Council still helps you tell your Congressfolk that you want to be able to buy cable TV channels a la carte. A la carte cable packaging would be a powerful tool to battle the shallowness and violence in our culture, because it would allow us to buy only the cable channels we want to buy, without having to buy the rest in some corporate package. While we should boycott advertisers of programs and channels we find shameful, only when they're being threatened at the pocketbook will those programs and channels ever hold themselves accountable to us, their consumers. You may not like Fox News or ESPN or MTV, but even if you're not watching them, you're still paying for them; why would they ever change, as long as they're getting paid? People consume a lot of shallow and violent content not because they're looking for it, but because it's there. With a la carte cable packaging, we can help put a stop to that.

The Parents' Television Council still helps you tell your Congressfolk to support a la carte cable packaging. Their email tool still describes an episode of American Horror Story, but we've got bigger fish to fry -- our cable news channels talk too damn much about celebrities, promote punditoids who yell and scream all day, hire corporate flacks to discuss issues without disclosing their conflicts of interest, and let guests lie on their programs without challenging them -- all worse than some overly showy piece of drama. But even if we don't like cable "news" channels, we're still paying for them -- even if we make the cable company come out and block the channel. They make money hand over fist, these cable news channels, but if we can buy only the channels we want to buy without having to buy a bunch of other channels in a package, we can make them change their behavior much more quickly than even a well-organized advertiser boycott could.

Meanwhile, Public Citizen helps you ask your Senator for a copy of the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" "free" trade deal. Public Citizen suggests your Senators might be mad at not having a copy themselves, and while it is true that they almost certainly don't have one, and it is true that Hell hath no fury like a Senator disrespected, I suspect more of them don't care whether or not they have it, given that most of the folks who support "free" trade seem to be in Congress. This "free" trade "deal" is so nefarious that hardly anyone can get any details about it, but we know from leaks that it would send more American jobs offshore, jack up medicine prices, keep you from visiting certain pages on the internet, and let corporations override national environmental or labor laws they don't feel like following. Your Congressfolk may not care how we feel about "free" trade, but that bit about overriding our laws? I bet they do care about that.